Understanding Trumpism

 

 

 

Over 15 years ago I studied a local Christian right campaign against gay/lesbian rights in the Pacific Northwest for my book The Stranger Next Door. I spent a year interviewing people in a small timber community to try to understand why the issue of sexuality emerged there. They were white working and middle class people, mainly evangelical Christians.

I met people who believed gays and lesbians are sexual predators who were out to convert their children. Who considered teachers to be untrustworthy representatives of the liberal secular humanism, who were destroying the family. Who believed that multiculturalism is a bad word. And who saw themselves as victims. They felt that their power as Christians, small town Americans, and as white people, was slipping away.

After the book was published, I moved to New Jersey and focused my attention on other things. I assumed the world of politicized Christian conservatism had become increasingly marginal, and largely irrelevant to Republican Party politics.

But then came the Trump campaign. Even though Trump did not run as a Christian conservative, his campaign, and the issues it raised, echoed many of the themes I saw in my research in small-town America. His slogan “Make America Great Again” was tailor made for those sectors of society who believe their power is slipping away, who long for the “good old days.” Trump’s election prompted me to revisit my research on the rightwing, to try to make sense of the political universe we are now dealing with.

The fact that Trump seemed, at least during this campaign, like more of an opportunist than an ideologue fooled many of us. He may be an opportunist, but he has surrounded himself with ideologues, a governing coalition that reaches across the spectrum of the American right. It is an unstable coalition, as we’ve seen from the leaks coming out of the White House. But it is a ruling coalition that brings together different sectors of the rightwing. And it is important for us to understand it.

Analysts often divide the American rightwing into the Secular Right, Christian Right, and the Xenophobic Right. Collectively, the right stands for the reinforcement of racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual hierarchies and the belief that these hierarchies are natural and/or God-given. But different hierarchies are of greater or lesser importance for different sectors of the American rightwing.

The secular right is mainly concerned with relationship between state and economy. It wants to unleash capitalism and minimize government regulation. The Christian right concerns itself with the relationship between church and state. It wants to fight against what it sees as the secularization of American culture. And the xenophobic/far right concerned primarily with preserving whiteness and national dominance. All sectors champion male dominance and white/Christian supremacy. Some do so very explicitly, others in coded ways.

Until now, the Republican Party has mainly drawn its leadership from the secular right. The Christian right has been a powerful presence during the past few decades, but mainly at the local and state level. And it has distanced itself from the xenophobic right, at least publicly. Trump is changing all of that.

Trump, the presidential candidate, was basically a “paleoconservative.” He adhered to nationalism, free markets, and moral traditionalism. He supported a strident form of anti-immigrant politics, an isolationist foreign policy, and a deep skepticism toward economic globalization that put him at odds with an important element of the business agenda.

Trump, the president, has assembled an administration comprised of a coalition of the secular, Christian and xenophobic right. Some say it is the widest rightwing coalition ever assembled by an American president. And it is far more radical than anyone would have believed after the election.

The Trump administration has welcomed Christian conservative influence (Betsy DeVos and Mike Pence). It has has placed white supremacists such as Steve Bannon—a former spokesperson for the so-called “alt-right.” That means that Islamophobia is likely to be central driver of foreign policy—hence the recent effort to implement a Muslim ban. For Trump’s different constituencies on the right, Islam is a perfect target, encapsulating beliefs in American and Christian superiority, evoking fears of terrorism, and playing into clash of civilizations-preservation of Christian nation; nationalism. It targets Jews in coded, less explicit ways.

In terms of Trump’s cabinet appointees, a Tea Party libertarianism is ascendant: a Secretary of Education who doesn’t believe in public education, a Secretary of State who believes that foreign policy should be run by Exxon, and so forth. They basically want to destroy the Federal Government. And despite all of Trump’s campaign talk about “draining the swamp” of crony capitalists, he has assembled a cabinet that is more pro-business than any other before it, and which includes Wall Street bankers and corporate globalists like Steve Mnuchin and Rex Tillerson.

I’ve heard some liberals reassure us, saying that in four years we will take back Congress and the Presidency. But that’s far too optimistic. The basic operations of our democracy are now under threat. What are we likely to see within the coming months? A massive attempt to roll back the last fifty years of liberal social reforms and an undermining of democratic institutions. The disruption and destruction of Federal government and privatization of many of its basic functions.

