MITPressLog

The 2012 Debates: What We've Seen and What to Expect

Mike Edwards, coauthor of Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well, analyzes the first Presidential and Vice Presidential debates and tells us what to expect for the debates still to come. 

 

Common wisdom says that Mitt Romney won the first debate because he was “energetic” while the President appeared “lethargic.” It certainly destroys any lingering myth that presidential elections are about actual policy; despite the best efforts of the fact-checkers, impression trumps policy every time. Besides, let’s be honest: most people would rather not have a drawn-out discussion of tax plans. Big Bird’s possible unemployment is so much more amusing.

Overall, the debate was about as interesting and informative as a 90 minute lecture on macroeconomics given by a C student.  

 At least the Vice Presidential Debate had some fireworks. Of course, the “policy debate” still came down to dueling platitudes and mischaracterizations, and it will have less impact on voters than an Election Day rainstorm over Ohio and Pennsylvania. But it made for good television; and, honestly, that’s what both the media and the voters really care about.

Now the focus is back on the top of the ticket. Moving forward, the worry for the candidates is that Romney’s performance was not as dominant, and Obama’s not as bad, as many pundits have been portraying. It isn’t entirely the media’s fault: we would all rather hear about “Obama’s Debacle” than about “Obama’s Mediocre Performance.” But this creates danger. Governor Romney must now deal with raised expectations. People may now expect him to dominate each of the next two debates in a way that he didn’t really dominate the first one. Romney’s campaign needs to dampen expectations as much as possible, lest he find himself facing an impossible hurdle. Meanwhile, President Obama has to avoid overreacting to his mistakes. His basic strategy was sound: be the more likable candidate, avoid major gaffes, and let Romney make his own mistakes. Just do it with a bit more zest.  

Atari 2600 Turns 35

Happy 35th Birthday, Atari! Here's a toast (in the form of an excerpt) from Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's Racing the Beam.

 

 

 

Although it was not the first home videogame console, the Atari VCS was the first wildly popular one. It was affordable at the time, and it offered the flexibility of interchangeable cartridges. The popularity of the Atari VCS--which was the dominant system for years and remained widely used for more than a decade--supported the creation of nearly one thousand games, many of which established techniques, mechanics, or entire genres that continue to thrive today on much more technologically advanced platforms. Although several companies fielded consoles, by 1981 the Atari VCS accounted for 75 percent of home videogame system sales. Indeed, the generic term for a videogame system in the early 1980's was 'an Atari.'

...Obviously, the Atari VCS is a cherished relic. Although no longer manufactured in its original form, it remains a living fossil. An article in Time in 2001 described the console's continued life after the turn of the century: "At '80s-themed parties it's common to see a 2600 wired to the TV set and guests jumping at the chance to rediscover their first video game experience." The VCS consoles have continued to come out to play, for instance, for celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the system in late 2007. Just as a practice like letterpress printing is a contemporary, ongoing activity in addition to being the dominant method of printing from times past, the Atari VCS is admirable for its historical role in video gaming while it remains playable and programmable today.

On a related note, check out this Atari commercial from 1978:

 

Monday Eye Candy: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Happy Monday! Today's eye candy is from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Our Kind of Movie"

October is LGBT History Month. Last Friday, we posted an excerpt from Louis-Georges Tin’s The Invention of Heterosexual Culture. Today’s post is an excerpt from Douglas Crimp’s “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol.

 

 

 

Just as shame is both productive and corrosive of queer identity, the switching point between stage fright and stage presence, between being a wallflower and being a diva, so too is it simultaneously productive and corrosive of queer revaluations of dignity and worth.

In his book about the banishment of sex from contemporary queer politics, The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner argues that we need to “develop an ethical response to the problem of shame.” “The difficult question is not: how do we get rid of our sexual shame?” Warner writes. “The question, rather, is this: what will we do with our shame? And the usual response is: pin it on someone else.”

How does this work, performatively? Sedgwick explains: “The absence of an explicit verb from ‘Shame on you’ records the place in which an I, in conferring shame, has effaced itself and its own agency. Of course the desire for self-effacement is the defining trait of–what else?–shame. So the very grammatical truncation of ‘Shame on you’ marks it as a product of a history out of which an I, not withdrawn is projecting shame–toward another I, an I deferred, that has yet and with difficulty to come into being, if at all, in the place of the shamed second person.

