Tuesday, November 27th, 2012 
He was meant not to come and he didn’t. Barack Obama decided to make Burma, Cambodia and Thailand his first foreign destinations after his re-election, revealing U.S. foreign policy priorities in the next four years. The American president plainly doesn’t have time for Europe now. It’s not a surprise, but it does require serious European deliberation and critical self reflections.
Historic Visit
Of special significance is above all Obama’s trip to Myanmar – a country under military rule since 1960’s, which until recently invariably occupied the very far end of every possible civil liberties ranking. Myanmar’s position began to change rapidly in 2010 when the new president, Thein Sein, for reasons not entirely clear, initiated democratic reforms and freed thousands of political prisoners, including the most famous regime victim, Aung San Suu Kyi, put under house arrest in 1989 and kept in custody virtually ever since. Suu Kyi was not only allowed to go on a triumphant international tour – in Oslo she finally received the Nobel Peace Prize awarded in… 1991 – but also to run in parliamentary by-elections. In April 2012 her National Democratic League won 43 of 45 seats under contention, thus becoming the largest opposition party. Only a few months after the reforms started, non-governmental organizations and independent media began to operate in a country not so long ago deemed as an “outpost of tyranny”.
And though democratic transformation in Myanmar proceeds quickly, there are still significant problems. Millions of its citizens live in extreme poverty. Hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail. The northern part of the country is being devastated by a civil war against one of many separatist groups. A military coup is an ever-present possibility, and the authenticity of president’s commitment to democracy is still difficult to assess. For these and many other reasons democratic changes in this former British colony may collapse at any time.
That despite all these uncertainties Barack Obama decided to visit Myanmar – becoming the . . .
Read more: President Obama Goes to Asia: The View of a Pole in Oxford
Monday, November 26th, 2012 
On 17 September 2012, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its first anniversary. In spite of the usual problems facing bottom-up political activism in the long term, on which Pamela Brown reported a few months ago, OWS is still alive and kicking. Protest is clearly ‘in’, as the global protests on 14 November 2012 also demonstrated. But social movements and political protest have also made it to the screen, as memories of protest and rebellion reverberated both at the 69th Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with Olivier Assayas’ movie about the French 1968 protests (Après mai), Robert Redford’s interpretation of a former Weather Underground member in The company you keep, and Shola Lynch’s documentary about the black civil rights activist Angela Davis, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.
Characteristic of OWS as well as other recent protests across the world, notably the Arab Spring, is the role of social media and the subsequent global reach of the protests. In Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012), BBC Newsnight economics editor and journalist Paul Mason narrates the course of events in both the Arab world and in a number of European countries since the start of the financial crisis, and analyzes the role and impact of social media in these protests. Starting with the Tahrir Square uprisings, “a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube,” Mason takes us back to the 2008 clashes in Greece and Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ in 2009, when the images of a dying Neda Agha-Soltan – discussed recently on this blog by Lisa Lipscomb – made it across the globe in a matter of minutes. Through citizen journalism, Neda became a “global icon” and a martyr, provoking a “thread of solidarity and collective mourning” both online and in the streets (see also Aleida and Corinna Assmann’s chapter in Memory in a Global Age).
In . . .
Read more: Social Media and Protest in the Age of Globalization
Friday, November 23rd, 2012 
A dozen years back Goodman David Brooks entered the cultural pantheon through an oddly incisive book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The title charmed as Brooks asserted that a new generation of elites was upon us. Living well – not political clash – was the best revenge. What Brooks recognized and what Mitt Romney missed was that aesthetics mattered as much as economic interest in establishing political culture.
I think of Bobos when I assay the broadsheet of Brooks’ current employer, The New York Times. One can count on the editorials of the Times to embrace the most progressive respectable position: the stance of the established Statist elite. And one can count on the adverts in the Times to inspire the warm glow of Veblenian pecuniary emulation. I think of Bobos, too, when I peruse the New Yorker or even such ostensibly apolitical, but fully progressive, sources such as Time Out New York (or, from my prairie perch, Time Out Chicago).
These journals are committed to the goals of redistribution of income, environmental sustainability and ecological responsibility, and rabid, compulsive consumption capitalism. Perhaps there is no inherent contradiction between caring about people and caressing things, but the sections of the paper rarely seem as one. Recently in the Sunday Review, the Times’ editorialists promoted more regulations on health care and financial services, a more welcoming immigration policy with support for new arrivals, and one of their columnists, Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahmbo’s brother, Ezbo) is in high dudgeon about companies providing the wrong snacks for their employees (“an additional serving of potato chips every day led to a 1.69-pound weight increase over four years”). The mandarins of the Times did not comment on sea levels or climate change, but wait.
Along with these exhortations, the Times also delivered a posh 156 page Style Magazine: a testimonial to Ferragamo, the Ritz, and the Caymans. The best of living if living well is the best of life. The two sections as juxtaposed represent the Bobo . . .
