Saving Private Godward (7-1-21)

00:00 Saving Private Ryan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Private_Ryan
01:30 Justin Martyr’s Dialog with Trypho, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spv_T4QE9Ow
03:00 Justin the Martyr, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Martyr
05:00 Fruit of the Holy Spirit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_Holy_Spirit
36:45 Justin Martyr by Andrew Hayes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scmdaGIteNo
1:07:00 Justin Martyr and the Jews, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1453625
1:14:00 The motivations of Leo Strauss, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140778
1:53:00 Germany’s neo-nazis and the Far Right, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/germanys-neo-nazis-the-far-right/
2:29:00 CNN: “Anti-Semitism Gaining Traction in the US”
2:37:00 Rabbi Stabbed Outside Shalom House Synagogue In Brighton
2:39:00 Stephen Kotkin: Taiwan, geopolitical tension and China’s inevitable rise in indices, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fFxhqT7d4Y
2:51:00 Goddess Dr. Jill Biden
3:04:00 Charles Murray Uncut, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8mWxWfblfw
4:03:00 Richard Spencer vs Judas Maccabeus debate Zionism on the Killstream, https://odysee.com/@theralphretort:1/richard-spencer-vs-judas-maccabeus-killstream:a

Posted in America, Christianity, Jews | Comments Off on Saving Private Godward (7-1-21)

‘Considering an Author’s Background in Relation to His Unstated Motivations’

Godward writes:

Yes, we should think about Melville & Heraclitus’s personal background if we really want to understand their thinking. Yet, for some reason, if we apply this same logic to someone like Leo Strauss, people get a lot more sensitive. Where was Strauss from? What major events in politics & war defined his early & middle life? How might his Jewishness, for example, shape his interpretation of Plato and of Thucydides — and how might his exile from his birthplace, and his being unable to find work in England because he was Jewish, have shaped his teaching when he finally found work in academia in America?

These seem like reasonable questions to me — but if we arrive at a hunch that his personal experience gave him cause to subvert or work to change certain definitions or even to deceive students for his own benefit, or for the benefit of other exiles, etc., well — that seems all the sudden more controversial.

There are many books and articles about Leo Strauss that examine these very questions. Did Godward look at them? Did he even look for them? If he did, he should state that. If he did not, he should state that. The honest man won’t proclaim we can’t talk about things that many scholars publicly discuss.

Leo Strauss was from Germany, he escaped the Nazis, and he wanted to create a world safe for Jews. Strauss praised religion but was an atheist and did not practice Judaism. He praised Zionism as he thought it was wonderful for Jews to pursue their ethnic interests, but he had no interest in living in Israel and he thought it would be awful if Europeans pursued their ethnic interests. Strauss thought that Jews being conscious of their race was wonderful but if Europeans were conscious of their race, that was terrible. Strauss thought that Christianity, in moderation and so long as it did not inconvenience Jews, was good. His thinking boiled down to — is it good for the Jews?

Stephen Turner notes: “One cannot really understand the Frankfurt School, or Leo Strauss, or Hans Kelsen, or Hans Morgenthau, without understanding what they both absorbed and rejected from [Carl] Schmitt.”

In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, “Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.” That sounds like Godward.

Steve Sailer wrote in 2005:

…the importance of extra-rational charisma in the appeal of egomaniacal, messianic intellectuals like Marx and Freud to younger Jewish students. Over the last 150 years, secular Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly reproduced the traditional brilliant rabbi-student relationship in launching powerful cults. Among the more recent examples have been Ayn Rand (see Murray N. Rothbard’s hilarious 1972 article “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult“), Susan Sontag (see Terry Castle’s hilarious 2005 article “Desperately Seeking Susan“), and Leo Strauss (see the unintentionally hilarious 2003 article “What Leo Strauss Was Up To” by two true believers, William Kristol and Steven Lenzer).

From the book Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America by Paul Gottfried: “This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. According to this study, Strauss and his disciples came to influence the establishment Right almost by accident. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of “value relativism,” which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be “conservatives.” Strauss’s followers continue to view themselves as stalwart Truman-Kennedy Democrats and liberal internationalists. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and “timeless” values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary.”

