Deliberately Considered has suspended the publication of new posts. I am now turning my full attention to a new project, Public Seminar. I thought I might be able to work on both DC and PS, but alas it is not possible. The new project is a seminar that has its roots in my intellectual home, The New School for Social Research, and in my experience here at Deliberately Considered.

The mission statement of the new project:

P.S.

“Confronting fundamental problems of the human condition and pressing problems of the day, using the broad resources of social research, we seek to provoke critical and informed discussion by any means necessary.

We use short form posts and long form essays, audio and video reports and discussions, and links to provocative materials of critical public interest anywhere we can find them. We are committed to creating a distinctive intellectual community, suspicious of clichés, informed by diverse experiences, theoretically heterodox, politically plural, worldly.

We work in the tradition of critical scholarship and public engagement of the original New School for Social Research (1919) and its University in Exile (1933). We seek to open the discussion of experts to broader publics, in the United States, and crucially far beyond, in the tradition of Charles Beard, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Emil Lederer, Max Wertheimer, Frieda Wunderlich, Hans Speier, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Public Seminar is an extension of The New School’s legendary ‘General Seminar,’ founded by the original exile scholars. Through it, we are constituting a public seminar for the 21st century.”

It is my hope that Public Seminar will continue and extend the work of Deliberately Considered. I developed Deliberately Considered with an understanding that more and more political, cultural and private life was developing in and through new media, and with a sense that this presented both great opportunities and great dangers. It opened public expression and discussion. More people could express themselves and a broader range of perspectives are expressed. Global conversations now occur. It is possible for the politics of small things to become large very quickly, dramatically revealed in the new new social movements of 2011, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, and much in between. Classical eloquence again became a strong grounds for politics, as was revealed in the political life or Barack Obama.

We have observed these developments in the past four years, as we have also tried to avoid some of the evident problems of the new media environment, a deluge of questionable information, the confusion of news with rumor, tendentious political argument that confuses rather than illuminates, intellectual gated communities rather than open intellectual exchange. Our response to these problems is summarized by the name of our site Deliberately Considered. We tried to slow things down a bit, adding serious thoughts about the events of the day, from a variety of different perspectives, theoretical positions, experiences and places: left, right and center; East, West, North and South. I am proud to say that I think we have succeeded to a notable degree.

Yet, it is my judgment that we needed to broaden the circle of deliberation, that I needed to join up more explicitly with the traditions, practices and promise of the New School to succeed in using the new publishing and discussion qualities of the web to achieve the goals of Deliberately Considered. Thus, Public Seminar.

Over the past few months we have moved some of the posts on Deliberately Considered to Public Seminar. We will continue to do this. Eventually we may import the entire DC archive to PS, but that for the time being is technically challenging and too labor intensive. We, thus, will continue to make the past posts available at www.deliberatelyconsidered.com. Want to know the origins of the term “skin in the game” or consider whether there are any serious intellectual conservatives, or want to understand the Obama presidency as revealed in his speeches, and much more? You can still come here.

This site is my creation. It has been identified with my name, though this was probably a mistake. PS has a more collective identity, connected as it is to a discursive intellectual community. This is what I always wanted. It seems right to dedicate myself to that now. Yet, I want to thank all the loyal readers and the great authors of Deliberately Considered posts, from whom I learned a great deal. And especially I thank Naomi Goldfarb and Aron Hsiao, who made DC possible, and are now doing even better work as we extend the Deliberately Considered project:

“(Providing) a platform for informed response to the events of the day, by putting them in larger historical and theoretical contexts… dedicated to lending perspective by considering both what is close to home in the everyday life of ordinary people and what is happening elsewhere in other parts of the world, … not primarily concerned with who’s up and who’s down or tendentious polemics, but with trying to understand the promise and perils of politics and culture, exploring alternatives to prevailing clichéd ways of understanding and acting.”

As we withdraw from the active publishing here at Deliberately Considered, I encourage you to join us at Public Seminar. And perhaps sometime in the future, I may decide to return to DC if events of the day or in my life warrant it.

Goin’ Fishing? Not quite, but things here at Deliberately Considered are slowing down for the summer, as I go to teach in the Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, and then to take part in a research project on Regime and Society in Eastern Europe (1956 – 1989) in Sofia, Bulgaria. After three years of regular, often daily, publishing, posts will be less frequent until September. At that time, we will be presenting Deliberately Considered in a new form.

Here some quick thoughts on topics I would like to write about now, but don’t have the time or energy to do so thoroughly.

On Egypt: I am fascinated by the grayness of it all: the unbearable grayness of being? I don’t see heroic figures or villains. Rather I see mortals, tragic figures, facing huge challenges, beyond their capacity to address.

