Accused of being an optimist once again last year, I was sure that Barack Obama would be re-elected and that this potentially had great importance. As the election contest unfolded, it seemed to me that Romney and the other Republican candidates made little sense and that a broad part of the American electorate understood this.  A major societal transformation was ongoing and Obama gave it political voice: on the role of government, American identity, immigration, social justice and a broad array of human rights issues. Thus, I think the re-election has broad and deep significance, and I conclude the year, therefore, thinking that we are seeing the end of the Reagan Revolution and the continuation of Obama’s.

But, of course, I realize that my reading is a specific one, and partisan at that. My friends on the left are not as sure as I am that Obama really presents an alternative. From their point of view, he just puts a pretty face on the domination of global capitalism and American hegemonic military power. I have to admit that I view such criticism with amusement. It takes two forms. The criticism is either so far a field, so marginal, that it is irrelevant, leftist sectarianism, which is cut off from the population at large, confined to small enclaves in lower Manhattan (where I work and have most of my intellectual discussions) and the upper west side, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Austin, Texas, Berkley, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brooklyn and the like. Or there is the happy possibility that the critiques of Obama and the Democrats engage popular concerns and push responsible political leaders to be true to their professed ideals. I have seen signs of both of these tendencies, significantly in the Occupy movement. I hope the leftist critics of Obama pressure him to do the right thing. Marriage equality is an important case study.

I think the criticism of Obama from the right is much more threatening. If conservative critics of Obama don’t take seriously the significance of the election results, they are not only doomed to failure, they may take the country down with them, evident today as we are purportedly falling off the fiscal cliff.

Michael Corey in his response to my post on the Obama revolution exemplifies a significant problem.

“President Obama waged a very successful campaign; however, there is a darker side to it. One of the major reasons he was successful was his ability to destroy Romney’s reputation with innuendo and misinformation. President Obama also adroitly avoided dealing with major policy issues concerned with the longer term viability of a number of programs. President Obama is likely to get his way on tax rate increases and many other tax issues without giving up anything because he is more than willing to drive over the fiscal cliff, and then introduce his own legislation next year. It probably will work, but will have numerous unwanted negative consequences. When elephants dance, the grass gets trampled.”

I think Corey is mistaken about the elections, and though this is good willed, it is serious. To propose that Obama won by vilifying a good man, Governor Romney, is to ignore the significant principled differences between the two Presidential candidates and their parties. Obama emphasized economic recovery and a Keynsian approach to government spending. He proposed to address the problems of the cost of Medicare by working to control our medical care costs, more in line with costs and benefits in other countries that have significantly sounder public health. Obamacare is his solution, though his conservative opponents don’t take this seriously. If conservatives don’t face this, if they don’t take seriously that new alternatives to market fundamentalism are being presented, they can continue to work to make this country ungovernable, their apparent strategy for the past four years. I think they will suffer as a result, but so will everyone else in the States and, given our power, way beyond our borders.

But the situation is far from hopeless. There are numerous signs of hope. I am impressed by posts on Deliberately Considered by our contributors over the year as they reveal grounds for hope here and abroad.

Ironically, the Republicans might address their problems by moving ahead, while looking backwards.

And then there is the hope founded in the work of extraordinary individuals, who can and do make a difference, such as Vaclav Havel. See tributes here, here and here.

There is the engaged art of resistance, as it criticizes the intolerable, as in the case of Pussy Riot in Russia, makes visible distant suffering through artistic exploration in far flung places such as Afghanistan, and illuminates alternatives in Detroit, a central stage of the collapse of industrial capitalism.

And new media present possibilities of new forms of public deliberation and action, see this and this for example.

The possibility of action should work against cynicism, which is often confused for criticism, but actually is a form of resignation.

But I am not an myopic optimist. Suffering is knitted into the social condition, something I hope to investigate more systematically with my colleague Iddo Tavory in the coming year, starting with two posts in the coming week. Indeed as proof that I am well aware that naïve optimism about the future is mistaken, I view the last post of 2012 as one of the most important. The death of innocent victims through the force of arms has enduring effects. Richard Alba underscores this through personal reflection and professional insight. We all then suffer whether the violence is the result of accident, domestic or state violence, through the widespread arming of American citizens or the use of drones apparently far from home. Let’s hope next year is a better one.

In the past week, I have published in Deliberately Considered and posted on my Facebook page a series of reflections on the implications of the nomination of Paul Ryan as Vice Presidential candidate of the Republican Party. And I have explained that the basis of my understanding of the present situation is a conservative insight concerning the dangers of ideological thought. The replies have been quite illuminating. The discussion starts with an interesting American irony: amusing, perhaps more.

Ryan’s nomination, I believe, assures the re-election of President Obama. The basis of my belief is a judgment that Americans generally are guided by a conservative insight, an American suspicion of ideological thought. Conservative insight defeats the conservative ticket.

