Politics Today Research Articles

Broken Trust: Dysfunctional Government and Constitutional Reform

Stephen M. Griffin has helped redefine the study of constitutional development by calling scholars’ attention to transformations in the fundamental structures and processes of governance. These changes often escape notice because they tend to occur outside the courts and without a formal announcement, yet Griffin demonstrates that to ignore them is to miss crucial features of our constitutional order and its development. His most recent book, Broken Trust: Dysfunctional Government and Constitutional Reform, continues this important project. In Broken Trust, Griffin sets out to demonstrate that a late twentieth-century decline in American citizens’ trust in government (mis)shaped America’s governing institutions and that we should understand this decline as a constitutional problem. He argues that representative government cannot operate effectively in an atmosphere of citizen distrust and that Americans’ lack of trust in the federal government is ultimately responsible for the dysfunctional condition of American politics today. In the first chapter after the introduction, Griffin joins scholars such as Sandy Levinson (author of the book’s interesting foreword) in urging Americans to overcome their instinctive veneration of the federal Constitution in order to grapple with its problems. The chapter explores four “policy disasters” (September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and rising income inequality) to demonstrate that particular features of America’s constitutional order are ultimately responsible for the government’s failure to function effectively.

Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism

In Right Out of California Kathryn S. Olmsted tells two stories. The first is a fascinating narrative of labor activism and New Deal support for agricultural strikes in California in 1933. The second is a less successfully told tale of the development of conservatism in reaction to both the strikes and the federal government's actions. Olmsted argues that Western growers helped to cultivate and nurture the antilabor, antistatist movement that dominates American politics today. By the end of the Depression decade, the philosophy, tactics, and leaders of modern conservatism had emerged in California. (p. 4) The modern Republican party, she claims “came right out of California” (ibid.). Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 but did not extend the collective bargaining rights provided by its section 7a to agricultural workers. Nevertheless, California farm workers on the state's giant factory farms believed the law's broad language extended the freedom to organize to them, just as much as it applied to industrial workers. Long hours, low pay, and brutal living and working conditions made these farm laborers willing to strike, which they did in 1933. Organizers from the communist-led Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union rushed to the Central Valley in response. There, they helped lead a massive strike in the cotton fields. Once growers responded with violence, organizers reached out to the Roosevelt administration for protection against the growers. Surprisingly, George Creel, the administration's representative, extended food aid to the strikers and threatened to cut off federal aid to the growers, a “shocking break from past practice” (p. 69). He convinced both sides to present their arguments to a nonbinding commission, which ultimately decided in the workers’ favor. The administration's actions infuriated growers. In response, they developed a strategy to manage strikes and regain their advantage over labor.

P.C. Chang and the Quest for a Global Ethic

AbstractThis essay aims to describe and analyse the important contributions of the Chinese philosopher and diplomat P.C. Chang concerning the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UDHR). After a brief biographical sketch, Chang's main contributions will be presented and discussed. A study of Chang's contributions in this context may also highlight the ethical potential of the UDHR and its great relevance to global ethics and world politics today.

Female migration and multiculturalism in Extranjeras (Helena Taberna, 2003)

ABSTRACTExtranjeras – a 75-minute documentary made in 2002 by Spanish film director Helena Taberna – offers a collection of interviews in which foreign women living in Madrid talk to the camera about their experiences of immigration and adaptation to their new life in a new country. Taberna focuses on domesticity and cultural traditions but avoids other socio-political realities of female immigration in Spain, including prostitution and sexual exploitation. Instead, I argue, the film takes the viewer on a reassuring journey of multicultural discovery that seems at times more like a pleasurable tourist excursion than a documentary geared to presenting the difficulties and political issues that female migrants from non-Western European countries face in Spain. As Fredric Jameson indicates, we should try to understand the dominant cultural logic against which genuine difference can be assessed, and to project “some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today” (6). Taberna’s documentary, I suggest, represents a certain idea of multiculturalism that promotes a depoliticization of difference, thus diverting attention from forms of oppression suffered by migrants in Spain. I will explore to what extent Taberna reinforces the consensual view that places Western women in a superior position to non-Western women, considering herself responsible for their well-being and liberation.

