I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.

To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).

Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.

Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).

After all objective reports on election night indicated a decisive Obama victory, Romney wouldn’t concede. Karl Rove on Fox News comically refused to acknowledge what Fox News (Fox News!) projected. Before the election, Republican pollsters systematically distorted their election predictions to confirm their desired results. A fact denying normality had become the order of things. The right-wing politicians, and their media enablers, were not simply lying to the public. They were blinded by their own fabrications. There were the fortunate (from my point of view) miscalculations of the campaign, but when it came to science, to climate change, to biology and much more, fact denying had become deadly. Thankfully, there is now sensible resistance, by the population at large and also by conservatives themselves.

As reported by Jonathan Martin at Politico notable young conservatives are now presenting important criticism. Ross Douthat: “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself.” Ben Domenech: “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality.” Such self-criticism is heartening. Perhaps, it will be possible for serious conservative intellectuals and public figures to present positions without the craziness.

Severely conservative Romney continued his ideologically driven, fact-denying, forty-seven percent ways, blaming his defeat on “free gifts” to Obama’s core constituencies, free birth control to single women in college, health care to African-Americans and Latinos, and a special gift to Latinos — the promise of amnesty to children of illegal aliens, “the so-called Dream Act kids.” In the conservative cocoon at Fox, Bill O’Reilly strongly agreed, but it is very interesting to observe many Republicans running away from the remark. Surely political calculation is involved, but it is also a healthy matter that key conservative figures, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, are distancing themselves from the ideological fiction of the society made up of takers and makers, as Paul Ryan has put it.

I wonder, thinking ahead to 2014 and 2016, perhaps there will be a Republican civil war, between the ideologues and the conservatives. I have my hopes, but also my concerns. But at least in this election, those who used facts to mobilize their campaign won over the prisoners of fictoids.

I identify with Barack Obama’s political position, as a centrist wanting to move the center left. I identify with the democratic left because of its long and developing progressive tradition, addressing the problems of inequalities based on class, race, religion, gender, nation and sexual orientation, and because of its critique of the injustices of untrammeled capitalism and its conviction that the present order of things can and should be subjected to critique, its conviction that the way things are is not necessarily the way they must be. For these and other substantive reasons, I am very happy with the election results.

But further and in a less partisan way, I understand that alternative political traditions, broadly understood as conservative, are worthy of respect, especially as they illuminate the importance of learning from experience and highlight the limits of reason. I respect this tradition and have learned from it. I think a healthy modern republic should be informed by it. And, for these reasons, I even have sought to find conservative intellectuals worthy of respect at Deliberately Considered, see here and here. It is a terrible loss that fact-denying, right-wing ideology has prevailed in the Republican Party in recent years, amplified by racist currents during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the tide will now change among conservatives.

Conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, and radical icon, Karl Marx, are important thinkers for me as I try to make sense of the political world, but it is the ambiguous and ambivalent commitments and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt that make them my primary political teachers. Tocqueville, the ambivalent democrat, highlighted the dangers of mass society as the underside of democracy. (I should post my thoughts on this one of these days.) Arendt more crucially observed the dangers of ideology and emphasized that a common factual base is the ground upon which democracy is built. I sense that the most significant result of this election is that we are moving back to this ground. I hope Fox News craziness, the right-wing entertainment industry, as David Frum is now describing it, is “so yesterday,” or at least no more intimately connected to the Republicans than the Democrats are tied to MSNBC. I can’t tolerate either as a source of news. It worries me that some think of them as such.

This is how I understand my centrist orientation. My primary political commitment is to a free public life, where people with different identities and principles meet between left and right, i.e. in the center. I don’t’ believe in watered down progressive and conservative positions, but a position where there is informed debate. For me, this is the meaning of “the vital center.” I think this election, as truth prevailed over truthiness, and as a principled leader prevailed over one that pretended to be a true-believer, who had a very problematic relationship with factual truth, provides hope for a centrist with leftist commitments.

I think that the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content, as Scott Beck showed in his earlier post on the occupation. I observe, further, that the way people use social media contributes to this form, as does the setting of the occupation. And I believe deliberating about the movement and connecting the debate to other political, social and cultural activities are keys to the democratic contribution of the movement to broader politics in America and beyond.