Yet, on the intellectual front, there are few conservative thinkers who would illuminate this. Exceptions? Andrew Sullivan, perhaps also David Frum. (Anyone else?) But because these two are so guided, few, if any, conservatives recognize them as comrades in thought.

Aron Hsiao in a reply to one of my posts on conservative intellectuals explains the factors involved:

“The essence of the moment is that the mainstream demographic blocs of the Right have, as an ideological move, adopted anti-intellectualism as a central tenet of conservatism. Any marriage of democratic practice and political epistemology at the moment therefore precludes the conservative intellectual; if someone is intellectual in the slightest, the Right will disown him/her. They are the oft-maligned “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). To make matters worse, any intellectual at the moment of any value is loathe to be associated with the totality of the present (i.e. recent form of the) conservative project in America and thus tends to gravitate toward the (D) party. My suspicion is that rationally informed self-selection (they have careers and statuses, after all) results in a state of affairs in which few serious intellectuals can be found in the (R) party…”

Aside from the way he uses the term ideology, I agree completely with Hsiao. The implications are indeed scary.  I explained my understanding in my last post. I think it can help us understand the unfolding electoral debate.

Ideologists are more enamored by the purity of the ideological position, than they are committed to factual reality. This week we observed the strange case of the Republican candidate in Missouri Senate race, Congressman Todd Akin. Akin knows about wondrous powers of female biology “from what doctors have told him.” In cases of “legitimate rape” the reproductive system shuts down, according to the Congressman. I wonder what he thinks about the rape war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and beyond? From such ideologues we also “know” that there is no human induced climate change and that evolution is just a theory, persuasively challenged by creationist “science.” With the incredible power of the ideology induced human mind: fiction becomes fact; fantasy (in the technical Freudian sense of wish fulfillment) becomes science. Human suffering is ignored. Faced with a serious anti-abortion ethical dilemma, a new science is born.

Alvino-Mario Fantini, a conservative intellectual who has contributed to Deliberately Considered, I believe understands the problems here, the need to distinguish conservative thought from right-wing ideology. He responded to a commenter on my Facebook page, which he took to be an unwarranted dismissal of a significant conservative thinker. He asked:

What do you mean when you say “these days, Russell Kirk would be considered an ‘intellectual’ ?” Was he not? His seminal work The Conservative Mind was the work of a deep thinker (not an activist): an elegantly-written overview of literary and political examples of the “conservative imagination.” If anything, Kirk rejected ideology and would likely have very little to do with many of today’s GOP leaders.

Fantini shares my judgment that a serious debate between the left and the right needs to happen and hasn’t. He agrees with Gary Alan Fine that we live in partisan gated communities and that our ideas and our politics are diminished as a consequence. Fantini testifies that an important American conservative would have been appalled. Perhaps the most tragic consequence is that one party is now mired in an ideological fog, seducing a significant part of the public through ideology empowered media, i.e. Fox and company.

It is with this in mind that George Finch, disagrees with my observations and conclusions concerning the nomination of Paul Ryan. Finch noted on Facebook:

With all due respects, this country is very ideological, one that is based in the sanity of private property, individualism, the wisdom of the market, and a god-like capitalism. All are related of course. To top it off government is now seen as incompetent and part of the problem, not part of a solution. Ryan can appeal to this better than Romney, and with the right pr (lies) they may not scare people. Obama like most of the Ds do not help as they are now deficit hawks and have shifted to the Right and their ideology over the years. Obama will cut the safety net , and Ryan and his folk can use this to counter the D’s attacks and confuse people. The issue is not whether there are any Conservative intellectuals, but how far close we are coming to a form of Friendly Fascism.

And I responded:

I am not so sure that the American population is quite as nutty as you think, or that the market is worshiped in the way right wing ideologues hope and you fear. I think, and hope, that these things are in play and that the Republicans have over played their hand. I fundamentally disagree with you on Obama. He is not a deficit hawk and I think he has long fought the shift to the right and it is most clear now. Friendly Fascism is an epithet. I think it warns of the dangers of the rise of the hard right in one party, not both. Here again is a strong reason to vote for Obama and the Democrats.

Finch concluded the exchange by conceding that he has been hard on Obama, hoping that I am right in my electoral prognostication (“I would vote for a stale, bug infested baloney sandwich rather than Romney”), but asserting that Obama may be the conservative I have been looking for, given his commitment to stability and support of existing institutions and realities.

We, Finch and I, apparently, will vote the same way in November, though our reasons will be different. He will vote for “not Romney – Ryan,” holding his nose as he votes for a conservative, while, I, as a centrist who wants to move the center left, will vote for Obama, a centrist who wants to move the center left. Finch as a left-wing ideologist (as he and Hsiao understand the term) will vote against right-wing ideologists and their policies. While I will vote against ideology and a set of political principles with which I don’t agree, and vote for a candidate who I think is principled but also against “isms,” a politician looking for meaningful dialogue with his opponents, but holding to his own positions and visions, as he beautifully describes the reinvention of the American Dream. Finch, I suppose, imagines that the Romney – Ryan ticket is likely to win, given the pervasiveness of right-wing ideology in the American population. I agree that there is a problem, but think and hope that an ideology aversion will prevent this from happening.

