Intellectuals and Their America
Editors
SYMPOSIUM: PART 1 Intellectuals and Their America Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the...
...One reason we don’t is that, whatever the searing inequalities of the American economy, talented Americans of almost every conceivable background have access to higher education...
...I think this opens enormous possibilities for progressives...
...I understand that such a collection of causes runs the risk of promiscuity, of a sort of consumerist approach to the most precious things in life...
...I am willing to sacrifice for all of them—not in the same measure, of course, but I cannot be indifferent to the predicaments of any of them...
...And we all know who they are...
...That kind of thinking is now a caricature, but I’d venture that many liberal-left intellectuals still have some sympathy with the general idea...
...The late Michael Harrington tried to square this circle by insisting that he was fighting for “the left wing of the possible...
...university system is not perfect, and we must always be extremely vigilant about potential denials of academic freedom...
...But the faults never challenge the plot line of continual selfimprovement (as if other nations have not also become more tolerant, inclusive, and fairer over the centuries...
...Persuasion is a long process, reform is always achieved in steps, compromise is inevitable, and moving forward is better than moving backward—even if the number of steps taken at any given moment can be limited by circumstances...
...Something changed after 2001...
...LEON WIESELTIER “I am human and I consider nothing human alien to me”: this statement has always struck me as preposterous...
...and they should make their contribution in a manner that may be useful to the makers of policy, even if only indirectly, in the clarification of the philosophical foundations...
...Our people are everywhere...
...The U.S...
...The difference between dilettantism and multivariousness is work...
...and some were acquired as a gift of experience...
...Cultural Marxism fell into disuse...
...E D S . E.J...
...good schools...
...Our work (as well as our thought) has found its way into limited venues as the subjects of research rather than as inspirations to action...
...On the other hand, Baudrillard is probably right about television news, which people should watch only with deep skepticism...
...We asked four questions: 1. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet...
...Both kinds of critics are necessary...
...From the mid-1980s on, it was possible to discern a kind of left-wing Reaganism among academics in the humanities and social sciences, most visible in the postmodern tendency to celebrate consumer culture as an arena of choice, liberation, and selfcreation...
...Powell was alarmed by what seemed to him to be the dominance of left-wing views in universities and the mass media...
...As an academic, an intellectual, a student of twentiethcentury American history, I resonated to the call...
...So I don’t worry about intellectuals being able to penetrate mass culture...
...In the United States, Left and Right both make much of their love of country...
...The nation represented in the news media—blue versus red, divided, irate—is not really the nation that exists in most places...
...And 24 may have influenced how a generation thinks about torture...
...I do not say this facetiously...
...Of course it was not simply a conspiracy: journalists and other gatekeepers were acting in accordance with their own professional standards and practices, as well as their own beliefs...
...Think of how much more Mill could have written had he not had a day job...
...True, they don’t agree about what makes the USA so superior: conservatives insist they protect the ”Real America,” where family farms and family values resist the incursions of Hollywood, socialism, and sex...
...Don’t you wonder why women in India, China, Africa, Latin America, Russia, or for that matter Utah, never enter into the question...
...King described the “promissory note” to the nation’s African-Americans, a pledge to the “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...But as King knew, demanding that the check be honored is only a first step...
...Here I think intellectuals have some intellectual work to do—to design a more public-minded communications system than the one we have, while keeping the barriers of entry to its use low, and to design an intellectual property rights regime, globally, that will not choke off humanity’s current capacity for improvement...
...In our lives as individuals we would find it unfair, bigoted, even bizarre, to give automatic preference to another American...
...Her latest book is From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution...
...As intellectuals, we have not shirked our responsibilities to raise important questions about what is “American...
...Whatever else one thinks of him, Michael Moore exemplifies this, as does Spike Lee, whose mostly rigorous documentary When the Levees Broke was broadcast on HBO the same year his crime drama Inside Man hit theaters...
...All these allegiances I regard as obligations of self-transcendence...
...The Right has disgraced itself by its inability to govern and, even more, by its disregard of international law and fundamental constitutional traditions...
...It’s worth going out there and seeing this...
...Not since the Great Depression has there been such an opportunity for the Left: a chance to make politics more than a matter of managerial technique—to take the moral high ground, to reassert the claims of commonweal...
...I do consider myself a world citizen, but I have also come to believe that Mazzini was correct: patriotism of the right sort is an essential source of political stability and, ultimately, of global concern...
...An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics...
...But despite the fact that these images captured the imaginations of the voting population, the promise has been left dangling...
...In our own uncertain era, it is useful for women and men with a reputation for thoughtfulness and creativity to reflect on issues that bear profoundly on both their craft and their country...
...We don’t even have political debate requiring rhetorical regard for the public interest...
...Maybe that’s the question we need to think about...
...Of course, there were prominent counterexamples of intellectuals at work...
...The question answers itself...
...The ruling class ruled by keeping some ideas out of circulation, as gatekeepers in the mass media and other cultural institutions declared them “tasteless,” “irresponsible,” or simply “unrealistic...
...They also define as tax increases any effort to modify a tax system that ensures huge income gaps between rich and poor...
...And democratic politics is an ongoing commitment...
...Since the campaign, these calls for a new direction have disappeared, obscured by the daily political battles in Washington as well as the failure of the Obama administration to adequately articulate principled and ethical aspirations...
...The most powerful example, however, is the notion of a ”War on Terror”—on idea that one political group is invested with such vicious content that it has the force that communism once had to stir a population to action...
...Recent experience suggests the media will respond to such a language, even if it seems subversive...
...Fifty or sixty years ago, we might have argued that these outlets—magazines like Dissent, Partisan Review, Politics, and Commentary—could reach out beyond the intellectual community to serve as conduits to the desks of presidents and politicians...
...I assume the next generation of them will assume, with everyone else in our Internet-united humanity, that there are a variety of technologies available to make their arguments and art and a variety of genres and styles that can be mixed in making it...
...I’m sure I could have written more carefully and sensitively...
...But it has also manifestly opened up a host of mid-sized audiences for good content...
...As Judge Sonia Sotomayor admitted of herself, Perry Mason and Law & Order shape popular thinking about law...
...The opposite of patriotism is not cosmopolitanism...
...That may have been okay then, when New York was the cynosure of virtually all intellectual activity in America and could dictate tastes and mores to the rest of the country...
...Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation...
...America-hating—it’s the ultimate, unanswerable charge...
...It is also not the case any longer that New York is all that singular (there’s a used-book store in Bethesda, Maryland, as good as any I currently know of in Manhattan...
...A little higher up, the expansion of the number of commercial broadcast channels and segmentation of audiences has of course increased the dangers of only listening to oneself...
...Above all, they should never lose their heads...
...But serious reexamination of American empire proved impossible to sustain for long...
...He would consider my choice selfindulgent...
...Academic freedom is especially important because, I believe, the best way for intellectuals to engage with American society is for us to think, write, and teach...
...But even here, I think we’re a bit better off than a while ago...
