gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee

A Phenomenology of Democratic Politics

March 19, 2009

Democratic Phenomenology Project, Uncategorized

This academic year I’ve been working on a new book project. Roughly, it’s a phenomenology of democratic politics — democratic in the deep and strong sense, not the thin sense of liberal, representative democracy. I’ve written several chapters, that have been published as papers here and there. It’s time to start ordering this all in a coherent way.

I think I’ll use this blog of mine as a way of trying out the ideas. Of course my writing here will be in a rather different register than the book.

I’ll start posting a discrete thought one at a time. Please do share your thoughts as I move along.

Here’s the first thought:

To help a country become more functional and even flourishing, it is important to look at the whole body politic. This will include at least two things: the mechanisms of government (what we often refer to as the state) and the political culture. To understand the political culture it is important to start from the very local and immediate. At the neighborhood level, when there is a problem, what do the people do? Do they have habits and norms of problem solving? Or do they leave the problems for someone else to address? What are people’s habits and expectations about who will define problems, frame them, decide what to do and then act?

Alexis de Tocqueville noted that we Americans are peculiar. In France when there is a problem people start knocking on the magistrate’s door, demanding that the magistrate do something. In America, when there’s a problem, people form an association to do something about it themselves. By the 20th century this habit was long gone. But if Tocqueville was right, in the 19th century the French and the Americans had distinctly different political cultures. They had certain habits and norms about what to do when problems happen.

Think about where you grew up or where you live now. When there’s a problem, how do people behave? Do they get together? Do they protest, beseech, complain, or even riot? Do they give up? These habits are crucial indicators of a community’s civic capacities.
Feminist Political Philosophy

March 6, 2009

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Here’s a glimpse of my recent contribution to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Feminist political philosophy is an area of philosophy focused on understanding and critiquing the way political philosophy is usually construed, often without any attention to feminist concerns, and to articulating how political theory might be reconstructed in a way that advances feminist concerns. Feminist political philosophy is a branch of both feminist philosophy and political philosophy. As a branch of feminist philosophy, it serves as a form of critique or a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricœur 1970). That is, it serves as a way of opening up or looking at the political world as it is usually understood and uncovering ways in which women and their current and historical concerns are poorly depicted, represented, and addressed. As a branch of political philosophy, feminist political philosophy serves as a field for developing new ideals, practices, and justifications for how political institutions and practices should be organized and reconstructed.

While feminist philosophy has been instrumental in critiquing and reconstructing many branches of philosophy, from aesthetics to philosophy of science, feminist political philosophy may be the paradigmatic branch of feminist philosophy because it best exemplifies the point of feminist theory, which is, to borrow a phrase from Marx, not only to understand the world but to change it (Marx and Engels 1998). And, though other fields have effects that may change the world, feminist political philosophy focuses most directly on understanding ways in which collective life can be improved. This project involves understanding the ways in which power emerges and is used or misused in public life (see the entry on feminist perspectives on power). As with other kinds of feminist theory, common themes have emerged for discussion and critique, but there has been little in the way of consensus among feminist theorists on what is the best way to understand them. This introductory article lays out the various schools of thought and areas of concern that have occupied this vibrant field of philosophy for the past thirty years.

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Bench Project

February 4, 2009

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My buddy Linda Hesh had her latest art project written up in boingboing today. I helped her out a bit this past summer. We set up “for” and “against” benches and invited people to sit on a bench for a quick photo and write what they were for or against. We got all kinds of answers…

Read the boingboing article for a quick summary or check it out directly here.
Blogging and the End of Journalism

February 2, 2009

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I’ve had a running debate with someone very close to me—I won’t say who, just that he is a journalist—about whether blogging has killed journalism.

It’s true that journalism as we have known it is dying an agonizing death. Walk into the newsroom of any major newspaper, my journalist tells me, especially its Washington bureau, and it’s a ghost town. The bodies that are there are those of the young. The old, along with their relatively big salaries, have departed.

