The people have spoken, and they have decided that “fat cat teachers,” and not greed gone wild on Wall Street and beyond, are the source of their problems. A deep disappointment. A defeat. This was my initial response to the results of the special recall election in Wisconsin.

I noticed a Facebook post blaming Obama and the Democratic Party. They betrayed the grassroots. He who engages in a crazy militaristic foreign policy killing innocents abroad was denounced. This is irrational, self-defeating and irresponsible. Politics is about alternatives, and the direction the country would go if it follows Wisconsin’s lead last night is profoundly problematic. There is a deep seeded problem in our political culture that must be addressed at the grassroots and in the Democratic Party.

Big money surely played a role, as John Nichols at the Nation quickly declared, reflecting on whether people’s power can overcome money power. But something more fundamental is at issue. How the broad public understands the problems of our times. Somehow in Wisconsin, at least last night, the Tea Party’s diagnosis of our problems made more sense than the view of those engaged in and inspired by Occupy Wall Street. This was my first reaction this morning.

This afternoon I feel a bit less alarmed, though still deeply concerned. There is considerable evidence that the campaign itself made a difference. With the 7 to 1 spending advantage of the Republicans, many Wisconsinites seemed to be critical of the idea of the recall absent major malfeasance in office. They, along with Walker’s most passionate supporters, prevailed. The Democrats were not as united as they needed to be. Their message was muddled. Yet, despite this, in fact, there was a progressive advance. The Democrats took control of the State Senate. Governor Walker won’t be able to count on the rubber-stamp approval of his proposals anymore.

And oddly polls indicate that if the election were held today, Obama would win in Wisconsin decisively. Wisconsin with a long and deep progressive traditions, including a distinguished record of supporting labor unions, would re-elect the President, but conservative Wisconsin, the state that elected Joe McCarthy to the Senate, affirmed Walker and his very aggressive deeply conservative (really reactionary) policies.

In the end, the results tell us what we already knew about the upcoming election, and not much more. As in Wisconsin, the Presidential election is going to be not only about the incumbent and his party, but, more significantly, about Obama’s and Romney’s competing political approaches and personalities. It is often noted the Democrats will try to make the election a choice, while the Republicans will try to turn it into a referendum on Obama and the present state of the economy. But because the principles upon which the two men will be running are so strikingly different, it is hard for me to believe that it will just be a referendum. It is interesting to note that few national commentators observed the Wisconsin recall as being about Walker himself and the state of the state under his leadership, which it was formally. Rather the big principled issues have been emphasized, for and against unions, for and against austerity as an economic policy, sharply highlighted by none other than Sarah Palin.

The election results present a big challenge to those of us on the left. The union movement and not only public employee unions, has suffered a serious blow. The momentum of the Occupy movement has been turned. The focus on inequality is in danger of being lost. It was not a good day.

But giving up on electoral politics, or blaming Obama, as I read on Facebook, is extraordinarily foolish. Two strongly competing visions about America are in competition, on the economy and much more. Elections matter, as was revealed last night. For the general public, Wisconsin announces some of the key issues that lie ahead: blame teachers and their unions or finance gone wild for our present fiscal woes and depressed labor market. Address the problems by working for a more just economic framework, or by breaking unions. For the left, the challenge is to engage, and to link grass root concerns with the Democratic Party and truly reach out to the general public. I observed how powerful this worked in the case of the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign in The Politics of Small Things. I showed how this became the base for the Obama campaign and how it contributed to the project of Reinventing Political Culture, in my book by that name. The task is to win hearts and minds. If we don’t, the trouble suggested by the results last night will come to define our political reality.

Following developments in the Republican presidential nominating contest the instability of the race is stark. Every political contest involves flawed candidates: how could it be otherwise? But often the public develops a firm sense of the perspective of the candidates and chooses to join a team. As primary campaigns are waged on a state-by-state basis, it is expected that in some realms one candidate will do better than another, but psychiatric mood swings are something else. We saw the politics of allegiance in the competition between Barack and Hillary (and the wormy love apple: imagine our blue dress politics in an Edwards presidency!). In the states of the industrial Midwest, home to Reagan Democrats, Hillary posted strong numbers; Obama was more successful in states not so hard hit by industrial decline, states with a rainbow electorate, and those open to a new type of politics. Soon one knew the metrics of the race, even if the outcome was uncertain. But the Republican campaign upends these rules as voter preferences lurch wildly. This is a campaign year that reminds us of voters’ cultural fickleness – their political ADD. They are watching a reality television show and so are we (Jeff Goldfarb describes his pained reaction in “The Republican Reality Show”). If one is not newly tickled, one turns away. Media narratives set our politics.

We have gazed at candidates, quasi-candidates, and proto-candidates – Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and The Donald – dance with the stars. Can parties fire their voters? Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty could have had his turn had he the internal fortitude or cockeyed optimism to recognize that to be dismissed in August might lead to be crowned a year later. If politics were based on a comparison and conflict of ideas, this would be inconceivable.

