By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 1st, 2013 
Obama’s deeds don’t always match his words. Thus, he is a hypocrite and worse: a corporate stooge, the commander and chief of the prison industrial complex, and a war criminal. This is the sort of judgment one hears from the left. It seems this was the ground of Cornel West’s recent expression of self-righteous anger. And this, I believe, is all the result of a lack of understanding about the relationship between politics as a vocation and the art of protest.
In my last post, I expressed my indignation, my criticism of West and this sort of criticism (not for the first time, and certainly not the last). It is with the same concern that I have regretted the lost opportunities of Occupy Wall Street, which had real prospects to expand its influence, but fled instead, for the most part, into utopian fantasies and irrelevance. In Weber’s terms OWS activists chose completely the ethics of ultimate ends and fled responsibility, the articulation of the dreams over consequential actions. For me personally, the saddest manifestation of this was in the events of Occupy New School and its aftermath. Students and colleagues posturing to express themselves, to reveal their sober judgment of the realistic or their credentials as true radicals had little or nothing to do with the important ideas and actions of OWS, centered on the concerns of the 99% and the call for equality and a decent life for the 99%.
But my hope springs eternal. Perhaps with Obama’s new inauguration the protesters will get it.
A friend on my Facebook page summed up the problem. “It’s really difficult to be on the left of the current White House in the US nowadays.” Apparently hard, I think, because both easy full-throated opposition and full-throated support don’t make sense. Binary opposition is off the table. Struggles for public visibility of political concerns and consequential action are the order of the day. It’s difficult but far from impossible. Politicians will do their jobs, well or poorly, but so will social protesters. . . .
Read more: Guns and the Art of Protest: Thinking about What is to be Done on the Left
By Vince Carducci, December 14th, 2012 
A couple of days after the November 6 election, my New School pal Sam Binkley posted this comment on his Facebook page:
“As I see it, the occupy movement deserves a lot of credit. Nobody was talking about economic inequality before fall ’11, but after all the media coverage of the various occupy groups, that theme became a fixture of the liberal and democratic narrative right up to the election, and remained a staple of Obama and other campaigns. Did I hallucinate that or did it happen?”
He didn’t elaborate on this sentiment, which he could have easily done from his perspective as a cultural sociologist, and perhaps he did in another context and I just didn’t know about it. But I believe he’s right. So I’d like to take a detour from my normal blogging beat to explain.
New Social Movement theory as laid out by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato in their authoritative text Civil Society and Political Theory (MIT: 1994) can be seen to have four distinct phases of political action, which I call the four “I’s.” (Cohen and Arato use slightly different language but I feel that the alliteration has value as a mnemonic device.)
The first is identity, coming out as it were to declare one’s right to openly exist in the public sphere. The individuals who physically showed up in the place originally known as Liberty Plaza Park in Lower Manhattan on September 17, 2011, in the opening episode of the Occupy movement, to protest growing social and economic inequality in the United States, embraced such a political identity. That public intellectuals such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Zizek and celebrities such as Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Deepak Chopra, among others, put in appearances with the Occupy crowd further raised the profile.
The identity position of Occupy soon spread to other parts of the country and then around the world, leading to the second phase, namely, inclusion. In this phase, identity (in social theory lingo, subjectivity) establishes a collective aspect. More and more individuals . . .
Read more: Occupy the White House
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 8th, 2012 
In Reinventing Political Culture, I argue that there are four components to Barack Obama’s project in reinventing American political culture: (1) the politics of small things, using new media to capture the power of interpersonal political engagement and persuasion, (2) the revival of classical eloquence, (3) the redefinition of American identity and (4) the pursuit of good governance, rejecting across the board condemnations of big government, understanding the importance of the democratic state. I think that there is significant evidence for advances on all four fronts. The most difficult in the context of the Great Recession was the struggle for good governance, but now the full Obama Transformation, responding the Reagan Revolution, is gaining broad public acceptance.