Posted in Leo Strauss | Comments Off on ‘Considering an Author’s Background in Relation to His Unstated Motivations’

New York’s Mayoral Race (6-30-21)

00:00 Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140750
21:00 New York Times investigates Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/jan-6-capitol-attack-takeaways.html
25:00 The Politics Of The Word And The Politics Of The Eye, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=140729
1:56:20 Tucker Carlson on New York mayoral election
2:08:00 Mark Levin Launches BRUTAL Attack On Tucker Carlson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3KzPqLIT5U
2:17:00 Jason Kessler
2:20:00 Ramzpaul responds to Karlyn Borysenko on CRT

Posted in New York | Comments Off on New York’s Mayoral Race (6-30-21)

Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco

Something awful happens. Do you immediately jump to conspiracy thinking? Or do you first suspect incompetence? I first suspect incompetence (unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary, such as two planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9-11).

I am not an expert on voter fraud but I do like the challenge of reading what the experts say, and then comparing their views with one another and with popular accounts.

I notice that many skeptics of the 2020 election results are seizing on New York City’s latest vote counting problems as evidence that the voter fraud experts quoted in the media are not up to snuff.

A friend says:

It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination. They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent. The fact that 135,000 votes run as a test were maintained in the computerized total and would have remained undiscovered except that Adams started questioning them (and was roundly criticized for doing that) says it all. I am not saying that Trump won the election. All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based. That specific claims of fraud were debunked don’t seem to get anywhere near the issues that occurred in the NYC mayoral election.

You were appropriately skeptical of the Trump claims of fraud, but you have uncritically accepted the assertions of the election integrity’s defenders. Of course that is inconsistent with the attacks on the 2016 results in which Trump won and with the criticisms of computerized voting which Democratic senators raised a year before the 2020 election. The experts you relied on may be right on particular claims by those who challenge the results, but on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong.

When I looked at the most prominent claims for massive voter fraud in the 2020 American elections, I found that all the claims fell apart upon examination. I don’t claim that voter fraud has not played a significant role in American elections, rather, I propose that all arguments that voter fraud has played a large role in recent American elections fall apart upon examination. I’m waiting to read a strong case for massive voter fraud in 2020.

“Voter fraud” means many things to many people. For example, “voter fraud” is often used to describe mistakes that are endemic to all large human enterprises. You show me any activity that is largely staffed by amateurs and involves counting millions of pieces of paper, and you will always find lots of mistakes. Mistakes in processing ballots are not voter fraud. Taking weeks to count votes is not evidence of voter fraud.

It seems to me that there is one definition of voter fraud that makes more sense than the others — that voter fraud is a crime. The recent mistake in the counting of the New York election is not, I believe, a crime. I am unaware of any evidence that the mistaken counting of 135,000 test votes would have remained undiscovered except that Eric Adams challenged the count.

Regarding this: “It’s pretty clear that the experts who claim there was no substantial result changing fraud in the 2020 presidential election fail from a failure of imagination.” All the expert analyses I have read were responses to allegations of voter fraud that did not add up. I’m not sure what role imagination should have in this type of analysis. If someone imagines ways that voter fraud might be massive, that could be the beginning of a useful investigation, but to say something important, one needs to uncover evidence supporting your imagination. Fantasies about voter fraud in and of themselves and without any supporting evidence have no importance and they need no analysis.

“They are applying their standards of the past to things which may have been without precedent.” No, they were examining claims of voter fraud in 2020 and finding that these claims fell apart upon examination.

Mail-in balloting is not without precedence in America. Five states do voting exclusively by mail and we don’t have evidence that these states have higher rates of voter fraud. There may be such evidence, but it has not been presented as yet.

“All I am saying is that those who unqualifiedly say nothing happened are expressing opinions based on their own preconceptions and not necessarily fact based.”

I am unaware of any voter fraud experts who say nothing happened. Instead, they say the allegations that voter fraud happened on a massive scale do not hold up to scrutiny. They say that the evidence does not indicate massive voter fraud.

