The late twentieth century is chock full of important and flourishing movements. The African-American freedom struggle always comes to mind, but there’s also the gay rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, etc. However, arguably none of these movements have achieved as much as the New Right. I always tell my students that we have to think about conservatism as a social movement closely related to the movements of the 60s. The New Right came to prominence largely as a response to the 60s, while also borrowing heavily from their enemies’ tactics.

Why has conservatism had so much success? Why have the Tea Parties washed over the American political scene, possibly altering the nation’s history? I suggest two major ways conservatives have outflanked progressives. First, conservatives better understand how to move the levers of power in this nation. Second, conservatives have a defined ideology to guide them and progressives do not. Together, these two issues have done more than any of conservatism’s inherent advantages to make them successful and to push us to the political margins.

Conservatives do have some built in advantages over progressives. The New Right appeals to base values of greed and hate. Progressives certainly can’t emulate that and wouldn’t want to anyway. The conservative focus on maximizing individual wealth has attracted billionaire investors like Edward and David Koch, who have funded the Tea Party. While people like Warren Buffet or George Soros may support some progressive causes, the vast majority of the extremely wealthy act in their own financial self-interest, putting progressives at a severe fundraising disadvantage.

The conservative movement also benefits from an aggressive homogeneity. Not only are conservatives by and large white and quite frequently wealthy, but they actively pursue this as a goal, shunning diversity in their ranks. This is very important for understanding conservative success. Progressives come from diverse backgrounds and have varied interests. Many feel particular passion about one or two issues but support a broad swath of causes. This diversity makes progressive movements so dynamic and it has helped break down racism, sexism and homophobia in this country.

Unfortunately, diversity of background and interests also increases the level of organizing difficulty. While we are holding diversity trainings, conservatives are plotting to destroy Social Security. While we are searching our souls to drive out vestiges of sexism in our organizations, conservatives are gutting science and history standards in schools. This is not to denigrate diversity (quite the opposite!) but simply to state that it makes organizing harder for us than for the homogeneous New Right.

While progressives should recognize these disadvantages, we shouldn’t use them as excuses. More important than money, hate, or homogeneity, progressives have failed because we don’t understand how to leverage power and because we no longer have a consistent critique of capitalism.

Conservatives know how to use power. People keep asking where the Tea Parties came from. People point to their funding, their astroturf roots, their old and white demographics. All true. But people don’t seem to recognize that this movement is six decades in the making. After World War II, conservatives, disgusted by the New Deal, liberalism, and government expansion, began organizing. At first, they operated in fringe groups like the John Birch Society, railing about fluoridized water and communist spies. Most people saw them as lunatics.

Soon however, conservatives began gaining respectability. Shunning the more radical elements, they worked to take power rather than just complain. Moreover, they recognized quite clearly how to reclaim the Republican Party from the soft conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. In the 1950s, conservatives in Orange County, California; Texas, Atlanta, and other parts of the nation began joining local school boards to influence their children’s education. They also started volunteering for their local Republican Party committees and taking on the least desirable tasks within the party and local government. Each one of these people helped build a base within local Republican parties for a resurgent muscular conservatism that openly rejected the New Deal and social liberalism, refusing to compromise for electoral relevance.

Finding themselves newly empowered by their political activism, conservatives quickly rose up the ranks of many state parties and increasingly in the national party. In 1964, they managed to secure the Republican presidential nomination for their hero, Barry Goldwater. Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater and pundits declared the nascent conservative movement dead on arrival. But a mere two years later, conservatives got Ronald Reagan elected governor of California and then pushed Richard Nixon into the presidency in 1968. Building on those victories and Reagan’s enduring popularity, conservatives increased their power within the Republican Party for the next four decades. Today, the entire Republican Party is beholden to the conservative movement.

Conservatives knew how to take power and they started a successful multi-decade effort to do it. Ever since the Carter Administration of the late 1970s, progressives have found themselves as alienated from their party leaders as conservatives of the 1950s. But instead of organizing within the party, by 2000, many progressives decided to support Ralph Nader’s quixotic run for the presidency.

The Nader campaign showed progressives completely misunderstanding to how create change. Change doesn’t begin at the top; it comes from the bottom. A Nader presidency without a massive grassroots campaign to build a Green Party would have been disastrous and short-lived. Similarly, progressive hopes that Barack Obama would herald a new future completely miss that Obama lacks to power to convince Congress to pass a progressive program, even if he wanted to do so. Only the fear of an angry base can move Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln. Centrist Democrats have no reason to fear that base because we aren’t organized within the party structure.

The next time you wonder why Olympia Snowe caves to the right on major votes while Ben Nelson shows no respect to progressives, understand that the answer is sixty years in the making. We have to understand how change happens within the American political system and act upon that knowledge to transform the Democratic Party to our liking. Only then will we hold the power that conservatives do today.

Conservatism has also benefited from its commitment to an ideologically fundamentalist version of capitalism. The teachings of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman have become sacrosanct for conservatives: to stray from orthodoxy threatens excommunication. This ideology, embodied in plans to strip the American welfare state, support the outsourcing of jobs overseas, and export disaster capitalism around the world, guides the conservative movement. It gives conservatives a common language, set of beliefs, and cultural references. In short, it provides them an architecture of activism.

On the other hand, progressives have no clear ideology today. After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991, progressives lost their answer to capitalism. Even if they disliked socialism, at least Marxism helped shape a critique of capitalism. With socialism discredited, progressives have flailed around for twenty years for organizing principles to unite them.

As I will argue in my final column in this series on activism, progressives’ inability to construct a new ideological structure to fight fundamentalist capitalism, and often their ignorance of the need to do so, is the left’s greatest failure of the past two decades.

Check out Erik’s previous pieces on Activism in America here.

And on Saturday, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and a host of other conservative politicians and political figures, including Michele Bachmann and (sigh) Alveda King gathered with hundreds of thousands of their conservative supporters for a “non-political” rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. (Beck insisted that the date selection was purely coincidental.)

I watched with equal parts outrage, sadness and amusement as the Restoring Honor march/rally/hullaballoo-making unfolded on Saturday. With so many politicians spearheading and keynoting the event, if promoting a political agenda wasn’t the goal, then what was?

Here’s an answer:

The event’s website says the rally is to pay tribute to America’s military personnel and others “who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.” It also is to promote the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which provides scholarships and services to family members of military members.