The election was won using precise mobilization techniques. Key fully developed speeches by the President and his supporters, most significantly Bill Clinton, defined the accomplishments of the past for years and the promise of the next four. Obama’s elevation of the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum (in diversity union), defining the special social character and political strength of America, has won the day. And now, the era of blind antipathy to government is over.
The pendulum has finally swung back. The long conservative ascendancy has ended. A new commonsense has emerged. Obama’s reinvention of American political culture is rapidly advancing. The full effects of the 2012 elections are coming into view. The promise of 2008 is being realized. The counterattack of 2010 has been repelled. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, right in front of our eyes, and we should take note that it is adding up. Here is some evidence taken from reading the news of the past couple of days.
It is becoming clear that Obama’s tough stance in the fiscal cliff negotiations is yielding results. The Republicans now are accepting tax increases. Signs are good that this includes tax rates. A headline in the Times Friday afternoon: “Boehner Doesn’t Rule Out Raising Tax Rates.” A striking shift in economic policy is apparent: tax the rich before benefit cuts for the poor, government support for economic growth. . . .
Read more: The Reagan Revolution Ends! Obama’s Proceeds!
By Andrea Hajek, November 26th, 2012 
On 17 September 2012, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its first anniversary. In spite of the usual problems facing bottom-up political activism in the long term, on which Pamela Brown reported a few months ago, OWS is still alive and kicking. Protest is clearly ‘in’, as the global protests on 14 November 2012 also demonstrated. But social movements and political protest have also made it to the screen, as memories of protest and rebellion reverberated both at the 69th Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with Olivier Assayas’ movie about the French 1968 protests (Après mai), Robert Redford’s interpretation of a former Weather Underground member in The company you keep, and Shola Lynch’s documentary about the black civil rights activist Angela Davis, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.
Characteristic of OWS as well as other recent protests across the world, notably the Arab Spring, is the role of social media and the subsequent global reach of the protests. In Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012), BBC Newsnight economics editor and journalist Paul Mason narrates the course of events in both the Arab world and in a number of European countries since the start of the financial crisis, and analyzes the role and impact of social media in these protests. Starting with the Tahrir Square uprisings, “a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube,” Mason takes us back to the 2008 clashes in Greece and Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ in 2009, when the images of a dying Neda Agha-Soltan – discussed recently on this blog by Lisa Lipscomb – made it across the globe in a matter of minutes. Through citizen journalism, Neda became a “global icon” and a martyr, provoking a “thread of solidarity and collective mourning” both online and in the streets (see also Aleida and Corinna Assmann’s chapter in Memory in a Global Age).
In . . .
Read more: Social Media and Protest in the Age of Globalization
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 3rd, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to “Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Digital Age” by Lisa Lipscomb, click here.
In today’s In-Depth post, which was presented at this year’s American Sociological Association Meeting in Denver, Lisa Lipscomb extends Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz analysis of media events to the new media and the new political environment. I am struck by how the analysis of Dayan and Katz still illuminates important political developments, and also appreciate how Lipscomb extension gives a fuller understanding of media politics of our day. Their work still shows how institutionalized democracy is significantly constituted through television. She shows how extra institutional democratic forces, contributing to what Pierre Rosanvallon describes as counter-democracy, are manifested through Digital Events of the new electronic media.
Thus, the main events of this week and last: using the insights of Dayan and Katz, it is clear that the nominating conventions are anything but empty affairs. It is true that these conventions have long ago lost their instrumental purposes: before the fact everyone knew who the candidates for president and vice president would be, and the party platforms developed and passed at the conventions are ignored by the electorate and the politicians alike. Yet, the conventions still play a very important political role, ritualistically indicating that the election contest is now entering its decisive stage, and that it is now the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their party (to paraphrase the old typing drill).
