Introduction: A Democracy of Hope: The Stubborn Legacy of Struggle (original) (raw)

Telling a New Story of Democracy, 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture, Arizona State University

2019 IHR Distinguished Humanities Lecture, ASU, 2019

This 2019 Distinguished Humanities Lecture for the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University argues that there is a difference between a bottom up citizen movement addressing collective crises such as the Great Depression with government as catalyst and partner, and a top-down mobilization by government, affiliated with dominant understandings of proposals for a "Green New Deal," as well as socialism and progressive politics. I argue that how the democratic possibilities and productive potentialities of "the people" are developed is the great question of the age. In this lecture I argue possibilities that public arts and humanities are crucial wellsprings of a new story of "we the people." The lecture draws on earlier theoretical work on populism, especially the essay, "Populism and the Left," for the journal democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change, making the case that populism has expansive democratic possibilities because the concept of "the people" is far more open and pluralist in political possibilities than politics deriving from the ways in which groups are organized (or oppressed) in modern societies such as class, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, geography. It also makes the argument that, in democratic and political terms, the human person is best seen as a co-creators of communities and a societies -- a way of seeing expressed in the concept of "public work," developed in essays such as "Constructive Politics as Public Work," in the journal Political Theory, and "Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work," a working paper for the Kettering Foundation. Public work was at the center of the democratic energies and spirit of the New Deal and the civil rights movement, and needs to animate democratic movements to address collective crises of our time such as climate change.

Introduction: Organizing hope: Narratives for a better future

Organizing Hope, 2019

According to thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman (2017a) and Wolfgang Streeck (2016), the current social world is ruled by a crumbling, morbid system. Old social institutions are failing and no new ones have yet emerged. This state in between ruling institutions has been labeled the interregnum by Bauman (2012), using Antonio Gramsci's metaphor. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (Gramsci, 1971, p. 276), Gramsci foretold. Rather than literally denoting an era after the death of one sovereign yet before the enthronement of a new monarch, in today's late global capitalism an interregnum denotes "times of uncertainty, and while [it is] raising many questions, three of them seem particularly pertinent to address at a time when rulers no longer can rule and the ruled no longer wish to be ruled: institutional disparity, the future of migrants and the endurability of the planet" (Bauman, 2012, p. 51). The structures that once supported collective social action (Bauman, 2012) and which enabled more or less smooth self-regulation of economic mechanisms (Streeck, 2016) have lost their taken-for-granted character and often reveal their powerlessness to solve any of the mounting problems that face humanity and the planet. The usual resourcefulness and responsibility that seemed to be found at the bottom of modernity are giving way to direct violence and what looks like a relentless raid on the common good, blatant malice, greed, mounting fear, uncertainty and a sense of powerlessness. Humanity seems to have betrayed its values or, with the rapid dismantling and discarding of the institutions that once held memory and social identity, such as academia and eldership, it may even look as if it never really had them, as if it all were a dream or a lie. Humans however depend on making sense of the world and life, perhaps as much as on nourishing their bodies for survival and so on. In times of rabid meaninglessness, we fill the unbearable void with whatever we are able to find, such as simplified and idolized images of "what it used to be

Politics: Tomorrow's values may be more radical than we think

Critical Quarterly, 1997

The unspoken but dominant wisdom in contemporary politics ± at least up to May 1997 ± is that each succeeding generation drifts further to the right. The absence of an engagement by young people with politics is deplored by middle-aged commentators in the liberal press who fondly recall their revolutionary vapourings at university in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1968 generation will go down in history as the most useless, self-indulgent, whinging, narcissistic bunch of good-for-nothings in world history. They inherited the best combination of democratic rights, economic well-being, and social protection known to history and utterly squandered it. The courtiers and creeps of France's ancien re Âgime in the late eighteenth century were models of progress and sensibility by comparison. Daniel Cohn-Bendit invited the students of the late 1960s and 1970s to undertake their long march through the institutions, and the result is there for all to see. Whether in business, in academe, in art or in Tory government, the reign of the meretricious, the poseurs, the turncoats and the glib phrase-and image-makers has conquered all. Since the 1968 generation got its hands on power and control over money, the world has got steadily worse, meaner, and more divided. The heroism of the fighters for democracy in South Africa or East Europe has been squandered and wasted as those in power in Washington and Brussels failed day by day to rise to the challenge of creating new institutional structures to consolidate the post-dictatorship societies. Across the Atlantic or Channel there is nowhere a hint of a George Marshall or a Charles de Gaulle. Sacrifice, discipline, responsibility, cooperation are gros mots ± swearwords ± for the 1968 generation. Whether of the Mitterrand±Clinton so-called left or the Thatcher±Gingrich right, the revolutionaries turned bankers, ministers and editors have added no value to the world save to their private bank balances. The problem of generation is now a major source of discomfort as the new political e Âlite in Britain seeks to find its bearings and to awaken

No more anger and fear: The inspirational vocabulary of contentious politics

Studies on literature, discourse and multicultural dialogue, 2013

The article holds that along with the media paradigm shift, a new generation emerged, a more balanced, awake and participatory one. Its core is represented by tech savvy citizens with both a social and an international conscience, fueled by global interconnectivity. The model of Media Related New Humanism, designed by UNESCO specialists in 2010, is tested. The model implies that new media technologies conduce to a more critical thinking, more socially responsible and more humanity-conscious society. The present research analyzed the change rate of balanced discourse published by citizen journalists connected to authoritarian states phenomena. A longitudinal analysis showed that over a period of five years, no significant change was registered, and the balance of discourse was rather stable. Citizen journalists who are writing for an international public are the most representative figures of the new generation regarded by the new humanism model. To avoid the bias which appears when samples are collected from a liberal society, which is prone to enhance autonomy and personal responsibility, there were purposely selected samples of citizen journalists from Russia and Iran, which are states with a high degree of authoritarianism. Results indicated that people with both a social and an international conscience hold their balanced view even when they are subjected to a repressive reality. The implications are discussed, as Millennial Generation conceptual description is not to be applied exclusively to the western world, but to the worldwide youth.