The threat of a shut down of the federal government put a crimp in protests planned for DC, but it didn’t shut them down. On Tuesday, October 8, 10,000 people came to demand immigration reform. Backed by major unions, the rally and march had been in the works long before anyone thought a small group of Republican House Members would force the federal government to close in order to compel a delay in the start of the Affordable Care Act.

As the clock ticked on passing a continuing resolution to pay federal bills, permits were in place and everything was set to go. Several hundred people had signed up to be arrested at the foot of Capitol Hill in order to demand that the bill passed by the Senate in June be voted on in the House. Plans were thrown into turmoil when the deadline passed and numerous federal employees were told not to report to work on October 1. Parks all over the country were closed, including the Mall. There is no fence to actually keep people off the Mall, but the shutdown did affect uses requiring a permit, such as the erection of a sound stage. Rally permits were revoked at the last minute.

The organizing committee didn’t cancel the rally; instead it negotiated with the National Park Service and the US Capitol Police, whose personnel were among those furloughed. At the last minute, it was agreed that events could go on, including the planned civil disobedience at the foot of Capitol Hill, with some adjustments.

For many years civil disobedience in the nation’s capitol has been negotiated and choreographed somewhat like a stage play. Fifty years ago, when large protest resumed in DC after a hiatus of several decades, such actions were spontaneous. Police cracked down to discourage future disruptions. This did not work. It just made the cops look bad. The resulting court cases, both criminal and civil, were expensive.

Over time police and protestors learned to work things out in advance. The cops knew how many personnel and paddy wagons to have available, and the protestors knew that they would have a chance to do their thing before sorting out who did and did not want to be arrested. With occasional exceptions, behavior on both sides became far more civil.

These changes happened throughout the nation, though not evenly or everywhere. Essentially, sitting in to get arrested, whether it was blocking the sidewalk or filling a room, became institutionalized, as had the unruly practices of picketing, striking and leafleting before it. Rules emerged to govern behavior, which were mostly followed by police and protestors. The goal was to get maximum messaging at minimum cost.

Following post-shutdown negotiations, the permit to have a sound stage was restored, though the sound stage had to be assembled the day before the rally in a heavy rain. After a welcome by the DC Mayor, numerous Members of Congress, members of the clergy and union leaders spoke from this stage. Ordinary immigrants got mike time to tell their stories.

A rousing address by Rep. Leon Guierrez (D IL), leader of immigration reform efforts in the House, sent thousands of people down Jefferson Drive to the street between the reflecting pool and the west lawn of the Capitol. The list of those to be arrested had been reduced to 211 to accommodate the U.S. Capitol Police, who had to report for work every day even though they were not being paid.

It was an “A” list, with eight Members of Congress and 90 union leaders as well as some ordinary folk. Most of the union members wore identifying t-shirts, especially UNITE HERE and LiUNA local 78. The 211 lined up on the east side of the street, facing west, so the photos could show the Capitol dome in the background. Observers crowded across the street, cheering and calling out to each one arrested. In between were several lines of police, one for crowd control and the others to handcuff each person arrested and escort her or him to a paddy wagon. The cops did not interfere with the organizers who gave selected protestors letters to spell out the message:

CONGRESS GET TO WORK –AMERICA NEEDS IMMIGRATION REFORM

Twelve hours later everyone had gone in and out of custody. Each had paid a fine of $50 so they did not have to return to court or face trial. This was also negotiated; the usual fine for one of these actions in DC is $100. Most of those arrested paid their own fines, but arrangements were made for those with insufficient funds.

And now that the government shutdown is over, immigration reform is again on the top of the public agenda.

Last week, I intended to write my reflections on President Obama’s speech at the commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Instead, I offered my ambivalent thoughts on Obama on Syria. Summarized in my opening: “Two Cheers for Obama.” The potentially tragic decisions of the week overshadowed, in my mind, the enduring accomplishments and challenges of decades. Obama is not only threatening Assad. Assad is threatening Obama. A march to war overshadowed a poignant remembrance of this historic march of 1963.

I closed my reflections by expressing my fear that this overshadowing may become emblematic of the Obama presidency: significant work on jobs and freedom challenged by questionable military and national security adventures, including not only the potential attack on Syria, but also drone warfare and heightened domestic and international surveillance. Unlike the President’s full-throated critics on the left and the right, I am not convinced that his positions have been simply wrong. Yet, I too sense that there is a pattern here that is troubling, especially so since the ideals which Barack Obama embodies, symbolizes and has acted to fortify are of such crucial importance to the vigor and health of the American body politic, revealed in his speech commemorating the great civil rights march and its most powerful leader, Martin Luther King Jr.

Obama’s talk, like King’s, is not cheap. His words often act. He is the only man to have been elected President of the United States based on a speech, (William Jennings Bryant was nominated but not elected), and his speeches, in form as well as content, continue to be consequential. This was my hope when I watched and then read the text, despite recent events in Syria, and the possibility of an American attack. Obama’s words on jobs and freedom, and the people who marched on Washington, tell us something about who we are, where we are going, and by what means, and as I see it, even offer interesting insights into the Syrian dilemmas.

The speech revolved around an irony. While, Obama honored King and his eloquent rhetoric, he emphasized the more humble deeds of the many who came to Washington and gave the words substance.

“We rightly and best remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory that day, how he gave mighty voice to the quiet hopes of millions; how he offered a salvation path for oppressed and oppressors alike. His words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time.

But we would do well to recall that day itself also belonged to those ordinary people whose names never appeared in the history books, never got on TV. Many had gone to segregated schools and sat at segregated lunch counters. They lived in towns where they couldn’t vote and cities where their votes didn’t matter. They were couples in love who couldn’t marry, soldiers who fought for freedom abroad that they found denied to them at home. They had seen loved ones beaten, and children fire-hosed, and they had every reason to lash out in anger, or resign themselves to a bitter fate.”

The humble were in Obama’s telling the real heroes:

“Because they marched, a Civil Rights law was passed. Because they marched, a Voting Rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else’s laundry or shining somebody else’s shoes. (Applause.) Because they marched, city councils changed and state legislatures changed, and Congress changed, and, yes, eventually, the White House changed. (Applause.)”