Saying “Shame on you” or “For shame” casts shame onto another that is both felt to be one’s own, and, at the same time, disavowed as one’s own. But in those already shamed, the shame-prone, the shame is not so easily shed or so simply projected: It manages also to persist as one’s own. This can lend it the capacity for articulating collectivities of the shamed. Warner explains,

"A relation to others [in queer contexts] begins in an acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. Queers can be abusive, insulting, and vile toward one another, but because abjection is understood to be the shared condition they also know how to communicate through such comradery a moving and unexpected form of generosity. No one is beneath its reach, not because it prides itself on generosity but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you. At its best, this ethic cuts against every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room. Queer scenes are the true salons des refuses, where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality."

The sad thing about the contemporary politics of gay and lesbian pride is that it works in precisely the opposite way: It calls for a visibility predicated on homogeneity and on excluding anyone who does not conform to norms that are taken to be the very morality we should be happy to accept as the onus of our so-called maturity. It thus sees shame as conventional indignity rather than the affective substrate necessary to the transformation of one’s distinctiveness into a queer kind of dignity. This is why the queer culture of the 1960s, made visible in Warhol’s films, is so necessary a reminder of what we need to know how.

Social Learning in Democratic Elections

What does social learning have to do with presidential elections? Mark Earls, coauthor of I’ll Have What She’s Having, explains.

 

 

 

 

There are few things in the world that better evidence the importance of social learning—the I’ll Have What She’s Having (IHWSH) effect of our book of the same title—than democratic elections, particularly presidential elections. At the same time, they reveal our culture’s deep ambivalence about IHWSH and copying.

We tell ourselves that pursuing our democratic rights means each and every one of us having our own private say on who should be leading us and spending our tax dollars, but the lengths we go to in order to ensure that the votes we cast are indeed the votes of free and independently-minded individuals suggest that we suspect that human nature might be working in the other direction. Consider the privacy of the polling booth, the elaborate machinery we develop to reduce human error (and the complex human protocols to ensure there is none), the (debatable) limits on campaign expenditure, the labyrinthine procedural legal frameworks within which we manage the Great Big Vote. 

Indeed, many countries go further: for example, the UK is one of those countries in which exit polls may not be published while the polls are still open. Germany and India are unlikely bedfellows, but both are tougher still—they have strict limits on the publication of opinion polls of any sort in the latter stages of elections.

And rightly so. Whether or not lawmakers behind this legal framework realized what they were doing, both of these types of banned information syntheses provide the rest of us with an example to follow—in uncertain decision-landscapes (as the jargon has it), they provide very good proxies for “what she’s having.”

Indeed, despite our best efforts, support for political parties and candidates is a very social phenomenon. Hence the heavy use in our politics of rallies (large gatherings of enthusiasts which give the impression of popularity), celebrity and VIP endorsements (former Presidents and Hollywood A-listers, please form an orderly line), and our obsession with the ever-elusive “momentum” that spin doctors seek for their candidate—momentum is a reflection of which way other people (including the media pundits) are shifting in their views and intentions. Again, a great shorthand for working out where to land your own vote.

Hence also the notion of “class” (i.e. group or tribal) politics and political views as a badge of shared social identity. Indeed, the depth of political divide, which the last few years in Washington has been characterized, is a reflection of a larger tribalization of opinions and culture across the US. As Bill Bishop’s excellent The Big Sort points out, we have sorted ourselves out into mutually misunderstanding and mistrusting electorates.

Another big clue to the importance of #IHWSH in shaping US politics is the clustering of opinions and positions around issues— Low Taxes, Small State, Gun Control, and Right to Life all seem to go together because they have come to reflect a group identity. Most discussions or debates on these issues immediately defaults to the preset position of those involved; sometimes, as Bishop points out, even encouraging a more extreme position thanks to what social psychologists call the “risky shift.”

Oscar Wilde was mostly right when he observed,“…most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

The difference between Oscar and us is that we don’t see this as essentially a bad thing (he despaired of the common man’s lack of originality). In our view, in politics as in life, IHWSH is large part of how we decide, when we’re left to our own individual—social—devices. 

