It Was 35 Years Ago Today...

On this day in 1973, the Senate began its televised hearings into the Watergate scandal.    

Coincidentally, I just ran across an excerpt from an interesting new book by Rick Perlstein: Nixonland - The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. This book seems to review familiar territory that still resonates today:  it is the story of how the Democractic party lost the support of white blue collar ("hard working") Americans because the Republicans successfully blamed them for the social and racial unrest of the 1960's.

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Elitist and Out of touch?

OBAMA: So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter)...

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

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What will you do about the Chicago Shock Doctrine, Obama?

Welcome to the age of Milton Friedman's ghost, who looks on all suffering with equal opportunism, linking Argentina's junta, terror in Chile, Tiananmen, Boris Yeltsin's tanks, Margaret Thatcher's Falklands, Asia's financial crisis, Africa and Latin America's debt crisis, Canadian David Frum, and Donald Rumsfeld.  I'm only 40 pages in but can safely say that this book blows the lid completely off the modern zeitgeist. This despite its sociological style in which the author manages to state hir core thesis seventy-five times using different words by page 24!  Say what do we do with this work of actual parrhesia that does with detailed scholarship, historical investigation and synthesized compassion what No End in Sight and Sicko did with these things, and images? 

The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the "War on Terror" but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a a "disaster capitalism complex," it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with [...] unending mandate.  In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters.  The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state–in effect, to privatize the government.

[...] in market terms, it cannot fail.

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Get the man an editorial column, congressional seat, something...

I've voted for Ralph Nader several times,

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working days

(What follows is by Chris Okane, a graduate student in social and political thought.  His blog is here.)

As the punditry weighs in on how Hilary Clinton's inevitability became evitable, Clinton has responded in a number of desperate ways.  The brash attacks have got the headlines- as they always do- but I want to focus on her new commercial running in Ohio, as it is far more illuminating for those of us interested in the politics that underlie neo-liberal posturing.

I believe Clinton's new ad was introduced following her speech in Youngstown, a steel town, which has been particularly devastated by the effects of globalization.  This setting reflects the Ad's purpose:  to appeal to the traditional democratic base of lower income workers i.e. the working class.  But the content of the ad backfires because Clinton's attempt to identify with working class is made palpably ludicrous, first by her patronizing empathy, then by the way she identifies with their lives:

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On Being Partisan

But I am running for President because I believe that to actually make change happen - to make this time different than all the rest - we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, Independents, and Republicans together to get things done. That's how we'll win this election, and that's how we'll change this country when I am President of the United States...

Many will recognize this as part of the standard stump speech of Senator Barack Obama.  He has often been referred to as the "Cum Bi Ya" candidate or the "Can't we all just get along" politician.  Our own Jodi Dean has ridiculed him as advocating "Let us rejoice and be glad that we are one." I must admit that I myself have struggled with the issue of democrats appealing to bi-partisanship and a message of unity.  With the issues we face as a country so large, and stakes so high, can we afford to white wash the real economic and political divisions in the United States?

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Do politics exist?

A not-so-favorable review of the Dylan movie, I'm Not There (previously discussed, and contra others).  Most provocative excerpt being this:

It was during a recreation of the London concert at which a betrayed folk fan screamed “Judas!” at Dylan that I realized the best analogy for I’m Not There is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Only Gibson’s film is equal in its commitment to surreal reverence and literalism. The truly unbearable aspect of the Passion was not its primeval anti-Semitism or pornographic bloodshed; it was its predictability. Despite being a story that so many know down to its barest details (in four separate versions), Gibson retold it with grinding exactitude. Even Gibson’s recourse to dead languages had no effect on the film’s sense of inevitability. The horror that dawned on me when I realized that I knew – and that everyone who had read the Gospel of Matthew (or Ginsberg’s “Howl”) knew – the Aramaic for “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (“Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani?”) was the same horror that gripped me when I realized I’m Not There couldn’t resist a recreation of the “Dylan-goes-electric” 1965 Newport folk festival, replete with the apocryphal story of Pete Seeger attempting to take an axe to the electric cords because he couldn’t hear Dylan explaining that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm anymore.

Meanwhile the real beef on Saval's part appears to be two-fold:

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Bore me with your grand pronouncements

We've written about politics a lot here on Long Sunday, so maybe a quick post, however reluctant, is warranted.

