By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 5th, 2010
Is democracy in America fundamentally flawed?  Do our political parties offer significant enough political choices? Do they actually engage in consequential political debate, offering alternative political policies? Are we so accustomed to inconsequential elections that our major newspaper confuses real consequential politics with authoritarianism? . These are the questions posed by Martin Plot in the past couple of weeks at DC. I think they are important questions, and I find insight in the answers he presents, but I don’t completely agree with Martin’s analysis. He thinks the democratic party in America may be over. I think it has just begun. Tonight, I will bluntly present my primary disagreement. Tomorrow, I will consider the implications of our differences and add a bit more qualification to my commentary. I welcome Martin’s response and anyone else’s.
First, though, I must acknowledge the insight of his media criticism. I think the Times reporter is inaccurate about politics in Argentina for the reasons Martin presents in his post, and further elaborated in his reply to the post. The reporter may very well hang around the wrong people, listening to critics who are far from unbiased and with questionable democratic credentials. And he may not fully appreciate that fundamental change can occur democratically, with radical changes in social policy, because this has not a common feature of American political life since the 1930s. Such a reporter can’t tell the difference between the democratic, and the authoritarian and populist left.
And when Martin notes that factual lies can persist because they are left unopposed in our fractured media world, in response to my concern about the power of fictoids, I think he is onto something very important.
But I do disagree with Martin’s overall appraisal of Democratic politics and the Presidency of Barack Obama, thus far. Put simply, I am not as sure as Martin is that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have not offered a significant alternative to the Republican Party and the Presidential leadership of former President George W. Bush, both in terms of platform and enacted policy. I don’t deny that “mistakes were . . .
Read more: The Democratic Party’s Over?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 3rd, 2010 
WikiLeaks, Fictoids, and Plutocracy
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 . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review
By Elzbieta Matynia, December 3rd, 2010 
The ambivalence around the WikiLeaks mission and especially its recent disclosures are understandable (see Jeff’s previous post). On the one hand, it does make us feel that we no longer have to live in a fog called the diplomatic game, that we need no longer be treated like children who for their own protection are excluded from family secrets, and that we the citizens of the world deserve not to be patronized and paternalized by our own governments, and need not concede so much discretionary power to our government officials.
On the other hand, as someone who is living at this moment in post-apartheid South Africa, and works in the archives (of which only a small part is available to the broader public), and who has studied the processes that led to the dismantling of Soviet-style autocracy in Central and Eastern Europe, an apparently widespread schadenfreude about exposing everything to everybody brings shivers. Two very different, but in both cases repressive, regimes in Poland and in South Africa, would not have ended peacefully as they did, if not for lengthy and secret conversations that laid the groundwork for the official public negotiations. Imagine that the secret meetings between Church officials, leaders of the outlawed Solidarity movement, and General Jaruzelski’s government in Poland had been exposed in 1987…….Or that the “talks about talks”, and the meetings between exiled leaders of the ANC and certain members of the ruling nationalist party, had been exposed by WikiLeaks.
Nelson Mandela in 1937
In each case, the negotiations that led to fundamental systemic change and the launching of democratic rule were preceded by an overture, made of many secret meetings. The South African overture began roughly with a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where most of the ANC leaders lived, and was followed by twelve clandestine gatherings in England, gradually building a fragile trust between the key enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals and ANC leaders. . . .
Read more: Privacy and Progress
By Martin Plot, December 2nd, 2010 
It’s mystifying to read The New York Times’ coverage of my other polity, Argentina, where the editorial positions seem to be the exact opposite to those of their coverage in the US. On the one hand, in American politics, the attacks on Obama and the Democrats as “totalitarian,” for having attempted and achieved a modest reform of the healthcare system are presented as borderline madness by the Times. But on the other, the progressive, democratic, and successful reformist governments of Nestor Kirchner—from 2003 to 2007—and Cristina Fernandez—since 2007—are accused of “authoritarianism.”
Moreover, the sources quoted when making such accusation are often mediocre conservative political commentators and journalists that would hardly be taken seriously in the US—at least, I think, in The New York Times. In no way less problematic, but perhaps more understandable, due to their sharing social circles with members of financial global institutions, the journalists’ assertions often come straight from “risk consultants” in financial firms. It is never made clear, however, that these are political adversaries of the democratically elected administration and significantly less appreciative of the working of democratic politics, to say the least, than the Argentine government.
While this strange phenomenon at first may seem difficult to understand without resorting to conspiracy theory, a closer examination of Argentine and American politics explains the apparent reporting anomaly. In Argentina the working of democratic politics involved during the period serious conflicts about major issues—such as repealing amnesty laws giving impunity to the 1976-83 human right violations, appointing the most prestigious and independent Supreme Court in the country’s history, astonishingly reducing the national foreign debt in tough negotiations with international financial groups and the IMF, building a strong and democratic Union of South American Nations, and passing transformational laws de-monopolizing media markets, universalizing marriage (gay marriage,) extending social security benefits to millions of uncovered senior citizens, streamlining the path toward citizenship for hundred of thousands of Latin American immigrants, and creating a universal subsidy for children. In contrast, in the United States, we have come . . .
Read more: The New York Times in the Americas
By Esther Kreider-Verhalle, December 1st, 2010 
On Nov. 9, Jeff pondered the use of fictitious “facts” presented in the cable political arena–fictoids.
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 . . .
Read more: 34 Warships and Other Fictoids
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