...Obama led us to expect these things of him when, in his mellifluous and powerful voice, he advocated “change you can believe in...
...4. Do you consider yourself a patriot, a world citizen, or do you have some other allegiance that helps shape your political opinions...
...Still, this is a moment of possibility...
...No, I confess, I’m not moving to Alabama anytime soon...
...It’s not as if book readers are high-brow and blog readers are low—after all Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels and Glenn Beck’s screeds dominate book sales while scholars like Juan Cole and Michael Bérubé reach their largest audiences via blogs...
...But neither can intellectuals ignore a world in which new forms of communication require us to speak a language that can be heard...
...Often, though, the new media discourage people from reading books...
...Of course not...
...Sometimes the new media can help reading: for example, I now listen to novels on my iPod while I am running, and I “read” a lot more Trollope and Eliot than I used to...
...If we were Romanians or Gambians or Uzbeks, we would trumpet just as loudly our unique and special way of life, our history and customs and beautiful landscapes (for which people curiously take credit, as if they put the mountains and forests there...
...These distinctions have long since stopped making sense—if they ever did...
...It was the new collective name taken by those diverse writers and artists who, in sudden and articulate concert, condemned the injustice of his treatment...
...In mainstream politics, liberalism lost its moral fervor as it dissolved into technocratic and therapeutic jargon: the Clinton-Gore administration caught the new tone perfectly...
...I do not believe that we have escaped the rigors of zerosum any more than I believe that we have escaped the law of the excluded middle...
...However, I think of intellectuals as not only fearless truth-tellers but as people materially contributing to that truth by advancing science or art...
...They should not condescend to Washington, as if they themselves live in Athens...
...It may be natural to love one’s country, but it’s less a noble virtue than a habit, the way people tend to like the food they grew up with, even if it’s haggis or lutefisk or roasted rats on a stick...
...Alone or in a gang, they should say what they really believe, and proceed to justify it...
...It’s much harder to do that now than it was formerly, given the decline of print journalism...
...for the first time, capitalism has become an entirely global system, but its fruits are, as always, distributed unequally, in the United States as well as abroad...
...They will call power to account even when those in power have some sympathy for their goals...
...And in the United States and the rest of the world, I think it essential that we stop the commercial erosion of the democratic global space opened up by the Internet...
...When I watch it, and know that millions of others are— and when I visit its Web site or read chat rooms devoted to the show—I become a part of something...
...In this regard, too, the great sin is passivity...
...My Nation column after 9/11 about not flying the flag was widely attacked as antiAmerican, cold-hearted, foolish, and ill-advised...
...I try to do that every day...
...During the Vietnam War era, in particular, there were abuses...
...Here, the differences between Lincoln, the politician, and King, the prophetic activist and critic, are clear...
...But when one speaks not of Americans but of “The United States of America” everything changes...
...I understood candidate Obama’s call to be not simply one of political style—not simply a cry to throw the scoundrels out...
...One who is immersed in the plenitude of commitments can easily understand the fantasy of shedding them...
...It takes both passion and perspective...
...On Election Day last year, I anticipated a more generous health care bill and a restoration of modest regulations on banks and financial investment firms...
...In The Twilight of Common Dreams, Gitlin noted that while the Left was “marching on the English department,” the right took the White House...
...We have turned our accounts of movements like progressivism or the New Deal to reveal how effective government programs could and did enhance individual liberty rather than constrain it...
...Whether or not Monk is like Debussy, he sure as hell is not like Kanye West...
...It may infuriate Glenn Beck and his followers, but again, I believe most Americans (perhaps just barely, but yes, most) understand that so many of our challenges—the environment, poverty, development, disease—are transnational and global...
...and, most important, ideals of social justice extended through struggle to more and more people (blacks, workers, women, gays, the disabled...
...One may also find this in the oratory of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.: all used a resonant and moving idea of the nation to attach people’s hearts to abstract moral values that ultimately acquire a cosmopolitan significance...
...Katha Pollitt is a columnist with the Nation...
...We’re also seeing the rise of a new generation of intellectuals who freely combine high and low culture, demanding and easy analysis, in ways that find a decent-sized audience...
...Milton Friedman’s “free to choose” comes a close second in the contest to engage the American imagination...
...We need to declare, to one and all, that in the mass of commercial speech we also need easily accessed, publicly driven or public-minded sources of news and information...
...Now I have a sensation of stewardship, of responsibility for the building and the maintenance of certain institutions of meaning—the elders are almost all gone, it is our watch now, on our world...
...and even the ones that are received need to be chosen...
...The tone of that column was unnecessarily prickly, and I went too far when I identified the flag with racism and jingoism, because of course it has many meanings, including anti-racism and rejection of ignorant chauvinism...
...If I say America should run the world because we’re Number One, and you say, Well, it shouldn’t run the world all by itself, but still, it’s unique in world history because its identity is so fluid, or it was founded on ideals of equality and freedom, or it’s a fabulous generator of cultural innovation, aren’t we both saying a version of the same thing: America is superior because I was born there...
...Amid the fearful chauvinism of the post 9/11 era, George Will began to look like a moderate, and the Washington Post began to look like the Washington Times, with an op-ed page that resembled a public relations document from the Pentagon...
...What was left of the left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, where the tragedy of 1960s cultural politics was replayed as farce...
...and less religious folderol...
...Its tendency,” the editors of PR complained, “is to exclude everything that does not conform to popular norms...
...This was an act of democratic irresponsibility...
...Even feminism can be shanghaied into the narrative of America exceptionalism as justification for war...
...It is for television, though, that I reserve my clearest enthusiasm...
...But it doesn’t erase the bigger picture, which is that in important ways most people in other wealthy, industrialized countries have a better chance of flourishing than Americans do...
...Finally, patriotism lends itself to an Us versus Them worldview that fuels our grotesque military budget and all too easily leads to war...
...Flag burning does not cleanse a nation...
...I’m sure I would have joined them...
...A generation ago, Noam Chomsky said the responsibility of intellectuals was to tell the truth and expose lies...
...Or we might involve programs like Law and Order and the old West Wing—both of which have attracted huge audiences— on the issues we care about...
...DIONNE, JR...
...There are so many aspects, so many measures...
...And now is an especially good time for it: the Republican Party and the Tea Party Right, accusing our side of harboring infectious, alien schemes, is paradoxically sounding crazier and crazier (and more un-American) with each passing year, month, and week...
...However, I think that most of us serve the republic better by our writings than we would by going to Washington and giving up writing...
...What about fairness, equality, merit, relative need, and simple human feeling...
...Michael Tomasky is editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and American editor at large for the Guardian...
...The right gets such vast mileage out of its jibes about liberals and the coasts and “flyover” country and our alleged contempt for regular folkways...
...safe jobs at decent wages...
...If you were in charge of feeding an international crowd of travelers stranded by a disaster, would you give the Americans extra pie...
...Closer to our own time, both Bertrand Russell and John Dewey encountered significant problems of academic freedom, though they kept their positions...
...An almost embarrassing number of things—beings and entities and ideas—rightly claim me...
