Well, I’m currently out of work. Rent is due today.

But what if I refuse to pay the rent UNLESS my landlord agrees to change the lease, lower the rent, give me my security deposit back, allow for pets and let me borrow his car once a week to pick up groceries? Better yet, no rent will be forthcoming unless he immediately cancels the lease, sets it on fire and allows me to decide how much rent I feel like paying each month. No? I simply won’t take no for an answer, even if it means I’ll be evicted next month.

I’m really tired of being thrown under the bus by these backward-thinking extortionists in the House of Representatives. Today America is really, literally broken. Still, I hope that congressional leaders and the president do not appease the hostage takers. That would be a very bad precedent to set for future congresses and presidents. Paying the ransom would only encourage the hostage takers to exact more demands the next time rent is due, no matter how unrealistic or unrelated the demands may be. The DC gridlock would continue indefinitely. It’s BAD FAITH to include the same poisonous pills in what should be routine legislation to keep the government running and pay the bills that are already racked up.

Who cares about election results? Who cares what the Supreme Court says? If you don’t agree to X, Y and Z, we will blow up the government and force the first default in American history! What kind of governing is that? Is that a democratic way to resolve disagreements?

House Speaker John Boehner refused to let the House vote to temporarily keep the government open at the current sequester levels, with no other strings attached, just to buy time to negotiate an actual budget. But because this approach would not destroy Obamacare, the Tea Party has instructed Boehner to block it. Why won’t Boehner allow the democratic process to play out in a full House vote, like the Senate did? Because the simple stop-gap bill would pass with BI-PARTISAN support, throwing the Tea Party destructionists into a tizzy. His job as Speaker would be in jeopardy.

Playing into the House’s new approach to negotiating a budget and paying the bills would reward and promote a new and destructive form of governing–one that is completely undemocratic. Democracy CANNOT work this way. It’s closer to how terrorists do business. The full faith and credit of the United States just doesn’t seem to matter to them. It’s only a bargaining chip to be used to force their narrow vision on the rest of the country, without going through the electoral and legislative processes that are established by our Constitution. So much for the rule of law! The US and global economies be damned.

Public servants work hard to help their families, neighbors and perfect strangers live better lives. That’s the point of choosing a career in public service. To give something back to the community. To empower your fellow citizens to make things better. To ensure that laws are enforced–laws that Congress passed to make sure buildings and bridges don’t collapse, to make sure your food won’t make you sick or kill you, to keep the air and water safe, the list goes on and on. Because of their work we are undoubtedly safer, healthier, smarter, faster, more productive. Public servants, like most contemporary Americans, believe their government should be there to help people and communities and businesses work together in mutually beneficial ways. Public service should be an honor, a privilege, something worthy of respect.

But then these friends and neighbors, who work for you, start hearing from some in Congress that they are out-of-control, greedy, lazy, job-killing leeches who do nothing more than push worthless papers around all day in pursuit of destroying liberty and freedom, providing no real service or value to anyone except themselves. They wonder how they could have become the enemy. They wonder why they are being blamed for things that are not their fault. They wonder why their paychecks are being cut while the true culprits of fiscal insanity walk away and get fatter. They wonder: “Why do I care anymore?”

So, with that, I’m heading into my office to close down. I’ll change my voicemail and email messages, get all of my stuff from the fridge and lock my door. Clean air will have to wait for another day. This is EXACTLY what many House Republicans have been dreaming about since 2010. And it’s all on the record, well-documented history in the making. The battle for the soul of America rages on. It’s time to confront the hostage-takers and to show them there will be NO RANSOM in exchange for simply doing their jobs, performing their most basic constitutional duties.

Maybe I’ll be back to work tomorrow, or the next day, or. . . . But in a sense the damage is already done. A small minority found a way to throw the whole country over the edge, and they didn’t flinch when executing their plan. A group of legislators clearly demonstrated that they do not care about democracy or value the rule of law. Well, I still do care. And I’ll wait here until I’m authorized to participate in my democracy and uphold the rule of law again.