Will more moderate Republicans push back? Will mass mobilizations push Democrats to the left? Will apolitical Americans rise up when they realize they will lose their health insurance, and when they defund their kids’ schools? Or will they direct their wrath against the most vulnerable members of our society? The answer depends, in part, upon how quickly and effectively we can mobilize to defend the institutions that Trump is trying to destroy.

The Yale historian Tim Snyder, who has written extensively about the rise of fascism, says, “we have at most a year to defend the republic.” What we do in the next weeks and months is thus of vital importance.

(Thanks to http://blog.feministische-studien.de/2017/03/understanding-trumpism/)

Remembering Joan Acker

I first came to know Joan when I arrived at the University of Oregon, ostensibly to replace her, over twenty years ago. At the time, I knew full well that that was an impossible task. She was a grande dame of Marxist-feminist sociology, a researcher of work and organizations who came out of the Old Left. I was a member of younger generation of feminists who was influenced by the New Left, and by the “cultural turn” in sociology. My generation was more skeptical about the category of “woman” –which we believed was a socially constructed identity. “What’s all this fuss about identity?” Joan used to ask me, when we spoke about my work. She was always more of a materialist, and also more of a radical feminist—even a separatist, at times.

Once, when I suggested that she read the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, she responded: “I only read work by women.” She suggested, in an interview with Jennifer Pierce for Contexts, that she thought we should outlaw football: it was dangerous, and it propped up a masculinity that was far too aggressive—and anachronistic. Joan always spoke her mind. She got that from her mother, she said—and from her experience as a woman in academia when there were far fewer of us around, when one had to fight much harder to be heard. As she once wrote, much of her work was dedicated to “getting the man out of her head”—devising ways of thinking and being that placed women at the center, and moved toward a more egalitarian world.

Some will certainly recall Joan’s passion for social justice, her intellectual achievements, and they should. Tristan Bridges and James Messerschmidt have recently posted a wonderful summary of some of her contributions. But I will remember Joan most for her wit, her refusal to suffer fools, and her sense of fun. There were stories about her that circulated in the sociology department: that when she taught in Europe, she had a romantic liaison with a hunky younger man, who came to visit her in Eugene, and whom she installed at her office, at least for a short while. Well into her 70s, if there was a good party, Joan was often the last person to leave the dance floor.

 

Joan and I shared a birthday, and we sometimes celebrated together when I lived in Eugene. Even though she was 35 years my senior, she always seemed ageless to me—until the last few years of her life. The last time I saw her was at the assisted living center. She had lost a lot of her vision, dementia was setting in, and she was, at that point, mostly bedridden. I wasn’t entirely sure she knew who I was any longer. I asked her about the facilities, and whether she was getting good care. She told me that there were a number of other older women there whom she liked very much. In fact, she planned to undertake a new research project in which she would interview them. But first, she said, she would need to do a literature review on women and aging. A sociologist to the very end!

I will miss Joan’s friendship, her irreverence, her tireless dedication to her craft and to making a better world. But most of all, I will miss her laugh.

CONTEXTS and the Lost Art of Translation

Contexts, as many of you know, is a hybrid journal/magazine published by the American Sociological Association for the last dozen years. Every few years a new team of editors is selected. Three years ago Jodi O’Brien and I became the editors. Our latest—and last– issue is hot off the presses.

As our website says:

“Contexts is a quarterly magazine that makes cutting-edge social research accessible to general readers. We’re the public face of sociology.”

That’s a bit of an overstatement. We’re not the only public face of sociology. There are others as well. But Contexts is the ASA-endorsed and resourced public sociological magazine.

It resembles other sociological journals insofar as its peer reviewed, and draws its authors mainly from among sociologists. But there are a number of things that make it unique: First, it departs from the standard article format. Articles are shorter and more narrative in style, and eschew specialist language. Second, it conveys its story through the use of images—graphics photos– as well as text, and also through the use of sound–podcasts.

Contexts raises some larger questions about the politics of scholarly communication in our discipline and beyond. It suffers from a bit of an identity crisis which illuminates how the pressures of professionalization clash, at times, with the urge to popularize.

Some would like Contexts to be a glossy mass circulation magazine, the discipline’s answer to Popular Psychology, or Atlantic Monthly—a magazine of ideas with an audience that transcends professional sociologists. But a project like that takes enormous investments of time and money that ASA hasn’t really been willing or able to commit to. Perhaps that’s because ASA members haven’t pushed the discipline to do that.