I found this discussion here and on Facebook illuminating. It gets me thinking about the tension within conservative thought between anti-intellectualism and opposition to ideology, i.e. as I put it previously, opposition to all “isms.” We suffer from the former, would greatly benefit from the latter, in my judgment. And I am not convinced with Pait, as he responded to my last post, that ideologists get things done, while those who oppose modern magical thinking don’t.  But I agree with him, it is a challenge. More soon.

Paul Gottfried and I disagree. He positions himself in opposition to “the post – Marxist PC left.” I suspect that my commitments to feminism, gay rights and the victories of the civil rights movement, while thinking that Marx was an important 19^th century thinker, but not a guide for politics in our times, means that the phrase applies to me (even though I am not sure what it means exactly). Yet, I am pleased that I found a prominent conservative intellectual to contribute to our discussions. I have already learned something from Gottfried, and want to explore what the practical implications of an exchange of views between us, along with other Deliberately Considered contributors and readers, can be.

We certainly won’t come to agreement on some fundamentals. I don’t believe that the confrontation of our ideas will yield a higher dialectical truth. I am pretty sure that on some issues it is a matter of prevailing, not convincing. He writes about the “our oppressive anti-discrimination apparatus,” while I see only reasons to celebrate the struggle against discrimination, racism, sexism and the like. I see no possibility of compromise here. In fact, I regret that things haven’t changed as much as I think they should and welcome political action to move things forward.

Yet, I believe that there is a possibility that differences such as those that divide Professor Gottfried and me can be civilized, and not simply be about confrontation. A starting point is sharing insights, and I think I see one based on our opposing appraisals of the present state of American political culture. I see, and worry about, an ascendant know-nothing right, while Gottfried is deeply concerned about the ascendance of the post Marxist left. These differences, I believe, ironically point to a compatible understanding.

Gottfried’s diagnosis of the present political climate does indeed surprise me:

Those who oppose this [post Marxist pc] Left are fighting from a steadily weakening position. They have lost the cultural war to the state, our educational system and MTV; and as the predominantly left-leaning Latino population and the lifestyle Left continues to grow, the real Right and the faux right GOP will be driven into a less and less promising minority status. The only way out of this worsening situation for those who don’t like the direction in which the multiculturalists and our two national parties are pushing us is a vast reduction in federal authority, together with the increase of state and local powers. This will not deliver New York City or San Francisco from the Left, but it will limit the power of New York City to control what goes on in Augusta, Georgia or Ames, Iowa.

In contrast, I have good reason to worry about the ascendency of the right wing in America. Each year, it seems to me, the Republican Party has moved to the right. What they proposed in the last decade of the 20^th century, healthcare reform with mandated participation of the public, and a cap and trade approach, using a market, to control the ill effects of industrial development on the environment, they now denounce as socialism. And conservative political leaders step by step have moved radically to the right, from Nixon to Reagan to George W. Bush to Mitt Romney, indeed given the unsteadiness of his commitments, from Romney to Romney. And at the same time, despite my expectations and fears, these men have repeatedly won elections, the worse case for me was the re-election of George W. Bush, despite his extremist security and foreign policies. Now opposition to abortion rights is absolute among Republicans, and their approach to the reading of the constitution, original intent, has moved from the margins of judicial philosophy to a near majority on the Supreme Court.

Yet, I must admit, Gottfried also has good reasons to be concerned by the direction of things. From the point of view of the right, much has changed for the worse, despite the cascading right wing successes at the center of political power. We do now live in a much more multicultural America. The political and social rights for women, African Americans, gays and many other groups of the formerly excluded have expanded, sharply represented by the first African American president. The typical American looks very differently than a generation ago. The successful passage of “Obamacare” has extended state mandated and supported social benefits. The promise of the New Deal is more of a reality today than when FDR was at the height of his powers, free of its initial racist limitations and greatly expanded by the Great Society reforms and the accomplishments of Barack Obama in his first term.

Thus, I think that both Gottfried and I perceive real changes in the American political landscape. The left’s victories until Obama, since Reagan, have been for the most part off the center stage. Despite the elections of right wing Republicans, a slow and steady transformation has occurred in America. People are changing their relations with each other in their everyday practices: gay and straight, black and white and Latino and Asians, men and women. Little victories concerning the extension of citizenship have transformed the country. The right has mobilized against these victories, winning most of the major electoral contests over these changes since 1968, threatening real progress, in my judgment. But, nonetheless, there has been progress from my point of view. Because Gottfried believes these changes are being forced by a repressive state, liberal educational institutions and the media apparatus, the situation is grave from his point of view.

The threatening storm of a right wing backlash looms, as does the spread of the PC left.