To the House GOP: Negotiating in bad faith is NOT negotiating at all. Stop holding the country hostage. Do your basic job and keep the government running, pay the bills. Then sit down and figure out how to resolve your differences in an intelligent, professional and CONSTRUCTIVE manner. This means having to compromise, and not bringing the rest of the country down with you when you fail to get 100% of what you want.

I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:

“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”

The other:

“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.

In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.

The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely vivid example of a contemporary violent essentialism we can witness in many different places and with changing force. There are the extreme right-wing nationalists and Christian religious fundamentalists in Europe and the US, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn activists in Greece, the Le Pen nationalists in France, the Tea Party in the US, as well as the Polish nationalist youth, with neo-Nazi and pagan ties, who recently tried to interrupt Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław.

All these groups seem to play on a fantasy of a bygone era of a harmonious society formed solely by “us,” without outsiders or deviations from the unanimously accepted norms, “inventing” their traditions, as Eric Hobsbawm would have named it. The past is idealized into the present in a form deeply conservative but also modernly total, one in which men rule and women obey; the “we” are the masters, the “others” are the slaves. There is no space for sexual freedom or mental sickness. Foucault’s descriptions of these freedoms in the Middle Ages seem, on the contrary, extremely modern.

In this sense, the current fundamentalist movements are essentialized ideas of a glorious past, devoid of any ambiguity. They are definite, brutal and all-encompassing in a way only an extreme mixture of Enlightenment and Totalitarianism could lead to. They are belief systems based on a logic of the elimination of “otherness.”

The past to which they refer, never was. The refusal to acknowledge the ambiguous, heterogeneous, histories of cultures, religions, ethnicities, and civilizations, makes these movements arrogantly, violently contemporary.

In Reinventing Political Culture, I argue that there are four components to Barack Obama’s project in reinventing American political culture: (1) the politics of small things, using new media to capture the power of interpersonal political engagement and persuasion, (2) the revival of classical eloquence, (3) the redefinition of American identity and (4) the pursuit of good governance, rejecting across the board condemnations of big government, understanding the importance of the democratic state. I think that there is significant evidence for advances on all four fronts. The most difficult in the context of the Great Recession was the struggle for good governance, but now the full Obama Transformation, responding the Reagan Revolution, is gaining broad public acceptance.

The election was won using precise mobilization techniques. Key fully developed speeches by the President and his supporters, most significantly Bill Clinton, defined the accomplishments of the past for years and the promise of the next four. Obama’s elevation of the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum (in diversity union), defining the special social character and political strength of America, has won the day. And now, the era of blind antipathy to government is over.

The pendulum has finally swung back. The long conservative ascendancy has ended. A new commonsense has emerged. Obama’s reinvention of American political culture is rapidly advancing. The full effects of the 2012 elections are coming into view. The promise of 2008 is being realized. The counterattack of 2010 has been repelled. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, right in front of our eyes, and we should take note that it is adding up. Here is some evidence taken from reading the news of the past couple of days.

It is becoming clear that Obama’s tough stance in the fiscal cliff negotiations is yielding results.  The Republicans now are accepting tax increases. Signs are good that this includes tax rates. A headline in the Times Friday afternoon: “Boehner Doesn’t Rule Out Raising Tax Rates.” A striking shift in economic policy is apparent: tax the rich before benefit cuts for the poor, government support for economic growth. The Republicans are giving ground. The grand bargain to avoid the fiscal cliff will represent a major change in policy, with broad public support.

Boehner is talking tough but is gathering support of his party to enable a deal on President Obama’s terms, the Times reports in another story. The Republicans will support now what Boehner negotiates.

Even Rand Paul is supporting Harry Reid’s proposal in the Senate to increase taxes on the rich, albeit with a professed assurance that this will hurt the economy and in the long run hurt Democrats. Rand’s ideological conviction enables him to politically act. He pretends to know that taxing the rich will ruin the economy and be good in the end for libertarian Republicans such as himself. But note: he is accommodating to the new commonsense as he expresses a conviction that in the long run it will end.

Shockingly, following the same pattern, Ann Coulter, the extreme right wing Fox commentator, scandalized her host Sean Hannity by maintaining that Republicans support Obama’s tax proposals. Rightists are recognizing that the winds are pushing left.

