The Conditions of Discourse

What the occupation of Portland City Hall destroyed, and for whom

On the evening of February 18, 2026, the Portland City Council convened to discuss, among other items, the allocation of $20.7 million in unbudgeted housing funds. Fifteen minutes into the meeting, approximately forty demonstrators filled the council chambers, chanting demands that the city revoke the land use permit for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland’s South Waterfront. One person crossed the dais to confront council members physically. Others blocked the lobby doors. The council evacuated. Portland police deployed twenty-six officers to clear the building, drawing from nearly every officer on duty in the city. Four people were arrested. The housing discussion was postponed indefinitely.

In the days that followed, the police chief raised the possibility of locking down City Hall or moving council meetings permanently online. One councilor announced she was considering a concealed weapons permit and drafting an ordinance to allow elected officials to carry firearms during public meetings. She rescinded the proposal two days later, but not before it had entered the public record as evidence of the trajectory the disruption set in motion. The mayor condemned what he called “parachute activism,” noting that three of the four arrested were not Portland residents. Meanwhile, the organizing group’s allied media outlet published an account headlined “Portland police brutalize and jail immigrant rights protesters,” framing the arrests as suppression of free speech and the police response as state violence.

This essay is a critique of those who disrupted the council meeting, offered not from the right but from within the tradition of critical democratic theory. It argues that the procedural norms governing public hearings, however flawed, constitute the minimal conditions for democratic discourse. It argues that the deliberate destruction of those norms by organized political actors does not expand democratic space but eliminates it. And it argues that the organizational framework driving these disruptions, rooted in a Marxist-Leninist tradition of democratic centralism, is incapable of engaging in the communicative action required by democratic governance.

I. The Managed Meeting

Jürgen Habermas theorized the public sphere as a space in which private individuals come together to engage in rational-critical debate about matters of common concern, a space distinct from both the state and the market, where the force of the better argument could, in principle, prevail. Nancy Fraser’s critique cut through the exclusions built into this ideal: the public sphere, as Habermas described it, was never truly open but was structured by inequalities of status, access, and recognition that systematically disadvantaged subordinated groups. Fraser argued for the existence of “subaltern counterpublics,” parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.

Portland’s city council hearings sit at the intersection of these two frameworks. They are, formally, instances of the public sphere in action: residents addressing their government about matters of policy, their input solicited and recorded as part of the democratic process. But anyone who has attended one knows how far reality falls short of the ideal. Speakers are allotted two minutes each. ICE-related agenda items have been consistently placed last, requiring residents to wait through hours of unrelated business. The gallery is warned against applause, snapping, or vocal expressions of agreement. The procedural structure of the hearing constrains participation to a form that the institution can process without disruption.

This is what I call procedural containment: the set of institutional practices through which municipal governments convert democratic participation into a managed, bounded, and functionally inert event. Procedural containment is documented, consequential, and a legitimate object of critique. But it is not the only thing that can go wrong with democratic participation. What happened on February 18 represents a different pathology—one that procedural containment, for all its flaws, exists in part to prevent.

II. The Two-Minute Clock

Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power offers the vocabulary for understanding how public hearings organize participation. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described how modern institutions produce compliant subjects not primarily through violence but through the spatial and temporal organization of behavior: the timetable, the partition, the examination. Power operates not by forbidding but by structuring the possible field of action.

The city council hearing is structured around three disciplinary mechanisms. The timetable: two minutes per speaker. The clock does not account for hours spent waiting, childcare arranged, or work missed. It disaggregates collective testimony into individual, time-bounded units that cannot accumulate into sustained pressure. The partition: the gallery is separated from the council. Speakers approach the microphone one at a time. The audience is instructed to remain silent. The spatial organization reproduces the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed. The examination: each speaker submits to procedural requirements—sign up, wait for your turn, state your name, keep your remarks to two minutes, and accept the chair’s ruling. Compliance is the condition of being heard. Those who comply are thanked. Those who do not are warned, then threatened with removal.

