Andrea Hajek’s post on the seamy side of satire and the Italian elections  and Iddo Tavory’s post on humor and the social condition got me thinking about the promise and perils of political humor. This has fascinated me ever since I made it a nightly habit to tune into Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as a refuge from the madness that were the George W. Bush years.

I have wondered: why has my regular dose of political satire seemed so essential to my mental health? Why has it been so appealing to so many of us? On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend too much time wondering. Most scholarly accounts of humor seem to miss the point, and they are decidedly not entertaining. I feel like responding to the authors of such serious reflections: please just relax and enjoy.

But Iddo’s analysis, which is part of our on-going dialogue on the social condition, seemed to hit just the right notes: it moved our deliberations on the social condition forward, as it helped me understand important developments in global political culture, and it had a light informative touch, focused on a joke. A Jewish father warns his son not to marry outside of the faith, finding confirmation in his warning when the son’s new wife takes the faith too seriously, insisting that her husband no longer work on Saturdays, both the Jewish Sabbath and the most important day of his father’s business week.

The joke is funny in the telling. Social structure as it is manifested in interaction makes the “funny telling” possible. Social structure – the family, religion and the economy – informs the structure of the joke, which sets the stage for the performance. As Tavory maintains: “If we attend to the structure of humor, we can see that jokes work precisely because they shine light on dilemmas that are built into the social fabric.”

Political satirists work with this, for better and for worse. They provide momentary liberation from the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) when they highlight the tensions we must live with, mocking easy, or foolish or dictated answers, the positions of the other, the distrusted, the opponent, the enemy, and even with friends, families, loved ones. But when they take their own answers too seriously, with too much self assurance, they skirt with danger, the danger we now see in Italy, but can be found in many other times and places.

I remember having a sick feeling watching Poland’s famous satirical cabaret, Piwnica pod Baranami in Krakow in the early 1970s. The cabaret was past its prime. In 1956, it was one of the key creative locations where Polish Stalinism was sharply questioned and overturned. They questioned totalitarian authority. They expanded the possible, by mocking the dictatorial. But the show I saw was odd. The audience seemed to be enjoying itself, but the performance seemed quite racist to me. There was one anti-China joke after another (this at the time of the Sino – Soviet split). I understood, as a friend explained, that when they said China, they meant and the audience heard Russia, but the mocking of the Orient was off putting. So much so that it stays with me. I thought of it then as an example of satire growing old and stale, in marked contrast with the student theater I was then observing. But now, I perceive more, thinking about my discussions with Tavory. The satire was drawn too easily. It referred to the sorry state of living in a society where a foreign power stifled daily life, but that insight was just too thin. That the Russians, or the Communists, were to blame for everything wrong in Poland explained too much with too little. Rather than confronting the social condition and providing relief from its tensions, the satire turned away from textured experience and flattened it.

On the other hand, take Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, please! (I’m echoing Henny Youngman here, just for fun) In their nightly shows, they illuminate. Mocking the dogmatic, they show how simple-mindedness stumbles over complexity, how the social condition is ignored. Colbert is more clearly aiming at the nuttiness of the right, through his Bill O’Reilly impersonation. Stewart tries to be more even handed, reporting absurdities wherever he sees them.

Not all their jokes work. Sometimes, it seems to me, Stewart mocks difficulties that he and his audience don’t understand. Nonetheless, unlike the Polish cabaret, he and Colbert work with tensions and ambiguities, posing questions, rather than providing easy answers. Posing questions, not providing answers is their democratic role, like that of intellectuals more generally, which I explored in depth in my book Civility and Subversion.

This was especially evident in their mock mass demonstration on the Washington Mall, “The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” Stewart was for sanity; Colbert for fear. It’s interesting to note how many participants and observers wanted the rally to be partisan, and how the comedians understood that this wasn’t their role or their point. They weren’t working as propagandists for the Democrats, or just attacking the Republicans. They weren’t working with a clear political end. They were fake activists, extending their performances as fake newscaster and commentator. And as such, they revealed the transgression of the fine line between the serious and the comic by those who purport to be serious. The comics understand the difference, while so many in the news media and in politics don’t. Brilliant and funny.

