1NC

1
Topical affirmatives must affirm the resolution through instrumental defense of
establishing a domestic climate policy, including at least substantially increasing
restrictions on private sector emissions of greenhouse gases in the United States

Climate policy refers to policies designed to limit climate change

Franck Lecocq (Lead author of the IPCC 4th and 5th Assessment Reports, lecturer at AgroParisTech,
director of CIRED (Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement), Former
Deputy Director of the Labarotry of Forestry Economics and Economist at the World Bank), Climate Policy
Assessment on Global and National Scales, Chapter 23 (Climate Policy Assessment on Global and
National Scales) in Climate Change and Agriculture Worldwide, pp.301-303, 2016

From Climate Policy to Integration of Climate Issues into ‘Non-climate’ Policies

The term ‘climate policy’ refers to all public policies designed to limit the effects of global warming. A
distinction is drawn between mitigation policies , aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions, and adaptation policies , which seek to limit the negative impacts of climate change on
human societies (or even, in some cases, to take advantage of possible beneficial effects),
whether the impacts are already present or, more often, only anticipated.
Because GHGs are generated in virtually all areas of activity, mitigation covers a wide variety of
actions, ranging for instance from fossil fuel taxation, to reduction of fugitive emissions of natural
gas or methane capture from landfills, to the fight against deforestation.
Similarly, adaptation covers a broad range of actions: for instance from the abandonment of
spruce—which is heat-intolerant—in lowland areas of Western Europe, to infrastructure upgrades
in areas likely to be affected by major floods or the development of climate insurance
mechanisms, to dyke-building to protect coastal areas threatened by rising sea levels.1
Whether they focus on mitigation or adaptation, climate policies typically have other
consequences than just control of the greenhouse effect. For example, replacement of coal-fired
electric plants with gas-fired plants or with renewable energy generation will limit GHG emissions,
but will also tend to reduce fine-particle emissions, benefiting health. Similarly, a policy favouring
urban public transit at the expense of cars is likely to reduce GHG emissions (if emissions from
public transit are less per passenger-kilometre) while potentially helping to reduce traffic congestion.
These non-climatic effects of climate policies are referred to in the literature as ‘co-benefits’, when
they benefit human societies, and as ‘adverse side-effects’ when they are detrimental.2 As will be
seen, integrating co-benefits and adverse effects into climate policy assessment is a major challenge.
Climate policies, however, are only part of the toolbox available to governments to combat climate
change, for they are defined as policies intended —by implication, primarily—to combat climate
change . Speaking of co-benefits clearly emphasizes that implicit hierarchy of objectives.
However, there are many examples of public policies whose primary purpose is clearly not to
combat climate change but which nevertheless have significant effects on emissions and/or on
adaptive capacity. Town planning is a good example. Because they structure urban space, town
planning policies play a key role in determining transport needs for households and businesses, and
hence GHG emissions, and yet economic (property tax, construction financing, etc.) and social
considerations (access to housing, risks of segregation, etc.) are most often their priority .
The distinction between climate policies and those whose main objective is not to combat climate
change (referred to herein, for want of a better name, as non-climate policies ) may appear purely
rhetorical, but the distinction is an important one in the public climate change debate. Focusing the
debate on climate policies alone tends to put the spotlight on very specific forms of public action ,
such as carbon taxes, markets for tradable emission permits, or the creation of dedicated funds (for
adaptation or mitigation), etc. Conversely, anything that makes for better integration of the climate issue
into ‘non-climate’ policies is overshadowed.
Yet non-climate policies have a decisive effect on a large share of all GHG emissions and the ability to
adapt to them. Hence, for ambitious anti-climate-change objectives to be attained, such policies must take
account of the climate issue (Hourcade and Shukla 2013). For example, adapting a country highly
dependent on agriculture to climate change may involve diversification of activities in rural areas
to non-agriculture sectors (Fig. 23.1) or population migration away from the areas potentially most
affected. Adaptation in that case goes well beyond climate policy at the margin (such as installing air
conditioners) and necessitates a review of development strategies. The same reasoning applies to
mitigation.
In what follows, we shall begin by discussing climate policy assessment, then focus on the specific
problems posed by the integration of climate issues into policies whose primary objectives lie elsewhere.

1) Limits: Our interpretation of centered on a static point of debate is better than

their model of limitless affirmation – creates the condition for rigorous
educational discussion and argument testing which make us better political
agents – their politics tacitly relies on the same liberal assumptions they criticize
Ruti, professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto, ‘15
(Mari, Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics, Bloomsbury Publishing, pg. 170-177)

After the collapse of metaphysical justifications for universality, we do not have any choice but to admit
that the version of universality we conjure into existence – and the a priori norms that support this
universality – inevitably arises in a particular context: it is historically and culturally specific even as it
strives to transcend this specificity. But – and my point here mirrors the argument I made about rationality
above – this does not mean that our universalism is intrinsically worthless ; while the loss of
metaphysical foundations for our normative systems complicates their claim to universality, it does not
automatically invalidate them. This is exactly what Allen is getting at in the passage I quoted at the
beginning of this chapter: we make a mistake if we assume that our only options are either the delusion
of being able to transcend our context into a realm of "pure" universality or a descent into "anything-
goes" relativism. More specifically, Allen argues that we can profess the universal validity of some of
our principles – such as the principles of equality, reciprocity , or mutual respect – as long as we remain
aware that these principles are derived from the historical and cultural resources of Western modernity. In
this manner, Allen advocates what she calls " principled contextualism ": we may take our norms "to be
universal and context transcendent, as long as we recognize that the notions of universalizability and
context transcendence are themselves situated in the context of late Western modernity" (PS 180). An
important part of this recognition is the admission that "it may turn out from some future vantage point that
our normative ideals are themselves, in some ways that we have yet to realize, pernicious and
oppressive" (PS 180). That is, we need to be "more historically self-conscious and modest about the
status of our normative principles" (PS 180); among other things, we need to be open to the possibility
that our principles can be contested. Yet this does not imply that "we are incapable of making
normative judgments in light of such principles" (PS 180).
Allen is looking for a way out of nihilistic relativism by proposing that our awareness that we must
continuously interrogate our ethical principles does not mean that these principles are devoid of all
value. Nor does our recognition that our principles cannot be divorced from their context mean that we
cannot claim that they are capable of transcending their context; that is, our principles can be context-
transcending without being context-neutral. This, as we saw in Chapter 2, is Butler's argument in Parting
Ways, even if she ends up backpedaling on the universalist implications of her approach. 14 More
important for our present purposes, this is how Allen arrives at the "historical a priori" I have referred to in
passing. As Allen explains, "The historical specificity of our a priori categories , their rootedness in
historically variable social and linguistic practices and institutions" (PS 31-2) does not cancel the power of
these categories to order our existence. However, if we want others to be convinced by our a priori ideals,
we need to persuade them through a democratic process. If the Enlightenment resorted to aggression
to spread its views, the Habermasian democratic method, according to Allen, relies on more collectively
formed public opinions. Allen's point is akin to the one Benhabib makes through her notion of
"democratic iterations": rather than the solitary Kantian subject trying to figure out in the abstract what
everyone might conceivably agree on, the Habermasian approach offers a model where social agents
collaborate with each other to forge a perspective that everyone can agree on. This junction of
compatible views, then, becomes the current "historical a priori," the current version of the universal.
Any given "historical a priori" can obviously take hegemonic forms. I grant, as does Allen, that we need to
remain vigilant about the constitutive exclusions that a priori norms often imply. Yet the merits of a
normative system that is brought into being through a continuous democratic process – a process that
can accommodate the tensions of rethinking , refinement , and renegotiation – also seem
considerable . Borrowing from Fraser, one could say that the historical a priori is always open to
reframing . Such reframing happens, for instance, when individuals or groups who have been excluded
from a given ethical frame demand admission to it, thereby automatically altering the parameters of
the frame. Proposing that "misframing" may be "the defining injustice of a globalizing age," Fraser
advocates – echoing Butler's observations about the necessity of revising the frames of perception that
eliminate some populations from the status of the fully human – "an enlarged, transnational sense of who
counts as one's fellow subjects of justice." 15 This implies that when the frame shifts – say, from a
national to a transnational one – so does the historical a priori: an a priori that was formulated in a given
national context might not be appropriate for a transnational one. There must thus be a period of
readjustment, but this does not imply the neutralization of the a priori – as some cultural relativists might
assume – but merely its reconfiguration. Or, to restate the larger argument I have tried to articulate, the
concept of the historical a priori requires that we admit that an a priori principle can be normatively
meaningful even as it is open to alteration ; the a priori – as I noted above – holds until it is deemed
somehow flawed or unjust. In Fraser's words, "The result would be a grammar of justice that incorporates
an orientation to closure necessary for political argument, but that treats every closure as provisional –
subject to question, possible suspension, and thus to reopening" (SJ72).
The model Fraser advocates hence treats every ethical closure as provisional. Fraser calls this model
"reflexive justice," specifying that it scrambles the opposition between the Habermasian democratic model
on the one hand and the more poststructuralist, Marxist, and skeptical model (which she calls "agonistic")
– the model that dominates contemporary progressive criticism – on the other. If the first of these is
sometimes accused of being excessively normalizing, the second-which is essentially the model I have
been analyzing in this book (with the exception of Levinas) – is, as Fraser puts it, "often seen as
irresponsibly reveling in abnormality" (SJ73 ). Against this backdrop, the advantage of Fraser's model is
the following:
Like agonistic models, reflexive justice valorizes the moment of opening, which breaches the
exclusions of normal justice, embracing claimants the latter has silenced and disclosing injustices the
latter has occluded-all of which it holds essential for contesting injustice. Like discourse ethics, however,
reflexive justice also valorizes the moment of closure , which enables political argument, collective
decision-making , and public action – all of which it deems indispensable for remedying injustice.
(SJ73-4)
In this manner, Fraser declares the standard opposition between the Habermasians and the agonists to
be a false one, for it is possible to admit the best insights of both by acknowledging the value of both
opening ( contestation ) and closure (binding norms that enable ethical and political decisions). Such
an approach rejects relativism , enabling normative judgments and political interventions, but
without thereby locking the content of such judgments and interventions into a fixed , immutable
definition.
All of this of course implies that there is one norm that stands above every other: what Fraser calls "the
overarching normative principle of parity of participation" (SJ60). On this view, Fraser explains,
"Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from
participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction" (SJ 60). In other words, for Fraser's
paradigm to function, one needs a base-level faith in the democratic process even as one acknowledges
that it is always going to fall short of its own ideals. Like Levinasian justice, which knows that it will never
he able to live up to the demands of ethics, concrete democratic formations are invariably guilty,
humiliated by their failures, but this cannot, for the Habermasians at least, discourage us to the point that
we stop trying to improve them. As Benhabib explains:
As with any normative model, one can always point to prevailing conditions of inequality, hierarchy,
exploitation and domination, and prove that "this may be true in theory but not so in practice" (Kant). The
answer to this ancient conflict between norm and reality is simply to say that if all were as it ought to be in
the world, there would be no need to build normative models, either. The fact that a normative model
does not correspond to reality is no reason to dismiss it, for the need for normativity arises precisely
because humans measure the reality they inhabit in the light of principles and promises that
transcend this reality . The relevant question therefore is: Does a given normative model enable us to
analyze and distill the rational principles of existing practices and institutions in such a fashion that we can
then use these rational reconstructions as critical guidelines for measuring really existing democracies?
16
Allen sums up the matter by noting that though imbalances of power are important for Habermasian
critical theory to grapple with, the solution to this "can only be more discourse or debate" (PS 18). This
continued faith in the perfectibility of the democratic process is what distinguishes the Habermasian
feminists I have cited in this chapter from the thinkers – perhaps, again, with the exception of Levinas – I
have discussed in earlier chapters of this book. The latter thinkers, as well as those aligned with these
thinkers, would in fact ridicule the Habermasian stance for its naive inability to recognize how power
corrupts the democratic process, how, for example, neoliberalism and global capitalism have torn
democracy into shreds. As Wendy Brown explains, "This is a political condition in which the substance of
many of the significant features of constitutional and representative democracy have been gutted,
jettisoned, or end- run, even as they continue to be promulgated ideologically, served as a foil and shield
for their undoing and for the doing of death elsewhere." 17 Indeed, what good can the ideal of
participatory parity do in the context of biopolitical and other invisible forces of power that constitute us as
compliant subjects well before we understand the basic principles of such parity? If our psychic lives,
including our unconscious desires, fantasies, and motivations, are shaped by hegemonic power, then
participatory parity seems like a mere stopgap measure – something that makes us feel slightly better
about being nothing but the obedient marionettes of power.5
To some degree I agree with such pessimism about the Habermasian democratic process. But I am not
convinced that the alternative approaches I have analyzed in this book necessarily fare any better in
terms of being capable of addressing the problem of power. I have already explained my reservations
about the ability of Zizek and Badiou to do so. Butler may at first glance seem more competent in this
regard, given that the critique of disciplinary power has always been central to her theory. Yet, as I have
demonstrated, I am not reassured by her assertion that opposing power is a matter of negotiating with
it. Nor am I persuaded by the haphazardness of her understanding of resistance—a haphazardness
that arises from her rejection of agency. Take her assertion that the Benjaminian messianic rupture of
divine violence—outlined in Chapter 3—offers the possibility of a political intervention based on
distraction: Perhaps we need to be more distracted, as Baudelaire was said to be, in order to be available
to the true picture of the past to which Benjamin refers. Perhaps, at some level that has implications for
the political point I hope to bring out here, a certain disorientation opens us to the chance to wage a fight
for the history of the oppressed.1*
Butler here offers disorientation and chance—rather than action, choice, or decision —as a political
strategy. As she adds, "We have to be provisional situationists, seizing the chance to fight when it
appears" (PW \ 10).
This is not a new problem, for long before Butler's turn to ethics, she wrote, in relation to our tendency
to identify with the power structures that subjugate us: "The very categories that are politically available
for identification restrict in advance the play of hegemony , dissonance and rearticulation. It is not
simply that a psyche invests in its oppression, but that the very terms that bring the subject into political
viability orchestrate the trajectory of identification and become, with luck, the site for a disidentificatory
resistance."''' I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the idea that the psyche invariably
"invests in its oppression," but in the present instance I want to call attention to Butler's reduction
of resistance—here configured as a practice of disidentification —to a kind of lucky break from the
generalized background of power. Allen has noted the same problem, arguing that luck is too flimsy a
basis for political resistance , and pointing out, furthermore, that Butler's reluctance to theorize the
social world as anything but hegemonic makes it difficult for her to envision the possibility of social
solidarity, including nonsubordinating , nonstrategic forms of mutual recognition. As Allen asserts:
Without a more fully developed and less ambivalent notion of cognition, Butler is left unable to explain
the possibility of collective or, ultimately, individual resistance. . . . Without an
account of how the recognition of our commonality provides the basis for political community and
collective resistance, Butler is left suggesting that the transformation from identification to disidentification,
from signification to resignification, from subjectivation to a critical desubjectivation, is nothing more
than a matter of luck. (PS 93)
Exactly. As complicated and potentially flawed as the democratic ideal of participatory parity may
be, it still seems like a better basis for political action than dumb luck.
One of the stock objections to participatory parity, of course, is that it is a Western invention and therefore
intrinsically imperialistic. Undeniably, as Allen's notion of "principled contextualism" suggests, it is
important to acknowledge this possibility. Yet it is equally possible that the very belief that the ideal of
participatory parity is a distinctively Western virtue is merely yet another example of Western
superciliousness—which dictates that all good things must by definition be Western—for surely it would
be easy enough to find examples of non-Western societies that, in various ways, respect this ideal
(as do, for instance, many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies). In addition, as vehemently as progressive
critics such as Butler, Zizek, and Badiou attack "liberalism," including Habermasian discourse ethics, the
ideals that they end up promoting are usually ultimately not that different from the ideals that someone
like Benhabib would endorse: freedom, equality, reciprocity, and democratic process. Indeed, my
sense is that these fundamental Enlightenment ideals continue to constitute the silent background of
much of progressive theorizing, that no matter how insistently poststructuralist or Marxist
academics rail against the Enlightenment—while also disagreeing with each other— they still
secretly hold onto its basic values: they merely add "radical" in front of these values, so that
rather than speaking about, say, freedom, they speak about "radical" freedom.