It shouldn’t be hard to make a case for voter fraud in 2020. Simply point out counties and states where the voter returns were anomalous. I am unaware of such counties and states. In 2018 and 2020, there was a 2% swing against the Republicans in the suburbs. That little swing accounts for the election results in 2018 and 2020.

Regarding “on the broader claim that the election in fact reflected the will of the voters, they might be wrong”, I’d just like to see evidence for this claim. Everyone might be wrong on anything. We all have to make judgments based on imperfect information. I find it fun to try to make sense of imperfect information.

I agree with this analysis by Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

This is the first year New York City will use ranked-choice voting to pick its leaders. So far, it isn’t going great.

The Democratic primary election for mayor was held last week, on June 22, with initial results favoring Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams by a healthy margin. But ranked-choice voting means determining the winner of the primary will require several rounds of vote-counting. Each voter was able to pick up to five candidates who they hoped might win. If their preferred candidate is eliminated by being the lowest vote-getter in a round, the voter’s ballot shifts to their next preference down the list, until either the race is down to two candidates or until that voter’s ballot lists no more viable candidates.

For some inexplicable reason, the city’s Board of Elections (BOE) decided on Tuesday to run through how that ranked-choice system would work using the ballots it had received and counted. That tally showed Adams’s lead narrowing — and the second-place slot shifting from lawyer and activist Maya Wiley to former city sanitation director Kathryn Garcia. But while that trial run of ranked-choice voting did reveal generally how the eventual results might shift, it didn’t offer much insight into how that shift might occur, given that there are still more than 124,000 absentee ballots to count. That’s about 10 percent of all the votes cast — an obviously significant number.

Then things got worse. It turns out that the results the city released also included a number of dummy ballots, used to test the system — ballots that should not have been included in the initial count. The mistake was caught soon after the trial-run results were announced, so the Board of Elections ended up pulling its totals and announcing its mistake.

No observer of New York City politics was surprised to learn that the Board of Elections had messed things up. It’s common knowledge the board is at best inept, as a report from the city’s local paper documented in late October. The city’s politics broadly are byzantine and dishonest, often relying on a system of patronage that those in power — generally the system’s beneficiaries — are loath to challenge. It’s an embarrassing situation, but usually one that does its embarrassing thing out of the spotlight of national attention. A mayor’s race in the country’s most populous city, though, tends to draw a spotlight.

It will still be a few weeks before we know who won the primary, given those absentee ballots (which are likely to aid Garcia) need to be counted. But in the meantime, the snafu at the BOE has been seized upon by allies of former president Donald Trump as evidence that elections in Democratic areas are corrupt and dishonest, just as Trump has been claiming for months…

Look, it is obviously the case that there is no connection between reality and Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. For nearly eight months, he and his allies have been trying to claim rampant fraud occurred and they have the evidence to prove it, without actually providing credible evidence and without offering any reason to assume that the claims of rampant fraud are worth taking seriously.

But it is nonetheless worth explaining why this argument is no better.

There is an apt analogy between what happened in New York City on Tuesday and the 2020 election. That error was akin to the miscounted ballots in Michigan’s Antrim County, an error that election administrators quickly caught and corrected. In that case, a change to the ballot wasn’t accounted for properly, so vote tallies were shifted between candidates. It’s as though you announced the order of horses in a race and, at the last second, slotted a new horse in the middle, shifting all the numbers. Suddenly, all the existing bets get wonky — a correctable but embarrassing mistake.

According to the BOE — which, again, is a mess, so assume this might also change — the mistake on Tuesday was similarly technical. It was a thing that should not have happened, but did, and officials announced the mistake and are correcting it. It was not some effort to throw the election. Unlike in Antrim County, these weren’t even intended to be final results! If the idea was to somehow allocate a number of ballots to all the candidates and hope no one would notice, it seems weird to inject them in a preliminary trial run of the results.

Damon Linker writes:

With its massive screw-up in counting and reporting preliminary results in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor, the city’s Board of Elections has managed to vindicate the self-serving and politically corrosive mendacity of Donald Trump.

