Defeatism on the Left
from NYBullshit.wordpress.com
At some point, the right’s response to the Obama Presidency turned into what feels like a rout. The old ready defeatism of the left reemerged: the astounded bafflement about the success of right talking points, the flustered games of catch-up with proliferating memes about Obama’s ’socialism’ and ‘foreignness’.
At the same time, the left performed an incredible 180 on the President, renouncing him for selling out with remarkable speed – as if the election had itself banished every demon and won every battle the left needed to move forward on an ambitious agenda. Part of the defeatism is the effective corralling of mainstream liberal sentiment by the ‘veal pen’ of the President’s popularity and obsessive message discipline. There’s always been the expectation that Obama would just take care of it himself, and that adherence to his message-line would get the job done. The result has been a woefully under-organized and frustrated left searching for a point from which to put pressure on the President, but still years behind the right in its organizing capacity.
There’s something about liberal thinking that makes it prone to easy defeatism. Part of the ideology of liberalism is an explicit pluralism, embracing the interaction between different interest groups in the public sphere as the path to a just society. This lends itself to a focus on strategy (the interaction of those groups in the public sphere) and an obsession with telling the story about the battle of those competing interests. Folks on the right tell a better story in the battle, and focus less on the interactions of strategy in the public, lending itself to a more effective language for mobilization – one that is more visceral, immediate, and messianic. The endless deliberations of strategy allow more points of division between left groups, and downplays values-driven emotional appeals. The result is less action, and an obsession with the effective strategies of your opponents, who consistently do a better job of getting people fired up. And so the defeatism slips back in, and the rout begins again.
The folks at SmartMeme have a good starting point for reversing the rout. They describe a division between “the story of the battle” and the “battle of the story”. The Story of the Battle is the liberal machinations about activism and interest groups; the Battle of the Story is the public-facing narrative that speaks to people and makes them want to get motivated to act. Left strategists need to think about the differences between the two narrative styles, and invest more time and energy into the battle of the story in order to turn the rout around, and continue building a better future for all.
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from the DC Writeup
In the past two weeks, the emergence of so-called ‘birthers’ into the mainstream political consciousness has been met largely with astonishment and disdain. The birthers are conspiracy theorists who question the validity of Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate, alleging that the president was born in either Kenya or Indonesia.
But this is no ordinary conspiracy theory, and we need to understand the birthers in order to understand the underside of the new political world created by technology and by the election of our first black president. Catapulted into the limelight by internet organizing and the remnants of the radical right fringe, the birther movement is emblematic of the ways American politics has changed during the past decade.
The fervor of the birthers has been incubated in the strange backwaters of the right-wing blogosphere, an environment not so unlike the ascendant left-wing ‘netroots’ that helped bring Obama to power. Both have their minor celebrities, significant major party connections and cause célèbres. In fact, Robert Gibb’s “15 dollars and a web domain” comment neatly describes what most people call (in other contexts) the democratic potential of internet publishing. Websites like WorldNetDaily have mobilized highly motivated people via a drumbeat of criticism (repeated in the echo-chamber blogosphere), and then allowed these highly motivated people to project what would otherwise be an invisible issue into the limelight — with YouTube and crowding internet polls as their chief weapons.
Which is not to say all net-movements are created equal. The shrill nativism of the birth certificate conspiracists makes them particularly dangerous as the US embarks on a radical reconfiguration of its relations with the world post-Bush. They are the backlash and the defenders of the old guard, and their power must be accounted for as the rest of the country moves forward.
The fervor of the birthers should be understood in its broader context. Essentially, the birthers represent a dethroned white right-wing movement, grasping for some kind of kill switch that will short-circuit the course of change charted by the Obama administration. Many on the right see a host of changes — in the role of government, in the relationship of the US to other countries, and in race relations — and correctly recognize them as a death knell for traditional American conservatism. The birth certificate issue becomes a way to delegitimize everything Obama stands for — and in the case of his legal changes, literally a way to wipe the slate clean.
The same pattern emerges with other prominent conspiracy theories. The 9/11 ‘truthers’ gained steam as the Bush administration went to war in Iraq and a vast network of civil liberty violations came to light. Truthers saw 9/11 as the lynchpin of Bush administration’s power to do most of whatever it pleased, and sought to destabilize the entire administration by revealing the ‘truth’ of what happened on 9/11/01.
Of course, all this could be resolved with the release of one simple document, right?