Gottfried and I have grounds for our concerns, given our commitments. But I wonder: shouldn’t a reasonable conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke, understand the progress that I see as an instance of the power of slow and steady social transformation, as a healthy kind of conservative change? This is clearly the position of Andrew Sullivan. I wonder about recent Deliberately Considered contributor Alvino-Mario Fantini. Can he perceive that the state presents both a reasonable promise for the fulfillment of and a possible threat to the defense and extension of our liberties? And can my friends on the left appreciate that small victories add up to major change and abandon utopian dreams of sudden and complete transformation?

When I describe Barack Obama as a principled centrist working to move the center left, I confess, I am seeing in the President’s political orientation my own primary commitments. As a professor, as a participant observer of the opposition to previously existing socialism around the old Soviet bloc, and as an engaged American, this kind of center-left position makes the most sense to me.

I oppose true believers, of the left and the right, and am confused by those who see only their own position as intelligent and insightful, viewing their opposition as, at best, mistaken, and, more likely, as fundamentally mendacious. Working in the academic world, in my daily life, I mostly see this in my leftist colleagues who are certain about the superiority of their own political commitments. On the larger political stage, the fallacy of political certainty seems to be primarily a right-wing disorder, vividly epitomized in the Republican debates and on Fox News. The new direction of MSNBC, I should also note, has become a mirror image of Fox. I find it almost as hard to watch for more than a few minutes.

I look for alternatives to this, and I believe that this is not only a matter of personal taste or my specific political commitments. Hannah Arendt’s essay on truth and politics highlights the depth of the problem, as I have already reflected on here and here. Confusing political opinion with political truth and empowering that truth is a primary cultural characteristic of modern tyranny, and basing politics on factual lies, avoiding factual truth, is another definitive cultural characteristic of the tyranny of our times and of the recent past. For this reason, I am self critical about my own convictions and quite critical of many of my friends on the left, and also for this reason, I am on the look out for opponents on the right worthy of respect, from whom I can learn. Thus, my posts looking for conservatives (here, here and here), and about Corey Robin’s attempt to understand the reactionary mind, and the post by the distinguished and controversial paleo-conservative, Paul Gottfried.

The matter isn’t finished. I hope these posts will be only the opening of contributions about and from the right on the events of the day at Deliberately Considered. “Mario” has agreed to post an answer to the question I posed to him.

He compactly asserted in his comment to one of my recent pieces:

I think you will find that many American conservatives are fundamentally (a) concerned about being able to live in traditional ways — in the ways or manners that they have inherited from their parents and grandparents, and respectful of established societal codes of conduct shared with their neighbors and communities — and, perhaps more importantly, (b) suspicious of any attempt to improve or re-engineer society based on an ill-defined idea of progress or some ideological model of a future utopia. History has shown us repeatedly that such projects usually require the violation of a certain group’s rights — and often lead to bloodshed.

And I asked how these commitments could be applied to considering deliberately the events of the day in a way that might convince people who are not conservative? I actually agree with some of the implications of the two points, but not all of them. Perhaps a real discussion could be opened. Next, I will work on the opening in a response to Paul Gottfried’s post.

Recent posts and discussions at Deliberately Considered have been about fundamental problems in contemporary democratic culture: the need to engage in political discussion beyond clichés, the consequences of the persistence of modern magical political thinking, and the danger of transition to dictatorship from democracy. It makes me think about the state of the right and the left and the ideal of a contested political center.

Ideology has not ended, to my dismay (as I reported in my New Year’s post). People believe that they have the truth in politics in a variety of different forms, on the left and right, in the U.S. and globally. In a strange mirroring of Socrates, who confirmed that he was the wisest of men because he “knew that he didn’t know,” contemporary ideologues know that their opponents don’t know. Opponents don’t only think differently but incorrectly, politically incorrect. Material interests, character, moral failure and ignorance are used to explain the other’s mistaken position. Alternative views are dismissed instead of confronted. True believing market fundamentalists know that the problem of the economy will be solved through de-regulation. They will not pay attention to the arguments and evidence of those who explain how such de-regulation is the cause of our global economic crisis. Those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil won’t pay attention to those who examine how all attempts to construct a systemic alternative to capitalism in the last century have ended in economic and political failure. It is not the convictions that I find disturbing. It is the unwillingness of people to actually take into account the insights and evidence of those with whom they disagree.

Thus, I think that Gary Alan Fine’s imagined magazine is not only a matter of idiosyncratic taste. As he put it in his recent post:

“I hold to a somewhat eccentric contention that there are smart liberals (neo- and old-timey, pink and pinker), conservatives (neo- and paleo-), progressives, reactionaries, socialists, libertarians, and more. Is my generosity so bizarre?”

No, not at all bizarre. I think there is a pressing need for Fine’s generosity, that we need deliberate debate about the problems of our times, drawing upon diverse opinions and orientations. It is my hope that over the coming months Deliberately Considered becomes more and more like the magazine of Fine’s dreams. Indeed, I think we have from the start been moving in this direction.

