03.27.08
Posted in Politics, Current Events at 6:43 am by diantus
There is a shifting dynamic in the American electorate today – a collapse of what has been a defining feature of our political system since the cold war. This feature is the importance of ideology in American politics. For the first time in a long time, the role played by defining ideologies is falling under scrutiny.
How am I defining ideology here? I understand an ideology as a fixture of ideas, usually very narrow in focus, that end up taking prominence over all other ideas or developments in a society. Moreover, this spectrum of ideas are held up as being inherently in opposition to others, and can seriously impede meaningful discussion, as they create an intellectual tendency to go to extreme poles of thought and action.
For much of the twentieth century, and for the lives of our most prominent politicians, they have always viewed the political world through the lens of certain ideologies and causes. Things like Communism, Socialism, and Racism… these are issues and talking points, and have successfully engaged the political dialogue for a very long time. However, these causes tend to be seen as all encompassing; as though addressing one will somehow fix everything. Instead of being symptoms of a wider set of social and political diseases, they are the core cause of most of our social ills – and must be dealt with first before anything else can be managed.
Perhaps the best example of this dangerous narrow mindedness was the Communist threat during much of the 20th century. So concerned with Communism was our society that any project that could have been construed as socialist or communist in origin meant the beginning of a slide directly into Stalinist Totalitarianism from which we could never recover. This thinking forms the core of opposition to most of the major efforts at poverty reduction in the last 90 years, including the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and even universal healthcare in the 90’s. Moreover, it completely has stifled any serious discussion of class in the political mainstream.
Most recently, we have been waylaid by the War on Terror and the Neoconservative agenda. Both of these are powerful ideologies that again place one relatively small set of problems at the center of our national thinking. What’s worse, the problems that are supposed to be solved by the War on Terror and the perceived need to forcefully ensure America’s military preeminence are merely symptoms of bigger problems in foreign and domestic policy – many of which are being exacerbated by this narrow-minded dogmatic approach.
Increasingly though, there is a segment of our society, led by those who were not brought up in the center of the 20th century’s viciously ideological environment and those that recognized the fallacies of such thinking at the time, that is breaking away from such rigid ideologies. These are people more willing to look at wider issues and break away from patriotic fervor a little bit in order to ask earnest questions about the origins of some of America’s most crippling deficiencies, and actively seek the best road forward instead of insisting of the correctness of one’s pet cause.
This is a movement that has found expression in the candidacies of Barack Obama and John McCain. It was John McCain who provided a future for his disgraced party by playing the role of loyal opposition – calling out the Republicans on their most grievous violations of decency and freedom. Admittedly, he has spent the better part of his campaign thus far pandering to the crazies at the base of the Republican machine, but we can hope that he’ll settle down and remember that common sense and developing understanding through reason are still better tools than bull-headed narrow-mindedness as he enters back into the mainstream.
Barrack Obama exemplifies this changing worldview even better. He has again and again demonstrated a tendency towards more holistic political thinking. Through his various speeches and political conversations, he has shown a consistent willingness to examine issues in a wider context than most other politicians currently active. So much so, that his larger points are frequently missed by his critics. In his recent speech on race, he drew an oft cited, but seldom heeded link between racism and racist attitudes on all sides of the color barrier and economic conditions present in the United States. He painted it as an issue in need of addressing, but one that was ultimately a scapegoat in the face of large political and economic issues.
The entrance of this kind of thinking into the political mainstream makes me feel positive. However, my basic fears remain in place: mostly that this new public dialogue will be drowned out by those who are too invested in the old. In fact, it is likely that Obama and his ilk, like Al Gore and his, will be accused of intellectualism – that old charge trumped out by those to slow or stupid to make real contributions or change their views in the face of overwhelming evidence. This is a very real fear. Our political system is in desperate need of serious evaluation and rethinking. Not because the left or the right of our political spectrum has been under-represented, but because the entire political system has lost the space for both reasoned debate, and for any meaningful role of the rule of people. Americans need to move beyond ideological conflict and into an era where people can speak honestly about what shape the future will have.
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03.20.08
Posted in Politics at 7:56 am by diantus
I’ve been staying away from the daily grind of American politics as a subject of my writing for some time now – with good reason. After all, I am not, at present, residing in the United States, and have no real sense of how life on the ground there is at present. Moreover, so disgusted have I been with, what seems to be, the obvious direction of domestic policy at home that I have seen no good reason to go back to the United States.
With this in mind, please bear with me while I try not to gush over Obama’s recent speech on race in America. He correctly pegged our thinking and dealing with race relations in the US for what they were – a divisive distraction to the real issues. He stood before the nation and talked candidly about the feelings on both sides of the divide, and made the point that all of us have the same problems, and that to move forward, we needed to do it together.