Leaders lead when they are pushed, Obama argues. The eloquence of leaders such as King, but also Obama himself, has power when it is empowered by social movement. Odd to hear the President argue this, a reading of leaders and activists that he also emphasized in his second inaugural, as he is preparing for acts of war that are not only unpopular, but seem to distract from his principal policy initiatives, as Robert Reich recently observed on his blog.

And in the speech, Obama argued the urgency of not being distracted, for, much is left to be done. From defending past gains, to completing the project:

“But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote, or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all, and the criminal justice system is not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails, it requires vigilance.” (Applause.)

He highlighted the legacy of the March by pointing to two courses of action. On justice – there is an urgency to push back reaction, to fight against those who would again limit access to the ballot and who accept growing inequalities and incarceration, and on jobs, there is an equal urgency grounded in the pursuit of happiness:

“For what does it profit a man, Dr. King would ask, to sit at an integrated lunch counter if he can’t afford the meal? This idea — that one’s liberty is linked to one’s livelihood; that the pursuit of happiness requires the dignity of work, the skills to find work, decent pay, some measure of material security — this idea was not new. Lincoln himself understood the Declaration of Independence in such terms — as a promise that in due time, ‘the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance’.”

I have a dream, or at least I can imagine, a way out of the Syria dilemma, inspired by these words of the President. In terms of my last post moving from two cheers for Obama to three.

Under pressure of the social forces he celebrated in his address marking the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Washington, Obama works with world leaders to find a course of non-violent common action to responding to the atrocity of Assad’s chemical warfare. I admit that is probably a pipedream.

But alternatively, I can imagine very positive results of Congress turning down Obama’s request for authorization of the use of force in Syria. In his defeat Obama still will have expressed his strong response to the use of chemical weapons, and the need to find more diplomatic means to control Assad will become the order of the day.

It may cost Obama immediate political capital, but it may also help him more assuredly move American foreign policy in the direction he has long sought, that his words point to and can enable in the future. The state senator who spoke up against a stupid war, without democratic support, will have achieved his goal. The newly elected President who won his Nobel Prize for the perceived promise of changing the direction of the global hegemon, will get a boost from among others his most right-wing opponents. The Nobel Peace Laureate explained why war is a necessary evil to be avoided when possible, and this may come to pass. It will become harder for the President, as his aides now emphasize, to embark on military actions for the rest of his term, but it will also make it harder for future presidents to engage in such action without the approval of Congress and the American people. The result will be an American foreign policy that is more suited to the emerging global order, that is less militarized, and is more subject to democratic restraints. America will have turned an important corner: a tactical defeat for the President, but in the long run, a major strategic victory, a foreign policy that Martin Luther King Jr. and the marchers of ’63 would approve of, a foreign policy that makes it more likely that the struggle for jobs and freedom will move forward.

Coming out of my dream I still am deeply concerned, as is President Obama that those who would use chemical weapons against innocent civilians should not go unpunished and must be stopped. Obama’s obligation now, as he and his Democratic critics, such as Congressman Grayson, see it, is to make the case for military action against Syria disclosing all the purported evidence of its necessity. But those same critics, of the left and the right, must then work on effective non-violent action. I fear this is another pipedream.

Upwards of 100,00 people came to Washington last week to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But they didn’t all come for the same event. Indeed there were so many things going on that there is no way to count how many people came for something. There were at least two marches and two celebrations at the Lincoln Memorial, as well as several exhibits, numerous conferences and conventions and a few protests. I went to many and took photos at several.

By August it seemed that everyone wanted a piece of the commemoration pie, but first out of the gate was an amateur without an institutional base. Van White is a civil rights attorney in Rochester NY whose late father frequently talked about going to the 1963 march. As much in memory of his father as anything else, early in 2012, White decided to replicate the march on the actual date, August 28, even though it was a Wednesday. That’s a hard day to draw a crowd, but about 10,000 people got up early to march 1.6 miles to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

He filed for the ideal domain name in June of 2012 and requested the permits two months later. Once his webpage was up, he invited people to comment and get in touch; that’s how he found a couple dozen of the original marchers to lead his legacy walk the morning of August 28. He also ran a civil rights conference the day before, attended by about 150 people and staffed by a couple dozen students from Alabama State University (an HBCU in Montgomery) as a school history project.

White was going to do a presentation at the Lincoln Memorial, but the National Park Service nixed that idea. White eventually found out why; the White House wanted that spot on that day. He did get permits for his march, but only after the King Center did its best to kill it.

The King Center was created in Atlanta after Dr. King’s death to memorialize Dr. Martin Luther King and house some of his archives. As a family business, it has mirrored a lot of the family disputes. That may be why it didn’t file for a domain name until late in June of 2013, and had to settle for officialmlkdream50.com. For many months, anyone who googled variations of “March on Washington anniversary” to find out what was in the works got Van White’s webpage, not the “official” one.

To pull off an event the size of Reclaim the Dream, MLK III, the current CEO of the King Center, partnered with Brooklyn’s Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. NAN handled most of the logistics and the Rev. Al was the keynote speaker. While they wanted their event to be on Saturday, when ordinary working people could come, they didn’t want any competition. The old dogs didn’t like that new puppy, Van White, poaching on their territory. But he had his permits and wouldn’t go away.

As was true in 1963, organized labor provided major resources. Unions were about half of the official organizational sponsors and probably brought more than half of the participants to DC. All 500 bus parking spots at RFK stadium were filled on Saturday. The UAW alone paid for 106 buses. Other organizations sponsored buses, but their riders had to pay for their passage. Anyone who could get a spot on a union bus road for free and got fed along the way. Saturday’s speakers included a lot of union leaders. If a speakers list had been provided to the press or posted online I could do a count, but that never happened.

Since the speeches started early in the morning, anyone coming from far away had to travel all night or come early. Those that did found plenty to do. The DC Commemoration Committee held its own forum at the African-American Civil War Museum the preceding Tuesday. On Thursday and Friday the Coalition on Black Civic Participation held a two day training session for black youth at the National Education Association. Friday night an anti-war group lighted up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial until the U.S. Park Police made them move. That’s just a small sampling.