“People reside in gated communities of knowledge.” Fine notes. I trust we contribute to opening the gates, a place for serious discussion about the problems of our times. The pungent political speech that Fine sometimes enjoys, though, from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and company, is not particularly welcome. This is not the place for shouting heads. I suppose Fine would be fine with that.

It is with my concerns about true-believing and the need to take into account the positions of those with whom I disagree that I reported my response to the Iowa caucuses. I don’t want the eventual Republican nominee to win the election. This is my partisan position, not only because I support President Obama, but also because I think there is a fundamental crisis on the right in our times, which has not yet been addressed. A shellacking would help. I think there are real signs that a day of reckoning is upon us. I think the fissure in the Republican Party, clearly revealed in its primary campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination, is a hopeful sign. Thus, Michael Corey in his response to my post misunderstands me. My point is not that the Republicans are fighting with each other, therefore my candidate will win, or my position will prevail. Rather, my point is that the odd combination of the Reagan coalition, including true-believing free market, neo and Christian conservatives, along with Main and Wall Street moderates, is breaking down, and that this is good not only for Democrats, but also for Republicans, and for the Republic. I understand that Romney will likely win the primary campaign and that he may even defeat Obama. But the lack of enthusiasm for Mitt underscores that the coherence of Reaganism, with its unexamined dogmatisms, is at last over. The only thing that now holds it together is an extremely dark force, hatred of Barack Hussein Obama.

I agree with Lisa Aslanian in her reply to my post, in which she emphasizes the dangers of hatred. I also agree with her that Obama’s opposition enflamed by hatred could conceivably persist into his second term. But I suggest that the power of hatred, like the power of love, has its limits. I think the limits of Obamaphobia are already evident, as the President is taking the initiative against the Republicans (more on this in a later post). I also think his new tough turn does make an appeal to OWS and Ron Paul skeptics (as Lisa desires). My hope, which is pitched against hopelessness, is that those who are committed to libertarian principles, conservative morals and the wisdom of habit and custom, learn to proceed with their commitments in a less dogmatic fashion. A reinvention of Republican political culture is something that is pressingly needed. Such reinvention is already ongoing among Democrats, led by Obama, as I explore in Reinventing Political Culture.

Scott in his reply to my Iowa post ends with the assertion that we are all liberals. I assume he is referring to the legacies of 19^th century liberal thought, that unites present day conservatives, i.e. free market liberals, and progressives, i.e. those who think that state interventions are necessary to assure individual opportunity, along with those who want to keep the government out of the bedroom, along with those who want to keep it out of the market. While I think Scott is making an important point, there are also many who are motivated by principles outside the liberal tradition, as I am sure he realizes. Some conservatives believe in the priority of community, tradition, religion and an inherited order. Among the Republican Presidential hopefuls, this is the emphasis of Rick Santorum. And, of course, there are those who are in principle socialist, as well. Although the self-proclaimed socialists are rare in American society at large, they are quite common in the academic world. In fact, while I am extremely skeptical that there is a systemic socialist alternative to capitalism, I do think that socialism is an important principled position within a democratic society with a modern economy, a real utopia that suggests that the way things are now is not the way they will always be. Vince Carducci has been developing this position in his posts here.

Rather than declaring that we are all liberals, I would suggest that we all should be democrats and republicans, in favor of a free public life and rule of the people, committed as we are to competing partisan positions. I imagine Deliberately Considered contributing to this, in its small way, at least as an exemplar. Crucial to this is having a center where left and right meet, for common debate and action, for deliberate consideration.

Final note: This past week I posted a letter authored by former dissident activists, key figures of the democratic opposition to Communism in Hungary, expressing their deep concern on the recent developments in their country. The post attracted a wide global readership. Later this week we will follow through with a series of reflections on the course democracy is taking in that specific Central European country as seen by critical observers in another country in that region, Poland. We also will be taking stock of the developing American political drama. Comparing developments there and here, I trust, will highlight the importance of a free public for democratic culture and also provide us an opportunity to understand the fragility of democracy.

I have made this editorial decision because I am not an optimist. While I take it as my intellectual project to illuminate hopeful alternatives to the prevailing unjust order of things, I think it is important to realize that dangers loom.  The path from democracy to dictatorship is not only a danger in Hungary.

There have been three distinct phases of Barack Obama’s presidency, thus far. There was the period when the President worked with the Democratic Party dominated Congress, the period when he attempted to work with the Republican Party dominated Congress, and the present period, with Obama fighting against the Republican Party dominated Congress and starting his re-election campaign. He has engaged in different tactics in each of these phases, geared to the prevailing political environment, but he has also revealed himself as being a political leader with a long-term strategy meant to change the environment, not simply adapt to it.