Their rejection of argumentative stasis leads to spur-of-the-moment ethics and

inability to respond to violence
Ruti, professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto, ‘15
(Mari, Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics, Bloomsbury Publishing, pg,164-166)

I do not here wish to revisit the details of these critiques of Habermas. which I mostly agree with, but
merely to point out that the problem of power discrepancies may be even more pronounced in Badiou's
paradigm, where the event is supposed to produce a generic truth without any of the checks and
balances of democratic deliberation. Though the event, like the Lacanian act, can be a private
revelation—one of Badiou's examples is the amorous event as an experience of unconditional lover—its
ethical valences are most clearly discernible in the context of collective situations where participants are
supposed to arrive at a shared truth through a miraculous galvanization of their passions. Ethics
becomes a matter of the kind of leap of faith —the kind of inspired moment of certainty (and even of
madness)—that does not recognize any grounding principle external to itself. What matters is the
strength of conviction and the capacity to rally others behind this conviction, with the consequence that
those with charismatic or forceful personalities are likely to overpower more reticent ones. The heat
of the truth-event, in other words, favors those who do not hesitate to dominate . It may be true that
the resolutions that result from a democratic process are no more objective than those that are extracted
from a specific situation through the irruption of the event, but at least they have the advantage of
being open to challenge . And while it is undoubtedly true that a priori norms that sustain unjust
social systems are oppressive, so are, potentially at least, ethical decisions based on spur-of-the-
moment evaluations that carry a mystical, quasi-theological force . I understand why Badiou does
not want to determine the content of good and evil a priori, ahead of the specific necessities of a given
situation, for in his view, this effectively precludes the possibility of any genuinely new, surprising, or
unprecedented perspectives.
Jamieson Webster explains the matter beautifully when she claims chat Badiou's ethical vision—what she
describes as an "ethics of that which is not yet in being"—can be likened to the position of the analyst
who does not seek to fix the truth of the analysand's desire ahead of time bur rather waits for this truth
to reveal itself through the gradual exploration of the unconscious." As Webster specifics, the ideal
ethical actor, in Badiou's sense, would aspire to the stance of the analyst as someone who chooses to be
"without memory" (/,D 108), who starts from scratch with every new patient, without assuming that the
desire of a new patient has anything to do with the desire of her previous patients. Badiou's situation-
specific ethics, Webster claims, demands a similar clean slate, a similar lack of a priori judgments.
I can see how, conceptually, this comparison is seductive. But using the analyst's position to explain
Badiou's ethics also reveals the limitations of this ethics. It may make sense for the analyst to be "without
memory," but this posture would be disastrous in relation to historical events such as American slavery,
the Holocaust, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Congo, Sudan, or Syria (to name just a few of the
most obvious examples). The impulse to let sociopolitical atrocities fall into oblivion, or even to
deliberately hide them, is already so strong that the aspiration to be "without memory" in relation to them
hardly seems like the appropriate response. Furthermore, in the clinical encounter, there is time and
space to linger in the specificity of desire. In contrast, in the domain of world politics, being able to
act swiftly —on the basis of predetermined codes of conduct —is sometimes the only way to
prevent violence from escalating. Saying that we should approach ethics with the same attitude of
unknowingness and refusal of precedent as the analyst takes in relation to each new patient is a bit like
saying that, the next time Jews start being rounded up and shipped off to undisclosed locations, we
should assume that the past can teach us nothing and that we need to consequently enter into a
lengthy process of seeing how things will unfold . I am sure that this is not what Webster—or even
Badiou—means to suggest. But it is a matter worth contemplating. What, in Badiou's model, is to
guarantee that an ethics that arises from a particular situation does not serve the interests of those who
happen to be powerful in that situation? It seems to me that an a priori set of ethical principles would
have a much better chance of handling this dilemma successfully.

Centering instrumental climate policy in research is key to effective climate

deliberation and critical environmental action
Duit et al., Department of Political Science, University of Stockholm, ‘15
(Adreas, Peter H. Feindt Strategic Communication Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands &
James Meadowcroft, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carelton University, “Greening
Leviathan: the rise of the environmental state?” Environmental Politics Volume 25, 2016 - Issue 1)

(Re)Turning to the state

At first sight, putting the state at the core of research on the way contemporary societies organise their
relationships with the natural environment might appear to be going against the flow of knowledge
development. In political science and international relations, the governance perspective has widely
displaced the state as a central analytical category (Pierre 2000 Pierre, J., 2000. Debating governance:
authority, steering, and democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press., Bevir 2011 Bevir, M., 2011. The
SAGE handbook of governance. London: Sage.). Environmental geographers and sociologists now
emphasise a dynamic approach that looks at networks and flows rather than superficially stable units and
borders (Sonnenfeld and Mol 2011 Sonnenfeld, D.A. and Mol, A.P.J., 2011. Social theory and the
environment in the new world (dis)order. Global Environmental Change, 21 (3) (August), 771–775.
doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.03.019). Environmental sociology has produced increasingly skeptical
accounts of the possibility of systematic intervention to reconfigure human relationships with the
environment. While scholars in the ‘Treadmill of Production’ tradition see the state as mainly serving a
legitimation need of the market (Schnaiberg et al. 2002 Schnaiberg, A., Pellow, D.N., and Weinberg, A.,
2002. The treadmill of production and the environmental state. In: A.P.J. Mol and F. Buttel, eds. The
environmental state under pressure. Bradford: Emerald, 15–32.), others have moved attention to deeply
embedded behaviour-shaping structures of everyday practices, habits, and routines (Spaargaren 2011
Spaargaren, G., 2011. Theories of practices: agency, technology, and culture. Global Environmental
Change, 21 (3) (August), 813–822. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.03.010). Against these developments, a
research focus on the state might appear to reproduce antiquated societal self-descriptions, conveying an
illusion of the controllability of social processes, and an overly static vision of social affairs.
Yet, there are good reasons for affirming the significance of the state for the analysis (and practice )
of environmental politics and policy. First, and most obviously, states still matter . States structure
political, economic, and social interactions, maintain legal frameworks (including systems of property
rights) backed by coercive power, and deploy significant economic and administrative resources through
taxation/expenditure and their bureaucratic apparatus. In the environmental domain, systems of national
regulation remain the foundation of the environmental management practices built up over the past half
century (Sands and Peel 2012 Sands, P. and Peel, J. with Fabra, A. and MacKenzie, R., 2012. Principles
of international environmental law. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). Of course, how
states operate and what they do depends on complex interactions among varied actors that evolve
over time. Municipalities and regional governments are active in the environmental sphere, although
these too are ultimately components of the state. International organisations and treaties are important,
but remain largely dependent on the states that created them. The influence of the EU in environmental
affairs has been increasingly evident for several decades. The EU is an evolving sui generis political
entity, but member states retain a significant direct influence in decision making and policy
implementation, and to the extent that the EU determines the development of environmental governance
within its sphere (and acts as a unified external political actor), it comes to display ‘state-like’
characteristics. Environmental governance arrangements now involve ‘market-based’ approaches, multi-
partite agreements, and non-state mechanisms (Wurzel et al. 2013 Wurzel, R., Zito, A.R., and Jordan, A.,
2013. Environmental governance in Europe. A comparative analysis of new environmental policy
instruments. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.). But one should not forget the extent to which these rest on
regulatory foundations (consider emissions trading), explicit state sponsorship (e.g. in the form of
‘negotiation in the shadow of hierarchy’), or implicit support. States stand at the juncture of domestic and
international political order. They remain the most powerful human mechanism for collective action
that can compel obedience and redistribute resources. And it is not just that states actually wield power,
but also that they are understood to embody legitimate authority.
A focus on the environmental state differs , for example, from environmental policy perspectives that
mainly emphasise ‘instruments’ or ‘networks’ . It does so by putting the agency of the state, as well as
historically defined patterns of state institutionalisation that structure political interaction, into the spotlight.
By adopting the state as a central analytical category , researchers can explore its role in the
constitution and reproduction of governance arrangements, the stabilisation of framework conditions for
everyday routines, and the organisation of networks and flows . It helps to focus attention on the
venues and processes of the authoritative determination of contested social arrangements . Once
established, state agencies and practices influence the discourse and knowledge of other organisations in
their field (Scott 1998 Scott, J., 1998. Seeing like a state. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.). State
agencies act to shape their societal and organisational environment, as highlighted, for example, in the
corporatism literature (Streeck and Schmitter 1985 Streeck, W. and Schmitter, P.C., 1985. Community,
market, state-and associations? The prospective contribution of interest governance to social order.
European Sociological Review, 1 (2), 119–138.). State structures and programmes tend to persist over
time, although their functions might alter, depending on the coalitions that support them (Thelen 2012
Thelen, K., 2012. Varieties of capitalism: trajectories of liberalization and the new politics of social
solidarity. Annual Review of Political Science, 15, 137–159. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-070110-122959).
This can be understood in evolutionary terms: state agencies are a significant element in the ‘ecology’
within which political interactions occur. The state’s authoritative character, and its institutionalisation of
mechanisms for collective decision making , mean that it can respond to the ‘public good’ and ‘free-
rider’ dimensions of environmental problems, as well as to the distributional conflicts they typically
embody. Of course, state institutions are themselves the objects of political struggle , and are
continuously contested – both internally and externally. So, ostensibly environmental institutions can
serve a range of other purposes , depending on the actor coalitions that influence events. Nor should
the state be considered a single and unified entity: rather it is fragmented, self-contradictory, and only
partly coherent. These considerations suggest the importance of an historical perspective on the
development of the state’s engagement with environmental issues. We therefore tend to disagree with
perspectives that see the state as axiomatically anti-environment , irrevocably locked into a
historical project of dominating nature (Polanyi 1944 Polanyi, K., 1944. The great transformation: the
political and economic origins of our time. New York: Rinehart., Leiss 1972 Leiss, W., 1972. The
Domination of Nature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.). While we acknowledge the
continuous influence of older, Promethean layers of the state, we stress that environmental engagement
can be empirically observed, and we are interested in the ensuing internal tensions among different parts
of the state, rather than considering it as a monolithic entity.
Concern with the state can also encourage researchers to see environmental governance in a wider
political context that includes the specific character of state–societal interactions, constitutional and legal
norms, administrative practices and political culture, electoral systems, and mechanisms of representative
democracy. There are tensions and complementarities among the issue areas with which states are
preoccupied (including economic management, social welfare provision, and security) and among the
specialised institutions established to handle these other domains. A focus on the state points to the
linkages between environmental politics and policy and more general patterns of political continuity and
change. And it raises the question of what impact the engagement with environmental issues has had on
pre-existing state structures and practices.
Finally (and closely related to the previous point), invoking the state as a central analytical category can
facilitate connections with significant research traditions that were not focused on the environment
(Held 1983 Held, D., ed., 1983. States and societies. Oxford: Blackwell., Pierson 1996 Pierson, C., 1996.
The modern state. London: Routledge.). This is particularly important with respect to the analysis of the
historical evolution and character of the modern state, including comparative work on welfare states
(Esping-Andersen 1990 Esping-Andersen, G., 1990. Three world of welfare capitalism. Cambridge: Polity
Press.), varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2003 Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D., 2003. Varieties of
capitalism: the institutional foundations of comparative advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.), and
democratisation (Huntington 1991 Huntington, S.E., 1991. The third wave. Democratization in the late
twentieth century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.), as well as to long-standing arguments
about the nature of politics, the appropriate role of the public power in social life, citizenship, political
obligation, justice, rights, and so on. Drawing on these traditions can potentially enrich environmental
scholarship and serve to accelerate the transfer of findings from the environmental sphere into other
areas of political enquiry .
 2
Their focus on body-toxicity and subjective performance against dominant codes
of power prevents institutional struggle essential to contest neoliberalism
Schwartz, Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, ‘15
(Joseph, “Being Postmodern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary
Self-Defined “Radical” Political Theory,” in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive
Politics, ed. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson, Chapter 7)