On Saturday both sides of the reflecting pool were packed with people. While there is no longer a count given out by any disinterested party, my guess is that there were about a hundred thousand people. A few hundred drifted across the street to see the exhibits at the “Freedom Festival,” but most just sat in the sun, watched the speakers on a large screen and waved their signs. Most of these came from the NAACP, whose logo appeared on at least half of the printed posters. Major themes were “End Racial Profiling” and “Justice for Trayvon Martin.” The march that began when the speeches ended was an anti-climax. Led by bigwigs and mounted US Park Police, the crowd walked pass Dr. King’s statue to disperse at the Washington Monument.

Wednesday’s commemoration was called Let Freedom Ring and featured a bell-ringing ceremony at 3:00, the hour of Dr. King’s 1963 speech. While bells were rung all over the country, the one placed at the Lincoln Memorial had once been at Birmingham’s 16^th St. Baptist Church, which was bombed on Sept. 15, 1963. President Obama spoke afterwards. In contrast to Saturday’s almost slapdash style, Wednesday’s event was carefully orchestrated and timed so that all the other speakers and entertainers finished right before 3:00. The weather was less predictable, with frequent light showers and only occasional sun. Despite the rain, people dribbled in. When the speeches began, there were only a few thousand members of the general public on either side of the reflecting pool. When the President spoke, both sides were full.

Those listed as sponsors of Wednesday’s “coalition” included more black organizations and few unions, but the Secret Service was the power behind them all. Access to the area between the reflecting pool and the Lincoln Monument was limited to press, staff and people with tickets. Press movement was severely restricted; audience tickets were given out to pre-selected people; umbrellas were removed when everyone went through the metal detectors; men stood on top of the Lincoln Memorial scanning the crowd with binoculars. For the final staging, when three Presidents and a first lady were on one side of the speaking level and members of the King family on the other, a three-panel bullet-proof screen was placed in front.

At this semi-centennial celebration of a protest march, there was something for everyone, from the President on down. The only thing I didn’t see, hear or read about were counter-protests.

Two cheers for President Obama! On his performance leading up to his speech yesterday in the Rose Garden. See video below.

Great that he is going to Congress. I hope this sets a precedent, making it harder in the future for Presidents unilaterally, and contrary to the constitution, to go to war. No guarantee this will be the case, but it is very much worth the effort, notable here because it is far from clear that the President will get the support he seeks.

Cheer two: I am pleased that he is standing against chemical warfare. Too many of my friends on the left are missing this point. In their generalized criticism about American power in the world (thus, for example, America now is “waging war on Syria”), they seem to not understand, even seem to purposively ignore, that the Assad regime in Syria has engaged in a horrific act, one of the few times since WWI that chemical weapons have been used so openly.

I know this is not the only time. I know that the U.S. was silent when Iraq used such weapons against Iran. I know that the U.S. has used chemicals in Vietnam and Iraq, and I know that Israel has used chemicals in Gaza. But Assad used chemical weapons for the sole purpose of indiscriminately killing people, his fellow citizens, actually his subjects. It was state terror, pure and simple. There are those who point to the less than certain evidence, but I think a pretty clear case has been made by the White House, and those who still doubt that Assad is a butcher do so out of willful ignorance, powered by ideology, close to home, a blind anti-Americanism. To the contrary, I believe that sometimes, there is something worse than American power, and sometimes, the U.S. does the right thing. As an expert on East and Central Europe, I especially appreciate this.

To be sure on purely humanitarian grounds, a case can be made that an attack upon Syria will only cause more causalities, the position of the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. The fear is that fighting violence with violence cannot solve the problem. But this is a sensible position only if you think that war and all acts of war are never the answer, are ruled out on moral grounds. I respect this position, but can’t buy in, as I couldn’t many years ago during the Vietnam War when I tried to convince myself that I am a pacifist. Thus, it makes sense that human rights groups are divided in their understanding of the proper course of action.

But is Obama’s outlined course the right one? I admit; I am not sure, and I have serious concerns. Violence is communication. This is clearly the case of suicide bombing, for example, and terrorism more generally. Communicative violence doesn’t directly change the balance of coercive power, but it can change opinions, affect morale, spread fear. But is this the way legitimate democracies should communicate? I fear that limited intervention in Syria is a kind of expressive politics, and not more than that. It may feel good to do something, but it is far from clear that it will do any good. Unforeseen consequences for the U.S. and the region are almost guaranteed. But then doing nothing also will have consequences, and will say something, perhaps making matters worse. I am conflicted.

It would be best if a broader coalition of nations and citizens were behind action against the Baathist regime in Syria. It would be wonderful if the UN were capable of acting. Putin’s Russia has made this impossible for the last two years, with no prospect for change. It would be much better if the opposition in Syria had a democratic face: apparently not, unfortunately. I support some action, worry about the present course, but also about alternatives.

PS. This past week marked the 50^th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. I wanted to open September with serious reports and reflections. These are forthcoming. For now, I perceive tragedy revealed in the events of the week. The very positive role Lyndon Johnson played in the civil rights story was overshadowed at the end of his term as President and in the last years of his life by his big mistake in Vietnam. Thinking about Obama, I fear repetition.

I am on the road this month, now in Paris. For the previous three weeks, I have been teaching a course, “Social Movements, Publics and Politics,” at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. I also squeezed in, the weekend before last, work in Sofia, Bulgaria, consulting, along with Sandrine Kott, on a European Union research project “Regime and Society in Eastern Europe.” The research was from and on Bulgaria (Ivajlo Znepolski), Germany (Thomas Lindenberger), Hungary (Adam Takacs), and Poland (Dariusz Stola), studying “State and Society in Eastern Europe, 1956 – 1987.” While in Sofia, I had an opportunity to spend a few hours exploring the protests there, a chance to observe an exciting social movement confronting seemingly intractable problems. The protest, the research and the teaching were interestingly related: Here are some preliminary notes on the protest, as illuminated by my seminar and the reports of the European scholars.

