Steven Johnston had written a fascinating study of how the collective understanding of violence, tragedy, and democratic politics might be brought into sharper focus for the United States during the early twenty-first century. At once a remarkably rich intertextual meditation on American democracy and its acceptance of violence, as well as a personal record of living in Washington, DC, during troubled times, American Dionysia also recognizes that popular government must rest upon force. Yet Johnston also ponders when, where, and why such force is exerted, and represented, by firearms.

The book, however, is not a big-time moralizing extravaganza devoted to dissecting the contradictions of gun violence in American public life. Even though firearms are discussed here and there, they do not have a starring role in the plot, themes, or supporting cast. Guns are not ignored, but they also are not fetishized. Johnston’s style is too nuanced to completely convey the book’s arguments in this brief review, and so it is important for all to read his study to appreciate his wide-ranging explorations of American democracy today. At the outset, the author commences his analysis with an unusual, but arguably true, claim: “Democracy engenders magical thinking” (pg. 1). Unlike too many contemporary political theorists, he does not fall under this democratic spell. He turns instead to tragedy rather than magic by openly conceding how effective democracies are still state formations, and all states are—despite their putative monopolies of the use of force within a given territory—fragile institutions. Like all states under many forms of government, democracies often arise, sustain themselves, and then fall during times of violence.

Following a path taken by many Western political theorists, Johnston then roves around America’s emotional and intellectual terrain with a few key canonical thinkers—Arendt, Weber, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hobbes and Machiavelli—who also tend, first, to favor tragic over magical thinking. And, second, these thinkers also return to Hellenic city-states, particularly Athens, for insights into why violence and politics are inseparable, how tragedy follows from the historical coevolution of force with governance, and when democracies grapple with these stark necessities. Not surprisingly, then, the book’s Introduction is titled “There Will Be Blood: The Antinomies of Democracy,” which signals that his reconsideration of American democracy will explore key cinematic examples of democratic politics in Hollywood film. Movie plot lines, scripts, and characters are frequently used to illustrate to the reading public where and when violence has been effectively depicted at the movies as essential to the survival of America’s imagined democratic community. His narrative also reaches back to Greek tragedies, Athenian civic rituals, and times of war throughout Western history for “a tragic sensibility” to counteract democracy’s magical thinking, because “it is both life-giving and death-inducing” (p. 3). Such antimonies are replete in democracy, but few political thinkers are willing to find and then embrace them as openly as does Johnston.

The book’s arguments unfold in six chapters that weave together observations about America’s violent history, landmark cinema productions, military service animals, timeless literary works, canonical political thinkers, iconic rock music, major civic monuments, contemporary political theorists, and greater Washington as a capital city. Johnston wrote the book while living and working in the District of Columbia, and he continually points out key features in Washington’s varied and complex architecture, culture, history, monuments, and planning to suggest how American citizens might better understand themselves and one another initially by experiencing the capital’s real, and would-be, concrete teachings. In addition, he speculatively develops the designs for, and then muses about the merits of staging, new civic rituals, such as an American Dionysia, in order to educate the nation and world about the contrary, but also necessary, demands of democratic life.

Chapter 1, in fact, is a scenario for having an American film festival—as a fresh civic ritual—staged annually on the Fourth of July around the Washington Mall. To emulate the original versions of an Athenian Dionysia in which that ancient city-state, in part, celebrated the children of its fallen citizen-warriors by feting that great city’s civic culture and mythic might, Johnston suggests that everyone should savor John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Its central themes and characters make a wonderful lesson about the use of violence “of/for/by the people” in order that citizens intent upon realizing democratic politics might grasp how “turning to arms” carries many tragic contradictions, ironies, and dimensions.

Chapter 2 examines how democracies, as state formations, must often sacrifice their collective ideals about cultivating the good life for all. First and foremost, it always remains among the responsibilities of individual citizens to forsake the ease of civilian life by serving as soldiers. If mobilized, then citizens sent to war will lose much of their own good lives, kill all enemies foreign and domestic, and even toss away ethics, law, and morality in protecting each of these valued practices against all threats. Rambo in First Blood (1982) is depicted as such a citizen-soldier, returning home as a strange, war-born monster hard-tested in many battles abroad. As he reenters the routines of small-town life that he left behind to fight in Vietnam, local policemen dog him roughly with more than disrespect. And once provoked by the authorities, he wreaks violence on the nation that debased him with violence. As a citizen trained to destroy all enemies in Indochina, Rambo is triggered by the injustice he encounters back home to attack his fellow citizens as if they were his enemies abroad.

Here, Johnston speculates that the United States needs a new ritual “Admission Day” so that this nation-state may render ambiguous the bright one-dimensional claims about servicemen defending peace, freedom, and the American Way, when they are actually branded forever to bear the harsher actualities of endless war, total domination, and the darkest violence. Johnston also points to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Korean War Memorial, and Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism for the initial guidance needed, explicitly and implicitly, to illustrate how wrongs frequently are committed by citizens in uniform for democracy. However, they must not forget those costs, lest they someday make these same bloody sacrifices to democracy and then fail to secure the values such sacrifice sought for their compatriots in America’s contradictory commonwealth.

