I am embarking upon a new project, the investigation of the social condition, highlighting dilemmas that are inevitably built into the social fabric, and exploring the ways people work to address them. Some examples:

It is obviously important for a democratic society to provide equal opportunity for all young people. The less privileged should have the advantages of a good education. This is certainly a most fundamental requirement for equal opportunity. On the other hand, it is just as certain that a good society, democratic and otherwise, should encourage and enable parents to provide the best, to present the world as they know and appreciate it, to their children: to read to them, to introduce them to the fine arts and sciences, and to take them on interesting trips, both near and far. But not all parents can do this as effectively, some have the means, some don’t. Democratic education and caring for one’s children are in tension. The social bonds of citizenship and the social bonds of family are necessarily in tension. This tension, in many variations, defines a significant dimension of the social condition.

Another dimension of the social condition was illuminated in a classic lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” by Max Weber: the tension between what he called the “ethics of responsibility” versus the “ethics of ultimate ends.” We observed an iteration of this tension in the debate about Lincoln, the movie. In politics there is always a tension between getting things done, as Weber would put it, responsibly, and being true to ones principles. Ideally the tension is balanced, as it was portrayed in the film: Lincoln the realist enabled Thaddeus Stephens, the idealist, to realize his ends in less than idealistic ways. A wise politician, Weber maintained, has to know how to balance, ideal with realism. But this tension goes beyond individual judgment and political effectiveness. Establishing the social support to realize ideals is necessary, but sometimes the creation of such supports make it next to impossible for the ideals to be realized. Making sure that educational ideals are realized, for example, equal educational opportunity, requires measurement, but the act of measurement can get in the way of real education. Making sure that funds distributed by an NGO to disaster victims can get in the way of getting the funds to the victims. Most generally, organizing to achieve some end establishes the conditions for those who have their particular interests in the organization itself to pursue their interests. NGOs often provide for a comfortable standard of living for its employees in impoverished parts of the world, sometimes this gets in the way of realizing organizational ends. But this isn’t a new development: Robert Michels described this in the early 20^th century, as “the iron law of oligarchy.” I suggest that we think of this as a dilemma built into the social order of things.

I think one of the most fundamental manifestations of the social condition animates the work of Erving Goffman. He explored the power of the Thomas theorem more intensively than any other social theorist. If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Goffman was particularly interested in how in their expressive behavior people managed to define social reality.

The dilemma arises when people disagree about the reality, are ambivalent about it, or even want to flee from it. A prime example is the concept and apparent reality of race. It’s a social construction, as every college freshman comes to know. It’s a fiction, but a fiction that we cannot ignore, a fiction that we continue to treat as real. becoming a social fact. To pretend it doesn’t matter even as it does, is to flee from enduring social problems. But attending to the problems of race carefully has the unintended consequence of furthering its continued salience in social life. Recognize race and it continues to be real. Ignore race, and it is likely that you will ignore its continued negative effects. Controversies over affirmative action policies revolve around this dilemma of race.

I worry when political actors pretend that the complications of the social condition can be easily overcome, following one formula or another, with negative political consequences. This is what motivates me to explore the topic, why I feel compelled to do so. I am concerned that bad sociology also pretends that these tensions are easily resolved, often with a theoretical slight of hand. I am planning on working on this topic, developing a more adequate approach to the social condition, with my colleague, Iddo Tavory. We will start next semester by integrating the topic into our classes.

I will be teaching an undergraduate seminar on social interaction next semester and a graduate seminar on Erving Goffman. Although I regularly teach these courses, I have now my new special theme in mind. The dilemmas cannot be definitively solved, although schools of thought and political programs often purport to do so. Thus, the courses will present a critique of politics and sociology, along with an outline of a distinctive approach to the discipline.

As I teach these courses, I will be working with Tavory. We have already had some interesting discussions about the social condition and hope to continue them not only, as we already have, over coffee, drinks and meals, but also with our students. We are planning to visit each others classes next semester to this end, bringing students into the discussion.

I am particularly excited about this project. It makes the near end of my sabbatical more bearable. I think sociology can help us make sense of the human comedy and its tragedies; working on this directly with my colleague and our students makes the normal academic life well worth living. And note regular Deliberately Considered readers: this approach to sociology helps explain this magazine’s project of public discussion beyond intellectually gated communities.

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.

As a social critic, I am ambivalent about the power of imaginative action in politics. On the one hand, I think that the power of the definition of the situation is a key resource of power for the powerless, the cultural grounding of “the politics of small things.” On the other hand, I worry about myth-making that is independent of factual truth.