I was at the protest on a Sunday, a slow day apparently. The protest routine: daily, people gather in front of the government building at 6:00 PM. There is a human ecology in the gathering. Friends meet each other at agreed upon places in the plaza and then march together to the Parliament building, attempting to disrupt the politics as usual. Informal groups with peer pressure keep the protests going. People come a number of days a week, visible to their friends and colleagues, as well as the nation and beyond: small group social interaction links with and fortifies the large social protest.

During the week, people gather in large numbers after work; on weekends, a smaller group gets together, perhaps a thousand or two on the Sunday I was there. Yet, it still was impressive, enthusiastic chanting and whistling, inventive placards, coupled with interesting discussions. I was there on the thirty seventh day of the demonstration, and it has continued (on day forty, there was violence). Through a few quick exchanges, I felt I had a sense of the general contours and direction of the movement.

The protesters are outraged by Parliamentary machinations, demanding the resignation of the present government, calling for new elections. They are trying to break a cycle of corruption, which has led to political and economic stagnation, and national impoverishment. Quite obvious to me: Bulgaria in 1989 had a much stronger economy than Poland. The reversal is now striking. Everywhere in Sofia, I could perceive the legacies of communism. Wroclaw more resembles Paris in comparison.

There are concerns that the present government is leaning towards Russia, away from Europe: thus along with the Bulgarian flag, the European Union flag is everywhere. There are hopes that if they keep the daily ritual going that in September, unions would join in. After the police broke up a protest blocking the Parliament building last Wednesday, there is hope that the European Union will somehow do something.

The protesters want to put an end to the national decline. Earlier in the year, there were anti-austerity protests, sparked by electricity price increases, leading to the resignation of the right of center government and elections in May that were quite inconclusive. Now, the socialist led governing coalition, including the socialists and the Turkish minority party (combining to have the support of 120 seats in the 240 seat parliament), cynically governs with the tacit support of a xenophobic nationalist party.

Cynicism provoked protest: the appointment of media mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the national security agency, the appointment of an oligarch to oversee, among other things, oligarchic corruption. Although he has resigned in response, the demonstrations continue, demanding new elections, seeking to form an electoral coalition of small parties who did not make it into parliament, hoping that somehow the distance between the political class and the broad public will be diminished.

Viewed from afar, the situation looks hopeless. The regime and society appear to be worlds apart, no matter which party is dominant. A rotation of leadership changes little. No election result would appear to have the potential to break Bulgaria’s downward spiral, supported by corruption, center, right and center. But looking closely, as was the common theme of my seminar and the EU research team, there is overlooked promise.

I was very impressed by the form of the protest. The demonstration has become a daily ritual for tens of thousands of citizens. They don’t all attend every day, nor do they bodily occupy a space, day and night (though there is a small occupation across from parliament). Rather they have made protest a regular aspect of Sofia’s everyday life. The regularity of the protests reminds me of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in their struggle against the Argentine Junta and its dirty war, although these protesters have no claim to martyred status. They meet daily rather than weekly. Everyday ordinary participation demonstrates democracy. Indeed it may help form democracy.

In my course and in my commentary with the European researchers on the topic of state and society in the good old bad days around the old Soviet bloc, I emphasized a key proposition of Hannah Arendt, my favorite political thinker. She maintains that in politics the means are an important part of the end. The way we do politics, the way we appear when we act politically, is an important consequential political fact. With this in mind, the creativity of the protesters, the way they are centered on the problem of politic cynicism and corruption, was very impressive. A young woman told me that in her judgment as the protests began she thought that a key sign of the seriousness of the protest would be if older people joined in. The presence of young and old together was quite striking. The fact that a medieval historian who clearly looked westward for his political inspiration and was liberal in the European sense of the term, underscored the importance of unions joining the protests, suggested to me a view of the common good that went beyond narrow orientation or interests. While the corruption is found across the political spectrum, this appears to be matched by protests that are across the social and political spectrums. A new alternative public is in formation.

The two key propositions of my Wroclaw course: the new “new social movements,” the movements of and after 2011, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and beyond, are distinctive in the way that they constitute diverse independent publics, and a key to their success is maintaining the diversity: something that tragically has not happened in the Arab world. In Bulgaria, there still is promise.

In the EU research project, an overall basic finding is that social changes, changes in the way people live and interact with each other, have a way of shaping even the most repressive regimes. Regime action has a way of creating social forces beyond their control (Stola). Expertise has a way of significantly limiting political – ideological mandates (Lindenberger), and philosophy and critical thinking are imperfectly controlled by ideology and political repression: cultural creativity has a way of persisting even under the most repressive conditions (Tokacs and Znepolski). While I lack the knowledge to know how this might lead to the next move in Bulgarian development, the social vitality, good humor and openness of the protesters, combined with their resolute democratic action, provide grounds for hope. The sort of creative political action I observed long ago on the Polish political scene (before, during and after Solidarność) is now observable in Bulgaria.

Jo Freeman writes: “Most of the press seems to have overlooked this protest in front of the White House. The Supreme Court decisions had been released only two hours previously, so they were elsewhere.” Freeman, though, was there. Here is her report, illuminating a persistent protest against the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in solidarity with the camp’s hunger strikers . -Jeff

Code Pink co-founder Diane Wilson climbed over the White House fence on Wednesday as part of the ongoing campaign to get President Obama to close Guantanamo. Once over, she stood about five feet from the fence as three armed uniformed Secret Service approached with rifles and a snarling dog. Told to GET DOWN, she was handcuffed and hauled off to jail. The audacity of her feat was enhanced by the fact that she is in the 57^th day of a fast in solidarity with the Guantanamo hunger strikers. Unlike the 104 men refusing to eat at Guantanamo, Wilson is not being force fed.

This is not Wilson’s first challenge to White House security. On May 10^th she had her neck attached to the White House fence with a special bicycle lock during another Code Pink demonstration. It took the cops two hours to free her neck from the fence. She was arrested, fined $70 and released.

Her latest feat occurred after a noontime rally put together by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in Pennsylvania Plaza. The backdrop to the speakers featured sympathizers in orange jump suits holding the names of those still being held in Guantanamo.

After the rally, participants and observers congregated on the sidewalk in front of the White House for a street theater re-enactment of an “enteral feeding.” Tighe Barry of CodePink pretended to strap “Shraf Masud” of Yemen into a chair and feed him (actually her). Barry usually gets to play the villain in CodePink skits and does so with gusto.

