On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.

Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.

Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.

Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.

While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.

I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the emotions will affect political choice will play a big role in the coming elections. How is it that public personalities that I find so repulsive are actually attractive to my fellow citizens? I can more easily accept my policy differences with Tim Pawlenty than I can listen to Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. I hope the majority of my compatriots feel the same way, but I worry about this arena of feelings. It is one thing to recognize that feelings matter. Its quite another for them to run wild, as in the xenophobic birther movement.

Mine is not always a reasonable response, I admit, and I try to fight against this. I have been looking for conservative thinkers and public figures to respect, without much success. I have sought out conservative contributors to our discussions and hope for more success in this regard. I think that there is an underlying serious debate about the public good occurring in American politics, but I am perplexed how ideological certainty and willful ignorance of facts seems to be the price of admission into Republican presidential politics. Not one of the Republican presidential hopefuls would agree to reduce the deficit if it included minimal tax cuts. This indicates that they are either ignoring hard budgetary realities or that their ideological project is to radically reduce the role of the state, far beyond the expectations of the general public.

The Republicans have included the extreme right into their mainstream ranks. As a committed partisan, I believe that this will lead to Obama’s reelection and a more Democratic Congress. I also hope that as a result a more reasonable opposition emerges. As an analyst of politics and the human comedy, I fear that my partisan self may be mistaken. Fictoids have power. True belief can be convincing. Calm deliberate leadership can look weak, and the economy is stagnating, thanks to global forces, but also to American politics gone wild. Reason, imagination and feelings may be destructively interacting.

In my book, The Cynical Society, published in 1991, I had a simple project. I sought to show that along with the manipulation and cynicism of contemporary politics and political reporting, there was ongoing real principled democratic debate in American society. I criticized one dimensional accounts of American society that saw the debate between Ronald Reagan and his opponents, for example, as being about his personality and theirs, the interests he served and they served, and the manipulative strategies of both sides. They didn’t recognize that fundamental issues in American public life were being debated, specifically about the role of the state in our economy. I worried that people who didn’t like the prevailing order of things confused their cynicism with criticism, and in the process resigned from offering alternatives. My posts this week were extensions of that project to our present circumstances.

I attempted to illuminate the ways in which Barack Obama’s Presidency was and still is about fundamental change in my first post, and I tried to illuminate the terrain of principled political debate in my second post, additionally accounting for Obama’s position. America is a cynical society, but it is also a democratic one. A rosy colored view is naïve, while an exclusively dark one is enervating. I insist on understanding both dimensions.

But as the host of Deliberately Considered, I am learning and expanding my understanding. My two dimensional picture is limited and conceals some important matters, specifically the emotional dimension. We should keep in mind that we don’t only act on principle and reason and pursue our interests with strategies that are sometimes manipulative. We also act out and upon our emotions, as James Jasper explored in his posts a couple of weeks ago, and Gary Alan Fine has analyzed as well. Indeed Richard Dienst’s “bonds of debt,” that Vince Carducci reports on, are more emotional than rational, highlighting the connection between attachment, indebtedness and power, making it so that breaking the bank is a good thing. This is an imaginative act, working on emotions, revealing alternatives. I have my concerns about such thinking, skeptical as I am about utopias, but I understand how they can work reasonably to illuminate and form the basis of criticism.

Vittorio Arrigoni

But there is a much darker side to emotional politics revealed in Benoit Challand’s post and the discussion which followed. Emotions and emotional dispositions are part of the explanation for the assassination of Vittorio Arrigoni and our reaction to it. Chiara questioned Benoit Challand’s account when it came to the assassins. His suggestion that Salafists were responsible was not convincing. She felt that those responsible for killing a pacifist must have an overpowering reason and noted that “as Kant reminds us, human beings are not devils.” Yet we received a reply from Gaza which answered her assertion, poignantly explaining“to kill you do not need a reason you need to lose one,” affirming that the killer may very well have been a Salafist.  Chaira confidently maintained that we will know the identity of the killers if we can discover who could not tolerate what he was saying and who benefited from his silence. And then in a reply quite untypical, for its brevity and certainty, on this blog, Inggaw declared “This is an Israel move.” The ungrammatical sentence suggests that this reply also may be from Gaza or the region.

Although press reports emanating from the Hamas authorities in Gaza do suggest that this was a Salafist operation, gone bad, I don’t think we can know for sure at this distance. What is noteworthy in terms of our theme of the week is that what people “know” is as much a product of their emotional state as a product of their reason, and that this is an important if difficult part of the political situation in Israel – Palestine. To overlook this dimension means to not understand it. This has been revealed in some earlier posts coming from the region and will be explored in the future.