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The Venezuelan Referendum: an Exodus from Constituted Power

Commentary on the recent Venezuelan referendum, particularly among foreign observers, has turned into a rather tiresome to and fro between self-satisfied opponents of Chávez, who like to think that the Bolivarian revolution has been stopped in its tracks, and equally self-satisfied supporters, who think they have refuted the claims of Chávez's dictatorial tendencies.

The referendum has also been interpreted as a weathervane for the region's Left Turns as a whole.  With the Bolivian constitutional process also stymied, Lula quiescent, Bachelet unpopular, and the Kirchners apparently reinstating Peronist husband-and-wife politics as usual, have we reached the high water mark for Latin America's renascent left movements?

But in all this discussion, the central point has been lost: that the process of setting constitutions registers a balance of forces between constituent and constituted power.

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Successful states, failed theories

In "The Failure of Political Theology", a review essay for Mute of Forrest Hylton's Evil Hour in Colombia and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, Angela Mitropoulos (aka s0metim3s of the archive) skewers the assumptions of "failed state" theory.

She points out, on the one hand, that the notion of "failed states" presupposes the norm of the "successful" state as a more or less harmonious instance of the social contract at work.  This is a presupposition shared by liberalism and by Gramscian hegemony theory alike.  And obviously enough I thoroughly agree with her assessment of hegemony theory as no more than "a variant of social contract theory with Marxian pretensions."  Indeed, as Mitropoulos's reading of Hylton's book shows, if anything so-called progressives are more wedded to the social contract (and so to the repression of the state's founding and ongoing violences) than are liberals.  The (populist) demand to refound the state by means of an organic representation of subaltern classes is a ruse of the state's feigned self-cancellation.

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Blair and Bartleby: The Conditional as Enemy

[cross-posted from Infinite Thought. Apologise for the perhaps overly regional  nature of the piece, but I thought it might be interesting to resurrect Bartleby after discussions on LS last year]

1. One Gigantic Empty Vessel

The world is of course full of people saying nothing at all, at great length. In fact, some jobs explicitly require the ability to keep on speaking, no matter what, whilst keeping the import and meaning of language to an absolute minimum. Academic bureaucracy is full of deliberately weightless waffle. The 1700 page 1997 Dearing Report is a case in point. The report could have simply read: proposal 1: 'We want to charge students fees and increase the links between universities and business, as well as giving lecturers so much bureaucracy they won't have enough time to do anything as recherché as teach'. But perhaps that might have upset people with its bluntness. But let us be clear: the kind of waffle on show in the Dearing Report is dangerous, and serves a very real purpose, whether in academia, politics or business.

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'The Most Radical Historicist'

It seems Leo Strauss is referring to one of two people - both of whom he greatly admired: either Heidegger or Schmitt. Which is the more likely candidate?

It is only at this point that we come face to face with the serious antagonist of political philosophy: historicism. After reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man's thinking orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity. Historicism rejects the question of the good society, that is to say, of the good society, because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought: there is no essential necessity for raising the question of the good society; this question is not in principle coeval with man; its very possibility is the outcome of a mysterious dispensation of fate. The crucial issue concerns the status of those permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists: can these permanencies be used as criteria for distinguishing between the good and bad dispensations of fate? The historicist answers this question in the negative. He looks down on the permanencies in question because of their objective, common, superficial and rudimentary character: to become relevant, they would have to be completed, and their completion is no longer common but historical. It was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason. ("What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 26-7)

As a matter of context, "What is Political Philosophy?," is the published version of the Judah L. Magnes lectures Strauss delivered at the Hebrew University in December 1954 and January 1955.

(Cross-posted to theoria.)

Piracy and Liberty

An excerpt from my ongoings readings on the history of piracy. Marcus Rediker compares the frontispiece of Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers to Delacroix's Liberty Leads the People.

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Partisanship, polemics and politics

Hello, Long Sunday!  The editors have kindly invited me to post here on an occasional basis.  I maintain the Foucaultblog, an ongoing experiment to see whether it is possible to create a space where one does not already know the answers to questions and pose already as an expert.  I welcome your comments either here on back at the entry on Foucaultblog.