He spoke to Americans as though they were adults, capable of rational discourse. I am tempted to make a joke about this assumption, but I won’t. He spoke honestly and plainly about something that Americans cannot afford to ignore – precisely because there are bigger issues at stake, and Obama is correct when he asserts that how we deal with race is a reflection of how we deal with other issues.
It has been called a historic speech. It is. He rightfully has been lauded by people on the left and right for his forthright and respectful attitude. He has boldly issued a challenge to the people of the United States to acknowledge the fact that America isn’t perfect – that it can, and should be challenged to be better than it is. He challenged us to hold our leaders, no matter who wins the election, accountable to the people so that we might move forward together. It made me, for the first time in a very long time, proud to be an American.
I don’t expect this feeling to last. I expect to see these words buried underneath the right-wing noise machine. I expect Hillary to belittle this contribution to our nation’s dialogue, and I don’t really expect government to change. I’m too young to have seen this country really do anything all that glorious. I didn’t live through the Second World War, or the Apollo missions. These are dim memories from a history book. Instead, I lived through the twin gulf wars and Monica Lewinski. The greatest political minds in the America of today are outsiders to whom no one listens. I see a country in the grip of Fox News and Bill O’Reily – and somehow this form of witless patriotism is seen as what we need, not nuance and subtle understanding of deeper meaning. I see a country whose politicians have been unable to provide a rational explanation for anything they do, or want to do and desperately try to avoid the real genuine suffering in our streets and our schools because they spend most of their careers trying to get re-elected, and fixing problems take time. And I see Obama, in the middle of it all, that horrible ray of hope in the dark; beckoning me with another promise of a better future I just can’t see from the mire and muck of the present.
Obama has succeeded in making me want to believe that it can change. And that’s more than I can say for most. Like Pastor Wright, I don’t yet know what to do but be angry.
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03.13.08
Posted in Politics, Current Events at 12:00 am by diantus
One of the pillars of democracy is the free media. I bring this up because in an era of unprecedented access to information, there is a tendency to think that more information necessarily means that the filters have been weakened somehow. The assumption is that between the internet and 24 hour news channels, it is possible to find some reliable information on world affairs.
This is far from the truth. You see, for all of the various outlets available to us, our information originates from the same sources. The same news agencies are still the ones in the press rooms asking the questions and writing down the stories. The same government agencies are the ones delivering well-rehearsed press releases to journalists and the odd blogger who managed to slip a laptop or PDA past security. Moreover, during the same period of time that our available outlets for transmission have been so dramatically increasing, the actual agencies that find this information in the first place have been consolidating and cutting back.
Independent media is almost non-existent today. More major sources of information on the internet are controlled by the larger conglomerates, and most of the “revolutionary” blogosphere is simply wading through and commenting on the materials produced by any number of centrally controlled newspapers and internet sites (kind of like yours truly, but I don’t bother to link anything). If you don’t believe me, wander through some of the independent blogs out there, and note how the vast majority of what you find is things like “Surprise, surprise; the Washington Post put up another editorial about how great Barak HUSSEIN Obama is again. This is the kind of left-wing garbage we’ve come to expect from those rotten commies…” and so on.
Needless to say, it might be independent opinion, but in the end, the sources and materials are in no danger of becoming divorced from the centralized media system that rules over the production of information. There is still great impetus on individual journalists in the field to provide us with serious information that is accurate and reliable. Sometimes, those of us in the “political ‘chattering’ classes (a designation that I hated before accepting its unenviable veracity),” might hit on something worthwhile, but we are every bit as dependent on big media as those who are more passively engaged.
While the internet and so-called new media has made its way into nearly every home and neighborhood, the media conglomerates have been closing overseas bureaus, dismissing experienced journalists, and shutting off writers’ ability to be independent in the first place. When Samuel Huntington declares that his freedom as the senior international correspondent will never be seen again after his career is over, one can wonder about the near future of journalistic integrity. Instead of meaningful reports from around the world, we are subjected to hours of entertainment news because it is much cheaper and doesn’t really need an informed opinion to discuss it. Depth and specialization cost money and can cut deeply into profit margins.
The irony is that increasingly the best sources of independent journalism and reliable coverage are sources like the BBC and NPR – both of which are state-owned news outlets. NPR routinely wins awards for excellence, and the BBC has always been a great source of news and information. These two organizations have a significant international presence and can limit their reliance on wire services like the AP and Routers.
The fact is that the world is becoming increasing short of independent sources, even if we’ve got way too many people analyzing what we do have. The growing role of the internet underscores this need.
