Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
 On the left, there has been great disappointment with President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress. The compromise on tax cuts and unemployment benefits announced yesterday underscores this. Nonetheless, I think it is important to remember that this should provoke not only criticism and analysis but also practical action, and that the action should be predicated upon a recognition of accomplishment along with critique.
Many of Obama’s critics from the left, including Martin Plot I’m sure, do recognize the accomplishments of Obama and the Democrats. But they are understandably frustrated with how things are going. While I think we got a much better stimulus package under Obama than we would have under Republican leadership, that’s not saying much.
A significant effort to address structural problems with the economy, including its escalating inequalities, was not forcefully presented and defended as being economically wise and socially just. The attack on the human rights abuses of the Bush era was too quiet at best, nonexistent at worst. Given Martin’s experience with the Argentine dictatorship this is a particularly important point for him. I understand and respect this.
And disappointment goes further: there was no climate change legislation, no immigration reform, and no labor law, making it easier to organize (The Employee Free Choice Act). The Republicans succeeded in blocking numerous legislative actions and now they have control of the House and have the Senate under control, even more than before in the age of the ubiquitous filibuster.
So Plot’s critique is important. Does this prove that the power in the United States is stacked against progressive change? That power is not an empty space as Martin chooses to put it? That the space, where power is exercised, is permanently occupied by corporate power and Republican interests? I think not, primarily because it is easy to imagine things developing differently if the Democrats play their game better, and crucially if Obama had succeeds in (what I take to be his central political project) changing the nature of the center of American politics. Further, I am far from sure that continued failure is on the horizon. Things can turn around.
. . .
Read more: For Disappointed Democrats, Action is the Answer
Sunday, December 5th, 2010
Is democracy in America fundamentally flawed?  Do our political parties offer significant enough political choices? Do they actually engage in consequential political debate, offering alternative political policies? Are we so accustomed to inconsequential elections that our major newspaper confuses real consequential politics with authoritarianism? . These are the questions posed by Martin Plot in the past couple of weeks at DC. I think they are important questions, and I find insight in the answers he presents, but I don’t completely agree with Martin’s analysis. He thinks the democratic party in America may be over. I think it has just begun. Tonight, I will bluntly present my primary disagreement. Tomorrow, I will consider the implications of our differences and add a bit more qualification to my commentary. I welcome Martin’s response and anyone else’s.
First, though, I must acknowledge the insight of his media criticism. I think the Times reporter is inaccurate about politics in Argentina for the reasons Martin presents in his post, and further elaborated in his reply to the post. The reporter may very well hang around the wrong people, listening to critics who are far from unbiased and with questionable democratic credentials. And he may not fully appreciate that fundamental change can occur democratically, with radical changes in social policy, because this has not a common feature of American political life since the 1930s. Such a reporter can’t tell the difference between the democratic, and the authoritarian and populist left.
And when Martin notes that factual lies can persist because they are left unopposed in our fractured media world, in response to my concern about the power of fictoids, I think he is onto something very important.
But I do disagree with Martin’s overall appraisal of Democratic politics and the Presidency of Barack Obama, thus far. Put simply, I am not as sure as Martin is that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have not offered a significant alternative to the Republican Party and the Presidential leadership of former President George W. Bush, both in terms of platform and enacted policy. I don’t deny that “mistakes were . . .
Read more: The Democratic Party’s Over?
Friday, December 3rd, 2010 
WikiLeaks, Fictoids, and Plutocracy
Starting today, on Friday afternoons, I will present reflections on the deliberate considerations of the past week.
 The discussion about WikiLeaks at DC suggested the importance of looking at other dimensions of the problem, not only the issue of whether the release of official secrets serves or undermines immediate political interests, but also what it suggests about fundamental social problems, about the relationship between public and private in diplomacy, and in everyday life, and about what it means for “the big picture,” concerning the prospects for war and peace, and the success or failure of democratic transition from dictatorship and democracy.
I understand and anticipated the critical responses to the conclusion of my post. “I believe WikiLeaks’ disclosures present a clear and present danger to world peace.”
Esther expressed concern that the boldness of my judgment suggested a need to constrain the media. She, Scott and Alias agreed that the danger of the WikiLeaks “dump” was not great. Scott judged that “it’s rather unfair to assume that the US is the only country whose diplomacy can be duplicitous and shady.” And he criticized Alias’s summary judgment, based on the predictability of the revelations, “Oh well.” Scott noted that there are detailed reasons for not being so blasé and cites the possible complications in Afghanistan.
