By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 12th, 2011 
The summer is winding down. And a dramatic one it has been on the personal front: one wedding and two funerals.
My mother-in-law, Frances (Tiny) Gruson died yesterday. The funeral is on Sunday. She lived a long life, ninety-six years. She was in slow decline for the last ten, rapid decline in recent months. She experienced the gift of the full cycle of life.
Casey Young, my niece’s daughter, Tiny’s great granddaughter, was not so fortunate. Hers was a life that was meant to be, but wasn’t. She died in June, mysteriously during her afternoon nap, at twenty-one months. A century ago, what Casey’s mother and father are going through was a most difficult part of the human condition. Now, thanks to advances in modern medicine and health care, it feels like a moral outrage, a direct assault on meaning, unbearable for those who were the closest to Casey, extremely painful for the rest of us. We don’t know what to do, as we muddle through. We are overwhelmed with grief, trying to find a way to continue.
In the meanwhile, I put a book to sleep. I had to proofread the galleys of Reinventing Political Culture, which will be published at the end of September. I was involved in a minor controversy at The New School, taught my class in Wroclaw, and as the readers of Deliberately Considered know, I have been working constantly to keep this experiment in deliberate public reflection and discussion alive, trying to turn it from the more personal blog that it was to a more cooperative online magazine, as was my plan from the beginning.
And then, in the middle of the personal chaos and the professional ebbs and flows, my son Sam and Lili Lu were married. Now they are in the northern paradise of the Fjords of Norway. Their happiness, along with the great joy of being together with our family to celebrate, lifts our spirits. But it does not balance out. And I realize as a man of many words that I have little to say, other than to report the facts.
By Eugene Halton, August 11th, 2011 
Let us call experience seniority. And let us mean by this that people who work over extended periods of time develop, ripen, face the hard knocks of life day in and day out, and that they usually gain from the experience.
To be experienced is to have spent the time, paid the dues of the job, learned what it takes, put out the raw energies and skills required. And more: to be experienced means that one has internalized all these things, and that one can bring to the everyday situation of work an array of competencies that the inexperienced are unaware of. That is why this precious game of life requires the serious engagement with it. Engagement brings, even if only eventually, an enlargement and a subtilization of competencies, things that one has in one’s hands, in one’s plan for the day, in one’s skill set, in one’s general work habits, all which add up to becoming experienced.
But consider: “senior” in America typically means old people, not only not at the top of their game, but also not necessarily competent. In the right-wing attack on seniority in the public sphere, and unions more generally, seniority translates into deadwood. Now every institution has some tiny percentage of deadwood in it, people who have disengaged from their work experience. But to assume, for example, as Republican state legislatures are in the process of doing, that teachers with years of experience are the deadwood whose seniority rights have to be eliminated (meanwhile ignoring the administration deadwood), is sheer folly. It completely ignores how those experienced teachers incorporate a reservoir of potential mentoring and actual “how-to” knowledge. It is a way of promoting inexperience at the cost of experienced professionals. And isn’t that what the mad-hatters’ Tea Party celebrates in politics as well: lack of political experience as a qualification for office?
Seniority in the workplace means that the years and decades you have put in paying your dues to the job count for something in the work community, and that a larger and deeper outlook and ability is something . . .
Read more: Have You Ever Been Experienced?
By Rafael Narvaez, August 10th, 2011 
The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?
 As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.
De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than . . .
Read more: Thinking like a Terrorist
By Irit Dekel, August 2nd, 2011 
In Israel, for over three weeks, there have been demonstrations initiated by young people. They were first directed against the high cost of living, but they seem to be developing into something much larger, a movement for a systematic social change, addressing the growing disparities between rich and poor and the difficulty of living well, concerned about issues of social security and the deterioration in the provision of education and health care. What had begun with a consumer uprising against the high prices of cottage cheese over a month ago, leading to a boycott on dairy products (since in Israel they operate as a cartel, not open for competition), appears to be the beginning of what Rosa Luxemburg describes as ”an exercise in democratic action.” I observe the exercise as an Israeli living in Berlin, basing my commentary on newspapers, blog posts and conversations with friends at home.
The “cottage cheese revolt” is no trivial or accidental thing. Israeli dinner tables usually contain this staple, together with a salad. The most popular cottage cheese, Tnuva, has an illustrated home on its package and a well known advertising trope: “the cheese with the home.” Fighting for home is not only for affordable housing or the cost of living. The protesters also talk about the quick decline in the freedom of speech and of the Israeli democratic system under the current government. However, the demonstrators delay, for the time being, what they see as “political demands” for possible negotiation with the government. They fear this would compromise the call for “social justice,” and more immediately, could scare off some of the right-of-center demonstrators. According to Ha’Aretz today (August 2), “a document setting out the demands of the tent protesters in the areas of housing, welfare, education, health and economic policy is being drawn up by the movement’s leaders.”