And the far right is moving to the margins. Witness Boehner’s demotion of four Tea Party Republicans from choice committee assignments in the House of Representatives , and Jim DeMint, the Tea Party Senator, choosing exile at the Heritage Foundation, as its president, over completing his term in office, a luxurious exile worth one million dollars a year.

There are also more creative Republican responses. Rising stars in the Republican Party, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, gave speeches to a Jack Kemp tribute dinner, which emphasized the need to address the concerns and needs of the less advantage. I think that David Brooks reading of the significance of this is on the mark. There is a new “Republican Glasnost,” an openness to ideas, beyond trickle-down, ideas that could positively affect the life chances of the vast majority of the American citizenry, ideas that recognize positive government roles, that address the concerns of the less privileged.

The age of the attacks on big government is over. The times are truly changing. The New York Times today, under the headline “Obama Trusted on Economy,” reports on a Heartland Monitor Poll, finding broad support for Obama’s economic policies, with little support for  the Reaganesque Republican approach. The age of debate about good government has begun in an America that is becoming more comfortable with and confident of its pluralist identity, with more citizen involvement, and in which eloquence and intelligence matters. The election mattered.

On a more sober note: I don’t think that all is well in the Republic, that we are entering a new era of good feelings, that the President has the answer to all challenging problems. On many issues, the environment, national security, privacy and citizen rights, education and poverty, I think his policies and programs are wanting. I agree with the many leftist criticisms of Obama found on the left. But I think now is the time to push for corrections, with a chance to achieve them. As Obama himself said once, he has to be pushed to do the right thing.

I also think that the ideological polarization of the American public and its leadership is still a very serious problem. I wish the Tea Party were a thing of the past, but I fear it isn’t, and I hope the Occupy Movement will more practically engage in our pressing social problems, but I worry that it may not. It needs to work on speaking American, as Tom Hayden once put it in the 60s, stop dreaming about utopian visions, anarchism and the like, that make no sense to the broad American public, and address the incompleteness of the Obama transformation in ways that the public can understand and support. The emerging commonsense makes this possible. Obama has moved the center left, which has long been his project. The task for leftists is to move it further, engaging their fellow citizens.

I am having second thoughts about my last post in which I assert that the nomination of Paul Ryan, because he is a right-wing ideologist, assures the re-election of Barack Obama. I don’t wish to revise my observations or judgment, but think I need to explain a bit more. I realize that I should be clearer about what I mean by ideology and why I think, and hope, that it spells defeat for the Republicans. My thoughts in two parts: today, I will clarify what I mean by ideology and my general political prediction; in my next post, I will consider further implications of ideological developments in American politics, addressing some doubts and criticism raised by Deliberately Considered readers.

I also want to point out that my thoughts on Ryan and ideology are related to my search for conservative intellectuals worthy of respect. In that what I have to say is motivated bya conservative suspicion of the role of a certain kind of idea and reason in politics, I wonder what Paul Gottfried and Alvino-Mario Fantini (two conservative intellectuals who have contributed to Deliberately Considered) would think. As I understand it, my last post was a conservative critique of right-wing ideology, pointing to its progressive consequences. As a centrist who wants to move the center left, I am hopeful about this, but I imagine committed conservatives would be deeply concerned. I am still having trouble finding a deliberate dialogue with them.

A brief twenty-five year old encounter comes to mind as I think about ideology and its political toxicity, trying to explain my Ryan judgment.

We were in a taxi in Prague in 1987, Jonathan Fanton, the President of the New School for Social Research, Ira Katznelson, the Dean of The New School’s Graduate Faculty, Jan Urban, a leading dissident intellectual-journalist activist, and I: the preliminary meeting between The New School and the small but very vibrant, creative and ultimately successful Czechoslovak democratic opposition. In the end, we did some good in that part of the world, starting with a donation of a computer that enabled Urban and his colleagues to more easily publish their underground newspaper, Lidove Noviny. As we were exchanging pleasantries in the taxi, I became serious and asserted that I am against all “isms”: communism, socialism, fascism, but also liberalism and conservatism. Urban turned to me and happily declared that we were comrades in thoughts. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, based on our deep concern about the ideological politics of the sort that is now to be found in the Tea Party on the American radical right, and also played a unfortunate role in the politics of post–Communist Czech Republic under the stewardship of Vaclav Klaus.