On Scatter, the Trace Structure, and the Opening of Politics: An Interview with Geoffrey Bennington

On Scatter, the Trace Structure, and the Opening of Politics:An Interview with Geoffrey Bennington Alberto Moreiras (bio) [End Page 34] Geoffrey Bennington was invited to come to Texas A&M University for a discussion of his recently published book Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016) on March 24, 2017. (The commentaries produced by the group of Bennington's interlocutors that day are forthcoming in Política Común, with the exception of Matías Bascuñán's commentary, which is published in this issue of Diacritics.) The next day, when our other guests had left, I was privileged to spend some additional time with Bennington, which allowed me to record the following conversation. Alberto Moreiras: Let me start with a question about a topic that you go into at some length in your book Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida concerning which there are bound to be some misunderstandings given today's political climate. Would you care to expand on the critique of the "politics of truth"? Geoffrey Bennington: The book does not advance a critique of the politics of truth as a general concept or a general issue. I take the phrase from Michel Foucault, who uses it to define philosophy at one point in his late courses, and then I try to show that, at any rate in the way Foucault formulates the issues, his version of a politics of truth, of philosophy as the politics of truth, is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. I do not think his focusing on the concept of parrhesia generates, let's say, a politically perspicuous way of thinking about politics today—and that "today" includes the today of thirty years and more after his late courses. I also think Foucault has always had throughout his work a great deal of trouble motivating—if I can put it like that—his own historical presuppositions. The quick way of saying that, as I write in the book, is that Foucault does not take account of what Derrida reading Heidegger calls "transcendental historicity."1 Foucault is doing a kind of history, but the conditions under which he is able to do that history are never made explicit, and, I think, if one tries to make them explicit, his very project becomes deeply problematic. That is one set of problems with Foucault. Even assuming he did not have those problems, what is very striking in the (very interesting) analysis of parrhe-sia—there are several striking things—is that Foucault first of all uses parrhe-sia to develop a notion of truth as to do with the very gesture of speaking, so that the parrhesiast speaks the truth not in the sense that we can go somewhere else to test whether what he says is true: simply the enunciative or quasi-performative gesture is, intrinsically as it were, a gesture of truth-telling. However, Foucault is keenly aware in some of the texts he reads (and he has some, I think unsatisfactory, attempts here and there to historicize these problems away), that that gesture of parrhe-sia always might be misleading, it always might not be truth-telling, it always might be a "bad" form of parrhesia, as he himself says reading Plato,2 and this need that he has to distinguish parrhesia into a good form and a bad form obviously provokes the question, which I do not think he ever raises, still less answers, as to what parrhesia might be prior to that distinction between good and bad forms of it. [End Page 35] It is not hard to see that with this distinction between what he sometimes calls "true parrhesia" and its "shadowy double"—what he sometimes calls good and bad par-rhe-sia—that with it he leaves the status of the concept "itself" unclear, and that shows up symptomatically and repeatedly in the late seminars, in the way Foucault defers dealing with the issue of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. Because after all parrhesia is the name of a rhetorical figure, in Quintilian for example—as Foucault mentions in passing but...

Wild Democracy: A Biodiversity of Resistance and Renewal

Might the theory and practice of liberal representative democracy need to be rethought in and for the ‘Anthropocene’? What resources are available when trying to orientate oneself in radical political space today? In this paper, the authors draw on varieties of anarchism and Marxism to develop a new, ecocentric political sensibility and practice, which they call ‘wild democracy’. Calling for a ‘biodiversity of resistance and renewal’, this signifies an eco-egalitarian politics that privileges grassroots participation over parliamentary representation, with the aim of transcending capitalism and initiating a degrowth process of planned economic contraction. Focusing attention beyond the ballot box, this analysis attempts to rethink the meaning of political participation in an age of ecological crisis and deepen the understanding of what it means to be an ecological citizen today.

