By Jo Freeman, March 4th, 2013 
Several ghosts from the civil rights movement haunted Capitol Hill on February 27, but it was a little unclear how many were the ghosts of CRM past and how many were the ghosts of CRM future. The State of Alabama, where so much civil rights history was made, had built the house from which many of these ghosts came.
On one side of First Street the ghost of Rosa Parks, embodied in a 9-foot-tall statue, waited in the Capitol’s Statutory Hall to be unveiled by President Obama, her political descendant. He was assisted by both party’s leaders while some still-living civil rights activists, a few blood relatives, members of the public and a lot of press crowded the space trying to see.
On the other side, the ghosts of CRM past, present and future were duking it out at the Supreme Court. Shelby County, AL had challenged the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that requires covered jurisdictions to clear any changes in how they conduct elections with the Department of Justice. Its lawyers argued that ghosts of racial sins past had no place in the present. The DoJ maintained that these racial sins were not yet ghosts.
Outside, a couple hundred civil rights supporters rallied on the sidewalk. Some of the speakers soon walked across the street where they had reserved seats in front of the stage in Statutory Hall. The ghosts of CRM present could be seen in the faces of the six elected officials who sat on that stage. The two Republican leaders were both white men. The four Democratic leaders included one white man, one white woman and two black men.
. . .
Read more: Civil Rights Ghosts Haunt Capitol Hill
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, 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
By Elzbieta Matynia, October 25th, 2011 
Like a whole lot of other people, I am trying to get a handle on Occupy Wall Street. It’s obvious that this is a very special movement, but I am trying to figure out what makes it so special. The one-month-old movement is being accused of being unclear, directionless, fragmented, vague, fuzzy. Indeed, it is not made up of disciplined cadres marching with mass-produced banners. It does not have a Central Committee, and though it is an expression of what one Zuccotti Park woman veteran calls an Economic Civil Rights Movement, it stays away from specific demands. These are there, too, but not easy to list or prioritize. It is not just about jobs, not only about mounting poverty, or student debts that now total more than all our credit-card debts; it is not only about corruptibility of the political system, and not only about accountability of the banks and bankers. It is – not unlike the Civil Rights Movement – about something much more fundamental. And I think it has something to do with the way we are locked in to rigid ways of thinking and talking about democracy.
There is nothing new in the observation that we are often imprisoned by language. Language is a conventional system of signs, and if we want to communicate we have to rely on its conventional usage. But there are dimensions and usages of language that, when tweaked a bit, have the capacity either to keep us captive, or to bring in some fresh air, helping us breathe. That we are captives of language, confined within a language that does not serve us any more, is conveyed vividly by Susan George when she says that “cost recovery” is the polite way of saying “make families pay to educate their children.” Indeed, we hear it all the time: education is a very good investment. On the other hand, a pleasantly surprising example of a more refreshing linguistic game comes from Occupy Wall Street: “Yes we camp!”
Something has happened to our thinking and talking about democracy, and we academics are not without guilt here. . . .
Read more: OWS and the Recovery of Democracy
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