Is it possible to be honestly partisan?

We hear a lot of talk these days about the need for bipartisanship (I'm thinking of statements coming out of Capitol Hill), and in light of the poll findings I posted yesterday about American's distrust of political bias in the university, you might be justified in concluding that the source of the problem is partisanship.

Foucault famously observed that he preferred "problematizations, not polemics" and defined the former:

Problematization doesn't mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn't exist. It is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 257.

So are problematizations and partisanship compatible? One might initially think not.

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Human Rights and Cosmopolitanism

Below the fold, extracts from Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings, Gary J. Bass' review of Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History, and Michael Blake's review of Seyla Benhabib (et al)'s Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations.

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comfort torture

Yesterday, Tuesday April 10, I saw an article by Mr. Joseph Kahn at the New York Times on China's mistreatment of one of its intellectuals. If you read the Times, you've read the same article about a hundred times before. They love writing articles about evil foreign regimes while luxuriating in the pink bubble bath background assumption that "we" aren't anything like that. And thus Kahn was more than willing, when referring to China's treatment of its reformist intellectuals, to use a word that has become, recently, "contested": torture. Earlier this year, in January, I contacted another Times reporter, Mr. Scott Shane, who was unwilling to use the 'T' word in an unqualified way concerning our treatment of detainees at Guantanomo. The contrast between these two uses of the word 'torture' is what prompted me to contact both authors.

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Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11

NEW YORK—At a well-attended rally in front of his new Ground Zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11.

"My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise," said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. "As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all."

If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world's conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.

"Let us all remember how we felt on that day, with the world watching our every move, waiting on our every word," said Giuliani, flanked by several firefighters, ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and Judith Nathan, his third wife. "With a campaign built on traditional 9/11 values, and with the help of every citizen who believes in the 9/11 dream, I want to make 9/11 great again."

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Security and Rights in Canada

If Maher Arar's exoneration wasn't enough, the past couple weeks have seen more good news from Canada regarding the war on terror (youngest accused in 'terror sweep' has charges stayed and 'security certificates' squashed by Supreme Court).

Now, news that Parliament has voted against the government's efforts to extend 'terror law' by three years:

Opposition parties joined forces Tuesday to vote down the extension of two contentious anti-terrorism measures, ending an acrimonious political battle rife with accusations of dirty politics.

But the debate over national security versus civil liberties is sure to continue into the next election campaign.

Indeed, Prime Minister Stephen Harper predicted that the Liberals will be defeated in the next election because of their refusal to back a government motion seeking to extend the security measures for three years.

“This issue is not going to go away. It’s going to haunt the Liberal party from now until the election campaign,” Harper said after the motion was defeated by a vote of 159 to 124.

“Any party that doesn’t take the national security of Canadians seriously will never be chosen by Canadians to form the government of Canada.”

Marching? Again?

What's the use of marching... again? Link: AlterNet: The Washington Iraq Peace March: A Protest to Be Proud of.

WASHINGTON, DC -- A dazzling sun beamed down on peace activists from around the countrywho gathered on the National Mall Saturday to demand an end to the Iraq War. Beneath this benevolent sky, the event read as much like a victory parade as a protest march. These were not the angry demonstrators who took to the streets of New York City in February 2003 in an attempt to avert a war, or the beaten-down and beleaguered ones who marched through US cities in March 2005 to protest US occupation of Iraq, or the slightly bedraggled group who last Spring tied US spending on the Iraq occupation to mismanagment of the crisis as they traced Hurricane Katrina's path in a three-state "March to New Orleans".

Estimates of the crowd size vary -- CNN put it at "tens of thousands" and event organizers insist nearly half a million showed, DC police declined to speculate -- one thing is certain: Today's marchers were as satisfied as cats who stole the cream, cats who were almost ... celebrating.

"Before, we were a minority marching to convince a majority that occupying Iraq was a terrible idea," says Hany Khalil, spokesperson for march organizers, United for Peace and Justice. "But today, for the first time we are out in force representing a majority of Americans who want us to get out of Iraq."

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800,000 Privileged Youths Enlist To Fight In Iraq

'We've Been So Selfish'

January 10, 2007 | Issue 43•02

WASHINGTON, DC—Citing a desire to finally make a difference in Iraq, in the past two weeks, more than 800,000 young people from upper-middle- and upper-class families have put aside their education, careers, and physical well-being to enlist in the military, new data from the Department Of Defense shows.

