The End of the American Dream as we know it

It appears that the American Dream is a thing of the past...Newer generations do not believe in it.       

from The 2013 Economic Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and Governance Studies at Brookings.

feminisms

From a questionnaire of the French feminist movement Les Petites Marguerites (active in the 70s):

Question: “Who is best suited to decide the number of children you have?"
(a) The pope, who doesn’t have any;
(b) the president, who’s having a hard enough time with his own;
(c) the doctor, who values the life of your fetus more than your own life;
(d) your husband, who plays with them for a few minutes each day when he returns from work;
(e) you, who carry, bear, and raise them.”

(from The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s by Richard Wolin)

Assorted ideas-1

Citizens of the former Soviet states also suffer from ideology fatigue. Especially on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, where communism was experienced as a reform imposed from a distant capital, many people today see democracy in similar terms, as a foreign ideology that has little to do with their lives. Sean Roberts, an anthropologist and Central Asia specialist at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, writes that “most citizens of Kazakhstan, and perhaps most post-Soviet peoples outside the Baltic states, engage the concept of democracy much as they embraced communism before—as a mostly empty ideological framework to facilitate deference to the authority and power of the state, not as a system of formal institutions that can effectively represent people’s interests and make governance more successful in serving the people.” Roberts further observes that “if many Americans saw in the end of the Cold War the victory of American ideals, per [Francis] Fukuyama’s ‘end of history,’ most former Soviet citizens viewed it more as an ‘end of ideology,’ or a sign that grand ideals are essentially incompatible with the realities of life.”

from Voting Against Freedom by Joshua Kucer, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2013. 

Perhaps sociology of culture has achieved such a dominant share in the contemporary “marketplace” of ideas because it too perfectly mirrors those corporatist and institutional values whose pervasive influence it seeks to expose. We can glimpse the triumph of the sociological view of the university as the credentialing, class-replicating institution par excellence in the positivist counterpart to the critique of credentialism: Are credentials meaningless? Well, now private “degree-granting” farms like the University of Phoenix offer for-credit classes with no content apart from forcing students to memorize statistics about the purported benefits of earning one’s degree.

from Too Much Sociology in the n+1 journal. 

Timothy Snyder: You mentioned the ethical and the prudential sources of social democracy, and I asked you about the aesthetic. It strikes me also that there is a truthfulness question that’s important. When we think of Gaskell, or Engels, or Dickens, or Upton Sinclair, we think of certain terms which they introduced which have stuck with us: “hard times,” for example. And I wonder if something which is missing today isn’t the same willingness or ability of intellectuals to formulate what’s actually going on in the economy and in society. Tony Judt: That capacity has come undone in two stages. The first stage, which I would date from the late 1950s, was the self-distancing of intellectuals from a concern with the straightforward, observable injustices of economic life. It seemed as though those observable injustices were rather being overcome, at least in the places intellectuals lived. The focus upon the “down and out in London and Paris,” as it might be, seemed almost jejune—you know, “yes, yes, yes, but it’s more complicated than that, the real injustices are,” and then something else. Or the real oppression is in the mind, rather than in the unfair distribution of income, or whatever it might be. So left-wing intellectuals became cleverer at finding injustice—and less interested in what seemed rather like the 1930s or, if they were more historically conscious, 1890s style of moral horror at simple economic unfairness and suffering.
More recently, I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970s, towards economics. Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity. The reason they do this is not necessarily because they are uninterested in society, but because they have come to assume, rather uncritically, that the point of economic policy is to generate resources. Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point having a conversation about distributing them.
This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail: surely you are not going to be so unrealistic or unworldly or idealistic as to place goals before means? We are accordingly advised that everything begins with economics. But this reduces intellectuals—no less than the workers they are discussing—to rodents on a treadmill. When we talk of increasing productivity or resources, how do we know when to stop? At what point are we sufficiently well-resourced to turn our attention to the distribution of goods? How would we ever know when the time has come to talk about deserts and needs rather than outputs and efficiencies?
The effect of the dominance of economic language in an intellectual culture which was always vulnerable to the authority of “experts” has acted as a brake upon a more morally informed social debate.

 from Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder, Penguin Books, 2013. 

Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia

The city of Gori is located around 80 km westwards of Tbilisi. It is reachable by bus or by marshrutka that can be taken from the improvised bus station just outside the Didube Metrostation. 

A trip from Tbilisi to Gori and back costs around 8 GEL (5 USD) and lasts 1 hour.

As disrespectful as it may sound, my only reason to go to this otherwise very lovely city was because it was the place where Stalin was born and grew up. I wanted to see the Stalin Museum, to breath the air of the city and to see what is so special about it that it gave to the world one of its most controversial figures: Joseph Stalin. A God for ones, a terrible dictator for others. 

Later, our guide from the Museum told us: there are people that come here to pay their homage to Stalin - they kiss the things exhibited here, they even kneel in front of some representations of him. But there are other people that spit on them and they curse his name.
The rumor has it that when the Russian troops occupied Gori during the 2008 South Ossetian War, the Russian commander asked forgiveness from Stalin for bombarding his city: "Прости, Батюшка!" (Sorry, Father!)

The people of the city, however, nurture rather a friendly attitude to the memory of their most famous citizen (later I found that the famous Soviet philosopher Merab Mamardashvili was also born in Gori, but as far as I know there is no museum dedicated to him). There is no shortage of reasons to hate Stalin but the citizens of Gori have one particular to love him: he brings more than 30 thousand tourists per year. And this means money for the depleted economy of the city...

The museum is located, of course, on Stalin avenue.

The two buildings of the Museum.

 

 The smaller building represents actually an open air memorial for the house where Stalin was born.

 

 Tourists are awaiting eagerly to see the inside of the house.

 A view of the left side wall of the house.

 The plaque reads, in Georgian and Russian 

Here I.V. Stalin was born on 21

December 1879, and here he

spent his childhood until 1883

 A view from the front side. It is a typical Georgian rural house. 

The house has stood there for almost two hundred years. 

And here is the bed on which supposedly Stalin was born.

A detail of the roof that protects the house.

 

The monument of Stalin just behind the house.

 

 

He looks sad from this angle.

 

The arches at the entrance of the Museum. 

 

Here is a marble Stalin guarding the entrance. 

The museum displays an impressive collection of pictures of Stalin, copies of documents and a lot of things that have belonged to Stalin.

Carpet portraits are by far the most interesting pieces.

General views of the Museum exhibition halls.

 

They say this is how the working space of Stalin was arranged in Kremlin. All the furniture was brought from there.

 

This is a very interesting document - the Soviet Academy of Sciences has awarded Stalin the title of honorary member. 

 

This hall hosts an exhibition of things that Stalin has received as gifts for his 70th birthday in 1949. 

Here is a plate made by the Czechoslovakian workers. 

 And here an accordion with gems.

 This picture of a joyful Stalin supervises the halls with gifts. It protects them from being stolen, probably. :)

My impression is that the Museum is actually a Temple to Stalin. 

I do not think it has suffered any modifications from the Soviet era. There are no mentions of the Gulag, the repressions or the forced collectivization. In fact, there is no collection dedicated to any problematic aspect of Stalin's life and political activity. 

The guides in the Museum also prefer to not talk about Stalin's crimes. They call it "neutrality".

The Politics of Internet...and the Internet of Politics

Elective Affinities. The Moldovan audience knows media researcher Evgeny Morozov in at least two different hypostases. First, as a news-media missionary, Morozov knocked about the former soviet countries, including Moldova, where he organized a series of trainings, lessons and workshops on the use of new technologies - blogs, social networks, wiki-type portals - in journalism, the public arena and civil society, in particular. The typical audience of these workshops consisted of journalists and activists, meaning people that can make a change. In this position, Evgeny Morozov did not differ at all from dozens of other international consultants who come to Moldova or any other country in this region, trying to familiarize local staff with the solutions that worked in other parts of the world. 

The other one (Evgeny Morozov–Moldova relationship) is infinitely much more important, as it had several exciting consequences. This relation originated on a specific date - 7 April 2009, 2:15 p.m. (Washington time), or 9:15 p.m. (Chisinau time). It is the time when the Moldova’s Twitter Revolution (1) post was placed in Morozov’s personal blog at the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine.

