Has America given up its “pursuit of happiness”? Why do we ask so many questions? "How does it feel to be a problem?" Du Bois asks in a searing passage of his 1903 masterwork The Souls of Black Folk. Of all the openings that Civil Rights political thought makes in modern democratic rhetoric, perhaps the most powerful and overlooked one is its use of the question (and the pause).

What if the question carries in itself not simply a moral demand but a right to logic? A systematic rethinking of the relation between truth and method not from the center of racial power but instead from the outskirts of our institutional and moral universe? We probe the implications of this question about the Question in this special episode of Mutant, anchoring our archaeology in the immortal urgency of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 question, Where Do We Go From Here?

“In King, the question belongs at once to the order of epistemology and of faith,” says @realaishwarykumar. "The question is that which tests the depths of our self-knowledge. That is, our awareness not merely of what we are—which lies at the foundation of ontology and its extreme nationalism—but instead of what we have become.”

To think about the "question" as this primal site of democratic faith and risk, following King, @jbouie, who has been called “one of the defining commentators on politics and race of the Trump era” by Columbia Journalism Review, joins @realaishwarykumar live in our studio in Los Angeles for this episode of Mutant.

“In the noise of all the platitudes about that unforgettable moral arc of which MLK speaks, it is ironically forgotten that King remained acutely aware of how easy it was for America to pivot from its promise of community into a state of brazen and violent chaos,” Aishwary points out. “King never forgets that this moral choice between community and chaos is a matter not of consecrating but instead questioning the foundations of America’s promise of equality (including equality under law). There is nothing intrinsically just about America’s moral arc unless we, by force, bend it towards justice.” Bending, indeed force, is key to this immovability of the question about our future, Aishwary reminds us.

For King, only the question can tear open the fissures of American life and lighten the hills we must climb (or the abyss we must stare at).

In the Black political tradition, Jamelle lays out, the question has always been an insurgent mode of expressing this sense of the future. “Black Americans have long acted as a counterpublic, posing questions to the larger public.” The question “who belongs?”, for instance, is not merely civic, it is ontological, he argues. It exposes the very terms on which life and citizenship are distributed. And it is a disjuncture dug deep into the history of American consciousness, at least since the time Frederick Douglass first asked, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" And then there is BR Ambedkar, who would ask a century later about the undercaste, "Who were the Shudras?"

What becomes, then, of the question as a mode of spiritual thought in our present? “Neither a rhetorical gesture nor a civic prompt, neither a function of restlessness nor of uncertainty, the question in our time returns—with catastrophic force—along the four militant threads that King had started to weave in the 1960s: political, epistemic, moral, and juridical (or punitive),” Aishwary proposes. “Only through the combination of logic and faith might we be able to reclaim, following King, a certain kind of transcendence, a sacrificial power that we all have and that America must rescue.”

King’s question resists hopelessness. But it also rejects the nostalgia obscuring our own exclusions and distrust. To question is to stand at the edge of ruin and still insist on a moral vision. To question is to muster, above all, the courage to not merely name this moment a crisis but to also see in it the consequence of what we have just done. 

Jamelle and Aishwary walk us through this haunting moment. 

Q | Question #nowstreaming

Watching the scale, speed, and lawless ease with which some of the most storied postwar American institutions have been attacked and dismantled in the past month makes it tempting to see this resurgent hatred against the government as an anomaly, at best a degenerate aberration even.

The truth however is that for as long as there has been the idea of government in the modern world, there has been a stubborn strain of hatred against it. For as long as there has been the question of human need, there has been the fear of the government taking over life in its name. For as long as individualism and privacy have been the stuff of politics, there has been the specter of the government depriving us of them. The distrust of government as a villainous swallower of liberty is almost as old as—if not the counterpart to—the modern faith in government as a guarantor of the common good, a guardrail against lawless power, and a shepherd of our pursuit of happiness. 

“The modern vision of politics rests on the idea that the government is more than simply an apparatus to manage the use and abuse of power, more than just a figure in our political and legal consciousness,” argues Aishwary. “In fact, the government exists in and through our moral consciousness, compressing in it our ways of relating to the world. An entire tradition and mentality of thinking about the common good—what we call the social contract—is today contained in the word government.”

“How do we discriminate between the needs of our neighbors and of those who are strangers? When do we abandon even our friends? What do we owe the world? And what parts of it will we destroy simply because we are free to do so? The government, more than a theater of checks and balances on power, is a battleground for these insoluble—and vicious—moral dilemmas.”

