Thanks to The Sanctuary, a great blog new blog I found on immigration issues, for this link to The Pinky Show’s oddly mesmerizing take on the immigration issue. Pinky is a kitten with a mission to speak truth to power! Stick it to the Lou Dobbs-man, Pinky!

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, UCLA historian Russell Jacoby asks a great question:

How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy?

In his view, their absence reflects a conformity in academic thought:

Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past.

No doubt that the bias towards positivism in the social and behavioral science has driven out interpretive approaches (Freud) or theories that are deemed unfalsifiable and/or tautological (Marx). But I think it reflects a larger reticence on the part of academic to directly engage issues of social power.

Admittedly, it’s a bit overdrawn to suggest that Marx doesn’t register in the social sciences. It’s true that Marx has pretty much vanished from political science, but there are some prominent neo-Marxists in other parts of the social sciences. People like Harvey Molotch, Erik Olin Wright, and (David Harvey). come to mind.

Jacoby asks at what cost does this purging come:

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines.

Here I think he’s on to something. What good is an “academic wisdom” that has strayed so far down the track of emulating the “hard” sciences by emphasizing theory testing through quantification that it fails to connect to “informed opinion.” I don’t discount this type of social science, but I do find it problematic when social scientists degrade efforts to view problems contextually. Jacoby succinctly points out the effects of an ahistorical, acontextual social science:

Economics looks more and more like mathematics, in which the past vanishes. Sometimes it even looks like biopsychology. A recent issue of the American Economic Review includes numerous papers under the rubrics of “Neuroscientific Foundations of Economic Decision-Making” and “Cognitive Neuroscientific Foundations of Economic Behavior.” But can we really figure out today’s economic problems without considering whence they came?

I get why a mathematical turn is alluring. It provides a comfortable veneer of certainty. Viewing the world through equations and models is a convenient way to eliminate the messiness of the social world. But the emphasis on developing “grand universal theories” falls short when the social world is a moving target. The permanence of great thinkers like Freud, Marx and Hegel in ancillary disciplines is no remedy for this problem. As Jacoby accurately points out:

Instead of confronting recalcitrant thinkers on their own terms, the new disciplines slice them up. Freud turns into an interpreter of texts, Hegel into a philosopher of art, and Marx into a cinema theorist. That saves them from oblivion, but at the price of domestication. Freud no longer excavates civilization and its discontents but merely unpacks words. Hegel no longer tracks the dialectic of freedom but consoles with the beautiful. Marx no longer outlines the movements of capital but only deconstructs the mass spectator.

What he’s getting at is that social science has lost what C. Wright Mills refered to as the “Sociological Imagination” or the ability to help develop “informed opinion” on the contemporary problems of the day. This abdication of responsibility is troubling. I’m astounded, for instance, by how few academics blog. If anyone has something useful to say about the great issues of the day it would be social scientists, but most of those voices are silenced by traditional demands to publish or perish.

The new issue of Annual Review of Political Science is out, the best friend of lit review creators and syllabus constructors everywhere. Here are three articles that I’ll be reading in a nice lavender bubble bath:

1) Hutchings, J. “Results from Experimentation: Racial Priming in Political Campaigns.”

2) McClain, P. “Evolving Racial Identity in American Politics.”

3) Ward, M “Application of Network Analysis to Political Problems.”

Ben Smith at Politico notes today that while Obama only has a slight lead in the polls, he has a commanding lead in the betting markets. On Intrade, Obama leads McCain by 66.7 % to 29%. What to make of this discrepancy? The betting markets seem to be putting little stock into the so called “Bradley effect.” If you went out and polled most race scholars, you’d probably get a more skeptical assessment of Obama’s chances of winning.

I’m pretty torn in my own view. All of the conventional metrics suggest a Democratic blowout in November (poor economy, better candidate, two Republican terms, superior energy and organization on the Obama side). But the other part of me thinks the betting markets are getting it wrong vis-a-vis Obama’s chances.

Case in point, a new Gallup Poll finds significant differences on issues of racism and discrimination towards minorities. Whites (63% of them) are satisfied with how Blacks are treated, while only 35% of Blacks share the same optimism. I think this explains, in part, Obama’s under-performance in the latest polling (he leads by about 4% on average). The lingering effects of “Wrightgate” has left a hint of black grievance in the minds of those who are inclined to think that social policy is unfairly skewed away from white people.

