What Brexit vote, Trump and Clinton mean for America

By Ted Morgan

Published in the Morning Call  (c)

Can we reclaim democracy?

Back in the mid-1990s, political scientist Benjamin Barber wrote the book, "Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World." McWorld represents the globalizing culture of capitalism. Jihad refers to reactions to the spread of this culture, not only Islamist extremism but all forms of ethnic nationalism or racist xenophobia.

Barber maintained that the two forces feed off each other, and the corporate media play a crucial role in this process. Whereas Jihad is fed by emotion, often reflecting yearning for a mythical past, McWorld offers the "rationality" of the market and illusions of a universal future. From the perspective of the market, Jihad is irrational and dangerous. From the perspective of Jihad, McWorld threatens one's sense of place, one's religious beliefs and traditions, even one's identity.

Crucially, Barber argues, Jihad and McWorld interact to undermine civil society and the democratic institutions of the nation-state. That is the issue we face today: Can we escape the no-win choice of Jihad and McWorld and reclaim democracy?

We have before us two prime examples of Barber's thesis at work. Donald Trump and the British vote to exit the European Union represent Jihad, and Hillary Clinton and the EU and British establishments represent McWorld.

Trump has tapped into angry frustrations among sectors of the population who have long felt the world is leaving them behind. He has used vitriolic attacks against the alleged threat of immigrants and Muslims as key elements in his campaign pitch, but what is crucial is the way he has presented himself — as a bombastic, tell-it-like-it-is guy willing to throw away the conventions of civil politics. His angry outbursts express and legitimize what his constituents feel — anger that they're losing out. For decades, people drawn to Trump have been told that they are victims of the liberal establishment and its Big Government.

Ironically, Trump succeeds because of a foundational McWorld institution — the entertainment medium of television news, which spreads a culture of drama, personalities and conflict that grabs our attention and plays on our feelings. This is a world of images and sound bites, not sober political realities. Trump's recent attacks on NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership resonate well with people whose economic security has been shattered by "free trade" agreements.

In the context of Great Britain, similar dynamics are at work. The "Leave" campaign emphasized the loss of Britain's control within the EU, highlighting the fear of increasing hordes of immigrants from the Middle East. Clearly voters were angrily disenchanted with the self-serving rhetoric of political elites; clearly they feel they've had enough, whatever the outcome might be.

The alternative we are presented in both cases is a defense of the institutions of McWorld — ultimately the investment markets and the globalization of capital. Not surprisingly, McWorld also sells itself to voters via fear — most fundamentally the fear of economic and political instability.

In the case of Clinton, her campaign rhetoric promised "progressive" solutions because, as she put it, "I believe in progress." However, the central drive for many pro-Hillary voters is fear of — you guessed it — Trump.

Yet, the Clinton campaign has already undercut most of the progressive challenges coming from the Bernie Sanders camp, to say nothing of reversing some of Clinton's own campaign rhetoric. In a June 29 piece in Politico, platform-drafting committee delegate Bill McKibben described how the Clinton delegates voted en masse to defeat amendments challenging the TPP and supporting Medicare for all, and helped defeat five amendments to combat climate change. Presumably, then, if you fear her opponent enough, empty rhetoric that disguises business-as-usual becomes more acceptable.

Ditto with Brexit. The panic in the world's markets and dire warnings of spreading economic recession in The New York Times, Britain's Guardian and other establishment media play on our fears, while exaggerating the benefits of McWorld. Thus, for example, the Times warned on June 25 that Brexit would weaken institutions and alliances that have "helped guarantee international peace and stability for 70 years." (Note to the Times: The United States has been at war for 40 of those 70 years.)

The two fatal flaws of Jihad vs. McWorld are: 1) neither provides a path to a livable world for all humans, and 2) their dynamic interaction spreads the belief that there is no alternative.

Yet in Britain and elsewhere around the globe, many on the left envision a different form of democratic globalization, responsive to the needs and aspirations of all people. In the United States, Sanders articulated a vision that could lead us toward that alternative and a far more democratic world — if we joined the political revolution.

Ted Morgan is professor of political science at Lehigh University and author of "What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy."