No, reporting hugely inaccurate preliminary results in the Ranked Choice Voting primary held last week doesn’t demonstrate that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump — or that, as the former president continues to claim, voter fraud was rampant in the swing states that delivered the election to Democrat Joe Biden. But there was always a more sweeping and more dangerous claim underlying those baseless assertions — namely, that American elections in general are corrupt and unreliable, producing untrustworthy results. That’s what Trump alleged during the summer and fall of 2020, before any ballots has been cast or counted. And that’s what the shambolic Democratic primary in New York City has now vindicated.

The primary involved only Democrats. It pioneered the use of RCV in order (supposedly) to deliver fairer, more representative outcomes. The Board of Elections is overseen by bipartisan commissioners. For all of these reasons, last week’s vote should have served as a demonstration of what a clean and corruption-free election looks like. Instead, it’s shown that NYC’s BOE is too incompetent to be trusted with counting the votes. And the shadow of its bungling will haunt whatever results it announces going forward, opening the door to fully justified challenges to the outcome.

From Politico:

NEW YORK — For months, President Donald Trump has made baseless claims of voter fraud, insisted he would only lose an election that was “rigged” and said he is rushing a Supreme Court nominee ahead of a potential legal challenge to the results.

Democrats and published media reports have widely disputed his assertions and officials have promised a valid voting process, despite the unprecedented challenges brought by the pandemic.

Then along came the New York City Board of Elections.

The notoriously dysfunctional entity has given ammo to Trump’s charges by mailing some 100,000 ballots with erroneously marked return envelopes to voters in Brooklyn. The latest screw-up from the bipartisan board — whose members are appointed by local party leaders and approved by the City Council as one of the last vestiges of old-school machine politics — became an immediate talking point for Republicans….

Susan Lerner, of the good government group Common Cause New York, said the president is misrepresenting the issue at stake. Rather than providing an opportunity to cast extra votes for his opponent Joe Biden — as the president has claimed mail-in voting would do — the mix-up in Brooklyn would have the opposite effect by bringing vote totals down if it is not remedied.

“Not only is the info being used in a negative way, it is being misused,” she said. “The problem is not what the White House is making it out to be.”

The sanctity of mail-in ballots is not the only uncertainty facing New York City voters ahead of the momentous presidential election in November. The board hasn’t even instructed voters on how much postage to use for sending their ballots in, according to city and state officials. And last week, Ryan indicated a final count of all the votes may not come until well into December.

A friend says:

The failure of imagination is that as far as I know none of experts considered that test ballots, which may have been entered favoring a particular candidate, were not deleted but added to the legitimate votes. I had no idea that election boards ran test ballots, but experts on elections who claim to know every aspect of elections should have known about it. That’s what I mean by failure of imagination. The biggest experts on election law are Sabato and Hasen, I am unaware that either of these persons considered the possibility..

The issue is not the 2% swing of voters, but if there was such a swing at all. A relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines could account for the swing. Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied. That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method. Most lay persons, including those who follow elections, such as you, have no idea how such a thing can happen and can’t conceive of it, but the experts should. The difference between intelligence and wisdom is that the wise person can foresee consequences that the smart person cannot. The experts have proven themselves with their opinions to be smart, but not wise.

Anyone remotely acquainted with American mail-in ballots knows that voters are sent test ballots. Anyone with voting expertise would know the potential for test ballots to get counted as real ballots (as I understand it, the experts say there is no evidence that this has happened in significant numbers). What happened in New York was a test run of a system never used before. It did not purport to be a final count.

Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen would not rank in the top ten of voter fraud experts, but they do get interviewed a lot in the media, just as Carl Sagan was often interviewed about space, but he had no significance to the discipline of astronomy. Even Larry Sabato and Richard Hasen know about test ballots and they know that there are infinite number of mistakes that vote counters can make. There is no evidence that a “relatively small number of ballots such as those in New York “mistakenly” left in the voting machines account[ed] for the swing” to the Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Contrary to this assertion, “Instead the experts rely on polling (which is notoriously inaccurate) to confirm the numbers which under their application of knowing how past election fraud works, they categorically denied”, academic studies of claims of voter fraud that I have read do not mention polling.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that a 2% swing in the suburbs against Republicans accounts for the 2018 and 2020 election results.

