I couldn’t sleep last night, haunted by a world gone crazy.

I dreamt that a purported Israeli, with the support of one hundred rich American Jews, pretended to make a feature length film aggressively mocking the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims in general – Islamophobia and anti-Semitism combined!

The faux film producer uploaded a mock trailer to YouTube. Along with thousands of other clips, it was ignored. But then when the film was dubbed into Arabic, the demagogues of the world all played their roles – the clash of civilizations as mediated performance art.

Radical Islamic clerics worked as film distributors (monstrous monstrators as my Daniel Dayan might put it), bringing the clip to the attention of the mass media and the masses. Islamist and anti-Islamist ideologues worked up their followers, happily supporting each other in their parts. Feckless diplomats in embassies tried to assure the public that hate-speech isn’t official American policy. Analysts identified root causes.

The clash of civilizations was confirmed. All the players needed each other, supported each other, depended on each other. A marvelous demonstration of social construction: W.I. Thomas would be proud of the power of his insight. Social actors defined the clash of civilizations as real, and it is real in its consequences.

A reality confirmed with a jolt when I awoke, knowing full well about the global attacks on American embassies and symbols, and the tragic death of a man who was determined to go beyond clashing clichés, the heroic American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. The American right, including the marvelous Mitt Romney and Fox News talking heads, denounced President Obama’s purported support of the attacks and failure to stand up for American values, including the freedom of speech — this from people who worry about the war on Christmas. It’s a surreal reality this morning.

And this morning, wide-awake, I am savoring Marvelous Mitt’s recent video performance: right-wing newspeak de-constructed. At last, class warfare in America has been given a full public airing. In pitching his candidacy with his fellow fat-cats, Romney revealed his definition of job producers, the nature of dependency and the work ethic. He also showed himself to be a true student of Ayn Rand. Really, all who depend on government vote for Obama and the Democrats? No wonder he selected Paul Ryan. Identifying those who don’t pay federal income taxes with votes for Democrats is amazingly poor sociology, bordering on comedy, a point made beautifully in a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times.

To the Editor:

I woke up early this morning and drove my daughter several miles on a government-built road, all the way to a government-operated school.

I came back to my home — for which I receive a government-sanctioned mortgage-interest deduction — and called my parents, who both receive Social Security and Medicare from the government. Then I signed on to the Internet, which was developed by government-sponsored researchers.

So Mitt Romney is right, on two counts. I am “dependent upon government.” And I’m not voting for him.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Sept. 18, 2012

The jobs report on Friday was bad, as David Howell analyzed here. This immediately was interpreted across the board as good news for Mitt Romney and his party, bad news for President Obama and his. It’s the economy stupid, and bad news about employment means that Obama’s chance for reelection has declined precipitously. And things are worse then that. It’s now or never. It is in the summer that the public’s perception of the economy is locked in for Election Day. Even if things improve in the fall, there won’t be enough lead-time to change the public’s perception.

I know that this is based on solid evidence. Considerable scholarly research has demonstrated the strong correlation between the state of the economy and election results.  But the way this research has been directly applied in daily political commentary is troubling, especially because it can become a political factor itself. As the “Thomas Theorem” posits: If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.  I add, especially when they are doing the defining on television.

This concerns me as a scholar and as a partisan. As a scholar, I worry about the philosophic anthropology of this. The voting public is being depicted as simpletons, not capable of critical thought, of the most basic examination of the facts. There is a kind of economic determinism involved and the determinism is quite mechanical. People vote their pocketbooks and they don’t think critically about it. They don’t wonder about the causes of their economic woes and just vote the bums out. It amazes me how in the same broadcasts talking heads suggest both that the job numbers are a result of long-term trends beyond the control of the President and that Obama’s chances of victory have greatly diminished because of the state of the economy as indicated by the latest job report. They propose a simple Pavlovian stimulus and response vision of voters, never inquiring about how they may interpret the news.

