It’s funny how much conservatives like to talk about “entitlements”. Because, when I think of the word entitlement, I think of white people crying at public meetings about wanting their country back. I think of Mitt Romney not bothering to write a concession speech because he feels that the universe somehow owes him the presidency.
Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Republican Party has behaved as if it still has a mandate. They want it to be the early 1980s. Whoa is them; there’s the small detail that the country’s values and demographics have changed profoundly since the conservative cultural backlash ushered in by Reagan. These values shifts will likely continue moving away from conservatives.
Leonard Cohen wrote (in Sisters of Mercy) about “you who must leave everything that you cannot control. It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul.” I think of today’s Republican Party in relation to “their country”. Except for the leaving part. They don’t strike me as the leaving kind. Forgive the metaphor, but their actions—especially around sequestration—remind me more of a murder/suicide scenario. They must destroy everything they cannot control. If you prefer a lighter metaphor, think of a spoiled child playing with a toy; when forced to share, the child opts instead to destroy the toy.
But back to the suicide analogy, which Paul Rosenberg made a few weeks back at Al Jazeera:
The United States is on the verge of committing suicide. Slow suicide, perhaps, which may take decades to fully play out, but suicide nonetheless. The proximate event is the sequester – deep across-the-board cuts to military and discretionary domestic spending, originally conceived as a Sword of Damocles, but which Tea Party-dominated Republicans now see as just the perfect budget axe. And that’s just one of several successive and mostly recurring crisis points at which Republicans are obstinantly demanding deep budget cuts that will inevitably slow, if not cripple the already weak economy – as well as debilitating or destroying vital government functions in the long run.
If I can’t own America — if I can’t count on America to be my rightful inheritance, to do with what I will — then I’m going to burn it down.
From my article in The Sociological Quarterly‘s new special issue on Occupy Wall Street:
Public Performance and Backstage
We know that Rosa Parks was not merely tired when she refused to give up her bus seat. She was acting with agency, and the appearance of spontaneity was part of an intentional performance designed for strategic effect (Polletta 2006). It was fine—intended even—for most people to see and sympathize with her as a tired woman who had simply had enough. It would not be fine, however, for students and strategists of social movements to take her performance at face value. We must also look behind the scenes.
Accordingly, it behooves us to explore Occupy Wall Street’s (OWS’s) backstage and not take its bountiful public performances at face value when assessing the movement (Goffman 1954). What complicates matters is that what we might usually think of as a movement’s backstage—for example, decision-making processes, general meetings, working groups, planning, and so on—is not really behind the scenes with OWS. It is all part of the public performance. To many OWS participants, internal democratic processes were often indistinguishable from external messages. To me OWS’s hyperdemocratic process was an important part of the public message. General Assemblies at Zuccotti Park in New York City operated as a brilliant theater, dramatically juxtaposing a visibly participatory people’s movement against what OWS participants and sympathizers perceived to be a rotted political system that has effectively disenfranchised most Americans. The downside is that General Assemblies were not functional forums for actual decision making. Because they were so cumbersome and easily derailed, many of the most active OWS organizers, myself included, eventually stopped going to them. Thus, much of the real decision making was pushed back-backstage into underground centers of informal power…
Read the full article on The Sociological Quarterly website (no paywall). Check out the full special section on Occupy Wall Street here.
I’m reading Cihan Tuğal’s Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. I’m still working my way through it, but so far I’ve found it very insightful. There are so many things in the book that I’m looking forward to digging into, so I feel a little bad that I’m about to start with the one thing that I’m ambivalent about: Tuğal’s use of the term counter-hegemony. I’m not usually one to nitpick about terms—especially esoteric terms like counter-hegemony—but here I go…
Dr. Tuğal did not invent the term, of course. Moreover, I suspect that because I agree so much with his descriptions and assessments (of patterns of political engagement, in the case of Islamist movements in Turkey), it stands out all the more when I do take issue with something. His book has got me thinking more specifically about what I don’t like about the term generally. To be clear, I introduce his work here as a jumping off point for this blog post, rather than as the object of my critique.
Here’s my problem with the term counter-hegemony: it is unclear whether (1) it implies an opposition to the idea of hegemony itself, or (2) it notes an opposition to a particular hegemony — opposition by a challenger force (i.e. an alternative, aspiring hegemony). I want to be careful to not put words in his mouth, but I suspect that Dr. Tuğal intends something closer to the latter interpretation of counter-hegemony. I had the pleasure of meeting him this past weekend at the UC Berkeley sociology open house. At the end of one of our conversations, we briefly discussed my ambivalence about the term. This ambivalence was reinforced later that same day by a discussion with another person who subscribed to the first interpretation, i.e., that to be counter-hegemonic is—and should be—to be against all hegemony.
This is how I define hegemony only some of the time.
To me, particular actors and political alignments maintain particular hegemonies. Their political challengers are not counter-hegemonic—insofar as the term may imply being against the idea of hegemony itself—but are themselves aspiring hegemonies. They want their ideas to win.