“That is their preconceived notions, ignoring a possible wholly new method.”

There is nothing new in sending Americans test ballots though there is something new in the number of mail-in ballots and test ballots mailed out in 2020. I am unaware of any evidence that either of these produced increased voter fraud in 2020.

A friend says:

I don’t think Trump won the election, but I do think it is possible he won. As you know a swing of under a total of a hundred thousand votes in certain states would have given Trump an electoral college victory. If in a relatively small election with a relatively small turnout in a community that watches its elections closely, you can “inadvertently” add in 135,000 votes, it certainly raises the possibility that the experts you relied on might be wrong… These experts claim to have some sort of superior knowledge about election procedures so that they can opine on whether the election is open to question. If they limited their conclusions by stating that there may be other means of committing fraud which may have occurred which we aren’t considering, that would be one thing. If they specifically said that although registrars testing the machines with test ballots there is no way that could end up skewing election results that would be something else. But if you are relying on them to conclusively state that there was no fraud, that seems to be a big stretch.

You can’t conclusively prove there is no voter fraud. You can conclusively prove that shoddy arguments for massive voter fraud are shoddy.

James Joyner writes:

The drive to make voting easier, which I support, has had the pernicious effect of making it less trustworthy.

Eric Adams seemingly won a plurality of the vote on Election Day. But, of course, Election Day no longer exists. Some people vote early. And a lot of people, effectively, vote late because they can send their absentee ballot in on the last day and we allot an inordinate amount of time for ballots to arrive.

We used to get election results almost immediately. It was rare that we went to bed on Election Day without knowing the outcome of the race. Now, we’re expected to wait days—in this case, an entire month!—for results. Yet, over the same evolution, we have become to getting our information instantaneously.

Even absent malfeasance such as the Republican Party leadership’s attempt to falsely claim the 2020 Presidential election was somehow stolen, partisans are not going to trust a system in which their guy seemingly has the lead and then watch it slowly disappear through a mysterious process in which new votes are found and old ones are thrown out because errors are discovered.

Incompetent administration—as seen here an in the most recent run of the Iowa Caucuses—certainly don’t help. It just feeds the conspiracy theorists.

And the addition of ranked choice voting to this particular contest—which, again, I support in theory—complicates matters further. While there’s no obvious reason why a computer program can’t eliminate the votes for the bottom candidate and reallocate second place votes and so on and so forth, this particular election board somehow didn’t get its act together ahead of time. And, again, it’s feeding the conspiracists.

Posted in New York, Voter Fraud | Comments Off on Election Experts & The New York Voting Fiasco

The Politics Of The Word And The Politics Of The Eye

Stephen Turner wrote in 2003:

* Weltanschauung is a term that best fits commonalities of opinion and belief that are the product of words, and particularly printed words, and even more particularly, printed words used in connection with a particular set of social technologies. Weltanschauungen are a product of the information technology of the 19th century, particularly of newspapers, a technology marked by its lack of reliance on images, and therefore on seeing.

Contemporary politics, however, is a politics of the eye. The politics of the eye is different from the politics of the word: images work in different ways than words; they make claims on our primordial sense of solidarity that words do not make. Our own political world is increasingly a world of images, or more broadly of virtual experiences, often partly constituted by images. I give some examples of this, suggest some ways in which the politics of the word and the eye interact, and, rather than to propose a theory of the eye, plead for the irreducibility of the eye to the word, and reject attempts to ‘theorize the eye’ as a new ideological formation or worldview.

* ‘If the embryo is held to be a fetus, then it becomes socially permissible for women to subordinate their reproductive roles to other roles, particularly in the paid labor force’; holding an embryo to be a person ‘is to make a social statement that pregnancy is valuable and that women should subordinate other parts of their lives to that central aspect of their social and biological selves’ (1984: 8). A decision about the status of the embryo ‘enhances the resources held by one group and devalues the resources held by the other’.