But American politics has become, as Jeffrey Goldfarb emphasizes, a reality show – adore it, dismiss it, or despise it, but depend on it. Voters demand diversion; they want bread and circuses, at least circuses. Around the scrum are kibitzers, now Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, who, after deciding to disengage, demand that attention be paid. Palin seems committed to pursuing Rush Limbaugh’s 2008 “Operation Chaos,” designed to prolong the Democrats’ primary contest and undercut the eventual nominee. In her case, the fleeting Governor undercuts what is ostensibly her own party as she tells her admirers to vote for Newt to continue debate, and, presumably, her role in it. Our rogue muffin, a mildly progressive governor of a mildly libertarian state, has assumed her role as a mistress of ceremonies of the grand guignol of tabloid politics.

At this moment, after the Florida presidential primary, Mitt Romney seems to have surmounted Newt’s second surge, despite Sarah Palin’s counter-cultural rap to “rage against the machine” by voting for the former speaker. Images, even those of the heavy metal left, are to be plucked by anyone plucky enough to do so. No doubt twists and turns will continue in this drama on the road to Tampa, as voters get bored with the pragmatic lassitude of Mitt, a man who would be Ike or at least Bush 41. Perhaps Ron and Rand Paul will galvanize voters to throw the TSA off the island, raging against those airport scanners and the bureaucratic touch that follows. More plausibly, we might discover that the sad illness of Rick Santorum’s special needs young daughter Bella, now hospitalized in Philadelphia (from the effects of the genetic disorder Trisomy 18), will provide sufficient weepy pathos to propel his candidacy among an electorate weaned on Love Story.

But what if Mitt triumphs? Mitt as nominee poses challenges for an ADD electorate that demands the frisson of thrills and the flutter of delight. Elections in which a President is on the ballot can be referendums or choices. The incumbent hopes that the voters will see the contest as a choice. The challenger, particularly in parlous economic times, hopes for a judgment of the sitting leader. Despite his deep pockets, if Romney is the Republican nominee, Obama will provide the only electricity in the room. He will be the Ozzy Osborne, Paris Hilton, and Kim Kardashian of October. Perhaps Mitt Romney will find it difficult to energize his base, but Barack Obama will achieve that for him. With Newt on the ballot, the choice will be stark, but with tame, vague Mitt, the election might be a referendum. Our ADD electorate will have to determine the narrative of the moment on that first Tuesday in November. On that day will the president be imagined a Greek naïf, an acolyte of Fidel, or the Great Leader of the resurgent East? Or is being an American Idol enough?

We at DC have considered a number of political cultural controversies over the last months concerning: a new political correctness, domestic workers’ rights, celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving, the Tea Party, the problems of a Jewish and democratic state, identity politics, fictoids and other media innovations, the elections, the lost challenging conservative intellectuals, political paranoia in the U.S. and beyond, Park 51 or the Ground Zero Mosque, Healthcare Reform, and the continuing but changing problems of race and democracy in America, among others.

In just about all these controversies, there has been a basic split between two different visions concerning democracy and diversity, and more specifically two different visions of America.  One sign that democracy in America is alive and well despite all its problems, is that the past Presidential campaign was a contest between these two visions, clearly presented by the Democratic candidate for President and the Republican candidate for Vice President, and the citizenry made a choice.  Recalling how Obama and Palin depicted the two visions is an appropriate way to end the old and look forward to the New Year.

In Palin’s Speech at the Republican National Convention, she introduced herself and what she stands for:

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” [quoting Westbrook Pegler]

“I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.

I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA.

I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.

So I signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education even better. And when I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and I knew their families, too.

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska…… I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved.

I guess — I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”(link)

Obama presents a clear alternative.  His vision and identity have been extensively rendered, in many of his speeches and in his two books.  He cut to the core in his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on Election Day, 2008.  He stood there as the first African American elected President of the United States, and declared:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled — Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” (link)

As he opened the celebration of his victory, Obama summarized what he thought his victory means for the American story and American identity.  The contrast with Palin’s presentation could not be more striking.

Palin celebrated the traditional values and the homogeneity of small town America.  She tapped into a nostalgia for a rural American myth, building her speech around the words of Westbrook Pegler, an American racist of the mid – twentieth century.  She returned to this theme during the campaign itself.  In a speech she gave in Greensboro, North Carolina, she declared:

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America,” Ms. Palin said, according to a pool report. “Being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans.”(link)

Although it is not stated, this real America is homogeneous.  It is not black, not foreign born, not the children of the foreign born, not gay, not Muslim, probably not Jewish.

Obama is clearly from the point of view of that world an outsider. He has not looked at the past with nostalgia.  Rather, he has searched the past for the future promise of inclusion.  The American people of all races and creeds chose him to be their leader.  This is a sea change, measured by its distance from the Palin ideal.

America is the place that is open, where a man of African and Muslim, as well as Christian and agnostic, ancestry became the leader of the country.  That this could and did happen re-defines what the nation is.  Much of the controversies during his Presidency involve an adamant rejection of this re-definition.