Most objective observers are labeling the latest turn of events as a coup, but that seems to me to be too simple. Equally simplistic is the view of those who see the events as a clear political advance. A democratically elected leader, President Morsi, was overthrown by the military, not a good thing. But there was a significant popular movement, perhaps representing more than fifty per cent of the public, demanding the resignation of Morsi and new elections, and a resetting of the political order, which didn’t include them and their opinions, and didn’t provide the mechanisms for recalling the President. Yet, a legitimate President, from the point of view of many of the over fifty percent that voted for him, has been removed by the military. While I am no fan of military interventions in politics, I know that there is a real danger when a party confuses its particular interests with the common good. Yet, while lack of inclusion was a key problem in the Muslim Brotherhood led regime, it continues to be a problem as reports today indicate a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Obama, the NSA and Snowden: I am disappointed, dismayed and irritated. National security is the one arena in which I have been least satisfied with Obama’s Presidency. I had wanted a clear line to be drawn between the policies of Bush and Cheney, and Obama’s. The compromised civil liberties and the continued escalation of surveillance revealed by Snowden’s leaks, alas, indicate continuity rather than change. I think the leaks serve good purpose. I also think the arguments Obama presented in his national security speech provide reasonable grounds for the criticism of the administrations surveillance policies. There is, indeed, a need for a consequential national conversation on the continued ways the war on terror has compromised civil liberties in the United States and beyond. Obama seems to recognize this, but he has not facilitated the discussion, to say the least. On the other hand, I can’t stand the self-righteous, self-serving arguments of Snowden and his chief supporters, Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks. The demonization of the U.S. and Obama, the absolute certainty that all surveillance is about the projection of oppressive power – is not serious. As I felt after the attacks of 9/11, I find the critics of official policy as dismaying as the official policy itself. And the melodrama of Snowden’s search for asylum makes matters worse. Why didn’t he stand his ground on principle in the U.S.? Seeking asylum in countries with regimes with questionable human rights records is irritating and confuses important issues, as does the 24/7 news treatment of Snowden’s latest whereabouts and likely endpoint.

Politics and the social condition: I think the NSA revelations and the events in Egypt underscore the reasons for studying social dilemmas as they are knitted into the fabric of social and political life. Iddo Tavory and I are working hard on this over the “summer vacation.” I am leaning heavily on Hannah Arendt, he on Jean Paul Sartre. We believe that there is something missing in social science. It oversimplifies. Today I am thinking about the political significance of our project. If Obama and his critics would recognize, discuss and act upon complexity, perhaps the line between then and now, between Bush and Obama, would be drawn. Perhaps, if all parties recognized the problems of inclusion, democracy and social justice could be constituted in Egypt. I know this may sound naïve, another example of my easy hopefulness. But consider the alternative: without the recognition and understanding of dilemmas, the political challenges in Egypt and between Obama and his critics can’t be resolved.

The Ironies of Consequence: Daniel Dayan and I are talking about analyzing the interaction of what I call “the politics of small things” and what he calls “monstration.” We have had many discussions on this, public and private, in classrooms, at conferences, and in very pleasant meetings in our favorite cafes, and at our homes in New York and Paris. In our last meeting, in the spring, we agreed that our focus would be on what we are calling “the ironies of consequence.” Apparently trivial things sometimes have major consequences, while what appears to be of major significance, has little consequence. And there is also much in between. Take the recent surveillance revelations: it is striking how popular and elite European responses were strong, while the American public and political leadership responded quite weakly. The Americans responded as cynical world-weary cosmopolitans, apparently understanding the ways of the world and power, while the Europeans at least feigned outrage, appalled that a security apparatus uses state of the art methods to gather information on foreign and domestic citizens, and other states, both friend and foe. Media reporting, I believe, shapes this. I wish I had time to show it. I think as I did, I would also be showing how unstable these responses are.

This will have to wait for a couple of months. We will continue to publish pieces occasionally, deliberately, but less frequently, responding to the events of the day. In the pipeline: Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer’s “Reflections on Al Qaeda in Mali and Other Radicals at the Gates,” and Susan Pearce’s update on the cultural shutdown in Bosnia and Herzegovina and her report on the LGBT pride parade in Istanbul.

I probably got carried away describing President Obama’s Libya policy as a “self-limiting revolutionary solidarity approach.” I know I should be careful in applying my formative political experience to unrelated circumstances. False analogies are often foolish. They can even be dangerous. But, I drew upon my experience to express my admiration for the precision and cogency of Obama’s approach, concerned that many observers, especially my friends on the left, didn’t understand the significance of what the President is trying to accomplish. Things are very different now, and we should face these differences. But even so, the combination of realism and idealism, balancing insights into capacity and aspiration, reminded me of things past, from Gdansk, not Baghdad.

The President sought to highlight the humanitarian justification of our military involvement in Libya. He also emphasized that the involvement had to be limited. Surely, this had something to do with cold calculation about the overextension of the American military, but principle was also involved. For Libyans, Obama attempted to express support for the principle that it was for them and not for us to determine their future. And for Americans and for the rest of the world, Obama tried to make clear that in order for an international military effort to be truly international, it can’t have an American face. The U.S. not only cannot afford to be the world’s policeman. It should not be. If the world needs policing, then the world should do it, or more precisely a coalition of countries, not led by the United States. Yet what seemed clear to me was not clear to everyone, despite the President’s widely recognized eloquence. And this wasn’t only true on the left, as was demonstrated here by Gary Alan Fine in his post on Friday.

