Reading James Baldwin, Against Great-Power Competition
I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in 2019, when I was just starting to find myself.
Baldwin wrote it in 1963, just as the Civil Rights Movement was about to have a breakthrough. Its style was unusual, presented in the first person as two letters of advice to his nephew—a young black teen growing up in a deeply racist country.
The Fire Next Time is the best kind of literary non-fiction—poetic prose, emotional truths, historical perspective, personalism. It was also mercifully short. Some of the quotes from it that offer transcendent truths:
Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats those foundation, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.
To accept ones past—ones history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.
the only real advantage Russia has...is the moral history of the Western world. Russia’s secret weapon is the bewilderment and despair and hunger of millions of people of whose existence we are scarcely aware.
renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.
I find myself drawing on these insights in all sorts of contexts, but most especially on the foreign policy beat.
If you read between the lines of Pacific Power Paradox and The Rivalry Peril, you see that the way Baldwin sees the world was my source code for those books. There’s a meta way in which American hegemony has ended because it’s built on false histories and doctrines of hypocrisy. A romantic image of American power was perpetuating injustice-cum-instability; a corrective was needed for the sake of a better future and that was my intervention.
The reason for this post, though, is not to help Baldwin with posthumous sales or draw a comparison that will inevitably make my prose look graceless. It’s this: Throughout the 1960s, the FBI invested A LOT of time and money into surveilling and harassing Baldwin for absolutely bullshit reasons.
It’s an unbelievable story and it says something in microcosm about how geopolitics is an affront to political and economic democracy.
“Negroes Have No Cause to Have Faith in the F.B.I.”
Baldwin was not much of an activist, and while he had radical sympathies, he was not quite a radical himself. He spent a lot of his time, in fact, associating with the New York literary scene, which was high brow, overwhelmingly liberal, and sometimes reactionary.
But Baldwin was black, sexually fluid, had contact with the activist world, and was a best-selling public intellectual in his day. He was also—like any public intellectual worth a damn—an open critic of the national security state. Those traits were more than enough to draw the wrong kind of attention.
The proximate cause of the FBI’s Baldwin obsession—which was of a pattern with how the FBI surveilled society generally—was a mention in the Washington Post that Baldwin was planning to publish a book on the FBI in the American South.
The FBI, it must be remembered, was not just an agent of Cold-War imperialism—it was a corrupt tool of J. Edgar Hoover personally. And Hoover was intent on making sure critical books about the FBI did not make it to print. The FBI was obsessed about policing everything because its entire project was built on “untrue doctrines” and “invented pasts.”
The result was a campaign of harassment, censure, and ceaseless monitoring of one of America’s great minds in the 20th century. The FBI compiled 1,884 pages of notes from their surveillance of Baldwin! What a colossal f*cking waste.
“The Police Are Simply the Hired Enemies of this Population”
This is not some distant history unconnected to the present. To the contrary, it foreshadows what began under the spiritually fallow framework of “great-power competition” the past decade, which has metasticized the past 18 months as Trump ramps up repression politics at home and imperialist geopolitics abroad.
The largely unjustified anti-communist obsession that defined reactionary politics during the Cold War was the content of great-power competition against the Soviet Union. Geopolitical competition is national security is anti-democratic. They can’t be seen as separate things.
What the Baldwin surveillance (1,884 pages worth) reveals is one of countless small ways in which geopolitical rivalry does not provide democracy fuel but rather robs it of meaning.
The fact of the surveillance is galling enough—the immense amounts of taxpayer money that were wasted surveilling some 250 famous writers and public intellectuals like Baldwin—none of whom were revolutionaries and none of whom were working on behalf of the Soviet Union. It makes the blood boil.
But this was also an era when policymakers had abandoned economic democracy as a concept, narrowing the version of civil rights that passed to be what we know now—an equality before the law without material foundation. After civil rights legislation passed, the practice of redlining in real estate continued. The “war on poverty” immediately morphed into the rise of the carceral state. And the FBI escalated its war on black and brown communities from the surveillance and harassment it imposed on Baldwin to outright frame jobs and assassinations of black leaders.
“Great-power competition,” in so many words, was the foundation for the national security state’s existence. And the FBI, the security institution that played the seams between the domestic and the international, pegged its legitimacy entirely to that supposedly great struggle while it waged war on fellow Americans and democracy itself. A popular failure to understand this history leaves us ill-equipped to recognize it happening to us again now.
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