Consequently, Contexts operates, I would say, more like an AJS or ASR lite. It provides an opportunity for sociologist to translate their work to other professional sociologists and students of sociology. And this, I think, is the principal source of some sociologists’ ambivalence toward Contexts and its goals.

When we speak of public scholarship, public sociology, or even “popular sociology,” I think we should differentiate between two linked but somewhat separate processes: translation and dissemination.

Most conventional understandings of public scholarship focus on the process of dissemination—getting our work out to broader publics—which often means getting media attention.That is, we do our research in tried and tested ways, and then we send it out into the world, hoping that it will catch the eyes of journalists, policymakers, and others.

Sometimes university media affairs office, or a publicist at a publishing house, or sometimes even a paid publicist pitches in. Some types of sociological work lend itself well to dissemination, and pickup by media outlets. Dissemination is important—it gets our research out there—though not always in ways that we intend.

But there’s another dimension of public scholarship, that I would term translation. This is what academics are not as good at. In effect, I’ve come to see Contexts as a training ground for the work of translation.

Translation requires one to conceptualize one’s work somewhat differently—to make it engaging to nonspecialist audiences. It requires rethinking the audience in your head—transforming it from a finite group of other experts, such as your dissertation committee, or experts in your field, into a group of people you may not know at all, who may not share any of your expertise.

In a recent book, about writing, the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker says that the cause of most bad writing, he says, is not laziness or sloppiness. It is what he calls the “curse of knowledge”: the writer’s inability to put herself in the reader’s shoes or to imagine that the reader might not know all that the writer knows—the jargon, the shorthand, the assumptions, the received wisdom.

It takes a deliberate effort to break out of this. In writing her book Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins invited a number of her African American women undergraduates to serve as readers of selected chapters. They were bright, primarily working class women. She asked them what thoughts and emotions the ideas in the book raised for them, and as she revised her manuscript, she incorporated their ideas. (See “Truth Telling and Intellectual Activism”)

Translating means changing the audience in our head. It can also entail finding the narrative, the story, in your research that can transform a complex argument into one that draws non-experts in. This requires showing and telling, painting a portrait of a group, a scene, or a trend that unfolds over time, offering thick description while analyzing what is occurring beneath the surface of events.

As academics we are all about creating and disseminating knowledge, and that is what we are rewarded for. But there is, I believe, is a time and place for taking ourselves out of our place of privileged insight, to think about how we might share that knowledge with others.

We shouldn’t do this out of the goodness of our hearts, or because we want to gratify our egos and our desire for attention—but of course those considerations always play roles. We should do it because it makes our work better. By bringing others in conversation with our work before and after publication, we also have the ability to test our ideas out and make them stronger.

Graduate students who are reading this may be thinking: this is all fine and good, but I need a job, and in order to get a job in an increasingly competitive market, I need to be pumping out journal articles and playing by the rules. Junior faculty members may thinking: well that’s all fine and good but I need to keep my job–and prepare for my next promotion. Senior faculty members may be saying to themselves: well, that’s fine and good, but things are working okay for me, so why ruin a good thing?

I’m not suggesting that translation should be all that we do. There’s a time and place for high-level conversations with our scholarly peers of course. But in the rush to professionalization, we’ve forgotten how to speak to other audiences, and we no longer collectively value it.

The reward structure of the profession must change in order for us to make translation more than simply a hobby we do on the side of our “real” work, or something we feel that must cover up in order to be seen as “professional.” It is changing, very slowly.

I’m encouraged by a number of small-scale efforts to encourage other kinds of scholarly communication— initiatives like Discover Society, Sociological Images, Society Pages, and Public Books. I’m intrigued by those who are using new modes of sociological writing and representation such as performance –Les Back and Nirmal Puwar in the UK, and Patricia Clough and Jackie Orr in the US. And I value the kinds the critical discussions about the politics of scholarly communication that are cropping up in the blogosphere, at sites like SociologicalImagination.org.

What these and other initiatives suggest is that many younger scholars in particular are looking for different ways of communicating their research. As a first step on this path, I suggest that rather than deride the label “popular sociology,” we should proudly embrace it.