I agree with Felipe Pait’s reply to Fine’s post. I too think that Fine exaggerates. “From observing the fact that the Obama administration has cautiously decided to use limited military force in Libya to worrying about the danger of invading a dozen countries is a long jump,” Pait wrote.

Nonetheless, Fine poses interesting questions as he carefully doesn’t present answers. Is there a danger that what Fine takes to be a war on the cheap may make war and international intervention hard to resist? And could that lead to unintended, indeed deadly consequences, as those attacked strike back on the globalized political arena, i.e. through terrorist attacks addressed to our homeland? I am a New Yorker who travels through Grand Central Station and the subways on a daily basis. For me, these are not simply theoretical questions.

Yet, I think that Fine lets his imagination carry him away. As a distanced observer of the human comedy with his commitment to pungent politics, he mistakes his own imagination for a developing reality. It’s amusing to imagine a “teetering superpower” engaging in a war without cost and then thinking about Libya based on that premise, provocatively speculating about ubiquitous worldwide humanitarian wars and dangerous implications at home. But what Fine defines as cost free war is not actually about costs, but about a new kind of limited commitment, including a willful decision by the superpower to act, not as such, but as a nation among others. I even think that it involves a move to de-militarize American foreign policy and to withdraw from the role of global hegemon.  Use military power along with others to stop a massacre. Let politics depose the dictator.

Indeed, on the political front, not on the military front, there is good news. High ranking Libyan officials are distancing themselves from Qadaffi, resigning from their posts, and defecting.

Obama’s speech about American actions in Libya was impressive for its intellectual subtlety, for its sharp reasonableness. He made an argument, fulfilling his obligation, critics note belatedly, to inform the public about the nature of his decisions, and he did so cogently. Congruent with the message, the speech was coolly presented. He wasn’t rallying support of the American citizenry and military to fight the just fight, but explaining a policy decision. This made sense, but the dispassionate nature of the policy formation does have political dangers if the war and political situation in Libya go poorly. The dispassion makes sense this week, but in the long run there are the sorts of dangers that James Jasper explores in his two posts. The hateful response to Obama’s speech from the left and the right are challenging and potentially significant.

Clearly, emotions are an important part of political persuasion and action. Clearly, there are times when mobilizing fear and even hate serve political purpose. But just as clearly, as Jasper emphasizes, a responsible politics requires balance.

The stink of pungent politics may sometimes be quite normal, but at others it indicates that there is something rotting at the core of the political culture, in general, or in a specific segment of the polity. I, with Jasper, worry about the partisan imbalance these days, brought to us by Fox News and company, and many of the leaders of the Republican Party. Perhaps this is a function of the partisan position we share, but I don’t think so as I look at and listen to how Obama explains his policy positions in approaching a major international crisis and our continuing economic crisis, and how many of his critics approach them and him.

This week Hannah Arendt’s notion of “past and future” has been revealed at DC. We have addressed a variety of different issues, trying to orient our future action, by thinking about our experiences.  We have looked at the headlines, but also looked elsewhere and thought about different experiences to support the imagination.

I was particularly happy to receive Sergio Tavolaro’s post on President Obama’s visit to Brazil. Following cable news logic, it was a big mistake for the President to go to Brazil, given the pressing problems at home, centered on the impending budget crisis and the great debate about jobs and the deficit, and the military engagement in Libya and the growing uncertainties in North Africa and the Middle East. Yet beyond news sensation, there are important ongoing developments in the Americas, with very significant changes and challenges. Paying attention to Latin America, not only connected to drug and immigration issues, is a necessity especially when there are problems elsewhere.

Brazil is an emerging global power. Brazil and the United States have a long, sad history, marked by domination and political repression. As Brazil has emerged politically and economically, it often has defined its independence against the United States. Obama’s trip worked to change this. The highlight: the historic appreciation of the first African American President of the United States meeting the first woman President of Brazil. Tavolaro reports that there is a fascination with a shared progressive heritage, working against racism and sexism. And he notes that Obama embodied the declaration of equal partnership between nations: the President of the United States visited Brazil before he had an audience with the Brazilian leader in Washington, reversing the usual order. Using a sad past, the Brazilian population could and did imagine a hopeful future with the great American superpower to the north. This is important news for them and for us.

Karl Marx famously said “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Gary Alan Fine shows how sometimes it works the other way around. First the popular entertainment show, “Candid Camera,” and now the grave dangers of the politics of surveillance.

I believe there is a need to distinguish between the public and the private. I think that targeted revelations about hidden injustice is necessary, but generalized invasions of that which is private will have a long time effect of diminishing democratic capacity, as Daniel Dayan, Elzbieta Matynia and I have noted here, as we each reflected on the WikiLeaks controversies. The new form of simulated revelations is even more pernicious. It has been associated with the left, directed at Governor Scott, but especially by the right, directed at wonderful organizations such as ACORN, Planned Parenthood and NPR. I always find Fine provocative, but I often disagree with him. On this issue, in his linking between a happy past with a frightening future, I am in complete agreement.