Jenny Davis in her post last week makes cogent points about the role of social media in social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Her key observation is very important. Digital activism is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. I would add that it can constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture. This is especially telling as David Peppas and Barbara note in the two comments to Davis’s post, because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of protesting, as well as the act of posting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world differently is what is most needed at this time, to face up to stark social realities that have been ignored and develop the capacity to act on this. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media, while the power of the movement, is quite material. It’s embedded in a specific geography and its link to political culture.

The place of the occupation in an important way contributes to its power. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, to my mind, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement.

Ironically, mine is first of all a “pedestrian observation,” based on very particular experience. In recent weeks, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack, including a stroll on Wall Street. And last week, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

Because it is at the symbolic center, the media are paying attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration is capturing global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. A report yesterday indicates that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces are spreading around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world is watching. Occupations are going global, eminating from ground zero to London, Seoul back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and many points in between.

They have been watching in Gdansk. I was surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there, and surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, is planning on coming to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

“Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.
They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’ ”

The news is spreading through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media are spreading the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

“This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.”

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and much more have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged. Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on fictoids, as we have been observing here at Deliberately Considered over the last year. As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long term power of the newest development on the global stage. As I observed in concluding my comparison between OWS and a social movement in South Korea, the candle light movement, a candle is, indeed, being lit.

On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.

Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.

Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.

Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.

While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.

I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the emotions will affect political choice will play a big role in the coming elections. How is it that public personalities that I find so repulsive are actually attractive to my fellow citizens? I can more easily accept my policy differences with Tim Pawlenty than I can listen to Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. I hope the majority of my compatriots feel the same way, but I worry about this arena of feelings. It is one thing to recognize that feelings matter. Its quite another for them to run wild, as in the xenophobic birther movement.

Mine is not always a reasonable response, I admit, and I try to fight against this. I have been looking for conservative thinkers and public figures to respect, without much success. I have sought out conservative contributors to our discussions and hope for more success in this regard. I think that there is an underlying serious debate about the public good occurring in American politics, but I am perplexed how ideological certainty and willful ignorance of facts seems to be the price of admission into Republican presidential politics. Not one of the Republican presidential hopefuls would agree to reduce the deficit if it included minimal tax cuts. This indicates that they are either ignoring hard budgetary realities or that their ideological project is to radically reduce the role of the state, far beyond the expectations of the general public.

The Republicans have included the extreme right into their mainstream ranks. As a committed partisan, I believe that this will lead to Obama’s reelection and a more Democratic Congress. I also hope that as a result a more reasonable opposition emerges. As an analyst of politics and the human comedy, I fear that my partisan self may be mistaken. Fictoids have power. True belief can be convincing. Calm deliberate leadership can look weak, and the economy is stagnating, thanks to global forces, but also to American politics gone wild. Reason, imagination and feelings may be destructively interacting.

I am convinced that the mess in Washington, which may still lead to another world economic crisis, and the resolution of the latest conflict over the debt ceiling, which probably won’t have any positive impact on the American economy and could make matters worse, is primarily a matter of political culture, not economics. I think specifically that the relationship between truth and politics is the root of the problem. Truth is both necessary and fatal for politics. It must be handled with care and in proper balance, and we are becoming unbalanced, driving the present crisis.

Factual truth is the necessary grounds for a sound politics, and philosophical truth cannot substitute for political debate. Hannah Arendt investigated this in her elegant collection Between Past and Future. I have already reflected on these two sides of the problem in earlier posts. I showed how factual truth, as it provides the ground upon which a sound political life develops, is under attack in the age of environmental know-nothingism and birther controversies, a politics based on what we, at Deliberately Considered, have been calling fictoids. And I expressed deep concern about a new wave of political correctness about the way the magic of the market and highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution have been dogmatically asserted as the (philosophic) truth of real Americanism.

The posts by Gary Alan Fine and Richard Alba confirm my concerns.

Fine is sympathetic to the Tea Party politicians, specifically the fresh crop of Republican representatives in the House, and he reminds us that they are smarter and more honestly motivated than many of their critics maintain. I tentatively accept this. As a group they have a clear point of view and know the world from their viewpoint. They are likely no dumber, or smarter, than our other public figures. But still I see a fundamental problem, which Fine perhaps inadvertently points out when he observes: “The fresh crop of Republicans has that most dire of all political virtues: sincerity.”  I think he means this to be a complement, though the use of the word “dire” indicates he may be ambivalent. I am not. Where Fine sees sincerity, I see true belief and the great dangers of true believers in a democracy.