While most political coverage over the last three years has been focused on the tactics and the day-to-day ups and downs, serious assessment of the first term of the Obama presidency requires evaluation of the strategy, and its successes, failures and continued promise.  President Obama is a principled politician with clear commitments, even if without a unifying simple ideology. He is a centrist, working to move the center to the left, trying to make the American Dream more inclusive and politics more civil, serious and participatory. He is working for a major political transformation, as I have explored carefully in my book, Reinventing Political Culture and have examined here at Deliberately Considered as well. In this post and in two future posts, I will review what we have learned about his attempt to move the political center to the left, specifically as it involves economic policies and social reform. I will review other dimensions of the Obama transformation in further posts as the Presidential election season develops.

Obama with Democrats:

Given the global crisis that greeted the new president, the economy was the initial focus of Obama and his administration. Even before he became president and then in the early days of his administration, Obama was involved in major actions to forestall a complete meltdown of the financial system and a global depression. The “Wall Street bailout” (the Troubled Asset Relief Program), the rescue of the auto industry, and the stimulus package ( The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) presented aggressive policies that undoubtedly made a difference, even though today it is convenient for Republicans to label all as wasteful. One of the first signs that Obama recognized the hard times was in his inaugural address. The public and commentators expected an upbeat “yes we can” speech. He gave instead a sober appraisal of a country in crisis, seekingto address serious problems. He included ambitious plans, concerning jobs, economic recovery, healthcare, education and energy and the environment. He recognized that realizing the plans would be difficult.

He, along with his allies in the Democratic Party, fought long and hard for healthcare reform. This battle overshadowed much else that was happening in first stage of his administration. The passage of what his opponents call “Obamacare” into law is a singular achievement. I am convinced that in the long run the label will be understood positively. But it certainly wasn’t at first. While much was being done to get the economy going again and to try to create jobs, the controversies around the healthcare reform focused a great deal of his opposition’s and the public’s attention. The Republicans attempted to use it to sink Obama’s presidency, while he worked to make pragmatic reform a reality. They linked healthcare reform with the necessary measures to address the economic crisis, TARP, the stimulus package, and the Auto Industry Rescue, and criticized what they took to be government overreach, politely put, or more aggressively put, the imposition of socialism and worse. The word fascism was casually introduced by Glenn Beck and many others.

There was a strange a-symmetry in public debate. Obama compromised and tried to work with Republicans to achieve a broad bi-partisan agreement on healthcare reform, while he was denounced as an alien-being imposing European socialism on a free society.

Between conservative Democrats (notable that Ben Nelson announced his retirement yesterday) and the united Republican bloc, normal politics proved to be impossible. His liberal critics wanted more, but Obama did everything possible to establish the principle of universal health coverage in the United States. Short of a constitutional challenge, this has been achieved. We observed this here.

Note: most of the media attention has been focused on the news of the passage of legislation and the developing tea party tempest in opposition. But also note that there is a major change in American life. Decent healthcare has been established as a citizen right.

Yet, the political fallout was significant. Obama worked to credit the Democratic House and Senate and his Presidency for this achievement and for the (limited) progress on the economic front. But he was working against the momentum of a major social movement, The Tea Party, and even when he made clear what principles were at stake in powerful partisan speeches, the media tended to not pay attention. It didn’t fit their narrative. They reported on the ups of the right and the downs of the left, Tea Party theatrics, and not Obama’s substantive arguments.

The media focus on short term tactics did anticipate the political contest of the past year, with the high stakes show downs on the debt ceiling and the deficit, taxing and spending. But the long term debate about defining the center of public discussion, which Obama has steadfastly worked on, is again gaining attention. Tactically, this can be and has been explained by Republican overreach and blunders, but it is positively connected to Obama’s leadership and developing social movements concerned with social justice, which I will address in future posts next week (year).

Over the past week, big changes have occurred in the little virtual world of Deliberately Considered. We have put up a changed format that has been on the drawing boards for months. You will note that while now the text of only the most recent post is to be found on the home page, the titles and images of many more posts can be viewed and easily accessed. We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but rushed this week to get it going in response to events just south of my New School office in lower Manhattan, in Zuccotti Park and its neighborhood. We are part of the neighborhood and seek to have neighborly discussions.

The new format provides easier access to more of the unfolding reports, analyses and debates on our site, and allows us to bring forward posts past that continue to address pressing problems, particularly in the editors picks.  And most important now, it will permit us to highlight more intensive investigations of pressing political issues, hoping to inform debate about those issues. Thus, now you will find the continuing posts on Occupy Wall Street.

Elzbieta Matynia and I find the occupation movement to be of great interest. For her, it is a case where her ideas of performative democracy apply. For me, the occupation is a clear case of the power of the politics of small things. We proposed and are now coordinating the Flying Seminar with our intellectual interests  and our previous work together on the Democracy Seminar in East and Central Europe and beyond in mind. As we have already reported, it is off to a quick and extraordinary start. Occupy Wall Street and Shiroto no Ran on Tuesday, Adam Michnik on Saturday. And Deliberately Considered now has a space for the announcement of upcoming sessions of the seminar, for reports on the seminar sessions, including videos of the events, and for what I hope will be sustained ongoing discussions about the issues discussed in the seminar.