A postmodern mandala? Moving beyond methodological nationalism

The colonial translation of the “nation-state logic” to Southeast Asia is commonly understood to have superseded what O.W. Wolters called the pre-colonial mandala model, in which power was exerted by a sort of central “sun king” whose gravitational pull weakened with distance and was overlapped by other spheres of power in a complex system of tributary relationships. The historian David Biggs has argued that, in accepting the undeniable importance of national sovereignty in contemporary political analyses of Southeast Asia, there has been too definitive a break with pre-existing understandings of power relations, which may prove useful to explaining the particularities of politics today. In political science, the translation of nationalism and sovereignty to Southeast Asia is reflected in an entrenched “methodological nationalism,” whereby the nation-state is frequently taken for granted as the central unit of analysis. Paying attention to the “margins” of society still implicitly assumes a national centre, for example. Historians of Vietnam, including Keith Taylor and Li Tana, have made significant advances in loosening the “stranglehold” of nationalist historiography. Anthropologists and geographers of cosmopolitanism and migration have also long questioned the analytical usefulness of bordered nation-states. Building on these insights, the article calls for a paradigm shift in political enquiry and playfully proposes the “post-modern mandala” as an alternative to methodological nationalism applied to Southeast Asia.

Contemporary Mamactivist Artists: A Forum on Maternal Activist Art for the Studies in the Maternal Special Issue on The Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work, Summer 2016

This special forum for Studies in the Maternal asks fourteen activist-mother-artists, or “mamactivists”, to respond to the following questions: (1) When and why did you start making activist/political work on the maternal? (2) What reception/reaction did you receive for the work? (3) What is the latest activist/political work you have made on the maternal? (4) What shifts do you see from this first work to this last work? and (5) Why is the maternal, in your opinion, important to activist, engaged, political art today? Responses highlight a range of geographic and cultural perspectives, as well as artistic strategies. One commonality between them is that they take the maternal not as a biological facticity, but a rich feminist site of political intervention.

Politik Hukum Pengaturan Unsur Pimpinan Partai Politik

Political party is a precondition for democracy. Political party should receive public trust to exist as the people’s representative. Indonesian politics today distrusts the political party. Because of commiting criminal offense such as corruption, many politicians are prosecuted. To respond this situasion, the dignity of the political party needs to be restored. This article recommends that requirements of political party leader should be regulated in legislation. Political party leader should have moral and ethics capability higher than its regular member. Furthermore, this article also recommends that the Law Number 2 of 2008 should be amended to accommodate this research finding.

The construction of citizenship and the public provision of electricity during the 2014 World Cup in Ghana

ABSTRACTWhy did the Ghanaian state go to such extraordinary lengths to facilitate the reliable broadcast of the World Cup in 2014? During a period of frequent power outages, Ghana swapped power with regional neighbours and directed major domestic industries to reduce production in order to allow Ghanaians to watch their national soccer team compete in the World Cup. This paper investigates the politics of the public service provision of electricity in Ghana. We focus on the short-term crisis during the 2014 World Cup to reveal the citizens' and politicians' expectations about electricity as a public good. Drawing on an analysis of archival documents, Ghanaian newspapers, and interviews with government, business, and NGO officials in the energy sector, we argue that the Ghanaian state historically has created the expectation of electricity as a right of national citizenship and explore how this intersects with competitive party politics today.