But if a pure politics of “difference” cannot provide a complete moral foundation for a politics of pluralism,
equality, and solidarity, can poststructuralist theory aid intellectuals and political activists in developing
such a compelling radical democratic public philosophy? Wendy Brown’s States of Injury, Judith Butler’s
work, particularly her more explicit political commentary in Feminist Contentions, and William E.
Connolly’s The Ethos of Pluralization, represent three now almost canonical works that attempt to
theorize a politics of radical democratic solidarity that draws heavily upon post-structuralist precepts. Each
of these theorists embraces the “post-structuralist” critique of both liberal individualism and
groupbased identity politics.32 Yet a profound tension remains between these theorists’ commitment to
radical democracy and their post-structuralist theoretical orientation. For if efforts to construct
communities of shared values and interests are rejected as efforts to “norm” the self, then the
possibility for human beings to transform political reality remains dim indeed. If all forms of cohesive
communities and coherent individual identities are suspect, then the only form of “resistance” possible is
that of isolated, “fragmented selves.”
The post-structuralist “deconstruction” of the concepts of human subjectivity and agency pose new
intellectual barriers to coherent theorizing about the activity of real human beings. As Susan Hekman
points out, many feminist and ‘radical’ theorists embrace the post-structuralist orthodoxy that the concepts
of “the subject” and “agency” are “fictive universals” that negate the role that the “repressed other” plays
within “fragmented selves.” According to this by-now standard post-structuralist narrative, coherent
subjects do not exist and agency is a fictive “norm” imposed upon individuals by “disciplinary
institutions.” Rather, human actors are “subject-positions” that struggle, in a Sisyphean manner, to “fix”
identities and institutions that are inherently unstable.33 Drawing upon Foucault, these theorists imply that
any recognition by the state of groups or even state-regulation of economic or political behavior, “norms”
individuals through the “discursive” constitution of “bio-power.” That is, the state, through bureaucratic
and statistical classifications tries to “norm” citizens into coherent identities. As if to affirm Michael
Walzer’s view that Foucauldian analysis yields a political sensibility of resigned resistance (resistance
inevitably involves only a “rearranging of the bars on the cage” of modern institutions),34 post-
structuralist’s most influential theorist, Judith Butler, counsels a strategy of “resistance” grounded upon
the “ironic” transmutation of the “performative” roles that power-knowledge discourses “norm” upon us.
But an adequate theoretical understanding of how people practice politics must grapple with the social
reality that individuals in the modern world believe that they are capable of exercising individual
choice . Poststructuralist analysis offers no coherent theory of intersubjectivity and social action and
appears to imply that a human being who thinks they have agency and choice is deluded. In reality, the
post-structuralist theory of the “performative self ” is a peculiar form of radical methodological
individualism, as the “labile” self can voluntaristically engage in “performative resistance” (although, in
contrast to the “rational chooser” of public choice theory, here the individual is incoherent and
fragmented). In contrast to the post-structuralist ideology of “decenteredness,” an adequate social theory
would have to comprehend how individuals operate intersubjectively while illuminating the institutional ,
cultural, and material constraints placed upon individual and group agency. Many commentators note
that neither Brown nor Butler analyze how social and group dynamics influence and help shape the
self .35 Butler’s holds that “resistance” only can come through an “ironic” and subversive choice to
“perform” outside the iterative norms that enables and constitutes the subject.36 Such a conception not
only raises the now longstanding question of whether she can define who is “the doer behind the deed”
of resistance. It also raises an ironic parallel between the methodological (“anti”) individualist nature of
Butler’s world of discursively constructed subjects and Rawls’s “rational chooser.” Social constructivists
(from communitarians to deliberative democrats) frequently criticize Rawls for deducing rules of justice
from the representative thinking of one (deracinated and desexed) ideal chooser operating in the original
position and behind the veil of ignorance. In a similar manner, Butler’s “performative” resister appears to
be a “representative” (incoherent) “subject” whose repertoire of “ironic,” “performative,” resistance seems
to draw upon disembodied discourse . (Seemingly one “incoherent self ” can represent all “incoherent
selves.”) Interaction among these “fragmented selves” never appears to affect the “performative”
constitution of any given self. And language or “discourse” seems to have a free-floating existence
apart from the social, political, and cultural practices that influence the behavior of social individuals. In
the actual world, one in which theorists live their daily lives, “discursive performance” is not the sole
manner by which individuals deal with (and express) the material and cultural realities that both empower
and constrain their choices and actions. For example, individuals cannot readily “discursively
perform” themselves out of their socioeconomic or class position. There is a certain materiality to
poverty or to unemployment or to being “bossed” that can’t simply be “ironically” and
“performatively” transformed. Class relations are structural, as well as discursive. The greater difficulty
in forming unions in the United States—as compared to other advanced industrial democracies—has
much to do with American legal, ideological, and political constraints and not simply with the relative
inefficacy of the “performative” “counter-hegemonic” behavior of (fragmented) individuals. Even the
“parodic” possibilities of “gender” reversal are constrained by the communities in which one resides. Is
the “reversal” of “drag” a viable public possibility in a violently homophobic community? Were not the
“performative” options of a Matthew Shepard more brutally constrained than those of a gay or lesbian
student at a “progressive” residential liberal arts college (while recognizing that unsafe—and even
degrading and violent—social spaces confront LGBTQ individuals, women, and students of color in even
the most allegedly “cosmopolitan” of social spaces). Simply put, distinct “social spaces” set
differential constraints on “performative” choices .
Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of “narrow” identity politics as an inverted
“resséntiment” of the Enlightenment desire for a universal, homogenized identity. They judge identity
politics to be a politics of “wounding, resentment, and victimization” that only can yield bad-faith
moralization. Wendy Brown takes to task identity politics for “essentializing” conceptions of group identity.
For example, she critiques the work of Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing “identity” political theory,
accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by depicting them purely as victims.37 Brown also
remains wary of the patriarchal, conformist nature of traditional left conceptions of solidarity and
citizenship. Brown’s implicit concept of radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition that
political identity is continually in flux and is socially constituted through “agonal” political struggle. Brown
celebrates an Arendtian conception of a polity in which both shared and particular identities are
continually open to reconstruction. In this “left Nietzschean” view of an “everyperson’s” will to power, there
can be no cultural certainties or political givens, as such “givens” would repress difference and fluidity.38
But, if the human condition is a world of permanent flux , then we must postulate a human capability of
living with constant insecurity, for in this world there can be no stable political institutions or political
identities.39 An ability to calculate the probabilities of political actions or public policies would
disappear in this world of infinite liminality. By assuming that the preeminent democratic value is that of
leaving all issues as permanently open to question, post-structuralist “democratic theory” eschews the
theoretical and political struggle over what established institutions and shared values are needed to
underpin a democratic society. If a repressive authoritarian Right wins this open “ agonal” struggle
are we left with no democratic resources and practices by which to critique their antidemocratic
actions (which may even gain majoritarian support)?

Unfettered neoliberalism leads to mass violence and environmental destruction –

radical engagements towards institutional change are key
Rees, professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning,
originator of “ecological footprint analysis,” founding member and former president of the Canadian
Society for Ecological Economics, ‘15
(William, “Economics vs. the Economy,” http://www.greattransition.org/publication/economics-vs-the-
economy)

Economic theories, though social constructions, can reflect reality to varying degrees. In the face of dire
environmental challenges , adopting a realistic theory is key to the survival of global civilization .
The neoliberal emphasis on limitless growth and monetary flows, a relic of nineteenth century thinking,
abstracts away from biological conditions. By contrast, ecological economics—as distinct from
environmental economics, which remains wedded to the neoliberal growth paradigm—understands the
economy as a subsystem of the ecosphere and envisions a steady-state economy embedded within
natural constraints. Achieving this equitably will require significant redistribution of wealth and
income, reduction of material throughput, and a transition away from fossil fuels. Although the neoliberal
paradigm remains dominant, its lack of fitness to current realities gives hope that an ecological alternative
could ascend.
Social Constructs and Social Reality
Is there anything we can say about economics that takes us beyond pure “conjecture”? How can we tell
whether one theorist’s interpretation of the economic process is any “better” than another’s?
These questions are not as simple as they seem. Of the many unique qualities that set Homo sapiens
apart from other sentient beings, one of the most important is that we humans tend to create our own
“realities.” To be more precise, we make up stories about almost everything, give tenacity to these stories
through social discourse and repetition, and then “act out” the stories as if they were reality. Tribal myths,
religious doctrines, political ideologies, academic paradigms, and grand cultural narratives are just some
of the fabrications that can make or ruin individual lives and set the course for whole societies.
Sociologists call the general phenomenon the “social construction of reality” (though it would be more
accurate to refer to the social construction of shared perceptions). The fact of “social construction”
provides a useful frame through which to assess the relative merits of neoliberal growth economics
versus Herman Daly’s steady-state ecological economics for a full world.1
To begin, it is important to distinguish between “the economy” and “economics.” Both are made-up
concepts, but with a significant difference. We define the economy as that set of activities by which
human agents identify , develop/exploit, process , and trade in scarce resources. It generally
encompasses everything associated with the production, allocation, exchange, and consumption of
valuable goods and services, including the behavior of various agents engaged in economic activity.
Different economies vary considerably in sophistication and organizational structure. However, all
economies are real phenomena ; people in every human society from primitive tribes through modern
nation-states engage in economic activities as defined.
“Economics,” by contrast, is pure abstraction. It is that academic discipline dedicated to dissecting,
analyzing, modeling, and otherwise describing the economy in simplified terms. Academic economists
engage in the social construction of formalized models—verbal and arithmetic “paradigms”—about how
the real economy works.
In fact, economists have advanced various competing economic paradigms to describe our modern,
techno-industrial, mainly capitalist national and global economies. These differ substantially in terms of
foundational principles, analytic tools, systemic scope, conclusions, and policy implications, particularly
where the biophysical “environment” is concerned. This diversity should be no surprise: whatever their
seeming conceptual elegance and analytic rigor, every economic paradigm is, at bottom, a socially-
constructed figment of the human imagination, one that necessarily reflects the starting beliefs, values,
and assumptions of its authors. And beliefs, values, and assumptions vary a great deal.
These insights should give us pause. Paradigms of all kinds, even those with demonstrably sketchy
origins, assert enormous power over expressed human behavior. Indeed, it is truly remarkable that
individuals and whole societies live in the real biophysical world guided by the parameters of various
myths, paradigms, social norms, and cultural narratives that may have only a tenuous grip on that same
reality.
This brings us back to wondering how reasonable people might choose between neoliberal growth
economics and steady-state economics, particularly in a time of ecological turmoil. Postmodernists of
the extreme relativist persuasion might argue that, since all knowledge is socially constructed, there
is no objective reality. Competing paradigms are therefore equally valid (as in “my vision of the
economy is as good as yours!”). This is dangerously wrong-headed : humans construct only their
beliefs, not reality . Relativistic equivalence is itself a constructed fiction . Culture critic Neil
Postman astutely observed, “You may say, if you wish, that all reality [i.e., perception] is social
construction, but you cannot deny that some constructions are ‘ truer’ than others . They are not
‘truer’ because they are privileged; they are privileged because they are ‘truer.’”2
To be clear, we should acknowledge that many social constructs are pure illusion with no counterpart
in nature (e.g., the tooth fairy or the notion of a fiery hell); others specify entities that actually exist in
total indifference to how people conceive of them (e.g., the law of gravity or the biogeochemical
cycling of nutrients). Postman is referring to constructs in the latter category. All social constructions of
real phenomena are conceptual models, but a “truer” model will be supported by tangible evidence ,
not opinion or wishful thinking. “Truer” constructions are better maps that more fully and faithfully
represent the real-world landscapes they purport to represent.
It is also important to recognize that while belief in some illusory constructs (e.g., “the sun rises in the
East”) is inconsequential, allegiance to others can determine the fates of nations. How a society
conceives of its economy, for example, really matters . Indeed, operating from a realistic economic
paradigm may even be a key to the survival of global civilization.
Neoliberal Mechanics or Eco-thermodynamics?
So, what do we know about real-world economic activities that might guide us in constructing a “true”
economic paradigm? By “true,” I mean one that, among other requirements, adequately reflects the
energy/material flows and biophysical processes basic to all living things, including human beings. It is not
an exaggeration to say that such a paradigm is a matter of survival. After all, the human system functions
like a multi-cellular organism except that, in addition to our bio-metabolic demands, we also have to
account for humanity’s unique industrial metabolism. Six facts about humanity and the natural world seem
particularly relevant:
1. All human economies are confined to planet Earth, i.e., they function within the ecosphere.
2. The entire human enterprise—our physical bodies, our possessions, and the infrastructure needed to
maintain the functional integrity of the whole—is made from energy and materials that we extract from
ecosystems and inanimate nature (i.e., from self-producing and non-renewable forms of so-called “natural
capital”).
3. All energy and material flows/processes associated with economic activity are governed by well-known
laws of physics and chemistry.
4. Real economies, societies, and ecosystems are complex systems characterized by lags, thresholds,
and other forms of nonlinear behavior (complex systems dynamics) that make their trajectories under
stress inherently difficult to predict.
5. The energy and material pathways associated with the acquisition of resources and the disposal of
wastes require people to interact with both other species (ecosystems) and inanimate nature. In fact, a
qualitative and quantitative record of these flows would describe humanity’s material ecological niche; the
goods economy roughly maps the human ecosystem.
6. The ecosphere is a finite entity with variable, but ultimately limited, regenerative and waste
assimilation capacities.
The next question is, how well do mainstream economics and Daly’s ecological economics respectively
incorporate these framing constraints? The short answer for the neoliberal paradigm is “virtually not at
all.” The dominant economics in this twenty-first century of increasing ecological turmoil is a relic of
nineteenth century thinking. Its intellectual founders, motivated by the remarkable success of Newtonian
physics, set out explicitly to model economics as the “mechanics of utility and self-interest.” The discipline
consequently lost sight of the social context and purpose of economies and became totally abstracted
from biological reality. Practitioners increasingly based their models on mechanical cause-effect logic and
other simplistic assumptions in the service of analytic tractability. Growth through efficiency gradually
became its raison d’être.
Analytic mechanics may have been a suitable platform for the design of early automobile engines, but it is
grossly inadequate to reflect the lags, tipping points, multiple equilibria, irreversible transformations, and
other complex dynamics of industrial economies or of the social and ecological systems within which they
are embedded. However, since the scale of human activity relative to “the environment” was initially
negligible, neoclassical economists were able to ignore biophysical context with impunity until the 1960s.
As pollution and general eco-dysfunction finally became embarrassingly visible (giving birth to modern
environmentalism), the mainstream response was “environmental economics,” essentially an extension of
the neoclassical growth-based paradigm. If environmental assets were being degraded, the solution was
to monetize nature and let free markets do their magic. Put a price on pollution (i.e., “internalize the
externalities”) and depend on market and technological efficiency gains to ease resource scarcity. Where
that fails, human ingenuity, stimulated by rising prices, will find substitutes for any failing good or
service provided by nature. As Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow famously wrote, “[t]he world
can, in effect, get along without natural resources.”3 There was no perceived need to question the
structural premises of the neoliberal model or its goal of unending growth through efficiency and
technological progress. There are arguably no constraints on human ingenuity.