The once-mainstay source of income for newspapers, the classifieds, has migrated to the net. The old business models have shattered. No one wants to pay for the news anymore. The advertising and eyeballs model of web journalism can’t pay for good reporting. And in the wake of journalism come all these blogs that just comment upon what real journalists do. If it weren’t for REAL journalists, the bloggers would have nothing to comment on. And increasingly bloggers come to be taken as journalists. But what the hell do they know? And so goes the rant.

My journalist isn’t the only one complaining. In my work on media and democracy I’ve convened and attended lots of meetings of journalists as well as new media types. Get the journalists in the room and they start kvetching and bitching and whining and looking for the nearest razor blades. Journalism as they know it, journalism that lives on newsprint, is dead. And so go their jobs.

Get a bunch of new media people in a room, and there’s glee mixed with trepidation. The world is their oyster; there’s something new every five minutes; and everyone will be there twittering about it, or watching via twitter, and clicking on the latest tinyurl to come their way with news of the newest, latest thing. There will be an obligatory session on “new business models,” as in, “how the hell are we going to get paid for this?” But there’s joy all the same.

What about journalism? Has blogging become stand in and interpreter? Miscreant? Monster?

Let’s make one thing clear: what you are reading here is not journalism. I am not pretending to dig up stories and give you the truth of the matter. The blogosphere is more like the op-ed pages. I’m going to give you my perspective on things. Of course the op-ed page can’t stand alone, it needs the news pages to comment on; but it is a vital place for making sense of the news, for thinking out loud about what it all means for us. The op-ed pages and the blogosphere are places for regular folks to think through and work through what kind of people and communities we want to be, what we stand for, what we think is vital and of value.

But to say that this isn’t journalism is not to say that I can just make things up. This communication, like any communication, ought to live up to what Habermas calls valididty condidtions. You have every right, and I have every obligation, to be truthful, sincere, and appropriate. These are obligations that journalism, blogging, and regular conversations all share.

So what about journalism? Definitely we need new models. I like my morning newsprint newspaper; I hope it continues. Yet clearly the main platform is becoming the web. But whatever the medium, the messenger needs to make a living. How are we going to support and sustain good old fashioned reporting, especially investigative reporting? Maybe newspapers need to be endowed. See a New York Times, ahem, op-ed on the subject. That’s a decent idea. There’s no easy answer to this, especially in the midst of an economic melt down. But while we try to figure it out, please don’t shoot the likes of me.
Engaging Citizens from the White House

January 30, 2009

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The White House now has a new office of citizen participation, so it’s time to set some things straight. First, some applause is in order. It is high time that elected officials started paying attention to what the public has to say. But second, a lot of caution is needed. Who is engaging whom? how? for what?

For over a decade now there’s been a strong movement for participatory democracy and civic engagement, and this has originated within civil society. Elected officials have barely noticed, except when the public starts slapping them around. New technologies exponentially increased opportunities for citizens to engage each other, to attend to matters of common concern, and to use new media to get their voices heard.

In his 2004 bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Howard Dean and his staff figured out how to tap this burgeoning new form of social and political organization to rally for his candidacy. A short four years later Barack Obama’s team took web tools and old fashioned community organizing skills and won the presidency. So in terms of citizen engagement, it seems like Barack Obama is master of the universe.

We the public, though, shouldn’t look to the White House to organize us. That’s our job. There is no substitute for self-organizing, certainly not if it is to be democratic.

What the White House can do is be a good partner, set up channels for communication, and in general do whatever it can to let a million flowers of civic association bloom and make a difference.

We have to be careful that a White House office of civic engagment doesn’t become the office of turning citizens into public interest lobbyists. It might be well and good for citizens to lobby their elected officials to enact this or that policy. But lobbying ain’t organizing.

(I know. I used to have the title of “community organizer” for a public interest organization, but my real job was to manufacture the illusion of public outcry, not the reality of a strong public sphere that will decide for itself what is just or unjust. But this is material for another post.)