Well, okay. Fair enough. “Support our troops!” is a nice and fairly innocuous concept, a nifty little sound bite that doesn’t stir up controversy. Regardless of your feelings about the war(s), you really do appreciate the efforts of all those brave men and women (because it’s always laid out just like that, “men and women”) who are risking their very lives to help keep freedom free or somesuch.

There’s an idea that a whole lot of folks, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, can feel confident in getting behind. Hell, it’s a bumper sticker. But it’s a sentiment, after all, and standing alone it’s not enough to get hundreds of thousands of people off of their couches and onto the Mall. It’s clear that these people are upset, truly upset, about. . . something. But what?

Ummmmm...

Like so many things in life, the real story behind Beck’s rally, and the true nature of what has continued to propel the Tea Party movement since its inception, lies in the subtext. Several “on the ground” reports featuring interviews with rally attendees revealed a bizarre amalgamation of concerns, from budget spending and the deficit to health care reform to prayer in schools to a general disbelief in climate change. Once again, apolitical rally, extremely political concerns:

“Want to know why I’m here?” asked a the first person I talked to–Nick, a 61-year-old retired nurse anesthetist from Sidell, LA in a rally-themed t-shirt–in the line for a port-a-potty off the Mall. Sure, I said. “As Popeye would say, that’s alls I can stand and I can’t stand no more.” What couldn’t he stand? “We’ve got czars running everything.” And health care reform. “It was unconstitutional, for one thing.”

Ah, the czars. They’ve haunted the Tea Party’s political imagination and appeared sporadically in their protest language for a while now. No one ever seems to remember that czars were what Russia had before the Bolshevik Revolution. They’re the ultimate manifestation of the notions of God-and-country that Tea Partiers seem to like so much. No one also ever seems to remember that the Bush Administration was pretty czar-heavy; maybe they were more constitutionally-minded and less possibly socialist.

Oh, and less Muslim. A Christian Beck supporter in attendance with her prayer group had the following to say about President Obama:

“I don’t believe in peaceful Muslims,” she says. “Before you know it, we’re gonna be overwhelmed by Muslims.”

You see, the coming Muslim tide, threatens to annihilate Christianity, Christian values, and Christians in this country. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party ideology are the only things standing between us and the coming caliphate. This individual’s clearly taken a page from the Nicolas Sarkozy book on interfaith relations.

I wish the sentiments I pointed out were less common. But as I read various news articles, reaction pieces, and op-eds about the Restoring Honor rally, they kept popping up. The ideas that united these people who didn’t agree on everything are reactionary and fear-based. Tea Partiers are almost universally anti-Obama, but if you ask them why, their answers gleefully skim along a veritable motif of ignorance and misinformation. Beck himself famously exploited racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic elements among his supporters earlier this year when he said this:

He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.

Many of the rally’s overwhelmingly White attendees could agree on one thing, even if they couldn’t express it on signs: they don’t like or trust President Obama. At all. They don’t like or trust his agenda. They don’t like the way he talks. They don’t like what he has to say. They don’t like the way he respirates, all through his nose and stuff. Oh, but don’t get them wrong! It’s not that they don’t like Black people per se. That gospel choir standing behind Beck was wonderful, and Martin Luther King’s message was generally positive and color-blind. It’s just that they don’t like the direction that this country’s headed in. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact there is a Black man at the helm when he should be down in steerage. Where he belongs.

When he took the stage on the same steps and same day as Martin Luther King all those decades ago, Beck didn’t deviate from his promise of an apolitical message. His speech was consistently religious and patriotic. Beck had donned the mantle of the itinerant preacher, and in spite of his insistence that the rally’s timing was merely serendipitous, most of what he had to say was distinctly and consciously reminiscent of King. The methods are the same, and the language – “freedom,” “love” – are obviously co-opted from the Civil Rights movements.

The difference, as several actual civil rights leaders pointed out, was that where King had lead through courage of conviction and inspired through love, Beck’s motivational arsenal is firmly rooted in fear: fear of economic uncertainty, fear of loss of privilege, fear of an uprooted status quo:

“This is going to be a moment that you’ll never be able to paint people as haters, racists, none of it,” Beck says of the event featuring Sarah Palin and other conservative political and cultural figures. “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.”

It’s pretty clear that Beck’s “we” doesn’t look like me, or anyone of the countless people who fought and died for civil rights that first time around. In Beck’s funhouse mirrored perception, though, King’s march for equality and his own march for privilege are the same.

As irritated as I was by Beck and his shenanigans, I was more upset on my 68-year-old mother’s behalf. She didn’t march with King, but she was involved with various Black liberation movements in her youth. We watched live coverage of the event. As the camera panned out over a sea of White folks draped in red, white and blue, and cut to Beck on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she sighed.

“Is that where we’re at now?” she asked.

“Looks like,” I replied. And changed the channel.

But that’s not really true. I visit my exes all the time (and not just because the Internet has made drive-bys a lot easier; you can do them on Facebook instead of having to have a car and be in the same town). I have to see for myself that they’re OK.If they aren’t, I just can’t handle it.

I had made tentative plans to go to New Orleans this year, though, and then the Deepwater Horizon well blew and oil saturated my beloved Gulf and I thought about a New Orleans with another haze of depression, tragedy, pain hovering over it, the threat of hurricane season not just possibly breaching levees that still, five years on, are not up to snuff, but pouring crude oil all over the city, coating still-devastated areas in toxic sludge far worse than the swampy cocktail that soaked into the city in August and September, 2005.

I couldn’t do it. Like that cliche love, who’s got new bruises, new wounds, has been beaten up again, I can’t bear to see it.

But then I feel bad because it’s selfishness on my part, after all. New Orleans has handled it. Without much help from the outside, Brad Pitt and HBO notwithstanding, the city’s slowly coming back. The police department is starting to investigate itself after the indiscriminate murders in the storm’s wake, and the music scene just won’t quit.

That’s what I hear, anyway, from friends who come to New York, from phone calls and articles and yes, Facebook updates. Because I couldn’t go back. Can’t. I wonder sometimes if I’m afraid of what I’ll see or afraid I’ll want to stay.

New York is my home now. Brooklyn. Sometimes I walk down a side street here and trip over a broken, jarring sidewalk and it’s like being back there. The houses look similar, sometimes.

I’m more healthy and whole now and I look back at the time when I loved the beautiful brokenness of that city and I want to cry. But I don’t cry now like I used to then. It’s hard to. The tears get stuck in my throat. Is this growing up? I don’t know if I like this part of it. Or maybe it’s just that in the last five years, the last eight years really, I’ve had so much to cry about. Or maybe I can feel New Orleans shrugging at me and saying “Don’t cry for me, what good will your tears do?”