W(h)ither the Lesbian Nation? Reflections on Millennial Sexualities

Sociologist Steven Seidman, author of such books as Beyond the Closet and Romantic Longings, recently interviewed me about lesbian identities and the changing landscape of sexual politics. 

Steven Seidman: Your first book, Sex and Sensibility, traced the decentering of lesbian-feminism in the 1990s. Has there been a parallel decentering of the broader lesbian culture in the last decade or so?

Arlene Stein: Lesbian culture in the United States has always operated under the radar to a great extent, and has taken varied forms, depending upon its location in space and time. My earlier work looked at how feminism offered many lesbians of the baby boom a unifying ideology. It was supremely sexy and radical to be a lesbian for a brief moment in the 1970s, at least in the context of the feminist counterculture.  To be very honest, I am not sure whether there is such a thing as a “lesbian culture” at all still. In small and medium sized towns, there are friendship networks comprised in part of women who have affectional preferences for other women. In cities and university towns, where there are more opportunities for institution-building, lesbian women may flock to softball leagues, volunteering at battered women’s shelters, or parenting groups. These networks tend to be highly segmented by age—and often by class and race as well. Because sexual subcultures, including lesbian subcultures, skew toward the young, I have to admit that I’m no longer the best person to serve as an analyst of them. When I wrote Sex and Sensibility as my dissertation at UC Berkeley in the late 1980s, I was myself a young person who was very much a part of the community I was studying. I am now in my 50s, and most of the lesbians I know are also roughly my age, other than those whom I encounter as a professor. My friends and I constitute a subset of the larger lesbian world, to be sure, but we’re certainly not on the cutting edge.

SS: How would you characterize the younger generation of Americans who are identifying as lesbian? Has the meaning of being a lesbian changed for these younger women?

AS: My impression is that today many younger women do not identify with the term “lesbian” at all. Many identify as queer, some as gay, some as trans. Many relegate “lesbian” to the past, associating it with a separatist impulse which they don’t particularly admire. But others, perhaps a smaller minority, are nostalgic for that movement’s radical imagination. A friend of mine, an academic who is more than ten years younger than me, and who appreciates lesbian feminism for its cultural manifestations—women’s land, women’s music, Tee Corinne drawings of vulvas, and so forth—makes large format photographs of still-existing feminist women’s land groups. She and others, some of whom identify with a cultural movement called “deep lez,” love the take-no-prisoners attitude of radical lesbian feminism, and they embrace elements of it without a hint of irony! Like other younger lesbian-identified women, particularly those who see themselves as artists, they identify with feminism’s DIY spirit, as well as with the more postmodern tendency toward cultural appropriation—and they don’t see these impulses as being at odds with one another. As the trans singer/performer Antony Hegarty said in an interview recently, “sincerity is the new punk.”

Tee Corinne, “Yantra #41,” from the Yantras of Womanlove series. c. Tee Corinne; Courtesy of the Tee A. Corinne Papers, University of Oregon Libraries.

SS: Do you think that current lesbians will continue a tradition of community building that separates lesbians from gay men and straight women?

AS: I’m not sure. I suppose that as long as women who love other women are excluded from certain avenues of respectability and mobility, and as long as they experience homophobia and sexism, there will be a place for lesbians who organize as lesbians, even if they don’t necessarily use that term to describe themselves. My sense is that fewer and fewer women, and fewer men for that matter, experience the deep sense of fear and shame that once accompanied the recognition of having same-sex desires. Younger people grow up with images of homosexuality on television. They’re rather sanitized, and typically white/middle class/male images, but who would have imagined the day when Ellen DeGeneres, a middle-aged lesbian, could be everyone’s favorite girl-next-door talk show host? Things have changed, to be sure. Still, as we know, there are young women (and men) who live in parts of this country, and not only in rural areas or religious communities, who face tremendous challenges in claiming their desires. But at least they have the Internet and can form communities online. That doesn’t insure their physical safety, but at least it gives them a lifeline, and the knowledge they are not alone.

SS: There’s been a wide-ranging discussion of late on sexual fluidity, especially among women. What’s your sense of how this theme is playing out among younger and older lesbians?