Copyright © 2016, The Morning Call

Sorry, Corporate Media: The More Americans Hear Bernie Sanders, The More They Like Him

Published on Saturday, February 13, 2016

byCommon Dreams

 

"Up to now," writes Morgan, "national media have obviously misjudged Bernie Sanders’ appeal." (Photo: Screenshot/NBC News)

Dear Corporate Media:

In bringing us the 2016 election spectacle, you demonstrate once again that the national mass media in the United States function, consciously or not, as the guardians of “managed democracy.”  That is, as the distinguished political scientist Sheldon Wolin observed, democracy that does not threaten the interests of, well, you, the corporate elite.

For much of the campaign your entertainment medium called TV news has been fervently attending to the demagogic campaign of Donald Trump.  Competing for audience attention, your cameras gravitate to the latest outrageous comment of Trump (or Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson for that matter).  After all, the Donald was already a media-anointed celebrity on reality TV.

As huge corporations, it is obviously in your immediate economic interest to give the demagogues a lot of air time—they do grab our attention, whether positively or negatively.  And sure enough, as media watchers like Andrew Tyndall and Eric Boehlert have documented, Trump coverage on network news has radically overwhelmed coverage of other candidates, most notably Bernie Sanders:

The three major news networks gave Donald Trump 284 minutes of coverage from January 1, 2015 through November, as compared to 10 minutes for Bernie Sanders. The disparity on ABC World News Tonight was even more staggering: 81 minutes for Trump, less than 20 seconds for Sanders!

The content of coverage of Bernie Sanders’ campaign has also been telling.  Initially, of course, Senator Sanders was viewed as a nobody candidate on the very margins of American politics—until you media started to notice that huge crowds were turning out to hear his message.  From that point on, the establishment has played up Sanders’ non-electability and/or lack of “realism.”

Now, with Sanders and Clinton finishing in a virtual tie in Iowa, and Sanders the landslide winner in New Hampshire, you seem to have panicked—nowhere more clearly than on the liberal paper of record, the New York Times.

Times columnists from David Brooks on the right to Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman on the liberal left have gone after Sanders ever since his polling caught up with Hillary Clinton’s.  Brooks’ penned a plaintiff column, “Stay Sane America, Please!” equating Sanders with Trump and Cruz as extremist candidates who are “not acceptable to all parts” of their parties.  Hmmm, I wonder whom he’s talking about.

On January 22, the liberal Krugman lectured the passionate Sanders partisans on “How Change Happens,” warning them against preferring “happy dreams to hard thinking.”  Kristof chimed in recently with the warning that Sanders’ bolder proposals simply “won’t happen” and that voters won’t vote for a “socialist.”

The editorial board itself issued an unusual pre-primary endorsement of Hillary Clinton as “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history”—a one-term Senator and Secretary of State with a record of devastating foreign policy decisions? The paper did acknowledge that Sanders’ “boldest proposals … earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people,” but asserted that he did “not have the breadth of experience or policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers.”

Others have chimed in as well.  The Boston Globe, once owned by the Times, also endorsed Clinton.  The editorially conservative Washington Post attacked Sanders’ allegedly “fiction-filled campaign,” and Post columnist Dana Milbank chimed in that the Democrats would be “insane to nominate” Sanders.  A David Horsey column in the Los Angeles Times suggested Clinton and Sanders posed an “imperfect choice” for Democrats, the latter because Americans were not attracted to “old guys with stooped shoulders and white hair.”

Corporate media bias is also readily apparent in post-New Hampshire headlines and editorials.  The Boston Globe’s lead headlines read “Trump Crushes His Rivals in N. H.” and “Bernie Sanders Defeats Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.”  Note to Globe: 60% is conventionally known as a “landslide.”  Meanwhile from its lofty heights, the Times assured Clinton that she “had no reason to panic,” since, as the paper reported, she was clearly the “more experienced” candidate with strong support from the Democratic coalition.

Up to now, you national media have obviously misjudged Bernie Sanders’ appeal, narrowing it to “telling progressives what they want to hear,” or more recently tapping into the “alienation” of youth and the middle-class.  But Sanders’ critique of the control exercised by corporate and wealthy elites over our political system taps into consciousness that has been building since the Occupy movement first emerged in 2011.

Clearly, the more Americans hear Bernie Sanders, the more they like what they are hearing: personal integrity, commitment to an egalitarian democracy, and some profound truth-telling about the nature of American politics.  The campaign has galvanized a hopeful fervor around these issues and has introduced into our political discourse issues that have lurked on the margins for a long time—the very ones you media criticize as “unrealistic.”