...The regnant modes of theory shifted as well...
...I don’t do that...
...Can we take advantage of his initiatives (there are others, like Air America that have less expansive audiences) to develop the missing narratives by writing reviews in local newspapers, organizing responsive support groups, or in other ways becoming more active participants...
...but that is my own inclination...
...As a naval officer and a participant in the antiwar movement, I encountered the calm insanity of the crackpots at close range—the denatured language deployed to justify mass slaughter, the “pragmatic” preoccupation with technique rather than purpose...
...Internet, film, television, and popular music are rather broad categories, each containing nutritious wheat and faddish chaff...
...But the consequence was that challenges to established hierarchies were either trivialized beyond recognition—as countercultural protest was transformed by journalistic convention into a riot of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—or else screened out entirely from public discourse—as single-payer health care has been eliminated from contemporary debate...
...By the end of the century the Right had reframed public discourse in the United States...
...We‘re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’ It dawned on much of the intellectual Left that control of the English department was not sufficient...
...The first reason is humanism: there are wise and deep expressions of the human spirit in popular film, popular music, and even television...
...During the campaign, Obama, very tentatively, challenged the prevailing antigovernment perspective, suggesting that government could be a positive instrument—that it could enhance the safety of communities, promote equal opportunity, foster the greater good...
...He is the author of Why Americans Hate Politics and, most recently, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right...
...And we have spearheaded discussions about immigration, homelessness, and the century-long efforts to achieve health care and other social policies...
...or to establish irony as the highest value of culture...
...Otherwise, as I say, protect the differences, find truth and beauty where you can, and slum on...
...A principle can sometimes feel like a country...
...Rousseau’s books were banned, and he was not employable in a university...
...Lincoln spoke of “a new birth of freedom,”[emphasis added] paying homage to a nation that had been “conceived in liberty...
...The most immediate way I know to do that is by getting the next issue out, making it as interesting as possible, and by disseminating its values and opinions on radio and television...
...But becoming actors in the American story required accepting the disciplines—and limitations— of democratic practice...
...Identities are not received, they are chosen...
...The nation’s sin originated not in the values that lay at its core, but in its failure to apply those values consistently...
...The analysis of a bill is not the analysis of a poem...
...The championship of mass culture by intellectuals must be vigorously challenged when it is done as an attack upon the legitimacy of the categories and the distinctions— for a leveling end, as yet another gospel of relaxation...
...It’s also true that the profit imperative and relentless consolidation of corporate media, and more than a little of human nature, means that much of mass culture is utter junk or worse— indeed degraded, inhumane, politically backward (sexist, racist, materialistic, and so on), or just stupid...
...Or was it when Luciano Pavarotti popularized it during the 1990 soccer World Cup games...
...They will lay out the requirements for a future better than the present even during times of progress—perhaps especially during times of progress...
...But I doubt it...
...And what about music and theater...
...What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them...
...In the last generation, historians (to name just one group of articulate social critics) have refocused scholarly debates to suggest the positive as well as the negative value of government for daily life...
...American intellectuals should participate in American politics truthfully, and with a lasting scruple about the integrity of argument...
...The third reason is hedonism...
...Few leaders better embodied the patriotism inherent in embedded criticism than Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...MICHAEL TOMASKY I’m not qualified to answer question two, so consider this a response to the other three questions...
...Views that had once been considered the province of a revanchist fringe—free market fundamentalism, bullying militarism—acquired a fresh patina of respectability...
...Graduate school was a good place to raise these questions during the 1970s...
...bestselling books...
...Bentham and Mill published, but they were not employable in universities because of their atheism...
...A patriot or a world-citizen...
...Which is to say, the world’s hooks are in me for good...
...Note the twin obligations Walzer imposes on the critic: the democratic obligation to voice “common complaints” and the intellectual obligation to elucidate values...
...They should espouse their ideas as if their ideas really might come to power—they should neither despise power nor worship it—and they should do so in a language that ordinary Americans can understand...
...It demanded a faith in the wisdom of fellow Americans and a dedication to the task of popular persuasion...
...The second reason is criticism: if millions of Americans are kindling to a song or a movie, anyone wishing to understand America must become acquainted with that song or that movie...
...Ecstasy is not an intellectual accomplishment, which is precisely why it is so often sought...
...There is no shame in partisanship, though there is often stupidity, and intellectuals in politics have a particular obligation, obviously, not to be stupid...
...to a variety of languages and cultural traditions, though I do not belong to some of them, and am not adequately educated in some of them...
...It seemed that the Right, far more than the Left, had learned from Antonio Gramsci, the revisionist Marxist who understood the power of ideas in shaping the outcome of political contests and economic struggles—even though Gramsci was, in fact, the vogue on much of the academic Left...
...More than they ever want to admit, intellectuals of the Left are influenced by the cultural politics that dominate their time...
...For my part, I am convinced that if we can reshape the language, we can reverse the moral course...
...Both U.S...
...I wanted to believe that it was also a call to recalibrate our moral compass...
...Huck Finn and Leaves of Grass...
...In fact, I thought it was more or less settled by the 1990s, let’s say, that the antique left-intellectual disdain for popular culture had been rather embarrassing...
...The social and cultural critic must be a traveler through the realms...
...Before answering it, let me first attack any effort to do so...
...I know what you’re thinking: patriotism is not the same as nationalism...
...As hopes for a New Left faded, my contemporaries and I became preoccupied with the failure of countercultural protest, the ease with which it became trivialized and reabsorbed into the mainstream of consumer culture...
...And in giving it, I’ll use “intellectual” in the broad sense of “a thinking American with interests in public affairs,” to include myself...
...Don’t count me against that...
...But I do not see only tragedy in “value pluralism...
...We don’t have standards of public discussion in this country...
...Eugene Genovese and my own mentor, David Brion Davis, were exploring the writings of Antonio Gramsci, unraveling the concept of cultural hegemony...
...He called for a return to such constitutional principles as habeas corpus and for a redefinition of justice...
...And Jean Baudrillard turns out to have had it wrong: I say television creates real communities...
...It’s too important...
...These were the likes of Walt Rostow, Herman Kahn, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, and their legions of imitators...
...That’s what happened after 9/11...
...Michael Walzer is right that the truly effective social critics are embedded in their societies and operate at least as much out of love as from alienation...
...when a member of Congress (Michelle Bachmann) says that Americans should refuse to participate in the Census...
...The latter can be quite subversive of accepted understandings, exposing as it typically does the ways in which a society ignores or violates the values it claims as its bedrock...
...Look at how a multi-layered conservative movement made use of the mass media to alter public culture and construct a new public ethos around the meaning of public good...
...For all I know, he wrote that line at his desk at the Museum of Modern Art, in the very epicenter of cultural mandarinism...
...The cheapest forms of popular culture (comic books, TV, pop music, and so on) have forever shaped the imagination of current and future artists and presidents and offered the consolations of escape and control and pleasure...
...What is not an option in democratic politics is self-marginalization...
