By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 31st, 2010
Barack Obama, Storyteller in Chief, has been going around the country making clear what he thinks the choice is in the upcoming election: the Republican position that government is the problem not the solution versus the Democratic position that good governance can matter. As I examined in my last post, he is telling his version of the American story, supporting specific candidates and promoting specific policies, but also giving his account of the recent past and his imaginative understanding of what the alternatives are in the near future. The specifics are interesting.
In Boston, supporting Governor Deval Patrick, the emphasis was on the economy and the kinds of tax cuts and public support that would benefit working people, the emphasis of all his speeches, but then a group in the audience called out: “Fight global AIDS! Fight global AIDS!” And the President improvised around his central theme:
And if they [the Republicans] win in Congress, they will cut AIDS funding right here in the United States of America and all across the world. (Applause.) You know, one of the great things about being a Democrat is we like arguing with each other. (Laughter.) But I would suggest to the folks who are concerned about AIDS funding, take a look at what the Republican leadership has to say about AIDS funding. (Applause.) Because we increased AIDS funding.
He was highlighting a distinctive position that Democrats share in contrast to their Republican opponents, public investment can contribute to the common good, especially in difficult times. And he makes his basic argument by citing the greatest of Republican authorities. (link)
But in the words of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, we also believe that government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves. (Applause.) We believe in a country that rewards hard work. We believe in a country that encourages responsibility. We believe in a country where we look after one another; where we say I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper. That’s the America we know. That’s the choice . . .
Read more: Obama Hits the Stump for 2010 Candidates
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 30th, 2010 
He told his story at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and became a national figure. This story, supplemented by his two books and some other good speeches, and Barack Obama became President. Too simple an account, surely, but Obama’s storytelling has been a key part of his political ascent. He was elected as “The Storyteller in Chief.”
This has led to some frustration. He can’t talk our way out of a major economic crisis, and he has had difficulty convincing his opponents and the general public that a balanced budget is not a rational answer to a severe financial crisis and deep economic recession. Further, he can’t convince real enemies abroad to accept American priorities, although he has improved attitudes towards our country around the world. And even more politically damaging, he can’t convince his political opposition to work with him, when they calculate that it is not in their narrowly conceived interests. Producing meaningful bipartisan legislation is a goal, but practical political calculation can and has stood in the way.
Now, the Story Teller is fighting back on the campaign trail. The fight started in a speech on Labor Day in Milwaukee presenting his basic themes, as I analyzed in an earlier post. Obama then extended the themes to specific circumstances, starting by going down the road a bit to Madison, Wisconsin, also analyzed here. He has since traveled from coast to coast delivering the message he introduced in the Wisconsin speeches. As he gives each speech, he is attempting to rally the troops, to energize his base, but he is also presenting different elements of his understanding of the political situation and his political vision and policy actions, telling the story of the last two years as he understands and feels about it, setting the terms of our politics for the next two.
The general theme: he dispassionately explains that when he became President Americans faced a severe crisis. He had thought and hoped that the Republicans and Democrats in Washington would work together to address this crisis. But the Republicans decided to play crass politics. . . .
Read more: Obama: “Storyteller in Chief”
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 29th, 2010 More than ever, cultural context informs the political scene, from late-night comedy to a recent Supreme Court ruling.
Sometimes the solution to theoretical problems become apparent not through careful research or close reading of important texts, but in the course of thinking about everyday life, in the course of leading a reflective life. You have an everyday encounter. You give it thought, and a major intellectual problem is solved.
I had such an experience and revelation at a lunch in Berlin in November of 1994. I remember the discussion. I remember the setting, an Italian restaurant in the leafy outskirts of the city. But I have only a vague recollection of my lunch partner, a female German scholar.
I was in Berlin in 1994 on a leg of a United States Information Agency sponsored lecture tour in Europe. The main event was in Poland, where I helped inaugurate a short lived American Cultural Center there. Following my stop in Warsaw, I flew to Berlin to speak in the well established American Cultural Center there about my book The Cynical Society, but also gave a talk at the Free University about my other relatively recent books, Beyond Glasnost and After the Fall. The first Berlin talk was about my work on American political culture, the second on my work in Central and Eastern Europe. After the second talk, I had a lunch with my hostess. We engaged in the normal small talk. No doubt, we discussed the presentation I gave and the reaction of the audience. The details escape me except for one exchange. It went something like this:
Jeff – “I think that it is not at all clear that Hitler’s crimes were qualitatively different than those of Stalin.”
