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.

I know from personal experience about the long-run suffering inflicted by gun deaths. I was not quite three years old when my father was killed, in November, 1945, by a fellow American soldier test firing a souvenir Lugar in the barracks. He had survived the war, but not the peace that followed. That shot has echoed down the decades in my family. I think I can still faintly hear it today, nearly 70 years later.

The cruelty of gun deaths comes partly from their absurd randomness. When I was a child, I imagined that my father was a war hero who had been killed in combat.  (How else could he have died?)  When I was an adolescent, I learned that the US Army reported that he was shot in a room where “men were working on guns.”  Later still, due to my mother’s obsessive persistence, we learned the even more prosaic truth:  he was seated, playing cards, when the unanticipated recoil of the Lugar directed a shot meant for the floorboards across the room and into his back.

Survivors of such capricious deaths cannot help being tormented by thoughts of alternative realities. In the case of my father:  If only the shooter had aimed in a different direction or taken into account the powerful recoil. If only the shot had gone twelve inches to the left (or the right). If only my father had been demobilized earlier.  If…if…if… Not far behind such thoughts lies the guilt felt by survivors.  For my mother, there was guilt about my conception. If only I had been born earlier, my father might not have been drafted in the first place.

My mother was haunted all her life by this death. Never able to find relief, she eventually took her own life, stipulating that she was to be buried beside her first husband.  Remarriage could not give the succor she needed:  As a Catholic woman with a young child, she faced a limited field of choice in the immediate post-war years, since a shortage of marriageable men was the inevitable consequence of the war. Her second marriage, to a man who had already been divorced twice (one more than she knew when she married him), lasted only six years, but left her with two more boys to raise. There was no further hope of companionship.

Premature deaths twist the emotional lives of families in ways that are very hard to discern, let alone straighten out. The familial black hole created by my father’s death, combined with my physical resemblance to him even as a child, meant that the adults around me encouraged me to see myself as his heir, an identification that I embraced eagerly, with little ability to anticipate all its implications. My father was described by all who knew him as a handsome, intelligent man, the first of his immigrant Sicilian family to try his luck in the American mainstream. In the abstract, not a bad example to follow.

The full meaning of this identity came home to roost during my 20s, when I was beset by intensifying anxieties and depression. As I approached 30, the age when my father was killed, I was visited by night terrors and the dread of early death. My understanding of what I was going through was limited (despite psychotherapy), and I perceived myself as mentally and physically ill. It was only when relief set in during my early 30s that I began to comprehend how my torment was connected to a death more than a quarter century in the past.

I feel I can now, at the age of 70, declare that the wounds that stem directly or indirectly from that gun death have healed.  It took many years of psychotherapy, and a very loving marriage. But based on my family’s experience, I think I am safe in predicting that for most of the survivors of recent gun massacres, in Aurora, Newtown, and now Webster, NY, the sadness will never fully dissipate.

My experience has led me to strong, strong support for gun control. A civilized society doesn’t allow private individuals to gather weaponry so that they can wreak violence on unsuspecting fellow citizens. The only sane course is to restrict access to very lethal weaponry such as automatic guns and to require the same sort of regulation of gun owners that we require of car drivers.

As a social scientist, I am trained to understand the way things actually work and to avoid projecting idealizations onto the social world.  The vision of the National Rifle Association and its supporters, of near-universal armament, so that for instance guards (or even teachers) can shoot it out in school hallways with intruders, is such an idealization. There is in fact no existing society that is so heavily armed (aside perhaps from the Jewish settlers on the West Bank, but is this an example we should want to follow?). Hence, the NRA project is based on a theory about how such a society would work, not the evidence of how one really does work.

In truth, we are already the most heavily armed society that has ever existed.  Currently, some 300 million guns are in private hands in the United States, almost one for every person living in our borders.  If widespread gun ownership inhibited violence, we should be a very safe society. But we are not:  We suffer a much higher rate of homicide due to guns and much more frequent gun massacres than any other western society. In comparison to some countries with very restrictive laws, such as Great Britain, the disparities approach a hundredfold.

The NRA and many of its supporters imagine a society of massive gun ownership, peopled by responsible armed citizens who use their weapons only to protect themselves, their families and their neighbors. A realistic glance at how weapons are actually figure in daily life in the United States exposes the fantastical aspects of this idea. Instead of prudent shooters, we have, just to take examples from recent months: parents who kill their children by accident, as happened when a gun being sold by a father discharged in the truck where his son was riding; individuals who use guns in ambiguous, but ultimately resolvable situations on the principle of “better him than me,” such as the killing of Trayvon Martin; and others who, in a moment of fury, impulsively shoot, as in the killing of a black teen in Florida over loud music.

In an ordinary year, some 30 thousands Americans are killed by guns (most, admittedly, by suicide), and 75 thousand are injured. Our overall rate of gun deaths (per 100,000) places the U.S. in the top 15 nations worldwide, just behind South Africa and not far below Mexico.

I acknowledge that, in a country drenched with weapons, meaningful gun control will not be easy to achieve. But the idea that the proliferation of guns forces the rest of us to arm ourselves moves us further in the direction of an insane, unworkable vision. More guns will not protect us, but worsen the violence and spread the suffering of gun deaths.