By Martin Plot, November 21st, 2010 
Martin Plot is a former student, and good friend and colleague. I have learned a great deal from him about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, specifically concerning the temptations and dangers of kitsch. He joins DC with this post offering his critical view of the question of truth in American politics. -Jeff
Many commentators on the Democratic side (including Jeff) are mesmerized by the fact that most in the Tea Party movement, and the Republican Party at large, seem completely delusional, asserting facts that are not so and assuming ideological positions that distort reality almost as a matter of sport. The problem is not, however, one of simple dichotomies between reason and un-reason, and of truth and fiction, the problem resides in the dynamic that is slowly transforming our political regime.
French philosopher Merleau-Ponty explained this in the epilogue to his Adventures of the Dialectic. At two different moments in that text he uses two phrases in an almost indistinguishable way. At one point, he says, in condemning the Soviet dictatorship, that a different regime is needed, one that makes room for opposition and freedom. Later on, almost as if he were saying the same thing—and he was, in the context of his philosophy—he calls for a regime that welcomes opposition and truth. For Merleau-Ponty, truth is opening, or what he calls hyper-reflection and hyper-dialectics, which means opening to both other perspectives and the unfolding of time. Put straightforwardly: hyper-reflection means that even “reason”—or what he calls “the point of view of reflection”—needs to understand that it has its own blind spots. Therefore, it needs to be opened to contestation. Hyper-dialectics, on the other hand, means that whatever is the case today, may not be the case tomorrow. Therefore, present circumstances should never be expected to remain unchallenged.
In this context, the problem with Republican illusions, and lies that are mostly self-delusions, is not simply that they are wrong and untrue. The problem is that they find no opposition, that Democrats are afraid of confronting them . . .
Read more: Opposition and Truth
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 9th, 2010 
I present an analysis of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” seeing the controversies around it as being about the status of fact and fiction in our politics, and making a call to action to DC readers.
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 . . .
Read more: Fact versus “Fictoid” in the Age of Cable
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 7th, 2010 
The Tea Party reminds me of political movements I have been involved with and studied in the past. The development of this movement well illustrates my conception of “the politics of small things,” a very real and powerful element of political life.
Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra's 1939 political drama "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (Columbia Pictures)
When people meet each other and speak and act in each others presence based on shared principles about common concerns, and develop a capacity to act in concert, they create political power, a kind of power highlighted by my favorite political thinker, Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future. I saw this in the alternative cultural movement in Poland, and later in the democratic opposition in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc in the 1970s and 1980s.
People on their own, many my friends, reinvented their political culture, and the unimaginable and the hopelessly naïve became the realistic and the practical. Solidarnosc was born. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Empire imploded. These opposition figures changed commonsense. They presented an alternative to newspeak as a public language. The unimaginable became the real. I wrote of many of these issues in my book, Beyond Glasnost.
In the anti-war movement, the Dean campaign and the Obama campaign, the same power was evident. In the aftermath of the patriotic wave and mass support for the policies of the Bush administration, those who dissented started talking to each other, meeting, talking and developing a capacity to act in concert. At first, this was accomplished by utilizing meetup.com and supported by Moveon.org. A dense network of conversation and common action was developed. The man naming himself as the candidate from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, changed the discussion among Democrats. They lost the election, but then won big, in 2008, very much propelled by the social support that was generated by the politics of small things.
Their great success, I should say our great success, was viewed very skeptically by a significant portion of the population. After all, while Obama won decisively, 45% of voters chose . . .
Read more: The Tea Party Goes to Washington: Now What?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 5th, 2010
In my state, New York, thanks to the Tea Party favorite, Carl Paladino, Andrew Cuomo’s election as Governor was never in doubt. In Delaware, thanks to Christine O’Donnell, Chris Coons easily became Senator, when it seemed that he was likely to lose against a mainstream Republican. In Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who started and finished with low approval ratings, managed to be reelected, thanks to the Tea Party candidate, Sharron Angle. On the other hand, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Rand Paul in Kentucky each impressively were elected to the Senate, assuring that there will be a discernable taste of tea in that great deliberative body.