Not surprisingly, where earlier notions of State had at their center a juridical theory of sovereign “command,” the modern vision of Government, pace Locke’s Second Treatise, pivots to the citizen’s voluntary “consent.” Where the State became a relic of an old, archaic system run by brute force and arbitrary taxation, the Government becomes a figure of moral reasoning, its shapes defined by the need to defend private property. So much so that in the American tradition, the word “state” is banished altogether; it formally appears only overseas where power operates without constraint: in the State Department’s handling of foreign affairs. In contrast, the government oversees the pursuit of happiness, guarding liberty at home, striving to make a perfect Union out of violently unequal parts.

The irony, of course, is that since the 18th century, those who benefited most from these unequal ideals and institutions have always been the quickest to sow distrust in it. And those who are most vulnerable to the government’s arbitrary excesses must always fight for its power to protect their common good. It is from this constitutional faith—forgiving the government’s excesses without forgetting its bloody violence—that the anti-colonial movements for self-government of the 1940s and the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s were forged. Whatever else one might say of the fictions of popular sovereignty, the idea of government cannot survive without this political faith.

The tragedy of the neodemocratic condition is that this faith is kept alive precisely by those citizens who need the government most but who are also most brutalized by its inequalities. “Political faith,” Aishwary reminds us, “is this ability to forgive the government that rules in our name—and even fight for it—knowing well that in its moments of strength it will do us maximum harm and even seek to destroy us. And knowing even better that, after we have fought for its survival, after it has survived the lawless onslaught of the vandals, it might abandon us again.”

Yet, without this faith in government, there is no freedom. Without this faith, as Ambedkar put it in a defining postwar moment, there is only the abyss of despair and the lawlessness of a majority let loose, riding its supremacist “grammar of anarchy” and openly declaring its hatred of the whole world simply because it can afford to.

New episode on G | Government #nowstreaming

Few words in our democratic language invoke visions as paradoxical and as powerful as sacrifice.

On the one hand, sacrifice recalls an archaic, ritualistic, even fetishistic set of practices, executed in the name of a sovereign power that draws its sanction from the theological, the divine right to rule.

On the other hand is the transcendent world that sacrifice opens up with its vision of an equal, just life (or afterlife), of a more bearable world one wants to leave behind for others if one dies dreaming and fighting for it. This dreamy, sleepless, transcendent sacrifice—the sacrifice of a Rosa Parks, a Martin Luther King Jr., the women of Shaheen Bagh—makes democratic politics possible, in their willingness to put themselves in the straight line of harm, in their refusal to surrender their right to be human.

“In this transcendental form of sacrifice, one does not abide by the religious laws that sovereigns write and masters enforce to keep or restore the artifice of violent peace: laws of giving up, of renouncing everything, of making oneself invisible, of turning one’s body into a subservient mass, of accepting the reduction of entire communities to superfluity, pushing them out of their own lands and opening them to extermination," says Aishwary.

"Instead, the transcendental vision of sacrifice first and foremost transcends mortal fear and reclaims the right to not move, not disappear, not yield to the oppressor for the sake of an unequal, segregated orderliness,” says Aishwary. “In refusing to renounce her seat for a white passenger, Rosa Parks exemplified this earthly, immovable transcendence upon whose radiance the Montgomery Bus Boycott would eventually ride: her rejection of white peace that always extracts sacrifice and demands place from the rest.”

“If the theological idea of sacrifice is rooted in a desire for mastery, the political idea of sacrifice is rooted in transcendence, in political faith, in the force of immovability,” says Aishwary.

But there is a third vector in which sacrifice has become the substrate of the modern political, of what we at Mutant have called neodemocracy. “In its most ambiguous and yet clarifying form, sacrifice is conservative. It strives for a punitive society. A majoritarian politics constructed on the brute, cruel reality of our will to punish others.”

We begin a dialogue on the theologico-political, and on democracy’s fragile, foundational relationship to sacrifice.

We have so far traversed almost two dozen concepts at Mutant. And yet every word thought and spoken in these dialogues, it might be said, is about one humane dream: equality. Every episode in which we have spoken of caste, of the figure of the migrant, of the logics of segregation, of thinkers of the Black radical tradition; every reckoning we have made with our neodemocratic condition, with its cruelty and the decomposition of the human, and with our abandonment of the social contract, has returned us to the strange absence of moral and political equality on our planet.

And yet it is freedom today that animates our rhetoric and galvanizes democratic politics worldwide, while equality—foundational to the very compact we make to recognize each other as human—remains ambiguous, even opaque.

