By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 31st, 2011 
 It’s been a busy week at DC and in the world, thus a slight delay in this post.
Indeed, last week has been “restlessly eventful,” as Robin Wagner Pacifici might put it. The main event has been in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt. But closer to home, President Obama gave an important State of the Union address. In both cases, we can see that something new is emerging, that tomorrow will be strikingly different from what yesterday was. Change rather than continuity is the storyline.
Obviously, Egypt appears to be more consequential. It would seem that there is real democratic promise and a promise of an end to stagnation, in a country and region with a history of great cultural and political achievements, mostly frustrated in the recent past. The outcome is uncertain, who wins and who loses is unknown, but clearly a page has been turned.
Less dramatically, President Obama for the first time seems to have been understood on his own terms, as a creative centrist, making advances in changing the nature of the center in the United States. Given the power of the United States, this may indeed be eventful.
Egypt and Beyond
I particularly appreciate the post by Hazem Kandil. He points out how conventional ways of understanding politics and history, not only in the media but also in academia, did not anticipate what is now happening before our eyes. I would underscore two aspects of this, which in fact coincide with my last two book projects, The Politics of Small Things and the forthcoming Reinventing Political Culture.
Kandil illuminates the gap between past and future, as Arendt depicted this. All the studies of Egypt as “thoroughly Islamized,” with powerful “mosque networks,” “social welfare circles,” mired by “identity politics,” and informed by and organized around symbols and rituals, suggested that the culture of political culture points in the direction of authoritarian continuity. His note demonstrates how we must consider cultural creativity, along with cultural continuity in political and not only in artistic matters.
Now, look again at the Muslim Brotherhood. Note . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Egypt, The State of the Union, Between Past and Future
By Hazem Kandil, January 30th, 2011
 Hazem Kandil is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at UCLA. His work examines state institutions (primarily, the military and security organs) and religious movements, with a special focus on Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. He has taught at the American University in Cairo and has published on the sociology of intellectuals, military sociology, developments in warfare, and international relations. His most recent publication is Islamizing Egypt? Jeff
It seems that the gap between scholarship and reality remains unbridgeable. Much ink has been spilled on studying Egypt and its political prospects. Most of it seems to have missed the mark. We learned that Egyptian society has been thoroughly Islamized; we read volumes about mosque networks, social welfare circles, identity politics, symbols, rituals, etc. But when Egyptians finally revolted none of this came to play. The demands were non-ideological; the participants were people who never got involved in social or political movements; and the urban heart of the revolt was secular downtown (a neighborhood Islamists never demonstrated in). Again, we were bombarded with articles about cyber movements, social network sites, and the like. Yet when the government shut down the cell-phone and Internet services at the beginning of the turmoil, there was virtually no effect. When asked, many demonstrators had never even heard of Facebook.
Experts warned of the ‘revolt of the poor’, i.e., the starving inhabitants of the inhuman shantytowns that engulf the capital. But spearheading the revolt were the country’s best and brightest. Among them, credit officers, stock market investors, and car dealers (each worth several million pounds), in addition to dozens of actors, pop singers, and other celebrities. Also, nineteenth century doctrines about the passiveness and incurable fatalism that plagues Muslim societies (justifying the ‘democratic exception’) were still circulating when Egyptians were pushing back the men with the black helmets and batons, torching armored vehicles, and mailing tear gas canisters back to sender. Finally, studies warning of the dissolution of social bonds in Egypt, and the absence of modern civil society values failed to explain how doctors formed voluntary medical committees, and fellow citizens set neighborhood watches (to guard against plainclothes police thugs . . .
Read more: Egypt Considered Deliberately
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 29th, 2011
I’ve been following the news of major political mobilization from the Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon, and now I see in Jordan too, with great interest. Since I was an eyewitness to the changes in East Central Europe, participated a bit and thought and wrote about them during and after, I can’t help but think about comparisons and contrasts. I think Roger Cohen’s piece drawing the comparison substitutes hope and dreams for careful analysis and is overly optimistic. Rather for me the comparison leads to questions and concerns.
I wonder why the roundtables that were key to the transition in Central Europe, but also in South Africa and Latin America, and earlier in Spain, which provided a kind of special architecture for the transition from dictatorship to democracy, are not being discussed in Tunisia.