...By exposing the mendacity of American policy, they fostered a critical spirit in their students...
...This is the case also with certain (but not all...
...I can get as much opera and political satire as I want, along with home-shopping networks and reality TV...
...But another side of Foucault proved more broadly influential: for many left academics, he became less a theorist of the surveillance state than an advocate of Nietzschean individualism, whose vision of “heterotopia” celebrated myriad sites of resistance to repressive authority rather than any larger notion of commonweal...
...The ecstasy about Obama was disgraceful, even though he was supportable...
...I admire the principles to which the nation aspires in its better moments...
...Of course there are human creations and activities that are alienating, or worse...
...It is in this last area where I believe that left intellectuals could play a vital role...
...I also don’t think “mass” means much these days...
...In 1952, Partisan Review, then near the apex of its influence, held a similar symposium, entitled “Our Country and Our Culture...
...Outnumbered, often—but everywhere...
...I consider myself a reasonably intelligent editor and publisher, running an independent magazine of opinion, whose chief social interests are political...
...SYMPOSIUM: PART 1 Intellectuals and Their America Last fall, we invited a number of prominent American intellectuals who are not editors of Dissent to participate in a forum about the culture and politics of our country...
...Cut off from engagement with actual policy debates (the province of “wonks”), the left intelligentsia retreated into academic politics—micromanaging curricular reform with ferocious intensity, debating the finer points of “cultural theory” with scholastic precision...
...On balance, these are overwhelmingly liberating and progressive forces...
...The critic is dogged in pointing to the work that remains unfinished, the reforms that are not adequate, the crooked places that have not yet been made smooth...
...In news, it’s past time that the United States join the rest of the world in having some public-minded alternative to the major commercial networks...
...Even the highly respectable Sidgwick had to resign his fellowship because he found that he could not support all the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England...
...much less poverty, child poverty, and homelessness...
...KATHA POLLITT I want to focus on the question of patriotism...
...Attack the religious Right too vigorously and you’ll find yourself accused of elitism—in the Nation, no less...
...We are not all presidents and prime ministers, and the antinomies of an ordinary life thoughtfully lived are signs also of its richness...
...That is the paradox of patriotism: everyone is supposed to think her or his own country is ”the best,” but only one set of inhabitants can be right...
...Single loyalties are a human deformation...
...and a denunciation of torture, rendition, and the endless pursuit of an elusive and protean terrorism...
...Moreover, embedded critics—their ranks include, but are not limited to, academics and intellectuals— have a necessarily ambiguous relationship to power...
...So it is very unlikely that they will be motivated to serve all humanity...
...They should deny themselves the ugly thrill of populist anti-intellectualism: derisive talk about elites and the “new class” and so on...
...It seems a good time for such a discussion...
...I am willing to “prioritize,” but not to shrink...
...MARTHA NUSSBAUM What relationship American intellectuals should have toward mass culture—television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet—will vary as much as the people themselves...
...All of this comported well with the emerging cultural politics of the academy, which in many ways constituted a mirror image of free-market individualism...
...If you still don’t watch even the critically acclaimed shows: do...
...How silly does that look today, as do so many indictments issued by the Left in those years of television and other expressions of popular culture...
...for the surrender of people’s confidence in their own judgment as a result of its barrage of pseudo-expertise and pseudo-authority—I could go on...
...That is what is still happening...
...They should learn to respect policy, which is less lofty and glamorous than politics...
...These caveats entered, I guess my answer to the question would be “critical embrace...
...Phrases like “right to life” and “family values” found their way into the popular media, embedded with meanings intended by a new Right and paving the way to new policies with astonishing speed...
...It is, however, better than most systems have been in most times and places...
...We can be confident that advertising money will follow success...
...For one thing, the notion of “mass” in our culture is transforming before our eyes...
...But it is the standard to which they must be called...
...I don’t mean intellectually engaged, which is a given, but literally and physically: get out there...
...In The Company of Critics, Walzer quotes the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik: “A movement that does not honor society’s constant values is not sufficiently mature to undertake the reshaping of that society...
...They and others are producing smart, nuanced, thoughtful massculture products that also find an audience, even if that audience isn’t the same size as, say, the one for The DaVinci Code or Dancing with the Stars...
...Without public protest Americans now allow private companies to run their jails, employ mercenary armies to win wars, create almost insurmountable obstacles to the organization of workers, and reject funding for most forms of public welfare except for poorly paid work...
...While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions, many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal...
...A single election campaign, however exhilarating, is just the beginning of engagement...
...A leftist who wants to make a systematic critique of actually existing America has to tread warily...
...Christopher Lasch was penning spirited (if sometimes unfair) polemics against “the fake radicalism of the counterculture...
...It seems to me the responsibility of intellectuals today to be engaged with the world and with our country...
...Chamber of Commerce...
...The Internet has already changed political campaigning and social movement organization and advocacy...
...Fifteen years ago, Todd Gitlin offered a precise and devastating metaphor for what he saw then as the academic Left’s default from democratic politics...
...Patriotism, today and in the future, includes recognizing this and acting accordingly...
...The instrument of that change was not the rise of a compelling vision on the Left, but a visceral reaction against George W. Bush’s presidency, not only on the Left, but also across much of the political center...
...Because we offer no way of speaking to a larger audience, we have little access to the media and almost no capacity to shape public opinion...
...I am mindful here of the quote, which I read too long ago to have down exactly, from Philip Rahv, who left Manhattan to take a drive around America and reported back to William Phillips with horror about the “monsters out there...
...The air was full of rueful re-examinations, but also fresh possibilities...
...That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’’ he continued...
...I accept his teaching gratefully...
...No wonder the Right had such an easy time establishing its cultural hegemony...
...But through history’s lens that view holds up about as well as 1948 predictions that come Election Day, Henry Wallace just might surprise some people...
...Our class system is becoming more rigid, not less...
...It meant moving from the seminar room to the precincts and the neighborhoods...
...He cut me off...
...The opposite of patriotism is Buddhism...
...Stifle the aporia and leave the hybridity at home...
...The political effects of totalization in one’s picture of the self and the world are well known, but even before one laments the danger of the consequences one should lament the falsity of the concept...
...As I contemplate friends of mine who are serving in the Obama administration, I feel so lucky to have the ability to say whatever I like and to work things out the way I like to work them out I think of what Cicero said about some of his contemporaries who refused to get involved in politics: they “claim for themselves the same privilege as kings—to obey nobody and to enjoy liberty, saying and doing whatever they please...
...So show me the flags...
...If an American child and a Peruvian child were drowning, would you rush to save the American child first...
...An enormous collective-emotion machine inculcates in us virtually from birth the notion that we have a moral obligation to put our country’s interests first, to love the United States above all other countries, and indeed above all else, not only because it is our home—because actually, people don’t always love their home, and sometimes they have good reason—but because it is the best...
...The larger part is simply that today’s America is a very interesting place...
...We have produced a literature that explores the relationship of race and gender to legislation enhancing civil liberties and civil rights...
...We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality...