“Democracy is consumed by the question of freedom,” says @realaishwarykumar. “But politics is the expression of freedom, not the problem that politics seeks to solve. To what end, after all, do we seek, as Hannah Arendt might say, the freedom to be free? The problem that modern democratic politics seeks to solve is of equality.”

Therein lies its fundamental paradox. For the grounds of our equality do not exist. Human beings are born unequal, sometimes unbearably so. They bear the brunt of earth—its water and fire—unequally. And they form unequal societies to maintain this disparity, slyly mocking the state of nature from which they claim to have emerged.

“There is nothing radical about evil, Hannah Arendt would later concede,” Aishwary reminds us. “It is equality that is radical, precisely because it's so elusive, and because it can be understood only as an act of faith, one whose pursuit requires both political trust in our institutions and the moral courage to disobey them. Equality will require what Ambedkar calls force. A force that ends inequality.”

“Like gravity, this force—the desire for equality—might already be in us, weak but irreducible, even if we remain unsure what an equal earth would look like.”

Image from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Often shrugged off as a passing sense of dejection in a world that has let us down, “disappointment” might be the most intransigent concept that has shaped the modern democratic experiment. Rarely thought of as a political concept at all, let alone as a passion foundational to democracy, disappointment, Aishwary argues, returns us to a heightened state of loss; a sense of ending of a future and a world that barely moments ago seemed within grasp. From such a heightened state of crestfallen grief alone can we truthfully and responsibly think about the fragility of our democratic faith. 

In fact, disappointment can be an attribute only in a world where faith still lives. In that, it is radically different from the sense of desolation that fuels majoritarian politics today. Disappointment is the constant reminder of our intimacy with those who repeatedly fail us and whom we can still never disown or part from. Nothing comes remotely close to disappointment in capturing this pain a people must bear to keep democracy truly democratic and anti-majoritarian.

“After all, democracy is an experiment in human imperfection, as much ours as of those who overpower us, outnumber us. Only in democracy is one allowed to be disappointed in power (rather than live in fear of it). Only in democracy are you given the right to be disappointed in those you consider different from yourself, those who consider you their adversary, those who see you as their enemy. There is something about democracy alone that allows us to feel publicly disappointed and not be held in contempt or shame because we are feeling deflated.”

This disappointment is the province only of those who want to push the limits of hope and test the boundaries of our political imagination. They are audacious enough to know they might be disappointed in the end, and yet, fighting against history, they still give a woman, a daughter of immigrants, imperfect like them and yet as perfect as America will ever be, a shot at power. Disappointment is the province only of those who are able to embrace their anger at the misogynoir that dashes their hopes. Which is why they never quibble about the causes of their defeat. Disappointment does not wallow in defeat or whine about populism; it does not turn desolate in entitlement and preachy in its nihilism.

There is in Southern democracy a strain of militant disappointment, one that runs through the thought of Du Bois, King, Ambedkar, Baldwin, and most recently the Obamas, which stands as a bulwark against majoritarian preachers and their self-fulfilling defeatism. For these thinkers of the South, defeatism is simply an inability to muster the courage to be disappointed (again). From this majoritarian fear of defeat also appears the classic liberal disdain for Black voters and their choices (which are simply erased in all economic arguments about the results of the 2024 presidential election). Often, without irony, this disdain today speaks in 19th century socialist tones, barely even trying to conceal what Ta-Nehisi Coates has so acutely called America’s “fear of a Black President.”

This “liberalism of disappointment”, as Aishwary calls for, following Judith Shklar, shows grace: grace towards those on whose toil has been built the epic story of American affluence (and inequality), and who, despite their oppression by a system put constitutionally in place 250 years ago, still refuse—in an act of immovable faith—to choose white supremacy simply because they are disappointed in the free market. Their disappointment too has grace. A grace that must in turn compel us to pause in humility and concede that liberalism will always understand income inequality less viscerally than those Black Americans who—in MLK’s immortal words—“made cotton king” and in so doing built America as such. 

“I am disappointed in the lack of grace liberals have shown, many of them my friends,” Aishwary concedes, “towards America’s doggedly democratic Black electorate, instead choosing to turn immediately against them—and against the woman they saw as one of their own—in the name of economic progressivism. Baldwin would call this a lie, a sincere lie, but a lie nonetheless. The paradox is, “only in a democracy are we even allowed this right to disappointment, one that MLK once prophetically expressed in the “white moderate.” Faith appears in our political world through this democratic humility, from this openness to being disappointed, from the courage to not shun disappointment.