"I don't know if it was the safety and comfort of the holidays or what, but I realized that my affluence and ease of living comes at a cost," said Private Jonathan Grace, 18, who was to commence studies at Dartmouth College next fall, but will instead attend 12 weeks of basic training before being deployed to Fallujah with the 1st Army Battalion. "I just looked at my parents in their cashmere sweaters and thought, 'Who am I to go to an elite liberal arts college and spend all my time reading while, in the real world, thousands of kids my age are sacrificing their lives for our country?' It's not right."

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[x] Political Thought

Jodi posted an ad for a job in her department looking for candidates able to teach "American Politics/American Political Thought." The idea of "American Political Thought" (the ad gives the example of the Federalists/Anti-Federalists) and wondered what it means to have a national tradition in "political thought." Regarding "American political thought," wouldn't the two main texts be the Federalist Papers and Democracy in America? Tocqueville, of course, was French, an aristocrat and not a fan of democracy - is that "American" or "French" political thought? My copy of Tocqueville's book, the Mansfield edition, says that it is the most important book on America. (Does Martineau's Society in America count as English or American? Does anyone actually read it?) But, does "French" political thought even describe Tocqueville's book? Is there a "French" tradition in political theory? The most famous book of "French" political theory was written by a Genevan, not a Frenchman. This, of course, lead me to thinking, "What would a course in Canadian political thought look like?" Certainly, Canada has produced some fine political thinkers - but there is nothing essentially "Canadian" about them that would characterize their thought as "Canadian." James Tully, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, G.A. Cohen, Michael Ignatieff, Shumalith Firestone, George Grant, H.S. Harris, Thomas Pangle, (Alan Bloom, IIRC) ... they're all either "Canadian" or spent time at Canadian universities. Does that make their thought "Canadian"? George Grant is likely the only "Canadian political thinker" we've ever produced - but I'm not sure there's anyone who could sit through a twelve week lecture course on his thought.

Altruism and Selfishness

In response to Adam's question regarding the significance of the religious right, I thought of a brilliant article in the latest addition of Harper's.  David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist, provides an insightful analysis of the relationship between economics and "values."  He succinctly argues that the right has been successful at appealing to populist sentiments because they effectively accuse liberals "of cutting ordinary Americans off from the right to do good in the world."

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lessons from the Iraq War

One of the primary lessons of the Iraq war is the correctness of political correctness. A cornerstone of Bush's whole effort was the assumption or belief that a key contention of the 'political correctness' movement -- that we need to understand and accomodate world views that clash, partly or wholly, with our own -- should be rejected. This is one reason the whole chorus of right-wing propagandists was so enthusiastic about the war: it provided room for the reassertion of American cultural, moral, and political superiority -- and not just in foreign affairs, where it's been much less successful anyway. The Bush administration worked itself up into the belief (they could not have reasoned their way to this idea) that American democratic ideals are the only ones that make any sense. The working out of those ideals into specific institutions should occur naturally once any artificial restraints are removed. Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was one such distorting influence on the people who happened to live in Iraq. Remove him, make it possible for a democratic culture to emerge -- which shouldn't be hard because it's so natural to humans -- and America will have lots of new friends in the region. (An article I read recently made an argument along these lines about Bush's adventure in Iraq. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I saw it so I can't link to it.)

The depth of this belief about human nature and the political institutions natural to it helps explain some of the most puzzling features of this invasion. For instance, the assumption that it really wasn't necessary for anyone involved in the invasion to know Arabic. You don't need to actually talk to people about how to think and act in a democratic way. All of that is already written on their hearts, so don't worry. Nor is it necessary to know much about the country itself. Sunnis, Shias, Kurds -- these are so many commas on the way to 'one nation under God with freedom and justice for all.'

But it turns out that they were wrong and those who promote the need to understand difference, in both its philosophic and cultural versions, were right. The willful and arrogant refusal to learn this lesson from (what is called) political correctness is the source of much of the disaster around us.

David Corn is Wrong: Impeachment is Necessary

Link: TomPaine.com - Impeachment At Our Peril.