Esther Kreider-Verhalle reminds us of the long term effects of Chernobyl as we are observing the horrors of natural disasters in Japan and the failing reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. It is a cautionary note, about future dangers, especially meaningful to me as I live less than twenty miles downstream from the Indian Point Energy Center.

And when I wrote about enhancing nature and mission creep, I also was positioning myself between past and future, trying to inspire thoughtfulness about not only the perils, but also the promise of our times. I often find strength, facing public and private challenges and difficulties, at my favorite retreat, the Rockefeller State Park. I thought about its special qualities to get me out of my latest funk, trying to absorb and think about the painful news from Japan. Bridges old and new helped me think this through, helped me link past and future, reminding me that the human hand can create useful, beautiful and meaningful things. I am looking forward to more reflections on bridges as they enable us to make creative links. Elzbieta Matynia has written incisively about this in her book Performative Democracy. I hope she will adding a post on this here in the near future.

And on my hopes for mission creep, I must confess some deep concerns. I see real creativity and promise in the Middle East and North Africa. But as that promise is being met by violent suppression and as it is defended by violent resistance, I fear the promise is retreating. I will consider this further in my next post, but in the meanwhile, some thoughts related to Michael Corey’s reply to my post. I don’t have a highly elaborated justification of American actions. I am appalled as he is by the administration’s use of the term “kinetic military action,” although I understand why they don’t simply use the word “war.” This is an intervention, very quickly enacted with multinational support, to stop an impending massacre of innocents. As the international support for the action was elegant, the domestic enactment has been clumsy. Using newspeak to cover this clumsiness is not a good idea. Obama’s speech to the nation on Monday is the way to go. I look forward to it and will deliberately review it here on Tuesday. But in the meanwhile, please take a look at a series of posts by Juan Cole. He presents the facts on the ground which explains why action was urgent, how it has been successful and why the mission creep I hope for has a chance.

Responding to the disaster in Japan, Elzbieta Matynia reminded us that our politics and our conflicts all are overshadowed by our need for human solidarity in supporting our common world, which crucially includes our natural environment. Yet, this doesn’t mean turning away from politics. It’s through politics that such solidarity, rather than enforced unity, is constituted. It is through deliberate discussion, informed intelligent talk, that such politics becomes successful. Difficult issues must be discussed and acted upon. Action without discussion results in tyranny, with or without good intentions. DC is dedicated to informed discussion about exactly this issue, which we have considered from a number of different concerns and viewpoints this week.

Andrew Arato’s analysis of the democratic prospects in Egypt involved careful examination of the prospects for revolutionary change. His is a sober account, drawing upon years of research and political experience. When he notes that under dictatorship “revolutions rarely can bring about a democratic transformation,” yielding either mere coups or new forms of authoritarian rule, he is underscoring the dangers of monologic action. When he argues that “it is negotiated transitions based on compromise among many actors” that most likely will yield a constitutional democratic government, pointing to the successful endings of dictatorships of our recent past, he is showing how central deliberate discussion is. “It is very important that in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the East Germany and South Africa oppositions demanded not the fall of a government, but comprehensive negotiations concerning regime change: its timing, rules, procedures, and guarantees.”

As he did last week, Gary Alan Fine again provoked an interesting discussion, showing how humor can be a very serious matter. Drawing upon the insights of Pope Benedict XVI and Lenny Bruce, considering the cases of the Jewish complicity of the murder of Christ, Jared Lee Loughner, James Earl Ray and this week’s House investigation of American Muslim radicalization, he examines the relationship between collective guilt and individual responsibility, showing that this is not an easy issue. I found his argument both interesting and disturbing. He explains the complicated field but he doesn’t take a stand, makes it almost seem that a stand cannot, perhaps even should not, be taken by the sociologist.

Indeed it is absurd and depressing that Jewish responsibility for the killing of Christ is still being discussed as a serious matter by the leader of the Catholic Church. But, as Fine points out, it is a mistake to think that only James Earl Ray was responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The constituted racist order of the United States, especially of the former Confederacy, which is still being celebrated, surely helped to create and motivate the gunman and that should be critically examined. And following this logic, Fine seems to support the present House investigation, which I think or at least judge to be nothing more than a witch hunt.

Fine’s sociological eye sees the dilemma and his pen illuminates it. But the sociological dilemma points to the necessity of making a judgment and discussing it. When does the link between the community and individual action require a forceful criticism not only of the responsible individual but also for the community at large? When is the assertion of such responsibility a sign of xenophobia or some other hatred, the sort that Matynia thinks we should cast aside when we take responsibility for our common world? This requires commitment. Something that Fine shies away from, at least in this post.

The responses of Felipe Pait, countering Fine’s humor with his own, and of Scott, thinking about his anti-war anarchist friend in Spain being accused of responsibility for Bush’s War in Iraq, point to the need to take some responsibility, drawing upon sociological insights such as Fine’s.  As Michael Corey notes quoting Peter Berger, “Unlike puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step towards freedom. And in this act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline … ” This is something that needs to inform public discussion, something we need to talk about.