AS: Sexual fluidity, and the possibility of bisexuality, has long been an elephant in the room. Lesbian feminists embraced fluidity when it worked to their advantage, when it brought many new women (including previously married housewives!) into the ranks of the lesbian nation. But when fluidity led in the other direction, toward heterosexuality, they castigated those who decided after spending years as happy little lesbians, to go back to men. My sense is that queer women today are much more keenly aware of the prevalence of sexual fluidity and aren’t quite as threatened by bisexuality as my generation was. Seventy years after Kinsey, we are better informed that sexuality is a spectrum. Younger women study this stuff in college, and they read magazine articles about it—and have access to girl-on-girl porn, for better or for worse. Older women? I suppose many of them—us!—have also been changed by the dominant culture’s flirtation with bisexuality. But some continue to see bisexuality as a threat.’

SS: What has been the impact of the emergence of transgenderism and transexualism on the lesbian community?

AS: It’s pretty huge, I think. I’m doing research now on trans men and top surgery. I became interested in this project because it seemed to me that more and more female-assigned individuals who might have been butch lesbians twenty years ago are now bypassing the lesbian label and identifying as trans. Why is this the case? Certainly the decline of the lesbian feminist world and the rise of the trans community has a lot to do with it. These communities create cultural scripts that make it possible for people to construct lives that make sense to them. But there’s more to it than that, I think. Trans medical procedures, such as top surgery, are now more widely accessible, and knowledge of them circulates on the Internet. There’s a commercial element, to be sure, as surgeons have come to see this as an increasingly attractive, and lucrative, specialty. Unlike some lesbians, who fear what I’ve called the “incredibly shrinking lesbian world,” I don’t really have a unified political or emotional response to this development–which makes me want to know more. Right now, I see the rise of trans as rooted in late modern reflexivity and restlessness, and our desire to constantly work on, and become the best possible version of ourselves. Of course the impulse toward self-improvement is very American. But it’s also a product of our neoliberal age, in which we all want to become masters of our own little universe, in this case our bodies. While I certainly do not share the opinion of some feminists that female-assigned individuals who wish to live as men are by their very existence antifeminist, I do see transgender as, at least implicitly a critique of radical social constructionism and a recognition of the materiality of the body

SS: In your view has a trend towards the “normalization” of homosexuality affected lesbians differently than gay men?

AS: Again, it’s difficult to generalize outside of particular class, geographic, racial, and age contexts, but on the whole, gay men continue to enjoy a great deal more power than lesbians in American society, as evidenced by the fact that there are still gay male neighborhoods and commercial spaces, however weakened, and that there are a considerable number of gay men who are economic and political elites. Lesbians still experience gender discrimination. Today, the highest-ranking woman in corporate America is someone who was born a man, who transitioned later in life. Collectively, men simply enjoy greater opportunities than women do in many spheres. At the same time, heteronormativity also structures society, allocating rewards to those who get married and construct families in which the couple is at the center. It’s no wonder many of us who can do so are choosing to enter that system, particularly as alternative forms of intimacy may be on more tenuous ground.

Israel, Gaza, and the Trouble with Holocaust Analogies

 

The recent violence in Gaza reverberates around the world, leading to confrontations and wars of words, and testing tribal loyalties: are you with us or against us? As is often the case in times of trial for Israel, in the pitched battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, Holocaust survivors and their descendants are playing prominent roles.

A few weeks ago, Elie Wiesel, in an ad sponsored by Shmuley Boteach’s Values Network, accused Hamas of using children as human shields in recent fighting. “In my own lifetime,” proclaimed Wiesel, “I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites.”

The ad, which appeared in several major American newspapers, including the New York Times, likened the Israel-Palestinian crisis to a clash of civilizations between “those who celebrate life and those who champion death,” pinning civilian deaths on the deliberate actions of Hamas.

Two weeks later, a group of 327 Holocaust survivors and their descendants unequivocally condemned the “massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation” and took the United States to task for funding recent attacks. In a half-page ad in the Times, they accused Wiesel of “abusing our history,” likening Israeli aggression to genocide.

We are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.

We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

That Holocaust survivors would be enlisted in the battle for American public opinion about Israel should come as little surprise. For groups vying for moral authority—the Christian right, gays and lesbians, and even captains of industry (such as when private equity titan Stephen A. Schwartzman said that asking financiers to pay taxes at the same rate as those who work for a living is comparable to Hitler’s invasion of Poland), associating oneself with the Holocaust has become a potent way to draw attention to an issue, claim moral authority, and elicit sympathy for one’s side of a conflict. (See my article, “Whose Memory? Whose Victimhood?“)

In a world of shades of gray, where it is often difficult for many of us to figure out where to stand, the genocide of European Jewry has come to symbolize absolute evil. Its survivors, in turn, have become revered figures, personifying heroism and moral authority.