In his post, Morozov integrated the Moldovan protest in a series of similar events and actions that took place in Ukraine (The Orange Revolution) and Belarus (the 2006 Revolts), where the technological element - cell phones, social networks - allegedly played a decisive role. Still underway, the bluff of Chisinau (2) found an international name. That post both represented the birth of the mythology of technology-mediated revolutions and generated a conceptual term, which still has a brilliant career in political studies and mass media: Twitter Revolution (3). Sometimes journalists, as well as politicians and expert, used this term to describe the unrests in Iran (2010), Tunisia (2010-2011) and Egypt (2011).
The physical and symbolic location of the one who invented a new concept counted a lot: this time Morozov was not a mere trainer, but a serious analyst working for an influential publication focused on international relations analysis.

Forget everything I told you before!
For those expecting Evgeny Morozov to become after 2009 a loud and enthusiastic voice promoting the democratic transformation of the world with the help of modern technologies, his book The Net Delusion, published in 2011, came as a cold shower. As well as a disappointment: the Morozov of 2011 criticizes the Morozov before 2009. The pragmatic guy calls down the idealist one.
That is why reading of the personal key seems more than plausible. In many places the book seems rather like a public self-exorcism, upon the completion of which the enthusiastic guy, who announced Freedom through the Internet, got freed from this blindness, rather than a cold-mind-analysis of the political implications of the Internet technology.

The personal key is perhaps responsible for a certain unilaterality of the book: Morozov insists exclusively on the problematic sides of technologies - manipulation, escapism, naivety, and consumerism. It is of course true, but only partially. Because there is the other side to the Internet, blogs, and social networks - liberating, community-building, and change-promoting.
At the analytical level, Evgeny Morozov considers critically two political attitudes. The first one is the so-called Google Doctrine. It refers to the enthusiastic belief in the liberating power of technology and economic success (p. xiii). The second attitude is the Cyber-utopianism, meaning that online communication is in itself emancipatory and acts in a single direction: dismantling oppressive structures and authoritarian regimes. According to the author, both attitudes were assumed by the US administration, due to different reasons, and were integrated in the foreign policy agenda of the United States. 

Morozov refers mainly to a series of remarks on Internet Freedom made by Hillary Clinton in January 2010. The US Secretary of State praised the peace-making potential of online technologies: “Information freedom supports the peace and security that provides a foundation for global progress. We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights.” (4)

Clinton also declared that she hopes that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”

Later, the US administration took several times a stance regarding Internet freedom, criticizing the censorship policies applied by the Chinese Government, Russian authorities or governance of some Arabic countries. Apparently innocent, suggests Morozov, this naive belief of US decision-makers in the liberating potential of the Internet is responsible for several errors already, which could compromise the entire goal.
First, the use of such metaphors as ‘electronic samizdat’ or ‘the new Iron Curtain’ makes references to the cold war times. This rhetoric, claims Morozov, is based on a mistaken view of the USSR collapse and the underlying causes. In the opinions of Washington politicians and experts, the winners of the cold war, the Soviet Union fell down under the joint influence of the samizdat and some media efforts of the West, first the Radio Free Europe, as well as Voice of America or BBC, which represented sources of quality information for Soviet citizens.
However, Morozov argues, this vision is rather a suitable post factum reconstruction, as things should have been, and not as they were in reality. The USSR, as well as the entire system of satellite states set up by Moscow, collapsed under the pressure of complex constellations of economic, social and political factors, where the samizdat had a marginal influence, limited to only some social groups. 