Hostess – “No! Hitler was unique. The intentional project of modern industrial genocide was unprecedented, uniquely evil, something that must not be forgotten.”
We went on and discussed this, I, as an expert on the Soviet bloc and its democratic opposition, she as a German scholar. The conversation was warm, not at . . .
Read more: Cultural context is crucial in identity politics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 28th, 2010 
A few days ago I asked the question “Where are the conservative intellectuals?” I posed the straightforward question, but also gave a reason why I, as a person who is generally on the left, asked: I used to be challenged by conservatives, but not these days, and wonder if there are any out there who are still challenging. I received interesting replies.
Michael suggested the Heritage Foundation, and Alex suggested Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution Blog and Kosmos, a career networking site for classical liberals. I found the Heritage site very predictable. The Cowen site an interesting place for the discussion by conservative economists, or more precisely classically liberal economists, and Kosmos a networking site for like minded people. Scott later pointed me in the direction of American Conservative Magazine, Reason Magazine, and sometimes the Frum Forum: a site of traditional conservativism, one for significant libertarian thought, and a kind of Huffington Post for conservatives.
So there are places to explore, but as a looked around, I didn’t find anything that challenged me. Where are the conservatives who have ideas that I must consider because of their intellectual power and insight?
Scott poses a hypothesis why I am having a problem. He wrote:
I think there are conservative intellectuals, but they use their brainpower however towards electioneering and must necessarily for the most part remain in the background. That is, they can’t be public intellectuals, or at least appear to be intellectual in public, but follow their own narrative which says that the elitist intelligentsia is out of touch with the majority of Americans.
This is ironic. There are conservative intellectuals, but because of their practical commitments and principled convictions that intellectuals are dangerous, they dare not show their faces, nor their ideas. In the past, they avoided this problem by calling themselves “men of letters,” reserving the label of intellectuals for despised leftists. This was the position of Paul Johnson in his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sarte and Chomsky.
Now, apparently, or at least according to Scott, . . .
Read more: Have we Found the Conservative Intellectuals?
By Nahed Habiballah, October 25th, 2010 
A note from Jeff:
Nahed Habiballah, a Ph.D. student at the New School, works on the sociology of religion in the public sphere. We first met in Jerusalem at a conference on the politics of small things in Israel and Palestine. After the conference, she took me, and also Elzbieta Matynia, to visit the city of Ramallah and her family home (on the other side of the Wall); the wall built by Israel under the pretext of security that appropriates more Palestinian land. She is a Palestinian holding Israeli citizenship. Her father came from a small town near Nazareth, but she was born and raised in Jerusalem. She later spent her undergraduate years at the University of Haifa, working as an archeologist after graduation with the “Israeli Authorities of Antiquities.” The paranoid politics of Israel-Palestine insists upon clarity, where complexity such as hers is the general rule. I asked her what she thinks about recent events, particularly about a recent op.ed. piece in The New York Times.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, recently published an op-ed piece in The New York Times arguing that the failure of the peace negotiations is a result of the Palestinians and/or the Palestinians Authorities’ refusal to recognize the State of Israel as a Jewish state. Oren backs his argument by saying that the United Nation created a Jewish state in Palestine in 1947. He failed to mention, though, that the resolution to which he refers, Resolution 181, the Partition of Palestine, created at the same time an Arab state in Palestine, more over that Palestine was divided almost equally between the two states, and Jerusalem was to be under International jurisdiction. Now Israel occupies 78% of Palestine, and Oren is only interested in one half of the resolution, ignoring the other.
To be sure, the Palestinians have already made significant concessions in the pursuit of a peaceful settlement. The Palestinians have recognized the existence of the state of Israel as mandated by the Oslo agreement signed in 1993 within 1967 . . .