Read more: All-Consuming Liberalism
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012 
Now that it’s over, I’ve spent two days reading reactions to the election results on conservative media, from self-proclaimed highbrow platforms like National Review and Human Events to populist platforms like Free Republic. What I see everywhere I look are central and fundamental internal contradictions in the values of the American Right.
On the one hand, the Right maintains an originalist attachment to American-style democracy. One of the most common criticisms made by the Right is that there exist in the U.S. a number of groups (the Left, minorities, gays, atheists and secularists) that seek to impose a policy agenda on the public by non-democratic means—a bad thing, they implicitly argue. They further often argue that the American system has become too open to undemocratic forms of manipulation by these groups, and that the result is an undemocratic society far removed from the intentions of its founders.
At the same time, through two presidential election seasons (but particularly in this most recent one), the Right has also maintained that there are other fundamental “American” values that these groups do not share. Anyone that has paid nominal attention to the campaigns is familiar with this list: limited or no government, self-sufficiency, Judeo-Christian morality, a kind of rugged individualism, the right to bear arms, a kind of practical nativism (integration rather than multiculturalism, limits on immigration, and cultural and demographic change), a particular affirmative conception of religious freedom (that the separation of church and state must create a believer’s right to practice his or her faith according to the dictates of conscience even when this practice imposes constraints, within the context of the policy status quo, on the rights of others), and so on.
In the Right’s estimation, a changing American public simply does not embrace these values in the way that it once did—in better times. What is interesting to me is that this is seen not as a problem with which the Right must come to terms, but rather one . . .
Read more: After 2012: The Troubled Values of the American Right
Friday, November 16th, 2012 
I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.
To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).
Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.
Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).
After . . .
Read more: Truth Defeats Truthiness: Election 2012
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 
I knew when I left for Europe that in all likelihood President Obama would be re-elected, though I was anxious. The stakes were high. If he won, as expected, my return from my few weeks visit would feel like I was truly returning home. If he lost, I would feel like I was venturing to an alien country, one that I had hoped had been left behind, a country trying to revert to a state that didn’t include me, and many others, as full citizens.
A key of the Obama election, presidency and re-election has been inclusion, and the Republicans were pushing back, clearly revealed in their voter ID, voter suppression campaign. The changing demography helps to explain the President’s victory, but his great gift to the country has been to show the country how these changes are our greatest strength. The changing demography plus Obama’s vision go a long way in explaining the election results and the forthcoming changes in the United States.
He did it again in his victory speech as the nation’s storyteller-in-chief. It was a beautiful conclusion to a less than beautiful election. The ugliness of the opposition to Obama left a bad taste in our collective mouths for months, in fact, for years, thanks to the Tea Party, Fox, Rush and company. Obama in his victory speech reminded the American public and the rest of the world to keep our eyes on the prize. I watched on CNN in my hotel room in Warsaw. Today, I watched again with my friends at the Theodore Young Community Center. We decided to share the moment together. We were inspired.
“Our man,” as my dear friend Beverly McCoy speaks of the president, first got our attention, by marking the accomplishment of a free election and celebrating all who took part, linking fundamental political facts with the theme of his campaign, but including those who campaigned against him:
“Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. (Applause.)
I want to . . .
Read more: Coming Home: Demography + Vision = the Re-election of Barack Obama
Tuesday, November 13th, 2012 By Alexander Nachman | 
When analyzing politics and society in the Arab and Islamic world, it is admirable and important to break away from a Western-centered analysis. This move is not sufficient though. There is a temptation to continue to fall back on theories and rhetoric that have emanated from the west and have informed exactly that from which one attempts to break away. Furthermore, when discussing public discourse in the Arab world, it is imperative that one addresses the importance of Islam and its continuing vital role in Arab and Middle Eastern politics, despite Western scholarship’s tendency to suggest a historical end that involves the marginalization of religion. I appreciate Professor Challand’s posts in Deliberately Considered and the admirable move of breaking away from Western-centered analysis, but I think his posts suffer from theoretical temptation and an insufficient appreciation of the role of Islam.
It is true that civil-society is more than “NGOs and the developmental approach which imagines that the key to progress is when donors, the UN or rich countries, give aid to boost non-state actors, in particular NGOs, in the ‘developing south’” as Professor Challand asserts in his post “The Counter-Power of Civil Society in the Middle East.” I believe, though, that one must also conceive of civil-society and democratic institutions as more than a source for “collective autonomy” using other than secular slogans in the tradition of Tocqueville and Hegel.
Writing a history of democracy would have to include analysis such as de Tocqueville’s, but we should also remember that de Tocqueville wrote:
Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Quran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power . . .