Conservative critic Alvin Rosenfeld recently took left-leaning Holocaust survivors and their children to task in The Forward for criticizing Israel in the paid Times ad. Rosenfeld, a conservative objected to their political stance, charging that being a survivor “carries no special entitlement to superior ethical insight or elevated political awareness.”

The signatories to IJSN’s ad, however, invoke just such an entitlement as they ostentatiously pull rank as Holocaust survivors in condemning Israel. In inflating and exploiting a status they regard as privileged, they are guilty of doing precisely what they falsely accuse Elie Wiesel of doing: “manipulating the legacy of the Nazi genocide to justify the unjustifiable.” Their abuse of Jewish suffering for contemporary political ends comes especially to the fore whenever they proudly parade forth their pedigrees as survivors to defame Israel.

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/204790/moral-emptiness-of-holocaust-survivors-who-took-on/?p=all#ixzz3DU3el6ya

He’s partly right. Survivors are rarely heroic paragons of moral virtue; they’re just ordinary people who through luck, fortune, or fortitude, managed to endure, despite the odds. I know because my father, who settled here in the early 1950s, after losing his home, his family, and nearly his life, was one of them. After spending the war years on the run in Poland and Russia, he returned home to Warsaw to find everyone gone. For four decades afterwards, he tried his best to fit into his adopted nation, and shied away from politics. He was fairly typical of other survivors in that respect.

Rosenfeld is happy to listen to survivors who agree with his stance on Israel, like Elie Wiesel. When they disagree with it, like the signatories to the letter from the anti-Zionist survivors and their families, they are guilty of “moral emptiness.”

The problem is not that Holocaust survivors are using their status to make moral arguments about Israel’s recent actions in Gaza.  The real problem is that quick and easy Holocaust analogies are easily used to shut down reasonable discussion. On the right, those who use Holocaust analogies tar critics of Israel, even thoughtful ones, with the brush of anti-Semitism, labeling them as self-hating Jews—and even charging them with inciting another Holocaust. Those on the left, on the other hand are too quick to liken Netanyahu to Hitler, and call his policies genocidal. Instead of encouraging debate, such talk discourages it. One can’t debate with Hitler, nor even, at times, with a Holocaust survivor.

Instead of enlisting Holocaust survivors as symbolic vehicles in an already polarized and all-too bloody conflict, we should honor them as the last links to a vibrant prewar Jewish world – a world that was once filled with the cacophonous sounds of debate about the future of the Jewish people. In that world, even though it was ravaged by centuries of anti-Semitism and on the verge of a yet-unknown cataclysm, there were spirited discussions about a host of issues, including the question of whether Jews should place their faith with visions of world socialism, with a national homeland, or simply with God.

 

 Sadly, that tradition of debate and dissent hardly exists today, if the current state of organized Jewry is any indication in this country. Gone are the days when spirited discussions of Talmud and politics spilled out from synagogues onto the streets. Religious institutions, fearful of alienating their congregants, now shy away from controversy.  Regrettably, so do most of our national Jewish organizations. Those who refuse to be quiet, like Brant Rosen, the suburban Chicago rabbi and unspoken critic of Israel who recently resigned his pulpit for fear of dividing his congregation, are among the casualties.

Instead, conversations about the Israel-Palestine issue are more likely to take place on Facebook, or in sponsored ads in our national newspapers today. They offer stark alternatives: are you with us or against us?

We people of the book are known for our fertile tradition of dissent and disagreement. While some may believe that times of war necessitate absolute loyalty, it is precisely now that we need dissent the most.

The Unhappy Divorce of Journalism and the Social Sciences

Just about the worst thing you can say about a piece of sociological writing is that it’s “journalistic.” The term is often used as a criticism, interchangeable at times with “descriptive”, “thin,” or just plain superficial.

There’s good reason many us have little confidence in journalism: the closer a story comes to our own experience, the easier it is to see its flaws. Take, for example, the article about the proliferation of “hooking up” on college campuses that appeared in The New York Times a few years ago.