Their affirmation leads to abstraction and hubris as an end in itself – radical

democratic politics is the only way to attack underlying logics of power
Smulewicz-Zucker, Editor of Logos and adjunct professor of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY,
and Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University, ‘15
(Gregory and Michael J., “Introduction,” in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive
Politics, pg. 1-32)

Radical politics in contemporary Western democracies finds itself in a state of crisis . When viewed from
the vantage point of social change, a progressive transformation of the social order, political radicalism is
found wanting. This would seem to go against the grain of perceived wisdom. As an academic
enterprise, radical theory has blossomed. Figures such as Slavoj Žižek openly discuss Marxism in
popular documentaries, new journals have emerged touting a radical “anti-capitalism,” and whole
conferences and subfields are dominated by questions posed by obscure theoretical texts. Despite this,
there is a profound lack in substantive , meaningful political , social, and cultural criticism of the kind
that once made progressive and rational left political discourse relevant to the machinations of real
politics and the broader culture . Today, leftist political theory in the academy has fallen under the spell
of ideas so far removed from actual political issues that the question can be posed whether the
traditions of left critique that gave intellectual support to the great movements of modernity—from the
workers’ movement to the civil rights movement—possess a critical mass to sustain future struggles.
Quite to the contrary, social movements have lost political momentum; they are generally focused on
questions of culture and shallow discussions of class and obsessed with issues of identity— racial,
sexual, and so on—rather than on the great “social question” of unequal economic power , which once
served as the driving impulse for political, social, and cultural transformation. As these new radical
mandarins spill ink on futile debates over “desire,” “identity,” and illusory visions of anarchic
democracy, economic inequality has ballooned into oligarchic proportions, working people have
been increasingly marginalized , and ethnic minority groups turned into a coolie labor force.
This has been the result, we contend, of a lack of concern with real politics in contemporary radical
theory. Further, we believe that this is the result of a transformation of ideas, that contemporary political
theory on the Left has witnessed a decisive shift in focus in recent decades—a shift that has produced
nothing less than the incoherence of the tradition of progressive politics in our age. At a time when
the Left is struggling to redefine itself and respond to current political and economic crises, a series of
trends in contemporary theory has reshaped the ways that politics is understood and practiced. Older
thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, and newer voices like Alain
Badiou, Jacques Rancière, David Graeber, and Judith Butler, among others, have risen to the status of
academic and cultural icons while their ideas have become embedded in the “logics” of new social
movements. As some aspects of the recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have shown, political
discourse has become increasingly dominated by the impulses of neo-anarchism, identity politics,
postcolonialism, and other intellectual fads. This new radicalism has made itself so irrelevant with
respect to real politics that it ends up serving as a kind of cathartic space for the justifiable anxieties
wrought by late capitalism, further stabilizing its systemic and integrative power rather than
disrupting it. These trends are the products as well as unwitting allies of that which they oppose.
The transformation of radical and progressive politics throughout the latter half of the twentieth and the
early decades of the twenty-first centuries is characterized by both a sociological shift as well as an
intellectual one. A core thesis has been that the shift from industrial to postindustrial society has led to the
weakening of class politics. But this is unsatisfying. There is no reason why class cannot be seen in the
divisions of mental and service labor as it was with an industrial proletariat. There is no reason why
political power rooted in unequal property and control over resources, in the capacity for some to
command and to control the labor of others as well as the consumption of others ought not to be a
basic political imperative . To this end, what we would call a rational radical politics should seek not
the utopian end of a “post-statist” politics, but rather to enrich common goods, erode the great
divisions of wealth and class, democratize all aspects of society and economy, and seek to orient
the powers of individuals and the community toward common ends. Indeed, only by widening the
struggles of labor and rethinking the ends of the labor movement—connecting the struggles of labor
to issues beyond the workplace, to education , the environment , public life, issues of racial and
gender equality , culture, and the nature of the social order more broadly—can we envision a
revitalization of a workers’ movement, one that would have no need of the alienated theory of the
new radicals.1
 3
LNG exports coming
Thorning 16
Margo Thorning (Thorning, Ph.D., is currently the senior economic policy adviser for the American
Council for Capital Formation (ACCF)), Liquefied natural gas exports signal a new era of US energy,
February 05, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/energy-environment/268348-liquefied-natural-
gas-exports-signal-a-new-era-of-us

The next few months will mark a significant time in the history of America's complex bond with
natural gas. This month, Cheniere Energy announced they will commence the loading and
transport of the first shipment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe from their Sabine
Pass terminal in Louisiana. Costing between $9.9 billion and $11.2 billion over more than a decade,
Sabine Pass is the first of its kind to be built in the U.S. in nearly 50 years. This shipment — set to depart
U.S. shores in March — signals a change in the realities of U.S. energy. From a country that was once
importing the majority of our supply and constructing billion dollar natural gas import terminals, we are
now embracing a new paradigm as a net natural gas exporter.
Over the past three years, I have written extensively on the overall benefits of LNG exports, including the
economic benefits of expediting the current federal permitting process and public interest determination
by the Department of Energy. And as we transition into 2016, it is imperative we continue to encourage
lawmakers to act on this historic opportunity, before it is too late.
The United States is truly in the middle of an energy renaissance. Overall, the United States has the
fourth-largest technically recoverable shale gas reserves in the world and is the world's largest natural
gas producer. As a result, U.S. prices have dropped to historic lows and supplies have stockpiled.
But the slow pace of federal permit approvals by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and
the Department of Energy (DOE) could be a serious threat to our thriving natural gas industry and the
significant economic benefits that could come to fruition as a result of exporting LNG.
A new study out by Rice University — commissioned by the DOE — indicates the macroeconomic
benefits of even large quantities of U.S. LNG exports are a net positive for the U.S. economy. In fact, the
report concludes that the impact of increasing exports from 12 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) to 20 Bcf/d
between 2026 and 2040 could add $7 billion to $20 billion annually to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).
The new study validates the importance of unleashing the power of U.S. markets to determine the most
feasible projects to ensure economic benefits are achieved. But this economic windfall is likely contingent
on our ability to have a streamlined and efficient federal decision-making on LNG export terminals.
Exports of U.S. LNG are key to keeping our domestic production — which fuels substantial economic
revenues, jobs and incomes — on its upward trajectory. With domestic production significantly
outweighing domestic demand for natural gas, limiting U.S. LNG exports would not put more volume of
natural gas in our domestic market, but likely stifle investment and job growth in the natural gas sector
and in supporting industries.
Not only are exports vital to encouraging continued production of shale resources here at home, the U.S.
also faces steep competition in the global LNG market and we could miss out on a window of
opportunity to fill international demand with U.S. resources. Though forecasts point to global demand for
natural gas increasing over the next decade, especially with 195 countries committed to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of this century, current LNG markets are limited . Major
natural gas trading partners like Japan have cut their LNG imports by over 10 percent last year. And with
48 competing LNG export projects planned or under construction across the globe, now is the time
to act .

The aff collapses exports

Levi 12
Michael Levi (Senior Fellow for Energy and Environment—CFR), How to Stop Natural Gas Exports, 2012,
http://blogs.cfr.org/sivaram/2012/08/27/how-to-stop-natural-gas-exports/

The underlying logic is similar across different uses for natural gas. Exports raise natural gas prices. That
reduces natural gas use in other sectors. Conversely, though, boosting natural gas consumption in other
sectors increases natural gas prices. That reduces exports .
This applies no matter what the alternative use is for natural gas. Want to use natural gas as a
more climate-friendly substitute for coal? Implement a carbon price, clean energy standard, or
regulation that promotes greater use of gas. Natural gas prices will rise. As a result, the gap between
U.S. and overseas natural gas prices will shrink. Some export projects will no longer be viable. Exports
will thus decline.
How about natural gas as a transport fuel? Same thing. Write CAFE standards in a way that boosts the
use of natural gas in cars and trucks, subsidize the purchase of natural gas vehicles, or raise oil
and gasoline taxes, and more people will use natural gas for transport (including through
conversion of natural gas to methanol and other fuels). Natural gas prices will rise, the gap between
U.S. prices and overseas ones will decline, and exports will no longer be as attractive.
The same thing even holds for natural gas use in manufacturing. I happen to find arguments in favor of
using policy to steer natural gas into manufacturing suspect. But perhaps you don’t. Then subsidize
manufacturing, as several administrations have done (and continue to do) through the tax code. You
know the routine by now: more gas use in manufacturing will boost prices, and exports will decline.
We can even put some numbers on this. Recent modeling by the EIA suggests that a modest price on
carbon could raise natural gas use in the power sector by as much as five billion cubic feet a day as of
2020. Using natural gas to back out a million barrels of oil a day in the transport sector could add roughly
six billion cubic feet a day of demand beyond that. The EIA has recently estimated what that much new
demand might do to natural gas prices (though in a different context). Assuming no surprises on the
supply side, natural gas prices circa 2020 would rise from about six dollars to between seven and eight
dollars for a thousand cubic feet. This would erode a decent part (if not all) of any edge that U.S. exports
might have. The result would be lower (or vanishing ) exports in the first place.
What if U.S. shale gas resources turn out to have been overestimated? The combination of scarcer gas
and a big boost in domestic demand would crank prices up quickly . It would not be surprising to see
prices rise well above ten dollars for a thousand cubic feet (though demand in other sectors would
probably fall to restrain that increase). Needless to say, with natural gas prices that high, exports
would most likely become uneconomic. U.S. exporters would probably still do just fine – their contracts
typically guarantee payment for liquefaction services regardless of whether those services are
actually used. Actual exports , though, would not materialize in any meaningful quantity.

Causes Russian aggression, key to EU unity and NATO

Czerwiec 15
Jason Czerwiec, Researcher at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C., Breaking
Russia’s Natural-Gas Chokehold, April 2015, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416312/breaking-
russias-natural-gas-chokehold-jason-czerwiec

Breaking Russia’s Natural-Gas Chokehold East Europe moves toward energy independence. Over the
past year, Western leaders have watched Russia’s aggression against Ukraine with mounting
apprehension. Indeed, Moscow’s moves in Ukraine are deeply concerning. But Russia’s policies there
should be understood for what they truly are: part of a broader and longer-running game in which the
Kremlin seeks to combat what it sees as the gradual creep eastward of European liberalism. In this
effort, one of Russia’s trump card s has been energy . Moscow has used its virtual monopoly on
European gas supplies to undermine the unity of the E uropean U nion, to weaken the economies of
Russia’s peripheral states, and to siphon off billions of dollars in profits to a corrupt oligarchy. Now,
however, an opportunity has emerged on the European Union’s eastern border to break the Kremlin’s
corrosive energy grip . On October 27, 2014, the Baltic nation of Lithuania welcomed its first
liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) storage and regasification terminal into the port city of Klaipeda. The aptly
named “Independence” is a harbinger of energy security , and it may soon be one of the first entry
points for alternatively sourced gas into Central and Eastern Europe. Litgas, Lithuania’s primary gas
company, is currently under contract to buy 0.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) from Norway’s Statoil this year,
just enough to make its terminal economically viable as an alternative to Russian gas. And it has now
signed an agreement with Chenier Energy in Houston that would send U.S. LNG exports to Klaipeda by
the beginning of 2016. Lithuania, a nation of just 3 million, is leading the push for Europe-wide gas
independence . Litgas has already signed agreements with Polish and Estonian gas companies to
supply gas and connect pipelines. Lithuania’s energy minister, Rokas Masiulas, has been one of
Europe’s most outspoken advocates for the creation of a unified internal energy market. And
Poland, central to any EU-wide gas plan, is not far behind. Its government has been building a
terminal at Swinoujscie, which will open this year with a capacity of 5 bcm. It is also planning an
investment of $1.3 billion in order to link its gas grid to Croatia’s by 2020. The resultant north-south
corridor could fundamentally alter the landscape of Europe’s gas market once an LNG terminal is
completed at the Croatian port city of Krk. Estonia is following suit. Tallinn is in the initial stages of
planning its own terminal, and last fall launched a joint project with Finland that would integrate the
Baltics into the European energy network by the end of this decade. Internal developments in the EU
could also extend energy security upstream. New interconnections could soon send cheap gas from
Lithuania and Poland to Ukraine, undermining Russia’s plan to instigate a gas crisis there to further
suppress European support for the struggling nation. These networks could radically improve Ukraine’s
energy security during Putin’s war of attrition, and for years to come. The writing, in other words, is on the
wall. The pieces are starting to fall into place for a European energy market that is truly free from
Russian dominance . But one critical element of the plan remains uncertain : the supplier . And herein
lies a historic opportunity for the United States. The U.S. has the capability to be a major gas supplier
for Europe. Pre-approved LNG export facilities across the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard will
be able to export up to 90 bcm of gas a year by the end of the decade. If current projections hold, that
would be enough to match almost a quarter of European gas consumption in 2020. There has already
been movement on the part of U.S. LNG firms to enter the Lithuanian market. Still, further investment is
critical and more gas will be needed if the U.S. is to help secure the energy independence of its allies
across the Atlantic. America should buy in, confident in the knowledge that cooperation on LNG will go a
long way toward creating a Europe that is truly whole, free, and at peace , especially in the face of
Russian aggression .