The danger of internet news is that the further from the source word travels, the less capable we are of verifying anything. It’s easy to find a news source that verifies one’s personal feelings on anything from communism to furry conventions and can be used to make some major point. In the end, well researched and verifiable information must still lie at the heart of anything that we choose to believe. In some ways, the internet makes that harder to do. In fact, I would argue that in order to remain informed about the world today, one has to work even harder than before; after all, the only thing harder to overcome than ignorance is a misplaced belief that one knows what one is talking about.
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03.07.08
Posted in Administrative at 5:24 am by diantus
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve actually been working on this stuff again (thanks again, my loyal 2.7 readers). I’ve had some time to get my head cleared and have remembered that I really do like doing this, so I hope you’ll keep reading and, at worst, think me in possession of too much time. Sorry about the irregular hiatus, but I’ve been busy getting settled into a markedly different life.
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03.06.08
Posted in Theory, Governance at 5:29 am by diantus
By now, the idea that the New World Order of George Bush senior is effectively a project in American Empire, has gained considerable traction among thinkers around the world. While any freedom-loving soul cannot help but see the basic contradiction between imperialism and liberty, western thinkers have struggled to try and choose a side. Having been raised under the shadow of our own culture of dominance, can we (to loosely paraphrase Franz Fanon) really contribute anything meaningful to liberation, or are we doomed to forever be the servants of exploitation?
This is a question that plagues me considerably. After all, I see much that is useful and admirable in furthering the project global integration. I have always felt that by combining the cultural and intellectual resources of mankind we can gain so much, and that our history of marked division must be put behind us as counterproductive and pointless. However, the project has gone horribly awry – having been annexed in the name of capital at any cost. The destitution of the poor has continued, and the only way to escape the desolation of poverty is to sell one’s dignity and traditions to the multinational. We have seen again and again that the lie of efficiency that underscores privation is contributing to incredible human suffering, and has succeeded only in shifting the burden of development of to the shoulders of those who can’t speak out in their own defense. This has led to a discordant opposition movement in many parts of the world.
The craving for liberation is lost on most Americans. We simply cannot imagine the world that supports the superstructure of our comforts. We simply cannot imagine the idea that people in the Sudan are compounding their considerable suffering with digestive problems that come from eat dirt mixed with flour because there is literally nothing else. Our assumption is just that the world has always been this way. We feel somehow that these impoverished regions are just unfortunate or populated by people that are somehow less capable than ourselves. After all, for our whole lifetime – our media saturated eyes have never seen anything but this endless cycle of suffering. With the world on our doorstep, how can we not wonder why it has seemingly always been this way?
What happened to Africa? Was the country always this barren and were these people just too stupid to move away? What were they doing there is the first place? Well, the truth is that a century ago, it wasn’t an unusable desert. It became that way owing to the efforts of locals and outsiders to over-develop a sensitive climatic region with the incompetence of governments who saw private enterprise as more important than people. The story repeats itself across many of the world’s most impoverished regions.
We can’t imagine the pressures that lie on these parts of the world. We get some sense from the plight of our own farmers who complain that they are being forced to by used equipment, and that government regulations concerning land use is hurting the bottom line. In Africa, there were no regulations, and now the Sahara is the fastest growing desert in the world – swiftly overtaking some of the best agricultural land in the world. No one is going to stop these escalating wars and boiling instabilities because the countries simply aren’t geopolitically important to the US.
The shame is not that we Americans have led a project of economic and cultural integration that is unprecedented in history. The shame is that through our thoughtless efforts to create a world order that is open and friendly to our interests we have created, against the better judgment of our founders, a global economic empire, where we export our developmental model in order to provide markets and resources for our corporations. This model has stripped away our own riches, impoverished our own culture because of the vast resources mobilized to protect it, and worse, disenfranchised millions more around the world.
What’s worse is that we are the only people who seem to be in a position to fix it and lessen the suffering that we have wrought, and that we can’t change anything. Our strength to make a difference is dependent on our intrinsically exploitive position. Moreover we are addicted to that power – its economic heroin. How can we conceivably let go of that? The best hope for us and those we have sought to rule is to fundamentally change the way that we engage the world and each other; a recasting of the American ideal and image.
Regrettably, the truth is that class still rules. Like the rural Indian displaced by the privatization of their traditional farmlands, the average American is not the beneficiary of the machinery of our global economic empire any more than the Sudanese coffee farmer, and because of that, Americans can start to break the cycle. We are cogs in this great machine as surely as anyone else, though our bondage might be punctuated by more visits to Starbucks. The sooner we recognize that we are being used as foot soldiers in an ongoing tale of colonization and exploitation that is still being for the benefit of people far removed from the realities of our lives, the sooner we can start to reclaim our liberties and potential.
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