Informed public discussion, more informed criticism of a repressive religious tyranny, is a deep concern for Ahmad Sadri. He illuminated in his post a problem in the Iranian opposition that is not often seen abroad. Sadri worries about a unitary dogmatic secularism replacing a dogmatic Islamism. He presents a window into an exciting debate that will have significant consequences. It is not surprising that in the face of theocracy, there are critics in Iran who are demanding secular purity. But Sadri recognizes that this purity may be just as dangerous as the present tyranny. I am reminded of a key intellectual intervention in the developing democratic opposition in Poland, Adam Michnik’s The Church, The Left and Dialogue. Sadri, like Michnik, knows that it is necessary for democrats of the world to engage in dialogue, even if they don’t unite. They should seek solidarity around shared democratic principles.

Close to home, on International Women’s day, Esther Kreider-Verhalle, thought about the problems of childcare in her community. Hers was a reflection on the problems of everyday life that point to a more significant issue: how does American society support the ideal of gender equality? When women are actively involved in the work force, do we have reasonable and affordable ways in place to take care of our children? Her reflections are funny: “Some schools ask parents in all seriousness for essays and letters of recommendation. In the essay, one must describe the child’s academic, social and personal strengths and challenges. Strength: knows his alphabet and can count way beyond ten; weaknesses: has a limited attention span and has an occasional tantrum during which both numbers and letters are thrown around.” But the situation is very serious, and for the poor tragic, particularly in an era when various public community centers are facing severe cutbacks, something I will post on next week.

Solidarity through dialogue was the theme of the week.

Gary Alan Fine is not worried about hate speech.  Most of us are.  He thinks it excites and draws attention, and that its negative effects are overdrawn.  Iris “hates hate speech,” but thinks that we have to learn to live with it.  It is the price we pay for living in a democracy.  Rafael offers a comparative cultural approach, agreeing that in English hate speech may not be as pernicious as it may first seem.  But he, nonetheless, reminds us that sometimes hate and its speech have horrific consequences, citing the case of a local preacher “insisting on an idea of building a memorial reminding folk that Mathew Sheppard is now in hell.”  Rafael underscores that sometimes hate speech and aggressive actions are intimately connected, sometimes, even, hate speech functions as an action.  Esther looks at the problem from a slightly different angle. She thinks that concern about civil discourse is a good idea, but asks: “shouldn’t we be thinking, talking and doing some more about cause and prevention of violent outbursts by lost individuals?”  While, Michael is more directly concerned with hate speech and action, maintaining that it undermines democratic culture.  “Hate frequently destroys the cultural underpinnings needed for democratic processes to emerge and thrive.”  He then expresses his concern about the hate speech in Madison, echoing those who were most concerned with the relationship between hate speech and the massacre in Tucson.

© Akiramenai | Wikimedia Commons

And then, in a sense, the Supreme Court joined our discussion, supporting the free speech of anti-gay zealots at funerals, deciding more or less on Fine’s side of the debate.  But, this was a legal position, not really deciding our political problem. How to judge hate speech?  How to respond to it?

I don’t think there is an easy answer to these questions.  But I think that the beginning of the answer is to be found in thinking about our practice here at DC.  Look at the issue from different angles.  Observe how various principles apply in different situations.  Debate the issue.  Act upon the implications of the debate.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi © Martin H. | Wikimedia Commons

Don’t support hate speech and its actions, or make believe that such thought and action is normal, as many have responded to Colonel Qaddafi over the years.  Certainly don’t endorse a country’s participation and even leadership in a UN body on human rights when its leader spews hate and supports terrorism connected to that hate.

But do support the development of a political system which can be open to what Fine calls “lusty talk.”  He maintains that “The allegiance to debate reflects the principles of the Founders, it doesn’t deny them. Being engaged in left or right disruption – talk or action – can be handled by a confident society. Yes, legislators, justices, and government officials must find grounds for reaching agreement, but they can do this – and over centuries have done this – within a welter of voices.”  But of course, constituting such a confident (democratic) society is very difficult.  Something we should note as we observe the revolutionary changes in North Africa and the Middle East.

© Unknown| Wikimedia Commons

Benoit Challand in his two posts examined how the counter power of civil society, with people acting independently and freely, has been the force behind the great ongoing transformation in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond.  Not the magic of class identity or of sacralized politics, but youth, he tells us.  I think what is particularly important is that the youth are basing their actions on free and civil discussion.  Once a civil order is established, perhaps, it will be able to handle hate speech.  But civility and its order must be supported as a top priority. It’s a precondition for democratic life, as we see it also is a cause promoting democracy’s institutionalization.  And, I think, this is not only for newly constituted democratic societies.  I should add: exactly these are the issues that I tried to work on in Civility and Subversion, one in which I consider not only civil intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, but also subversive ones who sometimes use a language of hate such as Malcolm X.

For the first time since we have been operating, I felt like the discussions on the blog were getting away from my editorial control.  I take this to be a good sign.  While there were interesting posts on the economy and economic theory, and on media and media theory, as well as on revolutionary hopes in Egypt, the focus of our discussion this week was on the issues surrounding the events in Madison, Wisconsin, moving in interesting and somewhat unexpected directions.