Russia is the only existential risk—no defense

--MAD, hotlines, etc don’t solve
Fisher 6/29 [Max Fisher, How World War III became possible: A nuclear conflict with Russia is likelier
than you think, June 29, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war]

It is practically a cliché in international relations: "Russia without Ukraine is a country, Russia with Ukraine
is an empire." Putin's Russia appears to believe that reclaiming great-power status is the only way it can
guarantee security against a hostile West. Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert, traced this Russian
government obsession with Ukraine back to Putin's political weakness at home, as well as Russia's sense
of military insecurity against a hostile and overwhelmingly powerful West. "I suspect that the desire to
unite the Russian world and to subjugate the non-Russian neighbors is driven by a fundamental
sense of insecurity," Lewis said in a much-circulated September podcast on Putin's nuclear threats.
"That, like the Soviet leadership, he has to try very hard to stay in power, and so there’s a tendency
as his legitimacy declines to try to blame outside forces. And the problem is that when you try to look at
the world in that conspiratorial way, there’s always a justification for subjugating the next set of
neighbors." This means that should the US or other Western countries become sufficiently
involved in Ukraine that Russia cannot maintain control of the conflict, then Russia may feel this
puts it at such existential threat that it has no choice but to escalate in response. Even at the risk of
war . Russia knows it would lose a full-blown war with NATO, of course, but it has other options. An
official with the Russian Defense Ministry's public advisory board told the Moscow Times that should
Western countries arm Ukraine's military, it would respond by escalating in Ukraine itself as well as
"asymmetrically against Washington or its allies on other fronts." Russian asymmetrical acts —
cyberattacks, propaganda operations meant to create panic, military flights, even little green men — are
all effective precisely because they introduce uncertainty and risk . If that sounds dangerous, it is.
American and NATO red lines for what acts of "asymmetry" would and would not trigger war are unclear
and poorly defined . Russia could easily cross such a line without meaning to , or could create
enough confusion that the US believes it or its allies are under a severe enough threat to demand
retaliation . "You don't get to walk this back," Matthew Rojansky, the director of the Kennan Institute,
warned in comments to the New York Times about what could happen if the US armed Ukraine's military,
as Congress is pushing Obama to do. "Once we have done this we become a belligerent party in a
proxy war with Russia, the only country on Earth that can destroy the United States," Rojansky said.
"That’s why this is a big deal."
 CASE
Personal experience shouldn’t determine our response to climate change
Weber and Stern 11—professor @ Center for Research on Environmental Studies
@ Columbia
Elke U. and Paul C, “Public Understanding of Climate Change in the United States” American
Psychologist Vol. 66, No. 4, 315–328 (May/June)
The power and limitations of personal experience. Personal experience is a powerful
teacher, readily available to everyone from an early age. Decisions based on personal
experience with the outcomes of actions (e.g., touching a hot stove or losing money in the
stock market) involve associative and affective processes that are fast and automatic
(Weber, Shafir, & Blais, 2004). However, learning from personal experience can lead to
systematic bias in understanding climate change. First, there are serious problems detecting
the signal. In most U.S. locales at this time, it is virtually impossible to detect the signal of
climate change from personal experience, amid the noise of random fluctuations around the central
trend (Hansen, Sato, Glascoe, & Ruedy, 1998). Second, people are likely to be misled by
easily memorable extreme events. Such events have a disproportionate effect on judgment
(Keller, Siegrist, & Gutscher, 2006) even though they are poor indicators of trends. Extreme
events by definition are highly infrequent, and it takes a long time to detect a change in
the probability of an event that occurs, on average, once in 50 years or less frequently.
The likelihood of an increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme climaterelated events large
enough to be noticed by humans will be small for some time in many regions of the world. Even
individuals whose economic livelihood depends on weather and climate events (e.g., farmers or
fishers) might not receive sufficient feedback from their daily or yearly personal experience to
reliably detect climate change, though recent surveys conducted in Alaska and Florida (two
states in which the climate signal has been relatively strong) show that such personal
exposure greatly increases the concern and willingness of citizens in these states to take
action (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2004; Leiserowitz & Broad, 2008).6 These
studies are noteworthy for examining people’s attempts to learn about climate change
from personal experience, providing direct empirical evidence about the power as well as
the shortcomings of this form of learning in this domain, rather than extrapolating from
results of research in other domains. Third, experiential learning tends to bias the public’s
understanding because of a tendency to over-weight recent events (Hertwig, Barron, Weber, &
Erev, 2004). The evaluation of probabilistic outcomes follows classical reinforcement
learning models, in which positive (negative) consequences increase (decrease) the
likelihood of a behavior that gave rise to them. Such learning processes give recent
events more weight than distant events, which is adaptive in dynamic environments where
circumstances change with the seasons or other cycles or trends (Weber et al., 2004).
Because extreme events have a small probability of having occurred recently, they usually have a
smaller impact on the decision than their objective likelihood of occurrence would warrant. But
when they do occur, recency weighting gives them a much larger impact on judgment and
decision than their probability warrants, making decisions from experience more volatile
across past outcome histories than decisions from description (Yechiam, Barron, & Erev,
2005). As a result, nonscientists can be expected to overreact to rare events like a hurricane or a
heat wave (Li, Johnson, & Zaval, 2011) but most of the time to underestimate the future adverse
consequences of climate change. Beliefs in climate change have been shown to be affected
by local weather conditions (Li et al., 2011), and a relatively cool 2008 may have
influenced the drop in American concern about climate change in 2008–2009 (Woods
Institute for the Environment, 2010). Confusing weather with climate increases the
 potential for these sorts of error (Weber, 2010). Climate scientists can also overreact to single
vivid events, but their greater reliance on analytic processing, accumulations of data, statistical
descriptions and model outputs, and scientific deliberation and debate can be expected to dampen
this tendency. Without such correctives, nonscientists are more likely than scientists to
accept evidence that confirms preexisting beliefs and to fail to search out disconfirming
evidence (Evans, 1989). The scientific method can be seen as a cultural adaptation
designed to counteract the emotionally comforting desire for confirmation of one’s beliefs,
which is present in everyone (M. Gardner, 1957). Finally, nonscientists differ from scientists
in the way they react to uncertainty. Rather than using probability theory to gauge and express the
degree of belief in possible future events and to incorporate new evidence, nonscientists respond
to uncertainty in ways that are more emotional than analytic (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, &
Welch, 2001) and in qualitatively different ways depending on whether the uncertain
events are perceived as favorable or adverse (Smithson, 2008). Nonscientists prefer
concrete representations of uncertainty that relate to their experience (Marx et al., 2007).
To satisfy this preference, some scientists translate probabilistic forecasts into a small set
of scenarios (e.g., best- to worst-case) to facilitate strategic planning by professional
groups such as military commanders, oil company managers, and policymakers
(Schoemaker, 1995).

No root cause to emissions

Sotiropoulos is Senior Lecturer in Finance at the Open University Business School in the UK, ‘15
(Dimitris P., “Financialization: Taking Stock and Moving Forward,” Ends of Critique, Global Dialogues 10)

Changes in profit-rate trends may indeed affect developments in finance, but this process cannot be
unidirectional or straightforward . Nor does it, of itself , explain the critical historical transformations
that have taken place in finance. At the same time, the rise of financial engineering cannot be 2 Hilferding
1981: 226. linked solely to a particular class, or segment of a class , far removed from ‘real’ capitalist
production. What unites the different approaches described above is their view of the nature of finance as
a passive element ever amenable to adjustment by extraneous forces. Finance in its contemporary
version encompasses much more than accumulated liabilities and increased indebtedness. It
presupposes substantial levels of analytical research and financial innovation and it is shaped by major
institutional developments , economic strategies , and state regulations within distinct capitalist
societies; all these have their own unique histories , institutional paces , and temporalities . The
range of unique historical patterns of finance that have emerged in different societies cannot be reduced
either to a mere reflection of a general historical trend in the profit rate or to the dominance of rentiers
among other economic groups or classes. Approaches that regard finance as so ‘flexible’ that it is able,
neatly and instantaneously, to fill the gaps created by underconsumption and/or the rise of absentee
ownership actually fail to grasp the true nature of finance in capitalism. If finance can be reduced to (and
is contemporaneous with) either the trends in the profit rate or the dominance of rentiers, absentee
owners, and/or money managers in social conflicts, then Harry Markowitz (the father of modern
portfoliotheory) and other important figures in the development of modern financial theory must be
recognized as true prophets. They would, after all, have managed systematically to convey a message
concerning the nature of financial markets years, or even decades, before there was any practical need
for such an analysis. Developments such as subprime lending, asset-backed securities (ABS) (including
collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) of various types and other forms of securitization), global capital-
flows in the context of diversified portfolios, contemporary banking intermediation according to the
‘originate and distribute’ model, option pricing methods, and private insurance markets would be
unthinkable without the theoretical and institutional groundwork done in the 1950s – that is, in the glorious
era of ‘welfare capitalism’, long before the demise of the Bretton Woods regime. Whatever the approach
to financialization, it cannot ignore the fact that the theoretical and empirical foundations of practices that
were to emerge fully in the 1980s were actually laid down, little by little , decades before . If modern
finance is merely the byproduct of profit-rate trends and/or of the resolution of social conflict to the
advantage of absentee owners, then we have indeed to believe that Harry Markowitz was able to address
problems that would only arise in a distant future. The point of this paper has been to suggest that the
roots of financialization should be radically reconsidered . This is not to say that serious existing
research on the symptoms of financialization should be discarded, or that the study of trends in profit
rates or of the conflicts between social groups is not important. My point, rather, is that the two most
widely accepted approaches to financialization are unable to explain its rise because finance is
already endogenous to (that is, it influences and is influenced by) economic trends in profitability and
related class struggles.

Affective performance fails

Barnett, Faculty of Social Sciences – The Open University (UK), ‘8
(Clive, “Political affects in public space: normative blind-spots in non-representational ontologies,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Vol. 33, Issue 2, p. 186–200)