Everyone, including the US Park Police, were so engaged in watching the drama that they didn’t notice Diane Wilson preparing to mount the fence about 100 feet away. Thus, she got all the way over despite the presence of a couple dozen police.

Once the excitement ended, 20 more protestors stood in front of the White House fence, waiting to be arrested. Most wore orange jump suits. Among these were John Pope, who was in day 28 of his sympathy hunger strike and Elliott Adams, who was into his 40^th day.

Adams, a past president of Veterans for Peace, was dragged from the group to the curb and handcuffed. He sat there for a while before being escorted out of the area and released without charge. The others were left to sweat in the hot sun for an hour before they were arrested and removed.

Today I explore the relationship between Obama’s national security address with his surveillance policies. Many see the distance between his speech and action as proof of their cynicism about Obama and more generally about American politicians. I note that the distance can provide the grounds for the opposite of cynicism, i.e. consequential criticism. But for this to be the case, there has to be public concern, something I fear is lacking.

I am an Obama partisan, as any occasional reader of this blog surely knows. One such reader, in a response to my last post on Obama’s national security address, on Facebook declared: “your endless contortions in support of this non-entity make you look increasingly ridiculous.” He wondered: “Is this really what a ‘public intellectual’ looks like today?” I am not profoundly hurt by this. I am enjoying the one time in my life that I actually support an American political leader in power. I was an early supporter of the State Senator from the south side of Chicago and find good reasons to appreciate his leadership to this day. Through his person and his words, he has changed American identity, to the pleasure of the majority and the great displeasure to a significant minority. Obamacare is his singular accomplishment. He rationally responded to the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, despite sustained opposition. Perhaps he could have done more, but powerful forces were aligned against him. He has carefully redirected American foreign policy, cooperating with allies and the international organizations, engaging enemies, working to shift the balance between diplomacy and armed force. Obama has worked to move the center left, as I analyze carefully in Reinventing Political Culture,  and I applaud his efforts even when he has not succeeded.

That said I have been disappointed on some matters, and I want to be clear about them here. In my judgment, the surge in Afghanistan didn’t make much sense. The escalating use of drones, without clear and public guidelines, has concerned me: the killing of innocents was not recognized, as drone warfare contributed to the long history of placing civilians and non combatants at increasing risk. (In this sense, drone warfare and terrorism are two sides of the same coin.) And now this week, there is the news about “Obama’s dragnet” (as The New York Times put it), Obama’s continued and even escalating mass surveillance. Although this was very much implied in news reports before the revelations (they are not really shocking to the informed), reading the details, particularly as reported by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian,  underscores fundamental problems.

I wanted to see a “strong black line” drawn between the war on terrorism and the rule of fear after “9/11,” and the Obama era. I wanted to see national hysteria replaced by sensible policy, to bracket the governance of Bush-Cheney in the same way that McCarthyism was bracketed and criticized. The latest news underscores that in significant ways this has not happened. The line has been thinly sketched rather than clearly drawn. Some things have changed, much hasn’t.

This is why I thought Obama’s national security speech was so important. He was announcing a change in policy, moving from a “war on terror” to a struggle against terrorists, using normal law enforcement methods. This was a change I had been waiting for. But what then to make of the latest revelations?

Many have expressed outrage, with the editorial writers of The New York Times leading the way. Others see confirmation of their strong civil liberty criticisms of the President on national security, with Greenwald leading here, and a broad swath of media commentators following. I find myself in between these positions, not persuaded by either, but also crucially not convinced by those who suggest that the surveillance is no big deal and argue that it is legal and necessary. That is the reasoning which must be put to rest.

Although clearly Obama’s speech and action conflict, drawing the conclusion that he is just a hypocrite, another cynical politician administering American hegemonic power, I believe, is mistaken. This is how Greenwald responded to Obama’s national security speech, as I analyzed in my last post written before the publication of the Snowden revelations. We now know what Greenwald knew, but we didn’t. He had inside knowledge of Snowden’s leaks. Yet, as Greenwald explains his position now, I am uncomfortable. He is too sure that the only reason for secrets is to protect the prerogatives of the powerful: too fast to dismiss threats to national security.

On the other hand, I find Obama puzzling, even schizophrenic in his response to the Snowden leaks. He welcomes the debate we must have (especially now) about the need to balance security and civil liberties concerns, while he also denounces leaks and leakers who instigate discussion. He is obviously caught between his desire as a principled centrist to have all with opposing views discuss a pressing problem, and his belief that national security requires official secrets. He wants to have a full public debate, taking into account all reasonable points of view, but he worries that this may lead to giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Disciplined governance is pitted against democratic deliberations. And there is a clear political calculation. Public opinion is more moved by security than by civil liberty concerns.

Here is the significance of his speech at the National Defense University, remembering that the speech preceded the revelation for the public, but for Obama it was the other way around. The speech was a response to the overt and covert policies that together have made “the war on terror.”

Perhaps, if we are still in a post 9/11 “war,” the argument for official secrets and escalating compromises in civil liberties is justified. But, if in fact, the war is over, as Obama announced in his speech, the continuation of war policies has to be critically appraised. Obama suggested in his speech a logical conclusion: “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” In these terms: how can the broad, not just targeted, surveillance by the National Security Agency be justified? Obama’s speech strongly suggests that it can’t. Obama’s words provide solid grounds for opposition to his administration’s policies, including those revealed about the NSA.

I still support Obama. I hope that under public pressure he follows the logic of the position he outlined in his national security speech. But I am concerned that the pressure may not be there.

I believe that the disclosures concerning the surveillance of phone records and internet communications in the Guardian and The Washington Post underscore the significance of President Obama’s recent speech on national security. His words provide the most cogent means to appraise his responsibilities for his administration’s actions. Today an analysis of the speech and the responses to it: in my next post, I will reflect on its significance in light of recent events. -Jeff

In his address to the National Defense University on May 23, 2013, President Obama set out to transform the common sense about terrorism and the proper American response to it. He continued what I take to be his major goal: the reinvention of American political culture, pushing the center left on a broad range of problems and principles, often meeting great resistance. In this particular instance, the change he sought at NDU, was apparently quite simple, moving from a war on terror to a struggle against terrorists, ending the prospect of total and endless war against an enemy whose power has been greatly and routinely exaggerated. The suggestion of the simple change understandably elicited strong and conflicting reactions. I think these reactions, along with the speech itself, illuminate the significance of Obama’s latest performance as “storyteller-in-chief.”