I wonder to what extent there exists in any of the countries the kind of social custom of pluralistic self organization which provided the micro infrastructure for the successful peaceful transition to democracy in Poland, what I call the politics of small things.
And tonight as I watch the dramatic video reports on television of the intensified protests in Cairo, with escalating violence, I worry not only about the frightening likelihood that by the time I wake up tomorrow, there may be massacres in the street ordered by the dictator in a last ditch attempt to stay in power. I also worry what will happen when he is finally overthrown, and the protestors have their day.
I have no expertise in Egypt and its neighbors beyond what I read in the newspapers and in casual reading of magazine and journal articles. I tend to think that the fear of the Muslim Brotherhood that the regime propagated has been self serving. I don’t know how the Brotherhood will act or whether it will act only in one direction. I worry about sectarian violence, about how changes in Egypt will affect other countries of the region and beyond. I suspect that the measured and cautious approach of President Obama, supporting democratic rights without daring to say the . . .
Read more: Transition to Democracy in the Arab World?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 26th, 2011 
Last night in his State of the Union address, President Obama revealed his fundamental approach to governing: centrist in orientation, pragmatic in his approach to the relationship between capitalism and the state, mindful of the long term need to address the problem of spending deficits, yet, still committed to social justice – “But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.” (link) As I have put it before, a centrist committed to transforming the center.
The speech was finely written and delivered, tactically and strategically formed to appear post partisan, while putting his Republican opposition on the defensive. As I understand his project, it was a continuation of the course he set during his campaign and has been following during his Presidency, despite the fact that many observers claim that he is now shifting to the center (if they like what has happened recently) or to the right (those on the left who see betrayal).
The contrast with the Republican response, delivered by Paul Ryan, could not have been greater. He spoke in an empty House Budget Committee meeting room bereft of notables and dignitaries, without ceremony. But he forcefully argued for significant budget cuts and warned of an impending crisis, being pretty effective under difficult conditions.
“We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency… Speaking candidly, as one citizen to another: We still have time… but not much time.”
His central principled position which he developed extensively:
“We believe, as our founders did, that the pursuit of happiness depends on individual liberty, and individual liberty requires limited government.” (link)
The virtue of limited government and a balanced budget through cuts in government programs was his major theme.
. . .
Read more: Obama vs. Ryan vs. Bachmann
By Daniel Dayan, January 25th, 2011
This is the first of a series of posts by Daniel Dayan exploring the significance of WikiLeaks.
Is WikiLeaks a form of spying? Transferring information to an alien power can induce harm. This is why spying constitutes a crime. In the case of WikiLeaks, the transfer concerns hundreds thousands of documents. The recipients include hundreds of countries, some of which are openly hostile. In a way WikiLeaks is a gigantic spying operation with a gigantic number of potential users. Yet, is it really “spying?”
Spying (in its classical form ) involves a specific sponsor in need of specific information to be used for a specific purpose, and obtained from an invisible provider. WikiLeaks “spies” eagerly seek to be identified (Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief, has been voted Le Monde’s “man of the year”). Information covers every possible domain, and there is no privileged recipient. Anyone qualifies as a potential beneficiary of Wiki-largesses and most of those who gain access to the leaked information have no use for it. Spying has become a stage performance.
On 9/11 a group of Latin American architects hailed the destruction of The Twin Towers as a sublime event. The pleasure of seeing Rome burning had been made available for the man of the street. It was –suggested the builders – a democratization of Neronism. In a way, WikiLeaks, could also be described as a democratization of spying. It offers a form of “public spying.” Distinct from mere spying (a pragmatic activity), it proposes “spying as a gesture.” This gesture concerns other gestures. What WikiLeaks discloses is less (already available) facts than the tone in which they are expressed.
Content or gestures? 
If the Assange leaks reveal nothing that we did not know already, what counts is less their propositional content than the enacted speech acts. The vocabulary of WikiLeaks gestures starts with the noble gestures of war. Many commentators tell the WikiLeaks saga in military terms. For the Umberto Eco, it is a“ blow:” “To think that a mere hacker could access the . . .