...We might follow the model of Michael Moore, who has been unafraid to debunk words like capitalism even as he utilizes capitalist methods to make his point...
...Its sources were compelling and wholly understandable—the desires of women and minorities to vindicate and explore a separate sense of self, independent of the hegemonic standard established by white males...
...There is pleasure, because there is life, in mass culture...
...it was about legitimation, not manipulation...
...I think that the life of the mind should be soulful...
...Kant held a university appointment, but he always had to fear, and sometimes encounter, the suppression of his writings...
...But we lack a language capable of capturing public attention...
...The famous sentence in Terence’s comedy is in fact spoken in bad faith, as an excuse for an obtrusive neighbor to intervene in a matter that is none of his business...
...Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in Law, Philosophy, and Divinity...
...It’s a powerful phrase because it asks activists and critics to keep in mind both of Max Weber’s categories for political action: the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of absolute ends...
...We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation,” King declared...
...Its purpose, wrote the magazine’s editors, was “to examine the apparent fact that American intellectuals now regard America and its institutions in a new way...
...Did “high-brow” opera (Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot) become “low-brow” trash when cell phone salesman Paul Putts turned it into a global hit on the reality TV show Britain’s Got Talent...
...In a democracy, political engagement is an act of patriotism, a declaration of faith in the judgment of one’s fellow citizens and thus, ultimately, in one’s nation...
...And maybe the time is right to fuse the two concepts a bit more than we have...
...The self-described reasonable Left—what Michael Walzer in these pages called “the decent Left”—regularly attacks as Americahating what it calls the “Chomskyan Left,” that tiny segment of the Left that espouses a less forgiving narrative—America as an imperialist superpower, fomenting wars, supporting autocratic regimes, and despoiling the world...
...That is what I am doing, staying here in Chicago, and my friends are doing what Cicero thought one ought to do, serving the republic at a serious cost of freedom...
...I must confess that I regard intellectuals who are immune to the power of Winterreise or The Flaying of Marsyas or Modern Love or The Four Temperaments as incomplete intellectuals, insofar as they cannot grasp such refinements of structure and meaning and make of them refinements of their own souls...
...Bruce Springsteen comes to mind—and yet we haven’t yet elevated him to the ranks of those whose music inspires social change...
...when other Republican members of Congress refuse to say whether Obama is a rightful citizen,they are themselves taking positions that average folks recognize as alien...
...All of this happened, of course, with a vengeance...
...We’re constantly being surprised that the rest of the world doesn’t automatically love us...
...Washington was full of mandarins who defended deranged policies in the name of “pragmatism” or its cousin “realism,” who cavorted in counterinsurgency fantasies, defended doctrines of surveillance and secrecy, and constructed rationales for the nuclear arms race...
...fighting Hitler...
...Where are the grants and the institutes that support the Arthur Millers and Bob Dylans of the twenty-first century—both of them masters at coining a phrase...
...But few intellectuals extended their new optimism about the nation to mass culture...
...Perhaps our loss of control over words and language explains why, offered a politician courageous enough to open up questions about the nature of our moral center, we have not pursued the opportunity...
...Go back and read, as I once did, the initial grudging and snobbish assessments of The Beatles in the highbrow journals (“No Soul in Beatlesville,” ran the Nation’s headline in March 1964...
...What if we took seriously the idea of one world...
...Of course, most patriotism is not like that, but it can be: look at Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech for a beautiful example of what I have in mind...
...less unwanted pregnancy and childbearing...
...Before Twyla Tharp choreographed to Billy Joel, the Joffrey Ballet danced to music from the Purple Paisley god himself— Prince...
...Vats of ink have been spent distinguishing the two, but how different are they really...
...That’s the way of a depoliticized capitalism: no real secular community, politics and society as largely spectacle, mass privatization of civic culture...
...for its hardening of an entire population toward the most obscene representations of violence, which we call entertainment...
...I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the war in Afghanistan...
...a general sense of optimism and openness...
...for the vicarious and self-estranged character of existences that are fascinated by the celebrity culture...
...It prevents us from seeing ourselves the way others see us...
...Together these add up to a new portrait of an America that reveals the changing and expanding nature of the American Dream...
...Look at Cicero: his direct political action had little effect on history, but the books he wrote during his periods of exile changed the world...
...The concept of cultural hegemony helps illuminate the disappointing intellectual history of the last thirty years—disappointing, at least, for anyone who believes that intellectuals have a responsibility to be critics rather than servants of power...
...I am a world citizen, too, emphatically so...
...digital technology has altered the ways most Americans inform and entertain themselves and communicate with others, but many worry that it also trivializes all forms of expression...
...politics and culture are arenas of great tension—whether the strains portend national renewal, decline, or more of the same...
...I want to be/at least as alive as the vulgar,” Frank O’Hara declared in a poem called “My Heart...
...Walzer draws the right conclusion: “Criticism is most powerful . . . when it gives voice to the common complaints of the people or elucidates the values that underlie those complaints...
...and to many principles...
...Our work participates in a process effectively captured by the pundit who described the New York Review of Books as “The New York Review of Each Other” Even outlets with higher circulation like the Nation and the New Republic don’t come close to reaching the millions who participate in blogs and Twitter, who read the mass circulation media, and who watch nightly television...
...Boundaries are pushed on TV that even movies shy away from...
...It has done so in the case of Rachel Maddow, whose gutsy approaches to the news we all admired but have insufficiently supported...
...Criticism of imperial excess even penetrated the halls of Congress, energizing the Church Committee and other inquiries into executive crimes...
...I am loyal to two countries...
...The ability of left intellectuals to speak a common language requires both nuance and subtlety, but nuance makes simple and meaningful language difficult to achieve...
...They should stop congratulating themselves for cottoning to the Internet just a tiny bit faster than the Right and devote themselves to collectively mastering and diffusing liberation technologies...
...Case in point, and frequently cited, is Ronald Reagan’s brilliant use of the slogan “It’s morning in America” to capture the presidency...
...The problem was not that ordinary people were brainwashed into accepting policies against their interests, but that certain ideas and values were simply not admissible into the charmed circle of “responsible opinion...
...special interests” as welfare recipients...
...But one unintended consequence of the quest for alternative identities was that it created a new kind of fragmented, interest-group politics, unmoored from any larger vision of the good society...
...And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out...
...A fight this will be, no doubt of that...
...freedom of speech...
...But beginning in the mid-1960s, it fell to the American Right to devote itself to producing politically useable ideas...
...The excitement so many experienced during the 2008 Obama campaign was nothing more or less than a rediscovery of the joy of democratic activism...
...Both can, if they keep Weber’s admonitions in mind, contribute to democratic progress...
...Both drew on the insistence of the nation’s founding document that all men are created equal to launch social and political movements that revolutionized the country...
...No, a patriot and a world-citizen...
...We could find ways of introducing this language, perhaps by developing a television program on the model of William Buckley’s Firing Line that would promote debate about serious issues...
...It is well on its way to transforming government and almost all critical economic relations: the structure of the firm, the divisibility of property rights, national and local strategies of economic development...