Unlike other members of the political establishment the new crop of Republicans stand on principle. This time around raising the debt ceiling is a serious business. This summer is not a silly season, as Fine observes. The Tea Party faction will not let the debt ceiling continue at its exponential rate of growth. They keep their promises. This year is different.

The more things change, the more they stay the same? (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?) 1885 political cartoon with caption "To begin with, 'I'll paint the town red'"

But their sincerity and certainty are not political virtues. These self-proclaimed pro-constitution Republicans do not understand the art of compromise, as many have observed. Strange because our founding document was built on compromise, and it has fostered a political system that cannot work without compromise. The Tea Party, though, will not compromise because of their sincere commitment to what they “know” to be true. Compromise between two fallible competing opinions is a virtue. Compromise of a perceived truth is a vice. Thus, the Republicans stand too fast. Bringing the competing parties together becomes almost impossible, and the results are much less likely to be desirable. To the degree to which true believers are defining the agenda of the Grand Old Party, and consequently playing a huge role in the functioning of the American political system, they threaten to make the United States ungovernable.

While Richard Alba in his posts at Deliberately Considered has presented his partisan position (with which I agree), he has also, I think more importantly, defended factual truth.

We stand at a crossroads. There is a principled contest between those who are fighting for a more limited government and those who think that the government plays a key role in the economic and social well-being of the body politic. This is the kind of situation for which democracy, as a very desirable alternative to violent conflict, is made. Yet, for this to happen, there must be some significant agreement about the facts. True belief hides inconvenient facts, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Revealing the facts, as Alba has, becomes an important non partisan contribution. In his first post, he clearly shows that the deficit is a function of both an increase in federal spending and a decrease in federal revenues, and questions the honesty of a Wall Streets editorial on the facts. In his last post, he points to two fundamental facts: the American economy is still by far the strongest in the world and that we face serious problems emanating from persistent economic stagnation and growing social inequality. Alba thinks these facts are more important than the present tempest in a Tea Party cooked pot. But, of course, that is his opinion, a matter of political judgment.

Beyond his opinion, Alba reminds us that it is time that we face facts in American political life. We can’t assert that tax cuts don’t affect deficits. We can’t maintain that a stimulus package killed jobs. We can’t ignore the growing inequality in American society, calling the wealthy “job creators,” and therefore denouncing any move to tax the rich. This is willful Tea Party ignorance, leading to a right-wing American newspeak, crafted for the twenty-first century, apparently designed to mask fundamental economic realities.

The political contest should be about alternative ways of interpreting facts and applying the interpretations. Politics should not be organized around fictions masquerading as facts. The facts should lead not to one clear course of action, but debate among competing ones. I recently came across a piece by Michael Gerson, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post.  He shows how, from different perspectives, the facts that Alba highlights should be politically addressed. Alba and Gerson would draw different conclusions from the facts. This difference is what politics should be about.

A fact-based politics about competing political opinions and judgments, not the politically correct of the new right (or the old left), would make for the sort of politics Arendt envisioned, as a matter of principle. In recent days, we have seen how this is a pressing practical matter. The politics based on the fictoids of true believers is a cultural disaster threatening to fundamentally weaken us. Indeed, as Alba exclaimed: “Watch Out!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because the demands of the academic cycle, because of the challenge of term papers, dissertations and dissertation proposals, I am late this week in this review. But now that I have a few moments this Sunday evening, I can make a few points, noting that all week we have been concerned about the difficult relationship between words and deeds.

If there were any deed which would be clearly and unambiguously a candidate for automatic verbal condemnation, it would seem to be slavery, but this is not the case. Narvaez shows, choosing the extreme case to make his very important point, judging the unacceptable requires a capacity for moral indignation. He worries that with the noise of infotainment, of cable television, web surfing and social networking, the capacity to express indignation is waning. On the other hand, Gary Alan Fine, in his reply to Narvaez, seems to be as concerned with the direction of such indignation as its presence or absence. Condemnations of Israel, for example, sometimes come too easily from the left and the Arab world, and they can be manufactured, as Daniel Dayan shows in his post this week.

This was an exciting and provocative exchange. I think Narvaez in his response to Fine revealed how sound public debate yields results when it is specific. Small things, details, make all the difference. Not moral indignation about Israeli atrocities, but a specific atrocity, the complicity in the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, for example. And Narvaez is surely right, democracy requires such indignation. The jaded society is a clear and present danger to democracy, explaining for example broad American acceptance of torture of political prisoners as long as it goes by the Orwellian name of “enhanced interrogation.”