This suggests to me that any whiff of black grievance that sticks to the Obama campaign in this election is going to drive poll numbers down. I think we will be innundated with a “black grievance frame” come September. I can almost hear Sean Hannity claiming that Obama is a surrogate for Al Sharpton and wants to make “slave reparations” his first act in office, or maybe it’s making Kwanzaa a federal holiday.

I still think the conditions favor him, but there is a race effect. The question is whether that effect is large enough to change the outcome.

Anybody who criticizes Obama for tacking swiftly to the center needs a reality check. We are in the framing stage of the campaign. Obama is keenly aware that he hasn’t yet been put into a box by the public. If he’s not incredibly proactive about his “Americanness” then he’s in for a world of trouble. Check out this video of West Virginia voters before the Democratic primary.

We can cast this off as a distinctly Appalachian problem, but that’s sticking out heads in the sand. Obama is fighting what Robert Putnam calls hunkering. Putnam finds that when confronted with diversity, people generally revert by withdrawing. This is still a majority white country and Obama’s people are well aware that if he can’t lower the hunkering instinct among a large segment of undecided whites, he’s got an uphill climb.

Case in point is Noam Scheber post on Bill Carter’s New York Times Article how comedians are finding it difficult to make fun of Obama. Carter notes that absence of a “comedic take” on him. Carter eventually taps into the core of the problem. He speculates that it’s largely due to sensitivity about making fun of race. Scheiber astutely points out that this should be a major concern for Obama. Here is the money quote:

the problem for Obama is that people tend to vote for a presidential candidate they feel personally comfortable with. If people aren’t comfortable with humor about Obama–if they’re reluctant to laugh at him for fear of being thought racist, or of crossing some line of political correctness–then some of them probably aren’t comfortable with him, period.

Hunkering people….this is not your grandfather’s presidential nominee.

I might have serious issues with the cover, but Ryan Lizza’s piece in the New Yorker is quite good. I do have one issue with the story. Lizza seems to weave of theme throughout his piece of Obama as a calculating, sometimes cocky, ambitious pol. I don’t get why this is news to anyone. Were we of the mistaken impression that the kitten from the “hang in there” poster was running as the Democratic nominee. What I personally like about Obama is that his penchant for cultural frame switching. Here’s a passage that best charachterizes Obama’s principal strength as I see it:

Chicago is still a city of villages, and Obama was adept at gliding back and forth between the South Side, where he campaigned for votes, and the wealthy Gold Coast, the lakefront neighborhood of high-rise condominiums and deluxe shopping, where he raised money.

This adaptability, I think, makes for a better overall learner. I’d like in a leader of the free world the ability to process vast amounts of information and adapt to changing circumstances. I don’t know if anyone’s ever tested this, but persons of a multicultural background, might have an edge in this regard because they are less bound to one set of cultural stereotypes. Their borderland status might encourage an affinity for and desire to connect with more than oune cultural group. Here’s Lizza discussing his early efforts to connect with Black audiences.

Obama, who hadn’t shown any particular gift for oratory in the race, now learned to shed his stiff approach to campaigning—described by Preckwinkle as that of an “arrogant academic.” Mikva told me, “The first time I heard him talk to a black church, he was very professorial, more so even than he was in the white community. There was no joking, no self-deprecation, no style. It didn’t go over well at all.”

Personally, I think this is what excites many of the latte-sippers, of which I county myself proudly. We might be poised to elect our first multicultural president. it will test a lot of views that people have about the benefits of being cross-cultural in terms of policy outcomes. Time will tell.

Obama is certainly experiencing the crucible of presidential electoral politics. On one hand the venerated Jesse Jackson wants to perform a no-cost castration. On the other, the netroots are in a “cyber-tizzy” over Obama’s singing of the FISA bill. Now he has to shake the mainstream media’s gleeful exploitation of the “Muslim/ Black-radical meme.” This New Yorker cover from Ben Smith’s Politico blog highlights how the MSM can use the flimsy justification that the public’s belief in “the Muslim thing” is an interesting cultural pheonomenon and thus worthy of treatment.

Of course, if you’re going to talk about it, you need a controversial cover because, well, you have to sell magazines. It’s a sleazy turn in the coverage of presidential politics. The New Yorker has decided to racialize the Obama’s because a small sliver of the U.S. population thinks he’s a Muslim. They’ve given the darker forces of our culture a new laptop screen background.