So I call on my fellow citizens not to look to Obama’s administration to be the leader on citizen engagement. And I call on Katie Jacobs Stanton, the new director of this new office, to think of her job as opening a pathway between the govenrment and the public sphere. That pathway should not be for telling and selling the public on pet policies, though some of that may well go on. As Andrew Nachison cautions,

The Obama team’s precision with producing and staging events and using Web 2.0 digital tools to connect and organize millions of volunteers sets the stage for an era of political engagement unlike any before. It also sets the stage for a system of public opinion management, manipulation and manufacturing of consent drawn directly from the film Wag The Dog, in which governance is theater and politics is lit and directed by unseen artists.

The new office should create pathways through which the public can convey to elected officials what its concerns are and what kind of policies it will decide to support.

But as for the act of deliberating, choosing, and forming public will on matters of public concern, that is something the public has to do for itself.
From Summer 1986 to Senate 2009

January 26, 2009

Uncategorized

Between my first and second year of policy school at Duke University, I spent a sumer at the Advocacy Institute in Washington, D.C. It was the best summer job ever, even though it paid nothing. Co-Director Mike Pertschuk would come bounding into the office, look me in the eye, exhilirated after some meeting, and tell me about every detail, never minding that I was a lowly intern. At big time parties, the other co-director, David Cohen, would also give me his full focus, telling me how I’d been at the heart of one of the best public interest struggles in the history of public interest struggles. The Advocacy Institute was a small little group that trained advocates who would fight big battles, like those against the tobacco industry, long before any of those fights had been won.

A few weeks after I arrived, so did another intern. A young fellow, the son of someone I had carted around the campus at Duke University, board of visitors member Doug Bennett, whose claim to fame at the time was being president of National Public Radio. Doug Bennett was impressive. But if he were in a line-up with his son, he’d never stand a chance. This kid was something else.

The son, Mike Bennett, was young and impressive and clearly the smartest person in the room. He was also extremely earnest. He was nice, like you’ve never seen nice. He was smart, erudite, and all in the most unassuming way. This was the boy next door with a brain out of this world. (And I’m no slouch.) He and I were assigned a task to write up a project. I thought it merited two pages; he gleaned from it ten. And there was no fluff. By the end of the summer we all learned he’d won a Coro fellowship, and we knew he was heading out to do some great work.

Indeed. He’s bounded from one career field to another, Yale law to business to being appointed to superintending the Denver public schools, where he as made astonishing improvements. And now he’s been appointed to fill Colorado Democrat Ken Salazar’s Senate seat, which will make Bennet the youngest Senator of the crop. (Obama has picked Salazar to be his Interior Secretary.) Colorado’s governor Bill Ritter claimed he wanted someone who was outside the usual circles to finish out Salazar’s term, someone who could meet the new challenges of the era. And despite a field of seasoned politicos ready for the job, he picked Michael Bennet. This makes me think that Ritter’s a genius. But because Bennet’s relatively young, not a Colorado native, never held elective office, and those “in the know” clearly don’t know the guy, some underestimate him.

I don’t.

Watch this guy. Really.

Read more: New York Times piece, Washington Post piece, CO Gov’s website, Coro fellowship program site.
Obama’s Pragmatism

January 24, 2009

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On his blog, Requiem for Certainty, pragmatist philosopher Colin Koopman dissects Obama’s inaugural speech and finds lots of good stuff for both pragmatist philosophy and democratic politics, including the recurring pragmatist theme of hope.

The inaugural address also made a pragmatist promise in another key moment. Obama spoke of “stale political arguments” concerning the relative size of government and market, state and economy, or what is so often today described under the loose banners of ‘public’ and ‘private’. What has gone stale in these arguments, he seemed to suggest, is the posturing that would suggest that we can know in advance of actual experience what respective roles governments and markets should play in our lives, as if we can cleave off public regulation from private enterprise all at once and be done with it. His point, I take it, was that we should approach the question of what roles governments and markets ought to play in a more experimental frame of mind. Sometimes governmental agencies will be needed to get the job done. Sometimes only markets will work. The old view that one of these is public and one is private misleads us from recognizing that we ought to invoke both in confidence as situations call for.

Instead of an old politics of certitude, Colin sees in Obama’s speech a politics of experimentalism. We aren’t going to know in advance what will work, but that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for progress. We need to go in with an open mind, try new things, and see what actually makes a difference.
Morning in America

January 20, 2009

Uncategorized

Now this really is morning in America. And maybe we can get on with the work of mourning a long dark history of racism and hatred that has always worked against the American ideal of freedom and equality.