Let's stipulate three propositions. First, George W. Bush led the nation into an elective war with false information and false assurances. Second, Bush acted with reckless abandon and immense neglect by inadequately planning for what would come after the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq. Third, Bush botched key decisions regarding the war, while refusing to acknowledge the hellish reality his invasion created. As a consequence, thousands of Americans are dead, as are hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Impeachment would be a suitable punishment for such actions. Still, congressional Democrats ought to resist the calls to engage in constitutional patricide.

To my mind, what follows from the 3 points Corn make is precisely the opposite--Bush must be impeached.

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The distribution of the sensible

Melanie Gilligan asks an interesting question of Rancière. Anyone care to offer a response, thoughts?

rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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Canada's Nuttiest Professors

Idealistic and optimistic often look to Canada when the going gets tough - recall all those false promises of moving to Canada should Bush be-elected and the popularity of sites such as Marry an American - might think twice. It's likely the case that everything is bigger in Texas and we, to the north, suffer under its ghostly shadow. Were it not enough that we had a shallow replica of "The Weekly Standard" in Canada called "The Western Standard," who, like "The Weekly Standard," views itself as the vanguard publication of "neo-conservatism" and western alienation, but they've also seen fit to erect a pale, ghostly shadow of none other than David Horowitz's The Professors in their recent "Back to School Guide" on "Canada's Nuttiest Professors" [pdf]. But, unlike Horowitz, they were only about to find twelve professors. (Readers will note that the Canadian Association of University Teachers claims to represent fifty-thousand academics.) But, unlike Horowitz (I assume; I haven't read his book), they also conveniently provided caricatures of those nutty professors.

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Ideology of Incompetence

This being Election Day and all, I thought I might put to you all a question that has been floating around my brain for some time.  Since the sitting president took office, it has been the desire of many of us theoretically inclined leftists to see not just the man himself exposed, but his chosen ideology indicted as well.  That is to say, neo-conservatism itself - with its historical blindness and close-cropped arrogance- would be the ultimate and deserving victim of the abject failure of this regime, ideally. 

But in the two years since exit poll deviations reached unprecedented statistical highs, the presidency has found itself at the center of such an embarrassingly huge number of scandals and fuck-ups that, it seems to me anyway, an entirely new possibility is emerging.  Could it be that Bush and Co. is so incompetent as to actually hemorrhage any ideological legacy whatsoever, good or bad?

If we consider the stories that are now pouring out of Iraq, we can see the effect of this problem begin to take hold – insofar as the relative ideological or legal merits/demerits of the invasion have been place out of bounds – protected somehow by the gross appearance of total and complete organizational inability at the highest levels.

The reality, it seems, is this:  They could not execute even their own ideas with a level of efficiency as to allow for their assessment as ideas.  Or to put it another way – what kind of failure is Iraq - a failure of planning, or of intention?  Can we in good faith say that it has been neo-conservatism that has failed this venture, and not, as it were, Rummy’s lousy communication skills?

As an amateur trader of ideas, it would be my inclination, in light of recent events, to argue (in so many ways) that one somehow breeds the other, that neo-con’s are somehow more vulnerable to failures of this kind.  But intellectual honesty compels me to admit that I often dismiss such arguments as category mistakes under different circumstances.  So I put the question to you all:  What then can be said of Bush’s neo-conservative legacy in light of his practical ineptitude?

(As if to answer this question from the other side, Vanity Fair runs a feature this January featuring prominent neo-cons bashing the Bush administration, one figure even goes so far as to say that an entire generation of would-be zealots has been lost due to the artlessness of the Iraq invasion. We should be so lucky.)

Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp is a documentary about the "Kids On Fire" summer camp, located just outside Devils Lake, North Dakota and run by a Pentecostal children's pastor named Becky Fisher. The film focuses on the indoctrination of the children through music, games and emotional terror.  I would almost describe the methodology as a severe form of brain washing. It is one of the most disturbing pieces I have ever seen, as terrifying as any horror movie you could imagine.

There is a lot one could say about this "camp" - its focus on recruitment, the passion of those running it, or the explicitly political nature of the experience.  But what brought me to write about this today are the revelations surrounding Ted Haggard, the infamous leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. 