And paying close attention to the relationship between words and deeds applies as well to the persistent problem of fictoids in our public life, as we discussed last year. Little tales that confirm preconceived notions of the truth, blissfully without regard to their facticity: Obama the Kenyan post-colonial non citizen, Newt Gingrich, the man who divorced his first wife while she was hospitalized on her death bed. Gary Alan Fine explains why such stories are too good to not be believed. I, influenced by Hannah Arendt, add that to base our politics on such fabrications is extremely dangerous, reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian practice, perhaps now as a joke, but serious nonetheless.

Daniel Dayan’s post this week demonstrates that he is a student of his great teacher Roland Barthes. In a compressed mediation, he compares the power of two recent radical events in North Africa and the Middle East. Without explicitly supporting or condemning either, the terrorist attack on a café in Marrakesh and the flotilla directed against the Israeli blockade in Gaza, he shows what each could and could not accomplish. He shows how, through theater, deeds speak. In my terms, he shows why “the politics of small things” is more powerful than terrorism. I was blown away by Dayan’s contribution. It would be great if we could further explore this in the coming weeks.

And then there was the power of words that President Obama unleashed in his speech on North Africa and the Middle East. I was impressed. The speech was better than I thought it would be. It actually got the serious potential consequential debate going again. Tomorrow, Gershon Shafir will present his careful commentary on how he thinks the speech moves the Israelis and Palestinians forward.

An additional note from me for now: I wrote my piece concerned that Obama would give an attractive speech that would be presented artfully and be pleasant to hear, but would prove to be inconsequential, like the speeches of a President of a Central European new democracy, not getting involved in the nitty-gritty of tough politics. But that is not what happened, evident in two ways. Netanyahu was given the opportunity to be a historic figure, to actually move toward peace now, and he angrily refused. And Republican candidates and office holders abdicated their responsibilities and played foolish politics.

Obama gave a careful speech on the American relationship to the promise of the Arab Spring, and he quite diplomatically tried to nudge Israelis and Palestinians forward to serious negotiations by saying publicly what has been the first commitment of all parties of the peace process for decades: “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” The practical consequence of this is yet to be seen.

But an important theoretical point was revealed, a mirror image of what Dayan shows in his post. Dayan’s analysis showed that deeds speak. Obama politics revealed that speech acts.

Matthew LaClair is a student at Eugene Lang College.  He attended Jeff’s course this semester on Democracy in America.   He is also a radio correspondent for WBAI in NYC. He sends in this report of a fictoid from the Heartland.

I received the following chain e-mail from a relative of mine. I thought of it as a good example of dangerous fictoids, because after I checked the story out, I found it has simply never happened. Here, read the unedited text of the e-mail:

Thought  for the day: 

Calling an illegal alien an ‘undocumented immigrant’ is like calling a drug dealer an ‘unlicensed pharmacist’

.

Have you ever wondered why good stuff never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, or ABC news………an 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended her home, and herself….

…against two murderous, illegal immigrants…

…and she wins, She is still alive.

Now that is Gun Control!

BUTTE, MONTANA

Shotgun preteen vs.  Illegal alien Home Invaders:
 Butte, Montana November 5,  2009

Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enrico Garza, 26,  probably believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11 year old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home. 

It seems  the two crooks never learned two things:


 1 – They were in Montana 


2 – Patricia has been a clay shooting champion since she was nine.

 Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father’s room and grabbed his 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.

 Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor and was the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old’s knee crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.

 When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive.

 It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45 caliber handgun he had taken from another home invasion robbery. The victim of that robbery, 50-year-old David 0Burien, was not so lucky. He died from stab wounds to the chest.

I like this kind of e-mail.

American citizens defending themselves and their homes.

And here is what I wrote in response to the email.
:

I can tell you exactly why this never made the mainstream news. 

Most of the major networks such as NBC, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, etc. report on news. I.E. things that actually happened.