Anna Paretskaya opened our deliberations, with her “Cairo on the Isthmus.” She presented a bird’s eye view, including some telling photos.  I actually found some of the details of her post more interesting than the elements that stimulated heated discussion.  Particularly fascinating was how she understood the beginning of the movement as she reported in the opening of her piece:

“What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill…”

This made clear to me Madison, Wisconsin’s connection to Cairo, and Cairo’s connection to the movement I observed around the old bloc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to the Obama campaign and the Tea Party movement.  People meet with each other, speak to each other, develop a capacity to act together, create a power that hitherto did not exist.  They may or may not reach their political goal, but they change the political landscape as they act.  This is what I see as being the most significant consequence of “the politics of small things.”  Not only has there been regime change in Egypt and Tunisia, but the Arab world will never be the same after the wave of protests we have observed.  And the Republicans may or may not succeed in their battle against public employee unions and the union movement in general, but the resistance to these changes that have appeared in Wisconsin and beyond, suggests to me that the Tea Party may have met its match.

The debate has changed, and the changed debate has appeared at DC. Michael Corey was quite critical of Paretskaya’s post.  What she takes for granted, he questions.  He wonders whether she is too close to the protestors to present an accurate description of the events and issues involved.  She is on the side of the protestors.  He sees the merits in both sides, clearly suggesting that she overlooks the necessity for State fiscal constraint, the democratic legitimacy of Governor Walker’s actions, and the illegitimacy of the Wisconsin Democrats withdrawing from legislative deliberations.  He also questions the very idea of unions in the public sector.  In a balanced fashion, Michael Corey engaged the fundamental issues of the debate, subtly, but clearly, taking a position.  This then opened the DC deliberations.

Iris and Chad Alan Goldberg objected strongly.  Iris expressed the strong conviction that Governor Walker was following Rahm Emanuel’s advice and wasn’t letting a crisis go to waste, using the need for fiscal discipline to promote a right wing agenda.  Chad Goldberg, a sociologist and union official in Madison, agreed and added a great deal of specific Wisconsin details.   I decided to publish his reply to Michael Corey’s comment as an independent post because of its length and detail.  Its tendentious quality made me uncertain, but we have had a serious debate about what is at stake in the standoff in Wisconsin, so I think I made the right decision.

Only Michael Corey expressed sympathy for Walker’s position.  But more than partisan debate occurred.   Scott in the exchanges about Goldberg’s post maintained: “Obviously, the proposed cuts don’t balance the budget. Furthermore, the state worker’s have actually agreed to the cuts. Therefore, by examining what facts I could gather, I can’t conclude that the main issue is really balancing the budget. As far as that’s concerned, the numbers just don’t add up. It appears that the issue really being contested is collective bargaining rights for workers.”

In my analysis of a post by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review, I came to the same conclusion.  And this was highlighted by Iris as she brought into our discussion the hoax telephone conversation between “David Koch” and Governor Walker, in which the Governor makes clear his broader anti-union ideological commitments, closing remarkably by comparing himself to Ronald Reagan, invoking a highly creative notion that the fall of Communism began with Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981.  He concedes that his stand may not have as broad international significance, but its importance on the ideological battle lines is comparable to his mind.

I believe with the DC consensus that the conflict in Madison is about fundamental positions and not just about how to divide the spoils and the pain in our present economic circumstance.  I agree with Chad Goldberg’s conclusion “maybe we all need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: Which side are you on?”  But I need to add, that I think that this is a political question and not one where truth is on one side or the other, which Chad sometimes seems to suggest.

And exactly what the fundamental question is, as Michael indicated in his reply to me, is open to question.

For Michael, the key issue is about public versus private unions, citing FDR’s warning against the establishment of public unions to substantiate his claim. This point has been made by numerous pundits on the right, but I feel it is highly unlikely that this would have been Roosevelt’s position given the present state of labor relations.

I think, rather, the issue is one that was dear to Roosevelt’s heart, the right of workers to collectively bargain.  Unions in the private and public sectors are in the same boat struggling against a long term trend of government policies and corporate strategies that undermine labor organization.  I think the conflict is about workers’ rights to collectively bargain versus those who are committed to more libertarian principles.

I also know that each of these sides have very concrete economic consequences, as Scott and Eric Friedman highlight in response to my post.  Michael knows that deficits and high taxes negatively affect economic growth.    We have a political disagreement, which can be worked on through democratic debate – a debate that is being facilitated by the events in Wisconsin.

A note on next week: in upcoming posts Daniel Dayan will reflect on the odd fact that until very recently the Libya of Colonel Gaddafi played a prominent role within the two highest United Nations human rights organizations, and Benoit Challand, a scholar intensively studying the Middle East, will offer a comparative reading of the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, and also about the little covered protests in the Palestinian territories, as we continue our consideration of the great changes of 2011 in the Arab world, following up on Hazem Kandli’s post this week.

I had the good fortune of being an eye witness to one of the major changes in the geopolitical world of my life time.  I observed the Soviet Empire collapsing, chronicled it at the front lines, even before many saw the collapse coming.  I don’t have such a privileged seat as we observe the transformations of in Egypt and Tunisia, but my intuition tells me that these may be every bit as significant as the ones I saw in their infancy thirty years ago.  We can’t be sure that the changes begun this past month will reach a fully successful conclusion: fully? probably not.  But there is no doubt that the world has changed, not only there, but also here.