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appropriate background music

If current predictions hold, Republicans will need appropriate background music this coming Tuesday to help them emote in a way consonate with their new status. I would like to suggest the well-loved Albinoni Adagio in G Minor, for Organ and Strings. Turn on the TV, leave off the volume, and watch election returns with that in the background.

But what about other voters who are not Republicans? And even some Republicans who have decided the Bush Presidency has written checks its competence can't cash? Don't they need background music?

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November Surprise

It's November 1st. Republicans are down 12 points across the board nationally. President Bush is struggling to get to 40% approval ratings. Could there be a better time to "condition the environment"?

Kerry's mispronuncisplained joke was Rove's unintentional October surprise. But could there be a November surprise? Be sure to glance at the last graph of the article.

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The Animal Question in Contemporary Radical Politics and Thought

First, I’d like to thank Jodi and Matt for their kind invitation to join Long Sunday as a contributor.   For those readers who do not know me, my name is Matt Calarco and I teach philosophy at Sweet Briar College and contribute on occasion over at I cite.  I have been meaning to post something here at Long Sunday for a couple of months, but have (much to my shame) failed to follow through.  I could offer the usual excuse of being too busy (which would not be false), but a more honest reason could be given.
 
The more honest reason is that I am never quite certain of how to insinuate myself in the debates that go on at Long Sunday, I cite, The Weblog, and other similar blogs I frequent.  The uncertainty stems from my predisposition to approach contemporary radical politics, activism, and theory from a deeply non-anthropocentric perspective—a perspective that is, I take it, not widely shared by most readers of and contributors to these blogs.  While some contributors (primarily Deleuzeans, with whom I am very close for obvious reasons) offer occasional nods to developments in transhumanist thought and radical environmentalism and their promise for contemporary political struggles (and I loudly applaud such posts, if only to myself in my living room), I almost never see any parallel discussion of the role that radical animal politics/theory/studies might or should play in these same struggles.  Similarly, the theorists who are most admired at these sites are rarely, if ever, taken to task for their brazen and dogmatically metaphysical anthropocentrism.

But, the comments on Jodi’s recent post on “A Fox” (which was in turn inspired by a post over at Infinite Thought), combined with a recent increase in attention given to animal studies by leading theorists (for example, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben) and various Marxists, made me wonder whether this state of affairs might slowly be changing.  Along these lines, I found the following comment by Anthony Paul Smith on Jodi’s “A Fox” post at I cite to be particularly interesting:

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The Liberal Manifesto

Although it's been up a couple of weeks, I just came across the "liberal manifesto" that Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin posted over at American Prospect Online - We Answer to the Name of Liberals.

Clearly this is a moment for liberals to define ourselves. The important truth is that most liberals, including the undersigned, have stayed our course throughout these grim five years. We have consistently and publicly repudiated the ruinous policies of the Bush administration, and our diagnosis, alas, has been vindicated by events. The Bush debacle is a direct consequence of its repudiation of liberal principles. And if the country is to recover, we should begin by restating these principles.

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Here's to Dorks

Watch the whole shebang.   The tenor it is striking.   He's trying reeeal hard, but his ratings are up 69%.  Must be doing something right.   Four years too late, and better late than never.   What a blowhard, God bless 'im.

Update:   In other news (not that this be a news blog, for after all who could ever hope to compete with the mighty Huffington, or Digby):

(Right.  This is worthy of investigation but the president of Diebold saying he was determined to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004 was just a figure of speech.)    The fact that the government is investigating Hugo "sulphur" Chavez's alleged interest in election machines may very well be part of an emerging post-election GOP narrative.   I have believed that Republicans might claim vote fraud in this election for some time.   

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David Held: "Reframing Global Governance"

The other night I attended a lecture given by David Held, who is apparently a rather large figure in something called the "new political economy" or "international political economy."  I'm not a political scientist and I'm a pretty bad sociologist - for a lack of time and interest, I pay little attention to the more "politicy" or "practically" oriented scholarship in either discipline.  This was, quite frankly, my introduction into what passes for liberal or left scholarship in the academy from an empirical perspective or approach.