All the talk about “experience” and “realism” reflects age-old American elitism, echoing back through our history.  In the tumultuous 1930s, Harold Lasswell argued against “democratic dogmatisms”—like the belief that people are “the best judges of their own interests.”  A decade earlier, journalist Walter Lippmann’s asserted that only the “responsible men” of the “political classes” could discern the nation’s “common interests.”  The rest of us are just the passionate, misguided “bewildered herd.”  The Framers of the Constitution, themselves, feared democracy –the “faction” of the property-less masses, or as Alexander Hamilton put it, “the people, sir, are a great beast.”

The distinguished sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has argued the world historic capitalist system that has, one way or another, shaped so much of world history for the last several hundred years has entered a period of transition to something different.  That “something different” can be more democratic than what we have or it can be less democratic.

It doesn’t take genius to catch the whiff of fascism in some of the passions aroused by the demagogues on the right.  But the enlightened answer would seem to be the candidate, Sanders, who offers something more democratic, rather than the “politics as usual” candidates who offer at best minor tinkering here and there in ways that bend to the interests of the corporate elite.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Ted (Edward P.) Morgan (epm2@lehigh.edu) is Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University and author of the recent What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (University Press of Kansas).

Op-Ed on Bethlehem CIty Development

Ted Morgan: Limit retail opportunities in Martin Tower rezoning plan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bethlehem City Council is considering how to rezone the 53 acres of land that includes Martin Tower, which served as the last headquarters of Bethlehem Steel. (MORNING CALL FIle Photo)

November 3, 2015

Copyright © 2016, The Morning Call

Opinion: Why Martin Tower rezoning should limit retail opportunities

Bill White's recent column on the Bethlehem rezoning of the Martin Tower site ended with Yogi Berra's quip, "If you don't know where you are going, you might end up someplace else."
That seems appropriate, given City Council's decision to vote for stealth rezoning: Rezone now and trust us; we'll restrict retail use on the huge Martin Tower property later on. That may prove to be impossible.

It's no wonder downtown merchants worry about the impact the development will have on Bethlehem's two downtowns. What's more, folks in west Bethlehem have no way of assuring that the new development won't create an impossible traffic snarl on the Eighth Avenue corridor because traffic impact is not even under consideration.

Which is why another Yogi-ism comes to mind: "It's déjà vu all over again."

For starters, it's highly doubtful that this is the first time deep-pocketed developers have been able to benefit from their political contributions to city officials. Perhaps it's time for Bethlehem to follow Allentown's lead and adopt an anti-pay-to-play resolution.

But to this former organizer from the west Bethlehem group, NoMall (Neighborhood Organizations to Assure Local Livability), there is much about the current rezoning that harks back to issues we raised in the early 2000s. Much of what NoMall predicted would happen after the Lowe's rezoning vote has, in fact, come true.

Traffic has become significantly more congested on the Eighth Avenue corridor, despite many traffic-controlling changes — including four additional traffic lights. Traffic concerns have led to the installation of huge electronic "Slow Down" signs around Nitschmann Middle School.

The Lowe's/Price Right development has also triggered the spreading commercial development of Eighth Avenue, and it has had a tangible effect on West Broad Street. Businesses that were within walking distance of neighborhood residents moved up Eighth Avenue so they now require car travel to get there. Many other businesses on West Broad have been vacant for a significant amount of time; yet West Broad hasn't been included in Bethlehem's City Revitalization and Improvement Zone.

I recognize that the Lowe's/Price Right development, which is across Eighth Avenue from Martin Tower, is here to stay, and some west Bethlehem residents are happy to have the Lowe's big-box store in proximity. That's a done deal; the Martin Tower rezoning shouldn't be.

For City Council to vote through the rezoning would be a huge mistake. First, without substantial restrictions on the amount of retail allowed in the mixed-use zone, a developer could then present a land development plan that maxed out the retail portion; at that point, it would be impossible for council to reduce the retail portion of that plan.

Nor would our elected representatives have any further say on that plan. Instead, the city Planning Commission would be charged with making sure the developer's plans met the technical and engineering requirements under the zoning ordinance and relevant subdivision and land use ordinance.