(Source: New York Times, “Sex on Campus”)

The story claimed that hooking up—sex outside of relationships—is commonplace on college campuses, and is being pursued as actively by women as men. On the basis of interviews with a small number of women at elite schools like the University of Pennsylvania, the article claimed that busy women students didn’t have time for full-blown relationships, so they opted for more superficial sexual liaisons.

It was quickly denounced by sociologists, who charged that the reporter based on claims on flimsy evidence. It was even more roundly criticized on the Internet by college students who felt that the article’s generalizations were unfair or inaccurate. Many of their classmates were indeed pursuing long-term relationships, some argued. A veritable cottage industry of commentary cropped up alongside the article, showing the press’ power to incite and engage. (See, for example http://goo.gl/vg57t.)

(Image Source)

“Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,” journalists frequently joke. And in fact, for journalists, who must hook the reader in and keep their attention in order to hold onto their jobs, storytelling is an end in itself. Since their audiences are reading for the sheer pleasure of good writing, they write, at least partly, to entertain, and to encourage readers to keep reading.

This is how George Saunders, the award-winning author of nonfiction and short stories, puts it:

“I’m essentially trying to impersonate a first-time reader who has to pick up the story and at every point has to decide whether to continue reading.” If an “intelligent person picks it up, they’ll keep going. It’s an intimate thing between equals. I’m not above you talking down. We’re on the same level. You’re just as smart, just as worldly, just as curious as I am.”

Academic books, in contrast, tend to be written for a finite group of other experts, conveying an argument which is typically based on  an extended research project. Writing a first book, which often emerges out of a dissertation, you may envision your audiences as particular professors on a tenure committee. Later on, you’re probably addressing experts in your field. While the writing should be persuasive, academics don’t particularly care if they’re holding the reader’s attention or not; they assume that what they say is inherently interesting, and that their potential readers are sufficiently intrigued by the topic to read on —even if the writing is less than scintillating.

Faced with these differences of purpose and audience, some would suggest that we leave storytelling to the journalists, and sociologizing to the sociologists. Let journalists speak to the people, while let sociologists keep working in the trenches, doing the hard work of data collection and analysis. As a graduate student of mine recently told me, “Sociology is supposed to be serious and scientific, not entertaining and story-like.”

Sociology and journalism, he was taught, are as different as cows and horses.

(Image Source)

Early in their graduate school careers, students learn that professionalization means performing the role of sociologist, and differentiating oneself from those who value good writing for their own sake, and who write to entertain—writers of fiction and nonfiction. Rather than writing pleasurable prose, they are supposed to be advancing sociological knowledge.

But in fact, sociology and journalism have long existed in relation to one another. For one thing, sociologists know what they know partly through the media. And of course social scientists rely, at times, upon the media to disseminate our ideas to broader publics.

Likewise, journalists regularly mine sociological work for insights on everything from young adults’ changing pathways to adulthood, to the question of whether equality diminishes sexual desire, and sociologists are used to being consulted as experts for that telling quote on a variety of subjects. The best journalists do even more: browsing the web and journals for story ideas. They regularly raid our work, popularizing it for others to consume—at times without citing us.

Sociologists and journalists also have in common the fact that they’re both in the business of producing representations of social reality— stories– accounts of connected events that unfolds through time, which have characters that interact with another in different settings. Journalists and sociologists have different strategies of storytelling, to be sure. When journalists tell stories about social phenomena, such as hooking up on college campuses and other social trends, they tend to tell them through the lives of individuals—they show the reader what is going on, painting portraits of scenes and characters. Sociologists, in contrast, tell—they make arguments, drawing on data— numbers if we are quantitative sociologist, or vignettes and thick description if we are ethnographers.

But while we sociologists have been busy honing our rigorous methodological skills and ways of telling, we’ve ceded the field of translation, which requires showing, to smart journalists. By failing to discuss our work in compelling ways, we limit its impact, placing a wall, in effect, between our work and potential audiences.

Rather than deride “popular sociology” which addresses larger publics, in book-length works of general interest as well as shorter articles and essays –it’s time to reclaim it as something to aspire to. Popular sociology offers the general reader a sociological take on something he or she may be curious about. It embodies a hybrid style of writing, bridging journalism and sociology by showing and telling, painting a portrait of a group, a scene, or a trend that unfolds over time, offering thick description while analyzing what is occurring beneath the surface of events.

First posted on justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/