The US-American Dilemma of Telling Someone What To Do

As my generous and richly perceptive commentators point out, I framed my book with the answer to a question that has been troubling me since I first started teaching a course on the anthropology of democracy in 2003. If, as Tocqueville claims, democracy is a form of government that requires a political imagination attentive to the common good, where do Americans learn their political imagination these days? Tocqueville in the 1830’s had an answer – civic associations – but as scholars such as Robert Putnam and Nina Eliasoph have pointed out, Americans aren’t participating nearly enough in these associations these days to believe this is where they learn how to be democratic. So where are they learning to think in broader terms? In this book, I venture that it is the workplace, but this immediately raises an ethnographic question: if it is in the workplace, what workplace practices generate this imagination? What kinds of political lessons about governing others and being governed are people actually learning in workplaces, which are all too often geared towards generating a profit, not generating good citizens? I began my book, in short, with a question about where and how citizens learn what they might need to know in order to participate in and sustain a democratic government – a question on a national scale.

However, there was another question that could have been the motor for this book, and both Greenhouse and Slotta’s musings on bosses made me wonder about an alternative organization of the book. What if I had begun with a fieldwork-inspired insight about a conundrum that Americans face regularly because of their own cultural logics. For in the United States, telling someone else what to do is a highly charged act, unless one is bound by contract or kinship. During the pandemic, what many people most wanted to do, despite how socially unacceptable it might be, was to tell others what to do – “wear a mask properly,” “stand six feet apart,” and so on. And for many other Americans, being told what to do, even in the context of a pandemic, was enraging. There is nothing about giving a directive that needs to be quite so charged – this happens only because of the cultural assumptions Americans hold about autonomy, equality, and hierarchy that are present whenever an American is interpreting the context and appropriateness of an order. Yet so many of the conundrums that Americans faced at work during the pandemic were the consequences of this very American relationship to directives.

As Greenhouse points out, if the federal government had provided clear guidelines for how to respond to the pandemic, Americans would not have faced their pandemic quandaries. Because people have such trouble telling each other what to do in the United States, people often justify their voiced orders by invoking an external authority. In states where there were clear guidelines, people could insist on following the state’s Covid protocols. And when this wasn’t available, people would point to their employers’ policies. Mentioning their own well-being or the common good met with such resistance that the people who tried soon learned not to do so again. When telling someone what to do is such a loaded act, people needed some version of top-down authority to coordinate without constant conflict.

In this sense, inverting my book’s structure – leading with an American problem with directives – would have led me to put front and center both Slotta’s and Collins’ cautions. It would have led me to explore what it means to be a boss or have a boss. After all, what is a boss but someone in a structural position that is allowed to tell you what to do because, through contracts, you have agreed. Looking at bosses through the lens of contracts, bosses hire, fire, and give orders (and the ways in which they do so enmeshed in social relationships at work is conveniently concealed from this vantage point). The role of the boss has a certain similarity in this day and age with the role of consumers – and Slotta’s analysis of the grandmother who decides she represents the American people and is authorized to fire Congress merges the authority of the boss with the authority of the consumer. I deliberately focused in my book on people who were quite aware that their work lives formed a mixture of democracy and autocracy – that they were constantly navigating circumstances in which giving directives was a charged act, and asking what kinds of political imagination about decision making emerges from these contexts. Collins reminds us that not all workplaces in the US lie so conveniently on a continuum – and many workplaces now use technologies that can stand in for people, shifting the not so easily worn mantle of directive authority from human to machine. What kinds of political imaginations do authoritarian workplaces, ones that lack even the illusion of fake democracy, engender when directives are a particular type of social dilemma in the United States? My fieldwork did not offer me good answers for that question – others’ fieldwork might.

When I think about President Trump these days, it is the highly charged nature of telling others what to do that haunts me. Because it is highly charged, there is also a certain degree of joy in ordering others and even in watching people order others. Part of what can be so presumably captivating and satisfying these days for MAGA supporters who are seeing Trump, and now Musk, perform as bosses is watching them tell others what to do. So much of the theatrics at the core of what they are doing these days is issuing orders whose primary purpose appears to be highlighting that they have the power to do so, that and firing people. They are violating an ever-present taboo in people’s daily lives, and this is very much part of why voters chose Trump. But he was elected to tell others what to do, to offer a performance to be watched, not a lived experience, for his voters. I wonder what happens when he and his surrogates begin telling everyone what to do, and what any American can say. There are hints that freedom of speech may not be allowed for people opposed to Trump soon. My fieldwork for this book showed me that part of Trump’s appeal is how he condenses a set of alternatives to the hypocrisies present in contemporary US workplaces which I discuss in my conclusion.  In his second term, he is taking a new tack in how he engages with social, organizational, and legal norms. The more he becomes a dictator, the more he risks making the ways in which he violates these social and political norms a vivid problem for everyone, not just those he has declared his enemies.