Not really. Gibbs was right when he said that the birther conspiracy is here to stay, because any facts presented to defend Obama’s American past will be viscerally delegitimized in the eyes of the birthers, who see Obama as a threat to their long held worldview. The birthers’ standard of proof is dictated by a set of values that make any defender of Obama un-American and therefore untrustworthy. The only people worth trusting are fellow reactionaries, who see America’s fall written everywhere — those who don’t must be blind to the truth, and therefore could never read the birth certificate for what it ‘really’ is.
In fact, the birther conspiracy theory evokes the supposedly American values that Obama transcends — notions of rights of birth, rigid identity borders and the ‘Homeland’ that proliferated in the darker days of the Bush administration, and have taken root in some parts of the American psyche. The idea of ‘proof of citizenship’ shows up in a number of right-wing arguments about welfare and voter registration, and in the massive ICE workplace raids that deport anyone funny looking who can’t immediately produce proof of their citizenship. Basically, for the birthers, America belongs to Americans, and if you disagree with what they think the country stands for — well, then you must not be from here.
That’s why I think that mainstream commentators miss the mark when they present official statements and internet print-offs as the final question on this issue. The real battle here is a battle over values — those demanding Obama’s birth certificate espouse the notion that someone becomes great primarily by right of birth, while many of Obama’s supporters backed him because they thought he would be a worthwhile leader in troubled times. The best way to defeat the birthers is to return to talking about the big issues facing our world today. There are more than enough
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12 Steps to Writing
12 steps for being a better writer, completed for a class.
Continue reading ‘12 Steps to Writing’
Filed under: Commucation Strategy, Duncan Writes! | 1 Comment
Tags: 12 steps, better writing, how to, writing
All politics contains and is contained by an ideology of communication that determines the character, location and tone of what is understood as ‘political’ about the world. An ideology of communication is integral to politics because communication shapes the collective action of communities; an ‘ideology of communication’ essentially constitutes the perceived connection from words, symbols and images to the action of human subjects. This ideology is necessarily multifaceted, involving questions of agency, proper discourses and community. I believe contemporary society remains in thrall to an ideology of communication that is a model of the spectacular ‘public sphere.’ Under an overarching system of alienated spectatorship politics that operates via the production of attention, this model selectively articulates at least two different forms of human-political agency under capital: the rational speaking subject of bourgeois industry, and the more contemporary consumer subject. In order to engage in an earnest confrontation with capital, radical politics must explore and articulate new forms of struggle beyond the spectacular public sphere, identifying points of unity and potential in communication that re-orients the subject in collective action.
Continue reading ‘The Ideology of Communication in the Public Sphere’
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Tags: Academic, communication, creative activism, new politics, public sphere, the image
In contrast to Daniel Boorstin’s approach to analyzing the pseudo event, I would like to examine the pseudo event as a kind of event that exists primarily in terms of the audience attention that develops after the ‘fact’ of its happening.
Pseudo events only exist after ‘the facts’ reported by news media and gossips, becoming events only by way of interaction with an audience. I agree with Boorstin’s description of a pseudo event as an event “planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced” (Boorstin, 1961 p. 11) However my analysis departs from Boorstin’s discussion of the pseudo event, which emphasizes the pseudo event as a premeditated, planned occurrence carried out by people with power (Boorstin, 1961 p.11). Despite this focus on premeditation, his description of the event’s “ambiguous” “relation to the underlying realty of the situation” (ibid.) demonstrates the limited role that planning and executing an ‘event’ plays in the constitution of the pseudo event. Events of all kinds have always been premeditated and thought of symbolically – what changes with the pseudo event is the premeditation of an audience’s caring about an event, and the use of symbols and people already constituted as meaningful as props to produce the audience’s willingness to pay any mind to the event. Indeed, in discussing the pseudo event, Boorstin almost seems to get tongue tied trying to describe exactly what matters about them – throughout The Image, only his section dealing with pseudo events engages significantly with issues of ‘facts’ and ‘truth,’ while others engage with issues of titillation and audience-building. He seems caught up in the language journalism provides for itself – the language of objective truths, facts and self-evident events. I would like to contend that ‘news’ pseudo events are merely one genre of a larger ‘pseudo’ environment that includes the discourses of celebrity, self-fulfilling prophecies and corporate image-making Boorstin describes elsewhere in his book. Most broadly, the implication of his analysis can be summed up as: “the rise of pseudo-events has mixed up our roles as actors and as audiences” (Boorstin, 1961 p.29). I intend to analyze the pseudo event largely through the lens of the overlapping roles of actors and audiences.