My concern is about power and the US Left’s ambivalence toward it. Rather than framing a conversation about how a Left might build and wield power, the term counter-hegemony may suggest inherent opposition to—or at least confusion about—power itself. The “counter” part reinforces our eternal outsider status and casts doubt on whether we even want power. It’s similar to how the term counter-culture suggests the creation of sideshow alternative subcultures, rather than a seizure of the main stage — i.e., a contestation of the meanings, symbols, narratives, and institutions of the popular culture. Read more…
I was struggling to find words to convey my sorrow on this day, the ten-year anniversary of the US bombing and invasion of Iraq. Then I saw these words from Leslie Cagan:
Ten years ago this evening I was out walking the dog. I ran into the Washington Post reporter based in NYC who was writing about the pending war in Iraq and the anti-war movement in this country. He said, “Have you heard?” I hadn’t. He said, “The bombing has begun.” And then he asked how I felt about it.
It was not a surprise, but it was devastating. We all knew what we were up against….the overwhelming power wielded by the U.S government…but the massive world-wide outpouring of sentiment against going to war in Iraq had given us a small measure of hope. Maybe this time it could be different. Maybe there are enough people in every corner of the planet saying no that the mad-men in Washington would be forced to take another course. Maybe we could prevent a war.
Of course, we couldn’t. And now, ten years later, there is still no peace in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine, in so many places in the world. And we are so very far from anything we might call justice!! Today is a sad, sad day as we note the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war…the war that never should have happened. And it’s a day to reflect on how much work there is ahead, to recommit ourselves — in whatever ways we can — to the struggle for a just peace, and a peaceful justice.
I feel overwhelmingly sad today. Sad and powerless. Powerless within the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Powerless as a drop of water trying to stop a waterfall. I take no solace in history vindicating my—and the antiwar movement’s—position and our actions to try to stop this criminal war that has devastated so many lives.
Over the past ten years, I have met many whose lives have been uprooted by this war of choice; people who have lost family members, friends, homes, limbs, and sanity. Meeting them and working beside them for a better world is the only solace I take on this sad day. These friends and comrades are too many to name. But you know who you are. Much love to you on this day.
Becca (my partner) and I spent the weekend in beautiful Santa Barbara — to check out UCSB and the surrounding area. The thought of spending five or six years here is really not so terrible.
Seriously, this place is a paradise. The natural beauty is definitely no small selling point. And there are a lot of fantastic professors I could see myself working with. I was able to meet with Dick Flacks, John Foran, George Lipsitz, Geoff Raymond, Verta Taylor, and Howard Winant. (I’m currently reading Dick Flacks’ must-read Making History: The American Left and the American Mind and Howard Winant and Michael Omi’s—also must-read—Racial Formation in the United States.) I was able to have rich conversations with other faculty and with a number of current PhD sociology students. I was also excited about the incoming admitted cohort. Many of them are also interested in social movements, politics, and society. All in all, UCSB is full of great folks and I think this is an excellent option for me.
No decision yet though! Tomorrow I check out UC Irvine and then University of Wisconsin on Friday on the way back east. More updates to follow.
Wow, the one-year anniversary of the eviction of Liberty Square (aka Zuccotti Park) came and went this week. I’m bad at keeping track of what the date is on any given day — or week! And for the past several weeks I’ve had my head buried in GRE prep and school applications. So I just now realized. It occurred to me while rereading William Gamson’s article The Social Psychology of Collective Action (in Frontiers of Social Movement Theory). This made me think of a major accomplishment of OWS:
When truly hegemonic, the legitimating frame is taken for granted. Would-be challengers face the problem of overcoming a definition of the situation that they themselves may take as part of the natural order.
It is an achievement, then, for a challenger to force the sponsors of a legitimating frame to defend its underlying assumptions. The sheer existence of a symbolic contest is evidence of the breakdown of hegemony and a major accomplishment for a challenger.
OWS—which, to me, includes “spinoff” campaigns like Rolling Jubilee, Occupy Homes, and many others—is itself “evidence of the breakdown of hegemony.” Hegemony, at least concerning the ideological legitimacy of the status quo. As I’ve said elsewhere, “In a very short time span, Occupy Wall Street dramatically shifted the dominant national conversation from a conservative deficit framework to a critique of economic inequality and the political disenfranchisement of most Americans.”
I am proud of the past year, grateful for the friends I have made, hopeful for what we—and many more of us—may accomplish in the years to come. Perhaps I am guilty of eternal optimism, but I see OWS as a harbinger of things to come; even bigger and better organized waves of collective action for social and economic justice. Read more…
Where did I go? Why no new posts since late September?
I’ve been swamped with studying for the GRE and applying to PhD sociology programs. I took the GRE last week. And now I’m in the homestretch on my applications. The homestretch will last another four weeks or so. Wish me luck — and anticipate the flow of new posts to resume in late December.