The ontologisation of theory has been associated with a strong preference for models of ethical and political
agency that focus attention upon embodied, affective dispositions of subjects. This reflects the influence of
various theoretical and philosophical traditions that share a deep suspicion of ‘cognitivist’, ‘intellectualist’ or ‘mentalist’
construals of human action. This follows from a widely shared intuition that propositional ‘knowing-that’ is a function of
embodied ‘knowing-how’. Once it is acknowledged that ‘knowing-how’ involves all sorts of learned, embodied
dispositions that are inscribed in various types of ‘unconscious’ disposition of anticipation and response, then theoretical
traditions that are too partial to a picture of a social world governed by rules, principles and practices of reason seem
constricted or even wrong-headed. Consistent with the ontological drift of certain strands of cultural theory and
‘Continental philosophy’ (Hemmings 2005; White 2000), in human geography affect has become the sort of thing one can
have ‘a theory of’, where this amounts to the correct delimitation of the ontological status of affective
forces (e.g. Anderson B 2006; Anderson and Harrison 2006; McCormack 2007). Thrift (2004a, 464; 2007, 223–35) identifies
a family of research fields concerned with affect: cultural-theoretic work on performance ; Sylvan Tomkins’
seminal work on affect; Deleuze's reading of Spinoza; and Darwinian accounts. Psychoanalysis is also acknowledged as a source,
somewhat reluctantly. So-called ‘non-representational theory’ (Thrift 2007) derives a highly abstract definition of affect from this
range of work. Affect is presented as an ontological layer of embodied existence, delimited by reference to the
purely formal relationship of the capacity to be affected and to affect. In this presentation, affect is doubly located: in the
relational in-between of fields of interaction; and layered below the level of minded, intentional consciousness.
This vocabulary of the ‘layering’ of thinking, feeling and judgement is fundamental to the political resonances
claimed on behalf of ontologies of affect. In principle, post-foundational philosophies which acknowledge that practical
reasoning goes on against a background of affective dispositions and desires could be expected to reconfigure what, following Ryle
(1949, 10), we might call ‘the logical geography’ of action. However, when the post-foundationalist avowal of the importance of
there is a tendency to simply assert
embodied ‘knowing-how’ is interpreted in terms of ‘layer-cake’ ontologies of practice,
the conceptual priority of previously denigrated terms – affect over reason, practice over representation. Disputes over
the significance for social science of post-foundationalist philosophy turn on the types of priority-claim that are
assumed to follow from ontological assertions that ready-at-handedness, background or affective attunement
stand as the background to embodied action. The ontologisation of affect in recent cultural theory is associated with the explicit
adoption of a layer-cake interpretation of the relationship between practice and expression. Layer-cake interpretations present
propositional intentionality as resting upon a more basic level of pre-conceptual, practical intentionality in such a way as to present
propositional intentionality as derivative of this layer of practical attunement (Brandom 2002, 328). On this view, the practical
presupposition of the available, ready-at-hand qualities of environments in embodied actions that treat these environments as
merely occurrent, or present-at-hand, is interpreted as implying an order of conceptual priority of the practical (Brandom 2002, 332).
This model of conceptual priority puts in place a view of practical attunement as a stratum that is autonomous of propositional
intentionality. It is treated as a layer that ‘could be in place before, or otherwise in the absence of the particular linguistic practices
that permit anything to show up or be represented as merely there’ (Brandom 2002, 80). This view of practice as an autonomous
layer therefore reproduces a representationalist view of representational practices in order to assert the superiority of an avowedly
‘non-representational’ stance. In contrast to this view, we might instead suppose that the priority of practice only holds in the order of
explanation (Brandom 2002, 332). This implies that we cannot understand propositional intentionality without first understanding its
dependence on practice, without supposing that this requires an understanding of practice as an intentional layer that kicks-in before
others. It means presuming that the capacity to represent things as being a certain way is the result of applying an assertional-
inferential filter to things available to us in the first instance as exhibiting various sorts of practical significance. (Brandom 2002, 80)
This alternative interpretation does not assert the priority of one ‘layer’ over another. Rather, it reconfigures our understanding of
what we are doing when representational discourse breaks out, when we say ‘that things are thus-and-so’ (Brandom 2002, 80).
Rejecting the layer-cake interpretation of the type of priority that practice is said to have over propositional intentionality leads to a
reconfiguration of the pragmatics of expressive rationality. Rather than supposing that acts of expression are ways of transforming
an inner content into an outer expression, in a representational way, we instead think in terms of acts of making explicit what is
implicit, in an inferential way (Brandom 2001, 8). An interpretation in terms of the explanatory priority of practice therefore allows us
to understand in inferential terms the embodied capacity for making explicit something one can do as something one can say. This
is a capacity to translate ‘knowing how’ into a ‘knowing that’ which is expressed in terms of commitments and entitlements, ‘as
putting it in a form in which it can both serve as and stand in need of reasons’ (Brandom 2001, 11). The sense of ‘implicit’ in this
holistic-inferential account does not presume that the reasons that can be made explicit were present as the maxims behind the
actions to which they are retroactively attributed. It just means there is no sharp line between unarticulated know-how and explicit
knowledge (Taylor 2000); and that the latter should be thought of as providing a step towards acknowledging the responsibilities
entailed in actions. This interpretation of the order of priority that holds between different sorts of intentionality opens up the
possibility of reconfiguring the logical geography of action. It supposes that different modalities of action enact their own ‘validity
conditions’ that can, in principle, be made explicit in public practices of giving and asking for reasons (e.g. Bridge 2007; Flyvbjerg
2001; Lovibond 2002). This reconsideration of the pragmatics of expressive rationality reconfigures understandings of deliberation
that underlie theories of democracy, justice and legitimacy (see Habermas 2000; Brandom 2000). This overlaps with attempts to
develop thoroughgoing accounts of affective deliberation in contemporary democratic theory (e.g. Krause 2007; Hoggett and
Thompson 2002). This work makes explicit the relevance of affective aspects of life for deliberative models of democracy that work
up from the principle of affected interest, according to which those affected by actions and outcomes should have some say in
defining the parameters of those actions and outcomes. The upsurge of interest in the theme of affect speaks in compelling ways to
a recurrent problem in democratic theory: how to respect citizens as competent moral agents whilst acknowledging the web of
dependent, conditioned relationships into which they are thrown. There is an extensive literature in political science on the role that
non-rational sentiments, feelings and emotions play in the political decisionmaking processes. This is a literature which is empirically
grounded (e.g. Marcus 2002), and explicitly reconfigures understandings of the relationships between rationality, reason and action
(e.g. McDermott 2004). The degree to which affective capabilities can be articulated with public procedures of democratic legitimacy
is a central problem in post-Habermasian critical theory's project of describing the conditions of radical democratic, pluralistic
constitutionalism (e.g. Habermas 2006; Honneth 2007; Markell 2000). Berlant's (2005a) historiography of affective publics in
American culture establishes that any and all political public spheres are shaped by affective energies, while Sedgwick (2003) and
Riley (2005) have explored the affective dynamics of textual practices. In moral philosophy, affect is embraced as a means of
rethinking the role of partiality in deliberative practices, for example in Baier's (1994) feminist ethics of moral prejudice which roots
reason in affects, or in Blackburn's (1998) Humean reconstruction of practical reason. The key thought guiding these
reconfigurations of affect-with-reason is the idea that rationality emerges out of situated encounters with
others. This same theme underwrites the work of political theorists reconfiguring democratic theory around an
appreciation of the affective registers of justice and injustice, expressed in an emphasis on the arts of receptivity,
of listening and acknowledging and responding (e.g. Young 1997; Coles 2005). Thrift's spatial politics of affect and
Connolly's neuropolitics of media affects sits, therefore, in a much broader range of work that is concerned with
affective aspects of political life. But the examples noted above all focus on the affective aspects of life without
adopting a vocabulary of ontological layers, levels and priority. This is in contrast to the characteristic
ontologisation of affect in human geography. The ontologisation of affect as a layer of pre-conscious ‘priming to
act’reduces embodied action simply to the dimension of being attuned to and coping with the world.
This elides the aspect of embodied knowing that involves the capacity to take part in ‘games of giving and asking
for reasons’. While the ontologisation of theory in human geography has been accompanied by claims to transform and
reconfigure understandings of what counts as ‘the political’, this project has been articulated in a register which
eschews the conventions of justification, that is, the giving and asking for reasons. This is particularly evident when it comes to
accounting for why the contemporary deployment of affective energy in the public realm is bad for democracy. The
contemporary deployment of anxious, obsessive and compulsive affect in the political realm is presented as having ‘deleterious
consequences’ on the grounds that it works against democratic expression (Thrift 2007, 253); contributes to a style of
democracy that is consumed but not practised (2007, 248); promotes forms of sporadic engagement that
can be switched on and off (2007, 240); and generally leads to certain dispositions being placed beyond question.
There is certainly a vision of democracy as a particular type of engaged ethical practice at work in these occasional judgements
(2007, 14), but the precise normative force of this view is not justified in any detail. The eschewing of justification arises in
part because the content of these ontologies, which emphasise various layers of knowing that kick-in prior to
representation, is projected directly onto the form of exposition. There is a particular type of authority put into
play in this move. The avowedly anti-intentionalist materialism associated with contemporary cultural-theoretic
ontologies of affect closes down the conceptual space in which argument and disagreement can even get
off the ground (see Leys 2007). In contrast, and as outlined above, the argument pursued here follows an avowedly
‘non-representationalist’ perspective according to which assertions of knowledge, including the types of
knowledge asserted by ontologies of affect, always stand in need of reasons, precisely because they
emerge as reasons for certain sorts of commitments and entitlements (Brandom 1996, 167). On this understanding
ontological assertions act as justifications, and are subject to the demand for justification. If ‘placing things in the space of reasons’
(McDowell 1994, 5) in this sense is not acknowledged as one aspect of practice, then recourse to the ontological register
closes down the inconclusive conversations upon which democratic cultural politics depends (Rorty 2006).

Structural analysis key to understand contingent nature of antiblackness

Gilroy, Professor of American and English Literature at King's College London, ‘09
(Paul, "Civilisationism, Securitocracy and Racial Resignation," Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and
Criticism Salon I, http://www.jwtc.org.za /the_salon/volume_i/paul_gilroy.htm)

Group psychology
The psychological dimensions of resignation to race are counter pointed by immediate technological and
political issues. The molecularisation of racial differences and the shift towards genomics suggest that
this order of natural difference is becoming more not less important.
Recently, the popular authority of commentators as diverse as the academics (Steven Pinker. James
Watson) Niall Ferguson and George Sterner and the journalist Max Hastings has combined to translate
what they take to be the latest fruits of resurgent racial science into the iron laws of middlebrow scientific
commonsense. This suggests that as a species we are "hard wired" to prefer those who are like us from
those who are alien - an outcome which fits tidily with the outlook of people who already believe that the
primary human disposition towards others is essentially conflictual and selfish.
In the Guardian, Ferguson cited Anders Olsson. a US-based neurobiologist of fear, to the effect that we
must sternly if somewhat ambivalently confront the persistent power of race lodged in our genetic
makeup. Hastings asserted that only "the idiot Left could deny" the reality of the simple truths involved in
the workings of a "tribalism ... winch has influenced mankind since the beginning of tune". George
Steiner. sometime custodian of lofty cosmopolitan and humanistic values, offered to the readers of a
Spanish newspaper his opinion that racism was inherent in everyone and racial tolerance only skin-
deep.
He staged the argument in the midst of a curious fantasy deeply marked by a peculiarly British idiomatic
engagement with the consequences of mass economic settlement from the commonwealth after 1945: "It
is very easy to sit here in this room and say racism is horrible". Sterner told his interviewer. "But ask me
the same thing if a Jamaican family moved next door with six children and they play reggae and rock
music all day. Or if an estate agent comes to my house and tells me that because a Jamaican family has
moved next door the value of my property has fallen through the floor. Ask me then!"
Steiner's Jamaicans can be seen as bastards in the venerable Caribbean lineage that descends from
Montaigne's Cannibals. They seem to be curious, timeworn creatures. It is impossible not to wonder what
layers of meaning were at stake in that particular national or perhaps ethnic designation "Jamaican"?
What is its relationship to the tacit language of polite race-talk on the one hand and the inflammatory
mythology of populist-nationalist race-talk on tge other? Would the grim situation Sterner describes be
substantively different if the aliens living noisily next door were Trinidadian or Barbadian: Bangladeshi.
Croatian or Surinamese? If they were Polish. German. French or Swiss? If they had immigrated to
Britain like Sterner himself for academic rather than manual work'1
To make the point more bluntly, what exactly is the sign "reggae" contributing to his horrible scenario,
particularly when rendered equivalent to all the cold, brutal savagery that is bound up with the
contemptuous word "rock" in this aggressively high-cultural context? Would opera, polkas, tangos,
accordion or country and western music have produced the same rhetorical and necro-political effects?
Steiner is on record elsewhere as having told a roomful of Asian and African academics that the "third
world could not afford the luxury of universities". I'm especially troubled by the great humanist's
implication that his repeating this particular mantra — which has, after all, supplied the imaginative
staging of racist, ultranationalist and anti-immigrant rants for almost three generations — was
somehow a difficult thing to do.
Perhaps his difficulty resided not merely in the illiberal act of speaking on behalf of wounded folk outside
the ivory tower, but in the specific discomfort of operating across the lines of class and privilege which
were quietly being inscribed here. The journalist. Sir Max Hastings, defended Stemer's remarks in the
Daily Mail and supported that interpretation as he spun off into a strange ventriloquism of Ins sometime
cleaning lady who, he explained, felt similarly aggrieved by what she was expected to tolerate at the
hands of immigrants: "A heavenly cockney cleaner named Elsie Elmer worked for our family for almost 40
years. Elsie was a widow, a Londoner through and through. When she was 77. she suddenly announced
that she could no longer endure life m Hammersmith, where on both sides of her little house Jamaican
neighbours played music full-blast through the night, every night. One day. I drove her to the airport to
emigrate to Australia, where she had a son living. She hated to go and wept buckets. But she felt that her
street, her city, were no longer the places winch she knew and loved." Hastings revealed that he was both
more typically and more melancholically English when he presaged his damning, illiberal verdict with the
words: "I'm not proud of it but human nature DOES sometimes make us all racist", an opening that caught
my attention for its downbeat admission of shame.
For all of these voices, racial differences may have been given initially by nature but they are
subsequently worked over , worked on and worked up in the social and phenomenological patterns of
performative, everyday interaction . I understand the complexity and insistent, iterative power of those
habits but my point — which needs to be repeated — is that, even when it comes to the "white working
class", it is from those social and historical relations that the groups we call races emerge to make the
idea of unbridgeable natural difference powerful and plausible.
All one-way constructionism — in winch natural difference precedes, underpins and orchestrates
subsequent social divisions — is an inadequate tool with winch to make sense of the social life of
races and other ethno-political actors. Natural difference does not merely supply source material for
social and historical modifications winch may be either bad or good. Race has always been the
particular, historical product of dense and complex interactive processes rooted in war,
conquest, slavery and suffering.
This change of perspective builds upon and hopefully extends the dynamic nominalism identified by Ian
Hacking for whom named kinds and things are altered by then interactive historical and social
correspondence with the processes and institutions that name them. As far as the history of race,
raciality and raciology are concerned, that interplay has involved a range of different institutions of
naming: theological, occult, military, economic, commercial, legal, scientific, technological and aesthetic.
These institutional settings and then ways of seeing and acting on the world may be in profound
conflict. But idea of race helped to synchronise and focus them. That is why we should be wary of
imagining that the particular pragmatic understanding of race associated with the worlds of science and
bio-medicine can be sealed off from racial discourse found in other areas of social and political life. If we
decide that it is desirable to communicate the findings and practices from those institutions in the
contested language of race, the best we can hope for is that the old ambiguities will be maintained. In
the current climate, it is more likely that they will be deepened and amplified .
After more than two centuries of scientific mystification, duplicity and bad faith, and against the often
hyperbolic rhetoric of the genomic revolution, we do not yet know how nature conditions the social
lives, risks and fates of racialised and ethnic groups. It should be obvious that science is not
immune to the mysterious psychological appeal of racial truths and racial certainties. There are
communities of scientists for whom alterity may still be "phobogenic" and "a stimulus to anxiety" just as
there are others for whom the vindication of racial probity and the struggle against racism loom large in
their own research.