The editorial board of The New York Times declared:

“President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.” 

Over on the op.ed. page a few days later, Ross Douthat presented a cynical alternative:

“President Obama’s speech national security last week was a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don’t worry, liberals. I’m not George W. Bush.”

At The New York Review of Books, David Cole judged:

“President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday at the National Defense University (NDU) may turn out to be the most significant of his tenure,”

and observed:

“Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his NDU speech. Instead, he went much further, outlining a way out of this ‘perpetual war,’ saying that ‘our democracy demands it.’ Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy. If he succeeds in doing so, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will be seen not as naïve, but as remarkably prescient, in its awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama in 2009.”

I agree, but many observers, left, right and in between don’t, including, I suspect many Deliberately Considered readers. There have been strong dissenting positions, some quite cogent.

From the right

Newt Gingrich:

“I thought the president’s speech was astonishingly naïve and a sign that he hasn’t read much history…”[Obama] wants to somehow rise above the big government scandals that are gradually drowning his administration…He wants to look like he’s forward looking, engaged, etcetera … But the truth is, what he announced and explained was almost meaningless.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.):

“What do you think the Iranians are thinking? At the end of the day, this is the most tone-deaf president I ever could imagine, making such a speech at a time when our homeland is trying to be attacked literally every day.”

And Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) concluded Obama’s speech:

“will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.”

From the left

Glenn Greenwald is convinced that the speech said nothing:

“his speech had something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions.”

Benjamin Wittes was even more critical:

“If there was a unifying theme of President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University, it was an effort to align himself as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration’s operational flexibility in actual fact. To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has—but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.”

Oddly, Ron Paul seems to have judged Obama most harshly from the dovish side:

“The speech speaks of more war and more killing and more interventionism all masked in the language of withdrawal.”

His was libertarian reading:

“President Obama’s speech is not at all what it seems. It is a call for more empire and more power to the executive branch. The president promises that ‘this war, like all wars, must end.’ Unfortunately the war on the American taxpayer never seems to end. But end it will, as we are running out of money.” 

These are strong judgments, apparently determined more by the identity, interests and commitments of the judges than the judged speech. Then again, perhaps Greenwald is right, the alternative judgments could be a function of Obama’s qualities as a politician, able to fulfill the wishes of his supporters and opponents alike.

Yet, I think it is more than this. Obama’s speech is a part of his overall project. He is trying to move common sense away from the assumption of a permanent state of war. The relationship between rhetoric and action is at issue, i.e. our political culture, and the rhetoric clearly was being changed. It was not mere rhetoric.

This was not one of Obama’s beautiful speeches. Rather it was lawyerly, making a case, justifying his administrations policies to date, suggesting immediate and future changes. There are problems.

With his critics, I worry about his drone policies, about lethal attacks outside of war zones. I note that the drone attacks have decreased of late, and that in this speech, he gives a more restricted account of when and how the attacks should proceed, significantly with oversight. But I also note that this was all pretty vague.

I believe with his critics, including Medea Benjamin, the Code Pink activist who disrupted the speech, that the President could probably have done more to realize his stated goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and it is far from clear, after the speech, how hard he will push now.

And I worry about the administration’s relationship with the press and its policies on leaks. As a father of a journalist, it was good to hear the President declare: “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.” Yet, I am still concerned by the Obama administrations aggressive policies toward leaks.

Yes, there are reasons to not just applaud the speech. But applaud, I will, because of the fundamental turn Obama made in the speech. He clarified how he understands the threat we now face, and he drew the logical conclusion. The era of permanent war is now over. The post 9/11 Orwellian Winter is coming to an end. Thus spoke the President:

“[T]he current threat — lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates; threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad; homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We have to take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.

In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on a Pan Am flight — Flight 103 — over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all brutal; they were all deadly; and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.

We must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

This is prose not poetry, but crucial. For those on Obama’s left, the significance of this change in official policy may not be perceptible. Obama is trying to get done what they take for granted. But he knows, what they ignore, that a broad fearful public has been convinced by the war metaphor of “the war on terrorism” and that a significant faction of the political establishment is committed to the metaphor. They have to be moved if we are really to move beyond a dark moment in American history, epitomized by the claim that torture was effective “enhanced interrogation.” Obama is doing the moving.

Gingrich, Saxby and Graham, et al, see what Obama is up to, and as with much else, they are engaging in a counterattack. They recognize that big changes are being initiated, and they will do all they can to stop them from happening.

Although there are good reasons to wonder about the detailed connection between the promise of Obama’s speech and the practice of the Obama administration, it is important to nonetheless recognize that a big political change is going on. I think this is a way to understand and criticize recent revelations concerning government surveillance.

In the immediate aftermath of the latest elections in Israel, my (somewhat snide, but really felt) response was “good thing there is a future; there’s surely no present.” Meaning, I suppose, something like: nice to see that folks really made a statement that the current political system is fundamentally broken (by voting in droves for the newly-minted Yesh Atid [i.e., there is a future] party), but that doesn’t mean that anything has actually changed, or can be expected to change, any time soon. I had wanted to try to develop that reaction into a sustained thought, but failed. Then, in the build-up to Obama’s visit and the drama of Netanyahu’s troubled, but ultimately (and predictably) successful, attempt to forge a coalition, I thought that there was a real moment to expand on my initial response. I failed again. Obama’s visit itself would have been a nice occasion to revisit my thesis and see how it was holding up against “facts on the ground.” But, alas, that moment passed as well.

Who would have thought that the “critical mass” would have been reached through a seemingly benign, almost anodyne, gesture by Yair Lapid (head of the afore-mentioned party) in saying that any structural changes to Israeli economic and fiscal policy—and such changes, it is universally agreed (and, seriously, now, how often is universal agreement reached on anything in Israel?)—must first of all resolve the difficulties faced by the “ideal typical” family of “Riki Cohen” who (it so happens) is said to hail from Hadera, the suburban semi-city between Tel Aviv and Haifa where my wife’s parents have lived for 25 years.