On the positive side, there is the definition of the situation: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This relatively simple assertion, the so called Thomas theorem, was first presented in a study of child psychology and behavioral problems by W.I. Thomas and his wife, Dorothy Swain Thomas. Yet, the theorem has very important political implications, going well beyond the area of the Thomases initial concern, moving in a very different direction than the one taken by the field of ethnomethodology, which can be understood as the systematic scholarly discipline of the definition of the situation.

While researching cultural and political alternatives in Poland and beyond in the 1980s and 90s I observed first hand how the theorem, in effect, became the foundational idea of the democratic opposition to the Communist system in Central Europe. The dissident activists acted as if they lived in a free society and created freedom as a result. A decision was made in Poland, in the 70s, by a group of independent intellectuals and activists to secede from the official order and create an alternative public life. People ignored the commands of the Communist Party and associated apart from Party State control, openly publicizing their association. They created alternative publications. They opened the underground by publicizing their names, addresses and phone numbers. They acted freely. They developed ties with workers and others beyond their immediate social circles. And when the regime for its own reasons didn’t arrest them, an alternative public life and an oppositional political force flourished, which ultimately prevailed over the regime.

The powerless can develop power that can and has overwhelmed the holders of conventional power resources. Daniel Dayan here considered how this worked in the case of the Gaza flotilla protest. This morning we could read about how a group of Saudi women are challenging the powers by publicly staging a drive-in. The controversy surrounding their action, the discussion of it on Facebook, is creating a new public life in Saudi Arabia. Facebook is facilitating the power of the powerless, in the Middle-East, North Africa and beyond, but it is the power of the definition of the situation that is creating this new public.

On the other hand, there is a seamy side of imagination and creativity in politics, revealed in two posts this week.

Rafael Narvaez illuminates a most basic and enduring problem. Race is a biological fiction that has become a most important social reality. Racial differences that do not exist, are said to exist, and, in the process, they come to exist, in their consequences. Racism is very much an ongoing social reality in the U.S. and beyond, even, and perhaps especially, in the face of the election of our first black President. Or is he bi-racial or is it post–racial? From institutionalized racism, where, for example, I observe that it is somehow especially difficult to keep open a decent food store in the black corner of my affluent suburb, to the persistent racial stereotyping on a major cable news network, i.e. Fox News, race is a fact, despite the fact that it is a fiction.

The relationship between fact and fiction is a more general problem, as Esther Kreider-Verhalle explored in her post this week. She was inspired to write about this issue when Fox News mistakenly used a still photo of Tina Fey, an entertaining impersonator of Sarah Palin, for Palin herself. Had the liberal cable news network, MSNBC, done this, some political motive might have been inferred, but that Fox did it, with a national political figure who also is a Fox employee, suggests the fundamental insights of the late social and cultural critic, Jean Baudrillard. Hyper-reality has overwhelmed reality. We can not tell the difference between the simulator of a political persona and the person herself, who is in fact a simulation. Politicians lie so much that their lies look like truths to them. In the process, they and their publics can not tell the difference. Truth melts away, as Anthony Weiner and a long line of public men behaving badly reveal. There is some resistance, suggested by periodic scandals, but these are but passing moments in our staged hyper-reality. I applaud Kreider-Verhalle’s cautionary conclusion: “Amidst all the gaming and faking, it would be good to realize that real decisions have an impact on real people.”

This is what our concern about fictoids is all about. Political actors imagine a reality. Palin makes up the notion of death panels for example, and the make-believe becomes real in its consequences, undermining the possibility of significant health care reform. The Republican leadership repeats often enough the formulation “the job killing stimulus package” and then what every sound economist knows – a recession is the time for government spending and not cuts – becomes politicized. Observations about global climate change become a matter of political debate, when fundamental scientific observations are questioned. Next, we will be politically debating fundamental the facts of Holocaust.

I once had dinner with Baudrillard. It followed his public dialogue with Sylvère Lotringer on “The Parallax of Evil: Domination and Hegemony.” I was surprised how quickly he accepted my criticism of his notion of a totalized hyper-reality. I asserted that the politics of the definition of the situation, “the politics of small things,” stands as an alternative to hyper-reality. I wondered why he was not interested in having a real debate. Perhaps it was a matter of his sense of table manners. Perhaps it had to do with his health. He died about a year later. But as I recall our discussion now, it is clear that we met each other representing the two sides of the definition of the situation and that the debate I wanted to have had no resolution. It is not a matter of debate but of judgment and action.

Living as if we are free requires confronting fictoids resolutely. Form matters.