Read more: In Israel: A Two-sided Problem Needs a Two-sided Response
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 24th, 2010 
As we are critical of the paranoid style of politics, as I am concerned that the worst elements of the American populism and demagoguery are being mainstreamed in our political life, I recall that this is a reaction to a major trend that many of us have experienced directly and meaningfully, including me.
 Even as we are bombarded by crazy assertions that the American President is not an American citizen and that he is a secret Muslim, we need to recall that this sort of paranoia is reactionary. It’s a response to an American triumph, the American people elected an African American, Barack Hussein Obama, to be President of the United States. Even as his popularity waxes and wanes, he is our President. We elected him by not succumbing to fears and hatreds, revealing our better selves. This triumph goes beyond our evaluation of President Obama’s job performance. It stands as a challenge to those who work to revive a politics of fear of the different. It challenges those who speak about “taking their country back.”
I came to know the dimensions of the triumph, along with my fellow citizens, on the night of the Iowa Caucuses and the day after. Obama won in an overwhelmingly white state. The previously excluded was chosen, and the seriousness of Obama’s candidacy was clearly revealed.
The next day when I went for a swim at the Theodore Young Community Center (link), I saw how my African American friends, the whole gang, but especially the center of the social circle, Beverly McCoy,  finally came to believe that I wasn’t crazy in thinking that Obama had a chance. In our community center, we started thinking differently about our country. I stopped being the naïve Jewish Professor. Perhaps, I was instead a realist. Together, we realized that we may live in a better country than we had imagined the day before. I think that we started looking at each other differently. We more openly spoke about race, about our fears and hopes, about being black and white, Jewish and Christian, . . .
Read more: Against Paranoia
By Virag Molnar, October 21st, 2010 
I bumped into my colleague Virag Molnar the day before yesterday in our sociology department office, and asked her about the news coming out of Hungary. To my shock, she revealed that she had a special connection to the disaster. She also had telling insights about how the crisis is connected to major developments in the region and to particular struggles in Hungary. I thought it would be important for her to share her observations with DC readers. -Jeff
Frankly, I would have never thought that my home town – a non-descript place of about 30,000 people in Western Hungary that was established as a socialist new town in Hungary’s postwar rush to build up heavy industries virtually from scratch – would become front page news in the New York Times and other international media outlets. But two weeks ago, during my early morning routine of drowsily surfing the Internet for my daily dosage of news I was confronted with surreal images of a rust-red landscape that looked like a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert or a sci-fi movie set on Mars but turned out to be pictures of the very region I come from.
My home town and the surrounding area became the site of Hungary’s worst environmental disaster when a reservoir containing toxic red sludge, the byproduct of aluminum production, burst and flooded several neighboring villages and small towns. The events are baffling and astonishing on multiple levels. The accident seemed unreal because in our quiet “Second-World” and EU-member complacency we have come to believe that this kind of environmental disaster occurs only in “less developed” regions where such disasters are enabled by a combination of cheap labor, lax regulations, disregard for the environment, outdated and dangerous technologies, complicit states and powerful multinationals.
The Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 in India, the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986, or most recently the Baia Mare cyanide spill in Romania in 2000 that devastated the ecosystem of the River Tisza and parts of the Danube have all clearly exhibited most or all of these . . .
Read more: In Hungary: The Politics of Toxic Sludge
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 19th, 2010 
The political right has been successful in swaying the general public for the time being, but American intellectuals remain unconvinced: are there any serious conservative intellectuals?
I am not worried that the universities are dominated by tenured radicals, as one right wing ideologue or another regularly discovers. While the political center of American academics is significantly to the left of the center of the public at large, I see no reason to be particularly upset by this. Career soldiers are probably to the right of the American consensus and this too doesn’t put me up in arms. Better not, I guess. The experience of particular vocations informs political judgment, and people with common world views make common career choices.
But I do worry about the absence of intelligent conservative commentary and criticism in American intellectual life. It does seem to me that almost all serious thought these days is to be found on the left, and I don’t think that this is a good thing. The conservative tradition contributes too much for it to come down to this. And given the swings from left to right in the public mood (which I do regret, all I am saying is give leftists a chance) it would be a good thing if there were a sensible right.