A big change: the idea of the clash of civilizations has been defeated.  It turns out, and should be clear to all, that Muslims are quite capable of initiating a genuine democratic movement.  It may or may not prevail, but it is certainly an important strain in Egyptian and Tunisian political culture.

Another big change: I suspect that the commitment to democracy is now “in,” more appealing than radical jihad, even for the disaffected in the Muslim world.  How long this lasts and with what effect will depend on the continuing success of the transformation begun last month.  I believe this is the first major victory in the so called “war on terrorism.”

A little change, close to home: in everyday life, Islamophobia may be in retreat.  After seeing the images from Cairo, why should Juan Williams wonder about that person in Muslim garb on an airplane?  It may never have been particularly rational, but especially not now.  There are crazy people of all sorts of cultural and religious persuasions, and also admirable ones.  Now the admirable of the Arab and Muslim world are front stage.  Now they are most visible.  Only the most close-minded will refuse to see them, i.e. over at Fox, Glenn Beck but, I suspect, not Juan Williams.

And now the “only democracy in the Middle East” seems to be most openly uncomfortable about democratic developments in Egypt and among its neighbors.  Better the autocrat you know, than the democrat you don’t know, seems to be the operative insight animating Israeli official reaction to recent events.  The striking limitations in Israeli democratic practice are also now strikingly apparent, as will be explored by Nahed Habiballah in her post tomorrow.

Indeed, this is not to say that everything and everyone is or should be happy.  Such expectations of revolutionary change are naïve, even dangerous.  The contradictions in American foreign policy, our professed commitment to democracy, and our pursuit of good relations with our “moderate” autocratic allies, are now clearly revealed and present pressing problems.  I have some expectations that this may be resolved in Jordon with the formation of a genuine constitutional monarchy a la Britain. Perhaps we will even see an interesting movie in the not to distance future about the King’s speech and the President’s speech there, and discuss it at DC. But such will not be the case in Saudi Arabia.  If there are negative consequences of these contradictions for American interest, we may be hearing the nationalistic question – who lost Egypt?  – echoing the old who lost China debate.  This will be explored by Gary Alan Fine in an upcoming post.

I think the discussion that we have had about the events in Egypt this past week illuminated the events as they were happening and provide insights for understanding what is yet to come.  Hazem Kandil concern about the need for the democratic movement to develop alternative grounds for political action is even more pressing this week, than it was last.  Thus far there has been a military coup against a dictatorial regime.  Those in control right now include principally those who benefited from the old order.  It is imperative that the forces in the society that opposed that order get their act together.

There is a clear analogy to be drawn to the changes of ’89.  There is a danger that those who can say “no,” but little else, will be overwhelmed by those who positively assert a new authoritarian order, as I have shown happened in Romania in 1989.  I am not sure that the alternatives are as stark as Daniel Dayan fears, military dictatorship or religious integralism.  But there clearly is a need for people who want alternatives to these stark alternatives to speak to each other and develop a capacity to act in concert, as Hannah Arendt would put it, beyond protesting against.  They must develop programs, policies, and parties, and a way to discuss their competing visions.  They must present alternatives to what Dayan calls “fear mongers “and “sleepwalkers.”

I was talking to Elzbieta Matynia about her post through Skype on Friday, just as Mubarak’s resignation was announced.  I thought that her post was too long.  We were discussing how I might edit it, so that it appeared in two installments.  But at that revolutionary moment, I decided not to cut her piece in two, because of the importance of what she had to say and my sense that it should be said as quickly and coherently as possible.  She put forward a key way that the sorts of problems that Dayan and Kandil anticipate have been avoided in transformations from dictatorship to democracy in the recent past.  Opposing parties and interest groups have to work together on the transformation, and the roundtable with its public etiquette, is an invention that has facilitated this.  I hope the Egyptian generals and oppositionists keep such experience in mind.

And as I am posting this, the revolution is spreading, confirming my conviction that 2011 may very well be as significant as 1989.  The headline in The New York Times is “Unrest Spreads in the Middle East” at this moment, with reports from Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt.

A specter is haunting the Middle East and it is up to the people of the Middle East to decide what this specter is all about – my point in my appraisal of President Obama’s performance thus far in these revolutionary times.

This has been another eventful week, and for another week I am a bit late in posting the review.  Thinking about the “news,” thinking about what is new in our world, I have been mesmerized by the remarkable drama in Egypt, the conclusion of which is far from certain.  At DC, we have been trying to make sense of this, with side glances at related problems.  I think in fact that the standard ways of understanding these revolutionary times require such glances, because conventional ways of thinking mislead.  I am going to address this with a couple of short posts, the first today, the second tomorrow, thinking about the revolutionary moment by reviewing the posts of my colleagues.  I will start by reflecting on an apparent comedy and move toward an examination of potential tragedy.