 Read this story from the Montana Standard:

A dramatic story about a shooting that supposedly happened in Butte last year is nothing more than an urban myth.
 The bogus story has been circulating for the past year on Internet blogs and Web sites concerning a girl shooting two men who broke into her Butte home in November 2006. 
According to the fabricated story, an 11-year-old Butte girl shot two “illegal aliens” with a shotgun after they broke into her home. The shooting supposedly took place on Nov. 5, 2006, according to Internet posts.
 When asked about the authenticity of the events described in this story, Butte-Silver Bow Sheriff John Walsh told The Montana Standard in an earlier interview that his office never investigated such an incident. 
“This never happened,” Walsh said.
 The story claims the girl shot and killed the two intruders while she was home alone. The story doesn’t provide a street address or attribute the information to any official sources.
 Walsh brushed off the story of an urban myth. 
“It’s amazing how these things get around,” he said.
 Numerous people from all over the United States have contacted The Montana Standard in the past year via e-mail or phone to verify if the story was true. The story is often given the headline “Home Invasion Gone Wrong.”  A recent search for this story on the Internet search engine Google.com returned with more than 400 hits. 
The story has been printed as fact on some anti-gun control and anti-immigration Web sitesricia Harrington, who shoots and kills the two “illegal aliens” identified as Ralphel Resindez and Enrico Garza.

When we substitute a philosophic truth for politics, as I observed in yesterday’s post on the new political correctness, both truth and politics are compromised, and in extreme form, totalitarian culture prevails.  On the other hand, factual truth is the ground upon which a sound politics is based.  As Hannah Arendt underscores, “the politically most relevant truths are factual.”  That Trotsky could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, is definitive of the totalitarian condition.  I know we haven’t gotten to this point, but there are worrying tendencies.

Fact denial seems to be the order of the day, from fictoids of varying degrees of absurdity (Obama the Kenyan post-colonial philosopher and the like), to denial of scientific findings: including evolution, climate change and basic economics.  (I can’t get over the fact that it seems to be official Republican Party policy that cutting taxes doesn’t increase deficits.)

The political consequences of denying the truth of facts are linked with the substitution of truth for politics.   In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth and their relationship with politics clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI.   The causes of the war are open to interpretation.  The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances.  The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central.  Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around.  A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation.  There must be an openness to opposing views.  But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI.

Arendt observes how Trotsky expressed his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party, in The Origins of Totalitarianism.   And, in her classic essay, “Truth and Politics,” she notes his tragic fate:  eliminated from Soviet history books and then assassinated.  The assassination followed the lie.

I am concerned that our politics are more and more becoming involved in this sort of vicious circle.  Fictoids are the least of our problems.  If we politically debate energy and transportation policy with one side denying the facts of climate change, to take the prime example, the debate will not yield consequential compromise and consensus, we will not be able to act effectively. We will be ill prepared to politically respond to the very real economic challenges of the future, and our capacities to address a central global problem will all but disappear.

Other nations free of know nothing politics will be working to adapt to the changes that are forthcoming.  They will have new energy industries and high speed rail systems, while the United States will decay.  But since the United States has the largest economy, by far, our gas guzzling pollution machine could bring the whole world down with us.  It’s time to face facts.

Starting today, on Friday afternoons, I will present reflections on the deliberate considerations of the past week.

The discussion about WikiLeaks at DC suggested the importance of looking at other dimensions of the problem, not only the issue of whether the release of official secrets serves or undermines immediate political interests, but also what it suggests about fundamental social problems, about the relationship between public and private in diplomacy, and in everyday life, and about what it means for “the big picture,” concerning the prospects for war and peace, and the success or failure of democratic transition from dictatorship and democracy.

I understand and anticipated the critical responses to the conclusion of my post.   “I believe WikiLeaks’ disclosures present a clear and present danger to world peace.”

Esther expressed concern that the boldness of my judgment suggested a need to constrain the media.  She, Scott and Alias agreed that the danger of the WikiLeaks “dump” was not great.  Scott judged that “it’s rather unfair to assume that the US is the only country whose diplomacy can be duplicitous and shady.”  And he criticized Alias’s summary judgment, based on the predictability of the revelations, “Oh well.”  Scott noted that there are detailed reasons for not being so blasé and cites the possible complications in Afghanistan.

Perhaps I exaggerated, but only a little.  Making public what is meant to be private undermines social interaction, whether it be in a family or in diplomacy or anywhere else.  I understand why for specific reasons one would want to do that in a targeted way, if the family is dysfunctional and abusive, if the diplomacy is sustaining an injustice.  But to reveal secrets just because they are secret makes little sense, since there are necessarily secrets everywhere.  That is whistle blowing gone wild. It generally undermines the practice of diplomacy.  Not a good thing, because the alternative to diplomacy in solving international conflict is war.  And in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, as Elzbieta Matynia considered earlier today, transparency would have insured failure, i.e. the continuation of dictatorship, a violent revolutionary change, or civil war, each a path to human misery and injustice.