Read more: Beyond the West: A Critical Response to Professor Challand’s Approach to the Arab Transformations
Monday, November 12th, 2012 
In this post, Łukasz Pawłowski a contributing editor for Kultura Liberalna, one of the groups I met with while in Poland, offers his reflections on the American elections for a European audience. Pawłowski is currently an academic visitor at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. -Jeff
Barack Obama won re-election, his party managed to hold the Senate, and the House of Representatives is still – exactly as before the elections – dominated by the Republicans hostile to presidential administration. Nothing has changed? By no means, potential changes are more than plenty, but the most important one concerns the American right.
The Republicans, who for the last few years have been leaning heavily to the right, lost the second election in a row, and in their own interests, it is better they rethink this strategy. In a rapidly changing American society this party is becoming, as the political scientist Benjamin Barber told “Kultura Liberalna” magazine, “the face of an already disappearing America – white, protestant, poor and rural.” And indeed, exit polls indicate that Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, 73 of the Asian-American and 93 percent of African American. Given that the share of the first two minorities in American society is increasing dramatically fast, GOP should start thinking of how to appeal to them.
Little better did the Republicans do to captivate other important demographic group – the young. Only 36 percent of American voters between the age of 18 and 29 marked the Romney’s name on their ballots. Obviously this does not mean that in a few years, when these young people entirely replace the now older generations, the Republicans will entirely cease to matter – let’s not forget voters get more conservative with age. Yet, in a society as relatively young as American – in 2010 the median age was 37.2 – winning the presidential election without the support of this age group is hardly possible.
Truly terrible news . . .
Read more: Change is a “Right” Thing Now
Friday, November 9th, 2012 
As I celebrate the glorious re-election of President Barack Hussein Obama, and as New York and my friends and family are still suffering from Hurricane Sandy, and a snowstorm follow-up, I have been in Europe, spending time with my daughter, and her family in Paris, giving a lecture and visiting Rome for the first time, and taking part in public talks in Warsaw and Gdansk on the occasion of the Polish translation of Reinventing Political Culture, offering my commentary on the American elections informed by the book. In Gdansk, I was honored to receive a medal from the European Solidarity Center for my work with Solidarność, and continuing work inspired by its principles.
I have been enjoying the joys of citizenship and patriotic hope, the love of family, and recognition for personal and public achievement. I have learned a lot in many very interesting discussions. I have been very busy, torn with mixed emotions, including a frustrated desire to put my thoughts down for Deliberately Considered. Some quick summary thoughts today; next, a close critical response to the election results and the President’s speech. In brief: Obama excelled once again as “story teller in chief.”
Election Day from afar: having cast my vote weeks ago. In Warsaw, I discussed the events of the day and the project of the reinvention of American political culture. As I have explained in previous posts and analyzed carefully in my book, I believe that Barack Obama is an agent of significant reinvention, changing the relationship between culture and power: the way he has used the politics of small things, his eloquence as an alternative to sound bite political rhetoric, retelling of the American story as one centered on diversity, as he embodies this, and his challenge to market fundamentalism, are the major contours of his transformational politics. On Election Day, I explained that as a social scientist I thought that the transformation that he has started would . . .
Read more: At Home, Abroad: Election Day
Friday, November 2nd, 2012 
As Sandy hit the east coast, many of us were watching the situation closely. This meant watching not only big media but also Facebook and Twitter, where storm-related activity was plentiful. The social media news was personal, reporting on the storm not as a large-scale atmospheric system but as the weather outside the living room window. We know whose power was out, whose wasn’t; we know who saw flooding and who just saw rain; we know who was drinking wine and who was drinking beer. We even know approximately when many went to bed. Stories in big media and even in blogspace, on the other hand, tended toward the documentary: ConEdison transformer explosion on the lower east side; flooding up to 14th Street; partial building collapse on 8th Avenue.
While the latter group may have been much more informative in the conventional sense, the former group was much more illuminating. True, the “news” version of Sandy was formally conventional, but even in the details it was macroscopic and opaque. Each detail in big media was merely a data point supporting the larger context, the bigger story. Eighth Avenue, for example, was just another dot in New York City and, more generally, the Atlantic coast, while on social media, Eighth Avenue belonged to the people living there; it became a geography all its own, rather than a mathematical point in a much larger geography. In the news, Sandy was a national meteorological event. In social media, Sandy was the particular experience of an unusual afternoon and evening by a particular community.
As someone experiencing the event from afar, the difference was stark. It was difficult to emotionally reconcile the two accounts, to see them as treating one and the same reality. It still feels as though the connective tissue linking macronews to microblogging is missing. Where is the ontological middle ground? Does our cultural metaphysics allow for it?
Of particular interest, in any case, were the Sandy photos, which comprised three genres of reporting.
News media images. The news coverage of the event provided the predictable series of disaster shots—cars floating in . . .
Read more: Sandy and Three Genres of “Reporting”
|
A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|