...Self-marginalization meant being confined to the wayside to “study” what others did...
...The more attachments, the more sorrows...
...There were many new theorists on the block, but the most influential across disciplines was Michel Foucault, a subtle and challenging thinker whose work was in many ways tailor-made for understanding the new forms of coercion unleashed by the “war on drugs” and the emerging surveillance state...
...Here’s how Suskind recounted a conversation with a Bush lieutenant: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,’’ which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism...
...role in the world...
...They are not a destination...
...and, yes, the liberalizing impact of the popular culture discussed above—these and other factors have transformed the country...
...No, no,” King declared, “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’” That is, to say the least, a standard that politicians cannot live by...
...3. How should American intellectuals participate in American politics...
...That is, we don’t have an identified bunch of very smart and socially interconnected people—of course, often neurotic, passionate, and sometimes delusional—who judge their life by its contribution to human science or art and who see themselves as the guardians of its standards before a debasing and resolutely meretricious mass culture...
...Isaiah Berlin taught that there is a tragic dimension to the conflicts between values, because they all cannot always go together, and in politics the stakes of decision are sometimes high...
...Film, or at least American film, seems to me to be in a bit of a moss-gathering period in general—too many projects aimed at fifteen-year-old-male Cowper’s glands, but even some of those can have a certain subversive wit about them...
...Sometimes some of us may take up actual political positions, but beware: the person who does so loses a lot of freedom...
...In truth, I think most of the work is political—to make the case for why that’s important at all...
...We understand, of course, that the inhabitants of other countries are under a similar obligation: the Japanese are supposed to love Japan the most, and Jamaicans Jamaica...
...And there is no use denying that lifelessness may also be found in high art...
...It’s practically as real as real life—a show about high-school football that’s also about race and class and physical handicap and angst and sex (fraught sex between teenagers, mature sex between their parents) and why people fear things they don’t know...
...He urged the friends of capitalism to retake the field by establishing right-wing think tanks, endowed professorships, and media outlets...
...At the time, it was all dismissed as masscult drivel...
...America has faults, of course, and fixing them is what the Left is all about...
...The rule was changed, and he resumed his fellowship, but he still had to conceal his sexual orientation, as Bart Schultz’s biography now shows us...
...I’m thinking of universal health care...
...High culture has always found inspiration in low culture—Romantic music would be inconceivable without folk songs and folk dances—owing to the discovery by great artists of the human truth in popular forms...
...Still, for a while it seemed that there were vital alternatives to the technocratic discourse of national security policy...
...It may be that changes of degree have produced a change in kind, that people have actually become lobotomized, not just idiotically entertained...
...I see this in many of my students, and it distresses me...
...And Obama’s cautious pursuit of bipartisanship may be another misuse of pragmatism...
...The politician focuses on the work that can get done and is called upon to have a realist’s sense of the limits of the possible...
...Of course, these protections may lull intellectuals into ignoring issues of their time, and that is bad when it happens...
...It follows from the above that of course I am a patriot...
...I do not agree that, as Irving Howe once argued, the retreat of intellectuals behind university walls that harbor and feed them, has subdued our voices...
...How—apart from guns and money—did the ruling class rule...
...Progressives counter with what I call Abstract America, America as the sum of its best parts: constitutional democracy...
...Why is patriotism bad for America...
...JACKSON LEARS Coming of age during the Vietnam War, I cut my cultural teeth on an exalted idea of intellectuals...
...I understand also that all these allegiances may not add up, but the ideal of adding up is a Hegelian illusion that infects individuals and communities with a totalizing tendency...
...That’s not how it looks in the Muslim world...
...But I hope not too many will become starry-eyed about these media and forget about the habit of slow reading, which is such a large part of good thinking...
...Now, we have been told, the reign of the Right is over—though it is a little too soon to celebrate...
...A single election, a lone health care reform bill (even a big one), this civil rights bill, that labor law reform: all are steps down a road...
...Franklin Roosevelt needed the labor movement...
...Typically, it is the Left that finds itself accused of excessively politicizing its intellectual and cultural work...
...On talk shows, the “liberal” position was usually represented by a gray figure from the Brookings Institution or some other centrist think tank, who spoke in the soporific idioms of managerial efficiency...
...The word “intellectual” traces to the Dreyfus affair...
...John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson needed the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr...
...When a sitting governor (Rick Perry of Texas) idly muses about secession...
...But that’s just a part of it...
...dignified support for single mothers...
...We are talking about how words like family, tradition, and opportunity came to have a loaded content...
...Public” became a four-letter word connoting unnecessary taxes, poor service, regulatory constraints, and inefficiency...
...policy makers serving elite interests persuaded themselves that they were acting in the service of society and indeed humanity at large...
...Above all, he promoted a spirit of fairness that would usher in a “postracial” moment and redefine our commitment to a more egalitarian society...
...access to social services...
...But I used to dream of escape more than I do now...
...The democratic public, without much organization or political leadership, is still not fully formed...
...The dominant political culture created by the Right has been challenged but not fundamentally changed...
...America is vast, weird, anomalous, and I love it...
...If we can’t do this, we will have abandoned the popular media, essentially withdrawn from the game, and allowed President Obama’s agenda to rest on political manipulation rather than a shifting public opinion about what our society stands for...
...Over the past forty years, conservatives (intellectuals among them) shifted the popular spirit from a liberal commitment to social good (exemplified by the New Deal) to a massive mistrust of government...
...Can it be any clearer today that these forces are our friends...
...But nothing’s new here except its totalizing reach, total because of the continued decline of alternative sources of authority...
...The anti-intellectualism of intellectuals is especially awful, and none of us work in the mines...
...The change in the atmosphere was palpable and unmistakable, as reporters from the Washington Times began appearing on television talk shows alongside “fellows” from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute...
...but the more attachments, the more joys...
...There’s a bit of tactical politics in my position...
...I realize that criticizing patriotism generally doesn’t go over very well, let alone telling people they’re not so great and even a bit greedy...
...For years I read and re-read Randolph Bourne’s critique of John Dewey’s justification for American entry into World War I, convinced that the misuse of pragmatism was one of the original sins of American intellectual life...
...He was confident that the nation was capable of finishing its work...
...crackpot realism was too thoroughly institutionalized, too pervasively intertwined with entrenched ideological needs and economic interests...
...Today’s most serious problems are global—climate change, environmental ruin, the north-south divide, the oppression of women, famine, disease, and overpopulation...
...I don’t think we have a recognizable group of American intellectuals of real political weight, at least not intellectuals of the sort celebrated by and occasionally inhabiting the old Partisan Review...
...All of the above debasements notwithstanding, I can think of three good reasons for intellectuals to engage with popular culture...
...But some critics will hold out and say they are not satisfied...
...Most of the commercial boundaries between high-brow and low-brow culture have long since dissolved...
...in the early years of the cold war, many even agreed that America had “become the protector of Western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense...
...a rapid closing of Guantánamo...