* A worldview is erected on a base of interest. The interests, however, are not material interests, but are ‘deeper, broader, and more subtle. People see in the abortion issue a simultaneously pragmatic, symbolic, and emotional representation of states of social reality – states that they find reassuring or threatening’ (Luker, 1984: 7). Different people find different things reassuring or threatening, and the interests in this dispute are essentially in seeing their lives valued. Thus people with different kinds of lives are differentially threatened or reassured by different beliefs about the status of embryos. Their interest is in a belief that validates them, reassures them about the kinds of lives they have chosen…

* The totalitarians, as Carl Schmitt so nicely pointed out, caused trouble for parliamentary democracy while they were still ‘parties’ competing in a nominally liberal political system because they created a world in which a totalizing social experience was supplied by a party. Everything from automobile clubs to childcare was available in party-specific forms. These efforts were designed to protect party members from intellectual contamination. The striking similarity to the present is in the reemergence of what might be called viewpoint-specific social institutions of this kind in common with niche politics: gay traffic violation schools in California and feminist daycare facilities. But these are hardly comparable. The social insulation of niche identities is incomplete; the attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the world and its events is feeble. Instead, a comfort zone is enforced, and a slant on salient issues is precariously constructed.

Party papers were unable to make a transition to the postwar period in Europe without making very substantial concessions to the machinery of the production of world events, events which were the product of state actions which were themselves increasingly didactic, actions designed to serve as ideological object lessons. States thus usurped the ideological functions of parties and newspapers, but by replacing acts needing interpretation with acts that carried their own interpretations. But state action was typically accompanied by images that gave the lie to the intended meanings. The sheer availability of images of burning Buddhist monks in Vietnam, for example, made it impossible for defenders of the war to give a convincing interpretation of the events of Vietnam. The power of images has a technological base, closely related first to the rise of photojournalism and second to the rise of television. The availability of these media proved to be a powerful equalizer in a sense that the opponents of a dominant mode of representation need only to produce an arresting image to undermine interpretation. The production of ideology or worldviews is curiously weak in the face of these images. Anything that requires talk, concentration, belief, and so forth as both fascist and communist ideology did, and which their paler imitations in the Cold War period also did, cannot compete cognitively with the sheer visual impact of a tank running down a Chinese student in Tian an Men Square or a monk immolating himself. These images, however, do very little to create ideologies, much less worldviews.

* The movement in the United States for the protection of legalized abortion has concerned itself with the suppression of images of fetuses, knowing that the images are a potentially powerful means of undermining its own accounts of such questions as when does life start. Yet images are not merely corrosive of ideology. They are in a complex way a surrogate for ideology. It would be too reductive to say that the ideology of a Clinton or Thatcher was constructed on visual images and visual expressions woven together to provide justification for policies, a set of definitions of enemies and victims, and so forth. Visual images obviously are only part of the story. But it is less implausible to suggest that the constructions that politicians and ideologists provide in an age of visualization (and perhaps more importantly of emotional immediacy) are driven by the images (and the demand for emotional immediacy that the images provide).

* Statecraft is essentially constrained by these images; worldviews are rendered fragile by them. The show trials of Stalin, one suspects, could not have taken place on television. The ordinary humanity of the individuals involved could be made to vanish in print; seeing the faces of the victims would have sufficed to delegitimate the process. Even Milosevic can appear as a sympathetic person, and indeed has come to seem more complex and perhaps even to seem justified as a result of his televised trial.

* The problem for would-be hegemonic worldviews is this uncontrollability of images and the potential that images have for disrupting and undermining the sympathies and dissympathies on which worldviews in some sense rest. Images do not always work in predictable ways when they engage our sympathies, and they do not always engage our sympathies in a single direction. The repeated picturing of the horrors of the Oklahoma City bombing represent an image that could have gone either way. It broke against the militia movement and the mentality it represented, allowing them to be stigmatized, just as the very compelling, images of the government destroying the Koresh complex failed to produce sympathy for the authorities. All these failures result from the uncontrollability of images, the uncontrollability that needs to be understood at the level of the emotional roots of solidarity. The politics of the eye produces its own characteristic forms of solidarity and its own novel political possibilities, because it produces new possibilities of solidarity.