Continue reading ‘Sit Down, Pay Attention! – Attention as Power in the Public Sphere’
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Tags: Academic, boorstin, pseudo events, public sphere, spectacle, the image
How Randomness Fooled the Market
The economic crisis of 2008 initiated a deluge of discussion about the reasons for economic collapse and the ability to predict those causes and then prevent them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers an interpretation of human economic nature that suggests another approach to thinking about how to contain the possibility for large-scale economic crisis – one that emphasizes reducing exposure to high-impact inevitable ‘black swan’ events and checking the nature of human agency on thinking about the future. The current economic crisis represents a failure to account for low probability, high impact ‘outlier’ events that introduce systemic risk into the economy – a failure that results from the use of tools that provided poor predictions about risk based on inadequate information, coupled with a kind of survivorship bias that widened the risk to the economy on the whole.
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Tags: Academic, black swans, economic crisis, finance, fooled by randomness, risk, Taleb
In line with my concentration ‘Meaning,’ my rationale focuses on the relationship between media, persuasion, and social change. The theoretical frame for my rationale is Jacques Ranciere’s theory on the ‘distribution of the sensible,’ which deals with limits placed on what is sayable and intelligible in politics. I believe his theory describes the impact of media technologies as systems that determine how, when and where people experience the world, as well as the messages that emerge in political discourse. The crux of my colloquium involves a historical examination of what types of appeals become persuasive in different media environments, and what forms of association/organizations most effectively use those appeals to create social change. I will investigate these topics from the position of grassroots activist strategy, looking at these theories for hints about how to better lead and think about social change. I took this course because I knew at least 3 of the books would end up on my book list – McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Jenkins’ Convergence Culture (I also added Plato’s Phaedrus, but won’t be covering it in this paper). The connections with my rationale fall under two headings, which I describe as ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ questions – theory about the organization of social systems in particular media environments (‘strategy’, dealing with the nature of power and its organization), and the way that media shapes persuasion (‘tactics’, how to make the most effective appeal possible). Here, I intend to describe the most useful insights developed from these texts on my booklist read during the class.
Continue reading ‘Strategy, Tactics and Media Change’
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Tags: Henry Jenkins, mcluhan, media ecology, new politics, organizing, strategy, tactics, walter ong
Bill Thompson just opened a new website designed by Blue State Digital, which also designed Barack Obama’s campaign site.
First of all, I’m increasingly inclined to give my qualified support Thompson for mayor – I don’t know if it was pure election-grandstanding, but it seems like every time he makes a public announcement of some kind, like his workaround of the MTA fare-hike, it’s generally sensible, effective, and conscious of class dynamics in the city (for instance, as Comptroller he got city pension funds to remove their money from companies that privatise formerly public housing in the city).
But that’s beside the point – I think this will be a test case in how well folks other than Obama can use his organizing model in their campaign strategy. While I trust that Blue State won’t apply the Obama model whole-cloth, many of the central elements of the Obama campaign revolved around him specifically, and might not translate well into other campaigns. When someone wins, it always makes their system look better than it probably is, and thevalidity of the organizing model will be need to be tested in a vareity of contexts.
Here are some of the risks I see in adopting the Obama model:
-Looking like an Obama hanger-on: to stick in people’s minds, you need to develop a distinctive personality. The individualist tendancy in American politics asks that politicians be in a way self-made. Trying to ride the coattails too overtly undermines credibility and might hurt the campaign.
-Social Media can hurt too: trying to mobilize folks via twitter/Facebook/etc. can become a conspicuous display of a lack of support as well. Having 50 people on a Facebook group demonstrates weakness in a citywide or statewide campaign. Thompson should be sure that embracing new media will build support among his target constituencies before over embracing the technology.
-You need a good story: Obama mobilized a series of glittering generalities based on his personal story. Thompson needs to develop a central story that reduces to a short-worded theme and three key policy proposals to organize people behind the campaign. One of the clear differences between Obama and Thompson’s site is the lofty quote Obama put on the top of every page. Thompson doesn’t have the same type of cred, or story to get people together.
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Tags: bill thompson, mayor, new media, new politics, nyc, obama
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