Keiko Fujimori

This dark emotional dimension of politics may play a decisive role in the upcoming second round elections in Peru and was evident in the first round, Rafael Narvaez reported in his post this week. Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a thief, her father, Alberto Fujimori, complicit in a regime of torture, may be elected, with a primary end of freeing her father from prison. She is not a rational choice, but one arising from a deep and dark emotional place. Narvaez speculates: “The Fujimoris of the world fit the almost Jungian image of the obscene, emasculating, and yet seductive father.” To ignore such emotional politics is to ignore the appeal and to turn away from confronting the horrors of authoritarians of all different sorts, archetypically from Hitler to Stalin. But clearly this is an emotional side that must be constrained and answered with alternatives.

Donald Trump

An assassination in Gaza and the possible return of a corrupt and brutal Peruvian regime, or at least the toleration of criminals associated with that regime, seems quite distant from New York, where I write this review. Yet, this dark side of politics clearly plays an important role here as well. How else can I explain Donald Trump’s remarkably high polling among potential Republican Presidential candidates, apparently at the top of the heap as he bizarrely escalates the attacks against Barack Obama, as the worst President in American history, an illegitimate office holder, born in Kenya? It seems to be a joke, but with public support emanating from an irrational emotional place, such jokes can become deadly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we reflect upon the dramatic political developments in North Africa and the Middle East, and as we anticipate a tough political battle in the United States about the budget and the role of government, James M. Jasper, a sociologist of social movements, emotions, and strategy, reminds us in this post and in another tomorrow that politics and public debate are  not only reasoned. They also have an emotional side that must be critically understood. – Jeff

Emotions matter in politics. This is evident at home and abroad. In the last two years, we have seen American citizens shouting at their own Congressional representatives in town hall meetings, a hateful Jared Loughner attempt to assassinate his own representative, and a million Egyptians assemble in Tahrir Square and topple a repressive regime.This leads to a pressing question: What emotions matter and help mobilize political action?

A sense of threat and urgency, anger and indignation (which is morally tinged anger), sometimes a desire for revenge, and, on the positive side, hope that the dangers can be resisted – one of the most effective ways to pull these together is to find someone to blame. If there is no one to blame, collective mobilization lacks a focus. It is more likely to be the kind of cooperative endeavor we see after natural disasters: shock, but no politics. And the more concrete and vivid the perpetrators, as the case of Hosni Mubarak showed, the more focused and intense the outrage.

In such mobilization we see the “power of the negative”: negative emotions grab our attention more than positive ones. The events in Egypt and Libya suggest that the power of the negative is increased when hatred, rage, anger, and indignation are focused against one person. Most revolutionary coalitions are held together only by this outrage over the old ruler or regime. It is hard to question the mobilizing power of such feelings, whether the mobilization is for voting in elections or efforts at revolution.

But are there other ways to mobilize large numbers of people? In the US, Democrats’ electoral campaigns, and especially Obama’s, are full of reasoned arguments, based on empirical evidence, with a regard for fiscal responsibility and logical coherence. They mostly avoid nasty frontal attacks on opponents, such as the gun lobby, bankers, or other potential targets. As Dr. Phil might ask, “How’s that working for you?”

The strong Democratic showing in 2008 might reinforce our civilized sense that rational discourse, buttressed by the opinions of experts and especially economists, can prevail even in a nation where a solid third of the electorate believes in the literal truth of the Christian Bible. But did the Democrats win because of their reasoned arguments? Or because the elections occurred during one of the nation’s worst financial collapses ever? (Even eight years of the worst president in US history might not have been enough without the economic crisis.) Let’s not fool ourselves. In normal times an articulate “egghead” like Obama could not win.

2010 was a more typical election in the United States.

Since Plato and Aristotle, commentators have feared strong emotions in public debate. They have twisted their logic to defend rhetoric and democracy even while recognizing the power of emotions. They distinguish between good and bad rhetoric, thinking and feeling, or real and sham democracy. There is no way around it: democratic procedures can lead to results that no one likes – and certainly not the intellectuals who write about such things.

In the United States, Democratic politicians are rarely as cutthroat as their Republican opponents, who simply do not believe in democratic procedures as much as they believe in the substance of outcomes. For instance, Republicans continually attack the legitimacy of the judicial branch – until they need it to steal elections as in 2000. But one result of the Democrats’ decency is that they lose elections even when the majority agrees with their positions. Another downside of decency is that the Democrats lost an opportunity to use the financial meltdown of 2007-2009 to make the kind of structural reforms we desperately need. And the reason is their unwillingness to pin the blame on anyone too directly. If the Democrats could not make financiers and hedge fund managers into robust villains after the meltdown, they are simply not political beasts. They will never have a better chance to fix our financial system.

The emotional dynamics differ somewhat for voting and for protest movements. The organizational structure for the former is already there, so that a small emotional push can move people to vote: it is easy to do. Participating in a longer-term movement requires the creation of networks and organizations and communications and other infrastructure in addition to the arousal of emotions. In voting, the power of the negative helps explain the “pendulum of threat” that moves back and forth: one side wins, the other side feels threatened and mobilizes more energetically in the next election, and so on.