...Pundits usually indifferent at best to women’s rights (or in the case of David Horowitz actively hostile to them) point endlessly to the fact that American women have freedoms women in Muslim countries do not...
...for its grotesque sexualization of an entire society, which has the effect not least of degrading sex, even dirty sex...
...Therein lay King’s hope...
...Conservatives no longer dominate U.S...
...And to the inventory of alienating human productions one must add a good deal of American mass culture—for its transformation of a citizenry into an audience...
...A lot...
...KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL Some questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag...
...Their other source is their friends, who are generally watching and reading the same things...
...Criticism comes naturally to a pluralist universe...
...He appealed to the nation’s “bonds of affection,” to “the better angels of our nature,” and he spoke of the country’s “unfinished work...
...But today, in the light of powerful Internet media, and a newly personal pop culture, the influence of these outlets has been diluted...
...much lower rates of violence, especially murder...
...more leisure time...
...Mazzini saw that people are usually preoccupied with their own narrow affairs...
...By “television,” do we mean The Wire or Dancing with the Stars...
...Yes, we have a black president, and that says something truly wonderful about our ability to overcome our past...
...The fundamental fact of the Internet is that it releases both information and knowledge to people who haven’t had access to them...
...A monistic account of human existence is a lie...
...Her most recent book is The Mind-Body Problem, a collection of poems...
...Obama’s early policy decisions reveal the inertial pull of powerful institutions—investment banks too big to fail, national security bureaucracies too sensitive to reveal their secrets, Pentagon contractors too hungry to forswear their appetite for overseas bases...
...They seem equally real and equally reliant on each other...
...The English department is not the White House...
...We cannot separate ourselves from those worlds nor ignore our obligation to generate funds for a popular culture that speaks to the best in human nature...
...In fact, that is what happened...
...So we have come to cash this check...
...I admit I don’t listen to much new music, but from what I gather the singers and rappers are still for the most part counseling their young listeners to question authority and smash convention and engage in kindred healthy activities...
...ALICE KESSLER- HARRIS I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far...
...But I do not want to be mistaken for a snob or a prude...
...To be sure, the election of Barack Obama signified a great triumph of insurgent democracy, and a deliverance from the unfolding coup d’état conducted by the Bush administration...
...shared prosperity...
...Would Rachel Maddow, a decidedly intellectual, openly gay, and progressive commentator, have commanded an audience of any size ten or twenty years ago...
...Would you refuse on principle to marry a foreigner...
...The well-heeled abandoned this country some time ago...
...Those who challenged the Bush administration’s selfserving account (they hate our freedom) were demonized as unpatriotic, even for saying the most innocuous, self-evident things, such as that Mohammed Atta and the other perpetrators were not cowards...
...Now a little stillness goes a long way...
...Perhaps I mistake myself...
...It meant tempering utopian expectations and accepting the need for near-term reform...
...My rant—excuse me, my meditation— might wound some people I admire and even adore...
...This, at least, is something that most progressive intellectuals learned in the years between 2001 and 2009...
...politics, but a new liberal era has not yet begun...
...It is far from clear what part American intellectuals—in and outside academia—play, or wish to play, in understanding and dealing with these issues...
...He advocated a restoration of the rule of law in such arenas as civil rights and occupational health and safety...
...They owe their loyalty to principles, not to persons...
...I see also delight...
...So we should do what we can to neutralize those arguments...
...At the ground level, the fact that the costs of broadcasting and information retrieval have dropped to near zero, and the limitless possibilities of peer-production and self-organizing made available by the Internet, is the greatest social technology fact of our time...
...Much television writing is good today...
...I want the public itself to have the information and capacity to act on arguments, and worry that that is diminishing...
...I do not see a contradiction between them, in the way that I do not see a contradiction between the particular and the universal...
...We won’t get there until we can play that game...
...others, like liberty, have new and unrecognizable meanings...
...How did dominant groups defang dissent...
...As Americans, we need to stop living in a Ken Burns documentary and take more seriously the fact that politically we are just one nation among many, and economically we are 5 percent of the world’s population using 25 percent of the world’s resources—a gigantic national potlatch of overconsumption and waste...
...The resurgent Right was quickly crowned with electoral success in 1980: the ascendance of Reagan ratified and reinforced their ideological counteroffensive...
...That is where the intellectuals come in, to articulate that larger vision...
...Intellectuals, in this world, were trivialized into “policy wonks...
...I take it to be manifestly crazy, even were it possible, for such intellectuals to ignore or shun mass culture...
...equality has all but disappeared from the lexicon of politics...
...I doubt it...
...Some of them originate in love, some in honor, some in both...
...It is a fight our side will win eventually...
...for the mental passivity inculcated in millions of people who are helpless before its big and little screens, and who mistake screen-experience for experience...
...She is the author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America...
...And not all of those forms can be highmindedly reduced to “mass culture...
...We might see why more clearly if we weren’t so in love with ourselves...
...I also don’t consider myself such an intellectual...
...But without wasting space on a virtually endless inventory of such distinctions, I say, Embrace...
...They’re good...
...But the spread of information and education...
...Frank Rich must have written a dozen columns using AMC’s Mad Men to frame these times...
...Is jazz high or low...
...By “Internet,” do we mean amazon.com or pornography...
...King’s declaration that the note was “a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’” was a classic exercise in the elucidation of values...
...Most writers who advocated socialism during the 1930s no longer saw themselves as “rebels and exiles...
...We expect to run additional essays in a forthcoming issue...
...or as the cultural program of a political ideology...
...But what has all our flag-waving done for us in the end...
...2. Does the academy further or retard the engagement of intellectuals with American society...
...A third is that America now lacks anything like a responsible business elite or a working class that might provide a natural audience...
...And where was the Left during this ideological putsch...
...Alice Kessler-Harris is a member of the Department of History and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University...
...Democracy” lost its cachet, as conservatives convinced the electorate that getting more people to vote was merely a plot to expand the influence of the poor...
...Our commitment to the patriotic progress narrative means we end up living in the past, like Italians who would rather reminisce about Garibaldi than face up to Berlusconi...
...The solution then might be to do as conservatives have done: to overlook small differences in the interest of articulating our moral center...
...The point, I suppose, is never to confuse the spheres...
...an addiction to allegiances, which I can justify not only sentimentally but also philosophically...
...Again, I think the old and stereotypical liberal-left view of patriotism as somehow jingoistic or simple-minded could do with some revisionism...
...Suggest that bombing villages is not the way to liberate Afghan women and to “liberal hawks”you’re a cultural relativist...
...People who called themselves intellectuals, in this brave new era, were often little more than craven apologists for wealth and power...
...Gestures are not enough...
...Candidate Obama raised some big issues...
...The standpoints expose each other’s limitations, and so they serve as instruments of criticism...
...Who would want to be, who could be, only particular or only universal...
...Would an academic like Charles Ferguson have gone into business, and then decided to make an Oscar-winning political documentary...
...I think that it’s good if there are some intellectuals who get deeply involved with these media, because this will help intellectuals keep contact with a wider public...