Read more: WikiLeaks and the Politics of Gestures
By Vince Carducci, January 24th, 2011 
Vince Carducci blogs about art and other aspects of culture in Detroit at Motown Review of Art. He has also written for Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications.
On January 3, the online culture news service Flavorwire ran an item on a new book of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre titled “The Ruins of Detroit.” Marchand and Meffre are French photographers who worked in the city over the last year or so as part of Time magazine’s “Assignment Detroit” in which a cadre of journalists took up local residence and reported on what they discovered. Detroit has long been a poster child for urban disinvestment and Marchand and Meffre discovered plenty of evidence of it.
The genre Marchand and Meffre mine is known locally as “ruin porn” and artists of all media here have been ruminating on the city’s gradual return to the state of nature for decades. (For a couple of the more interesting examples, see the work of Scott Hocking and the blog of painter Stephen Magsig “Postcards from Detroit.”) But while the city”s deliquescence holds an admittedly romantic allure, there is another potentially more fertile tendency emerging that I’ve come to call “the art of the commons.”
The art of commons has sprouted up in spaces created by the erasure of the distinction between public and private as part of the city’s wholesale abandonment over the last forty years — there are upwards of 80,000 vacant buildings and lots in Detroit and the population is less than half the postwar peak of approximately 1.9 million. Artists and other social entrepreneurs are using this preternatural environment to rethink notions of community and the role of art and other aspects of culture.
Perhaps the most well known is The Heidelberg Project, begun in 1986 by Tyree Guyton. Working with his grandfather Sam Mackey, Guyton began cleaning up vacant lots in his neighborhood and used the castoffs collected to create dozens of outdoor art installations. As with other examples of the . . .
Read more: Detroit & the Art of the Commons
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 23rd, 2011 
I’ve been on the road this week, giving a public talk in Santa Barbara at Fielding Graduate University, and taking a break from a very hectic writing and teaching schedule. Returning to frigid New York, I feel cut off from my usual news sources and news gathering customs. As it happens I couldn’t read the paper version of The New York Times first thing, as is my morning custom, didn’t listen to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on NPR, and didn’t go from there to search the web for interesting under reported news and commentary. Instead I took a look at cable news, and found, to my dismay, that I really didn’t understand what had happened this week. This underscored Laura Pacifici’s point. Audiences consume “news products” that confirm their beliefs; news reporting and commentary are not informing. It struck me that this is the way that many people keep up with public affairs. I felt like I was in a fog. No wonder fictoids work! I was warmed by the Santa Barbara sun, chilled by “the lame stream media.”
Although I was on vacation, I managed to keep DC going, thanks to interesting posts by DC contributors. Will Milberg presented a very different account of the China – America relationship. I am convinced. The issue is less about currency valuations, more about economic practices of them and us. As Milberg succinctly put it:
“The key to the problem of global imbalances is to resolve them in an expansionary way rather than a contractionary way. In the wake of the crisis and a deep and widespread recession, we should be thinking about a reform of the international payments system that shifts the burden of adjustment from deficit countries (who are forced to contract their economies in order to reduce imports) to surplus countries (whose extra spending raises their imports).”
Gary Alan Fine, following up on his brilliant Jared Lee Loughner post, considered a fundamental problem in representative democracy, should we vote for representatives because of their personal qualities or principled positions. He makes . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Obama, no Lincoln, and a few other observations
By William Milberg, January 21st, 2011 
As Hu Jintao and President Obama gather in Washington for their summit meeting, it is a good time to take another look at U.S.-Chinese economic relations. China has become the lightning rod for Americans on the left and right who find an obstacle to the U.S. recovery from its economic woes. From Niall Ferguson on the right to Bernie Sanders on the left and to many the politicians and economists in the middle, the problem with China is that its high rate of saving and its undervalued exchange rate have resulted in high unemployment in the US and brought about an unsustainable American trade deficit. Some economists have even argued that this deficit was a major cause of the economic crisis in the first place.
There are at least three problems with the prevailing view.