I must say, I was rather dismayed.  Admittedly, I was not expecting much from the lecture.  A quick perusal of his publications indicated that his interests largely did not overlap with mine.  He's written on "cosmopolitan democracy," "cosmopolitan law," "governance," "globalization" and "social democracy."  These interests seem comparatively recent as his early work was on critical theory, having written books on "Horkheimer to Habermas" and an introductory text on critical theory in the early eighties.  He also seemed to participate in the late seventies/early eighties renewal of interest in state theory.  Thus, his earlier interests resemble more closely my own, even if, with him being a Habermasian of sorts, I expected significant theoretical differences.

At any rate, the following is a brief summary of his lecture, the text of which is available here.   He opens, "The paradox of our modern times can be stated simply:  the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing extensity and intensity and, yet, the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete."  The rest of the lecture is an attempt, as one might expect, to grapple with, if not resolve, this paradox.  Consequently, he first lays out the "collective issues" before moving on to "the means for addressing these."  Clearly, this is a man pushing a particular political programme.  (I'd point out at this point that my relunctance to accept his position does not require that I advance a better one - no blackmail of the status quo, as it were, will be accepted.)

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The Third Awakening

I find it fascinating that in the same week President Bush speculated that America may be  in the midst of a "Third Awakening," he also passionately defended the need for torture  [U-Tube].  Though it appears paradoxical, perhaps it is the intense pleasures of righteousness that are really on display–we are awakened from our secular slumber  by the profound confrontation with radical evil:  "President Bush said yesterday that he senses a 'Third Awakening' of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as 'a confrontation between good and evil.'  In a manner that I think resonates with many folks, the President went on to say "he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history.  Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people 'who saw life in terms of good and evil' and who believed that slavery was evil.  Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms. . . ."

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Machiavellian

There are, at the very least, two ongoing major tragedies in English-language social and political theory: the non-translation of Carl Schmitt's Die Diktatur and the non-translation of Claude Lefort's Le Travail de L'Oeuvre Machiavel. While the non-translation of Schmitt is inexcusable (it's a pampthlet, it's an essential work and, yet, somehow we have two translations of "Theory of the Partisan" published in the same year), the non-translation of Lefort's book is understandable: Machiavelli studies is an already bloated field and, like most bloated fields, it is filled with negligible and unimportant works - one hardly, on first impressions, requires yet another book. And, of course, Lefort's book is seven hundred seventy eight pages long.

While I have some reservations with Bernard Flynn's recently published The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political, it is the only book on Lefort in English, it is a moderately able introduction to his work, and it contains the single, most detailed discussion of Lefort's book on Machiavelli in English (the first three chapters are on that book).  The final chapter about Machiavelli, on Lefort's theory of interpretation and reading, ends as follows:

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Freedom? No, thanks!

A commonplace in some left intellectual circles is that freedom is nothing but the freedom of the market. That is to say, when the term freedom is used by American politicians, it really means the freedom of corporations and their investors to enter into an area and exploit it in every way they can. Elaborations on the same theme tend to emphasize free choice in terms of consumer goods or free choice in elections, again, between candidates as different as Coke and Pepsi in comparable (but not quite as creative) ad campaigns.

Of course, there is more to it than this. Over the past five years, Americans have heard a lot about the freedom of our way of life, on the one hand, and the necessity of sacrificing certain liberties in the interests of security, on the other. The willingness to suspend civil liberties might seem to break with the fanatical emphasis on market freedom. But I think it is an extension of the same logic.

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Disappeared

This is part one of a trilogy of short films called Disappeared in America - the other two can be watched here.

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Liberalism as an Auto Immune Disease

I came across a radio show about a month ago which was quite shocking to me.  Some might think me quite naive but I really didn't expect what I heard.  The talk show host, Michael Savage, was in the middle of his usual rant against the American liberal establishment, when he introduced the (almost) Derridean metaphor of autoimmunity:

SAVAGE: How do I relate the rise of radical Islam, with its restrictions, with its throwback mentality, and with its hatred and its murderous nature, with the progressive movement in the West? It's quite simple. You have to think about biology to understand it. You have to think of the AIDS virus, which is symptomatic, actually symbolic rather, of what I'm talking about.

The AIDS virus is actually quite symbolic. It's a retrovirus and it invades the body but it doesn't really cause infection for awhile. It lays in wait. And while it lays in wait, the retrovirus, the HIV virus, it starts to attack the immune system itself. And only after the immune system itself is weakened can infections arise within the human being that has been infected with the HIV virus.