New Orleans is stronger than me; it doesn’t need me. It’s full of people who didn’t leave or who came right back, buoyed by the love of people across the country who would return if they could, who go back as often as they can.  That’s what community means, really. Rebecca Solnit wrote this week, in The Nation:

A disaster unfolds a little like a revolution. No one is in charge, and anything is possible. The efforts of elites, often portrayed as rescue or protection, are often geared more toward preserving the status quo or seizing power. Sometimes they win; sometimes they don’t. Katrina brought many kinds of destruction and a little rebirth, including the spread of green construction projects, new community organizations and perhaps soon, thanks to the work of Thompson and others, some long overdue justice for police crimes. It’s too soon to tell what it will all mean in a hundred years, but it’s high time to start telling the real story of what happened in those terrible first days and weeks.

We who love New Orleans tell the story over and over and the story we tell is of people taking care of one another, of authorities and officials who failed the people and profiteers and mercenaries sweeping in to enforce some vision of Order, usually a whiter, wealthier, more tourist-friendly one. After all, Barbara Bush’s infamous words, that the storm was working out quite well for the city’s poor, were actually true for the disaster capitalists as well.

It’s been five years since the levees broke, and at the moment huge swaths of Pakistan are underwater and our reaction is slow, small, frightening in its very calm.  Why does this disaster simply pass us by? We know firsthand what it looks like when a city drowns; why did we rush to Haiti’s aid and not Pakistan’s?  The deaths on September 11 launched a global war on terror, one that includes drone strikes in Pakistan even as the flood waters destroy homes, but the deaths in August and September of 2005 didn’t launch a global war on floods, on climate change, on much of anything.

Maybe even more so than the poor black people of New Orleans (or Haiti), the people of Pakistan have been so effectively demonized that we don’t care if they drown (we’ve certainly seen the shards of Islamophobia reanimated like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s broom with the Cordoba House controversy).

But disaster fatigue can be a real thing, and after this summer’s grinding, draining news every day of more oil filling the Gulf, perhaps most Americans feel as I do, that they just can’t take any more. What good will our tears do, anyway, without a commitment to real change, a change that requires more than just quick donations? We have to relearn, most of us, what New Orleans already knows–that it’s community that can rebuild, that saves people, and that in the world we have now more than ever, where we can talk to people across the world with a few keystrokes, that community can stretch across oceans and include people who look nothing like us.

Numerous commentators have pointed out the historic parallels with other white American movements in response to black civil rights gains—from the Know Nothings to the Dixiecrats. Yet it is arguable that the movement is also a response to the traumatic stock market crash of October 2008 and the global financial crisis.

It is for this reason that the galvanizing issue, indeed the very name of the movement, is the apparent raising of taxes under the Obama administration. On one level this is counter-intuitive. CNN reported this year that American tax levels are comparatively low worldwide, and are at all time lows for middle and lower class people. Obama’s modest proposals effected only the wealthiest elite of this country. Why therefore would there be any kind of a popular working-class movement aimed at lowering taxes for this country’s obscenely wealthy?

My suggestion is: because neoliberalism itself is under threat. The Tea Party was necessary partly because institutionalized neoliberalism has so utterly failed, at a historical juncture when even dyed-in-the-wool neoliberals from Barack Obama to former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan have come to recognize that some form of state regulation of the financial markets is necessary. Among many economists, there has been a surprising turn towards long-disdained Keynesian economics, where the social democratic state creates the stability necessary to absorb the volatility and unpredictability of the financial markets.

The near-theological faith in the self-corrective power of the market from economists like Greenspan through the 90s and the early part of this decade has been irrevocably shown to be a sham. In response to epoch-shaking decline of economic orthodoxy, the Tea Party is a hysterical denial of concrete reality, suggesting instead that the solution to crisis is its cause and that only scorched-earth post-government libertarianism will fix the very problems it created.

To understand why this, we need some historical perspective on the American economy and its slow change from a social democratic state in the Roosevelt era to the current neoliberalist one. “Cut taxes” has been the mantra of neoliberals from Reagan onwards, Republicans and Democrats alike, one of a slew of policies (deregulation, privatization, downsizing, outsourcing, cutting labor costs) that over the 30 years of the long Reagan revolution have made the American economy vulnerable and heavily reliant on the volatile financial sector. As a result of that turn towards financial speculation, the comparative income share of the top 1% of the country has increased exponentially, shown graphically in a recent report from Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez. [PDF]

The point is, the financial crisis was a long time coming, and when the bubble finally burst once and for all, the American economy had been made immeasurably weaker by white-anting neoliberalist policies. Business Insider recently listed twenty-two staggering statistics that show the middle class is being systematically wiped from existence in the US. These included: 83% of shares being in the hands of the top 1% of the country, 66% of income growth going to the top 1% of the country between 2001 and 2007, only the top 5% of the country earning enough income to match the rising housing costs since 1975, record job search times, 40% of the country working in low-paying service industry jobs, the top 1% of the country owning twice as much of the country as they did only 15 years ago, and the bottom half of the country only earning 1% of its assets.

And yet the Tea Party rails against the evils of Big Government, against a backdrop in which the social democratic elements of government have been immeasurably weakened, with socially and economically stabilizing government programs steadily downsized over the years (except in the military/intelligence arena) and expenditure on public infrastructure has become reduced and politically unpalatable—and a widening gap between rich and poor in which more of the general population need government assistance.

The New York Times reportedly recently on America’s substandard infrastructure, with mediocre health and education systems, sidewalks crumbling to dust, and electricity blackouts increasingly common. At the same time, the $700 billion Bush tax cuts for the country’s wealthiest citizens are being fiercely argued for by the Right, especially the Tea Partiers.

Ronald Reagan’s infamous 1981 Inauguration statement “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” statement has been thus taken to its logical conclusion. Nevada Tea Party candidate Sharon Angle has said that

[social security] entitlement programs…make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.

For a government to have any social functions, for some Tea Partiers, is idolatry itself. Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Florida points out the religious roots of this critique of institutions, saying:

“Angle’s criticism is Christian Reconstructionism in a nutshell.

As Reconstructionists see it, there are three spheres of institutional authority established by God: the family, the church and that civil government. Each of the institutions has specific responsibilities and when “men” look to the State to meet needs the State was not intended to meet, they are looking to the State for salvation and making the State God.

This is the source of their views on helping the poor (it’s the responsibility of families and churches) and education (a family responsibility). For them the civil government has no legitimate role in either function so they advocate dismantling the welfare system, eliminating the Department of Education, and ultimately “replacing” public schools.”