But satirists may lose sight of their distinctive role, becoming convinced their jokes can substitute for serious political analysis and engagement. They may come to believe and convince their audiences, as I saw in Krakow many years ago, that their mocking illumination of the powers’ insufficient packaged answers to the questions posed by the enduring problems of the social condition is the answer. Thus, the Italian case: from a satirical V, “vaffanculo,” Day, (fuck them all day) to a party that won 25% of the vote, and has continued to follow the “vaffanculo” line. Hajek observed before the elections about the intentions of the leader of the anti-political party, The Five Star Movement: “It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution.”

Humor responds to and illuminates “the social condition.” Herein lies its personal and political significance and power, why Colbert and Stewart speak to me as I endure my daily struggles, and why it can matter, for example, in the role satire played around the old Soviet bloc. It can be a survival strategy for persecuted minorities, Jews and blacks, for example, and majorities, women, or just anyone, for example, in Youngman, husbands and wives. And because humor and satire refer to both the concerns of daily life and greater social structure, the social condition writ large and writ small, they have potentially significant political meaning and impact. But, handle with care.

I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.

To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).

Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.

Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).

After all objective reports on election night indicated a decisive Obama victory, Romney wouldn’t concede. Karl Rove on Fox News comically refused to acknowledge what Fox News (Fox News!) projected. Before the election, Republican pollsters systematically distorted their election predictions to confirm their desired results. A fact denying normality had become the order of things. The right-wing politicians, and their media enablers, were not simply lying to the public. They were blinded by their own fabrications. There were the fortunate (from my point of view) miscalculations of the campaign, but when it came to science, to climate change, to biology and much more, fact denying had become deadly. Thankfully, there is now sensible resistance, by the population at large and also by conservatives themselves.

As reported by Jonathan Martin at Politico notable young conservatives are now presenting important criticism. Ross Douthat: “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself.” Ben Domenech: “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality.” Such self-criticism is heartening. Perhaps, it will be possible for serious conservative intellectuals and public figures to present positions without the craziness.

Severely conservative Romney continued his ideologically driven, fact-denying, forty-seven percent ways, blaming his defeat on “free gifts” to Obama’s core constituencies, free birth control to single women in college, health care to African-Americans and Latinos, and a special gift to Latinos — the promise of amnesty to children of illegal aliens, “the so-called Dream Act kids.” In the conservative cocoon at Fox, Bill O’Reilly strongly agreed, but it is very interesting to observe many Republicans running away from the remark. Surely political calculation is involved, but it is also a healthy matter that key conservative figures, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, are distancing themselves from the ideological fiction of the society made up of takers and makers, as Paul Ryan has put it.

I wonder, thinking ahead to 2014 and 2016, perhaps there will be a Republican civil war, between the ideologues and the conservatives. I have my hopes, but also my concerns. But at least in this election, those who used facts to mobilize their campaign won over the prisoners of fictoids.

I identify with Barack Obama’s political position, as a centrist wanting to move the center left. I identify with the democratic left because of its long and developing progressive tradition, addressing the problems of inequalities based on class, race, religion, gender, nation and sexual orientation, and because of its critique of the injustices of untrammeled capitalism and its conviction that the present order of things can and should be subjected to critique, its conviction that the way things are is not necessarily the way they must be. For these and other substantive reasons, I am very happy with the election results.

But further and in a less partisan way, I understand that alternative political traditions, broadly understood as conservative, are worthy of respect, especially as they illuminate the importance of learning from experience and highlight the limits of reason. I respect this tradition and have learned from it. I think a healthy modern republic should be informed by it. And, for these reasons, I even have sought to find conservative intellectuals worthy of respect at Deliberately Considered, see here and here. It is a terrible loss that fact-denying, right-wing ideology has prevailed in the Republican Party in recent years, amplified by racist currents during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the tide will now change among conservatives.

Conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, and radical icon, Karl Marx, are important thinkers for me as I try to make sense of the political world, but it is the ambiguous and ambivalent commitments and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt that make them my primary political teachers. Tocqueville, the ambivalent democrat, highlighted the dangers of mass society as the underside of democracy. (I should post my thoughts on this one of these days.) Arendt more crucially observed the dangers of ideology and emphasized that a common factual base is the ground upon which democracy is built. I sense that the most significant result of this election is that we are moving back to this ground. I hope Fox News craziness, the right-wing entertainment industry, as David Frum is now describing it, is “so yesterday,” or at least no more intimately connected to the Republicans than the Democrats are tied to MSNBC. I can’t tolerate either as a source of news. It worries me that some think of them as such.