This is what liberalism is. Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet.

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Schmitt's Influence on American Politics

A moderately strange article at Counterpunch by Arthur Versluis about Carl Schmitt's influence on "fascist America" below.  Moderately strange because Schmitt's name doesn't appear until the end of the fourth paragraph in a six paragraph article; strange because there is a description of some aspects of recent American politics and then a (rather poor) description of some aspects of Schmitt's thought (one fragment of a line from Political Theology - likely taken from Wikipedia than an actual reading of the book).  This stuff is even worse than the "Straussian Conspiracy" business of last year - while Strauss and Schmitt are no doubt influential on certain American policymakers, this "There is this and there is that, therefore they must be connected" is the worst sort of "scholarship" imaginable and it certainly doesn't reflect well on the book this guy is trying to promote!

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Questions Concerning Democracy

(1) Can democracy be thought independently of its adjectives?  That is, is there such a thing as "democracy as such"?  What is the significance of democracy in locutions such as "radical democracy," "liberal democracy," "parliamentary democracy," "representative democracy" and so on?  Can democracy only exist insofar as it is connected to these other things - representation, parliament, liberalism, radicalism?

(2) If democracy can be thought, how can it be thought?  That is, is democracy but a secularized political theology?  Is there a horizon of politics - any politics at all - beyond the theological?

(3) If democracy can be thought, can it be acted or is it always "coming" yet never arriving?  (An asymptotic politics, if you will.)  That is, is democracy merely a demand or an imaginary - perhaps the radical imaginary?

(4) Is democracy tied to, on the one hand, representation and, on the other hand, modernity or are there other forms that democracy can take - anti-modern, post-modern, or even pre-modern?

(5) If democracy is the horizon for all present politics, is there a politics that is anti-democratic or beyond democracy? Can a "progressive" politics be non- or anti-democratic?  How can a progressive politics articulate its demands in a non-language and in a non-thought?  (That is, a politics that can neither be spoken or thought because it is beyond the horizon of all politics.)

(6) Who, or what, is supposed to be democratic?

(7) In terms of "really existing" democracies, why do they tend to come about anti-democratically and tend to die democratically?

Neocon Clusterfuck in Middle East (open thread)

"...in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel...it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war–not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself."

"....somthing frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime..."
-Doris Lessing

Post-oracular hypothesis:  that no thinking person would honestly dispute the distinction between a free-wheeling, cultural-political, descriptive or generic or even centuries-old genetic "desire" for (what will become of the concept of) "war," and someone ignorantly wishing it to happen, or for that matter, refusing the responsibility that comes with power, and for  having significantly, predictably, knowingly, and against the consensus wisdom merely prescient of the glaringly obvious, helped it to happen.  The very intensity and stakes of the current 'crisis' (what makes it new–though never purely original–this time) have everything to do with a certain pressure on 'democracy,' it seems to me.

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(democratic?) multitudes good and bad

The question regarding democracy is whether or not we can imagine an anti-democratic, or better non-democratic, politics.  In other words, is politics tied to democracy, or can it be imagined beyond democracy?

(A supplementary question might then be whether or not we can and should imagine a beyond to politics itself: a post-politics.)

The prevailing consensus would seem to be that politics is unimaginable without democracy, that it is only democracy that opens up the possibility for politics.  Without democracy, all we are left with is (variously, or perhaps in combination) power, administration, fanaticism, hatred.

Such is the view of Ernesto Laclau, but also, for instance, Jacques Rancière, who writes:

There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy.  Politics is encountered as already present in the factuality of democracy, in the very strangeness of the combination of words which joins the unassignable quantity of the demos to the indefinable action of kratein.  (On the Shores of Politics 94)

Rancière traces the mixed fortunes of both politics and democracy from its invention in Athens to the current "end of politics." 

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Dead Man's Chest

Based on a song from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the subtitle of Gore Verbinski's newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “Dead Man’s Chest,” is actually a pun. Taken literally, it refers to the chest cavity of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), the (un)dead captain of the Flying Dutchman. Jones’ torso is of interest here because it is actually empty—Jones having carved out his own heart due to loneliness (or heartbreak), locked it in an elaborate wooden chest, and then buried on a remote island. In this way