What does majoritarian disdain for Black grace do to our democratic future? And what must the liberalism of disappointment do to move past that disdainful, desolate vision? 

We begin a conversation on the relation between faith and disappointment in D | Disappointment.

If freedom is the most molecular of human desires and hope the most fragile of human capacities, then fear is an all too human anxiety—or weapon—that destroys both, in one stroke.

Whether this is the mortal fear of losing one’s own freedom, or the fear of losing power over another—the power to give oneself an unbridled freedom to rule over others—the connection between fear and freedom is more elemental than we often acknowledge. “Absolute freedom is absolute, radical evil,” says Aishwary Kumar. “The willingness to say that our freedom is boundless—or that it should have no limits—is not very distinct from our willingness to say that our excesses and cruelty towards human and nonhuman others is perfectly justified. Freedom is relentlessly tempted by tyranny; tyrants live in constant fear of freedom. Freedom and fear are connected on this mortal plane of human temptation: the temptation to be so limitlessly free that it can only end in a barbaric inequality, a cruelty without ends.”

This fear—and its counterpart, cruelty—seems disturbingly compatible with democracy. And yet, it also makes democracy wholly impossible. “Such is the enigma that Judith Shklar works through in her groundbreaking essay, “The Liberalism of Fear.” We are still to fully work out the depth of Shklar’s moral psychology, although this much is obvious: we simply cannot have a free society that is also an unequal, afraid one. And therein lies Shklar’s most profound, original insight. Inequality is the site of not just mortal fear; it is also the fuel of moral cruelty. Contra Hobbes, it is not a society of equals but a society of the afraid that is most cruel.”

Yet, to think freely of fear requires that we see in fear the sources of both an incurable inequality and our irreducible equality. “There is a kind of fear that is democratic,” Aishwary proposes, “a moral, mortal fear rooted in finitude which embraces the idea that we as human beings can feel afraid, can feel anxious about the future.”

This is why we think so closely in this episode with James Baldwin and W.E.B Du Bois, who seek to rescue fear—much like they seek to rescue freedom—from the defeatist, nihilistic rhetoric of the modern majority. “There is a way in which rejection of fear has become the most divisive, masculinist project over the last century and half,” says Aishwary. “Which is ironic, for the truth is that human beings always harbor fears that have nothing to do with their emasculation. If anything, there is the sort of fear that does not mean cowardice, that does not unleash rage, that does not compensate for itself by violence, but instead generates its own antithesis: a moral courage to be okay with solitude, with imperfection, with anxiety, with limits.”

“That is the fear James Baldwin writes of in his essay, “Nothing Personal.” That is the fear we think with in this episode, that ethics of not just ontological fear, not just existential fear, but an ethics of feeling afraid for humanity, precisely so that human freedom can be reclaimed. That ethics of embracing fear precisely so that a new freedom can be unveiled.” In Darkwater (1920), Du Bois sees in the teacher the exemplary figure of this fear (and thus of its unveiling).

No idea in our political lexicon is as deeply mired in paradox as freedom. One is wholly alive, wholly human, we are often told, only when one is wholly free. Free to move, free from constraint, free from tyranny. And yet, also comes with this liberty from constraint—this thing the Latvian-British historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin almost 70 years ago famously called “negative liberty”—the dangerous license to violate others, to disparage and desecrate the lives of others, to be so drawn to cruelty as to become anti-human, pure and simple.

Freedom is a desire so molecular it might have started to run through our bloodstream at birth. But perhaps its truth, its ambiguities, and its power become discernible to us only in the moment of its loss. For 2000 years, not surprisingly, says @realaishwarykumar, “absolutely no tradition of political thought has been able to truly delimit and defend what freedom is, except those thinkers who had witnessed from close quarters and in their own lives its total disappearance.”

“That’s because where there is freedom, there is force. Where there is freedom to fabricate, there is also the freedom and the will to lie. Where there is freedom to move, there is also the freedom and the will to quarantine, to segregate, sequester, and incarcerate. Where there is freedom to live and breathe, there is also the freedom and the will to make life for others unlivable, unbreathable. The freedom to breathe is not equally given. The freedom to be forgiven, to be excused, is not equally given.”

“Some will always be punished, never forgiven. Others have never faced punishment, and thus, never sought forgiveness for their crimes."

To ask “what is freedom?” therefore requires a certain kind of moral imagination about inequality today. “An imagination that transcends the easy, lazy, all-too-quick demarcations of the world into left and right, even if one is decisively worse than the other,” says Aishwary. “A spectrum of thought that does not simply reduce freedom to the clash between two or more visions of power—which it always will be—but to a new conception and measure of life as such, to a new pursuit of happiness, indomitably claimed and equally shared.”