Thinking comparatively, in this way, it’s not the austerity policies, along with other non-economic issues, that is leading to a left political shift in Greece, France and Germany, as we have reported in Deliberately Considered. It’s just a turn against incumbents, and the U.S. will make a right turn for the same economic reason. Might it not be a little more complicated that this?

As a partisan, I wonder are Americans capable of noticing that the persistent unemployment is the result of both the rise in employment in the private sector, and radical cuts in the public sector, including masses of teachers? They surely are capable of noticing that the Republican policies in Congress led the U.S. to the brink of default last summer, and that Romney is offering more of the same, with economic proposals that look a lot like those of George W. Bush and have about as much chance of success as those of David Cameron in Great Britain. Americans also are capable of noticing that in fact Congress is a co-equal branch of government and has moved economic decisions in the direction of austerity, and that state and local governments have been cutting jobs very rapidly during the recession. In effect, Obama is continuing to push in the opposite direction, while a national austerity policy is in place because of the Republicans, as Paul Krugman argued in his piece “This Republican Economy” in today’s New York Times. I know not everyone is going to agree with this Keynesian economist’s political assessment, though I do. What disturbs me is that many posit that argument doesn’t matter. Gross economic statistics, they assume, is political destiny. Following this logic, FDR would have been a one-term president.

And while economics are important in deciding Presidential elections, it is not the only thing. The Republicans, especially as they appeared in the primary elections and in Congress, state legislatures and state houses, are fighting a rearguard action against major social trends in America.

They became the reactionary party when it came to the issues of race and racism, when Nixon adopted his infamous southern strategy. This approach was continued by Bush the elder with his Willie Horton ad and his nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas as the most qualified jurist in the land (a strained anti-racism). And the reaction is alive and well in the Birther movement of Donald Trump and company, and the crazy wing of the Tea Party, with which the Republican establishment has toyed, and the Islamophobia to which many Republicans are deeply committed, fighting against Islamofascism and Sharia law in Oklahoma and beyond. Yet, America is a much more diverse, much more tolerant society. The American Dream more and more looks like the one depicted and embodied by Barack Obama.

And there is much more, concerning the rights of women to equal pay for equal work, immigrant rights, equal rights for gays to serve in the military and to marriage, full healthcare rights for women, including access to contraception and abortion, and much more. For significant segments of the population these are not just social issues, a euphemism that disguises the degree to which survival and fundamental dignity are at issue.

I know that the studies that predict election results take all this into account. They assume that people do vote on these issues, but that the turn of the election to the Republicans or the Democrats is decided by the state of the economy with a high degree of accuracy. Yet, it will matter who people hold accountable for their economic woes, and it will matter which candidate appears to make sense about the economy, often as this is related to other issues.

Perhaps when the economy went into deep crisis, McCain lost the last presidential election. But certainly when he declared in the face of the crisis that the economy was fundamentally sound, he put the nail in his election coffin. For the young, people of color, women and members of the LGBT community, his cluelessness on issues of their special concern magnified his apparent economic ignorance. Across the board, he didn’t make sense about the pressing issues of the day.

I believe this is the central factor: the struggle to make sense to the public about our problems, economic and non-economic, indeed as they are related. As a partisan, I think and I believe Obama still has an advantage in this regard over Romney and the Republican Party, which over the past year has revealed its radicalism. My next post: more reflections on the issue of making sense and communicating it. How it relates to the question in American identities and the issue of America’s place in the new global order.

I had the good fortune of being an eye witness to one of the major changes in the geopolitical world of my life time.  I observed the Soviet Empire collapsing, chronicled it at the front lines, even before many saw the collapse coming.  I don’t have such a privileged seat as we observe the transformations of in Egypt and Tunisia, but my intuition tells me that these may be every bit as significant as the ones I saw in their infancy thirty years ago.  We can’t be sure that the changes begun this past month will reach a fully successful conclusion: fully? probably not.  But there is no doubt that the world has changed, not only there, but also here.

A big change: the idea of the clash of civilizations has been defeated.  It turns out, and should be clear to all, that Muslims are quite capable of initiating a genuine democratic movement.  It may or may not prevail, but it is certainly an important strain in Egyptian and Tunisian political culture.