The tent city in Tel Aviv . . .
Read more: The Tents Movement Uprising in Israel
By Michael Weinman, July 21st, 2011 
While (not) sleeping with my one month old daughter on the couch in the middle of the night, sharing her experience of the latest set of what we call ‘growing pains’—those discomforts (some much more drastic than others) that inevitably arise simply from being a being that develops through time, and must so develop in order to be at all—I got to thinking about the figurative deployment of this class name in political contexts. The chronically optimistic Einstein, in December 1930, describing Nazi electoral successes as a result of “the chronic ‘childish disease of the [Weimar] Republic’” is a classic example. The sinister Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s analysis of the chaos and violence in post-invasion Iraq, in April 2003, as “‘part of the price’ for freedom and democracy” is a more recent one.
I do not mean here to assess the appropriateness of this trope. I hope only to clarify for myself, and perhaps for others, why it is that we might wish for “growing pains” to be an apt representation of such political phenomena.
To begin with the obvious: the phenomena in the face of which we aim to deploy this trope are, if not inherently noxious (as in the case of Einstein’s usage, or Rumsfeld’s), certainly of the sort that no one in their right mind would “choose for its own sake,” as Aristotle puts it so well. We look at events that, in and of themselves, we either wish would never have happened, or at least would not have wished to have happened. And, reaching for the familial and biological phenomenon of ‘growing pains,’ we try to “see the good” in such regrettable developments. Just as, we think, no one would wish for the fevers and diarrhea that accompany an infant’s first teeth, but we welcome those fevers and sleepless nights insofar as we know there is no way that this child will come to be what she was born to be without such fevers.
I would like to stress two characteristics of this metaphorical response to political phenomena: calling them . . .
Read more: Growing Pains
By Rafael Narvaez, July 11th, 2011 
Few words today are more worn out than “fascist.” As a mere term of abuse, particularly in the Obama era, it has lost all conceptual and political precision. Thus, Obama is a “fascist” as are Dick Cheney and a range of other people, from the Pope to the “Judeofascist Zionists,” to “Islamofascists,” to any third world satrap. “Tree huggers” are environmental fascists. Gay men in New York complain about “bodily fascism,” the high standards of muscularity that predominate in certain gay subcultures. “Fascist” has taken this increasingly clichéd side-road, it would seem, because actual fascist politics have virtually no relevance today, and so we have no point of reference when we say that so and so is a fascist. Of course, there is always the old Duce, Benito Mussolini and the History Channel. But the Duce has reemerged, transformed in the eyes of many consumers of the cultural industry, which often depicts him as a generic and predictably scripted evil character, a pompous lout in the business of world-domination (Charlie Chaplin’s Benzino Napaloni remains a personal favorite).
That Obama and Cheney are “fascists” is a clear indication that we no longer know who the Duce was, and what fascism meant; namely, a catastrophic collapse of modernity under its own ideological and technological weight, a breakdown of the project of the Enlightenment itself, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, two German philosophers concerned with fascism, may agree.
Yet, the triteness of the word aside, I have been wondering if fascist types, the personality characteristics that Adorno unsuccessfully tried to measure with the so called “F-scale” (F for fascist), are still around. I wonder if the regular guy who would have fitted well in the Duce’s ranks is with us in the subway and in the supermarket. And if so, I also wonder whether he (or she) may become politically relevant, even if by small degrees and at a local level.
 . . .
Read more: American Fascism?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 8th, 2011 
Next week I am off to the New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. The Institute opens today, but I will be arriving a few days late. As I review the events of this week at Deliberately Considered, I am anticipating my work at the Institute, which will be reflected in upcoming posts. The last two posts, on Iran and on American identity, in fact, were informed by Democracy and Diversity experience.
In the most mundane way, the Institute is like many other international summer schools. Students from many different countries, this year Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Italy, Poland, and the USA, among others, come together to study a set of problems from a number of different academic perspectives. As usual, in my judgment, the topics are particularly interesting, this year, each addressing the theme of the year The World in Crisis: “Gender in Crisis? Strengths and Weaknesses in the Strategy of Emergency” (Prof. Ann Snitow), “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” (Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb and Prof. Daniel Dayan), “Romancing Violence: Theories and Practices of Political Violence” (Prof. Elzbieta Matynia), and “‘We the People’: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Belonging” (Prof. Sharika Thiranagama). Still there are many summer schools that offer interesting programs with talented students such as we have. Yet, there is something special about this Institute that makes it different than most summer programs, linked to its history.