Second, justifies Morozov, Internet technologies entail evolutions that are not only complex, but also contradictory. Logical reductionism of the Internet to a single dynamic - the liberating on - ignores totally the adaptability of online technologies to various cultural, political and religious contexts. Internet tools bring power not only to the oppressed, but also to oppressors. As the old Chinese saying goes, the devil is in the details. Or, the attitude of the world countries towards the Internet should not be perceived only from the traditional perspective: censorship and control. Far from letting themselves be conquered by the liberating energies of the Internet, some authoritarian political regimes learned how to use and manipulate them according to their own interests.
This is what China does, for instance, when it pays to a series of informal agents: bloggers and activists who represent the Chinese Government in the online environment. They send spam messages, disseminate false information and denigrate the opponents. Or, the political leaders of some problematic states use the Internet as a platform for propaganda. This is the case of Dmitri Medvedev, blogger and user of social networks, or Hugo Chavez, very active on Twitter. Thus, the Internet is becoming a tool used by the political power to exert its dominance, impose its viewpoint and minimize the critics’ opinions.
Third, cyber-utopianism commits a factual mistake regarding the users/citizens themselves. The assumption that the online environment only has a liberating effect falls apart at the first encounter with reality. It is true that the virtual environment maintains some networks of activists that plead for democracy (in all its understandings) and human rights. It is also true that Facebook, Twitter and some portals have become live platforms hosting a kind of global e-society. On the other side, a range of world vices - nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, religious intolerances, racism and sexism - have successfully passed into the virtual world and were disseminated globally by the online technologies. Besides the global civil society, on the net one may find the global civil counter-society, dominated by reactionism and resentfulness. “Tweets will not dissolve all of our national, cultural, and religious differences; they may actually accentuate them.” (p. 247)
Other communities, which are religiously conservative, have resorted to voluntary self-isolation from the ocean of information in order to protect the minds and hearts of their members. The most well-known case of such a self-isolation is offered by a religious community from the US, which developed some software to block the access of their members to certain types of content that could undermine their faith (5).

Fourth, justifies Morozov, using the Internet for political purposes – organization, mobilization, discussion – is not the only way to navigate the Internet. Other ways, much more attractive and interesting, are much more widespread on the Internet. Consumerism, for instance. Or escapism. The latter refers to taking refuge in the virtual world in order to flee from the burden of the reality.
In case of consumerism, the things are much more complicated: entertainment is not only stealing people’s time, which could be used for political or community construction activities (hypothesis presented in the 1990’s by another American researcher, Robert Putnam (6), but decreases their interest in politics in general. Under socialism people, states Morozov nicely, “have such hapless apparatchiks running the entertainment industry. People got bored easily and turned to politics instead. Where new media and the Internet truly excel is in suppressing boredom... In a sense, the Internet has made the entertainment experiences of those living under authoritarianism and those living in a democracy much alike. Today’s Czechs watch the same Hollywood movies as today’s Belarusians— many probably even download them from the same illegally run servers somewhere in Serbia or Ukraine. The only difference is that the Czechs already had a democratic revolution, [...]. Meanwhile, the Belarusians were not as lucky”. (p.80)

(Post) Political Utopias
It would have been a mistake to regard the cyber-utopianism, attacked by Morozov, only as a variation of naive thinking. On the whole, those who made their money in Silicon Valley can be called whatever, but not naive or idealists. On the contrary, this type of thinking is inspired by a certain type of pragmatism with old roots in the political philosophies of the continent. Both the Google Doctrine and cyber-utopianism are the most legitimate heirs of the theories that announced in one way or another the arrival of the post-political era. That philosophic fashion had a number of names, technocratism being the best known one.
More recently, cyber-utopianism obtained new allies in the ideology on the End of Ideology (the term belongs to Daniel Bell) or End of History (Francis Fukyama).

In all these cases a good intention was implemented very badly. The good intention was to overcome the ideological separation, eliminate abuses and install some forms of democratic governance in accordance with human rights. The doctrine is inspired by the fear of recurrence of the horrors of ideological confrontations of the 20th century, from an elitist perspective on technology, believing that technology is not only apolitical, but as any supra-politics can condition and determine political developments.