Urban and I agreed that true-believing politics was extremely dangerous, whether or not the beliefs were attractive. We were suspicious of systematic overall positions. We understood together that the too intimate connection between ideas and assertions of power was extremely dangerous. Ideas then blind. The difference between fact and fiction become difficult to discern. Newspeak prevails.

There was, of course, exaggeration in our agreement, the danger of ideology is not neatly summarized by suffix “ism,” but we shared a common sense, the same sense that informs my judgment of Ryan and the likely Republican fate. Ideology for Urban and for me is a term that is best understood not as the confluence of interest and political ideas, enabling political action (ideology in the sense of Mannheim and Geertz, beautifully interpreted by Ricoeur). Rather, implicit in my exchange with Urban is an understanding of ideology that draws on the position of Hannah Arendt (and more conservative thinkers such as Eric Voegelin), as she and we try to make sense of a particularly pernicious form of political ideas.

Thus in the present situation, following the ideology of the free market true-belief, constitutional fundamentalism and a theological reading of the American tradition, rich people become “job creators” by definition. A moderate Democrat becomes a “dangerous socialist” who doesn’t understand what America is. Changing the fundamental principles of Medicare and Social Security becomes “saving” them, while controlling the cost escalation of Medicare means destroying it. We also have the “failed stimulus package,” the “racist” Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the Muslim president born in Kenya. All of this passes for the conservatism of Tea Party Republicans, and Ryan is said to be its great intellectual leader. This is ideological politics pure and simple.

I disagree with the substance of Romney – Ryan’s positions on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, something that Michael Corey identified and criticized in his response to my post. He believes that the Republican and the Democratic plans for “entitlements” should be dispassionately evaluated and seems to be disappointed that I didn’t do this in my post. But this wasn’t my point. There are indeed different ways to address the problems of medical care of the old and the younger that have their strengths and weaknesses. A debate about such things is a normal part of politics. What concerns me is the Manichean way this debate is presented and understood by the new right-wing ideologues, as a grand battle between good and evil, with the very future of America in the balance. Ryan reduces all political conflict in this way, as he put it in 2005: “the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.“

I think that this is the sort of thing that a great majority of Americans reject. There may have been a drift to the right in recent years. Belief in the possibility that government can address social problems may be down, but the certainty of free market true-believers makes little sense to people as they try to get by in tough times. It’s a matter of form, not substance, and again to paraphrase Barry Goldwater in order to criticize his position: extremism in defense of freedom doesn’t win elections in America, not for Goldwater in the early sixties and not for Romney – Ryan now.

As a consequence, the Republican ticket will prevaricate. They will back down. This has defined Romney’s career, and Ryan himself, to get re-elected, has also compromised his stated principles to deliver the “collectivist” government goods to his constituents. Yet, in the glare of the national campaign this sort of thing is less likely to work. Romney – Ryan will reveal to the electorate the worst of both worlds, the repellent dogmatism of true-belief, combined with the apparent cynicism of hack politicians who will say anything to be elected.

Thus, I think that Obama will be re-elected. I also have a hunch. This may allow Obama to be Obama. Perhaps just as the decisive defeat of Goldwater established the political opportunity for the reforms of “The Great Society,” the Romney – Ryan defeat may open up the opportunity for “change we can believe in.”

As I observed in my last post, I think that an OWS focus on debt, as Pamela Brown has been advocated, makes a lot of sense. We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar. I continue to think about that discussion and how it relates to American electoral politics.

The issue of debt provides a way to keep focus on the frustration of the American Dream as it is part of the experience of many Americans, from the poor to the middle class to even the upper middle class. It is an issue of the concern of the 99%.

Yet, there are many activists in and theorists observing the movement who council against this, such as Jodi Dean. Debt is too individualized a problem. It would be better to focus on an issue of greater common, collective concern (e.g. the environment). The issue of debt is too closely connected to the right wing concern about deficits, and criticism of student debt can too easily become a criticism of higher education.

