By Lukasz Pawlowski, November 12th, 2012 
In this post, Łukasz Pawłowski a contributing editor for Kultura Liberalna, one of the groups I met with while in Poland, offers his reflections on the American elections for a European audience. Pawłowski is currently an academic visitor at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. -Jeff
Barack Obama won re-election, his party managed to hold the Senate, and the House of Representatives is still – exactly as before the elections – dominated by the Republicans hostile to presidential administration. Nothing has changed? By no means, potential changes are more than plenty, but the most important one concerns the American right.
The Republicans, who for the last few years have been leaning heavily to the right, lost the second election in a row, and in their own interests, it is better they rethink this strategy. In a rapidly changing American society this party is becoming, as the political scientist Benjamin Barber told “Kultura Liberalna” magazine, “the face of an already disappearing America – white, protestant, poor and rural.” And indeed, exit polls indicate that Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, 73 of the Asian-American and 93 percent of African American. Given that the share of the first two minorities in American society is increasing dramatically fast, GOP should start thinking of how to appeal to them.
Little better did the Republicans do to captivate other important demographic group – the young. Only 36 percent of American voters between the age of 18 and 29 marked the Romney’s name on their ballots. Obviously this does not mean that in a few years, when these young people entirely replace the now older generations, the Republicans will entirely cease to matter – let’s not forget voters get more conservative with age. Yet, in a society as relatively young as American – in 2010 the median age was 37.2 – winning the presidential election without the support of this age group is hardly possible.
Truly terrible news . . .
Read more: Change is a “Right” Thing Now
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 9th, 2012 
As I celebrate the glorious re-election of President Barack Hussein Obama, and as New York and my friends and family are still suffering from Hurricane Sandy, and a snowstorm follow-up, I have been in Europe, spending time with my daughter, and her family in Paris, giving a lecture and visiting Rome for the first time, and taking part in public talks in Warsaw and Gdansk on the occasion of the Polish translation of Reinventing Political Culture, offering my commentary on the American elections informed by the book. In Gdansk, I was honored to receive a medal from the European Solidarity Center for my work with Solidarność, and continuing work inspired by its principles.
I have been enjoying the joys of citizenship and patriotic hope, the love of family, and recognition for personal and public achievement. I have learned a lot in many very interesting discussions. I have been very busy, torn with mixed emotions, including a frustrated desire to put my thoughts down for Deliberately Considered. Some quick summary thoughts today; next, a close critical response to the election results and the President’s speech. In brief: Obama excelled once again as “story teller in chief.”
Election Day from afar: having cast my vote weeks ago. In Warsaw, I discussed the events of the day and the project of the reinvention of American political culture. As I have explained in previous posts and analyzed carefully in my book, I believe that Barack Obama is an agent of significant reinvention, changing the relationship between culture and power: the way he has used the politics of small things, his eloquence as an alternative to sound bite political rhetoric, retelling of the American story as one centered on diversity, as he embodies this, and his challenge to market fundamentalism, are the major contours of his transformational politics. On Election Day, I explained that as a social scientist I thought that the transformation that he has started would . . .
Read more: At Home, Abroad: Election Day
By Aron Hsiao, November 2nd, 2012 
As Sandy hit the east coast, many of us were watching the situation closely. This meant watching not only big media but also Facebook and Twitter, where storm-related activity was plentiful. The social media news was personal, reporting on the storm not as a large-scale atmospheric system but as the weather outside the living room window. We know whose power was out, whose wasn’t; we know who saw flooding and who just saw rain; we know who was drinking wine and who was drinking beer. We even know approximately when many went to bed. Stories in big media and even in blogspace, on the other hand, tended toward the documentary: ConEdison transformer explosion on the lower east side; flooding up to 14th Street; partial building collapse on 8th Avenue.
While the latter group may have been much more informative in the conventional sense, the former group was much more illuminating. True, the “news” version of Sandy was formally conventional, but even in the details it was macroscopic and opaque. Each detail in big media was merely a data point supporting the larger context, the bigger story. Eighth Avenue, for example, was just another dot in New York City and, more generally, the Atlantic coast, while on social media, Eighth Avenue belonged to the people living there; it became a geography all its own, rather than a mathematical point in a much larger geography. In the news, Sandy was a national meteorological event. In social media, Sandy was the particular experience of an unusual afternoon and evening by a particular community.
As someone experiencing the event from afar, the difference was stark. It was difficult to emotionally reconcile the two accounts, to see them as treating one and the same reality. It still feels as though the connective tissue linking macronews to microblogging is missing. Where is the ontological middle ground? Does our cultural metaphysics allow for it?
Of particular interest, in any case, were the Sandy photos, which comprised three genres of reporting.
News media images. The news coverage of the event provided the predictable series of disaster shots—cars floating in . . .
Read more: Sandy and Three Genres of “Reporting”
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