It is clear, then, that the Tea Party is nothing more than the bastard child of Ayn Rand and R.J. Rushdoony. But doesn’t that accurately describe the Republican party anyway?

The Tea Party’s approach to institutions is nothing more than bog standard neoliberalism taken to its conclusion—destroy most of the functions of government except the military. This is, again, far from new, former President Bush proposed to privatize Social Security, and mainstream Republicans have attacked the unemployed (primarily victims of the crisis) by looking to deny extending unemployment benefits in the crisis and characterizing them with undisguised contempt. New York Republican Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino recently proposed housing welfare recipients in prison dorms.

In summary: the economic crisis is a crisis of capitalism at its core. Over the last 30 years, inequity in the United States has stretched towards the breaking point. Recently, the Washington Post found compelling evidence that the much-mooted economic recovery is essentially a jobless recovery, with profits among the 175 companies on Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up 43.3% last quarter. And yet, as columnist Harold Myers pointed out, “today, wages are still down, employment remains low and sales revenue isn’t up much, either. But profits are the outlier. They’re positively soaring.” Profit without workers, without revenue, is not a sustainable system.

There is something fundamentally wrong with an economy so dependent upon the financial speculations of its top 1% that it requires a trillion dollar bailout, above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis. Yet the Tea Party response to the bailout was, once again, a simplistic denial of both crisis and the necessity of government intervention, leavened with a hearty dose of American “bootstrapping” individualism and racial paranoia.

Since the collapse of the communist alternative in the late 1990s, we have been told that there is no alternative to exploitative, inequitable job-cutting wage-cutting tax-cutting program-slashing capitalism, and that any alternative will mean that ordinary citizens will lose everything, especially to cheaper migrant workers (hence the revival of racial xenophobia among the Tea Party in places like Arizona). Yet this conceals the way that low minimum wages and weak labor laws have weakened the system from within, so much so that Indian companies are beginning to look to the United States for cheaper call center workers.

With the miserable failure of neoliberalism in promoting widespread prosperity in the US it is unsurprising that some people would come forward to argue ferociously for its continuation as a dominant reality principle, despite the overwhelming evidence that such policies have centralized wealth in the hands of but a few.

This is nothing more than a “radical” movement advocating that things stay the same, a collective bout of magical thinking in which only repeating the behavior of the past will bring back the boom. Sadly, life is more complicated than that, and only a true change in economic policies will bring a true cure for the country’s ills. For the Tea Party, however, it is undoubtedly better to have the devil you know.

This case follows an eerily similar precedent in South Carolina: in 1994, Susan Smith, a white middle-class mother of two boys, strapped both children into their car seats before submerging her car in John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina.  Like Duley, Smith initially lied about the incident, claiming that her car had been stolen by a young Black man. 

However, unlike Smith, Duley was never granted the benefit of the doubt.  Orangeburg County Sheriff Larry Williams told CNN that Duley’s “clothes were dry… and there were no skid marks or other indications of an accident at the scene.” Physical evidence in Smith’s case may have suggested similar discrepancies in her story, yet in 1994, Americans were instantly sympathetic to Smith’s racially-loaded tale of carjacking.  Certainly, the police were not commenting as openly about the details of the Smith case as they have with Duley.

This story has received extensive national coverage in the U.S. and much of it shames her for being unemployed.  Never mind that South Carolina’s unemployment rate increased to 10.8% in July 2010, even as the nationwide unemployment rate in the U.S. during the same month.  Also, please ignore the fact that Duley was employed for several years as a cashier at a Dairy-O fast-food restaurant.  Duley is, after all, a Black woman, required by birth to fulfill the mythical and ever-pervasive strong Black woman stereotype and thus supersede the state’s alarming unemployment statistics.

Otherwise, she’s little more than a “welfare queen,” another stereotype of Black women which continues to plague the nation’s consciousness, even as the majority of U.S. welfare recipients are white.  There have been no comparisons of Duley to the white men who killed their families after losing their jobs in the ongoing U.S. recession.  Instead, Duley has been singled out as “lazy” by conservative legal pundits.  You’ve got to hand it to the conservative pundits: at least they’re consistent in their used of tired and racist tropes.

It is crucial that readers also consider the ways in which Duley’s mental health is portrayed, as ableism plays a huge role in the media’s coverage of this story.  Even mothers are unsympathetic to Duley’s story: Café Mom, a mothers-only online community, calls for the death penalty.  Nowhere, in any of the above coverage, is the term “postpartum depression” discussed.

Admittedly, neither Duley nor her legal representatives have publicly discussed the possibility, but surely, the public at large has entertained the notion that Duley may have experienced this illness.  Or are we more comfortable when a white celebrity like Brooke Shields is the face of this movement?  Postpartum depression is also intimately connected to job loss and financial problems.  Are only middle or upper-class women accorded sympathy for their experiences with postpartum depression?  Or do we assume that as an unwed mother, Duley deserved the anguish of raising her children without a support system?  Our collective silence on the topic of Duley’s mental health speaks volumes, as does our willingness to condemn her without a trial.

It seems only natural that the public reacts with shock, disgust and outrage when faced with the deaths of two young boys, particularly when their deaths occurred at the hands of their own mother.  Their lives are gone, their potential extinguished, and we are left to decide the fate of Shaquan Duley.  Yet the facts have not been fully presented and we are already ready to sentence a young mother to death for her confessed crimes.

As we consider the racism, classism, and able-bodied privilege which is invoked in the coverage of Duley’s actions, we are each responsible for refusing to take the stereotypes as truth.  We must insist on hearing all of the facts before coming to a conclusion.  We must demand a fair trial without bias or preconceived notions of Black women, unemployed women, and mothers.  Justice for Shaquan Duley is justice for mothers.

I would indeed have to be a certified lunatic if I had meant a word of the above. Yet, the only difference between my disease of the mind and that of the millions of Jews who claimed to have “returned” to Palestine, is that in my case, at least the monuments and Arab names I am referring to are real and do actually exist today, and it is not contestable that the direct ancestors of my people did actually build that great civilisation.

On the other hand, all Zionist archaeologists have failed – after digging up every conceivable corner of Palestine for the last 62 years – to come up with a single credible Jewish teapot or tablespoon, let alone excavate an alleged Jewish temple remotely matching the grandeur of any of the visible relics of Andalucía.