At a November 19, 2025, hearing on a proposed Detention Facility Impact Fee, these mechanisms were on full display. One speaker, Susan Bartley, asked councilors to stop texting during testimony, noting that residents had arranged childcare and taken time off work to be present. One councilor responded: “You have my attention. I can’t speak for my colleagues.” The asymmetry Bartley named is structural: the institution demands compliance from the public but imposes no reciprocal obligation on itself. The disciplinary apparatus runs in one direction.

And yet the November 19 speakers used that apparatus. They submitted to the two-minute clock and made it work. Speaker after speaker identified the proposed fee as a mechanism for normalizing detention through regulation. Pedro Anglada Cordero testified that the fee meant the city was “willing to fall into complicity by turning these oppressive dynamics into a transaction.” Polly Brown called it “a pay-to-play system.” An Emanuel nurse described the hospital’s complicity with ICE. They practiced what Paulo Freire called problem-posing analysis—naming the conditions of their oppression and connecting local institutional practices to broader structures of power—within a setting designed for banking. The hearing could not fully receive what they offered. But they offered it. They entered the discourse and changed its terms.

III. Occupation

Portland Contra Las Deportaciones (PDXCD) organized a protest at City Hall on the evening of February 18. The group had disrupted a previous council meeting on January 21, requiring police intervention. On February 18, they returned in greater numbers.

The meeting opened with testimony on housing funds. When the city administrator provided an update on the ICE facility’s land use violation, noting that the property owner’s appeal had been denied and a compliance deadline set for March 26, demonstrators in the chambers began chanting “Revoke the permit.” One activist approached the council dais carrying a printout of 19,000 petition signatures. Security intervened. Council President Jamie Dunphy shut down the meeting and ordered an evacuation. Demonstrators remained in the chambers for approximately thirty minutes, chanting. When twenty-six police officers arrived, most of the forty occupants left. Four did not. They were arrested on charges including criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

The organizing group’s account, published in Fight Back! News (the publication of Freedom Road Socialist Organization) describes the same events as “a violent suppression of protest” and “an egregious attempt to silence First Amendment rights.” The article does not mention the housing funds on the agenda. It does not acknowledge that the meeting was convened for purposes other than ICE. A PDXCD organizer told local media: “We have a right to be there and a right to talk with our representatives.”

The framing of February 18 as an exercise of free speech depends on a category error that must be addressed directly. The First Amendment protects the rights to speak, assemble, and petition the government. It does not protect the right to occupy a government chamber after being asked to leave, to block the exits of a public building, to approach elected officials at their desks during a session, or to prevent a legislative body from conducting its business. These are not speech acts. They are acts of physical imposition that foreclose the speech of others, including council members engaged in deliberation, members of the public who came to testify on housing, and residents whose access to their representatives was eliminated when the meeting was shut down.

Habermas distinguished between communicative action, in which participants orient themselves toward mutual understanding through the exchange of reasons, and strategic action, in which participants treat others as objects to be coerced, manipulated, or bypassed. The February 18 occupation was strategic action in its purest form. The demonstrators did not come to testify, to persuade, or to engage the council in dialogue. They came to impose a demand and to make the continuation of governance impossible until that demand was met. When it was not met, they occupied the space and refused to leave.

The speakers at the November 19 hearing—the healthcare workers, the neighborhood residents, the immigrant rights organizers who articulated critiques of carceral governance within the procedural constraints of the forum—were exercising free speech. What happened on February 18 was not an extension of their practice. It was its repudiation.

IV. The Emergency Defense

There is an obvious objection to this argument. People are being detained and deported. ICE agents shot two people in East Portland on January 8. An ICE agent killed a woman in Minneapolis on January 7. The facility on Macadam Avenue holds people. It deports them. If the council has spent months running out the clock while people are removed from their homes, their workplaces, their children’s schools—why should anyone respect the two-minute clock?

The urgency is real. I do not dispute it. But urgency does not change the distributive consequences of destroying the forum. It does not restore the housing discussion. It does not put police officers back in the neighborhoods that lost coverage. It does not prevent the institutional response: locked doors, virtual meetings, armed councilors. Urgency is a reason to demand better procedures, faster timelines, and more consequential forms of public engagement. It is not a reason to eliminate the space in which those demands can be articulated.