This is how I understand my centrist orientation. My primary political commitment is to a free public life, where people with different identities and principles meet between left and right, i.e. in the center. I don’t’ believe in watered down progressive and conservative positions, but a position where there is informed debate. For me, this is the meaning of “the vital center.” I think this election, as truth prevailed over truthiness, and as a principled leader prevailed over one that pretended to be a true-believer, who had a very problematic relationship with factual truth, provides hope for a centrist with leftist commitments.

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 demonstration once again of what Vaclav Havel called “the power of the powerless.” I am now facilitating a wonderful workshop on this, with young scholars, investigating this power as it is constituted in Russia, Romania, Morocco and Poland, as well as the United States. More from them in the future.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond,” click here.

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, bad, online media, good. Rather I maintain that media forms shape, support and undermine the formation of social and political movements and institutions.  The social and the political are my message, not the media.

Yes

Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s spectacularly successful cable news network in the United States, is not just biased. It is a political mobilization machine, shaping the political landscape. Consider the criticism of a well-known social thinker.

In September, 2010, Barack Obama offered a critique of Fox in an interview published in Rolling Stone magazine. This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the following evenings. They, the most popular in house celebrities on Fox TV, were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” the newspeak slogan of the tendentious network. In their self-presentation, they provide the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media. They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.

Yet, their response is cynical. They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise. Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism? Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows, in the television and radio discussions that followed the publication of the President’s interview.

Yet, actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America. While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough. Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects. It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization. I think this is a specific American case, but it may be indicative of a general trend, the substitution of media for political parties.

In the important case of the Tea Party protests, this was most clear. Glenn Beck, a particularly flamboyant Fox News commentator who later lost his job, announced a mass demonstration, the “9/12 Rally.” On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration were reported, and their significance was discussed. Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions brought the planned event to the attention of a large audience. Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event went well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

Dayan highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration.” In his research, he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle move beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of broader publics, an insight that can be found both in the work of the French classical sociologist, Gabrielle Tarde and the American pragmatist, John Dewey. This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream. What is intriguing about Fox News is how they systematically work on the act of monstration and actually connect it to the work of social mobilization. I wonder sometimes whether the Republican Party has become the Fox Party, with many, perhaps most, of the potential Republican Party candidates for president for the 2012 election to President having worked as paid employees of the television news service.

In the case of the 9/12 rally, the Fox produced media event happened. Fox was there giving it full coverage. It was the major event of the day, the story that was given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tended to report it as one story among many. It was a kind of sacred presentation while other news services viewed it as part of the mundane daily events. The fact that only Fox “properly” reported on the event was said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin. This format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars,” a popular entertainment show, to the networks annual campaign against “the war on Christmas.” (a particularly surreal campaign, in which the fact that public actors say happy holidays rather than Merry Christmas is said to reveal the anti – Christian bias of the liberal elites in government and the corporate sector)

Contrary to Obama, Fox is not just biased as it reports the news. It produces the news from beginning to end, conflating news reporting with the political action that is the story. Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp make money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

Note here: there is a way in which Beck’s rally could be understood from the perspective of Daniel Boorstein, in his classical critique of broadcast news, as a pseudo event. It was produced for television, was news only as it appeared on television. Generally, I have been convinced, along with most media analysts, that Boorstein’s work doesn’t really confront the new realities of the televisual age. Because in politics appearances are realities (Arendt), and because in the age of television, public attention to things political occurs through TV, there does not seem to be anything pseudo about such events. To play a little with the old theorem of W.I. Thomas, (i.e. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”) if political actions appear as real on television, they are real in their consequences.

I think no study better demonstrates this, no book more forcefully reveals the weakness of Boorstein’s position, than Dayan and Katz’s classic Media Events. I think that theirs is a modern classic. Yet, nonetheless, I also think we must take into account that there is something pseudo about Fox and company. As in the case of the 9/12 March, they specialize not simply in broadcasting news from a point of view. They specialize in the self-conscious production of political reality, and they do this with a thoroughness that I believe is unprecedented in the U.S. They turn fiction into facts and facts into fictions, from Obama’s citizenship to non-existent death panels in healthcare legislation, to non-existent mosques that threaten America at ground zero, to the importance of political candidates.