Ideologues of the right, of course, do exist, those who know that there is a clear and present danger, and we must be vigilant, these days against “Islamofascism. “ I think that’s what they call it. But these use fantasy and fear to empower their arguments, not reason and careful observation. How else can you find a liberal Sufi cleric to be a terrorist sympathizer?
And there are those who cling if not to their guns and religion, to their absolute dogmatic beliefs and their assertions of the moral high ground, while fearing actual moral inquiry and debate. Better to worry about the attack on Christmas. And also those who know with certainty that the market is magical, and condemn government waste and inefficiency, who never met a tax cut they didn’t like, won’t ever concede that tax increases . . .
Read more: Where are the Conservative Intellectuals?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 18th, 2010 
As politics have been increasingly paranoid around the world, the newest proposal in Israel amp up tensions.
I have been thinking about the ubiquity of paranoid politics, as I wonder whether the Israeli – Palestinian peace process has any chance for success, and as I read the news from Israel concerning a bill that would require non -Jewish immigrants to take an oath of allegiance to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
If we aren’t paying close attention, this amendment may seem to be no big deal. After all, hasn’t Israel all along been the Jewish homeland and a democratic state? But a loyalty oath that commits to the official formulation of Israel as a Jewish state is clearly directed at the rights and citizenship status of Israeli citizens of Palestinian origins. Although they are twenty per cent of the population, they are being asked to demonstrate their loyalty, publicly confirming their second class status facing this symbolic act and a variety of other oaths of allegiance.
There is a sense that they are being assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, and they have to demonstrate their innocence repeatedly. Many Israelis and friends of Israel, elected officials, including those inside the ruling coalition, are deeply worried.
The same politicians who came up with this oath have additional proposals, as Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz, puts it “a loyalty law for Knesset members; a loyalty law for film production; a loyalty law for non-profits; putting the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, beyond the scope of the law; a ban on calls for a boycott; and a bill for the revocation of citizenship.”
Some might suggest that Levy is a left wing critic who exaggerates. But Eli Yishai, the Interior Minister, has apparently been working to show that Levy’s worst fears are a reality, bringing paranoid politics to its logical extension, proposing to strip Israelis of citizenship for disloyalty. “’Declarations are not enough in fact against incidents such as [MKs] Azmi Bishara and Hanin Zoabi,’ Yishai said in reference to . . .
Read more: In Israel: Road Blocks to Peace
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 15th, 2010 
There is, as Richard Hofstadter put it many years ago, a paranoid style of politics. While, he came up with this notion in his examination of American politics, McCarthyism and its predecessors, I am struck how this sort of politics can be found in just about every democracy. The paranoid knows that enemies surround us. We must be vigilant and protect ourselves, limit or eliminate immigration, impose loyalty oaths, arm ourselves. For, “they” are out to get us. The complexities of the world are explained by the machinations of “them.” (A most popular them these days are Muslims.)
The paranoia continues: we will resolve the problems posed by them only through vigilance. Those who don’t see this are naïve, in some ways worse than the enemy itself. You’re either with us or you’re against us: our country right or wrong, love it or leave it. The National Front in France, the Swedish Democracy Party, the Austrian Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, the Bulgarian Ataka party, Hungary’s Jobbik party, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the British National Party, the League of Polish Families, among others in Europe and beyond, including the Tea Party in the U.S., utilize this style of politics, the populist, xenophobic kind. (link) (link)
In each country, the health of democracy, it seems to me, will be determined by whether the paranoid style is marginalized, and remains so through time, or if it seeps into the political mainstream. When a right wing coalition ruled in Poland and included the League of Polish Families, the prospects for Polish democracy dived, only reviving when that coalition was defeated in the polls, and , indeed, to mention Hofstadter’s immediate concerns, when Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party turned against McCarthy, American democracy was strengthened. A pressing American concern today has to do with the paranoid style of politics in the Tea Party and in the anti-immigration movement. Our fate is tied to how we respond to the Park Islamic Community Center and other such . . .
Read more: Political Paranoia Threatens Healthy Democracy Here and Globally
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