As Paul put it,
“They say that the U.S. Senate is the world’s most deliberative body. Well, I’m going to ask them, respectfully, to deliberate upon this. Eleven percent of the people approve of what’s going on in Congress. But tonight there is a Tea Party tidal wave and we’re sending a message to ’em.
It’s a message that I will carry with them on Day One. It’s a message of fiscal sanity It’s a message of limited, limited constitutional government and balanced budgets.” (link)
The language is ugly, but clear. The political discourse of the Senate is about to be challenged, and this is the body where the Republicans are in the minority. It will be even louder and clearer in the House, which I admit I find pretty depressing, both from the political and the aesthetic point of view. It’s going to be harder to actually deal with our pressing problems, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Indeed, it is in spheres of aesthetics and discourse that the Tea Party has been most successful. It’s not a matter actually of how many races Tea Party politicians won or lost. They won some and lost some, but from the beginning the Tea Party’s great success has been how it changed the public discussion about the pressing issues of the day. In my next post, I will discuss this more fully, comparing the Tea Party with the Solidarity Movement in Poland, . . .
Read more: Rand Paul and the Tea Party go to Washington
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 2nd, 2010 
 Nothing is decided yet. This is Election Day and what people do now will determine the results. We’ll soon know for sure, perhaps already when you read this. But it, nonetheless, seems likely that today’s election will be a good one for the Republicans, bad for the Democrats. The polls, the pundits and public expectations are all in agreement. The Democrats will lose the House and probably keep the Senate with a much diminished majority. With this general prognostication, we start the debate now.
What Happened?
There will be all sorts of explanations to account for the election outcome, most of them connected to the limitations of Obama as a political actor, most of them, also, not really serious. In the past two elections, the Democrats gained a large number of seats in traditionally Republican districts, and thus they were not particularly solid, and when times are tough, as they are now, it is not good for incumbents in marginal districts. I have nothing particularly to add to this. I recommend an excellent, realistic election preview of the likely post election storytelling by Bendan Nyhan, which I think gets it right.
Why?
But beyond the outcome is its meaning. Although Nyhan and other election realists are surely on target when they underscore that the old slogan “it’s the economy stupid” goes a long way in explaining the results, the results’ meaning will be less clear and more important as we proceed.
While I’ve suggested in my most recent posts that the power and limitations of Obama’s speech-making will be revealed by the voting, I don’t think that this is of crucial importance in understanding the meaning of the elections. That was how the battle looked on the ground, as Obama tried to maximize his and the Democrats’ advantage. Now there is the question of where the country is at this moment and where it’s going. The Republican victory does reveal Democratic failures, which need examination, which I hope we discuss here at DC in the coming days and weeks.
I think that the primary issue is commonsense. I have long maintained that Obama, and the Democratic . . .
Read more: Today is a Good Day for the Republicans
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 15th, 2010 
There is, as Richard Hofstadter put it many years ago, a paranoid style of politics. While, he came up with this notion in his examination of American politics, McCarthyism and its predecessors, I am struck how this sort of politics can be found in just about every democracy. The paranoid knows that enemies surround us. We must be vigilant and protect ourselves, limit or eliminate immigration, impose loyalty oaths, arm ourselves. For, “they” are out to get us. The complexities of the world are explained by the machinations of “them.” (A most popular them these days are Muslims.)
The paranoia continues: we will resolve the problems posed by them only through vigilance. Those who don’t see this are naïve, in some ways worse than the enemy itself. You’re either with us or you’re against us: our country right or wrong, love it or leave it. The National Front in France, the Swedish Democracy Party, the Austrian Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, the Bulgarian Ataka party, Hungary’s Jobbik party, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the British National Party, the League of Polish Families, among others in Europe and beyond, including the Tea Party in the U.S., utilize this style of politics, the populist, xenophobic kind. (link) (link)
In each country, the health of democracy, it seems to me, will be determined by whether the paranoid style is marginalized, and remains so through time, or if it seeps into the political mainstream. When a right wing coalition ruled in Poland and included the League of Polish Families, the prospects for Polish democracy dived, only reviving when that coalition was defeated in the polls, and , indeed, to mention Hofstadter’s immediate concerns, when Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party turned against McCarthy, American democracy was strengthened. A pressing American concern today has to do with the paranoid style of politics in the Tea Party and in the anti-immigration movement. Our fate is tied to how we respond to the Park Islamic Community Center and other such . . .