This presents a serious political problem. There is no broad agreement on debt as the central issue, and no leadership structure or decision making process which can decide on priorities. And of course, there are many other issues of contention. Primary among them, in my judgment, is the question of the relationship between OWS and American electoral politics.

It is here where the activists in OWS, like their new “new social movement” colleagues in Egypt and the Arab world more generally, are not prepared for practical politics. Coordinated strategy is beyond their capacity. One faction’s priority, debt or the reelection of President Obama, is not the concern of another’s, or even a position which it is forthrightly against. There are too many different positions within the movement for it to present a coherent sustained position. People with very different positions were able to join with each other and act politically thanks to the new media, but also thanks to that media, they were not required to work out their differences and priorities. They never developed the means to decide them.

Thus, the secular liberal and socialist activists of Tahrir Square have not played a major role in post Mubarak politics, and thus, OWS is struggling as it approaches its first anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park. It is interesting to note that the serious comments to Brown’s recent article on debt discussed not the issue involved but the means by which the issue has been given priority (the other comments were by anti-OWS readers).  But the story doesn’t end here.  Activists continue their work beyond the glare of the attention of the media mainstream.

The problem of sustaining movements, as they are an outgrowth of the way they have formed, should be noted. Yet, while this all intriguing with interesting theoretical and practical implications, I do not think it is of critical importance. Movements don’t legislate and don’t elect Presidents and parliaments and members of Congress. Rather, they shape the political culture (something which I will reflect on more directly in my next post on new social movements in Russia and Israel). Indeed by helping shape the story people tell themselves about themselves, they lead to legislation and election, and sometimes this takes time. This is where the success of OWS is undeniable.

OWS changed the conversation. Inequality again became an issue of broad public concern in the U.S. and beyond. A simple calculation became a theme infusing discussion around the world: “the 99%”and “the 1%.” In lower Manhattan, a symbolic center of global capitalism, a small group of protesters globally unsettled things. While the speech and action within the movement is important, the way it influences the speech and actions beyond the movement is probably even more important.

This is quite evident in American politics. Under the influence of the Tea Party, the discussion in the midterm elections was about debt and deficits and the Democrats received a shellacking, as Obama put it. For a while Obama and the Democrats were humbled, influenced by the Tea Party movement and its momentum, and by the Republican victory. This changed thanks to OWS.

The President and his party found a new voice, often speaking of “the 99%” directly. There is a steadfastness when it comes to the issue of taxing the rich. Obama himself refused attempts by so called moderate Democrats to bend on the issue (instead of ending the Bush tax cuts for those making $250 thousand and over, ending them only for those making over $1 million), and now the issue of inequality is at the center of his campaign. Obama’s clarity, along with his party’s on the issue, along with the way they are trying to define Mitt Romney, all have an OWS accent.

The challenge for activists in OWS, such as Brown, is to extend and deepen this influence. She, like many others, is working to sustain the impact of OWS. I think she is right about this and about the substance of the matter. Debt is a key issue. For the last twenty years broad segments of the population have managed to keep the illusion of the American Dream alive by going into debt. Now payment is due, and the responsibility requires not only individual action, but concerted public efforts to change the rules of the game. And as the Tea Party is a force for capitalism and individualism run wild, it is important that a social movement works to present a clear alternative.

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.

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.

The jobs report on Friday was bad, as David Howell analyzed here. This immediately was interpreted across the board as good news for Mitt Romney and his party, bad news for President Obama and his. It’s the economy stupid, and bad news about employment means that Obama’s chance for reelection has declined precipitously. And things are worse then that. It’s now or never. It is in the summer that the public’s perception of the economy is locked in for Election Day. Even if things improve in the fall, there won’t be enough lead-time to change the public’s perception.

I know that this is based on solid evidence. Considerable scholarly research has demonstrated the strong correlation between the state of the economy and election results.  But the way this research has been directly applied in daily political commentary is troubling, especially because it can become a political factor itself. As the “Thomas Theorem” posits: If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.  I add, especially when they are doing the defining on television.

