Author Archives: Peter Levine

global warming and citizen participation

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a leading environmentalist. On the basis of that conversation, I’m wondering whether many of his colleagues might be willing to endorse a statement that said something like this:

We believe that global warming is a profound challenge. Unless we reduce carbon emissions by two percent per year starting very soon, civilization is in danger. We trust scientists on this question, regardless of what democratically elected officials may say.

Yet we also believe that civic engagement and participation are crucial. Civic participation is not a luxury, something that you can worry about when life is going well and you face no fundamental threats. On the contrary, it is when threats are profound that we especially need the ideas and energies of all our citizens and institutions.

Despite our conviction that global warming is a serious problem caused by human action, we recognize that many aspects of the issue are unresolved and need public deliberation. In particular, the tools that should be used to mitigate the problem (such as cap-and-trade regulations) are by no means clear. A truly open, public discussion is needed.

Furthermore, we doubt that the government could solve this problem through command-and-control regulations, although regulation may play an important role. Other sectors, beyond the government, also need to change and innovate. Just as one example, colleges and universities can cut their own carbon emissions.

Not only big private institutions, but also individuals can and must address global warming. There are cultural and spiritual dimensions to the problem, which is profoundly connected to other social and human issues, such as poverty and over-consumption. Although we are confident about some facts (e.g., that human consumption of carbon causes global warming), no one has adequate solutions. Many perspectives are valid and useful; many people have the capacity to help.

an appetite for deliberation?

Several recent studies have argued that Americans are resistant to controversy. Therefore, we tend to avoid voluntary opportunities to exchange ideas with people who are different from ourselves. [See three Cambridge University Press books: Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (1998); John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work (2002); and Diana C., Mutz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (2006).]

Based on some quite ambitious current empirical work, I’d propose a different hypothesis. College students (at least) are hungry for a particular kind of conversation that is serious and authentic, involves diverse views, but is free of manipulation and “spin.” They want discussions that are open-ended in the sense that everyone is truly trying to decide what should be done.

Today’s young people are barraged with messages that have been designed to persuade them to do things that someone else wants. They experience an unprecedented amount of commercial advertising: companies spent $17 billion to advertise to children in 1992 (when our college student sample was entering grade school)–up from $100 million in 1983. Commercial advertisers use increasingly sophisticated techniques of persuasion, based on detailed public opinion research. The government, political candidates, parties, interest groups, and reporters and pundits also use such techniques. For example, political messages are now pre-tested in randomized experiments to measure their impact on specific demographic groups.

I believe that college students are aware that they are targets of manipulation; they resent it; and this is one reason that they are reluctant to engage in politics. They see such manipulation at work in several domains–the news media, political advertising, and their fellow students who are activists for social causes. However, a considerably proportion of college students can recall particular conversations that they’ve had that seemed open-ended. They seem grateful for those discussions, which took them out of what they call their “bubble.”

the Party for the Presidency

Mobilize.org is recruiting 435 young activists, one from each Congressional District, to attend The Party for the Presidency (P4P) in late December:

This conference will consist of a series of workshops and opportunities for the young leaders to learn from each other. Additionally, we will be hosting the Mobilize Awards and launching the Declaration of Our Generation at the P4P. The Declaration of Our Generation will focus on uniting values that are commonly held throughout our generation that we’d like our candidates to address.

The Declaration is being written in a highly interactive way, with face-to-face forums and an online discussion that has already begun–visit Mobilize.org to weigh in.

the end of narrative?

I’ve recently read two reviews that are highly pessimistic about narrative. Daniel Mendelssohn reviews 300, the film by Zack Snyder about the Battle of Thermopylae. He notes that the movie (which I have not seen) lacks a meaningful plot. Neither side seems to be fighting for any particular reason. Their characters and their choices have no discernible consequences. He compares the film to a video game, meaning a shoot-em-up game in which the hero mows down aliens or monsters. The popularity of “300” strikes him as deeply ironic since the first great original narratives of the Western tradition (Herodotus’ History and the attic tragedies) came soon after the Battle of Thermopylae itself. Mendelssohn suspects that the grand narrative of the Persian invasion stimulated the Greeks’ interest in meaningful stories. As they saw it, a Persian king of cruelty and hubris was defeated in a struggle against freedom and virtue. Thus ethos (character) and daimon (destiny) were meaningfully linked. That was the mainstream spirit of Western literature until–well, possibly until the movie “300.”