Perhaps I exaggerated, but only a little. Making public what is meant to be private undermines social interaction, whether it be in a family or in diplomacy or anywhere else. I understand why for specific reasons one would want to do that in a targeted way, if the family is dysfunctional and abusive, if the diplomacy is sustaining an injustice. But to reveal secrets just because they are secret makes little sense, since there are necessarily secrets everywhere. That is whistle blowing gone wild. It generally undermines the practice of diplomacy. Not a good thing, because the alternative to diplomacy in solving international conflict is war. And in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, as Elzbieta Matynia considered earlier today, transparency would have insured failure, i.e. the continuation of dictatorship, a violent revolutionary . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review
Friday, December 3rd, 2010 
The ambivalence around the WikiLeaks mission and especially its recent disclosures are understandable (see Jeff’s previous post). On the one hand, it does make us feel that we no longer have to live in a fog called the diplomatic game, that we need no longer be treated like children who for their own protection are excluded from family secrets, and that we the citizens of the world deserve not to be patronized and paternalized by our own governments, and need not concede so much discretionary power to our government officials.
On the other hand, as someone who is living at this moment in post-apartheid South Africa, and works in the archives (of which only a small part is available to the broader public), and who has studied the processes that led to the dismantling of Soviet-style autocracy in Central and Eastern Europe, an apparently widespread schadenfreude about exposing everything to everybody brings shivers. Two very different, but in both cases repressive, regimes in Poland and in South Africa, would not have ended peacefully as they did, if not for lengthy and secret conversations that laid the groundwork for the official public negotiations. Imagine that the secret meetings between Church officials, leaders of the outlawed Solidarity movement, and General Jaruzelski’s government in Poland had been exposed in 1987…….Or that the “talks about talks”, and the meetings between exiled leaders of the ANC and certain members of the ruling nationalist party, had been exposed by WikiLeaks.
Nelson Mandela in 1937
In each case, the negotiations that led to fundamental systemic change and the launching of democratic rule were preceded by an overture, made of many secret meetings. The South African overture began roughly with a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where most of the ANC leaders lived, and was followed by twelve clandestine gatherings in England, gradually building a fragile trust between the key enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals and ANC leaders. . . .
Read more: Privacy and Progress
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 
It’s mystifying to read The New York Times’ coverage of my other polity, Argentina, where the editorial positions seem to be the exact opposite to those of their coverage in the US. On the one hand, in American politics, the attacks on Obama and the Democrats as “totalitarian,” for having attempted and achieved a modest reform of the healthcare system are presented as borderline madness by the Times. But on the other, the progressive, democratic, and successful reformist governments of Nestor Kirchner—from 2003 to 2007—and Cristina Fernandez—since 2007—are accused of “authoritarianism.”
Moreover, the sources quoted when making such accusation are often mediocre conservative political commentators and journalists that would hardly be taken seriously in the US—at least, I think, in The New York Times. In no way less problematic, but perhaps more understandable, due to their sharing social circles with members of financial global institutions, the journalists’ assertions often come straight from “risk consultants” in financial firms. It is never made clear, however, that these are political adversaries of the democratically elected administration and significantly less appreciative of the working of democratic politics, to say the least, than the Argentine government.
While this strange phenomenon at first may seem difficult to understand without resorting to conspiracy theory, a closer examination of Argentine and American politics explains the apparent reporting anomaly. In Argentina the working of democratic politics involved during the period serious conflicts about major issues—such as repealing amnesty laws giving impunity to the 1976-83 human right violations, appointing the most prestigious and independent Supreme Court in the country’s history, astonishingly reducing the national foreign debt in tough negotiations with international financial groups and the IMF, building a strong and democratic Union of South American Nations, and passing transformational laws de-monopolizing media markets, universalizing marriage (gay marriage,) extending social security benefits to millions of uncovered senior citizens, streamlining the path toward citizenship for hundred of thousands of Latin American immigrants, and creating a universal subsidy for children. In contrast, in the United States, we have come . . .
Read more: The New York Times in the Americas
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 
On Nov. 9, Jeff pondered the use of fictitious “facts” presented in the cable political arena–fictoids.
There was once a Chinese correspondent who filed a news story to his hometown newspaper, The Beijing Evening News, by copying an article from an American “newspaper.” A nice show of laziness, as he was not only plagiarizing but also taking his secret source, The Onion, too seriously and his journalistic task not seriously at all.
But you certainly don’t have to be a lazy Chinese correspondent to start spreading urban legends, and sometimes these legends have potentially much more damaging political consequences. Recall the thirty four warships that radio host Glenn Beck said were accompanying president Obama on his trip to Asia? (link) Or, heard about the re-posting of another article from The Onion on FoxNation.com last week without a clear statement from the editors that the source was the satirical paper? (See coverage of the issue at Gawker.)
Some people will say the darndest things in order to get attention, or better yet, to be of influence. Nothing new here. But with the ubiquitous political use of fictoids, one wonders to what extent the misinformation fundamentally damages our traditions of public deliberation. And those who help create and circulate fictoids around the world are often well rewarded: they get a lot of attention, potential influence, and a guarantee that many a media outlet and their guests will spend less time discussing considerably more important issues.
Will the debunking of fictoids contribute to a healthier form of discussion? As noted by earlier DC contributors, our media outlets are fragmented.(See for example Martin Plot’s Oppostion and Truth) It is helpful when Anderson Cooper deconstructs the hollow estimates of the costs of President Obama’s recent Asia trip. (link)
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman even lauded Cooper for having done the country a favor. (link) But isn’t Cooper just preaching to the choir? If you are in the game for the attack and think that the means justify the end, you are not . . .