And please note how the everyday posting will quite often inform the discussions in the Flying Seminar and, I hope, the discussions and debates in various groups in OWS. This week, in addition to the posts that have directly related to the occupation, Malgorzata Bakalarz reflected on the problem of curatorial practice as it attempts to address large public issues, in her case what she calls nine-elevenism. How we remember 9/11 is key to how a social movement in lower Manhattan is understood. The need to “re-remember” (as Toni Morrison put it in Beloved) the attack of September 11^th may be one of the reasons why OWS is so powerful. Malgo is dissatisfied with how an art exhibition dealt with the problem. I sometimes think that the greatest significance of OWS is that it is a much more successful exhibition. And Anette Baldauf thought about her film on the tragedy of Victor Gruen, a progressive architect and urban planner who designed the shopping mall. He hoped to “combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center” and instead he “integrated living into shopping.” As she walked downtown through Soho, an art center turned urban shopping mall, on her way to visit the occupation, she imagined the city where this tragedy is overturned, where “people come before profit.”

Deliberately Considered is still a place for informed reflection on the events of the day. Now, I hope, we are moving in the direction where we can deepen the reflection and get closer to the events.

I think that the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content, as Scott Beck showed in his earlier post on the occupation. I observe, further, that the way people use social media contributes to this form, as does the setting of the occupation. And I believe deliberating about the movement and connecting the debate to other political, social and cultural activities are keys to the democratic contribution of the movement to broader politics in America and beyond.

Jenny Davis in her post last week makes cogent points about the role of social media in social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Her key observation is very important. Digital activism is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. I would add that it can constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture. This is especially telling as David Peppas and Barbara note in the two comments to Davis’s post, because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of protesting, as well as the act of posting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world differently is what is most needed at this time, to face up to stark social realities that have been ignored and develop the capacity to act on this. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media, while the power of the movement, is quite material. It’s embedded in a specific geography and its link to political culture.

The place of the occupation in an important way contributes to its power. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, to my mind, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement.

Ironically, mine is first of all a “pedestrian observation,” based on very particular experience. In recent weeks, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack, including a stroll on Wall Street. And last week, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

Because it is at the symbolic center, the media are paying attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration is capturing global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. A report yesterday indicates that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces are spreading around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world is watching. Occupations are going global, eminating from ground zero to London, Seoul back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and many points in between.

They have been watching in Gdansk. I was surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there, and surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, is planning on coming to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

“Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.
They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’ ”

The news is spreading through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media are spreading the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

“This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.”

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and much more have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged. Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on fictoids, as we have been observing here at Deliberately Considered over the last year. As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long term power of the newest development on the global stage. As I observed in concluding my comparison between OWS and a social movement in South Korea, the candle light movement, a candle is, indeed, being lit.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S. In practice, for most Americans, the primary significance of the day is as the unofficial last day of summer. I just went for a long swim in my outdoor pool, which closes today.

There are also political and union activities on the labor theme, marking the official reason for the holiday. Thus, President Obama gave a speech today in Detroit to a union gathering, previewing the themes of his long awaited address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, addressing the concerns of organized labor.

This September date as a workers holiday was originally chosen by the Central Union of New York in 1882. It is strange that the rest of the world celebrates May 1^st as the international day of labor, marking the Haymarket Affair of 1886, a scandalous labor conflict in Chicago. During the cold war, the U.S. even officially designated May 1^st as “loyalty day.” The contrast with the practice of the Soviet Union and its allies was essential. The American Labor Day, though, has an equally serious origin. It became a national holiday after the violent events surrounding the Pullman Strike of 1894. American indeed has an important and rich labor history.

I think it is unfortunate that American labor’s celebration is out of sync with the rest of the world. We commemorate alone, which weakens the power of the ritual. Nonetheless, especially now, when labor issues are so central, as President Obama indicated in his speech, it is important to take notice. I recall some previous Deliberately Considered posts.

Rachel Sherman’s “Domestic Workers Gain Visibility, Legitimacy” noted an advance in labor legislation in the state of New York. She highlighted the achievements of the Domestic Workers Union to agitate and achieve some fundamental rights in the new legislation, concerning overtime, vacation leave and protections against sexual and racial harassment. As she also observed the place of American domestic workers in the global economy and the connection between class and gender, she celebrated the work of the union in empowering its members, through educational programs, research and protecting them from abusive employers.

In her reflections upon her play commemorating another key moment in labor history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Cecilia Rubino commemorates the role women workers played in the early American labor movement, mourns the deaths of the victims of the fire and notes how following this catastrophe the citizens of New York demanded and helped enact significant labor, health and safety legislative reforms.  Further, “public outrage over the event galvanized the progressive movement and women’s suffrage, and went on to instigate many of the most important reforms of the New Deal.”