Not only that, but they needn’t have bothered digging. Two years ago, Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand argued, with meticulous scholarship in his earth-shattering book, The Invention of the Jewish People, that the claim that the Jews of today are the ethnic offspring of the biblical Jews is yet another Zionist myth, because all records tell us that the current Jews are the descendants of Khazar tribes who converted to Judaism, and have no genetic link whatsoever to the Jews who lived in Palestine during Roman times. The latter, he concludes, are, most ironically, none other than the Palestinians of today who converted to Islam (or Christianity), because the Romans apparently never exiled anybody. Moreover, Sand demolishes the myth of the kingdoms of David and Solomon by proving they are pure legends that never existed. What is astonishing is that, to date, no Israeli historian has been able to debate, let alone refute, any of Sand’s devastating findings.

Yet, not only would I need to be in a straitjacket if I was serious about reclaiming Spain for the Arabs – irrespective of our real history there – but the Spanish people would have the right to laugh at the sheer absurdity of my hallucinations, if not get gravely offended by their audacity.

I cannot, for example, visit the magnificent Hall of Abencerrajes (Ibn Sarraj) in Al Hambra and then, after explaining to my children that it was Muslim Arabs who constructed these wondrous architectural miracles, go on and indoctrinate them that this piece of real estate should belong to them. I cannot do that any more than an Italian tourist can visit Jerash in Jordan, and thereafter decide to build a settlement and live there because, he says, it really belongs to his great uncle, a certain Mr Julius Caesar.

This is the case simply because, in this modern world, we do not go around stealing other people’s land by attributing our crime to an ancient historical link to such land, or because we believe that we belong to the same race or religion of the people who once lived there.

But the Zionists get away with it the whole time, and have been doing so for far too long – despite the total lack of any real historical connection to the land of Palestine (not that it matters or makes it any more legitimate if they did have such pre-historic connection).

For who can, in their of heart of hearts, credibly deny the blatant repugnancy of the whole underlying premise of Zionism, the very madness upon which Israel was founded? Indeed, any person who happens to support the immorality of the theft of the land of Palestine under such religious or forged historical pretexts would in reality be making up excuses for blatant colonisation that are far more ridiculous than my demented ranting about returning to the gardens of Cordoba.

So why do these Zionists get away with such a ludicrous monstrosity?

We all know why. The hegemony over world media exercised by a handful of Zionist Jews is crucial so that no one can ever challenge the Zionist narrative or point out the naked, unadulterated lunacy of the whole Zionist enterprise. Coupled with a world conscience shrouded in a cloud of Holocaust guilt, an event that is forbidden to even debate, you get an oppressive atmosphere that has suffocated the ability of Western civilisation to deconstruct Zionism down to its most basic insanities.

For how is it conceivable for otherwise rational populations to even entertain, let alone accept and adopt, the twisted Zionist logic about the Jews “returning” to a promised land after so many thousands of years of supposed separation? And how can these same people acquiesce to Israeli politicians openly using such religious nonsense as a justification for the contemporary and ongoing catastrophe inflicted upon the millions of guiltless Palestinian inhabitants of that land?

Take for example, José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, who recently gave a solemn warning on the pages of the London Times:

“anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region … if Israel goes down, we all go down…”.

Well, Mr Aznar, we do not advocate for Israel to disappear or go down anywhere, because, despite the evil deeds accompanying its creation, Israel is a fact that we have to live with today. Likewise, the Israelis are fellow human beings upon whom I do not wish to impose the televised barbequing of the eyes and flesh of their children using white phosphorus, nor shall I ever tolerate such horrendous barbarity to be inflicted upon them.

But, hey José, if you see nothing wrong with what Israel is, and regard its Goldstone-documented war crimes as a mere “distraction”, while ignoring that it is the source of all the “turbulence” of the region you mentioned, then you might as well give us back Malaga and Marbella. After all, in Andalucía, no Christian or Jew was ever persecuted or burnt at the stake, nor had his bone marrow fried by any other means.

Yet, the travesty continues unabated. Take this most recent manifestation of the mental illness enveloping the racist state of Israel (branded by Jewish US Media Inc. as “the only democracy in the Middle East”). Hillary Rubin is a US Jew from Detroit who decided to move to Israel in 2006, something millions of Palestinian refugees can only dream of. But that is not the story. Rubin happens to also be the niece of Zionist leader, Nahum Sokolow, so you would’ve supposed that she is a Jewish notable, revered in Israel for her noble lineage. Last month, she fell in love and wanted to get married to a nice Jewish boy from Herzliya. According to Ha’aretz newspaper, after filing for a wedding licence, she was refused and was told that she needed to prove the Jewishness of her maternal lineage for – listen to this – four entire generations. This is not 1933 Germany, but modern day Israel. So she got letters from four Conservative rabbis and one Chabad rabbi attesting to her Jewishness. But the Herzliya Rabbinate still wouldn’t have it. To allow her to marry her sweetheart, these men of God stipulated she comes up with the birth or death certificates of her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, something she of course failed to do. This is not an isolated incident, but the official applicable Israeli law on the books. Oh yes, Adolf Hitler is turning in his grave at this news. “And they dared crucify me for the Nuremberg laws?”, the Führer is muttering to himself.

Well, there you have it, Ladies and Gentlemen. Didn’t I tell you that Zionism is nothing but a terrible, incurable disease of the mind?

Or so says the right wing.

In reality, the infamous “Mosque at Ground Zero” is a cultural and recreation center located two blocks away from Ground Zero. Officially named “Park 51” for its address at 51 Park Place, it will offer community classes, a performance art space, cultural exhibition space, library, child care facilities, fitness center, swimming pool, and 9/11 memorial space. The building will also be completely green and include a garden. Along with offering these services to people of all faiths in an increasingly residential area, the project will invest over $100 million in infrastructure and create over 150 full-time jobs and over 500 part-time jobs.

Within Park 51 will be the Cordoba House, home of the infamous mosque along with mediation rooms and a series of multi-faith classes and programs. The project is organized by the Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative as an inter-faith dialogue with an emphasis on improving relations with and within the Islamic faith. It is named after Cordoba, Spain, a city historically known for Jews, Christians and Muslims living and coexisting.

However, “Muslim-run-pluralist-tolerance-promoting recreation facility conveniently located two blocks and around the corner from Ground Zero” is not nearly as catchy or controversy-inciting as, “The Mosque at Ground Zero.”