This sickens democracy. Facts have become partisan, e.g. global warming. Science has become a matter of political debate, e.g. evolution. Republican politicians now have to explain why they would give priority to the latter in schools and why they may have once taken seriously the former before they became more enlightened, e.g. the position of the once front runner in the race for the Republican nomination to be President of the United States, Newt Gingrich.  In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, the Republican candidates for president faced a panel of right wing state attorney generals, grand conservative inquisitors, who sought to unmask any and all liberal tendencies in the candidates’ pasts, seeking reassurance of their ideological purity. This media event was produced and broadcasted by Fox.

These developments are encouraged by a media form that is extremely popular and clearly partisan, but calls itself “fair and balanced” (the networks slogan). It has helped to create a deeply polarized public, with mutually exclusive perceptions of reality.

Let me state forthrightly what I take to be the major problem and why I think it is particularly serious. In the present media environment, facts have become indistinguishable from political fictions for a large segment of the American public. The distinction between public and private concerns is disappearing. News and entertainment have become the same coin. In the case of Murdoch’s Fox News, tabloid sensation and ideological politics have been fused. I also see this creeping into other media forms: more and more another cable news network, MSNBC, has become the mirror image, on the left, of Fox. Though I often agree with the partisan stance of its reporters and commentators, they are increasingly trying to produce a counter reality to the world according to Fox, rather than a way to understand the world or to develop a particular partisan position. And even in what I think to be the best source of news in the United States, The New York Times, the present format of the week in review section, published every Sunday, makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish reporting, analysis and opinion.

Thus, I think democracy is indeed sick of its own media, and for good reasons. Yet, this trend, “the Foxification of American democracy,” and its media, centered by the intimate connection between Fox and right wing politics, is far from the whole story. There are, of course, many in the traditional media who work to maintain conventional standards, difficult, but not impossible in the print and broadcast journalism. But new electronic media now play a special role. Take an amusing illustration of a counter trend, as a movement towards my grounds for answering our question in the negative.

No

I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in October of 2010, produced by America’s two star television satirists.  I have enjoyed the programs of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as an antidote for the political madness of our times, produced for another cable news network, Comedy Central. Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity. In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television, mimicking the production of Glenn Beck on Fox. As you have seen, I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.  Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity, but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor. I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard. The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed by another political satirist, Bill Maher, in his response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, Maher and other critics pointed out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself. The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action. This was just before the midterm elections, which promised to lead to broad Democratic Party losses and Tea Party gains, which proved to be the case. The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways,which suggests to me how democracy is being healed by its media. His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted. Stewart is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively. His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way. The confusion of fact with fictions does indeed seem to be particularly a Republican ailment. Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers of Sharia law in Oklahoma, and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all come from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day without any notable use of facts. They do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   We have to watch Colbert and Stewart’s tongues as they go into their cheeks.

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in American political culture. There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification. One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions. Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue. More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of the stimulus package is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the falsehood that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate this lie or do little to criticize them. One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions. Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles. But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma. How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?

Enter Occupy Wall Street: Social Media and the politics of small things

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts. The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers. The next step was a more forthright organization that addresses both the distortion of media fictoids, working against the policies they justify. The need for this step was apparent at the Rally and in the discussion about it. The need has been filled with a social movement that uses irony in its rather nebulous political claims, demonstrating for the 99%, symbolically occupying the seat of American and indeed global finance capitalism. And as I tried above, they need to organize to act not only against policies they disagree with, but also against lies. As the Republicans obstructed responsible governance, I had hoped against a sense of hopelessness, to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization. And now Occupy Wall Street has appeared. A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Colbert Stewart Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.

This is where we move from the television, albeit cable, to newer electronic media. Clearly a new kind of politics is upon us. Many observers have highlighted the technological characteristics of this politics. Cell phones, and Facebook and other social media, blogs and the like, are the heroes in these accounts of the Arab Spring, the Israeli summer, and now of not only the Tea Party but also Occupy Wall Street. Yet, these accounts are often unsatisfying, when they don’t focus on the human agency of the new politics, the specific type of political action that is ascendant. We should recognize the importance of the new media, but it seems to me that what is extraordinary is the way a type of power, political power as Hannah Arendt understood it, is becoming increasingly important. People are meeting each other, now virtually and not only face to face, freely speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. Arendt maintained that this type of activity defined politics, as the opposite of coercion. I think that she exaggerates her position. But I do think that this kind of politics is ascendant in what Vaclav Havel named “the power of the powerless,” the power of what I call “the politics of small things.”