Read more: Political Paranoia Threatens Healthy Democracy Here and Globally
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 5th, 2010
Fox News is not just biased. It is a political mobilization machine, shaping the political landscape.
 President Obama offered a critique of Fox News in an interview published in an issue of Rolling Stone. This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity the evening of Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on Tuesday. They were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” providing the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media. They were appalled by Obama’s criticism. (link)
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.
But 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 . . .
Read more: Obama v. Fox News
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 28th, 2010 
The Tea Party has made an impact on political conversation, no matter your (or my) politics. I’ve written previously about them here.
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 The Tea Party Challenges ‘Business as Usual’
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 2nd, 2010
 The Tea Party Movement is an instance of the politics of small things–much like some of the causes I have supported. In their interactions, and through its members’ commitment to their cause, a power has been genuinely created. What changes the Tea Party will cause for American politics as a whole is yet to be seen.
The Tea Party Movement is an instance of “the politics of small things”–a version on the right. I am not a supporter of the aims of this movement, as I was of the Dean and the Obama campaigns and the anti-war movement, and earlier of the democratic opposition in the former Soviet bloc.
In those instances of “the politics of small things,” I was very much both a participant and an observer. I observed how real alternatives to existing practices were developed in ways that I strongly supported, i.e. the development of the Solidarity Trade Union Movement and Democratic opposition in Poland, the emergence of Barack Obama as President of the United States. But even though I am not so involved or supportive of this new instance of the politics of small things, I recognize it for what it is. People have been meeting each other, sharing opinions, discussing strategies, coordinating tactics and becoming clearly visible to each other and to outside observers.
Power has been created in these interactions. This cannot be artificially manufactured. It would not exist unless people willingly and actively took part. The success of this depended upon active participants interacting with others and bringing themselves along. Even if there are powerful forces behind this movement( see Frank Rich’s op-ed and Mayer article), its political power is primarily generated by people acting in concert, as they took part in the Town Hall meetings of the Summer of 2009 and in many other local and statewide movements and campaigns since, and in major demonstrations, such as the one Glenn Beck organized for September 12, 2009 in Washington and now again last weekend at his . . .
Read more: The Tea Party Effect
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 23rd, 2010 
While the Tea Party and other political-right opposition attacks President Obama’s policies with outlandish arguments, Obama is forced to contend with both emotional arguments without factual basis and defending his administration’s positions persuasively. He has been criticized by party leaders and citizens alike for his mediated approach to attacks from the political right: will his calm censure be enough to have his argument heard? Only voters from the right and left will decide. My fear: The opposition’s tactics and arguments, while ridiculous, may be effective in swaying the voting public.
It has always been the case that the politics of America is a blend of cynicism and real democratic deliberation. I wrote about this extensively in my book, The Cynical Society. There are the sound bytes and the serious modes of deliberation. There are the media circuses and the deliberative chambers. And, there are slogans and extended reasonable arguments. But the proportions of the blend changes. During the election, Obama used serious persuasion more effectively than his opponents and his predecessors as a political tool. He consistently did this, most strikingly in his famous race speech in Philadelphia. A provocative compilation of the words of his minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright was used to insinuate that Obama was an angry Black man, a reverse racist. He responded with a carefully reasoned speech, addressing the problems and promise for racial understanding.
He has tried during his Presidency to do the same. This has led to aggressive attacks by his opponents. They attack not only in substance, but also in form, as he insists upon reasoned deliberate debate, his opponents flee from reason. Many have wondered whether his cool reasoned response to this has been wise. His critics within his Party, his fellow progressives, are most interesting in this regard.
There has been a concern that Obama has not been tough enough. That he has been too open to an opposition that has been unbending. He has offered respect and cooperation, while they have vilified and demonized him. And when his opposition does not demonize, it . . .
Read more: The Far, Far Right Battles Reason with Fear-Mongering
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