That's why now is the time to constrain the potential impact of maxed-out retail development of the Martin Tower site on Bethlehem's two downtowns and on West Broad Street. And, given the fact that traffic-controlling measures have already been created for Eighth Avenue and that traffic is especially congested during rush hours, members of City Council should also consider the potentially disastrous traffic impact of the current rezoning plan.

The rezoning plan should not go forward without sharply limiting the potential retail development.

Ted Morgan, a resident of west Bethlehem, is professor of political science at Lehigh University and was an organizer in the grass-roots group, NoMall.

Hidden History: The War on Poverty at 50

Despite mass media attention to the War on Poverty at 50, its centerpiece, the Community Action Program, is ignored. Thus an important story - how the poor were empowered then cast aside - is lost.

Who controls the past controls the future;
who controls the present controls the past.
 - George Orwell, 1984

In the totalitarian world of 1984, Winston Smith was assigned the job of changing news accounts of past events so the total rule of the Party could never be challenged by facts that contradicted Big Brother's propaganda. Control of the past isn't quite so total in the United States, but to read about the 50th anniversary of the "War on Poverty" in the American press is to appreciate how significantly history is rewritten in this country, how information that doesn't square with the interests and propaganda of elites has disappeared down the "black hole" of memory.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty" in his first State of the Union address. The centerpiece of the poverty program was passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, which featured most prominently the Community Action Program (CAP) and the Job Corps. The long-invisible history of empowerment, struggle and ultimately defeat and abandonment of America's poor under CAP contains powerful lessons of hope and despair that Americans need to understand. That hidden history holds important lessons about both the possibility and erosion of democracy in America.

Continued Reading at Truthout

How Mass Media Distort Social Change: From the 1960s to Occupy and Beyond [longer essay]

© Edward P. Morgan

          For a time at least, 2011 seemed one of those historic turning points when grass-roots struggles ignite and spread throughout much of the world.  From Arab Spring to the Wisconsin protests to anti-austerity campaigns in Europe and South America to the rapid spread of Occupy Wall Street, the groundswell of sustained protest demonstrated that much of the world’s population was no longer willing to put up with the destructiveness of the neo-liberal world order or the autocratic regimes tied in to that system.  The tensions that came to the surface continue to fester.

          While the initial occupation phase of the Occupy movement ended, participants in Occupy have continued to organize and carry out a range of political actions, largely under the radar of mainstream mass media.  At the same time, of course, activists continue to mobilize against manifestations of the planet’s deepening ecological deterioration produced by world capitalism, and there is growing public opposition to the latest expansion of American militarism, drone warfare.  It remains to be seen if these movements can converge in a mass movement capable of effectively challenging both the ideology and reality of the world historic system we live in while ushering in a far more democratic future.

Edward Snowden and the Mass Media: Missing the Big Picture

Versions of this commentary were published in truth-out's SpeakOut, the Morning Call, and the Baltimore Sun --June 17, 2013 and June 20, 2013.

In the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations about government surveillance, the national mass media are in their element:  a highly controversial issue framed as national security vs. individual liberty, a dramatic figure to focus personal scrutiny and condemnation on (Snowden), the public as stakeholder, and government officials falling in line to reassure the public that our rights are secure.  Trust us, they declare.

What is, and will continue to be, missing from the mass media debate, however, is the connection between government surveillance and the larger imperative of maintaining a system both at home and abroad designed to maximize corporate profits.  Those who argue for a vastly more democratic system –notably the left— continue to be excluded from the mass media’s “legitimate” debate.

Progressive Solutions Can Solve Nation's Problems

Published in the Morning Call, Allentown, PA  6:17 a.m. EST, February 25, 2013

I've been thinking for a while about Bill White's Jan. 22 column praising U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent and the No Labels group, calling for "more moderation" in congressional politics.

You can certainly make an argument for less bitter partisanship in Washington. The public is rightly fed up with a Congress so paralyzed by partisan bickering that it doesn't seem to solve any of the problems facing us. No Labels' call to "Tell the full truth" and "Govern for the future" is admirable. Indeed, if these proved to be more than rhetorical slogans, they would be complete novelties in American politics of the last 35 years.

However, the key flaw in Bill White's argument is that more centrist or moderate policies in Congress won't do anything to solve the critical, deepening problems we face as a nation. The public wants less bickering in Washington so that the problems we face may be constructively resolved.