I analyzed the way this power works in our world in my book, The Politics of Small Things. It points to the way the power of “the politics of small things” was common to both Solidarność in opposition to the previously existing socialist order in Poland of the 80s, and to the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign during the Bush years in America. Now, I think the power of the politics of small things is becoming a significant force throughout the world in many different contexts, and that it is important to take notice in places far and near, in North Africa and the Middle East, in South Korea, in the candle movement, which I have analyzed a bit with the help of Jaeho Kang, and in the Tea Party in the US, and in what has become the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement. Here I will examine Occupy Wall Street and consider how media in supporting this and similar social movements contribute to the health of democracy, how these media present an antidote to the illness caused by other media.It is important to remember how small Occupy Wall Street was in the beginning and how small it remained. To begin with, it was just a couple of dozen people who met each other and planned the action in lower Manhattan. The first occupiers were in the hundreds, reaching the thousands only when the police acted out and stimulated greater support and focused broad media and public interest (pepper spraying became a particularly favored devise for this, first in New York and then beyond). Among themselves, the activists in OWP created something unusual. They developed rules of conduct and decision-making that were radically inclusive and democratic. They found common ground with simple ideas, the most compelling focusing on gross inequality in America, contrasting a power elite, i.e. “Wall Street,” with everyone else, i.e. “The 99%.” I observe in this case, what I observed studying Solidarność and the anti war movement and the Dean campaign, how consequential power can be generated when people interact with each other, committed to shared ends and how their interactions were important ends in themselves, of significance beyond the immediate group involved.

As with previous instances of the politics of small things, the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content. But, there are some telling special qualities of the latest developments.

First is the way social media contributes to the OWS form. Jenny Davis, in a recent contribution to my on line magazine, Deliberately Considered, makes cogent points about the role of social media in recent social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Digital activism in recent years, she argues, is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. She is pointing to the difference between the politics of small things just a few years ago, in the anti war movement and the Obama campaign, and now. The new media can now constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture.

This is especially telling because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of posting, along with the act of protesting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world with fresh eyes, beyond the sorts of ideological clichés found at Fox and its liberal rival MSNBC, is something that is most needed at this time. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media.

Another way that OWS is noteworthy has to do with the location of the occupation, intensively linked as it is with democratic culture and its enemies. The location of the practices of OWS contributed significantly to its successful monstration, in Dayan’s terms.

The actions of a relatively small number of protestors in OWS quickly became visible not only to the people involved, but quite rapidly gained global attention. This is because of the very special nature of the starting point of occupation movement. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement. Monstration came almost automatically.

I first saw this as a “pedestrian observation,” based on a very particular experience walking around New York. In recent months, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack.

And in more recent weeks, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

It is because the occupation is at such an intense symbolic center, the media paid attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration captured global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. Reports indicate that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces spread around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world was watching, and responding. Occupations went global, emanating from ground zero to London, to Seoul, back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and many points in between.

They watched in Gdansk. I had a peculiar experience in Gdansk in October, giving the annual Solidarność Lecture, reporting on a recent visit to Zuccotti Park, surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there. I was also surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, was planning on going to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.

They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’

In the end, Walesa did not go to support Occupy Wall Street. But what intrigued me about this experience of mine and this report is how media of all sorts spread the news and the insights of the new social movement. This is a mediated development perhaps stronger than Fox and the great trend it exemplifies.

The news spread through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media spread the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.

I was amused learning about Walesa’s visit through a Polish friend in New York when I was in the city where my exploration of the politics of small things first began, but there is a serious point being revealed here. The power of showing, the power of monstration, has been radically democratized in the new media age. My experience exemplifies something that is becoming quite common.

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating electronic expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and neo-liberalism have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged.

Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community constituted through interactions and debates on social media, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on Fox created little fictions, fictoids, as I have been reporting in my online magazine, Deliberately Considered over the last year.

As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long-term power of the newest development on the global stage.