Aff gets coopted

Joseph Schwartz, Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future of
Democratic Equality, ‘8

To justify the institutional and moral prerequisites of radical democracy, the democratic theorist must add
to a post-structuralist “genealogy” of identity constitution, a macro-structural analysis of how cultural,
economic, and political institutions shape and constrain identity. Butler’s assertion that the underdefined
nature of discourse inherently allows for “performative resignification” overestimates the extent to
which “transgressive behavior” may alter institutions of power. One has simply to consider the
absence of “performative options” historically for people of color or gays and lesbians living within
undemocratic, repressive, racist, and homophobic communities to see the naïve , apolitical aspects of
Butlerian analyses . Certainly, the struggle over several centuries of working people to alter the power
relationships between labor and capital involved more than “performance.” Democratic social movements
have organized politically to gain—and then use—state power to change social institutions, norms,
and laws in a manner that enhances the power of the dispossessed. Of course, such efforts, in part,
involve cultural and ideological behavior that might be loosely termed “performative.” But workers in a
society in which they have no right to organize nor political rights are unlikely to be able to “perform” their
way out of a subordinate class position. In short, the structure of material, cultural, and state power
matter . And democratic social movements will aim to alter these institutions by political forms of action
that include, but go well beyond, “performativity.” To garner the tax revenues necessary to provide for
universal health care or public child care radicals will have to alter the tax code. And raising tax rates on
upper-income individuals involves more than “performance.” One of the more emancipatory powers
of the democratic state is enforcing progressive taxation. Finally, Butler (as well as other post-
structuralist-influenced “cultural theorists”) radically underestimates how adept late capitalist political
economy has been at co-opting the “performative self.” The commodification of images by the
advertising industry has both domesticated and incorporated “gender-bending behavior” into acts of
capitalist consumption (cf. Calvin Klein’s definition of a pre-sexual, transgendered look as the mode of
dress among trendy, middle-class, white youth).78 If individual and group identity is constituted not only
by the micro power/knowledge discourses of performative practices, but also by ideological and
institutional power, then not all identities may be as easily “bent” as others. For example, while race is
certainly “socially constituted” and has no inherent genetic or phenotypical basis, can African-Americans,
in a nation where the “1 percent rule” still partially governs social and political relationships, radically
“deconstruct” their racial identity? And would they wish to “pass” (or “perform”) as something other than
African-American? How should radical democrats respond to the discrimination and structural economic
inequality confronting many African-Americans (and other communities of color)? Must they not go
beyond “performative” resistance to organize on behalf of radical social policies that would “deconstruct”
the material and political distribution of power and opportunity without necessarily “deconstructing”
African-American (and other racial and ethnic) collective identity? Post-structuralist political theory,
despite its alleged radicalism, mirrors traditional liberal pluralism’s inability to critique forms of
power as undemocratic. By arguing that an agonal politics of a democratic “will-to-power” is possible in
the here-and-now, post-structuralist theorists appear to judge contemporary politics a level-playing field in
which all have the equal ability to make “transgressive discursive moves.” As with classical liberalism’s
conception of individuals as free “contractors” in a “free market,” post-structuralists conceive of “free
performers” engaging in acts of transgressive resistance, seemingly unconstrained by any inegalitarian
structural distribution of resources of expression. But, if all political identity and distribution of power is
purely a result of “discursive” political struggle, what is to stop a conservative postmodernist from
contending that the United States has agonally and democratically decided that the competitive
marketplace is the proper operative definition of democracy? Could not a conservative, libertarian post-
structuralist theorist contend that the democratically, “socially constructed” American conception of the
will-to-power is a world in which individual self-worth is determined by marketplace outcomes rather than
through the public provision of basic human needs? After all, does not our entrepreneurial individualist
politics, which forces candidates for office to spend most of their time trolling for corporate PAC funds in
order to purchase TV advertising time, epitomize the “image-driven” nature of post-structuralist
“discourse”?

Acting in response to conflict and violence is key

Kurt Spellmeyer, Professor of English, Rutgers, ’14
(Fighting Words: Instrumentalism, Pragmatism, and the Necessity of Politics in Composition,” Pedagogy,
Volume 14, Issue 1, Winter 2014, pp. 1-25)

In a world imagined by pragmatism — a world where everyone is treated as a friend — real friendship
becomes impossible. And what we get instead of friendship is its counterfeit, the universalization of the
cash nexus in the form of exchanges that aspire to private advantage, a “good deal.” “Value” in such an
economy is no longer tied to contexts larger than individual satisfaction, and fungibility takes
precedence over all other qualities (Graeber 2011: 336 – 45). This is just what we might expect to see in
a city like Casablanca, populated by transients who might not live to see another year and who have few
allegiances to the strangers surrounding them. But the long-term effect is to reduce everyone to the
status of instruments. Perhaps counterintuitively, the threat of violence and the need to fight back
make real value possible again — value in the sense of commitment to a future world worth living
in. And this shift is signaled by the change in the status of the money at stake in the bet between Rick
and Renault. Before the change, people were just a means; money was the end. But this relation is
exactly reversed: the money becomes the instrument of human purposes. Those of us in composition
now find ourselves at a Casablanca of our own. The current understanding of the public sphere as a
place apart from all politics has left the whole university, the sciences no less than the
humanities, powerless to resist privatization because resistance would have to assume the form
of an argument about ends, not means — an argument, in other words, that would appear political and
so would run the risk of calling down on us the charge of partisanship. For several generations, we
avoided this dilemma by relying on what Fish has called our “place at the table” alongside the other
players in the system of professions. But now that the era of professionalism is coming to an end, our
best chance for survival may depend on linking our future more visibly to the fate of the broad majority of
our fellow citizens — that is, to more politics, not less. After all, the teaching of literacy is a profoundly
political act. And even though English 101 began at Harvard a century ago, the rise of composition has
always been inseparable from the fortunes of broad-based public education. How, then, when our field
has its origins in the fight against inequality, can we suppress this knowledge when we teach? Today our
society is witnessing events that almost nobody foresaw in the optimistic 1980s: a lost generation
of unemployed or underemployed college graduates, trapped in a cycle of debt; a return to a Gilded Age
distribution of wealth; the collapse of public commitments to education at all levels; a coordinated assault
on labor unions nationwide; the manipulation of the press to discredit global warming; an attack on
women’s reproductive rights, including access to contraception; the removal of all barriers to money in
elections; an explosion of childhood obesity and attendant chronic illnesses; a tenfold rise of anxiety
disorders and fivefold rise in rates of depression. In other words, we have ample reason to think that
some kind of conflict might be justified. What we lack, however, is not just political will; we lack an
intellectual paradigm, something like the theory of “just war,” that would allow us to see conflict
now as necessary, even noble. John Dewey (1938: 5) starts Experience and Education with this frank
admission: “All social movements involve conflicts, which are reflected intellectually in controversies. It
would not be a sign of health if such an important social interest as education were not also an arena of
struggles, practical and theoretical.” But no sooner does Dewey make this observation than he takes the
liberal turn. “It is,” he writes, “the business of an intelligent theory of education to ascertain the causes for
the conflicts that exist and then, instead of taking one side or the other, to indicate a plan of operations
proceeding from a level deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas
of the contending parties.” This confidence in transcending differences has a powerful appeal, but a
“more inclusive” unity is precisely what cannot emerge because, as Dewey was willing to admit on other
occasions, ideas actually give expression to concrete ways of life , and these ways of life often prove
to be impossible to reconcile through any feat of analysis, synthesis, or identification. As the Belgian
theorist Chantal Mouffe (2000: 13) insists, the search for a “common ground” sometimes arises from the
self-deceiving hope that a truly public space can protect its inhabitants from the exercise of power. But
power is actually “constitutive of [all] social relations,” and instrumentalism is what we get when we fail to
“acknowledge the dimension of antagonism that the pluralism of values entails.” Drawing on the work of
Rancière, Žižek (2000: 188 – 89; also Žižek 2011: 387 – 402) has made the related point that politics in a
democracy is not about resolving differences within some greater unity but about fighting the right battles
to preserve democracy itself. Education in a democracy must teach citizens not only that power is
inescapable but also that nothing will improve unless they exercise it. The fact that people will
disagree about the nature of the good does not exempt them from having to choose. Refusing to
choose is not an exercise of power but an acceptance of victimization.
1NR
 1NR OV
Turns case – foregrounding engagement is key – their focus on narrative first
creates gaps in engagement that allow the state to roll back gains
Schwartz, Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, and Schulman, editorial
board of New Politics and the editor of Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy, ‘12
(Joseph and Jason, “Toward Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice,”
http://www.dsausa.org/toward_freedom)

In What Is To Be Done, Lenin claimed that trade union activity would produce only a reformist desire for
“more” economic goods rather than revolutionary consciousness. Lenin may not have inaccurately
predicted the nature of predominant working class consciousness during “normal” periods of capitalist
development. Workers under capitalism have more to lose than just their chains. But Lenin’s belief in the
privilege of the “vanguard” party—that it can do whatever it wants once it takes power because it
represents the workers’ “true” interests—contradicts Marx’s belief in working-class self- emancipation.
Though an effective strategy for clandestine organization in repressive societies, Leninism’s track
record in democratic capitalist societies is dismal , perhaps because self-described Leninist parties are
usually thoroughly authoritarian .
Any possible transition to socialism would necessitate mass mobilization and the democratic
legitimacy garnered by having demonstrated majority support . Only a strong majority movement that
affected the consciousness of the army rank-and-file could forestall an armed coup by the right . Even
when a repressive regime necessitates a minority road to revolution, democratic socialists stand with
Rosa Luxemburg—revolutionary Marxist leader in Germany a century ago—in her advocacy of the
restoration of civil rights and liberties once the authoritarian regime has been overthrown. There
has yet to be a “Communist” revolution in which the “vanguard” party then allows itself to be voted out of
office. The end of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the inspiring
struggles against “Communist capitalism” in China, will hopefully lead to movements for democratic
socialism in these countries.
Leninists often argued the state under capitalism was nothing more than a tool of the capitalist class.
What this “instrumentalist” view of the state cannot explain is why numerous reforms have been
implemented under democratic capitalism against the fierce resistance of capitalists. Nor can it
explain why some capitalist societies have stronger welfare states and greater democratic controls
over capital than do others. Certainly structural dependence upon corporate investment to reproduce
conditions of prosperity constrains democratic governments. The flight of capital has hindered liberal and
social democratic reforms. But in times of depression, war, or mass political mobilization (e.g., the 1930s,
World War II, the 1960s), the state has implemented reforms that have curtailed the rights of capital
and increased popular power. To preserve the legitimacy of democratic government (and, in the long
run, democratic capitalism itself), the state must respond to popular mobilization.
In part, this is possible because the capitalist class does not directly rule under capitalism. While the
demands of corporate and defense industry lobbyists heavily influence politicians and state bureaucrats,
the major goal of politicians is to guarantee reelection through steady economic growth. Capitalist
interests are often divided among themselves (importers versus exporters, finance versus
manufacturing, etc.), thus providing state officials with a certain degree of autonomy . In times of
economic crisis and/or popular mobilization, state managers and political elites will sometimes advocate
programs for economic recovery which are initially opposed by most capitalists. Politicians need to
win elections and capitalists simply do not have enough votes to guarantee victory.
In the long run, however, if popular mobilization does not persist , reforms will often be restructured to
shift the balance of power back towards capital (e.g., the reintroduction of regressive taxation; cutting of
benefits; deregulation; weaker enforcement of labor laws, and so on). State officials are always
constrained by the need for business confidence and continued private investment. State policy results
from class and political conflict, but the asymmetry of the capital-labor relationship stacks the deck
against popular movements. Only by building strong trade unions, community organizations, and socialist
parties can the left redress this imbalance of forces.
 LINKS
1. Subject focus – a focus on the subject and subject creation internalizes the
causes of environmental destruction – foregrounding individual dynamics – this
is bad for the types of movements foster talks about
Robert J. Brulle, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science at Drexel University, and, Riley E.
Dunlap is Dresser Professor and Regents Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. A long-
time specialist in environmental sociology, his current work focuses on the sociopolitical controversies
surrounding climate change, ‘15
("Sociology and Global Climate Change," in Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives,
August 24, pg. 10-12)

Although a good deal of psychological research on climate change has been sensitive to social and
structural influences on individual thought and especially behaviors (e.g., GifFord 2011; Stern 2011),
Swim et al. (2011:245) noted that "The most obvious contributions of psychology are at the individual
level." In this sense psychological perspectives on climate change—like those of economics—can easily
be (mis)used to reinforce the societal tendency to focus on individuals as both the primary cause
of, and solution to, climate change. Thus, the critiques of the individualistic approaches that dominate
psychology and economic analyses tend not to focus on the internal content of the research. Rather, they
center on how these approaches are used in the formulation of policies and recommendations for action.
Since individual behavior is seen to be the primary cause of climate change, "addressing the human
dimensions of climate change is, in essence, a matter of incentivizing, persuading and encouraging
individuals to do their bit and to 'kick the habit' of excessive resource consumption" (Shove 2010c:2).
This approach leads to an emphasis on addressing climate change by changing individual behavior via
financial incentives or disincentives or through various communications efforts aimed at promoting
lifestyle changes that reduce carbon emissions. A wide range of proposals seek to change individual
behavior by, for example, providing more accurate information regarding the nature of global warming (on
the assumption that increasing the public's scientific literacy will lead to attitudinal and behavioral shifts)
(Stoknes 2014), using carefully crafted messages framed to motivate individuals to adopt behaviors that
are more "sustainable" (Amsler 2009; O'Brien 2012), or employing well-designed social marketing
campaigns to persuade people that it is in their best interest to recognize that climate change is a serious
problem and to alter their behavior accordingly {Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and Leiserowitz 2008). No
matter how well designed, such approaches ultimately rest on the premise that factually correct and well-
packaged information, drawn from climate science, can help generate desired attitudinal and behavioral
changes.
Because these strategies focus only on individual or small-group dynamics, they fail to adequately
consider the larger social structure that forms the context in which individuals think and act.
Accordingly, these individualistic communications approaches have a highly problematic conception of
the role of information in the decision-making process. Instead of appealing to potential constituents in a
manner that resonates with their normative expectations and everyday lived experiences, they offer
technical, scientific discourse and related information, which has been shown to be ineffectual (Moser and
Berzonsky 2014). They are also politically naive , in that they assume that educational efforts focused
on neutral "facts" and scientific evidence will carry the debate without taking into account the role of
political power and the heavy influence of vested interests (Bluhdorn 2000; Taylor 1992).
Emphasizing the role of individuals in generating carbon emissions—who are thus held responsible for
reducing them—fits well with the Western and particularly American emphasis on individualism
(Lipset 1997). The notion of autonomous individuals responsible for their personal choices is widely
held among U.S. policymakers, the media, and the general public, and is of course quite compatible with
the "rational actor" model that pervades economics. One also finds a strong emphasis on individual
values, behaviors, and decision making when natural scientists deal with the "human dimensions" of
global environmental change and climate change in particular (Ehrlich and Kennedy 2005; Palmer and
Smith 2014). These trends suggest that the Bretherton Model's black box of human activities remains
poorly illuminated in the natural sciences.
The stress on individual behavior and change thus leaves the institutions that structure everyday life and
individual practices unexamined (Maniates 2001:33). In a highly insightful critique. Shove (2010a:1274)
argues that focusing on the role of individuals "is a political and not just a theoretical position in that it
obscures the extent to which governments sustain unsustainable economic institutions and ways of life,
and the extent to which they have a hand in structuring options and possibilities ." Accordingly, Shove
argues that the focus on individualistic communication approaches and the support for such approaches
by foundations and government "are part of an interlocking landscape of thought which constrains and
prevents policy imagination of the kind required" (Shove 2010a:1282). As such, it serves to maintain
the status quo. In accordance with this critique, many social scientists have advocated for the
development of a wider and more integrative approach that can move beyond the limitations of
individualism (Castree et al. 2014).