These two posts remind us that unions have played an important role in our history and are still playing the role. There are powerful forces seeking to forget this, as Vince Carduccci’s post on the murals in Maine’s Labor Department explains.  Governor Paul LePage, the Tea Party Governor of the state of Maine, really did remove murals commemorating key events in Maine’s labor history because he viewed them as being biased, i.e., pro labor. Even more striking, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, along with other Republican governors, has actively tried to disempower public employee unions.  We had a first row seat view of the early rounds of the political conflict over labor rights in Madison, Wisconsin, in reports by Anna Paretskaya and Chad Goldberg. One of the most important issues in the upcoming elections will revolve around this conflict.

And as we think about this issue, we can turn to some “new music.” In his two posts thus far (more coming soon), Daniel Goode reflects on the problematic status of new music in our cultural landscape. But by analyzing this, he works against the trend. And I am happy to report that in his “We’ve Been Demoted – Part II, you can find not only his reflections on the struggle of new music composers to find an audience, but you can also listen to his composition, which confronts Wisconsin labor politics. Note that the audio file of this work is now available on the post, and can also be heard below.

In my next review post, I will address the issue of cultural freedom, as it appeared this past week on music and politics. Here we close with a video of the President’s speech in Detroit, more on these issues later in the week.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As a rule, we do not post on weekends. But because of the rapidly approaching hurricane and the likelihood of a power outage, I offer today these thoughts inspired by Michael Corey’s last Deliberately Considered post, celebrating the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the Washington Mall, and by Cornel West’s op.ed. piece criticizing the Memorial and Barack Obama in yesterday’s New York Times. -Jeff

I am not a big fan of Cornel West. I liked and learned from his book The American Evasion of Philosophy, but most of his other books and articles involve, in my judgment, little more then posturing and preaching to the converted (I in the main am one of them). He does not take seriously the challenges political life presents. As he shouts slogans, cheers and denounces, I am not sure that he persuades. His and Travis Smiley’s ongoing criticism of President Obama seem to me to be first personal, then political, more the work of celebrity critics than critical intellectuals. That said, I think West’s op.ed. piece has a point, though not as it is directed against Obama and against the importance of symbolism.

“The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy…

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.”

This is unserious. The two parties are very different, and Obama has clearly been trying to address the needs of the socially and economically abandoned in his battle against the Republicans and so called moderate Democrats in Congress: on healthcare policy, financial regulation and jobs. A debt default would not only have hurt Wall Street and Main Street businesses. It would have profoundly affected the poor and working people for whom West and Smiley claim to be speaking. Perhaps, Obama doesn’t negotiate in the most effective way. Perhaps, he has given in more than was required. But to assert that the two parties “offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule,” is to ignore crucial realistic differences.

Certainly Obama is not a revolutionary, as West imagines he should be, following his particular vision of the King legacy. But, the office of the President is not where social revolutionaries are likely to be found. Revolutions and their revolutionaries, as West, Obama, King and I would agree, are usually elsewhere, particularly in the sustained actions of social movements. They push Presidents, as Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement pushed Lyndon Baines Johnson, and President Kennedy before him.

West blames Obama for one important social movement, The Tea Party. The most eloquent of politicians, in West’s judgment, has failed in his primary story telling responsibility.

“The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.”

Yet, the Tea Party is a radical response to the narrative of inclusion and opportunity that Obama forcefully has presented in his campaign and during his Presidency. The consequential fight against the Tea Party narrative cannot come primarily from the President, as I have analyzed in an earlier post. The fight has had to come from a social movement. Strong opponents of the Tea Party, like West, need to take the movement seriously and need to go beyond the leftist sentiment that whines about Obama’s failings. A movement has to directly oppose the Tea Party and push for different social values, a movement such as the one that seems to be developing since the pro worker confrontations in Madison, Wisconsin and beyond.

Here I agree with West that “extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be” are necessary. I just don’t understand why he imagines this as being something directed against Obama. It should, rather, push him on specific issues, and work against his significant opponents. Clearly, he is likely to bend in favorable ways, while the Republican alternative political leaders will likely continue to resist social change with all the power of the Tea Party behind them.

I also don’t get West’s concern about the symbolism of the new King memorial in DC. He seems to think that there is a choice between symbolism and substance and thinks that King was on substance’s side.

“King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced.”

Yet, King used symbols brilliantly, especially in his speeches, to achieve substantial goals. The monument doesn’t stand against substance, but contributes to the vocabulary of the alternative narrative that West calls for.

Words etched in stone, on the Washington Mall, at the symbolic center of the American Republic, as Michael Corey describes in his last post, provide the opportunity and inspiration for critical discussion such as West’s. He uses the symbolism of the inauguration of the monument to present his criticisms, but denies the importance of the symbol, revealing a limited self-awareness.

In the future, I am rather certain, there will be demonstrations, moving from the Lincoln Memorial, to the King Memorial, perhaps with activity as well at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Indeed, a walk around these places and discussion about the walk will enact and describe the alterative narrative to the Tea Party, as it most certainly will be inspired by King’s vision. And when President Obama takes part in the hurricane postponed official dedication of the monument in a few weeks, I won’t be surprised if he presents a compelling version of this narrative.