I am so proud that my country elected a brilliant man, an African American, a person willing to work through and get past all the stuff that turned upside down what this country stands for.
Coming Soon: The 21st Century

December 30, 2008

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Today’s must-read is E.J. Dionne’s Washington Post op-ed, Coming Soon: The 21st Century. Just as the 70s didn’t really begin until the winding down of the Vietnam War in 1972, this century is going to begin a little later than scheduled.

Some thought the new century may have begun with 9/11, but as Dionne points out, the way we made sense of that calamity was with old 20th century ideas like totalitarianism, fascism, and quasi-nation-states.

It was a dangerous and self-defeating set of illusions. Our battle with the terrorists is difficult precisely because it doesn’t fit into the familiar categories. It grows out of struggles within Islam over which we have little control — between Shiites and Sunnis, between modernizing and reactionary forces, between old regimes and new contenders for power.

The shortcomings of applying 20th century ideas to contemporary problems highlights “the urgency of disenthralling ourselves from dated ideas.”

So, too, does the rise of a new architecture of power in the world with the emergence especially of India and China. Fareed Zakaria says his book “The Post-American World” is not “about the decline of America,” even if its catchy title suggests otherwise, but he’s right to think anew about American influence.

What should fall is another illusion, the idea that the United States is the world’s “sole remaining superpower.” This notion weakened us because it suggested an omnipotence that no nation can possess.

By shedding this misapprehension, the United States could restore its influence. We could rediscover the imperative of acting in concert with others to build global institutions that strengthen our security and foster our values.

Dionne argues the world’s economic problems also merit concerted action.

What Dionne is pointing to is the need to imagine a new political topography, a new position for the United States in an interconnected world. This is a philosophical project, not just an empirical one of drawing up new treaties and alliances. Relationships follow up on our mental images and self-conceptions. We in the United States need to start imagining ourselves as partners and co-creators of a more just, peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world. If we are going to be world leaders, we are going to have to lead with moral authority and not brute might.

If Al Qaeda has shown us anything it is that the American “bully on the block” (Colin Powell’s term for the U.S. at the end of the Cold War) is powerless before more insidious and diffuse physical power. If we stay on the page of power as might, we are going to remain in peril. That power might have worked in the 20th century, but it is increasingly impotent in the 21st. America’s new power, power that can be shared with all others, will have to be the moral kind where we move away from realist notions of self-interest and self-preservation and towards normative ones of justice and right.
George Will’s Paranoia

December 7, 2008

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Someone please help me out. Why is George Will obsessed with the possible return of the Fairness Doctrine? Who are the “reactionary liberals” he fears who want to reinstate the doctrine that called for a balance of perspectives on the publicly-owned airwaves?

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.

Until the Reagan administration extinguished it, the doctrine required broadcasters to devote reasonable time to fairly presenting all sides of any controversial issue discussed on the air. The government decided the meaning of the italicized words.

Now that cable and the Internet have supplanted the airwaves, there could hardly be a rationale for reinstating it anyway. But Will devotes today’s column to dredging up the history of the fairness doctrine; hurling epithets at liberals: reactionary, illiberal, worrywarts; and getting all worked up about the specter of liberals trying to censor public discourse.

some liberals now say: The problem is not maldistribution of opinion and information, but too much of both. Until recently, liberals fretted that the media were homogenizing America into blandness. Now they say speech management by government is needed because of a different scarcity —- the public’s attention, which supposedly is overloaded by today’s information cornucopia.

Honestly, there’s surely a progressive agenda for media reform. Just go to the Consumer Federation of America’s communications page or the Consumers Union media page and see some of what is on it. But if you type “fairness doctrine” into either of their search engines, you’ll get nothing back calling for the return of the fairness doctine. It’s simply not part of the agenda.

That was a policy that made sense during an analog, broadcast era; not one that makes sense in an era of digital media.

Surely I’m missing something. George Will may be wrong but he’s not stupid. What is he all worked up about?