The first problem is that renminbi revaluation is not likely to help much in reducing the U.S. trade deficit. For one thing, U.S. importers in the major deficit industries (apparel, electronics, toys) will simply shift to other low-cost countries, and Chinese imports from the U.S. are not particularly price sensitive. Second, appreciation of the Chinese currency will lead U.S. corporate profits to suffer due to higher costs for imported inputs.
These limits of the policy effectiveness of renminbi revaluation are well known but largely ignored in the popular debate. Presidents Bush and Obama both spoke out loudly on the need for currency adjustment, but neither of them ever pushed hard in negotiations with the Chinese. It should be no surprise that the Obama administration revealed that this week it is going to back off on the currency question and focus instead on intellectual property rights infringement. There is simply too much disagreement within the U.S. business community on the issue.
The second problem is that excessive Chinese saving is not the entire story behind the U.S.- China imbalance. Low levels of U.S. household saving, and U.S. business strategies have also contributed. Household borrowing is clearly going through an adjustment, as home foreclosures continue at record levels and . . .
Read more: America’s China Problem: Another View
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici, January 20th, 2011
In these past few days, I have read and heard many responses to President Obama’s speech at the memorial service at the University of Arizona, including that of Jeff Goldfarb here at Deliberately Considered. While I agree with many of the encomiums to that speech – praise for its sincerity, civility, appeal to democracy, appreciation for individual lives – I am in a distinct minority in feeling that it was not altogether successful as a moment of high and consequential political rhetoric.
It was not the Gettysburg Address. Of course, it may seem unkind to compare Obama’s speech to that one of the ages by Lincoln, but I believe the tasks of that speech were similar to those of Lincoln and that it fell short of the mark. Public ceremonies of this type have unique challenges – memorialize the victims of violence, appeal to the better angels of the nation, re-establish the authority of the state, indicate a way forward.
The main issues involve choices of genre and structure. For me, Obama’s speech oscillated without adequate accounting or warning between the genres of private lamentation, religious homily, and political oration. Without an overarching structure that linked these genres together, their coming and going unsettled me as a listener. Was so much reference to scripture appropriate in a civil ceremony? Was so much detail about individual personalities befitting a national oration by a head of state?
The speech caused me to reflect on prior moments of national traumas that challenged leaders to make sense through collective reckoning. Traumas like wars and assassinations that resonate upwards, from individuals through families and communities, to the larger social and political collectivity call forth formal responses by heads of state. And these responses transform the traumas into history. Hegel linked history itself to the state: “It is the State [he wrote] which first presents a subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.” The state thus views itself as the central character of history, with an agency and a . . .
Read more: The Tuscon Speech: Not the Gettysburg Address
By Gary Alan Fine, January 19th, 2011
 What baggage becomes a politician most? In a democracy, voters are condemned to decide between imperfect men and women, each of whom presents a platform, listing left or inclining right. Should one select the platform or the politician who stands upon it? What is a simple voter to do? Put another way, should personal morality – or at least our judgments of that morality – trump those goals that we hope for a political to achieve. This is fundamentally the tension between having a politician serve as our representative in a Burkean sense or as our messenger of our immediate desires. Do we wish a deliberative democracy or a direct democracy in which we vote for a politician who will enact our policy preferences. Each model has appeal. The former suggests that we should focus on character and deliberative ability; the latter suggests that we examine ideology and policy most carefully.
While the battle between beliefs and character is not new, the choice is etched starkly at moments of national stress and ideological warfare – at those moments in which decisions really matter and in which we citizens are engaged. As Chantal Mouffe emphasizes a critically engaged electorate – one that accepts the reality and the virtue of conflict – can be good medicine in a democracy. At times we have the luxury of voting for virtue, but when the battle is joined, policy must trump person. Failed humans can still be fine leaders.
Perhaps, as Mark Twain averred, the Congress is our only native criminal class, but we have managed to thrive under the leadership of these rascals. We have little choice. Our lives are shaped by votes, more than by mischief. Perhaps we would like to find leaders who can persuade others and who can compromise – as Edmund Burke would have it – but most often politicians are tied to their beliefs and ours, and we voters find comfort in that.
We saw the stark choices in the recent election. When a party feels that they  are in touch with the mood of the . . .
Read more: The Conundrum of Their Character
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It’s been a busy week at DC and in the world, thus a slight delay in this post.