The bad implementation relates to the fact that the conflict generated by the fear of politics and political is resolved mainly by ignoring totally or even annihilating the politics. Or, political divisions are real divisions and conflicts. And in the Internet epoch, ideological conflicts should be solved only through ideological polemics and understandings. Neither the Internet, nor any other technology can be a magic wand that would solve all social conflicts.
Instead of Conclusion
Eventually, any generalization in terms of the Internet risks being a poor and over-simplistic reflection of reality. Because the Internet is not a finite or closed process, but a universe (techno-political-economic-scientific formation) under development, whose future is still unclear. One thing is for sure: the Internet and related technologies will not produce social and political changes on their own, will not overcome totalitarian regimes and will not encourage political mobilizations. The technologies are not operated in a void, but in society. The virtual world cannot replace politics or economics. It is only their extension.

Footnotes. 

1 http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution
2 A summary of the terminology polemics related to the events of 7 April 2009 can be found at: http://www.spranceana.com/2009/04/11/o-istorie-terminologica-a-crizei-moldovenesti/
3 “Twitter revolution” search on Google Scholar returns almost 80 thousand hits, with almost one thousand hits for “twitter revolution Moldova”.
Analyses of the Twitter Revolution in Moldova were published in such important magazines and newspapers as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and others.

4 The remarks can be read in full on the website of the US Department of State at http://www.state.gov

5 See here a case relates to the scientological cult http://www.xenu.net/archive/events/censorship/
6 See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).

This an English translation of a book review published in Mass Media in Moldova (December 2012), a journal published by the Independent Journalism Center, Chișinău. 

on the "depoliticization" of mainstream culture

As an occasional (but not regular) consumer of American mainstream television series such as The Finder,  Castle, The Big Bang Theory and others, I find it difficult to understand why there is almost no politics and political talk in these shows, arguably among the most watched ones. 

I do not remember, for example, any mentions of current political debates and events in the dialogues of Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter and their friends. As if they are living in a parallel California state where talks about cutting university funding are not taking place at all. 

Once in a while Raj will point out to his status as an Indian immigrant who fears being sent back to his home country. And that is all.
It is amazing to think that such an active writing-all-kind-of-stupid-things Sheldon, would not think of writing a protest letter to his candidate, or sending a message to his governor. 

As for Castle and The Finder, these two mention politics only in connection with murders, money laundering and other nefarious things.

What seems to be the most political character of the Castle series, the United States Senator William H. Bracken, is being constructed as an unscrupulous man who has used dirty money in order to finance his campaign and has killed the mother of Johanna Beckett, Kate's mother.

At various points in the series, politics is mentioned neutrally - I am somehow confused of how the two characters could investigate the bombing of "Takeover Wall Street" protest (an euphemism for the real Occupy Wall Street) without making any comments on the movement itself!

Instead, during that episode Becket has a sudden influx of memories concerning her shooting so everything is being moved on the personal scene. 

But most of the times politics is being presented only in negative tones: in another episode the Mayor of New York is being discovered to have operated transfers from charity to electoral funds in order to support his campaign for governor. And so on. 

These two ways of demeaning politics in the entertainment industry - arrogantly (in The Big Bang Theory) and  filthy (in Castle) - contribute to create an image of the "normal", "good" and "moral" world as a place with no politics and political activity at all.  

After all, if politics is so dirty and insignificant, why bother with it in the first place?

representing doesn't mean knowing

A study by David Broockman and Christopher Skovron finds that American politicians from both sides of the political spectrum hold mistaken opinions about the attitudes among their constituents concerning liberal/conservative policy.

Politicians consistently and substantially overestimate support for conservative positions among their constituents on these issues. The differences we discover in this regard are exceptionally large among conservative politicians: across both issues we examine, conservative politicians appear to overestimate support for conservative policy views among their constituents by over 20 percentage points on average. In fact, on each of the issues we examine, over 90% of politicians with conservative views appear to overestimate their constituents’ support for conservative policies. This misperception is so large that nearly half of sitting conservative officeholders appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than the most conservative legislative district in the entire country despite the fact that over half of these officeholders actually support positions more conservative than their own districts’ median voter. Comparable figures for liberal politicians also show a slight conservative bias: in fact, about 70% of liberal officeholders typically underestimate support for liberal positions on these issues among their constituents. These differences by elite ideology persist among all varieties of politicians: those from highly professionalized legislative bodies, those running in competitive elections, and those who have been in office for many years.

via The Daily Dish.