I am quite ambivalent about the Tea Party.  While I am appalled by some of the slogans and signs that have appeared in Tea Party rallies, I am convinced that this is a genuine social movement, a politically significant instance of the politics of small things, a political movement concerned with fundamental principles, engaged in a great debate about both the pressing issues of the day and the enduring problems of American political life.  As a registered Democrat and as a strong supporter of President Obama and his program, I am pleased that the actions of the movement may have made the Republican landslide in the upcoming elections less momentous, as the talking heads are now speculating, although I am still concerned that the movement may have given wind to the rightward shift of public opinion.  The emotional, irrational and often purposely ignorant political expression in Tea Party demonstrations is of deep concern, but I think the strong expression of fundamental political principles can and should be seriously considered and confronted.  I am unsure about what the Tea Party Movement’s impact on American public life in the very near term, i.e. the midterm elections, and in the long term, i.e. in the reinvention of American political culture will be.  As I have been trying to sort this all out, I am reminded of the insights of an old friend, Alberto Melucci, an Italian sociologist who presciently understood the meaning of social movements in the age of internet and mobile communications, before these new media were common.

The Theoretical Perspective of a Friend

Alberto Melucci

In series of important books, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, and Playing the Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society, Alberto explored what it means to become involved in a social movement in our times.  He understood that the means of social movements may be even more important than their ends, and that they make possible a new sense of self and self purpose for their participants to emerge.  Further and most significant politically, they can change the basic social codes.  Alberto was mostly thinking about progressive new social movements, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights and the like.  But I think his approach illuminates the new conservatism of the Tea Party quite well.  He died prematurely on September 12, 2001, not observing the strange turn in global politics since that very day.  But he would have understood the Tea Party, as a social movement concerned with primary values, unconcerned with electoral priorities, forging new, in this case, reactionary, identities and values, a movement that is very much a product and a challenge of our times.

Challenging Codes

The Tea Party Movement makes its participants feel good about themselves and gives them a sense of purpose, as the participants frequently report on movement blogs and to reporters.  The Movement seeks to “take our country back,” supporting and attacking politicians of both parties.  They have specific ends against bail outs and the government handouts to the undeserving, from the poor to the mighty banks and corporations of Wall Street and Detroit.  They are for limited government and the constitution, as they understand it.  They imagine together a new future based on an idealized past and in their movement they enact their future.

The movement activists and candidates sometime seem to hurt Republicans more than Democrats, an outcome that seems to be irrational given their own voting records, but this is not as significant to them as one would expect.  They are concerned about a vision of America between its past and its future and their place in this America, and worry that this vision to which they are deeply committed is being lost, taken away politically by politicians they revile, and overlooked by too many of their fellow citizens.  When the fundamental concern with the American code is kept in mind, the Tea Party Activists are not as irrational as most outside commentators, of the left and the right, think.

September versus November

Karl Rove got caught up in this Primary Night last Tuesday.   In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, they agreed on fundamental conservative issues.  Nothing in their discussion suggested a questioning of the principles and practices of the Tea Party.  But Rove dared to frankly criticize the candidate who won her primary in Delaware due to Tea Party activism and support, Christine O’Donnell.  She was the candidate of true conviction against a moderate, but her odd behavior despite her stated purity would lead to electoral defeat.  “It does conservatives little good to support candidates who at the end of the day while they may be conservative in their public statements do not [evince] the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for.”  Rove maintained, frankly concluding that “This is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” (link)   For this assessment he was severely attacked by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the full staff of Fox News, forcing him to retreat from his initial assessment. (link)

Rove was caught between the calculation of a political analyst and of a political partisan.  Since he cares most about the politics of the day, he could not be content with pronounced conservative purity.   He, on the right, along with most objective and Democratic partisan observers, noted that the Tea Party victory in the Delaware primary greatly increased the Democrats chances of maintaining their Senate majority.

But those who seek to take their country back, those more interested in the long march of changing the political culture, changing the code of politics as Alberto Melucci would put it, would prefer resolute cultural battle (most prominently Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, link).    Their movement is their message. For them the victory in September is more important than the increased chances of a defeat in November.

Why is an Islamic community center dedicated to intercultural and interreligious understanding in any way a desecration to the memory of the victims of the attacks?

Why is the planning of the center provocative or insensitive?

There are problems with facts and truth, as I have reflected upon in my previous posts, but there are also problems with interpretation and evaluation.  Given the facts, the community center can only be considered an affront if there is something fundamentally wrong with one of the great world religions.  This center is clearly not the work of radical fundamentalists.  Its goal is dialogue and understanding.  If these are jihadists, all Muslims are.  If we publicly speak and act with such interpretation, we are effectively declaring a religious war, playing the game of the religious fanatics.

And isn’t it odd that it is now, 9 years after the attacks of 2001, and not in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, that a broad fear of Muslims seems to be sweeping the country? So many major political leaders are complicit in the Islamophobia: from those who are stoking the flames, Gingrich and Palin and their media facilitators at Fox and company; to those who fear opposing the hysteria, Harry Reid and the like?

Even President Obama has not been clear about the problem (more about that in a later post).  I think that Islamophobia, not Islam, now presents a clear and present danger to American democracy, not only because it compromises our fundamental principles, but also because it challenges our security.  See for a report on this issue: U.S. Anti-Islam Protest Seen as Lift for Extremists