Conclusions

My yes and no answer to the question of whether democracy is sick of its own media points to the perils and promise of the media in democratic life. On the one hand, some media formats, such as that of Fox News, threaten democracy (specifically in America, but it’s not an insignificant place), with an intensification of ideological politics, conflating news with propaganda, presenting facts as opinion and opinion as facts. On the other hand, new media expanded the power of what I call the politics of small things, presenting the capacity to resist the Fox trend. This is a new kind of media culture war. Political culture, the relationship between the power and culture, is at issue. It can be reinvented in a democratic direction or democracy can be undermined, another sort of reinvention. As I put it in my subtitle of my book, at issue is the culture of power and the power of culture.

I would like to study the dynamic outlined here more systematically, if he is interested, with my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan. To do so, it clearly would be necessary to examine exactly how Fox (and other similar media outlets) and social media monstrate. I think a precise analysis of this would reveal how mediated monstration works in supporting and undermining democratic life. It would be an examination of the forms of democratic and anti-democratic monstration. I hope he is intrigued.

Actually, I trust that Dayan is interested, primarily because we have been talking about doing such work together (specifically after the Sofia conference), but also because in recent years a fascinating new way of resisting the powers, and new way of reinventing political culture, has been developing, related to his ideas about monstration and my ideas about the politics of small things and reinventing political culture. I have analyzed here media politics of cable television and of emerging social movements. Dayan and I will need to get into the formation of those movements and how they compare and contrast with movements past. Social movements have been key to such resistance and reinvention in the past and they are again, but something new is happening with promise closely connected to the topic of media and publics. In some places, in the Arab world for example, it has become pretty clear that it is through new “new social movements” and the media forms that support them that there is a democratic prospect. Far from being sick of their media, as posed in our opening question, democracy is radically dependent upon (especially new) media. This is both as a support of new movements and as ends of these movements. Constituting democratic publics is what is new in new movements, I believe, and I hope Dayan and I will study this.

I will close with a brief turn to the promise of such study. Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather the crucial point is to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them. Movements, old and new, have sought to achieve specific goals, the right to organize and strike, a fair wage, decent working conditions, equal pay for equal work, voting rights, ending racism, sexism and environmental degradation and the like. And movements have been about asserting identity and its dignity, for workers, women, gays and lesbians and many others. Clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking.

But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today, as I have been suggesting here.  The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central. The new media facilitate the form, an independent alternative public, but it is not completely defined by them.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. They came together with the help of Facebook and the like, but what was crucial was what they did once they were together. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day.

Their political ends may be different, radical critics of “the American Dream,” along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, the challenge of monstration, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming.

Thus the Dayan – Goldfarb project of new social and political movement: 1. Understand the new form the politics of small things is taking. 2. Appreciate how this new form is facilitated and frustrated by new media, 3. Consider how these developments are affecting the relationship between power and culture, reinventing the political culture of our times. And 4, analyze how 1, 2, and 3, all are about the constitution of free and expanding publics related to other publics, which depend on monstation: showing, revealing, appearing to others, through available media, as a primary challenge.

I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”  I have enjoyed Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows.  Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity.  In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television.  I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.   Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor.  I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard.  The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed in Bill Maher’s response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, the critics point out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself.  The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action.  This, of course, just before the midterm elections which promised to lead to broad Democratic losses and Tea Party gains, and which proved to be the case.  The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.”  It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways last night.  His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted.  He is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively.  His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way.   Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers  of Sharia law in Oklahoma,  and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all coming from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day, do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   But we have to watch their tongues as they go into their cheeks.

The correlation between fact and party

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in our political culture.   There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification.  One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions.  Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue.   More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of TARP is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that government action was imperative.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the myths that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate these myths or do little to criticize them.  One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions.  Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles.  But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma.  How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?  And the “fictoids” keep coming , the latest from Fox News – President Obama’s Asian trip is costing $200 million dollars a day, $2 billion for the whole trip, with 3,000 in his entourage, and 34 war ships providing protection, as Stewart was quick to ridicule, following his defense against his liberal critics in his program last night.

A modest suggestion

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts.  The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers.  And as I tried to argue in my last post, they, we, are going to have to organize ourselves to act not only against policies we disagree with, but also against the lies.  As the Republicans obstruct responsible governance, I hope to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization.  A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.   And I have a suggestion for how we might start contributing to this cause at Deliberately Considered, by collecting and analyzing fictoids.  The floor, or at least the blog, is open for contributions.