Some of the conventional responses to the events in Egypt would be funny, if they weren’t so serious.  The prime example is that of Glenn Beck: “Islam wants a caliphate. Communists want a Communist, new world order. They’ll work together, and they’ll destabilize, because they both want chaos, period.”  That this is what he gets out of the complex events in Egypt reveals the power of ideological thinking.

Beck, ever on the lookout for conspiracies and frightening analogies, normally distills a powerful brew. But it seems a bit weak when it comes to a major foreign affair, indeed quite foreign for him and his audience.  I suspect that even the confirmed Fox News viewer is put off by Beck’s week long attempt to demonize the obviously well meaning Egyptian activists, who have appeared on our television, computer and mobile screens.

In fact, I wonder what Gary Alan Fine thinks.  In his appreciation of Beck, he makes two strong observations, leading to a provocative conclusion: Beck is a talented communicator, expressing popular skepticism about elites who purport to know what is best for the people, better than the people.  And he pays intellectuals the complement of taking them seriously.  Therefore: “Glenn Beck is an endowed professor for the aggrieved, presenting cracked knowledge.”

Fine concludes that Beck and the intellectual opponents he demonizes, the progressive intellectuals, such as Frances Fox Piven, actually have much in common.  They question the easy assumptions of what they see as a self serving liberalism.  But I would add, as they do so, they may not only reveal the limits of liberalism, but also undermine liberalism in the process, sometimes intentionally.  And, back to Egypt, it is liberal freedom that is a (if not “the”) major commitment of protesters.

I think that Fine misses the dangers of Beck’s anti-liberalism.  Anti-liberalism of the left in the U.S. is primarily a comedy; the rhetoric is serious but the appeal is limited.  The right’s anti-liberalism is a much more serious threat, because it has a much larger and more powerful constituency.  Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the whole Orwellian “fair and balanced” institution hold the attention of a significant part of the American public.  If there is ever to be “a transition from democracy” in the United States, as potentially occurring in Hungary today, depicted by Andras Bozoki in his DC post , it will come from Beck’s quarter of the political landscape, it seems to me.  Hungary and Egypt show that democratic transitions are always potentially with us and that they don’t only go in one direction.

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 that it is endorsing the transitional leadership of Mohamed ElBaradei and seems to be working in a way that recognizes the pluralism of Egyptian society.  Then critically evaluate whether Egypt’s future now will replicate Iran’s future in the past.

And I think Kandil is absolutely right about the need to question the notion that recent events are caused by the new technologies and global media events (i.e. such as the WikiLeaks dumps).  It is crucial that people are speaking to each other, developing a capacity to act together, empowering themselves to a point that they are likely to overthrow a police state.  Media sometimes facilitate this, the politics of small things, but key is people interacting, not the form of mediation.

I expressed concerns about the outcome of the events in my post.  I worried about how and what people were saying to each other on the streets as their protests to expel the dictator proceed.  Recent reports from Egypt suggest that they are saying more than “no” and that people with differences are working with each other, respecting their differences.  This far from assures a happy ending, but it is a good sign.  As Arendt notes in politics the means are a significant part of the ends.  In terms of my Central European comparison, Cairo may not be Warsaw, with a long and extensive experience with democratic opposition before the fall of communism, but it is clear to me that it more resembles Prague than Bucharest.

Now prediction: I think that Egypt, along with Tunisia, may actually be at the vanguard of real and substantial democratic development in the Middle East, proving that the way this happens is through civil action and not war.   It is time for citizens and governments, including my own, inside and outside the region, to recognize this as a possibility,. Action based upon such recognition can facilitate this major positive transformation.  There are significant dangers, to be sure, but cynicism gets us nowhere.

Other Posts

A few words about the State of the Union address, about Dayan’s interpretation of WikiLeaks and about Carducci’s post on “the art of the commons:”

Given the very favorable response to the State of the Union Address, it is clear to me that Obama is now addressing and helping shape American commonsense, as has been his long term project.  This is good not only for his short and long term political prospects.  It also may help him move the country from the center right.  There is a real possibility that the Reagan mantra, that the government is part of the problem not the solution, will be reconsidered by a significant portion of the population, as the Republicans offer ideology (Ryan) and comedy (Bachmann) as the alternative to Obama’s leadership.

I do, though, have concerns about how far Obama is willing to go, or more specifically, about his caution about moving the country to a more reasonable center when it comes to foreign affairs.  There are the wars, and now there is the alternative to wars.  I hope that the administration sooner rather than later places emphasis on the promise of Tunisia and Egypt, and supports democracy in a fashion other than that of the previous administration.  Gestures matter, as Dayan explores in his recent post and will explore more extensively in his next one.  We need Presidential leadership that gestures publicly, visibly, in favor of democracy.  Not hidden realities but the public gestures are significant for the political moment.

And note public space in a center of a domestic crisis is also of crucial importance, as Vince Carducci’s post on art of the commons in Detroit reveals.   I hope that this contribution is one of a continuing series of posts on the arts, as they help us consider the problems of the day, from Carducci and other contributors.  Suggestions are welcome.  My intuition is that this dimension has not been insignificant in Tunis and Cairo.