Sarah Palin has resoundingly “refudiated” the mosque as wildly inappropriate. Newt Gingrich denounces the mosque as illegitimate until there are churches and synagogues being welcomed in Saudi Arabia. According to the website of the National Republican Trust, the mosque organizers actually “intend to erect a shrine to the 9/11 terrorists.” Aside from this expected political circus of right-wing support-garnering Islamophobia, a recent CNN poll states that 70% of everyday Americans oppose the mosque. Perhaps these numbers would change if headlines described the “All Faith Welcoming Community Center Built Upon the Excavated Remains of the Burlington Coat Factory” instead of the “Mosque at Ground Zero.”

Interestingly, for all the politicians across America who oppose the mosque, many New York politicians and citizens, many of whom have very personal experiences with September 11th, see no problem with it. Perhaps New Yorkers understand that every block in New York is its own little city, making “two blocks from Ground Zero” less affiliated with September 11th than others would argue. Or perhaps, like Mayor Bloomberg commented, New Yorkers realize that their city is “built and sustained by immigrants—by people from 100 different countries speaking more than 200 different languages and professing every faith.”

Nevertheless, the right is relentless in its mission to open, rather than heal, September 11th’s wounds. Unfortunately, their inane threats, protests, and conjectures about terrorist funding are gaining them more legitimacy than ridicule. Along with twisting media headlines and facts, blogging, and ranting, the right has organized and united based on their shared Islamophobia. These coalitions extend beyond the local mosque protests and Koran burnings. For example, after New York City’s M.T.A. rejected a graphic advertisement proposed by the American Freedom Defense Initiative for “visualizing the September 11th Attacks,” their executive director, Pamela Geller wielded the right’s tactics, responding with $10,000 and a lawsuit. The M.T.A. caved and will now run an ad that juxtaposes a plane crashing into the World Trade Center with a rendering of the proposed mosque and the text, “Why There?”

New York’s many Muslims aside, how will September 11th victims, loved ones, and New Yorkers who walked home across the Queensboro bridge and wondered if their wife, husband, lover, son, or daughter was alive feel when they are faced with those traumatic images every day on their way to work? What will happen when the children of September 11th victims see the ad, and associate that day with a community of innocent people who fight these stereotypes daily? What will happen when (the apparently 70% of Americans) who already harbor suspicion towards Muslim-Americans have their suspicions cemented? This does not bode well for a future of tolerance in America.

The Cordoba House may “refudiate” the right wing’s beloved white, Christian, heterosexual, patriarchal American nationalism. However, if you look at history, there is no better place for a “mosque” than the sacred remains of the Park Place Burlington Coat Factory. Before Astoria and Bay Ridge, Washington Street was known as “Little Syria” for its vibrant Arab-American population. Ironically, the neighborhood was destroyed during the 1960s to create the World Trade Center.

Also nearby is an African burial ground where several Islamic talismans have been excavated. These artifacts suggest that many of the slaves who first erected New York City were Muslims. History and archaeology indicate that Lower Manhattan is the forgotten birthplace of a thriving Muslim community that has contributed to New York City for generations. Creating a progressive Islamic Center honors these contributions, recognizes the tragedies of September 11th, and inspires a future of moderacy, community, and healing.

When I first started learning Arabic one of the things that struck me the most were the literal translations of colloquialisms. They were all beautiful, musical, welcoming, and confusing when juxtaposed against images of Islamic extremists in the media. Perhaps you are Muslim, or have visited a Muslim family. If you haven’t, they will most likely greet you with, “Ah ha la wa’sa ha lahn” which I learned translates to, “come in, the rough riding is over.” If they are anything like the Muslim families I know, they will make you sit down and talk for hours and won’t let you leave without feeding you.

Perhaps not all Muslims are like this, but there are a lot more of these than there are bomb-strapping, western-civilization-destroying extremists. It’s time to let these Muslims welcome us non-Muslims, tell us that the rough riding is over, and teach us about their religion.

They might even feed us.

The 14th Amendment contains many sections, but it begins “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” This was written into the constitution to prevent slavery, or the creation of any other permanent underclass of resident noncitizens.

Day by day, the GOP moves ever closer to eviscerating the 14th Amendment and bringing about the world of 1984.

Double plus bad.

For decades, people in the United States have carried ID to buy cigarettes, get into R-rated movies, and try to wheedle free drinks out of sympathetic bartenders on our birthdays. But not for much longer. Aside from bringing your papers to the hospital, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer wants (brown) people to prove their citizenship when stopped by the cops. If senators like McConnell (and John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Boehner, and a host of others) and governors like Brewer have their way, carrying papers will become the American way of life.

To prepare for this eventuality, here is a handy dandy list of a few other times that Republicans will soon require proof-of-citizenship:

* When buying a Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias or Christina Aguilera CD – Illegal immigrants want nothing more than to steal our precious resources of Spanish/English crossover successes. As an added bonus, this will crack down especially hard on gay illegal immigrants.

* When buying a margarita, daiquiri, or mojito – Both tequila and rum are strong indicators of anti-American tendencies. Thanks to heavy lobbying by the alcohol industry, any cocktail over $15 will be automatically exempt, and a sorority or fraternity pledge card will count as proof in this situation.

* If your last name ends in an “o,” an “a,” or a “z” – All American keyboards will also be outfitted with silent alarms, which will be activated any time someone uses the insert symbol function to write the letter “ñ.”

* When attending a Democratic function – Illegal immigrants are drawn to Democrats like flies to meat. Squishy, soft-on-crime, bleeding heart meat, to be exact. In order to prevent identity theft, three different forms of ID will be necessary.

* When attending any movie starring Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz, or Javier Bardem – While all three are Spanish, Congress is also debating a bill to declare Spaniards as “close enough” to being illegal, anyway. Any movie with Spanish subtitles will also be patrolled.

* When entering a mosque or Catholic Church – Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the new security state, this measure will also require an end run around the First Amendment to define these not as places of worship, but as illegal immigrant training camps.

* When ordering at Chili’s – Unless you order the baby back ribs, which shows you are a good American who has been kidnapped by terrorists and forced to eat their strange delicacies. Don’t worry, the FBI are on their way.

* When buying a café con leche – In a stunning about face, Republicans will now embrace the French, insisting that good Americans call this “café au lait.”

* At all times. – You’re safer this way. We promise.

I want to build upon that today by looking at Internet organizing within the context of changes in public life and public space. The architecture of activism has suffered because people have left public spaces for the privacy of their homes. Creating Internet communities has overcome some of the consequences of people’s retreat into privacy. But Internet organizing has its own limitations which prevent it from developing the broad-based activist movements that created progressive change in the past.

