Two Faces of Power; Two Faces of Fun

I’ve often wanted to argue that historians of the New Left would be well served taking a close look at the 1962 essay “Two Faces of Power.”[1] Peter Bachrach—one of the co-authors of the article—played an important role in the 1960s-era critique of pluralism as the ruling framework for political science, and that critique—which also included folks like Sheldon Wolin—has often been correctly aligned with the broader intellectual milieu of the New Left. But as far as I know, the essay itself has not received attention as a part of that milieu, even though its understanding of what power is would become almost second nature to anyone who was politically active later in the decade.

The thesis of “Two Faces of Power” was straightforward. One face of power was the ability to shape the content of concrete decisions. That kind of power could be defined more vernacularly as the ability to get one’s way, or as the situation when (using Robert Dahl’s words), “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”[2] Power could be coercive or persuasive; it could be implied or explicit. But it would ultimately show up as a demonstrable effect: a law would get passed, a project funded, a country bombed.

But that was only one face of power. The other was the hidden face, which Bachrach and Morton Baratz (the paper’s other co-author) called “non-decisionmaking,” or what some humanists and social scientists would learn by the end of the decade to call hegemony.[3] This kind of power, Bachrach and Baratz argued, was “exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A. To the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all practical purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in their resolution be seriously detrimental to A’s set of preferences.”

The example used in the article to illustrate this second face of power was that of a “discontented faculty member in an academic institution headed by a tradition-bound executive.” Irked by some departmental rule, the faculty member “resolves in the privacy of his office to launch an attack upon the policy at the next faculty meeting. But, when the moment of truth is at hand, he [sic] sits frozen in silence.”

Bachrach and Baratz leave unspoken the obvious alternative for that faculty member: ignore decorum, embarrass the “tradition-bound executive,” and make trouble. Transgress the unwritten rules of what can and cannot be said in a faculty meeting; lay bare the unseen workings of power.

Ben Alpers has written before about the centrality to the New Left of the felt need to “name the system,” but equally strong, I think, was the belief that power’s second, more insidious face required something more than exposure—simply bringing to light the hidden realities of control. Beyond naming, beyond exposure a second act must occur: a kind of rude eradication of tact and delicacy, a brazenness in the face of that repressive politeness that prevented the awkward question from being asked or the obvious (but “inappropriate”) point from being made. Hostility to decorum was a way to neutralize power’s hidden face, and because that hidden face was perhaps the more powerful, transgression was an incredibly potent form of opposition.

***

I was thinking of “Two Faces of Power” as I read a provocative and very intelligent op-ed in the New York Times by essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider. Titled “Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us,” Kreider points to the Parkland students as evidence that young people are often more unfazed by that second face of power and therefore have greater success in breaking past longstanding deadlocks in politics. “To them, powerful Washington lobbyists and United States senators suddenly look like what they are: cheesy TV spokesmodels for murder weapons. It has been inspiring and thrilling to watch furious, cleareyed teenagers shame and vilify gutless politicians and soul-dead lobbyists for their complicity in the murders of their friends.” For Kreider, the #NeverAgain movement has been a wake-up call about the nature of power, a wake-up call that neatly reproduces the argument of Bachrach and Baratz[4]:

Power is like money: imaginary, entirely dependent upon belief. Most of the power of institutions lies in the faith people have in them. And cynicism is also a kind of faith: the faith that nothing can change, that those institutions are corrupt beyond all accountability, immune to intimidation or appeal. Harvey Weinstein ultimately wasn’t the one enforcing the code of silence around his predations: It was all the agents and managers and friends and colleagues who warned actresses that he was too powerful to accuse.

Kreider isn’t entirely comfortable with some of the peripheral traits that go along with the earnestness of the young, however. “I am creeped out by the increasing dogmatism and intolerance of millennials on the left,” he confesses, and then adds a telling judgment on that “dogmatism.”

When I was young it seemed the natural order of things that conservatives were the prudes and scolds who wanted books banned and exhibitions closed, while we liberals got to be the gadflies and iconoclasts. I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong, because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history, but I just can’t help noticing that the liberal side isn’t much fun to be on anymore.

Although it’s not immediately apparent, both Kreider’s essay and “Two Faces of Power” are about how generational differences produce different visions of what power is and how it gets used. For Kreider and for Bachrach and Baratz (though they are not of the same generation), the hidden face of power is the more potent one, the face that is harder to grapple with. For the Parkland kids, for the “millennials on the left” (and, I’d argue, for the generation Bachrach was critiquing[5]), the exposed face of power is hideous enough: there doesn’t need to be a hermeneutics of suspicion to lay it bare.

But what Kreider’s comment about the not-fun-ness of young liberals reveals is that these differences don’t stop with the issue of power’s definition. They are also, in a sense, pre-political differences, matters of tone and style: Boomers and Gen-Xers operate largely on a different political frequency than millennials. That certainly comes through in how these groups process humor and enjoyment differently—they have “fun” in different ways and for different reasons.

This is clearly a generalization, but it is also a conventional enough observation: transgression has been an integral element of the “fun” of Boomers and Gen-Xers—it is a basic part of what makes certain things funny to them. Boomer humor is often lauded for being “subversive,” and I think it’s particularly important to pay attention to the etymology of that word. “Subvert”—to turn from under. There is a sense that true humor must target power’s hidden face, must sneak up under it and shock it or shame it or zap it from below.

But just think instead about one of the most common terms used to describe the stinging wit of millennial humor: “burn!” Burns happen from the outside and work their way in. They are not subversive, they are corrosive. They attack the exposed skin, not the hidden face.

Kreider may see iconoclasm—transgressive, subversive humor—as the only way to have “fun.” But that kind of “fun” may just be one more of those things—like department stores and napkins—that millennials are likely to kill.