So, I am sitting here in their house in Hadera, looking over the pages and pages devoted to “Rikigate” in the thick Friday [think: Sunday] editions of Yediot Ahronot and HaAretz (including prized positions on the front covers thereof), and I realize: this is the evidence that the January version of me would have wanted to rip from the near future and point to in making my comment about the lack of a political present in Israel. Basically, it seems to me, the situation is like this: a relatively (and surprisingly) broad swath of Israeli society got together to say that while there is no organized left worth voting for anymore in Israel, and while the centrist parties of the 1990s and 2000s have shown themselves to be equal parts feckless and selfish opportunists, the domestic policies of the right and further-right are fundamentally disastrous for the modern, liberal Israel these folks believe themselves to live in and be a part of. These people agree about this, and this is not nothing, but it is by no means the basis of a platform around which the kind of structural reformation of public policy and economic development that was the demand of the massive protest movement in the summer of 2011. And so, to the extent that Lapid and his party have been given more or less a free hand to set the domestic policy of the current government—a costly but necessary concession given that he and the nationalist “Bayit HaYehudi” [Jewish Home] party leader Naftali Bennet formed an “in government together or in opposition together” pact, which meant that Lapid effectively controlled as many seats as Netanyahu at the time of the coalition negotiations—he now gets to face the same stalemate we saw in the time of the Trajtenberg Committee. Israelis know that the current state of affairs is untenable, but there remains no consensus about the concrete steps that need to be taken in order to stand the country on legs that can actually carry it to the future. “Yesh atid,” you might say, but we have no (shared) idea of how to get there.

And this brings us to Riki Cohen from Hadera. Maybe you haven’t heard of her, but she’s been the beginning and/or the end of news broadcasts here in Israel throughout the week I’ve been visiting. (Pretty impressive for someone who doesn’t exist!) Basically, Lapid said this: there are a number of families in this country like this imaginary case I have for you. You have a pair of working parents with, say, two or three children. They are professionals and successful. They earn well above the average annual income in Israel (which includes the far too many un- and under-employed), and a decent amount more than the average income for families with two working adults. (This turns out to be the source of much of the controversy, but it is critical to Lapid’s thought experiment.) They bring home enough to keep paying down the house, to keep their cars on the road (fuel is very expensive in Israel, remember), to feed the family, and (and here, again, much controversy) to travel once every two years to a destination outside Israel. But they have no chance to buy a house for any of their kids, and no security for their retirement. The economic and fiscal policy of this government, said Lapid in the meeting where he introduced this character, will first of all take into consideration the need to improve the situation for families like this.

And what followed? In the phrase of my dearly departed mother: a shitstorm. A shitstorm that perfectly shows why there is no present in Israel. All kinds of different constituencies jumped on this one. There are those (and there are many) who assail Lapid (from the left, I suppose) for speaking about people who bring home something like3500 USD/month after tax, when there are many working families that bring home something like 2000 USD/month after tax. There are those (and there are many) who assail him (from the right) for speaking about trips abroad and buying a house for the kids, when we are at war and always at war, and people have sacrificed and will sacrifice much more than a trip to Venice for the sake of the continued existence of Israel. Both of these responses are predictable: they are the source of the stagnation of the past generation. And both of them fundamentally miss the point.

Let me be clear: I am no fan of Lapid, I wouldn’t have voted for him in January had I had the chance, and I haven’t liked him on Facebook, either. But I do recognize that he represented and represents the hope of many young and youngish people that Israel can be “a normal country.” These people don’t all agree (maybe even: don’t agree at all) about the conflict with the Palestinians, or about “the Iranian threat,” and they might very well disagree about tax and spending policy if they were transplanted to the US or to a European country. But they agree that, given Israel’s current realities, people who are more or less advocates of a limited government (neo-) liberal economic model and people who are more or less advocates of a continental European-style social democratic economic model need to make common cause to “rescue” the state from (on the one hand) its vastly too great financial commitments to some sectors (read: the ultra-religious and the settlers, two populations with a fair amount of overlap, but less than you would think) and, on the other hand, from its vastly too advanced (under Netanyahu I and Netanyahu II) program of “economic liberalization” with respect to other sectors.

At the risk of seeming tendentious, I’d like to call these people (the Lapid voters and, say, the people who see why the Lapid voters voted for Lapid) “the adults.” The adults face a stiff challenge: political discourse in Israel is rich and multifarious. All those statements about Israel being a flourishing democracy (albeit with the horrific stain of the occupation, which must end “speedily, speedily in our days”) are true. But the discourse is also often beside the point. If there’s one thing that can come and must come from the most recent election, it is progress on the path toward economic and fiscal normalization. And that will demand that political actors don’t return to bromides about Israel being a socialist country (on the one hand) or nonsense about the perpetual endangerment of tiny Israel meaning that “we all have to make sacrifices.” Both the left, at least in the current form of Avoda (the Labor Party) and its populist-nonsensical-obstructionist rhetoric, and the right are wrong about the future of Israel: where Israel needs to be in 25 years is neither returned to its solidarity-bootstraps (“Socialist-Zionist youth”) roots of the 1948-67 period—with “khol ha-kavod” to those “Pioneers”—and certainly not in some bizarre semi-theocracy of a center-right political faction joined together with a nationalist right and a theocratic faction. It needs to be, as the adults say (and say rightly), “a normal country.”

What is “a normal country”? In this case, at least, it must mean something like this: Israel as a moderate, perhaps somewhat (right or left) populist-leaning liberal democracy standing alongside an at least nominally independent (but economically and militarily coordinated) state of Palestine. That this is Israel’s only sustainable future is clear.  The problem is that there is next to no connection between the present and that future. A significant step in that direction would be to secure the economic future of families like Lapid’s “Riki Cohen from Hadera.” If these people (and they are the sector of Israeli society with which I am the most familiar, I confess) can’t live a life that is analogous to people living and working in economies of similar size whose educational backgrounds and career trajectories are similar to their own, then (even leaving aside “the security issue,” as one can do only ever do in abstraction), contra the name of Lapid’s party and all the interest it generated, there is no future for the State of Israel.