But I should be clear, once the information is public, I understand why news organizations need to report it and try to do so as responsibly as possible.  I think The New York Times did just that, although I find their explanations for their decisions to be strained.

As far as strains go, Esther Kreider-Verhalle underscored this week the dangers Fictiods present to American democracy in her post.  Hers is an ironic but critical observation: what first appears as farce, later appears as tragedy (to turn Marx on his head).  It seems amusing that a Chinese journalist mistook a satirical article in the Onion for real reporting, but it is deeply disturbing that Fox news did the same thing.  Disturbingly funny for those of us who don’t take Fox seriously, although we, (I, along with Esther, and probably DC readers), are deeply concerned that many of our compatriots do.   To struggle against this, we will organize a continuing fictoid watch at DC, starting next week, reporting on fictoids and critically analyzing the dangers they pose.  I hope this is not just an intra pillar activity, to use Esther’s imagery .  Our challenge, keeping in mind Martin Plot’s earlier post on opposition and truth, is to make this activity visible to those who take Fox nation seriously.  Is there anything that can be done?

Reading Martin Plot’s posts this week, I think, leads to pessimism, or at least a very critical appraisal of the prospects for democracy in America.  I am not so pessimistic, not quite as critical.  In my next post, I am going to consider his analysis of American politics, media and the leadership of President Obama.  My basic argument – Obama never was a leftist but an imaginative centrist, and the limits of that imagination may not be as exhausted and the general prospects for creative democratic action may not be as constricted as Plot thinks.

There was once a Chinese correspondent who filed a news story to his hometown newspaper, The Beijing Evening News, by copying an article from an American “newspaper.” A nice show of laziness, as he was not only plagiarizing but also taking his secret source, The Onion, too seriously and his journalistic task not seriously at all.

But you certainly don’t have to be a lazy Chinese correspondent to start spreading urban legends, and sometimes these legends have potentially much more damaging political consequences. Recall the thirty four warships that radio host Glenn Beck said were accompanying president Obama on his trip to Asia? (link) Or, heard about the re-posting of another article from The Onion on FoxNation.com last week without a clear statement from the editors that the source was the satirical paper? (See coverage of the issue at Gawker.)

Some people will say the darndest things in order to get attention, or better yet, to be of influence. Nothing new here. But with the ubiquitous political use of fictoids, one wonders to what extent the misinformation fundamentally damages our traditions of public deliberation. And those who help create and circulate fictoids around the world are often well rewarded: they get a lot of attention, potential influence, and a guarantee that many a media outlet and their guests will spend less time discussing considerably more important issues.

Will the debunking of fictoids contribute to a healthier form of discussion? As noted by earlier DC contributors, our media outlets are fragmented.(See for example Martin Plot’s Oppostion and Truth) It is helpful when Anderson Cooper deconstructs the hollow estimates of the costs of President Obama’s recent Asia trip. (link)

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman even lauded Cooper for having done the country a favor. (link) But isn’t Cooper just preaching to the choir? If you are in the game for the attack and think that the means justify the end, you are not bothered by shame. And your friends and followers either haven’t heard of Anderson Cooper or will just laugh at him.

Obviously, Friedman still has faith in the role of the media as a watchdog. But the dog’s barking has gone on deaf ears. Is America slowly but surely becoming a consociational democracy in which society is segregated in “pillars” that are based on ideologies and religions? (See Arend Lijphart’s The Politics of Accomodation.) We should ask the Dutch and the Belgians about their experiences with a fragmented fourth estate. For many years, the political landscape and social institutions in the Netherlands have been divided between catholic, protestant, socialist and liberal blocs.

As a result, during most of the 20th Century, all Dutch protestants voted for the protestant party, attended protestant schools, exercised in protestant sport clubs, and only read and watched protestant newspapers and television broadcasts. The catholics and other groups also lived in their own isolated world. Belgians lived in a similar fragmented society, albeit made up of different groups. It will be interesting to learn something about the quality of public deliberation and the presence of fictoids in the Dutch and Belgian media. One thing is certain: no Dutch queen or Belgian king was ever accompanied by 34 warships on their tours.