In terms of my student’s observations and reflection on Iran this week, our institute is in a sense, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, a not so lost treasure of  the revolutionary tradition. He observed how freedom was experienced in the days before and after the 2009 elections in his country, and noted how even in the face of extreme repression, the ability of independent people to speak and act in each other’s presence is still consequential, apparently preventing the execution of Habibollah Latifi. But the real significance of the free politics, before the elections of 2009 and through the Facebook . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Democracy and Diversity and Free Public Action
By Tim Rosenkranz, July 5th, 2011 
It was during the naturalization ceremony of my mother-in-law in Los Angeles, when I got my first glance at the immigrant’s American Dream: a packed auditorium of new US-citizens, exhilarated, proud and happy. When I read Jose Antonio Vargas’s article “OUTLAW: My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant” last week in The New York Times Magazine, I saw the unfulfilled version of this dream. In his article, Vargas gives an unexpected face to the more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the US: his own! As a successful journalist, Vargas uses his power to challenge the idea of what a US-American is. As much as I admire Vargas’s courage and hope it is not in vain, his claims are neither unambiguous nor unproblematic. On what grounds do they stand? Legality? Practice? Culture? Also, while Vargas intends to move the boundaries of what constitutes a US-American in the authoritative framework of the nation-state, do his claims not reach further? Do they not challenge the nation-state USA in terms of authoritative legitimacy? Following Vargas’s recent video on DefineAmerican.com, I want to take on his plea: “Let’s talk.”
“There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.”
The statement in the beginning of Vargas article shows two problems:
1. The general problem of the USA in sustaining a historically grown, economically integrated and sizable group of undocumented immigrants.
2. The paradoxical life-situation of these immigrants as being part of a social whole, without being legally recognized.
Where is this boundary of recognition drawn? Is it really just a matter of a piece of paper? This . . .
Read more: Who is an American? Reflections on Jose Antonio Vargas
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 4th, 2011
Last week’s posts all address the difficult issue of the relationship between public appearance and private beliefs and actions.
Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, Gays and Lesbians are unlikely to become President, Michael Corey reports. Large percentages of Americans would be unlikely to vote for these minorities for the highest office in the land according to a recent Gallop poll. This contrasts with other groups that have historically been objects of intolerance. Only small percentages of the population reveal an unwillingness to vote for a Hispanic, Jew, Baptist, Catholics, woman or African American. Given the definitive role that racism has played in American history, it is striking that of these historically excluded groups, the least amount of prejudice is directed toward African Americans. This represents significant progress. That Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, gays and lesbians don’t fare so well shows that progress is a slow and uneven process. To be sure, even in the case of African Americans and women, the taboo against the expression of prejudice may depress the numbers, as Felipe and Andrew maintained in their replies. There is private prejudice, public denial.
Corey proposes two special reasons for the persistence of prejudice against Mormons, true belief, i.e. ideological certainty, and “know-nothingism,” i.e. intentional ignorance. Michael Weinman explores how these are produced and reproduced in Israel, not only as a matter of official public policy, but more significantly in the naming of a picture book character, Elmer the Patchwork Elephant. The project of official policy to Hebraize the names in East Jerusalem is transparent. Every day practices and expectations about in group and out group relations are more fundamental than the official project of exclusion, resulting in more durable effects. The public project to disappear Arab Jerusalem is strongly supported by the intimate working of primary socialization, turning a difficult political conflict into an impossible one.
The passage of the marriage equality law in New York is a milestone. Changes in everyday practices preceded the event. With gays . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Two Cheers for Hypocrisy!
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 1st, 2011 
It is my custom before sleeping to read a novel. I turn off the events of the day and start my journey into the world of imagination. Last night, I was reading Madame Bovary when my wife told me about the latest turn in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. I was surprised, but left it to the morning to find out what happened. The New York Times report made it clear, the person who had every right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty by the courts, appears to be really innocent, a victim, not a criminal.
The implications for French and global politics and culture are significant. I worry that France, which desperately needs a serious political alternative, may be deprived of a capable public servant as President because of a false accusation and prosecution. I also worry that very serious problems concerning the relationship between public and private, the intimate and the open, sex and politics, may now go unexamined because the case is being closed, when serious deliberate consideration is what is needed now more than ever, there and here.
Daniel Dayan and I have been discussing the case as it unfolds. A few minutes ago, I received an email from him, continuing our discussion. We will actually make this discussion a part of our “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” seminar at the Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, later this month.
He wrote:
“Just a little note to set up our discussions to come: I may have told you that I was talking with a friend on a bench in Central Park, one Saturday morning, around 11 AM just when the Strauss-Kahn episode was going on, 10 blocks south. Uncannily, I was telling my friend that Strauss-Kahn was likely to win the elections unless he was the victim of some trap. I did not realize the trap I was anticipating was functioning already while my friend and I were . . .
Read more: Dominique Strauss-Kahn: A Play in Three Acts?
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