Archive for the 'Sociology' Category

US election: the demographics

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Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Culture, Foreign Elections, Polls, Race, Religion, Sociology and USA
. 22 Comments

The big note of caution should be that this data is drawn from exit polls which don’t take into account the very large early vote, and that exit polls have certain problems of validity and reliability.

However, there’s some interesting reading at both RedBlueRichPoor and FiveThirtyEight. I suspect the absence of the early vote in the sample diminishes the increases in youth and African-American turnout. And it’s just as well to remember that the election was actually reasonably close in the popular vote, and that the electoral vote map has been tweaked rather than transformed. Trends which were operating this year need reinforcing through the upcoming electoral cycles, and much will depend on Obama’s performance in government. You can never claim that there’s a realigning election on the basis of one cycle (06-08), though my bet would be that this will turn out in retrospect to have been one, for a whole host of more qualitative and interpretive factors.

I haven’t seen any comprehensive data as yet on Hispanic and youth votes’ partisan composition, but some evidence presented during the CNN coverage suggested very strong 60+% Obama votes in both populations. It’s worthwhile noting that the demographics of many states which are swinging to the Democrats strongly - or showing signs of such swings (ie in Texas, Arizona and South Carolina) - are fast changing to a much more heterogenous composition. And that generally, the younger cohort is more socially liberal and less hung up on racial barriers and all the baggage of the culture wars - including among younger Evangelicals.

There’s a lot here for Obama and the Democrats to make hay with in terms of partisan and geographic realignment, if they play their cards well.

Continue reading ‘US election: the demographics’

US election: Yes we can!

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Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Activism, Blogging, Elections, Foreign Elections, Media, Polls, Sociology, Technology and USA
. 16 Comments

Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr - reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:

The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.

In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.

In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:

The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process - as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.

Continue reading ‘US election: Yes we can!’

Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?

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Guest Poster
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Australiana, Climate change, Developing world, Economics, Environment, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, Government, Immigration, International, Markets, Policy, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 12 Comments

Director of the Centre for Policy Development Miriam Lyons writes:

Barack Obama’s victory represents a watershed in American history, but it will also have ramifications around the world. Before I head out to celebrate I thought I’d just bash out a few quick notes on some of the policy implications for Australia of this momentous turnaround in the state of US politics:

Climate change

Today’s election result heralds the rise of Green Keynesianism. The US economy is in the toilet and smart economists are advocating direct investment over a more consumer-based fiscal stimulus. Democrats in Congress got a head start last year with the Green Jobs Act, and elements of the President-elect’s energy and environment policies look a lot like a ‘Green New Deal’. This from Time Magazine:

He wants to launch an “Apollo project” to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: “The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit.” But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, “because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt.” A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and “there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy … That’s going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.”

Calls for a Green New Deal are also starting to gain traction in the UK - and the UN. This can only help the chances of Australia’s version of the Apollo alliance, which released the ‘Green Gold Rush’ report last week calling for investment in green-collar jobs growth.

The Obama campaign’s target for emissions cuts was 80% by 2050 - a fair way ahead of Oz Labor’s as-yet-unaltered election promise of 60% by 2050. With the Arctic ice-sheet melting rapidly even an 80% target is too low for a developed country like the US, but it should certainly give Professor Ross Garnaut reason to revise his pessimism about the likely outcome of the Copenhagen round of climate negotiations. It’s worth noting that the Obama campaign’s climate and energy platform specifically called for 100% auctioning of permits.

Continue reading ‘Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?’

US election: End of the Bush era

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Mark
3 weeks, 5 days ago
in Climate change, Culture, Economics, Foreign Elections, Poverty, Science, Sociology and USA
. 58 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few weeks about whether today’s vote would signal the end of the Reagan era. That discussion had two interlinked referents - the combination of militarism and small government rhetoric (if not practice) which marked Reaganite governance and the enduring electoral pattern Reagan’s win in 1980 ushered in. It may well be that these predictions are on the money, though we’ll need a few more electoral cycles to be sure (and one very useful thing the Obama administration could do would be reform of the voting process, which might make a fair bit of difference in and of itself). Certainly the red state/blue state frozen electoral map has begun to shift - with the state level strength in the West for the Democrats now translating nationally and the South becoming more competitive (and as Cliff Shecter observes, the demographics in Texas and South Carolina are heading in the same direction):

In other words, Barack Obama and the Democrats are a national party now, while the GOP has become regionalised and fallen behind the times. What a difference a few years can make. It will now be up to Obama and other leading Democrats to solidify these gains through smart politics and smarter policy. So we can all breathe a bit easier, by putting the Bush years behind us forever.