* The kinds of thin ideologies that it is possible to construct today are dependent on these vividly emotional contents, particularly of suffering and victimhood and the capacities of empathetic identification that are invoked by these images.

* All politics, all worldviews, have an emotional, solidaristic core. The emotional core is often, in a sense of injury, a sense of justice denied, a sense of right, an agonistic sense. Rudolph von Ihering taught this lesson many years ago in his greatly influential 19th century work The Struggle for Law (1915). The motive force for the evolution of law was in the recognition of injury and the consequent demand for rights to protect against the injury. This is a model with limitations, but fundamentally useful, in that the process of formulating demands of recognition begins at an inchoate and emotionally chaotic level in which contradictions, such as contradictions between explicit ruling doctrine and felt realities, are most strongly felt. Obviously the pinch of these contradictions happens at a particular point, most strongly in the experiences of a particular marginalized group whose response to the order may well be largely visceral and unintellectualized.

Gradually these hurts acquire ideologists. The technology of the word is spread by them to others whose sympathies could be engaged. Solidarity, beyond the solidarity of the face-to-face world, was closely bound up with ideology, or with shared identities that depended on print. It is no accident that modern nationalism followed print and is characteristically associated with national literatures. There is no sharp line between the literary and visual production of sympathy and solidarity. The production of sympathy itself is often a matter of the creation of intermediate images, images or ideas that do something to transcend the gap between those with whom we have face-to-face and intimate relations and those we do not.

Its very effectiveness works against it as a political weapon, simply because the demands that it places on our sympathies are so varied, unrelenting, and contradictory. Yet this I think is the key to the present state of the emotional core of politics. What is difficult to grasp is the existential situation of functioning in a world in which constant and contradictory demands are placed on one’s sympathy. But one can identify some features of this situation. The first is that the person subjected to these varied solidaristic appeals becomes a consumer rather than a simple ‘sharer’ of worldviews.

In the United States, it was traditional for candidates to eat ethnic food, wear bits of ethnic costume, and the like. Clinton, in contrast, told the people he spoke to that he felt their pain – not a mere generalized pain, but the specific pain of a form of shared experience of victimization. This is telling. The virtual recreation of experience, of sympathetic identification, is extraordinarily effective with experiences of injustice and victimhood. The Anita Hill testimony, for example, brought forth a complex response – a thin sense of solidaristic identity over sexist workplace slights which the male Senatorial questioners of Hill ‘did not get’, in the language of the time, but also a thicker, more nuanced sense of identity among black males, many of whom saw Hill along with those who testified in support of her as representative of the traditional enemies of black males, something that the women’s movement did not get.’

* The politics of the word provides very little comfort against the flood of images demanding our sympathies. Ideological politics seems phoney, inadequate, and emotionally dishonest. The production of ideology or of ‘word’ politics can adapt to the demands of this market, but typically survives by marketing to niches…

* The politics of the eye is a solvent of worldviews. It is also an engine of tolerance, tolerance dictated by the sympathetic pull of the various images that arise in the flood of images constitutes the politics of the eye.

* The visual representations of the act itself [9-11] were also widely distributed in the Islamic world, and produced, or illuminated, a kind of thin, nonideological solidarity. Spontaneous demonstrations with the demonstrators holding up reproductions of Bin Laden’s image took place, and T-shirts were sold with his picture. The ideological unreadability of this solidarity was its most striking feature. Although there is a large and confusing Islamist literature, and Bin Laden was an ideologist of the return to the Caliphate, this had little or no connection to the sense of solidarity in the Islamic world. The solidaristic sense was based on a much more visual sense of revenge, outrage, and pride at having bloodied the nose of those who had failed to give Islam the deference it was due.

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