The very wide-ranging discussion of animals in war, found in Chapter 3, extends insights from Chapters 1 and 2 by arguing how patriotism pushes democratic publics to recognize the military service of human citizens by extending quasi-, para-, and crypto-citizenship to nonhuman denizens of states, such as military service animals. Johnston uses many examples of exemplary dog, horse, oxen, mule, and pigeon service in battle to exemplify war’s horrors, sacrifices, and victories for all life forms. And, by exploring the memorialization of certain animals, he contemplates the costs to military men and women. He questions what animals in war disclose about states, even democratic ones, and their human citizens by reducing them to animals—as civilian victims or uniformed victimizers—without much choice, doomed to lives of degrading destruction, and then brutal death.

Chapter 4 looks to the unusual, even illiberal, vision of direct democracy in Rousseau’s On the Social Contract, with its origins in existential crisis. Are democracies doomed, as Rousseau asserts, to suffer endless embattlement by nondemocratic regimes, and is the intervention of “The Legislator” (e.g., a figure like Lycurgus, Solon, Moses, or Mohammad) essential to successful beginnings for a democracy? More pertinently, does the democratic citizen need the authoritarian mythology of a founder-legislator to recognize that every personal freedom, in a tragic sense, is created amidst a violent world by greater violence? Acceding implicitly to Aristotle’s recognition that the ideal of a founder-legislator is fatally flawed inasmuch as it is essentially impossible to keep the founder’s dream alive and its legislative first intent true to itself, the book’s arguments become woven into popular music. Bruce Springsteen’s musical performances and lyrics, as Johnston experiences them, might easily exemplify how slipping into civic complacency requires other democratic impulses that “force individuals and public to be free.”

Similarly, Chapter 5 explores how the ideas of “constitutional patriotism,” especially in Europe, have evolved in the European Community in light of the assessments of constitutional patriotism in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945 by Jürgen Habermas and others. Like modern Germany, the idea is advanced by Johnston that the contemporary United States needs to make its own amends for its hidden or forgotten violent history, which cascades from too many rash choices made by its governments for more than two hundred years. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at the attacks on the United States during September 11, 2001. Johnston suggests that they have become integrated uncomfortably and too glibly into the popular imagination through twenty-first century presidential discourses, as well as by the overcoded displays of peculiar forms of democratic freedom in the new museums and memorials constructed to commemorate this other “Day of Infamy.” The Conclusion, like Chapter 1, is a close rereading of the allure, as well as the damage, caused by individual and collective violence in American democracy as it is presented in the dramas depicted in another classic Western film, namely, George Stevens’s Shane (1953). Once again, handiness with a gun is both accepted and not accepted as integral to living in freedom and self-determination instead of subjection to ruthless oppression, but a democratic citizen must be far more than a deadly gun-hand.

In some ways, readers may find Johnston’s modes of reasoning, like many of his contemporaries in the North Atlantic world’s political theory circles, focused more on individuals than on institutions; ideal categories rather than actual conditions; moral choices instead of material necessities; and, all too often, riveting figurative agents in fiction, song, film, or theater rather than on confounding embedded structures in the political world. Sticking with these tropes are specific methodological choices that Johnston makes to adduce thought-provoking results in several registers, even though some may feel that perhaps he leaves many more thought-beguiling puzzles undisturbed. Sociologically, for example, the common comparison of ancient Athens as “a democracy” in the sixth century b.c.e. to the United States today is very problematic, since they are “most different systems” in too many ways. Yet the democratic idea, as practiced in a small city-state based on seafaring trade and conquest to sustain a slave-based economy dominated by a male warrior class conjures up a “most similar systems” matrix for discovering practicable contrasts and comparisons with the United States of America and its “empire of bases” near the turn of the twenty-first century, before and after the Cold War. To discover new ethical and political lessons of democratic life for Americans at the core of an unprecedented technocratic world empire beset by the challenges of global terrorism, rapid climate change, and neoliberal corporate corruption by looking back, once again, to ancient Athens is barely plausible. Even so, it remains a highly prized rhetorical move by most Western-anchored political theorists.

In search of a path to evince timeless ideals of patriotism, democratic devotion, and civic consciousness, a nearly complete state of civil equivalence might be seen as essentially naturalized as true. Nevertheless, too many parallels are not credible. Citizenship in America and Athens, like patriotism or militarism, is not a comparable practice (or even easily reducible to the same emotions). It is not obvious that a revitalization of “Athens’ City Dionysia” would or could “embody precisely this emotional complexity, a volatile combination of excessive celebration and stinging critique” in today’s Washington (p. 8).

Of course, heavily directive readings of Sophocles, John Ford, and Bruce Springsteen do create riveting textual allusions to explore how violence works in American democracy, but these exercises by Johnston are also extended sparring sessions with several of his contemporary political theorists, who are introduced as if their writings were truly weighty contributions to the Western canon. On the one hand, many readers can just as easily regard such minor-league hermetic debates as little more than the annual output of academic scribblers, adding lines to their curriculum vitae for the glory of their colleges and universities in the days of Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire (2000). Such dust in the wind, however, will not be read like Machiavelli, Hobbes or Weber during many successive coming generations. On the other hand, one hopes that George Stevens films, Bruce Springsteen recordings, and the American national memorials to 9/11 will survive in the long run, so that Johnston’s book can continue to be read and appreciated for the wisdom he finds in these reflections on modern democracy, the tragic place of coercion in development, and the easy acceptance by American citizens of brutal violence as integral to their freedom.