What’s a little surprising is that in the midst of these debates, there’s been little discussion of the exact significance and dimensions of the repudiation of Bushism. As publius says at Obsidian Wings:

Any way you slice it, the 2008 election should be seen as a massive repudiation of the George W. Bush administration.

And not just in psephological terms, as the Republican right may have driven Hispanic voters away for a long time. Let’s make no mistake about it. The collision of neo-con Republicanism and reality has not been kind to the latter. Publius again:

…recent events have repeatedly proven the progressive “sphere” more correct than the conservative “sphere.” Progressives’ policy assumptions seem to jibe better with empirical reality than the fairy tale world inhabited by many in the conservative sphere. In short, in the laboratory of ideas, progressives are winning.

Continue reading ‘US election: End of the Bush era’

NO on 8 - US election: the propositions

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Kim
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Activism, Foreign Elections, Lesbian and Gay, Sexuality and USA
. 11 Comments

Some US states which were influenced by the Progressive direct democracy movement in the early years of last century (which also saw direct elections to the US Senate and the beginnings of the presidential primary) have “propositions” as part of their electoral system - basically legislation or constitutional amendments which can be put on the ballot by direct voter iniative. Californians know how many bizarre votes you can cast in one go (and California also has the recall procedure for state officials - which is how Arnie became Gubernator). It’s largely in the South and the West, though a lot of municipalities also allow direct votes (for instance on bond issues and other local fiscal matters). Since the 1970s, when both anti-gay referenda and the famous Californian “tax revolt” (which incidentally, Murdoch’s Australian tried to transplant to Australia with negligible results), highly ideological measures have often featured on state ballots. Ann at Feministing has a partial list of some of the more egregious ones around the states tomorrow.

The most prominent has been Proposition 8 in California, which would remove the rights to marriage same sex couples currently enjoy. There’s been a vigorous No on 8 campaign in the blogosphere, and here’s a vlog from Riese and Haviland, who some may know and love from Riese’s L Word recap blogging (or maybe that’s just me!):

If Proposition 8 is defeated, there really would be some sign of a shifting cultural climate in the States. A complete list of ballot initiatives and propositions is at CNN, where voting figures will be posted as they become available.

US election: links post

Published
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Kim
3 weeks, 6 days ago
in Blogging, Foreign Elections, Polls, Religion, Sociology and USA
. 25 Comments

Excitement, or maybe nerves, is building:

I’ll admit it. I just can’t concentrate. How many times can I check 538, pollster, or real clear politics? Hundreds of times a day. I arrived at my office at 8AM with the best of intensions. It’s 10:50. I can’t get anything done. I don’t have any high hopes for tomorrow’s productivity either. Who else is an anxious wreck? Anyone calm?

Martin Kettle looks at why Democrats are stuck in the subjunctive:

What is really happening, I think, is that Obama is going to win, and the Democrats are going to do spectacularly well in the Senate and House races too. But the mood here is like a cup final where your team is ahead with a few minutes to go. Those last few minutes seem to take forever. So near and yet so far. You overreact to every little event on the pitch as the time drags on. You scream manically at the referee to blow the whistle. Right now, Democrats are in that position. They just want it to be over now. But deep down, they don’t really think that they will throw this one away. They just want the whistle to blow so they can cast off the subjunctive and start celebrating.

The last great white hope (sorry!) for McCain may be the Bradley effect, but Thomas Noyes thinks it’s non-existent, while Stephen Guess discusses the terminological inexactitude surrounding the “socialist” charge, and its ideological implications.

Looking beyond election day, Gary Sauer-Thompson thinks the Republicans will be reduced to a Southern and Western rump. In this context, it’ll be interesting to see if Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays loses his seat. Shays is the last GOP House member left in New England, and the only survivor from the wipeout of what remained of the once influential liberal and moderate Republicans of the North-East after the 2006 election. But the South is changing too, and Sasha Abramsky examines how the GOP’s lock on the region could be broken tomorrow. Firedoglake assesses the prospects for a Senate super-majority in the South, which is the battleground for some of the last close seats to take the Democrats close to a filibuster proof majority of 60. That majority would include Joe Lieberman, though he’s not flavour of the month among the Senate Dems (or anyone else bar John McCain, probably).

And if Sarah Palin wants to be the GOP’s standard bearer after a McCain defeat, it might be worth having a squizzy at her bizarre religious affiliations and why she’s just outed herself as a Klingon. One thing is for sure - the Republicans and the noise machine won’t take defeat lying down.

Related post: What to watch and what to expect.

Update: Some interesting links from Xeni at Boing Boing, including an election FAQ.

James Ridgeway at Comment is Free looks at the structural barriers to change Obama will face (including those within the Democratic party).

Update: An interesting post from Jon Perr on the “character war” waged against Democrats.

Taxation without representation is Federal Government policy on student services

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Paul Norton
4 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Education and Government
. 30 Comments

The Federal Government is going to restore the ability of universities to levy a compulsory student services charge of up to $250 per student per annum.

However, according to Federal Youth Minister Kate Ellis, student organisations or unions will not be managing the funds and the services to be funded:

Ms Ellis said university administrations were better placed to manage services like health, childcare, counselling and club funding.

Continue reading ‘Taxation without representation is Federal Government policy on student services’

Melbourne Cup open thread

Published
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Paul Norton
4 weeks ago
in Australiana, Melbourne, Religion, Sociology and Sport
. 34 Comments

It’s time to tear your attention from the Real Clear Politics coverage of the donkey versus elephant race, and post whatever you will (as long as it sufficiently complies with the comments policy) about the Melbourne Cup - what your tips are, what you’ll be wearing, where you’ll be partying and how, the social and cultural significance of the race, memorable past Cup Day stories, why the Irish, the Poms and/or the Aotearoans will be making jokes at Australia’s expense from tomorrow afternoon onwards - whatever!

More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars

Published
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Mark
4 weeks, 1 day ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Foreign Elections, History, Howardia and USA
. 35 Comments

In a previous post on expectations of whether an Obama win will reshape politics and end the culture wars, I briefly discussed Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I read recently. The title, incidentally, comes from a passage in a speech by Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 Presidential election, when the Democrats played on Eisenhower’s recent heart attack to stir up fears of Nixon becoming President - convinced as they were that attacking the genial Ike himself would be in vain:

Our nation stands at the fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

Perlstein emphasises the dissonance between Stevenson’s claims to high minded political virtue and his own tactics:

The courtly type, he couldn’t campaign directly against a dying war hero; instead he ran against the man who might replace him. And he did it in a singularly uncourtly fashion. He wrote his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the (courtly) Harvard economist, “I want you to write the speeches against Nixon. You have no tendency to be fair.” Galbraith acknowledged that as a “noble compliment.”

There isn’t much evidence that Stevenson’s “jeremiads” helped his cause much. His loss to Ike in 56 was comprehensive, and its dimensions were greater than those of his first defeat in 52.

In another excellent book on Nixon, in this case on his various images in the American cultural imagination, David Greenberg emphasises that liberal attacks on the Republican’s devilish character tended to backfire. Nixon’s Shadow highlights the genuineness of the identification between Nixon and many voters, and debunks the claims that such identification was nefariously produced by artifice. Artifice is one of the perennial political arts. Continue reading ‘More on Nixonland; of cultural politics and culture wars’

Happy Halloween!

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Kim
1 month ago
in Culture, History, Life, Religion and Sociology
. 62 Comments

Image courtesy of Faborito - used under a Creative Commons licence

Happy Halloween!

Here’s some history about the meaning and significance of the night.

Has anyone got any plans? Exciting Halloween themed parties? Going trick or treating? Spooky stories to tell?

Those shifty Ayrab eyebrows

Published
by
Kim
1 month ago
in Film, TV, Video etc, Foreign Elections, Levity, Race and USA
. 5 Comments

Not the Sarah Palin campaign… or???

All politics is local, but power is global

Published
by
Kim
1 month ago
in Activism, Feminism, International, Politics and Sociology
. 21 Comments

The Guardian’s Comment is Free website and Soundings magazine are organising a series of debates on the theme of After New Labour: Who owns the progressive future?. Some of the contributions are making it online. After excoriating the “Third Way” for its lack of focus on what used to be the left’s core goal - working to put into practice the belief “that it is the sacrosanct duty of community to care for and to assist all its members, collectively, against the powerful forces they are unable to fight alone”, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman poses a problem which haunts anyone concerned with political action in the name of social justice:

Genuine powers, the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances of most of our contemporaries, have evaporated from the nation state into the global space, where they float free from political control: politics has remained as local as before and therefore is no longer able to reach them, let alone to constrain. One of the effects of globalisation is the divorce between power (the capacity to have things done) and politics. We have now power freed from politics in the global space, and politics deprived of power in the local space.