The tradition of civil disobedience draws a distinction that the February 18 action collapses. Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail, argued for deliberately violating unjust laws to force dialogue. King’s disobedience was oriented toward entry into the discourse: it aimed to compel an institution to hear what it had refused to hear, to create the conditions for engagement that did not previously exist. King accepted the legal consequences of his actions because that acceptance was itself a communicative act, a demonstration of moral seriousness that demanded a response.

The February 18 occupation was not oriented toward dialogue. It was intended to end a meeting. The demonstrators did not break an unjust law to force the council into engagement. They occupied a chamber to prevent the council from engaging with anyone. King’s disobedience forced a seat at the table. The February 18 action flipped the table. These are not points on a spectrum. They are separate acts, and their consequences fall on different people.

V. The Conditions of Discourse

Habermas’s theory of communicative action rests on a demanding premise: rational discourse is possible only when the parties to a disagreement share a commitment to resolving it through argumentation rather than force. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas identified the preconditions of legitimate discourse: participants must recognize each other as interlocutors capable of raising and defending claims, they must accept a procedural framework within which those claims can be tested, and they must orient themselves toward understanding rather than domination.

These preconditions are constitutive, not decorative. Without them, there is no public sphere—only competing exercises of power. The procedural norms of the city council hearing are imperfect instantiations of these preconditions. I have criticized them. But they are simultaneously the minimal conditions under which dozens of speakers could articulate a sustained critique of carceral governance in November, under which one group cannot drown out all others, and under which a resident who arranged childcare and took time off work gets her turn.

I can hear the counterargument: if the council has used these procedures to stall for months while ICE operates with impunity, the social contract underlying those procedures is already broken. There is something to this. A procedural framework in which one party complies while the other stalls is not a mutual agreement. It is containment. But the answer to a broken social contract is to name the breach and demand its repair, as the November speakers did, not to destroy the forum in which the breach can be named. When these norms are physically overridden by a group that has decided the forum has no legitimacy, the council cannot deliberate, the public cannot testify, and the institutional response is not to open up but to shut down.

VI. The Vanguard at the Dais

The February 18 action was not spontaneous. It was organized by PDXCD and amplified through networks associated with Marxist-Leninist organizations operating under the principle of democratic centralism.[1] The aftermath of the action was narrated in Fight Back! News, which functions as the media arm of this tendency. This matters, not as a conspiracy theory, but as a theoretical observation about the relationship between organizational form and political practice.

Organizations built on democratic centralism do not approach municipal forums as sites of deliberation. They approach them as stages for the demonstration of organizational will. The internal decision has already been made. The public hearing is a venue for its expression, not its formation. Lenin’s distinction between trade union consciousness and revolutionary consciousness has a direct corollary for municipal governance: the city council hearing, from this perspective, is a bourgeois institution incapable of producing political transformation. Participation is tactical, aimed at exposing contradictions and building organizational momentum, not at achieving policy outcomes through deliberation.

This explains why the Fight Back! News account reads as it does. The housing funds go unmentioned because, within this framework, reformist allocations are irrelevant. The council’s legal constraints on revoking the land use permit are dismissed as “excuses for inaction” because institutional process is not recognized as legitimate. The police response is characterized as “brutality,” though no injuries were reported on either side, because any enforcement of procedural norms against political actors is, by definition, repressive.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Angela Davis has argued that the abolition of carceral institutions requires not merely their closure but the dismantling of the logic that makes them possible. These are serious commitments, and the activists who invoke them are not wrong that the ICE facility on Macadam Avenue produces the kind of vulnerability Gilmore describes. The housing funds whose discussion was deferred that evening represent the material resources of survival for the communities most exposed to organized abandonment: immigrant families, unhoused residents, and working-class neighborhoods. In Gilmore’s own terms, that deferral is a contribution to the conditions that produce premature death. The activists invoked an abolitionist framework to justify an action whose concrete consequence was the deferral of resources for the people abolition is supposed to serve.