...But my central point was, I believe, a good one: we need to think in a larger framework than our own country and be wary of appeals to patriotism in a crisis, because when the flags come out, people tend to turn off their brains, and the next thing you know, we’re at war...
...but my conscience in this regard is pretty clear...
...As with other public goods, a democratic media and communications system will be hard to achieve without a public...
...Within little more than a decade, the fulcrum of debate shifted sharply to the right: “economic reform” was redefined as deregulation of business...
...E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams were reviving Marxism with a cultural emphasis, groping their way toward what Thompson would call a “greenish libertarian socialism...
...By challenging the equation of anticolonial nationalism with Soviet communism and exploring the futility of foreign attempts to crush a popular insurgency, they gave us an alternative way of seeing the U.S...
...Politics,” Weber wrote, “is a strong and slow boring of hard boards...
...Public schools are rapidly resegregating...
...but it is still better that the protections be there, in the strongest possible form...
...Friday Night Lights is no false simulacrum...
...Certainly that distinction isn’t policed by the technologies themselves...
...I go into all this because I think it is the first prerequisite for true political participation these days: engage, investigate, see...
...Another is that technology has erased virtually all barriers of entry to broadcasting individual opinion...
...indeed, a high school football game...
...We agree on many things, including a restoration of balance between the public and private good, trust in government, the value of civil liberties and civil rights, and basic assumptions about fairness and justice...
...On the question of the academy, may I take an incomplete...
...Liberalism” became a political death sentence...
...There’s an opening there to redefine patriotism and rebrand it, as it were, with our stamp...
...But it’s also the case that we cannot—even Barack Obama cannot, it turns out—settle ancient scores that are not in the first instance about us...
...If human character did not change in 1910, as Virginia Woolf foolishly said it did, neither will it change in 2010...
...Lincoln needed the abolitionists and the proddings of Frederick Douglass...
...This lands us in the lap of what philosophers call the problem of the incommensurability of values, but I have never been overly tormented by this...
...I’d like to make a contribution to achieving this country and making peace in the world...
...They were the people who challenged the official pieties, especially the easy equation of power and virtue, the American civil religion that justified imperial misadventure...
...Hint: not the French...
...I have double, triple, quadruple loyalties, and would gladly consider more...
...Patriotism, with its narrative of progress, also makes it hard to see ways in which we’re moving backward...
...We need to remind them that thinking is slow and rigorous, and that it does not always go well with the fast pace and the flash of popular culture...
...What I miss from television is my own Fox, a source of intelligent analysis and widely resourced coverage that I can rely on, in the same way its current audience relies on its lethal distortions...
...At this late date in the discussion about identity, almost everybody recognizes that identity is multiple and plural, but not everybody recognizes the burden that this bounty represents—the chores of complexity...
...What I am worried about is that their contribution will become merely another form of niche entertainment, with no real bite...
...As a general proposition, democratic politics demands an ethic of responsibility...
...The list of all that is valuable to which I am indifferent is always too long...
...But that is not the case now...
...This is almost entirely a political matter, and this is where the critical part of the embrace comes in...
...I now think that we, we intellectuals on the Left, have failed our president and our country, that we share some of the responsibility for the political mire in which we are embedded...
...They cannot be solved if every country gazes lovingly in the mirror and refuses to give up any of its privileges...
...Sometimes, even at my conservative southern university, they were my professors—especially the historians Paul Gaston and Bill Harbaugh...
...This is all to the good...
...On balance, the academy is a great help in furthering the engagement of intellectuals with American society When we think of the political philosophers of the fairly recent European past, most of them had to struggle to make ends meet, because their radical ideas made it impossible for them to hold tenured academic positions or to be protected by the deficient standards of academic freedom that then prevailed...
...In an odd way, the response to Bush, even on the Left, was rooted in what might be seen as a conservative revulsion over the recklessness of Bush’s policies, particularly his approach to the war in Iraq...
...I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is as blue as the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I’m staying put...
...And how would one describe the phenomenon of Oprah’s Book Club, which can instantly put works by William Faulkner and Leo Tolstoy on the middle-brow New York Times bestseller list through the magic of TV talk and paperback mass marketing...
...To us, for example, the detention without charges or trial of some six hundred prisoners in Bagram is a small item in the ongoing and mostly uplifting story of American justice...
...We are too compounded and too complicated for single loyalties...
...E. J. Dionne, Jr., is a university professor at Georgetown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post...
...At this point in history, I can’t imagine that there’s even any argument about this...
...Since the 1970s, the Right has deployed the lessons of Gramsci with devastating success...
...For a start, the tension between values that do not go together is a foundation for the development of intellectual judgment...
...We have fostered a wideranging debate about the economic and social circumstances that have led to military commitments over the centuries...
...And love is usually dominant...
...It was time to rejoin the ranks of “history’s actors...
...Each writer could choose to respond to one or all of them...
...If the power to shape words and language is essential to capturing the media, it also poses something of a paradox...
...Partly this involved the dominance of identity politics...
...Jackson Lears is editor of Raritan and author, most recently, of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 18771920...
...Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of the New Republic...
...So of course we should engage...
...the impact of immigration, which has delivered people from all over the world even to small towns...
...The idea of the nation, however, can be transmitted in a powerfully motivating symbolic form, calling the heart to the service of noble ends, and these ends, rightly formulated, can lead on to the service of all humanity...
...It isn’t just that we, on the Left, lack agreement about alternative goals and the policies that would achieve them...
...We can do this by constructing a language of shared goals rather than one of difference...
...Yes, we’ve done a lot of harm in the world...
...This is not to denigrate their function, only to suggest that, in the modern world, to influence popular culture, to transform a mindset requires access to new cultural outlets...
...Cornel West has over 12,000 Twitter followers...
...And we are not just talking about slogans...
...Go to a Home Depot, an Applebee’s, a courthouse square, a small town’s theater company production...
...That’s where most Americans, especially but surely not only the young, get most of their information, opinions, and general take on politics...
...They should always be prepared to be disappointed, or proved wrong...
...These were the devotees of the “crackpot realism” identified by C. Wright Mills...
...Its narratives on the futility of government-sponsored efforts at social reform, the dangers posed to the economic sector by state interference, and the primacy of moral breakdown as an explanation for poverty shaped the political discussion through the Clinton years...
...Or so we can hope...
...We imprison more people per capita than any other country—that’s new...
...Using the language of freedom and individualism, and denigrating anything social, conservatives redefined perceptions of government from positive to negative...
...What they discovered was that cultural hegemony was not to be confused with social control...
...This was a conscious strategy, articulated in 1971 by Lewis Powell (who would soon be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) in a memorandum to the U.S...
...Bush’s radicalism—there is no other word— was captured rather chillingly in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind...
...it creates and satisfies artificial appetites...[and] has grown into a major industry which converts culture into a commodity...
...Fearful of seeming to be puritanical killjoys, left intellectuals backed away from environmentalist critiques of heedless consumption...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