“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings…our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.” — Arendt, We Refugees (1943).

What of oneself is lost—dispossessed—when one is possessed, owned and abandoned at the same time, by an occupier? Few thinkers open up the abyss of alienation that sprawls under the experience of occupation like Hannah Arendt. Contrary to what modern jurisprudence hangs its understanding of occupation on, for Arendt, the loss of home to conquest and “total domination” means not only a loss of land or territory but also an evisceration of one’s most private self—one’s sense of use in the world—so profound that occupation can mean nothing less than a total rupture, a borderless crime.

Occupation is a colonial war without end, says Aishwary Kumar. “But it is not colonial only. It is a demolition of the mundane, a segregation so immovable that even the most routine acts—like Elizabeth Eckford’s resilient walk to a high school in Little Rock in her own town and country in 1957, surrounded by National Guard troops in Arkansas—feel like a crime. Were the troops that day protecting Eckford and her fellow students who became the heroic Little Rock Nine or were they reminding Black America of the sheer immovability of their old life even after the schools had been desegregated?”

This is the vaporous heart of the history of occupation. So pervasive is it as a colonial, theological, and racial phenomenon that its ubiquity obscures from us a simple truth: that occupation, despite its violence and barbarism, is profoundly ambiguous in its form, structure, and effects. In that, it mirrors violence, without which it cannot be thought.

Like violence, occupation is an anti-concept. And like violence, rather than helping us understand our political history and moral present systematically, it splinters our time—and our judgment—into a hundred pieces.

“Occupation is not simply a military paradigm that leaves boot marks,” Aishwary reminds us. “It is a bearer, as W. E. B. Du Bois would say, of our double consciousness, as if we were moving freely, earning our livelihoods and performing our duties freely, right in the middle of a colonial disaster. A hesitation that hangs on my skin and in the air around me like a militarized punctuation.”

Occupation is someone’s control given the indifferent masquerade of skill. Occupation teaches the occupied subject the skills to live and earn and survive, they say. Occupation is thus like caste, which in turn—and not by chance—is the oldest theory of occupation. “Even though caste looks simply like a practice of occupations,” Aishwary suggests, “caste is a nodal theory of occupation, because caste occupies and steals time itself. Where colonial occupation is a question of breadth and expanse, caste occupation is a question of depth and verticality, stretching generations. Where colonial occupation is a question of territoriality, caste occupation is a function of temporality.”

Our episode on Occupation is perhaps Mutant’s most primal: rather than approaching occupation as a military concept, we deconstruct its strange political stability. We ask not what makes occupying forces so barbaric but instead what makes occupation so immovable? And what might become possible were it to be harnessed as a democratic strategy, an anchor for encampment, a new politics of immovability?

Art: Cain Slaying Abel by Jacopo Palma il Giovane

Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it the helpless, last resort of the inconsolable? Whatever we might think of it, hope is easy to dismiss and yet impossible to fully leave. In fact, hope acquires its greatest gravity, or what B R Ambedkar might call its greatest force, precisely when the circumstances for its existence seem bleakest. 

This paradox reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition: that while hope may carry an air of smug power, or exemplify the cheap talk of the disengaged charlatan, real (and material) hope is embodied in those we consider weak, those who live at the threshold of the unlivable, those we have deemed most disposable. Hope is, to quote Ambedkar again, a “weak force.”

“Hope seems like a thread you can hang by rather than change your existence with and through,” says Aishwary Kumar. “But precisely because it is a thread one hangs by, precisely because one refuses to let go of it, precisely because there is always hope even when there is not, hope becomes the oxygen of politics.” Its very fragility makes it, arguably, our greatest political and social commitment. 'Commitment' because hoping takes arduous, virtuous work; it requires the tilling of desolate lands.

“Hope is not transcendent, it does not belong to the order of the miracle. It is a political virtue, perhaps the most human, most immanent one, divorced from any sense or solace that help will come from elsewhere,” says Aishwary. 

“Such hope cannot be individualistic. Hope becomes political, and politics becomes hopeful, only when there is a collective commitment to changing the world, and sometimes to simply surviving the world as we find it.”

To think the Human, as we did in our last episode, means to think of—and with—hope, that we can bring another world into existence. “Surrounded by desolation, confronted with our greatest barbarisms, to have hope is to commit ourselves to movement, to getting back up again without being apologetic about our disappointment with humanity itself.”