This concerns me as a scholar and as a partisan. As a scholar, I worry about the philosophic anthropology of this. The voting public is being depicted as simpletons, not capable of critical thought, of the most basic examination of the facts. There is a kind of economic determinism involved and the determinism is quite mechanical. People vote their pocketbooks and they don’t think critically about it. They don’t wonder about the causes of their economic woes and just vote the bums out. It amazes me how in the same broadcasts talking heads suggest both that the job numbers are a result of long-term trends beyond the control of the President and that Obama’s chances of victory have greatly diminished because of the state of the economy as indicated by the latest job report. They propose a simple Pavlovian stimulus and response vision of voters, never inquiring about how they may interpret the news.

Thinking comparatively, in this way, it’s not the austerity policies, along with other non-economic issues, that is leading to a left political shift in Greece, France and Germany, as we have reported in Deliberately Considered. It’s just a turn against incumbents, and the U.S. will make a right turn for the same economic reason. Might it not be a little more complicated that this?

As a partisan, I wonder are Americans capable of noticing that the persistent unemployment is the result of both the rise in employment in the private sector, and radical cuts in the public sector, including masses of teachers? They surely are capable of noticing that the Republican policies in Congress led the U.S. to the brink of default last summer, and that Romney is offering more of the same, with economic proposals that look a lot like those of George W. Bush and have about as much chance of success as those of David Cameron in Great Britain. Americans also are capable of noticing that in fact Congress is a co-equal branch of government and has moved economic decisions in the direction of austerity, and that state and local governments have been cutting jobs very rapidly during the recession. In effect, Obama is continuing to push in the opposite direction, while a national austerity policy is in place because of the Republicans, as Paul Krugman argued in his piece “This Republican Economy” in today’s New York Times. I know not everyone is going to agree with this Keynesian economist’s political assessment, though I do. What disturbs me is that many posit that argument doesn’t matter. Gross economic statistics, they assume, is political destiny. Following this logic, FDR would have been a one-term president.

And while economics are important in deciding Presidential elections, it is not the only thing. The Republicans, especially as they appeared in the primary elections and in Congress, state legislatures and state houses, are fighting a rearguard action against major social trends in America.

They became the reactionary party when it came to the issues of race and racism, when Nixon adopted his infamous southern strategy. This approach was continued by Bush the elder with his Willie Horton ad and his nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas as the most qualified jurist in the land (a strained anti-racism). And the reaction is alive and well in the Birther movement of Donald Trump and company, and the crazy wing of the Tea Party, with which the Republican establishment has toyed, and the Islamophobia to which many Republicans are deeply committed, fighting against Islamofascism and Sharia law in Oklahoma and beyond. Yet, America is a much more diverse, much more tolerant society. The American Dream more and more looks like the one depicted and embodied by Barack Obama.

And there is much more, concerning the rights of women to equal pay for equal work, immigrant rights, equal rights for gays to serve in the military and to marriage, full healthcare rights for women, including access to contraception and abortion, and much more. For significant segments of the population these are not just social issues, a euphemism that disguises the degree to which survival and fundamental dignity are at issue.

I know that the studies that predict election results take all this into account. They assume that people do vote on these issues, but that the turn of the election to the Republicans or the Democrats is decided by the state of the economy with a high degree of accuracy. Yet, it will matter who people hold accountable for their economic woes, and it will matter which candidate appears to make sense about the economy, often as this is related to other issues.

Perhaps when the economy went into deep crisis, McCain lost the last presidential election. But certainly when he declared in the face of the crisis that the economy was fundamentally sound, he put the nail in his election coffin. For the young, people of color, women and members of the LGBT community, his cluelessness on issues of their special concern magnified his apparent economic ignorance. Across the board, he didn’t make sense about the pressing issues of the day.

I believe this is the central factor: the struggle to make sense to the public about our problems, economic and non-economic, indeed as they are related. As a partisan, I think and I believe Obama still has an advantage in this regard over Romney and the Republican Party, which over the past year has revealed its radicalism. My next post: more reflections on the issue of making sense and communicating it. How it relates to the question in American identities and the issue of America’s place in the new global order.