Not, in any case, as a liberal democracy.

This is the second in a three part series “Principle and Practice.” See here for Part 1.

At the New School for Social Research, my intellectual home for just about my entire career, the relationship between principle and practice is counter-intuitive. Principle, in my judgment, has been, since the institution’s founding, at least as important as practice, and, ironically, probably of more practical significance. The New School’s history has been set by its principles, even as sometimes in practice the principles were not fully realized.

I am thinking about this at a turning point in our history: a relatively new university president, David Van Zandt, has just appointed, following faculty review and recommendation, a new dean, Will Milberg. It is a hopeful moment, rich with promise and possibility for our relatively small, financially strapped, unusual institution. How we now act has, potentially, significance well beyond our intellectual community. This is directly related to the founding principles of our place, their historical significance and continued salience.

Founded in 1919, as an academic protest, The New School has represented, and worked to enact, central ideals of the university in democratic society, doing a great deal on relatively little. The New School’s founders were critical of the way economic and political powers interfered with the intellectual and scholarly life of American universities. While they were responding proximately to the firing of two Columbia University faculty members for their disloyalty during WWI, they were, more generally, concerned that those in control of American universities, their trustees, who were (as written in the mission statement) “composed for the most part of men whose views of political, social, religious and moral questions are in no way in advance of those of the average respectable citizen. Their tendency is therefore to defend established thought than to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards.”

Just a few years after the American Association of University Professors was founded to defend academic freedom and after the association wavered and didn’t defend the principle as it was systematically compromised during WWI, The New School was formed, primarily dedicated to independent social research, addressing pressing social and political problems. The New School’s principled commitment has been its distinction, with twists and turns, and up and downs.

The founders raised one key question and offered their solution in their original mission statement, “A Proposal for An Independent School of Social Science”:

“The question naturally arises, how can the Social and Political sciences be given the opportunity to develop at least as freely as the natural sciences…. The answer is by establishing an institution free from the ancient embarrassments.”

“Free from ancient embarrassments,” The New School opened in 1919, seeking to address the challenges of those times. The mission statement highlighted a variety of concerns: the expanding role of government, the importance of the labor movement and its organization, the problems of the modern economy. The makers of the school sought to develop modern social science and public policy that would respond to changing order of things. I particularly find intriguing the prescient declaration on women’s education and its purpose:

“The granting of suffrage to women and the extension of women’s interest into new and important spheres of public life will lead them to seek a better equipment both for power and service.”

The new institution emphasized interdisciplinary study and engagement in practical problems. Its founders sought a lean and mean educational enterprise, focused on research, teaching and public engagement, with a minimal administrative apparatus.

They sought to “Secure a sufficient endowment on the understanding that the greater part of the income shall be spent on research and education and the least possible amount on administration.”

But they were not just dreaming. The great American historian, Charles Beard, perhaps the most prominent mover and shaker behind the establishment of this new school, revealed an inventive practical side in his personal account of its project, making a special appeal.

“Those who give financial assistance to the New School are not so ingrained in their distrust of liberated human minds that they are not willing to accept the result of free inquiry… In other words, the New School is a cooperative concern, a pooling of interests intellectual and financial, designed to advance knowledge of the world and its pressing problems. ..It proposes to build up a center where those who care to work at the modern and industrial problems may find guidance and imagination. Those who have found ‘the one road’ or are now convinced that they can exercise the evil spirits of the age by single incantations will find no peace or comfort there. Those who have highly resolved that the human mind which has been so fertile in its inventive genius in the material world shall be freely applied to the problems of the social world will find welcome, good cheer, and if it is not too bold, some genuine help. The door is open and the way is broad”

Reading the original mission statement and Beard’s note, I am struck by how true The New School has been to its original mission, even at it seems to be long on idealism, short on realism. The theme of engaging the world using the advanced means of social and political science early on was extended.

In the twenties and thirties the arts and design were added to The New School’s agenda, formally pushed forward in 1970 when Parsons School of Design was merged with The New School. Aaron Copeland, Martha Graham and Erwin Piscator contributed to an expansive definition of social research at The New School.

The missions of academic freedom and opposition to dogma were radicalized when The University in Exile was created, as a refuge to endangered European scholars, artists and intellectuals from Hitler’s Europe. An independent center linking European art, social science and philosophy with American intellectual and public life was established.

I am particularly proud and honored to have been a part of extending this division’s activity to East and Central Europe’s democratic opposition in the 1980s, with my colleagues Elzbieta Matynia, Andrew Arato, Jose Casanova and Ira Katznelson. The New School’s board, importantly including Walter Eberstadt, Henry Arnhold and Michael E. Gellert, and the The New School president, Jonathan Fanton, supported our efforts, in the manner Beard imagined. And Fanton pushed this forward forging a cooperative relationship between The New School, and Helsinki Watch and Human Rights watch, taking a leadership role in both.

New School faculty became supporters, colleagues and collaborators with key opposition figures of the region, Adam Michnik, Martin Butora and Janos Kis, among many others, engaging in clandestine seminars before the changes of 1989, and open meeting and educational initiatives after the changes. In the region, The New School developed a significant reputation, known for its founding principles.

Independent scholarship pitted against tyranny and small mindedness, opposition to intellectual dogma, and engagement with the pressing problems of the day, these are the ideals of The New School’s founding, which have informed its history. The stated principles provided the opportunity for innovative actions. They are also strikingly present in the daily life of the university, in the faculty’s creative work and scholarship, and in their teaching, and in the problems and the challenges student pose in our classrooms and in their own work. I would love to document this in the future – an idea for a book or at least a series of cooperative blog posts.

There have been times, of course when practice has ignored principle. Many in the institution, even among its leadership, have forgotten what makes The New School, The New School, especially in recent years. And, there are a variety of different readings of its distinctiveness. More about this soon.

For today, though note my major point: the principles of The New School’s founding have persisted. I believe that these principles define the university’s history, including ups and downs, constitute its importance, and suggest its future promise.