PERANAN DAN SIKAP TRANSFORMASI POLITIK ULAMA DALAM MENGHADAPI PEMILU 2014 DI ACEH

Cleric is a person who always used various references in Acehnese society especially in politics today. Even now, most local political parties participated also pioneered by some scholars communities in Aceh. The role and attitude of the clergy in the face of the year 2014 election greatly affect the performance of legislative policy on the future, because the legislature is as representative of the general public. With the implementation of Qanun in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam (NAD) policy concerning both national parties (Pamas) and local political parties (Parlok) has contributed and a more mature understanding of politics, because the phenomenon will occur in the 2014 election ahead is a form of democracy the general public. Surely democracy must apply the principle of the system or if only to push forward or succeed to be submitted a candidate, is one of the 2014 elections itself. So that all policies of public interest can be accepted and applied in different elements of the community through the election to be held.

Book Review: Nancy S Love and Mark Mattern (eds), Studying Politics Today: Critical Approaches to Political Science

Book Review: Nancy S Love and Mark Mattern (eds), <i>Studying Politics Today: Critical Approaches to Political Science</i>

Sovereign Violence and the Power of Acting – (Imagining the Unsovereign Law)

Starting from Kant’s distinction between private and public reason, the idea is to challenge the meaning of political intervention today, political discourse. What is to be a scholar in the digital age? What are the limits of the law, and how can one speak of an alternative, unsovereign law? What is to resist subjection and build the new? True maturity and freedom cannot be reconciled with blind obedience and docility in the private sphere. Only lives guided by reason in Spinoza’s sense can overcome the logics of coercion and consent, both leading into subjection and servitude. Yet, for this, it is necessary to think about the role of contingency and the desire for freedom.

Historicizing social inequality: A Victorian archive for contemporary moral discourse

Starting from the uniformity of moral statements about social inequality during the Obama presidency, this article historicizes those statements by analyzing an archive of discourse drawn from Victorian England. Despite its distance in time and place, the archive reveals striking commonalities with the terms and phrases that invariably populate debates about social inequality in the American political field today. Drawing on critical theories of the archive, this article leverages those commonalities for the hermeneutic purpose of historicizing moral discourse. As I argue, moral statements like “equality of opportunity” and “equality of reward/outcome” resulted from the application of civil ideas and oppositions to interpret phenomena like poverty and social inequality during the eventful history of the Victorian period. The findings challenge T.H. Marshall’s classic argument about the origin of social rights as descendent of civil rights. The article concludes by discussing the broader implications of historicizing moral discourse, demonstrating the reflexive use of the archive to engage in a politics of meaning about social inequality.

Black Lives Matter and the Struggle for Freedom

In late April 2016, at a town hall-style event in London, President Obama complained about the rising movement against the state-sanctioned murder of black people often referred to as Black Lives Matter. Activists, he admonished, should "stop yelling" and instead push for incremental change through the official "process."… The spectacle of the first black president scolding black activists in the context of a rising rate of police murder (as of this writing, the police have killed 630 individuals, at least 155 of them black, nationwide in 2016) speaks volumes about the state of black politics today.… For those trying to understand the emergence of a new black movement—or, perhaps more accurately, a new phase of a longer, older movement—on the watch of the first black president, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's new book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential starting point.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Shining Light on Dark Politics: An Essay and Review

AbstractMax J. Skidmore considers the state of anti‐poverty legislation and programs in the United States, as well as the general condition of American politics today. In the course of his essay, he reviews a number of relevant studies and describes the dark forces that are explicitly attacking programs that improve the lives of Americans. He discusses the imposition of “dark money” throughout the American political system that has replaced truth with lies and warped perceptions, and distorted the “will of the people.” Setting aside gentility and the natural tendency to want to avoid giving offense, he directs blame, and concludes that these “dark forces” have brought the country to a perilous position by having distorted and clouded “centrist” opinions. He demonstrates, nevertheless, that counterforces have emerged, and are becoming stronger. He recommends a course of action: citizens must become sensitive to “false equivalency” and other arguments that obscure reality. Moreover, however as counterintuitive as it appears, the dynamics of American politics demand a frankly partisan approach with straight‐ticket voting.