2. Performance – abstracted from institutional reforms fails only building a

political agenda for change solves
Joseph Schwartz, Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future of
Democratic Equality, ‘8

The growth in “white consciousness” arose not only from this transformation in the political economy and
demographics, but also out of white political resistance to the efforts of the 1960s to bestow full social
rights upon the poor and communities of color. As the work of Jill Quadango and Margaret Weir
depressingly demonstrates, much of the Republican national presidential electoral resurgence from Nixon
onwards arose from political elites’ cultivation of the politics of white backlash. Reagan overtly played to
this politics in his 1980 campaign by creating the mythical story of the Detroit “welfare queen” who
parlayed the alleged use of eight illegal welfare checks to the purchase of a Cadillac. The Willie Horton
ads in 1988 contributed to George Bush Sr.’s victory over Michael Dukakis. In part motivated by the
Republican use of the politics of race, the fiscally-moderate Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the
early 1980s, urged the Democrats not to be overly solicitous of the “special interests” of trade unionists,
feminists, and, in particular, people of color. In retrospect, the legal desegregation of the United States in
1964–1965 represents a highpoint in the nation’s struggle for racial justice. After the passage of the civil
rights acts, further attempts to redress the radical disparities in socioeconomic opportunities between
white and non-white citizens would be defeated, with the abandonment of any federal commitment to anti-
poverty efforts culminating with Nixon’s dismantling of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1973. By that
date, all attempts at integration of housing, crossmetropolitan busing, universal child care, and
guaranteed income had been defeated in Congress by an alliance of the white South with middle-class
suburbanites, white ethnic urban defenders of neighborhood turf, as well as Chamber of Commerce (and
AFL craft union) opposition meaningful job training.18 Thus, the development of “white consciousness”
has a real material and structural history to it. “Deconstructing” such a consciousness would
necessitate the development of a counter-hegemonic vision of a democratic racial and class
order, as well as a credible political agenda that unites working- and middle-class voters across
the divide of race and nationality. Cultural theorists ask whites to “resist” their whiteness by
“deconstructing” it through acts of “performative resistance” (such as lecturing cab-drivers who take
them over a longer-waiting person of color19). These are important expressions of personal solidarity
across racial lines, but they seem inordinately focused upon symbolic and linguistic acts, while
underplaying (or “dematerializing”) the structural political, economic, and cultural realities that
constrain “discursive” possibilities. “White-skin” privilege can be partly redressed by whites
intervening in support of people of color organizing against police harassment, hypersurveillance in retail
stores, and blatant employer-discrimination (including by African-American employers) against entry-level
minority job applicants, particularly African-American inner-city males. But combating racism also
demands the development of a politics of structural redistribution of class and racial power that
goes well beyond (and confronts more powerful resistance) than do “ postmodern” acts of
“resistance .” These acts of resistance are good and necessary works; but faith in the radical efficacy
of such acts resembles the dominant liberal ideology that racism is caused by the bad acts of
malevolent individuals. Thus, strictly defining “whiteness” as a cultural marker of non-whiteness, as a
negative identity of “emptiness, vacuity” in which “there is no white culture, no white politics, no
whiteness, except in the case of distancing and rejection of racially-defined ‘otherness’ ”20 excessively
dematerializes the social forces that construct and defend a material order of racial privilege.
Conservative resistance to social rights for citizens of color has undergirded the ideological and
programmatic hegemony of the right in the United States since 1968. This conservatization of United
States politics is best symbolized by the fact that the Democrats, at the presidential level, have since then
only been nationally competitive when they back Southern moderates who have more a rhetorical, than
programmatic, commitment to racial and social equality. The presidencies of James Earl Carter and
William Jefferson Clinton only mildly challenged white-skin privilege, and certainly did not take on the
class prerogatives of privileged elites. (Though both are to be credited with a visceral commitment to legal
forms of racial equality. In addition to radically expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, the other
noteworthy progressive achievement of the Clinton administration involved its successful defense of
affirmative action. The “surprising” persistence of affirmative action policies—despite considerable
popular resistance— also results from many corporate elites conceiving of affirmative action as a means
for creating a more diverse corporate management that can reach out to a broader “customer” base.21)
Thus, analysts and activists who recognize the socio-economic—as well as ideological—structural nature
of race and class domination cannot uncritically embrace an excessively post-structuralist
conception of “whiteness” as a cultural trope which can be “performatively” abandoned. (As if
whiteness or blackness is strictly a voluntary, discursive identity, absent how such ascriptive differences
are imposed by others as barriers to equal life opportunities.) To contend that subordinate groups can
“resist” the “repetitive instantiation” of their own identity by refusing to “perform” the inscribed markers of
identity ignores the material reality of the “1 percent rule” in American society. That is, until 1965,
any person with a drop of African blood could be subjected (through no “performative” act of their own) to
the subordination of Jim Crow laws by an armed Southern state. And to this day communities of color in
the United States experience not only discrimination, but also the fear and frustration brought about by
police violence, biased juries, and disproportionate levels of unemployment and incarceration.
“Performative” resistance to such laws frequently results in those resisting being harassed,
tortured, and, to this day, sometimes, murdered.

3. Narrative resistance
Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University, ‘15
(Michael J., “Inventing the “Political”: Arendt, Antipolitics, and the Deliberative Turn in Contemporary
Political Theory,” in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics, ed. Gregory
Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson, Chapter 3)

The problem here is that she perceives “opinions” as originating in some existentially distinctive self
rather than from social relations and the ways that ideas and opinions that people come to accept are
generally embedded in the institutional functions of the world they inhabit. This is no place for a
phenomenological “lifeworld”; the problem is cognitive: The concepts, opinions, and ideas of people are
shaped by the social relations within which they are situated, rather than springing from some
existential “beginning.” The importance of the ’αρχη´ in this sense—as rule and as origin or beginning—
is that it denotes a self that is somehow presocial and existentially prior to any form of socialization.
We are asked to believe that each person does in fact initiate an ’ αρχη´, that each individual is somehow
unique and that this constitutes a valid basis for forming political knowledge about the world. In contrast to
this, the problem of social power must be conceived as a problem of domination. Domination is not simply
a process whereby one has legal or some other form of authority over an other; it is a situation where
social relations are constructed in order to extract benefit from others, control and subordinate
them for some self-interested purpose, as well as order the field of ideas and opinions to legitimate those
structures of extractive power. Opinion thereby becomes victimized by a sensus communis colonized by
norms and values rooted in the prevailing forms of legitimacy . Opinion effectively expresses
reified thought. Without truth, each opinion must be taken and accepted on its face; each is “isonomic” in
the political realm, as are their opinions.17 But if we were to accept this thesis, so crucial for Arendt’s
thought, we would find ourselves in a condition where ideological consciousness is free to reign ,
where opinion about things and the world has no objective metric for us to be able to gauge its
relevance. We would find ourselves adrift , with no way to shatter the reified structures of
consciousness that allow real political and social power to hold sway. In the modern age, we cannot
separate the dimension of surplus extraction from that of the constitution of values, norms, and commonly
accepted opinions since they work in tandem to form the social order itself.
This is one reason why any valid conception of politics cannot , however, remain within the
confines of opinion. It is not the case that all knowledge, all search for rational truths are limited to
surface phenomena. The reality is that truth-claims constitute the very substance of political
power and authority itself. Indeed, as Rousseau and Weber knew all too well, the basic problem of
political power in the modern world is the way it is made legitimate in the minds of its members.18
Violence and coercion, in contrast to Arendt’s thinking, are not the main tools of those who seek
domination—rather, it is legitimacy. And this legitimacy is constructed by cultivating opinion , by
weaving the cognitive and valueorientational prerequisites that in turn legitimate the concrete forms of
power that pervade the social world. Domination, the real concern of politics, is therefore functional in
nature: Institutional power is built from the minds of its participants, not from fiat. Truth is therefore
a means by which we shed the ideological valences of thought that are shaped by socialization. It
colonizes precisely those capacities and forms of “thinking” that Arendt sees as constituting
freedom and “action.” Indeed, since Arendt’s project is to carve out and define a distinctive sphere of
thinking and acting that is nonscientific, she is forced to rely on the phenomenological tools she has
ready-at-hand. The denigration of truth-claims is a major weakness in her approach, and it has
encouraged many other subsequent theorists to dispense with the importance of truth-claims and
their political import for politics.
 AT: PERM
It fails – organization and sequencing are impossible without our framing
Smulewicz-Zucker, Editor of Logos and adjunct professor of Philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY,
and Thompson, Associate Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University, ‘15
(Gregory and Michael J., “Introduction,” in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive
Politics, pg. 1-32)

These four elements of the new radical intellectuals and the movements they have influenced are in
direct contradiction to the rational radicalism that we implicitly espouse here. On our reading, there is
not only a theoretical but also a deeply political difference between what these theorists search for and
the Enlightenment-inspired radical view of a social order marked by solidarity around common goods,
civic virtue oriented toward the defense of the public welfare, well-ordered political institutions with public
purpose as their aim, constitutionalism that secures individual rights, and the democratization of economic
life as the criterion of social justice. The alternative move, marked by claims that have given shape to
radical and critical thought since the Enlightenment, not to mention the common sense that the thinkers
we address have sought to evade. We believe that the success of these thinkers and ideas marks a real
and disturbing departure from the more rationalist, more realist understanding of progressive and
radical politics that marked the more successful movements of the nineteenth century and much of the
twentieth century.
The basic thesis that organizes the essays that follow is that these thinkers and their ideas have had a
disintegrating effect on the nature of progressive politics, and each chapter in this book shows how this
has taken place and, of equal importance, contrasts this with a more lucid, more compelling account of
what progressive political and social criticism ought to be able to achieve. Our purpose is to indict a
style of theory and thinking that has become so esoteric and self-referential that it has divorced itself
from the historic concerns of progressive politics: from remedying inequality , confronting forces
eroding our public goods, or challenging the entrenched power of political and economic elites.
Whether it is a rampant irrationalism , a rejection of any sense of realism in politics, naive
antistatism , theories of power and oppression that have no empirical basis , or simply an incoherent ,
confused set of texts upon which one can project and read whatever one wants , these thinkers have
been able to seduce a generation into an understanding of politics that privileges an abstract , self-
regarding “politics” over the concrete analysis of power and a politics based on the public good.
 ALT
No centering da
Smith 6
[Sharon Smith is also the author of Women and Socialism: Essays on Women’s Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2005). Her
writings appear regularly in Socialist Worker newspaper and the ISR. Race, class, and "whiteness theory" ISR Issue 46, March–
April 2006 http://isreview.org/issues/46/whiteness.shtml]
Meyerson counters this set of assumptions, proposing that Marx’s emphasis on the centrality of
class relations brings oppression to the forefront, as a precondition for working-class unity:
Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One, of
course, is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent —a primacy which does
not , as often thought, render women and people of color “secondary .” Such an equation of
white male and working class, as well as a corresponding division between a “white” male working
class identity and all the others, whose identity is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender
and race or hybrid, is a view this essay contests all along the way. The primacy of class means that
building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations
should be the goal of any revolutionary movement: the primacy of class puts the fight against
racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory
primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender and class
oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not. 18 Designating
class as the primary antagonism in capitalist society bears no inference on the “importance”
of racism , as Roediger claims. Marxism merely assumes a causal relationship—that white
supremacy as a system was instituted by capital, to the detriment of labor as a whole. Marxist
theory rests on the assumption that white workers do not benefit from a system of white
supremacy. Indeed, Marx argued of slavery, the most oppressive of all systems of exploitation, “In
the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as
slavery disfigured part of the republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the
black it is branded.”19 Marx was not alone in assuming that racism, by dividing the working class
along ideological lines, harmed the class interests of both white and Black workers. Abolitionist
Frederick Douglass stated unambiguously of slaveholders, “They divided both to conquer each.”20
Douglass elaborated, “Both are plundered and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed by his
master, of all his earnings above what is required for his physical necessities; and the white man is
robbed by the slave system, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work
without wages.”21 Capitalism forces workers to compete with each other. The unremitting pressure
from a layer of workers—be they low-wage or unemployed—is a constant reminder that workers
compete for limited jobs that afford a decent standard of living. The working class has no interest in
maintaining a system that thrives upon inequality and oppression. Indeed, all empirical evidence
shows quite the opposite. When the racist poll tax was passed in the South, imposing property and
other requirements designed to shut out Black voters, many poor whites also lost the right to vote.
After Mississippi passed its poll tax law, the number of qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to
68,000.22 The effects of segregation extended well beyond the electoral arena. Jim Crow
segregation empowered only the rule of capital. Whenever employers have been able to use
racism to divide Black from white workers, preventing unionization, both Black and white
workers earn lower wages . This is just as true in recent decades as it was 100 years ago.
Indeed, as Shawki points out of the 1970s, “In a study of major metropolitan areas Michael Reich
found a correlation between the degree of income inequality between whites and Blacks and the
degree of income inequality between whites.”23 The study concluded: But what is most dramatic—
in each of these blue-collar groups, the Southern white workers earned less than Northern Black
workers. Despite the continued gross discrimination against Black skilled craftsmen in the North,
the “privileged” Southern whites earned 4 percent less than they did. Southern male white
operatives averaged…18 percent less than Northern Black male operatives. And Southern white
service workers earned…14 percent less than Northern Black male service workers.”24 Racism
against Blacks and other racially oppressed groups serves both to lower the living standards of the
entire working class and to weaken workers’ ability to fight back. Whenever capitalists can
threaten to replace one group of workers with another —poorly paid—group of workers,
neither group benefits . Thus, the historically nonunion South has not only depressed the wages
of Black workers, but also lowered the wages of Southern white workers overall—and prevented
the labor movement from achieving victory at important junctures. So even in the short term the
working class as a whole has nothing to gain from oppression.