Pre-World War II society forced us to leave the home and engage with other people. Progressive campaigns grew out of these interactions. Face-to-face meetings with organizers and friends who appealed to you to join up took place in the union meeting, the immigrant fraternal organization, the college classroom, the church, the Grange hall, the workplace, and the prison.

During the mid-twentieth century, Americans began fleeing public spaces for the inner sanctum of the home. Robert Putnam’s influential 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community demonstrated the decline of social interactions and suggested that the lack of personal communication threatens American democracy.

Technology has played an on-going role in the decline of public space. Commentators first began worrying about these issues with the rise of radio in the 1920s and then again with television in the 1950s. In recent years, the atomization of technology into niche products has exacerbated these trends. The rise of the Internet, video games, home movies, and other technologies have helped complete our alienation from traditional notions of the public sphere.

One of the most important technologies pulling us into the home in recent years is the Internet. But social networking has created new kinds of public spaces. Individuals may not know each other, but they form bonds around common interests. The growth of social media formed new outlets for political organizing, to some extent overcoming how the decline of traditional notions of public space hurt the ability of people to organize.

Activists quickly discovered the potential of the Internet as an organizing tool. There are obvious reasons for this: it allows people from around the world to create activist communities, spreads information rapidly, and has greatly increased our access to knowledge. The Internet opened up the possibility for relatively unknown movements in the developing world to gain allies and raise money in the developed world. Blogs created an opening for new progressive voices to challenge the corporate dominated media and entrenched editorial writers who had few new ideas.

Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004 and then Barack Obama’s successful run for the Oval Office in 2008 demonstrated the incredible possibilities of Internet fundraising and creating very real political communities in virtual space. Moreover, the Internet has allowed historically marginalized groups to contact each other under the cover of anonymity. Particularly in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender communities, Internet chat rooms, blogs, and email lists created safe spaces for isolated individuals to discover people they could talk with about their lives. The Internet helped spur the relatively rapid rise of the GLBT movement over the past fifteen years.

Despite these real and important successes of Internet organizing, real issues remain. The demographics of Internet activism reveals much about what kinds of issues have and have not flourished online and who can participate in these conversations.

As people have retreated out of the streets and into their homes over the last century, mass media have played an increasingly important role in organizing. Politicians and organizers of all stripes used the radio to reach millions of people in pre-World War II America. By the 1950s, television became the dominant medium of communication; activists since that time forward have understood the necessity of creating a public spectacle to receive television coverage.

Today the Internet has become the primary technology for mass communication. But whereas all one needed for the radio or television was to own one or know someone who did, Internet savvy comes in different levels. Young and well-educated people can usually keep up with the new developments. On the other hand, many older people find computers intimidating and might at most have an e-mail account. This means that the latest innovations can only touch those who have the requisite technological comfort and computer knowledge.

With age, education, and class barriers to who can play a role in the conversations, it is not surprising then that class issues have gained almost no traction among the netroots. Even progressives who participate in Internet communities tend to be whiter, better educated, and wealthier than the general population. These are not people with a vested interest in challenging global capitalism’s status quo. Despite the efforts of writers such as Nathan Newman, it has proven virtually impossible to get the netroots interested in labor issues, and particularly in promoting labor unions.

On the other hand, the netroots has created incredibly vibrant communities for progressive social and foreign policy issues that do not challenge the economic status quo. Powerful GLBT and feminist communities have developed. Opposition to the war in Iraq manifested itself as the blogosphere exploded in 2004 and 2005.

So while Internet organizing has constructed an architecture of activism for issues that appeal to wealthy white liberals, its limitations mean that we need to find ways to overcome the decline of public space in order to create campaigns across a diversity of incomes. The demographics of Internet users have helped define the progressive movement as one that avoids class politics. Labor unions always say that you can’t have a progressive movement without labor. They are right; no one can get out the vote like the unions. Yet the so-called progressive movement with its online home ignores working-class issues.

We need a class-based politics in order to create long-term progressive change. Working-class people of all races and gender around the world share much in common. Much of the world’s oppression takes the form of the rich stomping upon the backs of the poor. Yet I’m amazed that the progressive online world so rarely organizes around these issues. Until we start systematically fighting economic inequality, corporations will control our politics, throw us out of work at will, and create a global race to the bottom where a few plutocrats will rule over billions of impoverished people.

Evidently, bowling online isn’t going to produce a class-based politics any more than bowling alone. We need organizing within a truly public space because scared people need the crowd for bravery. Public activism is a courageous act, especially when your job or life is on the line. During the civil rights movement, activists frequently told of coming out to a protest scared but determined to make change. They were arrested. And it was during that time in prison, surrounded by other activists, singing freedom songs, and learning about nonviolence that they became committed activists. Their experience surrounded by fellow believers in racial transformation allowed them to subsume their fears behind a wall of solidarity that only physical contact with others can provide.

Internet activism can provide much, but it has not yet created a space where the poor, the uneducated, and the elderly can participate in mass numbers. The Internet empowers us, but mostly those already empowered by their race and economic status. If we want to expand our community of progressives, we need to add to our Internet organizing with physical contact. Those tangible human bodies, with their emotions, their faces, their voices, and their hands provide an electrifying energy that can really challenge entrenched power.

A longtime technologist and activist, Zandt has written a book, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, available now from Berrett-Koehler, to explain how sharing bits of ourselves online is going to change the world. She spoke with GlobalComment about her book, our shifting relationship to property, the news, friendships, and more.

Sarah Jaffe: Do you think “sharing” online is changing our relationship, not just to media, but to property? We share music, stories, files, but are we changing how we think about ownership?

Deanna Zandt: One can only hope, haha. Certainly digitizing a good chunk of our knowledge has caused us to noodle around with ownership. It reminds me a little bit about comparisons between cultures that are oral (meaning, for example, their histories and news are all carried via word of mouth) and cultures that are literate (meaning, they write them down and that’s considered the gold standard). What we’re seeing with our changing notions of sharing and ownership might be a new hybrid of orality and literacy. (Incidentally, the name of a very cool nerdy book by William Ong.)

SJ: I find myself more comfortable with getting digital files of music, not needing the physical object, or getting books from the library instead of buying more of them. It seems that information is becoming a shared resource again, rather than something we compete for…you think?

DZ: Yep.

SJ: Many of the people who’ve told me they were uncomfortable with Twitter or other social media have been straight white guys–they seem to be the most uncomfortable with the idea that they might “do it wrong.” I wonder if it has something to do with losing a layer of privilege.