Indeed, the nominating ritual confirms both the substantial existence and appeal of and the attachment to each of the parties. They try to refine and shape their message and appeal, and in the process, they define the terms of the American political contest and debate. In societies of the past, such rituals occurred face to face: not only in conventions and politics, but also in processions, coronations, funerals and holidays of all sorts, reported first by . . .
Read more: Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Digital Age (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 10th, 2012 
As I observed in my last post, I think that an OWS focus on debt, as Pamela Brown has been advocated, makes a lot of sense. We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar. I continue to think about that discussion and how it relates to American electoral politics.
The issue of debt provides a way to keep focus on the frustration of the American Dream as it is part of the experience of many Americans, from the poor to the middle class to even the upper middle class. It is an issue of the concern of the 99%.
Yet, there are many activists in and theorists observing the movement who council against this, such as Jodi Dean. Debt is too individualized a problem. It would be better to focus on an issue of greater common, collective concern (e.g. the environment). The issue of debt is too closely connected to the right wing concern about deficits, and criticism of student debt can too easily become a criticism of higher education.
This presents a serious political problem. There is no broad agreement on debt as the central issue, and no leadership structure or decision making process which can decide on priorities. And of course, there are many other issues of contention. Primary among them, in my judgment, is the question of the relationship between OWS and American electoral politics.
It is here where the activists in OWS, like their new “new social movement” colleagues in Egypt and the Arab world more generally, are not prepared for practical politics. Coordinated strategy is beyond their capacity. One faction’s priority, debt or the reelection of President Obama, is not the concern of another’s, or even a position which it is forthrightly against. There are too many different positions within the movement for it to present a coherent sustained position. People with very different positions were able to join with each other and act politically thanks to the new media, but also thanks to that media, they were not required to work out their differences . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: Occupy Wall Street, Debt and Electoral Politics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 8th, 2012 
I am still jet-lagged, or is it a cold? I can’t tell. Whatever it is, I have not been up to par for the past few weeks. The trip to Europe, including visits with my daughter and her family in Paris and the seminar in Wroclaw, was more challenging than expected. Naomi, my wife and Deliberately Considered’s Art and Design Editor, and I slowed down in our posting. But now, we are back. I expect to regain my strength, and you, dear Deliberately Considered readers, can expect in the coming weeks more posts on Wroclaw and on American and global politics and culture. Here, today and tomorrow, my thoughts on OWS responding to the discussions at the Wroclaw seminar. -Jeff
The starting point of the Wroclaw Seminar was Occupy Wall Street. It then served as our primary case for comparative investigation throughout and informed our final conclusions. Seminar participants Pamela Brown and Sidney Rose suggested additional readings for the seminar when we focused on OWS — Rose on the link between Anonymous and OWS. She was particularly interested in the online pre-history of OWS. Brown, an Occupy activist, was focused on the present challenges and recent accomplishments of the movement.
Rose suggested a piece describing an embrace between Cornell West, the philosopher, social critic and activist, and Gregg Housh, a leading figure in the shadowy group, Anonymous, at an occupy demonstration in Boston. This informed our discussion about the virtual infrastructure that supported the embodied occupations. As we tried to understand what is special about the new “new social movements,” the interaction between virtual and the embodied was a topic we knew we needed to explore.
We discussed how events in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with virtual actions, led to Occupy Wall Street, and sparked a global social movement wildfire. Following the Arab Spring, OWS developed with an Adbusters initial proposal to occupy wall street on September 17, 2011 , supported by politicized hackers such as those associated with . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: New Media and the Persistence of OWS
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 2nd, 2012 
Social movements create publics. They make it possible for people to express and act on their common concerns together. This creativity of movements has not fully appreciated. It has a long history, and it is also a key characteristic of the new “new social movements.” We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar, moving from history to the study of the movements of our times.
Our discussion reminded me of the work of one of my former students, Angela Jones. Her dissertation, now a book, is on the Niagara Movement, which preceded the NAACP. The movement established the first national forum for the discussion of African American concerns by African Americans. Until very recently, it has been viewed as little more than a footnote in the career of W.E.B. Dubois. Jones’s work fills in a gap in history, the first fully developed study of this early episode in the long civil rights struggle. The gap existed because of the insufficient understanding of the importance of creating free public interaction in social movements.
