It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. I have in my basement industry-produced videotapes that if Jack Valenti had had his way would never have been sold to me. There was money that left my pocket and went to the businesses he represented. And yes, I have videotapes I recorded off of television. Many of those I purchased in another media format later precisely because having videotapes sustained my desire to have those films and shows available for viewing. Videotaping (or making audio tapes) was the precondition of the explosive growth of a market for older visual culture as a consumer commodity. Think back to the early years of television: it never occurred to any of the people producing and owning that intellectual property that it might have value in the future. The more that we have been able to buy and copy, the more that we want. And much of the time, the more that we will pay for.

Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

Nowhere is this clearer than with intellectual property and the public domain. The Court’s majority in the Golan v. Holder decision are only the stone that seals the tomb, not the murderers who slit its throat. Which means what it has always meant: that those of us who believe in a public domain, whose professions are defined by a sacred commitment to its existence, whose lives were enriched by its existence, will have to fight every day forever to bring it into resurrected glory and then to hold dear its life when we do so. Waiting for the Court, the Congress, the President, the government, the powers-that-be, to live up to the trust they hold, or even to recognize where their own long-term self-interests lie, isn’t good enough. It was comforting for a time to see justice and freedom advance from those precincts, but that led to leaving the door unlocked for burglars.

a) What, you want gay marriage? What’s next, legitimating polygamy?

and

b) The only form of legal, sanctioned marriage that any human society in all of human history has ever sanctioned is between one man, one woman,

the following rejoinder should be automatic from anyone in the audience to whom these things are being said:

c) Actually, Rick, the most commonly sanctioned or legalized form of marriage in human history across a wide span of societies has been polygamy, albeit with numerous variants. You might notice this if you actually read the Bible like you claim to.

However, there’s something more at stake in this special cultural conservative version of an all-Cretans-are-liars paradox. It’s not just a question of whether it’s ignorance or cynicism lurking behind political pandering.

What this paired sentiment expresses more deeply is have-cake-and-eat-it-too vision of modernity and progress among cultural conservatives, and not just in the United States. I see something of the same in the most skilled recyclers of the tradition-modernity relation that was given its undead power under colonial rule in 20th Century African societies.

If I were able to actually have a conversation with Santorum in which the historical reality of sanctioned polygamy in most human societies was made impossible for him to ignore or soundbite into oblivion, I’m willing to bet that the likely way out of the trap would be to argue that contemporary life has overcome that old evil, that we’ve progressed. Santorum and other American Christian conservatives would likely put the origin of that progress somewhere other than secular liberals would. They’d probably ascribe it to the rise of Christianity, all the way back to the early Church, whereas a more secular (or at least not religiously conservative) view would probably be than contemporary companionate, monogamous marriage (or any companionate, monogamous relationship, really) is a direct consequence of the working out of liberal individualism and rights-based personhood after 1750.

But it really doesn’t matter which claim you turn to. If you think that the relative eclipse of polygamy (still practiced and legally as well as morally sanctioned in many parts of the world) is a good thing, as I presume Santorum does given his suggestion that legally sanctioning gay marriage would open the door to polygamy, you believe in progress, that some aspects of the human condition have improved over time through the deliberate efforts of human beings to reform or change their social structures. And the moment you believe in that, saying, “It’s natural for people to live a certain way, all societies have done it that way” is off the table as a justification of contemporary policy whether or not your claim about the naturalness of living that way is true or not.

(Which, in fact, Santorum’s claim about the universality of nuclear families and monogamous marriages is not. Not in any way, including its address to homosexual practices. The foundation stone of ‘the Western tradition’, classical Greece, very much included sanctioned homosexual relationships between male citizens, for example.)

The moment you accept that progress is the real explanation for a transformation in human practices that you defend or endorse, you shouldn’t be able to invoke the universal, unchanging natural character of that practice against some other argument for yet another change or reform.

And yet, of course, this is done all the time, because the rhetorical alternatives are to either embrace arbitrary bigotry or construct some weird Tower-of-Babel claim about the future consequences of reform. E.g., in the case of gay marriage, if modern companionate relationships are a good example of progress, that means that we’re capable of changing how we legally and socially sanction and regulate marriage or relationships for the better. If we’re capable of that, why not include sanctioning companionate relationships between same-sex couples? With the invocation of unchanging, natural traditions disallowed, the only ‘why nots’ left are: because we should hate or despise same-sex couples for fundamentally arbitrary or non-rational reasons; or because sanctioning same-sex relationships would lead to further bad consequences. American cultural conservatives often take a stab at the second argument in public discourse (indeed, that’s where Santorum leads into his ‘oh noes bestiality-will-be-legal’ line) but this is an even easier set of arguments to puncture: either the imagined consequences are those which already follow in full measure from legally sanctioned heterosexual relations or they involve a vision that legal sanction is the same as contagion, that it creates practices that would not otherwise exist, a belief that has a lot of odd collateral implications.

To start, I had bookmarked a thread at Crooked Timber on Steven Pinker’s newest book that claims that violence is on the decline in human history. Chris Bertram and most of the CT commentariat is scornful of this argument, in no small measure because it’s Pinker making the argument. For the same reason, I’m also inclined to jump on the dogpile. Pinker usually assembles an army of straw men that could outnumber the terracotta soldiers in the biggest Chinese tomb, and makes them so flatteringly attired for the confidently preformed common sense of a certain kind of enthusiastic but unwary generalist reader that it takes either a withering dose of disproportionate snark or a patient long march of skeptical questioning about details and complexities to get people to look underneath the attractive exterior.

I haven’t read Pinker’s new book yet, but I can see from the CT thread and elsewhere that there are likely to be many assertions big and small in it that I’d challenge or question. Most of the CT commenters rightly zero in on the big epistemological and definitional problem that would haunt any book by any author that was intended to characterize the general arc of global history in terms of violence: what is violence, anyway? There are some very precise philosophical and empirical hairs to be split if you’re going to say that any number of state or official acts of violence are not ‘violence’, that the paucity of quantitative data about most areas of the world besides Western Europe and the United States justifies using the West as a metric of ‘universal’ trends, and on and on. Does every time a Belgian colonial official or plantation manager used the chicotte on an African worker or peasant count as one incidence of ‘violence’? It ought to. I am not going to put good odds on Pinker counting it as such. Does it count every time a parent slaps a child? A fistfight breaks out in a bar? A militia member loots at gunpoint? A Gitmo detainee gets waterboarded? An enforcer sticks a hockey forward? A bully menaces his victims without touching them?

And yet, there’s probably a version of Pinker’s argument that I would be perfectly ok with. As the commenter Soru says at CT, “Anyone who seriously thinks modern Norway is comparably violent than the land of the Vikings literally belongs in an institution, or at least under police watch so they don’t act on their belief.” The problem is that charting or counting or ennumerating violence is simply the wrong way to go about making that point.

I often struggle with how to think about premodern violence (whether we’re talking about 16th Century France or the Luba Empire or the expansion of Mongol rule). Something like the patented Foucauldian storyline of epistemic transformation seems to be in order: violence gets named and imagined and tracked and lived in and on the body in modern states in ways that almost can’t be compared to a variety of premodern ways of experiencing and understanding ‘violence’. And yet I don’t want to be a silly nominalist about this or any other point. There’s some continuity and relationship between getting killed by an iron spear hurled from a Hittite chariot and an incendiary dropped on Dresden, between a woman beaten by a spouse in a premodern household and a modern one, between murders in the night across time and space. People in any given premodern society may not have imagined violence categorically as we do, or connected to a particular belief in individual rights, or felt that moral progress was linked to the reduction or elimination of violent action. But just about no one ever has welcomed being beaten, tortured or murdered themselves, even if they were enthusiastic practictioners of beating, torture or murder.

The thing that seems right in some way to me is that modernity’s understanding and mapping of violence names it as a new kind of problem and connects it to new structures of power as well as to new kinds of self-fashioning and aspiration. Somewhere in there ‘progress’ beats yet, both as something which has happened and something which has yet to happen. It does seem to me to be important to not bury that lede in an avalanche of skepticism about the details–or the author.

1) Occupy is already a success if the model is to provoke reaction from its chief targets. It’s hard to imagine pundits passing up the chance to comment on anything: the 24/7 news cycle is a harsh taskmaster. Nevertheless, the number of surly, whiny or malicious commentaries as well as the dropping of any pretense of an ethos of objectivity from some reporters has been pretty striking. What’s more interesting is the extent to which active responses (as in Oakland) or threatened responses (as in New York City) from the powers-that-be have taken place. I honestly expected municipal and other authorities to just patronize and wait it out. I think there may be real anxiety inside the crony-capitalist/Washington nexus about the possible spread of mass protest or public discontent.

2) I’d continue to argue that there is a sociological limit in the current iteration of Occupy that mirrors similar limits in progressive electoral politics, and that this is where the reaction of Tea Party representatives has been instructive: they don’t want to explore the obvious connections and real overlaps between some of their rejection of the status quo and Occupy because they don’t like the sociological habitus of the people involved (a sentiment shared very much vice-versa). However, the single least interesting, least useful criticism of Occupy in circulation is that it lacks a concrete set of demands, that it needs some kind of concrete policy platform that politicians could adopt. This misses the point in every way possible. First, that Occupy’s critique can’t be boiled down into something like “Pass a new version of Glass-Steagall”, that the real issue is “Why did we get rid of sensible governance and guardianship of that type in the first place, and why can’t we have it back now?” You can’t solve our current situation with the passage of some laws if the institutions charged with implementing them will subvert, ignore or supercede those laws. You can’t solve our current situation if the next regulation you create will promptly be evaded or mocked by those it was intended to regulate. (Bank of America’s debit-use charge, I’m looking at you.) It’s the system that’s broken: you don’t solve systemic failure with a five-point legislative plan. Demands in this context have to be something more like, “Unelect everyone and comprehensively reform the process of electing a new group of representatives and leaders, expect accountability in both economic and political life and set real consequences for the failure of that expectation, make transparency in both business and government one of the sacred watchwords of a democratic society”. Maybe Occupy needs more of a boiled-down, two-sentence root-level philosophy or viewpoint (parity with something like “down with big government”) but it doesn’t need a set of demands that the political-financial complex can promptly ignore or play pointless legislative shell games with.

3) I think Matt Taibbi provides as good a “root-level philosophy” as you can ask for: that Occupy is not against wealth, is not against competition, is not against business, is not against banking. It’s a very specific argument that the game as it stands is rigged, that the cheaters are being allowed to operate with impunity, that the safeguards against cheating are compromised, and that the cheats are running the risk of destroying the game itself.

As my readers and colleagues know, I’m hopelessly addicted to analogies and metaphors. Here let me try an analogy that I don’t think is particularly metaphorical, that is in fact quite directly applicable to this situation: the history of the computer game Diablo II.

The game was a huge commercial successes and initially supported a large, thriving and heterogenous multiplayer community where the range of participation went from casual players who played few other games (online or otherwise) to dedicated, hardcore players with long experience in a variety of gaming genres and forms.

Diablo II allowed players to trade magical items obtained through play, as well as to compete with one another in various ways. It was consequently one of the first multiplayer games to generate an unplanned real-money transaction (RMT) market, as players offered desirable items to other players in return for cash payments through various third-party venues. This being a fairly new kind of thing at the time, neither the player community nor the game’s producer really anticipated what would follow. Initially, crucial data about characters was kept client-side, and so was relatively easy to hack. At first, only a small number of players used cheats in order to gain an edge in RMT transactions. At that point, the game’s multiplayer ecosystem was still relatively healthy: a large number of customers, a small number of cheaters. Arguably the cheaters may even have helped a bit by introducing highly desirable duplicates of items at a faster rate into the multiplayer economy. In short order, however, the ease of cheating, created mostly by a lack of governance and control over the playing environment on the part of the game producer, devastated the multiplayer community. Items lost all value as they were illicitly duplicated in massive quantities, and any sense of genuine competition between players evaporated as cheats proliferated. In the end, the cheaters were left to prey on each other, an activity which defines “diminishing returns”.

In the end, open cheating, or cheating which proliferates in the absence of governance and enforcement, is not even in the interests of the cheaters. But once a socioeconomic system moves headlong in that direction, its acceleration towards generalized disaster can be exponential. Cheaters themselves cannot be expected to stop that movement even if they understand that it’s not in their own interests, because they’ve specialized their economic activity to take advantage of cheats. The biggest hackers of Diablo II when it was at the tipping point probably couldn’t have played the game even marginally well if denied access to their hacks: the game had become about hacking at that point, and about the incomes they could obtain from doing so. When the prey left and the cheats become more difficult, the cheaters just went looking for some other racket. A parasite at some point can become too specialized in its reliance on a complex vector and on the ecology of a particular host: if through its own efficient depredation or in concert with other stresses, it kills too many hosts, the parasite can’t undo its evolution. At some point in the 1990s, a fraction of financial capitalism became so dependent upon subverting or unraveling safeguards and so expectant of a level of profit obtained through government-protected market manipulation that it became effectively unable to back off and seek some more stable equilibrium–and its political partners became the same. The idea that Goldman-Sachs in the last decade represents “the free market” is as laughable as saying that the 19th railroad industry in the US was a laissez-faire triumph: in both cases, plutocracy was secured through and within the state rather than in the absence of it.

Stopping that isn’t a matter of a policy here or a single bugfix there. It’s about a comprehensive change to the paradigm. It’s about the government of the people, by the people, for the people, not perishing from this earth.

1) The New York Times has a nice piece about how global publics in democracies of one sort or another have increasingly lost faith in political elites and in the process, lost faith in democratic process as a whole. This is a point that I’ve been thinking about and writing about for a long time, and a good example of how American exceptionalism sometimes blinds Americans to seeing how events within their borders are connected to far larger patterns and structures. This is one reason I reacted somewhat over-enthusiastically to one element of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism about a decade ago. The thread I found interesting in Berman’s argument was that liberalism was a “cold” doctrine that was losing adherents worldwide because of its inability to provide guarantees of justice, equity, fairness or comfort, that its dispassionate tone and utilitarian ethos alienated global publics, and that its passive faith in its own teleological inevitability kept it from vigorously attending to its own shortcomings or defending itself from attack. That last part was ugly since it’s what led Berman and other so-called “liberal hawks” to believe that bombs and occupations could secure liberalism’s future where persuasion and institution-building could not. But there’s still something important embedded in that interpretation. Liberal democracy rested on its laurels and got hijacked by technocratic elites who have subsequently produced a tremendous amount of obfuscating noise about the equivalence between national sovereignty, technocratic bureaucracies and the practice of democratic norms.

The alienation that the Times article documents is a reaction to that obfuscation. A lot of global publics understand perfectly well what they should expect of democracies and technocracies, what they should expect that nation-states can accomplish in service to the interests of their domestic, democratically empowered publics. Their frustration is with political classes that have captured the structures of the state and the mechanisms of democratic selection to the point that even when democratic mechanisms are used to remove one group of representatives, their replacements continue to reproduce the interests of political classes against the interests of wider publics and against outcomes that common-sense forms of expertise seem to recommend.

The hard thing for a lot of liberals and progressives in the United States to understand is that however much they dislike some of the ideology of Tea Party activists, the rank-and-file of the Tea Party is much more aware of and responsive to this problem than American liberals and progressives have been.

2) Which connects in turn to the often-asked question of why there aren’t more protests in the U.S., or why the Wall Street protests aren’t catching on in a bigger way. The lightly malicious snark of Times reporters and others towards the Wall Street protesters is a bit too obvious in its anxious desire to have these matters left to Very Serious People. But neither is the “I do believe in fairies” call to just believe that some drummers and puppets can change the world much more satisfying. This is just the grown-up version of the quintessential high school Student Council complaint about the apathy of the student body: it attributes the disaffection and fecklessness of the council itself as being everybody’s problem, everybody’s fault, rather than asking a more introspective question about what that group of people really is, and more importantly, why they were attracted to participation in the first place. That maybe the student body isn’t generally apathetic, just apathetic about the student council.

The kinds of liberals and progressives who find themselves drawn for a day or a week or a month to show up behind the lines of orange fencing to join in this kind of protest, or to shout out their affection for it from afar, have a hard time grasping that the reason that larger publics look on with indifference is that the protesters are more like a dissident faction of the political class that they are allegedly criticizing than they are outsiders to it.

I mean, if I were hanging around New York for the day and I had some time, I might head on down there and join the crowd. I’d be happy to have an opportunity to join in fellowship with people who are as angry at our system as I am, and I’m sure I agree with many of them about a lot of other issues and values. Maybe I’m not so into the drumming and veganism or whatever but as Naomi Klein says, any genuinely democratic movement is going to have a lot of distractions and fractions. I’m the distraction for the vegan or the Spartacist or the Marxist cutting-edge crisis theorist.

But the thing is that I would arrive and leave from the protest, whether or not I got pepper-sprayed by a carelessly and bemusedly brutal cop or not, retaining my sense that I am, or ought to be, part of a public entitled to speak to the political class with a special intimacy. I don’t typically dwell on this as a sign of privilege, and I also find endless sessions of white-guilt self-flagellation about abjuring privilege to be a kind of special political hell anyway. But the fact is that I live in an institutional world that is profoundly interpolated with the business of the American political class. Even when I want to identify only with a public that is excluded from the business of that class and alienated at their appropriation of the democratic will, I can’t get that presence out of my life, my discourse, my expectations. Maybe I shouldn’t expect to, maybe that’s the value of intellectuals even in an anti-intellectual age, that they can still hope to check or modify the increasingly uninhibited contempt of political elites for the general self-interest by inserting themselves into gaps or holes in the consensus of those elites. With small power comes some responsibility?

The limit condition of the protests or expressions that I’m drawn to, however, remains the degree to which they retain that connection. It’s not a lack of discipline that produces the array of boutique causes and activist commitments that you’d find among the people behind that orange fence. That array of concerns is a sign of the tether between educated white progressives and the political class, that we still imagine much of the content of our politics as a set of well-composed appeals to policymakers and politicians, as advocating plans and statutes and targeted reforms.

Where larger protests and anger are breaking out against the elites who have commandeered political systems, it’s because the publics behind those protests have dissolved or tabled most of their more specific demands or commitments, have recognized that you won’t get good policy until you get something close to a social revolution, until the connection between democratic process, genuine responsibilities to broad publics, and a constraining ethics of bureaucratic power and expertise is forged anew.

In the United States, I think the specific move that needs to be made is the recognition that the rank-and-file hostility of Tea Party adherents and sympathizers towards “big government” has an intimate, potentially generative connection to the possibility of a wider mobilization against the powers-that-be, that this is the cognate American form of the energy that’s flowing into protests in India, in Egypt, in the European Union. Which in turn requires a less knee-jerk response by progressives about the wonderful things that government can do or already does. It’s true that government action at all levels of American life could do a great deal of good, that it already secures many fundamental rights and protections, that we are dependent upon that power in so many ways. But when our first response to a fierce, wild and often reactionary anger at “government” is to recite a litany of its benefits, I think we disclose too much our own desire to retain an intimate access to acting within as well as against a deeply entrenched political class.

Here’s a suggestion for what the standard briefing document should look like.

Does the candidate believe in…atomic theory?
Relevance to voters: Need to know if a possible President will treat our atomic arsenal as imaginary, as a material manifestation of the wrath of the Old Testament God, or as a confirmed scientific reality.

Does the candidate believe in…weather forecasting?
Relevance to voters: If all climate scientists are in it for a quick buck, presumably all weather forecasting is suspect. Need to know if possible President will disregard satellite pictures of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic and regard all weather events as a manifestation of Providence.

Does the candidate believe in…the germ theory of disease?
Relevance to voters: anti-evolution candidates presumably don’t really believe in the germ theory of disease and can be expected to shut down the Centers for Disease Control, direct the FDA to allow antibiotics to be freely manufactured and sold because what the heck they’re no different than herbal supplements, and cease all funding for disease-related health research. Also the possible President might be able to cut health care costs by refusing to pay for soap in hospitals and medical facilities. Who needs it?

Does the candidate believe in…gravity and heliocentrism?
Relevance to voters: Possible President may choose not to fly on Air Force One as planes should not exist, and will therefore be slower to visit parts of the country and the world away from Washington. Presumably would have no interest in monitoring for near-Earth asteroids, planetary probes, solar flares and other astronomical phenomenon connected to mere theories of gravity and heliocentrism.

Does the candidate believe in…Boyle’s Law and other gas laws?
Relevance to voters: Candidates who do not believe that there are formula that can describe the relationship between pressure and volume of gases might not believe that guns exist and function, since gas laws are an important part of how guns actually work. Not believing that guns exist might be a stealth form of gun control.

I’m sure folks can think of other things the public needs to know.

I’ve got extra protection: I’ve also studied marketing and advertising, so I have a whole other skepticism that I can bring to bear.

But no matter how experienced you think you are, you’re only one moment away from falling for something if you let your guard down. Case in point, I took at look today at Americans Elect without doing what I’d normally do, which is search out the organization and learn a bit before I get too deep into the site itself. (Obviously I am recommending that you do otherwise before following that link and diving into things.) No, I let the initial design and the seeming aspirations of the project draw me in. Political organizing through social networking, an end run around the two-party system, a chance to escape the toxicity of inside-the-Beltway gamesmanship: all my buttons pressed, and so gently. (Later, as I looked deep inside the community forums, I found that many participants had gone through the same sequence of emotions: pleased at first, annoyed later and then way beyond annoyed after going through the whole exercise.)

Yeah! A social network harnessed to create a new kind of political conversation between delegates, that lets people explore connections across existing political boundaries and to examine their own convictions with a fresh eye. Follow that distraction! So I sign up and dive in. About six or seven questions about my political preferences later, I’m getting really annoyed at the terrible phrasing of the questions. A fifth grader using SurveyMonkey might do better. About another seven questions later, I’m beginning to think that this is a classic instance of having to decide whether some group is stupid or conspiratorial. Either this whole thing is just a scam that’s hoping to herd a bunch of cattle towards some third-party aspirant who is secretly funding the whole thing or the people doing it are immaculately unacquainted with survey design and polling.

By this point I’m on the case, as I should have been at the start. I’m going to leave aside the sleuthing into who/what is really behind the project, which turns out to be a big theme in online discussions of the group. Let’s just talk about what minimal expectations we should bring to any novel social media project, site or outlet that we encounter. Not best or ideal practices, but features and conditions which if unmet should result in failure and rejection by potential users or participants.

1. Disclosure. If I can’t find out specific, detailed information about the organization, individuals and funding behind any social media project, particularly a non-profit project from clicking an easily found, prominently placed link within the site itself? Failure. If I can’t find out how community participation and the governance of the sponsoring organization intersect or connect? Failure.

2. Strong feedback, correction and user annotation of any participatory or informational content. In the case of Americans Elect, if I can’t tag flawed survey questions at the site of the question itself, suggest and create better questions, and expect that there is a quick feedback loop between user contributions and the architecture and content of the social media itself? Failure.

3. A social media site with aspirations to create new forms of community and mobilize those new community networks for some larger purpose has to own and design and imagine its own forums or other communicative interfaces. Outsourcing your community management to a generic corporation that just sees your site as another client, offers you generic services? Failure. Having community-management representatives who don’t participate in discussions as peers, aren’t part of the project or community and who do nothing more than placate users and deflect questions? Failure.

4. Going live with a social media site that doesn’t let people change their mind about participating or having their information associated with the site? That doesn’t let you change privacy settings? Especially a site that’s aiming to mobilize participants for some larger political or social project? Seeing this as an optional feature to be patched in later? Facebook and a few others get away with this by grandfathering. Nobody else should. Of all the disappointing or pathetic things on this site, the fact that the community-management babysitter is awkwardly stalling for time while they supposedly look for a way to allow participants to change their information or level of participation is the most shameful. You don’t ever start something like this up if you’re not already prepared for this basic functionality. Failure.

If you don’t see these commitments in place the moment you find a new social media project, it should be the equivalent of getting an email that says “You have to see this!” with an .exe file in the attachment. I know I’m going to remind myself of that the next time I follow a promising link to a shiny new social media site.

Let me parrot for one moment, anyway. David Cameron has said to his citizens: “And to the lawless minority, the criminals who’ve taken what they can get. I say: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done.” And I say, “Good, at last, I’m glad he’s going to get tough on bankers, NewsCorp, and members of Parliament who’ve misused their expense accounts. Maybe we can follow suit here in the United States.”

It’s an oft-repeated sentiment for good reason, though if you unpack it, there are divergent larger arguments behind it (say, a classical liberal’s assumption that equality before the law is a precondition of liberal democracy or a marxian assumption that the ruling classes are always already ‘guilty’ in some sense).

It strikes me as a more powerful and empowering line of response, at any rate, than the equally common call to investigate the “underlying causes” of unrest. That forms an instant dyadic pair with “let’s get tough on crime, don’t make excuses”, a permanent edifice of public discourse that’s encrusted with more barnacles than a shipwreck.

It’s not just that the “social causes” trope so quickly mobilizes a powerful counter, it’s also that it can actually get in the way of genuinely understanding a particular episode of social violence or unrest, whether your goal is to formulate policy that addresses underlying causes or just a comprehension of the socioeconomic structures involved for its own sake. We ought by now to understand that mass violence is a quintessential case of emergence in a complex-system sense. It has many “underlying causes”, none of them separable from one another, but the moment you flash over into violence is a case of self-organized criticality. That moment doesn’t depend on any single variable, and you can’t deal with it variable by variable (including if you’re a Cameronesque law-and-order type who just wants to get the water cannons and military into the streets). The way that people on the left sometimes talk the talk of “underlying causes” not only unnecessarily cuts out the individual agency (and responsibility) of people committing violence, it acts as if unrest is an equation. Add poverty plus racism plus poor social services and then just a bit of heat and humidity and bingo, violence. Which is not at all what happens: by that reasoning, the really curious thing is not the riots which happen but the many more which don’t.

Any given episode of riot is brimming over with contingency. One is as near and present as one person throwing a brick through a window and as far away as an old lady shaking a shaming finger at a neighbor poised with a brick in his hand. Given the dire combination of circumstances in most 21st Century societies, it’s as safe to predict that there will be a riot next week, next year, next decade as it is to predict that the weather is going to change and the seasons will come. So yes, change that combination of circumstances and you’ll change the weather, but damn if there aren’t a lot of interacting elements to consider.

Observing, on the other hand, that the way we (or at least David Cameron and his ilk) talk about and act towards rioters and the way we talk about bankers is wildly inequitable? It has the virtue, first off, of being overpoweringly true. It also redirects all the strengths of law-and-order rhetoric right back on its would-be wielders. Yes, indeed, Prime Minister, you do have a problem with a lack of “stronger sense of morality and responsibility” in your country, a crisis of values. Why else would you and your fellow politicians have been so lethally indifferent to the immorality of your associates inside and outside of government? Why would financial executives in the UK, US and elsewhere have looted and rubbished the lives and futures of so many fellow citizens with little regard for the consequences? All the excuses we’ve heard on both sides of the Atlantic from plutocrats and officials would be hard to distinguish from interviews with rioters if we stripped away the pictures and a few contextual details: everyone else was doing it, insurance will take care of a victimless crime, it’s just a sweater/million-dollar bonus. Neighborhoods and communities are too big to fail, too, in their own way. And whether it’s a street in Tottenham or Wall Street, it is indeed “the law abiding people who play by the rules” who will have to use social media to figure out where to bring their brooms or tighten their belts. To be honest, if I’m going to have to do some kind of clean-up, I figure it might be easier to sweep streets and rebuild burned buildings than rescue a million mortgages and shotgun a horde of zombie banks that have the assets of whole countries in their gullets. Just sayin’.

The deeper issue is something I keep coming back to as this blog. Precisely because I so deeply oppose both what the leaders and rank-and-file of the Tea Party and their allies are trying to accomplish I think it’s absolutely crucial to spend time trying to understand their motivations. That means inquiry rather than dashing off some bargain-basement invective about racism or standard-issue rhetoric about how they’re being manipulated by the steering committee of global capitalism.

I have two areas that I personally focus on in that inquiry. In this post, I’ll focus on the Tea Party as culture warriors retaliating for a long series of perceived intrusions and trespasses against them. The thing is that kneejerk mockery of Perry as an ignoramus based on his college grades shows that this perception is based on some kind of reality.

I’ll refrain from once again going through my “Gramscian repurposing of institutions once legalistic reform hit the wall in the early 1970s was a tactical mistake” argument in full. In short, the last forty years have provided deep and shallow reinforcements of the proposition that educated Americans who have some ability to prosper in the service economy that they played some role in bringing about have a lot of contempt for anyone left in their wake.

I know there are completely legitimate policy questions as well as moral ones trailing in the wake of issues like gun rights or public forms of religious practice. It’s troubling, still, viewed from a historical distance, how quick a lot of people were to rush in and entangle those policy questions with cultural ones. Honestly, as soon as gun rights questions come up, if I’m in a crowd where everyone is the “right kind of person”, it’s not long before the issue isn’t the right to own a gun but pick-up trucks with gun racks and nude female silhouettes on the mud flaps. And I grant equally that there’s a legitimate politics where that truck is an issue, too, but the mixing of the two has been fairly incendiary.

The consequence is a situation where when Palin, Bachman, Huckabee or Perry says something laughably wrong about either the past or the present there is nothing that we the eggheads can say that doesn’t get written into that record, one more bad grade in a class that we do not control and that the students refuse to accept as valid. If you’re a teacher you know it’s a hopeless situation from the moment that dynamic takes hold. In this case, in no small measure because the moment you set yourself up as the teacher to your peers on all things, rather than the small and narrow range of things you really know better than they, you’ve lost yourself as much as anyone you’d help to teach.

I don’t know better than anyone how to minister to all children or how to deal with all criminals or how to save all the dying or fix all the economies or have all the right governmental processes or have soldiers kill only those who ought to be killed. The olive branch to offer anyone who wants to be my sibling and citizen and peer is not, “You’re always wrong and stupid and you get a C”. It’s also not, “The whole of the law is do as you will: tear down my country and I’ll still always offer to negotiate with you and compromise with you”. Drawing a line in the sand isn’t about what we know: it’s about what’s right and wrong.

I can’t really let this whole mess go, much as I want to turn my attention to a couple of other issues and ideas that are on my radar screen. Much as I did before the Iraq war started, I’m having trouble sleeping. Even more than the political leadership, it’s the punditocracy that’s on my mind.

I’m simultaneously fascinated, vindicated and irritated by the near-total inability of expert commenters, political journalists, talk show hosts and other purveyors of the conventional wisdom to grasp what’s going on here. This is not just a case of blind men feeling their piece of the elephant: they’re not even groping the right animal.

Most of the talk, like on WHYY’s Radio Times this morning, is about what “the public” or “the American people think” on one hand and on the other, it’s the usual sports-style color commentary on what Washington insiders are thinking, doing and planning. At least in the second hour, Stuart Diamond and Julian Zelizer got pretty close to breaking out of that discourse to the real point. On other shows in the 24/7 news cycle across various media, I’m hearing a few experts and pundits make fragmentary moves to shift the conversation, often pulling back to more familiar tropes.

I suspect that a lot of Washington insiders, including older, established Republicans, are further down the road to recognizing the new shape of things, but it must be hard for them too to grasp what’s happening.

In a nutshell, what’s going on is something that hasn’t happened in American politics for 50 years: an ideologically coherent social movement with clear political aspirations has taken shape out of murkier antecedents and disparate tributaries and at least for the moment, it has a very tight hold on the political officials that it has elected. The movement is not interested in the spoils system, its representatives can’t be quickly seduced into playing the usual games. And the movement’s primary objective is to demolish existing governmental and civic institutions. They’ve grown tired of waiting for government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, so they’re setting out with battleaxes and dynamite instead.

Social movements that aren’t just setting out to secure legal protection and resources for their constituency, but are instead driven to pursue profound sociopolitical transformations are unfamiliar enough. What makes this moment even more difficult to grasp in terms of the conventional wisdom of pundits is that this isn’t a movement that speaks a language of inclusion, hope, reform, innovation or progress. It speaks instead about restoration of power to those who once held it, the tearing down of existing structures, about undoing what’s been done. This movement is at war with its social and institutional enemies: it has nothing to offer them except to inflict upon them the marginalization that the members of the movement imagine they themselves have suffered.

Even the left, whatever that might be, is having a hard time bending its head around the situation, because for decades it has been accustomed to thinking of organizations on the right as fringes or cults that need to be monitored or controlled, or watched for their infiltration of legitimate politics. It’s very true that the Tea Party and its cognate organizations are not by any means a majority of the electorate, but the point is that they’re a very coherent plurality that can win majorities in enough districts and localities to block votes and prevent business as usual, and that preventing business as usual is a political objective in its own right for them, not just a means to some other end.

On Radio Times, Stuart Diamond, who specializes in the management of negotiation, began to grasp the nettle when he recognized that you can’t find a compromise with a group that’s not seeking a compromise. Everybody who is still talking in those terms about deals and compromises really doesn’t get what’s happening. Even if there’s a compromise or agreement by Tuesday, it’s not going to have any long-term meaning. There is a sufficiently large political bloc inside the political system and a sufficiently coherent social movement outside of it who are unafraid of economic chaos, welcome the federal government’s inability to meet its obligations, and hope that the President is stuck with a major national crisis that he can’t fix because that’s what they want. Michele Bachmann isn’t ignorant about what might happen next week if there is no deal: the voters whose endorsement she seeks are hoping for the worst-case scenario.

Of course, the other reason that the punditocracy doesn’t know how to talk about a real social movement is that it isn’t the kind of thing that lends itself to political management or policy formation: it takes them into the unfamiliar discursive spaces of history, anthropology, culture, political theory, which don’t lend themselves well to punditry and don’t produce smugly self-contained recommendations and conclusions.