Last week, while observing the nationwide strike on May Day, and also the performance of a sociology student from The New School on Fox News a couple of days later, I wondered about the possibilities and obstacles of reinventing political culture. I was impressed that there was a significant attempt to bring May Day home, and also impressed by powerful media resistance to significant change in our political life.

May Day is celebrated around the world as Labor Day, everywhere, that is, except where it all began, the United States. The holiday commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago and the struggle for decent working conditions and the eight-hour workday. It is an official holiday in over eighty countries, recognized in even more. Yet, until this year, it has been all but ignored in the U.S., except by those far to the left of the political mainstream. Thus, the calls by people associated with Occupy Wall Street for a nationwide general strike was notable, and it was quite striking that there were nationwide demonstrations including many in New York, capped by a large a mass demonstration at Union Square Park, right near my office. Not only leftists were there. Mainstream labor unions were as well. In many ways, I found the gathering to be as impressive as the ones I saw in Zuccotti Park last fall. Yet, it did not attract serious mass media attention.

The New York Times was typical. It had a careful article on May Day in Moscow, but reported the American actions as a local story, focused on minor violence, arrests and traffic disruptions.

The events’ significance did not reach beyond those who immediately were involved or who were already committed to its purpose through social media. Where OWS broke through to a broad public in its initial demonstrations downtown in the Fall, it failed to do so on May Day in demonstrations that were both large and inventive. Beyond the violence of the fringe of those involved in the movement and the provocative actions of police, and beyond traffic disruptions, the first major American May Day demonstrations in years were pretty much invisible to the general public, other than those who were already convinced of their importance before the fact and those who were quick to dismiss and demonize them. The demonstrations in Zuccotti Park resonated. May Day didn’t. As Daniel Dayan would put it, the task of monstration, of showing a broader public, on May Day failed, and things even got worse, apparent right here at Deliberately Considered.

On May 3rd, I noticed a lot of activity here. An old post was getting many hits, and there were unusual replies being posted. At least at first, the character of the replies was upsetting, not with the deliberately considered tone. The post was by Harrison Schultz on his experiences as an Occupy Wall Street activist, and the replies were aggressively and vilely critical. -“They are just a bunch of little crying little girls. Grow up have some nads and get a job,” “Fucking Retard !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” “You my friend are an idiot. I’m I feel sorry for people like you.” “What a Dipshit you are. Good luck working at Starbucks after Grad school. RTARD!!!” and the like.

I was at first puzzled, but soon realized that Harrison had appeared that evening on the Sean Hannity show and Hannity fans googled Harrison and were using Deliberately Considered to give him a piece of their minds (if that is what it was).

I initially wanted to delete these comments because they clearly run counter to our comment policy and represent all that I oppose when it comes to political debate. But because of some technical problems, I couldn’t, and, after thinking about it for a bit, I decided that the comments should remain because they so clearly reveal a very significant cultural problem. They are a part of the Fox script, which I fear Schultz couldn’t escape.

Schultz went on Hannity and tried to do unto Hannity what Hannity would do unto him. Harrison came out aggressively, attacking Hannity for labeling him as a radical hippy. Hannity responded in kind, and for his audience, the exchange demonstrated the truth of all their preconceived notions about OWS and those who would dare to criticize the prevailing political and economic order. To be sure, on Harrison’s Facebook page, his friends congratulated him for standing up to the man, though some, including me, had doubts. Clearly, for the convinced, Hannity and Schultz were applauded by their supporters (with Schultz’s numbering in the hundreds, Hannity’s in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions). Clearly, Hannity solidified his viewers opinions about May Day and OWS. Harrison did not break through. The comment by David Peppas to the Deliberately Considered replies gets to this central point cogently.

The May Day demonstrations presented Hannity with an opportunity to vilify OWS and Hannity played his role. And the dominant mass media, such as the Times, didn’t recognize and show the demonstrations, didn’t even explain why they had been called and their deep historical significance. If I weren’t as a matter of principle the last one to recognize a conspiracy, I might suggest that there is one.

More on this later this week

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 to expect very little change coming from administrations from the left of center of the political spectrum. In Argentina, the victory of the democratic left led to real changes, in the U.S., less so, revealing a fundamental problem.

Would it thus be too strong a claim to say that The New York Times’ coverage of Latin American politics is over-determined by an expectation that power is no longer an empty place, in the sense of Lefort, as I explored in my previous post?  Would it be too strong a claim to say that democratic politics seem authoritarian from a perspective no longer expecting, or even accepting, successful political agency from our elected leaders?

A reasonably deliberate reader of the New York Times might have been flummoxed by an article that appeared last month on the front page.  The article, titled, Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent, tells many moral tales simultaneously – none of them thoroughly, none of them systematically.

Beginning with the story of a raid by plainclothes Russian police on the environmental group, Baikal Environmental Wave’s headquarters (confiscating the group’s computers to search for pirated Microsoft software), the article presents no fewer than five topics and themes for the reader to consider.  Among these are political corruption and abuse of power in contemporary Russia, capitalism’s dilemmas dealing with piracy, Microsoft’s complicity with authoritarian governments in trumped-up “crackdowns” on software piracy, problems of unemployment in Siberia and the re-opening of a paper factory in Irkutsk, and the pollution of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake, by just such factories.

A long article, continuing on an inside page and including three photographs (one of dead fish on the banks of the lake) and one chart, the article promises an in-depth report of a significant story.  But what is the story?

Normally, newspapers neatly divide the world of news into pre-ordained categories of experience – International News, National News, Sports, Business, Health and Science, Home, Arts and Leisure.  These divisions give us readers an illusion of clarity and coherence when absorbing information about real-world events.  But events are complicated and don’t come in pre-packaged categories.  So on the one hand, kudos to the New York Times for short-circuiting the readers’ expectations.

But on the other hand, the story also short-circuits the reader’s ability to make critical connections among the issues inelegantly tumbled together (capitalism, authoritarianism, unemployment, and environmentalism), or the ability to move upward to a higher level of analysis, and to critique the assumptions of a world-view that, in spite of its acknowledgment of political dissent, is never troubled by the imperatives of capitalism itself.

Here, David Harvey’s book, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference is a useful interlocutor.  Harvey aims to do precisely what the article avoids – to ask questions that connect Siberian workers’ need for industrial jobs with the dangers of pollution of Lake Baikal, with the global dominance of Microsoft, with capitalism’s contingent complicity with political authoritarianism.  Through an analysis of the philosophical and political roots of both socialist thought and environmentalist thought, Harvey sets out to answer the question: “how did we arrive at this seeming impasse in which the struggle for emancipation from class oppressions appears so antagonistic to the struggle to emancipate human beings from a purely instrumental relation to nature?”

Of course, Harvey’s question allows us to make sense of the “Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent” article in one way only.  There are other angles of vision, to be sure, including that exploring ongoing challenges for “post-authoritarian” societies to be truly post-authoritarian.  The point is that deliberate readings of confusing media reports take effort and time and a willingness to engage in a reconfiguring reading.  They require, in other words, theoretically informed deliberation.