Meanwhile, Edward Rothstein reviewed Lawrence Kramer’s book, Why Classical Music Still Matters in The New York Times. Rothstein argued that the Western art music tradition produced complex and lengthy narratives in which the components were abstractions (melodies or themes). That was an impressive achievement, but it is dying with the manifest decline in classical music since 1950.

These two arguments are parallel, and they are both worth worrying about. I’m not actually too concerned about narrative in films and books. “300” sounds like a shoot-em-up video game, but there is nothing profoundly new about such entertainment. (There were very popular bear-baiting shows right next door to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.) In our time, fictional and historical narratives seem to be in pretty robust condition.

However, I agree with Rothstein that power and vitality is slipping away from the Western art music tradition, which includes not only classical music but also ambitious forms of jazz. That doesn’t mean that the future is barren; we could see a revival. But the Western art music tradition was much shorter than the tradition of meaningful text narrative. It started with the sung masses of the late Middle Ages but really flourished, as Rothstein says, during the “long 19th century” (ca. 1775-1914). There’s no guarantee that it will recover, whether in the form of jazz or any other style.

the problem with strategic rhetoric

This is a belated comment on David Ignatius’ column of July 5, in which he lamented that a terrorist attack on the United States would provoke liberals to criticize President Bush for making America more vulnerable by invading Iraq–and conservatives to criticize liberals for weakening us by coddling terrorists. “America’s political disharmony is scary,” Ignatius wrote. What we need is bipartisan collaboration to improve our actual defenses.

Various bloggers noted, in Matthew Yglesias’ words, that “disagreement is a real phenomenon of American life.” (Cf. Steve Benen.) Atrios went further: “Disagreement is the root of politics.” These bloggers predicted that we will not come together after a terrorist attack because we are not together. We have sharp disagreements about foreign policy and domestic security, and that’s to the good.

All three bloggers further argued that resistance to debate is an elite phenomenon, resulting from “too much time inside the Beltway.” Yglesias wrote, “There’s an enormous desire on the part of the people near the top of the political-media pyramid to believe that they are participants in some kind of ethereal realm of Pure Ideas. The idea that politics is a clash of interests is disturbing to their self-image.”

I have a different take, more sympathetic to Ignatius. The problem with partisans is not that they disagree and criticize one another; disagreement and criticism are healthy. The problem is that they are highly strategic in their use of information. Liberals want us out of Iraq, and they might use a terrorist attack to support that goal. Conservatives want an aggressive foreign policy, and they would use terrorism for those ends.

One can see strategic politics very clearly by looking at a blog like Think Progress, which is really a compendium of news stories that are useful to a Democratic policy agenda. I read Think Progress because I have a leftish political identity and I am comfortable with strategic politics. I think I know where I stand on most issues and I want ammunition for my positions.

But many people are turned off by strategic politics–by “spin.” We just conducted 42 focus groups on 11 college campuses, involving 356 students. Many of these students expressed a resistance to political debates in which the participants try to persuade you of something that they already believe. Politicians and pundits feed you partial information and try to manipulate you. They don’t recognize shades of gray. For this reason, they are not trustworthy. Many college students say that they turn away from politics because it is manipulative (“strategic,” in my sense).

These students are the opposite of an elite. In fact, the students who attended the fanciest colleges were the most comfortable with political debate. Likewise, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found deep distaste for disagreement among ordinary Americans. Thus I think that Yglesias, Benen, and Atrios have it backward. They are right to see the necessity of disagreement, but wrong to think that “elites” want consensus and unity. Elites are good at using news, data, and examples for their ends. It’s ordinary Americans who want unity and a certain open-mindedness about politics.

The practical implication is as follows. I think American voters would respond very favorably if politicians did not use news events to score points. Imagine that a liberal politician responded to a terrorist attack on the USA (and God forbid that there should be one) by blaming only the terrorists and expressing a willingness to work with the president to strengthen our defenses. I think this would go over much better than attacking the president’s Iraq policies at such a time.

But what if we want American troops out of Iraq? What if we sincerely believe that the invasion has increased the odds of a terrorist attack on US soil? Isn’t it appropriate, then, to use news of a terrorist attack as an opportunity to criticize the president? Well, maybe–there can be value to strategic rhetoric, which is why smart people use it. But before I used a terrorist attack as an example to support my policy position, I would ask whether doing so would really persuade anyone not already on my side–and whether the strategic benefit was worth the price.