The strategic framework within which the action was organized makes communicative engagement with the council impossible by design. You cannot simultaneously treat the council as a stage for revolutionary theater and as a body capable of taking the legal, administrative, and political steps required to close a federal facility operating within municipal jurisdiction. The first orientation precludes the second. And when the first manifests as physical occupation, the second is destroyed for everyone.

VII. What the Hearing Taught

Henry Giroux extended Freire’s analysis to the terrain of public pedagogy, arguing that democratic institutions are themselves pedagogical sites that teach citizens what political participation means, what forms it can take, and what it can accomplish. Every public hearing is a lesson. The question is what it teaches.

The November 19 hearing taught a constrained and constraining lesson: that political speech is an individual act bounded by institutional time, that the appropriate response to testimony about human rights violations is silence or a raised thumb, that compliance with procedural norms is the price of admission to political voice, and the institution is under no obligation to do anything with that voice once heard. I have called this a form of political banking. The public deposits its testimony, the institution records the deposit, and the transaction is complete.

The February 18 disruption taught a different lesson, and a worse one. It taught that the public hearing is not a site of engagement but a target—that the procedural norms governing democratic participation are obstacles to be overridden, that the dais is a space to be breached, not a table to be joined. And it taught the institution that the public forum is a liability: that the price of keeping the doors open is the risk that the next group through them will shut down the meeting.

Giroux would recognize both lessons as forms of miseducation. But they are not equivalent. November’s miseducation left the forum intact. It taught a diminished version of democratic participation, but participation, nonetheless. February’s miseducation threatens to eliminate the forum altogether. The trajectory is toward a world without a gallery, a microphone, or a two-minute clock—not because the clock was reformed but because the room was closed.

VIII. Who Pays

Every theory of political disruption must answer a distributive question: who bears the cost, and is the distribution just?

On February 18, the costs fell as follows. Council members were evacuated and subjected to physical confrontation. Twenty-six police officers were pulled from their precincts, leaving Portland’s most vulnerable neighborhoods with emergency-only coverage. The housing discussion was deferred indefinitely. And the institutional trajectory shifted toward restricting public access to City Hall. This restriction will not fall on the organized cadre that prompted it, but on ordinary residents who depend on public hearings as their primary point of contact with municipal governance.

The activists returned to their organizing spaces, where the disruption was narrated as confrontation with power: police brutality, the suppression of free speech, the moral cowardice of elected officials. That narrative will circulate through allied media, recruit new members, and generate the organizational momentum that is its actual purpose. The residents who lost their forum—the ones who came to testify about housing, the ones who will find City Hall harder to enter next time, the ones whose neighborhoods went without police coverage that evening—will not appear in that narrative.

They never do.

Fraser argued for subaltern counterpublics as spaces where subordinated groups could formulate the discourses that dominant institutions refused to hear. The November 19 speakers were doing precisely that: circulating counterdiscourses about carceral governance, articulating oppositional interpretations of municipal policy, and doing so within and against the procedural constraints of the dominant public sphere.

What happened on February 18 was a vanguard organization substituting its own will for the broader public’s discourse. The forty people who occupied Portland City Council chambers believed they were confronting power. They were exercising it at the expense of everyone who was not in the room.

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[1]Democratic centralism has taken many organizational forms since Lenin theorized it in 1902, from the mass-line variants of Maoist practice to the factional pluralism of Trotskyist parties. The variant operative here is the cadre model characteristic of the US New Communist Movement: a small, disciplined organization enters broader coalitions with its political line already determined, uses public forums to demonstrate organizational will rather than to deliberate, and narrates outcomes through allied media that functions as an extension of the organization itself.

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References

Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Continuum.

Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press.

Giroux, H. A. (2004). Public pedagogy and the politics of neo-liberalism. Policy Futures in Education, 2(3–4), 494–503.

Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, Vol. 1 (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press.

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press.

King, M. L., Jr. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail. In Why we can’t wait (pp. 77–100). Harper & Row.