Marxism and Psychiatry: Rethinking Mental Health Politics for the Twenty-First Century

The republication of Peter Sedgwick’s book Psychopolitics – 34 years after its first appearance – is a significant event in what is still a backwater of political activism. Sedgwick’s subject was mental illness and, more widely, the psychiatric system of medicalized care for those so diagnosed. For Sedgwick, this represented a neglected but important aspect of social life as sufferers were to be numbered in their millions worldwide and psychiatric welfare apparatuses were a ubiquitous, if largely invisible (in 1982), feature of capitalist states. Sedgwick’s contribution as a Marxist intellectual and activist was to bring to bear a dialectical mode of analysis to surveying this system and the experience of mental illness and, suitably brought up to date, it retains its political relevance today.

Talk “Like a Man”: The Linguistic Styles of Hillary Clinton, 1992–2013

Hillary Clinton is arguably the most prominent woman in American politics today. Past research suggests female politicians conform to masculine communication styles in an attempt to evade the “double bind.” Clinton’s long and varied career thus provides an important and useful case study for investigating how female politicians present themselves strategically. Drawing on research in political psychology, political communication, social psychology, and linguistics I examine whether Clinton talked “like a man” as she navigated a path toward political leadership by conducting a quantitative textual analysis of 567 interview transcripts and candidate debates between 1992–2013. Results on Clinton’s linguistic style suggest her language grew increasingly masculine over time, as her involvement and power in politics expanded. I also consider Clinton’s language in the context of her 2007–2008 presidential campaign. In 2007, Clinton’s linguistic style was consistently masculine, supporting widespread accounts of Clinton’s campaign strategy. Beginning in late 2007, however, Clinton’s language became more feminine, reflecting a shift in the self-presentational strategies advised by her campaign staff. Throughout the 2008 campaign period, Clinton’s language fluctuated dramatically from one interview to the next, reflecting a candidate—and campaign—in crisis. This study reveals hidden insight into the strategies Clinton used as she navigated through the labyrinth toward leadership. Changes in Clinton’s linguistic style reflect the performance of gendered roles, expectations of political leaders, and the masculine norms of behavior that permeate political institutions.

Transforming habit: revolution, routine and social change

ABSTRACTCompelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.

Islamism, Muslims and Politics: State as Nafs Al Ammarah

Fiqh, which is the most influential factor for the minds of the Muslims, could not develop effective assumptions and norms in matters such as democracy, pluralism, equal recognition of all and respect for the rights of others. There are jurists and thinkers such as Fethullah Gulen who are not so few in number who struggle to change this but the results of these efforts have not yet reached the level orthodoxy dignity and prevalence. This leads to a kind of schizophrenic mental split for politics in many religious minds. In simple terms, the understanding of Today’s conditions are not suitable. Let's pursue democratic politics today, but let's implement the patrimonial fiqh when we find opportunity stands in a compartment of the brain as a subliminal fact that many religious people are not even aware of. In Islam, the legal schools, or maddhabs, each formed in a similar way independently of the state and individuals began following the views of a leader of a maddhab, with their own subjective judgments and self-determination. While those legal schools attracting a significant number of followers continued, those which were for different reasons unable or find or retain followers did not survive the test of time and remained were relegated to history (Yilmaz 2005c). In the end, if logic operates even in such a sensitive field as jurisprudence, which entails many relevant rulings directly from the primary sources themselves, is it too much to ask that a similar logic be brought into play in social and political issues about which only such basic principles as fair governance, rule of law, freedoms and human rights can be found in the primary sources, and the details of which are left to the particular time and milieu of individuals as a means for their trial and examination? Jurists who are familiar with social sciences and methodology should state opinions and try to popularize and functionalize them in matters such as democracy, pluralism, opposition, legitimacy of the government change, equality, human rights and criticism by benefiting from instruments such as makasid. Otherwise, the power of the religious will be nothing more than the power of the those who do second-class treatment to the ones who are not like them.