In the democratic opposition to Communist regimes, specifically in Poland, the goal of establishing independent publics was not overlooked. In fact, for quite a while, it was the major end of the social struggle. The constitution of a free public space for discussion and action became the primary end of underground Solidarność in the 1980s. Because the regime couldn’t be successfully challenged, the end became to constitute a zone beyond its control. The end was for individual and collective dignity, to create an area where one could express oneself, appear outside of official definition, consolidate agreement among diverse participants in an autonomous public, which could be applied at an appropriate moment. The goal was to engage in a long cultural march, as Adam Michnik put it in a 1976 classic essay, “The New Evolutionism.”
In the new “new social movements,” this movement feature has been cultivated in a new political, generational and media environment. New media forms have . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: The Arab Spring and The Creation of Independent Publics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 19th, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis of “Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond,” click here.
In December of 2011, I took part in a very interesting conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference participants were asked to respond to the work of the media theorist, Daniel Dayan (my dear friend and colleague and Deliberately Considered contributor) and to answer a straightforward question – “Is democracy sick of its own media?”
I presented a mixed answer: yes, when in comes to troubling developments in television news; no, when it comes to the effervescence of television satire and the social media. I closed with a proposal to Daniel to co-author a book, linking his ideas about “monstration” with mine about the politics of small things. While a book may or may not be forthcoming, a dialogue here at Deliberately Considered will appear in the near future.
In my paper, which I present here as an “in-depth” post, focused on the American case, I argued that we live in both the best of times and the worst of times concerning the relationship between media and democracy. Fox Cable News is relentlessly confusing fact with fiction with partisan intention, and serves as a model of media success, both financial and political, while responses to Fox including by the TV satirists, the famous “fake news” journalists, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, on Comedy Central, who also have interesting imitators around the world, present important challenges to Fox and its influence on common sense.
These media developments, I sought to demonstrate, are connected to significant new American social movements: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. In the case of OWS, and other new “new social movements,” social media is of crucial importance. They are providing new health to democracy globally in many different political contexts.
I maintained in my Sofia paper, that the relationship between social media and OWS is a significant manifestation of the way the politics of small things have become large in our world. I see in this a . . .
Read more: Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 19th, 2012 Is democracy sick of its own media? I seek to address the question before us, with a clear and forceful answer: yes, and no, but with no maybes. Yes, when it comes to certain emerging media conventions, revealed most vividly in the U.S. by Fox News (and its lesser imitators of the right and the left). But no, when it comes to an opposing and promising trend, the ongoing struggle to inform and constitute publics capable of deliberate discussion and informed actions, using a variety of media forms, new and old, but especially new. This trend is observable both in the central arena and, especially, on its margins, as a global development. I think that there are troubling trends in the dominant media, but I also think that it is important to pay attention to counter trends, and to take note of a new kind media war in political culture.
The conclusion of my presentation will highlight the counter trend, the “no” side of my answer to our question, doing so by linking two of my major projects, the study of the politics of small things and of reinventing political culture. I will suggest, further, the need to carefully consider Daniel Dayan’s ideas of monstration. In my conclusion, I will make a sort of book proposal for Dayan and me to work on, so that the weaknesses of my approach can be addressed. I will move toward the conclusion first by examining what I take to be the way a cable television network contributes to the sickness of democracy, specifically in the United States – the yes side of my answer to our question. I will then make my second move, to the no side, considering how social media and other new forms of electronic media open the opportunity for a counter trend, supporting the politics of small things. I analyze both tendencies as they are tied to significant social movements that define and redefine political culture, for better and for worse: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I want to be clear that I don’t see the problems and potentials I identify here as being primarily the consequence of media form, cable news, . . .
Read more: Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond
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