Bad Faith in the Boston City Council

A few days ago, I watched Chuck Turner get thrown off of the Boston City Council by a near-unanimous vote of his peers as I took photographs of the sad scene for Open Media Boston. The fact that he got shown the door that day surprised no one. One had only to look at the stony faces of most of the councilors as Turner made his final defiant speech to them to know that he was definitely going down. The feds were handing his political head to them on a silver platter. And there was no way they were going to pass up that opportunity. They had the eight votes they needed - even if the more progressive councilors didn't vote yes. And that was that.

Councilor Charles Yancey did a fine job trying to defend Turner on procedural grounds - convincingly demonstrating that the council had no authority to expel the democratically-elected Turner under the council rules. And pointing out that no councilor in the long and nasty history of the Boston City Council had ever been expelled in such a fashion before. Of course, virtually none of those other councilors were black - but we'll sidle past that ugly fact for the purposes of this editorial.

After about a half hour of wrangling, Council President Michael Ross made clear that he was having none of it, and the vote went forward. And that would have been that, even for this publication, if a couple of councilors had chosen to hold their tongues. But shortly before the vote, Councilor Felix Arroyo and Councilor Ayanna Pressley both got up and gave speeches.

Arroyo went first. He talked about how great Turner was and how much he respected him. Then he sat down. Astute observers noticed that Arroyo assiduously avoided saying which way he was going to vote. The audience started getting nervous at that point. Turner's supporters generally assumed both Arroyo and Pressley would either vote for Turner or abstain from voting despite some of the puzzling self-exculpatory language they were hearing from Arroyo.

After all, Turner had done a lot for both of them personally and for the communities they represented. Both were councilors of color in a city that has had damn few to this day. In fact, Pressley is the first African-American woman to be elected to the council. Both come from "tough" (to use the opaque language in Pressley's own bio) neighborhoods. They know what's what, right? So why, supporters figured, would they do anything other than the right thing and back their friend? Why indeed?

That question was answered in surprising fashion a few minutes later. Shocked noises burst from the crowd as Pressley started her talk and said that she was going to vote against Turner - before continuing on and making remarks similar to Arroyo's. Not long after, the crowd exploded with anger when Arroyo and Pressley both cast their votes to expel Turner from the council ... their outrage rising to crescendos of opprobrium and damping down when Ross banged his gavel and Turner raised his hand to calm them - only to rise up again.

Most of the councilors beat a hasty retreat to their offices immediately after the vote, and close to 200 Turner supporters made their way out into the City Hall atrium - chanting impromptu slogans - and proceeded down the central staircase and out the front door where most of them congregated and held furious impromptu confabs. Turner appeared, people swarmed him with handshakes and hugs as the mainstream media circled like vultures waiting to tear some last chunks off the carcass of a political career they helped destroy.

After the sound and fury died down, everyone returned home. Here at Open Media Boston, staff reporter David Goodman contacted both Arroyo and Pressley to ask them why they voted against Turner. Pressley has not yet responded to the request - and has said little in public to anyone on the matter as far as we have seen. But Arroyo did. We ran a story on his response. Arroyo told OMB that he "believes a Council member convicted of a felony should have to start over; in other words, leave office and face the public in an election."

OK, fair enough. Now here's what I think.

One of the things I like to read and think about is existentialist philosophy. In my study of existentialism, I am drawn to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. So as I sat there at City Hall taking pictures of the spectacle (and I mean that term in its situationist sense for all you philosophy fans out there) of the vote on Turner's expulsion, I thought to myself "Arroyo and Pressley are acting in bad faith."

Bad faith is one of the core concepts of Sartre's existentialist thought. Huge numbers of words have been written by Sartre, his defenders and his critics on this one idea; so I'm hardly going to do full justice to it here, but I'll try to give you all a very basic idea of what it means, and why I think it's relevant to this discussion.

In Sartrean existentialism, people are radically free to make any number of choices in any situation. Each person is an intelligence that acts for itself. But each person is surrounded by other people. Other "for-itselfs." So each person, in a variety of ways, also acts for others. These others have an effect on the actions of each person because they can do things that help or hurt the person. So when making a decision on a course of action, each person - despite being radically free - tends to factor these others into their choice.

In order to get a consistent beneficial reaction from these other people, each person takes on roles that they act out for different periods of time ... sometimes for their whole lives.

Sartre observed that people often make excuses about decisions they make by saying their decisions are constrained by the role they are playing in life at that moment. But at some level, he argues, even if they are only dimly aware of it, these people are making conscious decisions to do what they do. Decisions that only they can make as radically free beings. To deny that reality and that freedom in any one of a number of ways is to act in bad faith.

So here's how this relates to the situation at hand.

I believe that Arroyo and Pressley were playing their roles as "Boston City Councilors" in voting to expel Turner. They had the freedom to do the opposite and consciously chose not to do so.

So, if what they said about Turner in their speeches before the expulsion vote was true, then they are acting in bad faith. If what they said was a lie, they are also acting in bad faith.

That is to say, either they both were honest about really liking Turner, and screwed him because it became convenient to do so. Or else they really don't like Turner and used him until it was no longer convenient to pretend otherwise.

I assume the former in both Arroyo's and Pressley's cases. But either way, such bad faith is problematic. Radical freedom implies radical responsibility, as the existentialist saying goes. Responsibility for ones own actions, and for the things one says about ones own actions.

This responsibility includes the awareness that ones actions have an effect on the lives of all other people in some way. Especially the people directly connected to you. This understanding demonstrates why existentialism is a humanist philosophy - and why it is generally a philosophy of the left-wing.

And that's why it was especially disturbing for me to see two progressive politicians - one of whom, Arroyo, I've been friendly with for years - act in bad faith. I expected better of Arroyo and Pressley. Many other people - who did a lot to get them elected - did too.

They failed us by not supporting Turner at a critical moment. And they did it quite consciously. Which makes me wonder if they're going to fail us in the future in other critical situations. If they are going to choose expedience over principle. If they are going to do what's right for themselves as councilors, over what's right for the communities they represent. Because that's how I view what they did this time around.

So I would strongly recommend that Arroyo and Pressley put a lot of thought into figuring out how they're going to save their reputations with their constituents - and then put positive action behind that thought. Especially with the progressive activists who are largely responsible for putting them into office. Many of whom - uninformed mainstream media representations aside - were in the audience at the vote to expel Turner. Such people have long memories on certain matters. And from the perspective of high philosophy or street level morality, Arroyo and Pressley didn't do the right thing in failing to support Turner.

And people will remember that. At the polls. In the next election.

As well they should.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston