Abstract
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb announces in this book an effort to re-examine the notion of political culture. Past study has shown political culture to be the intervening variable between economic development and democracy. The problem is that culture is often seen to be a static variable. “It is crucial to move away from the problems of superficial correlation, too easy operationalization, and a static approach in order to reinvent the concept” (p. 25). This is the task at hand. It is in the nooks and crannies where we should look for “what actually goes on in groups” (p. 27) as the basis of empirical study. The other end of the spectrum is the culture of politics itself. This realm is seen to rest on “different dimensions of power” (p. 39) and like the culture of politics, political culture is also malleable, though often seen as a constant. “In order to understand the political world, we must understand how culture facilitates and undermines politics, and how politics shapes culture” (p. 39).
Goldfarb progresses in this task by applying the magnifying glass to several cases in Chapters Two through Four, and does a commendable job highlighting overlooked small- scale social interactions that are often undervalued or ignored. Chapter Two recovers some of his early work in the Soviet Bloc where the culture of politics stood in the form of a truth regime. In this environment, dissent had to be masked and couched in the “language of officialdom” (p. 50). When not in public, solidarity among the oppressed was found “only in private places, where they were able to form free publics” (p. 60). But in time, the prevailing order, the culture of politics itself, had to “make some sense to the people off the center stage who speak to each other in hushed tones” (p. 62). Slowly this undermined the established order and dismantled the truth regime. Truth was disentangled with power from above and returned to the masses who cultivated it over the dinner table and eventually political power as well.
Digging into the book with an eye toward Chapter Three, “Reinventing American Political Culture: Obama v. Palin,” I was not disappointed. The general consensus on political culture in the United States is that it has dissipated, and/or fragmented and polarized, and there may be no saving it. Goldfarb manages to give credit to the Tea Party, and restore one’s faith in American democracy in the same breath. Unlike in the former Soviet Bloc, in the United States there is no truth regime and “truth and power are not conflated, although they are related” (p. 71). Here we are faced with common sense—more specifically, power is in the hands of those who can mold their cause into a common narrative that speaks to the American identity. Obama tries to do this by addressing race head on, Goldfarb tells us, and by expanding the dream of inclusivity. We are said to be great because anyone, even someone named Barack Obama, can succeed. This common sense narrative is opposed by the one put forth by Sarah Palin who “tapped into a nostalgia for a rural American myth” (p. 81), one that is ultimately homogeneous.
The campaign of Obama involved supporters reflexively interacting in small group activity modeled largely on the Howard Dean campaign. The Tea Party surfaced applying the same tactics and subscribing to the opposing common sense narrative. The end result of all this has been a shift in U.S. political culture, and following the book’s publication we must assume that the Occupy protests have been a further outgrowth of this shift. Nevertheless, the culture of politics is again altered. And if Goldfarb is right, we should expect the winning side in upcoming elections to have rallied the masses in a way that resembles Obama’s 2008 campaign or the Tea Party that followed.
The most seemingly intractable case of the culture of politics is of course the Israeli and Palestinian narratives. The issue of security and resistance respectively are core values that are said to be the starting point for legitimacy in any political conversation. “When these core values are questioned, the questioner loses political standing. Each alternative position in the political sphere has to be articulated using these core values” (p. 111). To show us that things are not as bad as they seem, Goldfarb brings us to a most unusual place: checkpoints in Palestinian occupied territories. At these checkpoints, taxi drivers among others, carve out “alternative narratives written in everyday practices” (p. 124). That is to say, in lived cultural practice, both sides redefine the core values in ways that make the checkpoint flow more smoothly. “Potential is there for the most mundane interactions to lead to historic changes” (p. 127).
In each case presented, power and culture interact and change occurs, or at least an avenue toward change can be identified. The value of this work lies with this realization, though the reader may be frustrated by the lack of cohesion among the three case studies. This is a common response to a book that refuses to paint in broad strokes. Goldfarb tells the story of a faculty advisor who was unable or unwilling to accept the political relevancy of a Polish theater group that did not subscribe to one political position or the other. For this advisor the data needed to fit within the existing conceptual apparatus. Were they for or against the party? As it often does, the messiness of culture falls beyond neat labels. Goldfarb explains that through participation in these theaters, “alternative sensibilities and accounts of experience could be shared” (p. 63). Such spaces are the root of change and the place where people begin to transcend the “either this or that” and move towards consideration of all that could be. This book shows us, once more, that cultural sociology is complex because it is often more real than other accounts. However, this is exactly the place we must look because it is what people actually do, and what they actually think, that over time shapes the way things appear to be, and often ultimately the way they will become.