Continue reading ‘All politics is local, but power is global’

Exit Nixonland, stage left?

Published
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Mark
1 month ago
in Culture, Economics, Feminism, Foreign Elections, History, Media, Polls, Poverty, Race, Religion, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 43 Comments

Writing in Salon, Gary Kamiya describes the near hysteria to which “movement conservatives” are reduced in confronting a likely Obama victory:

…typical of the Limbaugh-inflected (or infected) movement as a whole is the apocalyptic attitude of right-wing columnist Mark Steyn, who thundered that an Obama victory “would be a ‘point of no return,’ the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America.”

The ludicrous hyperbole of such Jeremiads is self-refuting. Americans are desperate to fix their economy, end a ruinous, endless war and restore a sense of common purpose to civic life. As they face these challenging real-world goals, the abstract buzzwords trotted out by the right ring hollow.

Of course, Obama hasn’t won the election yet, and it’s vaguely possible that he may not, though highly unlikely if the polls are taken into account.

Kamiya’s analysis of the internal contradictions of the American right is sharp, and it’s certainly true that the movement conservatives’ dogmatic bag of tricks isn’t holding up too well in confrontation with reality. (And there’s some amusement to be gained from observing the cognitive dissonance in the right wing blogosphere.) But I wonder whether the implication - drawn by some - that an Obama victory would represent an epochal end to the culture wars craziness is overstated.

Obama’s election would, more than almost any other Democratic candidate, represent the long-overdue crushing of the barely-disguised racist “Southern Strategy” pursued by the GOP since the time of Richard Nixon. In doing so it would also represent the effective end of the Christian Right as a driving force in US governmental politics.

Continue reading ‘Exit Nixonland, stage left?’

Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Australiana, Culture, Economics, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Markets, Music, Sociology and USA
. 45 Comments

One of the longest bows I’ve seen drawn about the effects of the global financial crisis is this obituary (and not in elegiac style) for the 80s. And Gen X. Apparently because of Robert Zemeckis. And therefore Gordon Gekko.

I think I’m missing something here (though not surprised by the fact that whenever generationalism rears its head, the originary dissing of Gen X is reinscribed each time). Maybe it’s because the experience of the 80s was very different in Australia (and the UK) than in America, and this even similar cultural themes and texts and musical forms were read through distinctive lenses.

I feel so sorry for Generation X. They grew up without a unifying enemy. They grew up constantly criticized as a do-nothing care-nothing generation. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. They truly are The Lost Generation, sandwiched between the crisis of Nixon and the crisis of today. Now, my generation is the second-born prodigal son, the boy-king who snatched the crown of influence directly from his parents, bypassing the first-born’s rule entirely. We are fighting the War on Terror. We are innovators in tech and energy and media.

Err… whatevs. Continue reading ‘Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…’

Guest post by Ben Eltham: Australia Council changes bathwater, loses babies

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Guest Poster
1 month ago
in Culture, Policy and Sociology
. 63 Comments

Republished from yesterday’s Crikey with permission.

The Australia Council, an organisation in almost constant flux, has again spun the bingo barrel and pulled out a new round of surprises in its funding announcements — this time in the theatre sector. Eleven new companies have been granted triennial funding by the Council’s Theatre Board, while the same number have had their funding axed.

The announcement continues a recent history of wrenching change in the Commonwealth’s arts funding agency. In 2005, then-CEO Jeniffer Bott pushed through an organisation-wide restructure (labelled a “refocussing”) that led to two of the Australia Council’s funding boards being abolished. Out went specific Boards to support new media and digital arts, and community arts. In came some impressive-sounding “community partnerships” and a special department called the “Inter-Arts Agency”.

As respected ANU academic Jennifer Craik has argued in her book Re-Visioning Arts and Cultural Policy the Bott restructure was not really about addressing the major issues facing the Australia Council and its client organisations. Instead, “the restructure was more about bureau politics than policy reform.”

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Ben Eltham: Australia Council changes bathwater, loses babies’