Remember Preston Brown? He is the senior lifeguard at the Theodore Young Community Center, where I go for my daily swim. For a long time, Preston and I have been joking around about current events, joking with a serious punch. I play the role of the privileged white liberal, he, the skeptical black man. We first developed our parts in a year-long confrontation over the Obama candidacy. The skeptical Preston laughed at my conviction that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, and he thought it was absolutely hysterical that I thought that Americans would likely elect either a black man or a white woman to be President. As I have reported here, we made a couple of bets, which became the source of general community interest, and which Preston, to the surprise of many, paid up. We had a nice lunch at Applebee’s. It ironically, but presciently, ended with a small racist gesture coming from our waiter. We celebrated together, and we sadly noted that while things had changed, the change had its limits.

As a participant observer of Solidarność in Poland, the great social movement that significantly contributed to the end of Communism around the old Soviet bloc, I appreciate limited revolutions. Solidarność called for a self-limiting revolution. Perhaps this is even the time that I should approve of Lenin: “two steps forward, one step back.” Yet, I must admit, I have been disappointed with the stubborn and sometimes very ugly persistence of open racism after the momentous election of President Obama. While I think there is more to the Tea Party than racism, the calls to “take our country back” and the refusal of many to recognize Obama’s legitimacy have been extremely unsettling. Preston’s skeptical view was wrong about the majority of Americans, but he was right about a significant minority. And his concerns have a lot to do with the recent doings in Sanford, Florida.

Yesterday, Preston and I had a brief discussion about Trayvon Martin, which revealed to me, once again, how it is that race is a very real and persistent fact of American life, and why it is that we have so many problems with it.

When I entered the pool area, Preston called out to me, “they got your guy in Florida,” kidding that Zimmerman somehow was my guy. He was trying to get me to engage in conversation, distracting me from my primary task at hand (getting in an hour’s swim, a bit less than two miles) providing for himself some distraction from looking at the pool for hours. I had a little extra time, so I went over since we hadn’t yet talked about the Trayvon Martin controversy.

I told him how terrible I thought the killing was, how horrible it is that we live in a country where such a thing is not only possible, but likely. I confessed to him how I particularly felt badly for Trayvon’s parents, and the parents of young black men more generally, revealing my age and despair, and my recognition that this is something that I did not have to go through as a parent.

He responded by pointing out to me that most young black men who are killed are killed by other young black men. And he continued, the problem is something that we can’t ignore and must address.

I then agreed but pointed out that recognizing that problem doesn’t diminish the troubling racism that was probably at the root of Zimmerman’s identification of Martin as a threat and Zimmerman killing Martin, and the police acceptance of Zimmerman’s account. He agreed.

On that note, I reminded Preston that I wanted to swim for an hour and that the lap session ended in exactly sixty minutes. I suggested that he could allow me to swim into his break, but he would have nothing to do with that.

Our exchange was short and to the point. It was based on mutual good will and respect, which comes from our shared experience. I think it is important to note that if he made my argument and I made his, the meaning of the exchange would have been exactly the opposite of what it was. Instead of being two people talking against racism, it would have been a conversation of two people constituting racism’s persistence. There is a complex relationship between text and context in the exchange, and our mutual understanding is built upon an awareness of this, and our willingness to say things that are hard to say, especially Preston’s recognition of the problem of violent young black men. It is a question of the interaction between who can say what, what they must say and how the must say it, as Irit Dekel explored in her post about Guenter Grass’s controversial poem “What Must Be Said,” and as is implied in my reflections on Poles and Jews.

This is how I interpret the importance of the national protests calling for justice in this case, including “The Million Hoodies March” just outside my New School office, which I observed first hand. That the mobilized included people from different walks of life, young and old, black and white, was crucial. Their co-presence publicly represented at least the beginning of the kind of conversations that Preston and I and many others are having.

These are the two sides of race and racism in America. There are the hateful racists to be sure, those who make racist comments about our President and fight to get their country back, but much more common and difficult is the racism that informs George Zimmerman and the Sanford police’s decision to take his unlikely story completely seriously to the point of not seeing probable cause. And then there are the people who try to work the complexities out, difficult as this is, with no silver bullet, including the election of an African American President.