Read more: 34 Warships and Other Fictoids
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 
Last night in my course on the sociology of Erving Goffman, we discussed the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks. The students generally agreed with me that the publication was inappropriate and politically problematic. I think actually only one person dissented from the consensus. Given the general political orientation of the students and faculty of the New School, this was surprising. We are far to the left of the general public opinion, to the left, in fact, of the political center of the American academic community. Our first position is to be critical of the powers that be.
Why not disclose the inner workings of the global super power? Why not “out” American and foreign diplomats for their hypocrisy? We did indeed learn a lot about the world as it is through the WikiLeak disclosures. On the one hand, Netanyahu apparently is actually for a two state solution, and on the other Arab governments are just as warlike in their approach to Iran as Israel. China is not as steadfast in its support of North Korea and not as opposed to a unified Korea through an extension of South Korean sovereignty as is usually assumed. And the Obama administration has been tough minded in coordinating international sanctions against Iran, as it has been unsteady with a series of awkward failures in closing Guantanamo Prison.
And, of course, The New York Times, yesterday justified publication, mostly in the name of the public’s right to know about the foibles of its government, and also noted today how the leaks reveal the wisdom and diplomatic success of the Obama administration.
Most of the opposition to the release is very specific. It will hurt the prospects of peace in the Middle East. It shows our hand to enemies, as it embarrasses friends. But my concern, shared with my students is that as it undermines diplomacy, it increases the prospects for diplomacy’s alternatives.
In fact, given the social theorist we have been studying, Goffman, it actually is not that unexpected that my students and I share a concern about the latest from WikiLeaks. Goffman studied social . . .
Read more: WikiLeaks, Front Stage/Back Stage
Monday, November 29th, 2010 
In a democracy, power becomes an “empty place,” to use an expression of French political philosopher Claude Lefort. This does not mean that nobody occupies the place of power. Rather it means that those who occupy the place, do so circumstantially, and as a result of the periodic outcomes of the democratic, electoral struggle. That power is an empty place means that nobody can occupy it permanently, that nobody can “embody” it, and that no social group can claim to be entitled to rule.
My question is: in America, can we still consider political power to be the circumstantial result of the democratic electoral struggle?
Obama’s short political journey so far has proven two apparently contradictory facts related to the empty place, in my judgment. On the one hand, he has shown that the American electoral process is still able to make room for unexpected victories, for political actors defying political machineries and early financial disadvantages. On the other hand, however, his victory, together with his party’s victory, giving them ample majorities in both chambers of Congress, have indicated, in my opinion—and in that of most of those behind the famous “enthusiasm gap” between the parties—that neither decision-making nor legislative processes seem to be closely related to the electoral outcomes any longer.
The New York Times’ columnists Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristof have been using the word “plutocracy” in their columns to describe the problem I see. Would it be too strong of a claim to say that we have to take seriously the hypothesis of an at least partial plutocratic re-embodiment of power in America?
Thursday, November 25th, 2010 From the staff of DeliberatelyConsidered, have a happy and safe holiday weekend.
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010 
Thanksgiving is a special holiday, the great American secular celebration: a common ritual, eating of a turkey dinner, almost universally practiced, in all the nooks and crannies of the social landscape. Indians may not be very enthusiastic. The return on their historic hospitality was not very good. And those who are concerned about the Native American place in the national story may have their critical doubts, but still just about everyone takes part or at least is expected to take part, including me. A conversation I had with a good friend earlier in the week reveals what it’s all about.
My pool at the Theodore Young Community Center will be closed from Thursday through Sunday, as there will be no new posts at DC during this extended holiday weekend. Knowing the pool would be closed, I made sure I went today and earlier in the week. I chatted with Beverly McCoy , the receptionist and social center of gravity there, about the upcoming holiday. She explained her preparations.
Today she is driving to her son and his family in Central Pennsylvania. Yesterday and Monday, she was preparing, doing her packing and making the cornbread stuffing, a must for her African American family. Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Bev’s down home stuffing, a specialty of the South.
I have a similar but slightly different expectation at my Thanksgiving dinner at my sister in law, Geraldine’s, place in Brooklyn, across from the museum. She and her husband Bernard will cook the dinner, but one of the necessities is prepared by my other sister in law, Lana, the kugel (the traditional Jewish noodle pudding). As Beverly’s Thanksgiving requires her cornbread stuffing, ours wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Lana’s kugel.
My daughter, Brina, felt this deeply when she was spending her junior year abroad in Paris. When the program director organized a potluck Thanksgiving dinner for the Brown students studying there, Brina immediately thought of the kugel, which was a big success, even as it puzzled the French Thanksgiving guests, a sweet dish that wasn’t . . .
Read more: Thanksgiving, Kugel, and Cornbread Stuffing
|
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
|