The Invention of Heterosexual Culture

October is LGBT History Month. We'll be posting about a few of our related titles each Friday in October. Today's post is an excerpt from The Invention of Heterosexual Culture by Louis-Georges Tin.

 

 

 

The belief that heterosexual love was the most natural thing in the world was accorded widespread acceptance and approval as the twentieth century progressed. Even so, the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis soon called the notion into question.

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality published in 1905, Sigmund Freud argued the probability that heterosexuality was not a given:

Thus from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.

Far from being natural in biological or biochemical terms, therefore, heterosexuality and homosexuality were, in Freud’s submission, functions of an individual’s personal psychic makeup.

In his discussion of “polymorphously perverse” infantile bisexuality, Freud argued that heterosexuality was the result of a long and arduous psychic apprenticeship extending far back into earliest childhood. This assertion subsequently appeared elsewhere in his work, where he argued that “normal sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object.” In other words, although never going to the lengths that psychiatry once had and dismissing heterosexuality as a pathological condition, psychoanalysis was at pains to show that it was not an inborn characteristic. Analysis of every single complex—not least the Oedipus variety—tended to confirm this. Despite broad dissemination and awareness of psychoanalytical theory, however, the vast majority of the public (and most psychoanalysts) remained unaware of the notion that heterosexuality or, indeed, homosexuality was an acquired condition.

Job Creation Discussion Has to Come from the Bottom-Up

 

 

This week's Election Tuesday post is by Robert Pollin, author of Back to Full Employment. Pollin tackles the issue of job creation, claiming that the real discussion about rebuilding the economy around job opportunity creation will have to come not from the candidates, but from an engaged citizenry.

 

 

As a result of the 2008-09 Wall Street crash and Great Recession, employment conditions in the United States have been worse than at any time since the 1930s Depression. As of the most recent August data, the official unemployment rate is 8.1 percent. A better official measure—which includes people who have been discouraged from looking for work and those taking part-time jobs (sometimes very part-time) when they wanted full time—puts unemployment as of August at 14.7 percent. That is 23 million people, nearly double the combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles.

Based on historical experience, a U.S. president running for reelection would be tossed out by voters in the face of such disastrous employment figures. But polls show that President Obama is maintaining a small but firm edge over Mitt Romney, and that, if anything, the margin is widening with time.

In part, we can attribute this to both Romney’s ineptitude as a candidate and to the hard-right politics advanced by Tea Party Republicans. But even accounting for these factors, I would still venture that, while most voters do not believe that Obama and the Democrats offer anything close to a coherent plan for overcoming mass unemployment, they also understand that the Republicans—with their full throttle embrace of an austerity agenda—have even less to offer.

The situation was different during the 2008 Presidential campaign. At that time, Obama’s “hope” mantra conveyed, if only vaguely, that he had a serious platform for counteracting the financial crisis and recession. The fact is, Obama did indeed have a plan and he managed to implement significant parts of it soon after taking office in 2009.  His big initiatives were the $800 billion stimulus program and the auto industry bailout. For all their deficiencies, these programs did succeed to a substantial extent. The problem was that the full magnitude of the financial collapse was beyond what the Obama team had estimated (and, full disclosure, beyond what I myself had initially calculated). In addition, Obama gave himself little room to maneuver beyond these initial actions, primarily because he kept trying too hard to avoid offending the Wall Street crowd. 

The moment cries out for serious discussions throughout the country on how to dig out of the ditch Wall Street has shoved the economy, and how to rebuild the economy around a commitment to creating decent job opportunities for everyone. Don’t expect to hear much about this during the rest of the campaign. The real discussion will have to come from the bottom up, from an engaged citizenry, pushing to create the foundations of a decent U.S. society.

Monday Eye Candy: Being Nuclear

Today's eye candy is from Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade by Gabrielle Hecht. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A 1952 Union Carbide magazine ad promised a beautiful atomic future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Far-fetched depictions of how radiation exposure might change the human race expressed the inherent ambiguities in 1950s atomic fantasies. (Mechanix Illustrated, December 1953)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace speech to the United Nations was carefully staged as a major world event. (UN photo by MB)

 

 

 

 

Aerial view of open uranium pit at Roessing, 2004. (Photo: Paul Edwards)