Another big change: I suspect that the commitment to democracy is now “in,” more appealing than radical jihad, even for the disaffected in the Muslim world.  How long this lasts and with what effect will depend on the continuing success of the transformation begun last month.  I believe this is the first major victory in the so called “war on terrorism.”

A little change, close to home: in everyday life, Islamophobia may be in retreat.  After seeing the images from Cairo, why should Juan Williams wonder about that person in Muslim garb on an airplane?  It may never have been particularly rational, but especially not now.  There are crazy people of all sorts of cultural and religious persuasions, and also admirable ones.  Now the admirable of the Arab and Muslim world are front stage.  Now they are most visible.  Only the most close-minded will refuse to see them, i.e. over at Fox, Glenn Beck but, I suspect, not Juan Williams.

And now the “only democracy in the Middle East” seems to be most openly uncomfortable about democratic developments in Egypt and among its neighbors.  Better the autocrat you know, than the democrat you don’t know, seems to be the operative insight animating Israeli official reaction to recent events.  The striking limitations in Israeli democratic practice are also now strikingly apparent, as will be explored by Nahed Habiballah in her post tomorrow.

Indeed, this is not to say that everything and everyone is or should be happy.  Such expectations of revolutionary change are naïve, even dangerous.  The contradictions in American foreign policy, our professed commitment to democracy, and our pursuit of good relations with our “moderate” autocratic allies, are now clearly revealed and present pressing problems.  I have some expectations that this may be resolved in Jordon with the formation of a genuine constitutional monarchy a la Britain. Perhaps we will even see an interesting movie in the not to distance future about the King’s speech and the President’s speech there, and discuss it at DC. But such will not be the case in Saudi Arabia.  If there are negative consequences of these contradictions for American interest, we may be hearing the nationalistic question – who lost Egypt?  – echoing the old who lost China debate.  This will be explored by Gary Alan Fine in an upcoming post.

I think the discussion that we have had about the events in Egypt this past week illuminated the events as they were happening and provide insights for understanding what is yet to come.  Hazem Kandil concern about the need for the democratic movement to develop alternative grounds for political action is even more pressing this week, than it was last.  Thus far there has been a military coup against a dictatorial regime.  Those in control right now include principally those who benefited from the old order.  It is imperative that the forces in the society that opposed that order get their act together.

There is a clear analogy to be drawn to the changes of ’89.  There is a danger that those who can say “no,” but little else, will be overwhelmed by those who positively assert a new authoritarian order, as I have shown happened in Romania in 1989.  I am not sure that the alternatives are as stark as Daniel Dayan fears, military dictatorship or religious integralism.  But there clearly is a need for people who want alternatives to these stark alternatives to speak to each other and develop a capacity to act in concert, as Hannah Arendt would put it, beyond protesting against.  They must develop programs, policies, and parties, and a way to discuss their competing visions.  They must present alternatives to what Dayan calls “fear mongers “and “sleepwalkers.”

I was talking to Elzbieta Matynia about her post through Skype on Friday, just as Mubarak’s resignation was announced.  I thought that her post was too long.  We were discussing how I might edit it, so that it appeared in two installments.  But at that revolutionary moment, I decided not to cut her piece in two, because of the importance of what she had to say and my sense that it should be said as quickly and coherently as possible.  She put forward a key way that the sorts of problems that Dayan and Kandil anticipate have been avoided in transformations from dictatorship to democracy in the recent past.  Opposing parties and interest groups have to work together on the transformation, and the roundtable with its public etiquette, is an invention that has facilitated this.  I hope the Egyptian generals and oppositionists keep such experience in mind.

And as I am posting this, the revolution is spreading, confirming my conviction that 2011 may very well be as significant as 1989.  The headline in The New York Times is “Unrest Spreads in the Middle East” at this moment, with reports from Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt.

A specter is haunting the Middle East and it is up to the people of the Middle East to decide what this specter is all about – my point in my appraisal of President Obama’s performance thus far in these revolutionary times.