DZ: I think it does, but I also think that part of that prescribed identity is to do everything right all the time. It’s the Manly Way (™)! Certainly women, people of color, queer folk, etc., aren’t allowed to mess up in our culture, but there’s something to American masculinity that requires immediate technical performance knowledge. I also think that brand of masculinity doesn’t teach dudes to connect with others on a primal, emotional level that well, which social media obviously requires and facilitates. Their fear may be an expression of their discomfort with not relating well to others.

SJ: You compare social networking to consciousness-raising groups in the book; I think that’s a great point and it shows how we can both combine our experiences to realize something is systemic–and find out about experiences that are completely foreign to us. Of course that creates tension, when say the person you haven’t talked to since high school who adds you on Facebook is massively offended by your political opinions…

DZ: There’s a scholar that I reference in the book, Roosevelt Thomas, another Berrett-Koehler author, who argues that when we account for tension and difference, though, we make better decisions.

SJ: Related to that, do you think the tendency now to use real names and photos adds to or subtracts from the way race and gender privilege creates hierarchies online and off?

DZ: Using our real identities can help destroy prescribed identities, which in turn totally messes with hierarchy. How often do you hear women who’ve been writing under gender ambiguous names report back that when they post their picture, people say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a woman!”

SJ: When you’re anonymous on the Internet, you can leave your body and the attendant expectations behind. As soon as you put your real name on something, all the perceptions that people have of your gender, nationality, etc. pop up. Add a picture, and race comes in there too. I’ve often joked about blogging something at the groupblog I am part of under one of the guys’ names just to see if I would get the same treatment from male commenters as I do when I’m out and proud as a woman. Do you see a way in which anonymity helped break certain barriers, help people get heard? (I’m thinking of when blogger Digby was outed as a woman, particularly.)

DZ: Yeah, Digby, and the Copyblogger writer both, in the case of gender.

I don’t think anonymity — with all its benefits and drawbacks — can or should go away anytime soon. When I talk about anonymity in the book, it’s to show that we don’t *have* to hide ourselves online in the ways we did five or ten years ago.

SJ: You discuss the way social networks contribute to maintenance of weak ties, but do you have some thoughts on how they can also turn weak ties into stronger ones?

DZ: Absolutely! There’s a section in the book where I talk about how social networks allow for identity authentication or verification. The story I use is how I got to know Leif Utne via social networks; when we met up for coffee one time, it was completely natural and normal, even though we’d only met one other time in person. It happens often now, the more we swim in online social networks.

SJ: Have you had experiences where because of social networking you’ve found yourself feeling closer to people you know online than people from “real life” (meatspace!)?

DZ: Sure. I have a client in Germany, @cathesaurus, who I feel is a good friend but whom I’ve never met in person. She knows more about parts of my life from the last few months than some of my colleagues who know me from the offline world, simply because we’ve worked so closely on projects that personal things come up in the fray of getting stuff done.

SJ: You spoke about “slacktivism” and the way we can think that we’ve done our piece signing a petition online and forget about the real-world component. I see this as an offshoot of so-called identity politics–I identify myself as part of this cause, so I forget sometimes that I have to do things for it as well. Social media can aggravate this tendency with its “profiles” full of lists of interests and causes…

DZ: It definitely can. One of the things we have to remember is that we haven’t perfected the tools yet. It’s not like this is exactly how social networking is going to work from now until The End of Time (thank God). And that’s actually the big secret opportunity: if we’re in there participating, we have the ability to influence how the tools will keep shaping up. But if we’re not taking part, the conversations will go on without us.

As far as slacktivism goes, one word of advice from the book: Don’t make it so easy for your community to get their badge of honor. Let them say that they support you or whatever, but make them earn anything more than that.

SJ: Related to slacktivism, I joke sometimes that it feels like some people just add me on Facebook as part of a “human stamp collection.”

DZ: Bingo.

SJ: What do you think about the impact of social media on the blogosphere? Has it affected the way comment threads and other communities work–do we tweet about something or share it on Facebook and comment there instead?

DZ: Well, it’s becoming another part of the ecosystem. I imagine that the largest phenomenon is that people who would have never left a comment before (perhaps in part due to the toxic nature of many commenting communities) are sharing their thoughts with their own networks on Twitter and Facebook. It’s safer, for one, and they likely get more out of it on a human level.

SJ: That’s a great point as well–commenter communities were certainly not the best places for productive conversations, and the option of anonymity there certainly contributes to the drive-by-asshole phenomenon. Like I mentioned above, the people who know you personally might get offended at your beliefs, but they know you at least to some degree.

DZ: The other thing I mention in the book is that using our own faces as our icons aids in facilitating better conversation, p.96:

The use of these authentic personal markers, says Kevin Marks, V.P. of Web Services at BT, “taps into deep mental structures that we all have to looks for faces and associate the information we receive with people we decide to trust, through what we feel about them.” We’re able to add at least a couple of the missing physiological cues discussed in chapter 4, which builds our trust in and empathy for one another.

Here’s the post where Kevin (who’s completely awesome) talks about this— Twitter as phatic communication.

SJ: Do you think the blurring of lines between different forms of personal communication online (email/email lists/Twitter/Facebook etc.) contributed to the fallout we saw with Dave Weigel’s resignation from the Washington Post?

DZ: The “fallout” was a loaded bunch of BS, in my opinion. It’s a new version of a Red Scare, very McCarthyian in its ways. People can choose to take away from it what they want. I choose to stand by my assertions that making more parts of ourselves– our opinions, especially– can only bring us closer to an authentic life.

Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, recently said on NPR that there was no such thing, ever, as objective journalism. I agree with this. What he, and many others, are saying now is that these social technologies are giving rise to a new form of transparent journalism. And that will be incredibly powerful stuff.

SJ: Finally, why is it, do you think, that there’s such a reaction against the idea of “personal branding” on certain social networks, when that’s what’s encouraged so often by employers (and the shift to a freelance economy where selling yourself is often necessary)?

DZ:“Personal branding” feels inauthentic to us, and rightly so. What I have in the book about personal branding sort of sums it up neatly:

“People shouldn’t be acting more like brands,” [author Tara Hunt] said. “We’re humans! Instead of having a personal brand, why not just have a personality?” I couldn’t agree more. Remember that not only is sharing authentically what will win people over to your charming personality, but it’s also what’s going to change the world. Do we want to create “brands” out of each other or share our true selves?

That said, it’s certainly OK to pick the areas of expertise that you want to focus on to build your professional presence– just make sure it’s you that you’re sharing, not a branded version of you.