Revision of the neo-marxist concept of the “political spectacle"

The article presents an analytical revision of the neo-Marxist concept of the “political spectacle”, in which the main position of political neo-Marxism is formed.There is a possibility of political choice within the framework of the real absence of a political alternative (the political alternative is illusory) in the Western political process. The revision is carried out in two stages: a theoretical revision of the concept (a postpositivist check for falsifiability and a proposal for ways of theoretical development) and an empirical revision of the concept (a positivist check for verifiability). Verification of the neo-Marxist concept of “political spectacle” is carried out on the material of political forces in European Parliament. The verification method is the content analysis of the program documents of the “European Parties”.The article proves that the neo-Marxist concept of “political spectacle” is not theoretically correct enough and does not correspond to the current empirical material. First, the concept proceeds from the normativist view of the manipulative domination of capitalism and thus does not take into account the coordinated functioning of the modern bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Secondly, the example of the 2019 European Parliament elections shows that anti-capitalist forces are present in the Western electoral process and politics. The author concludes that it is necessary to update the neo-Marxist concept of the “political spectacle” on new theoretical grounds. The starting point of the updated concept is the following: the “political spectacle” of capitalism begins after the anti-capitalist forces become the structural elements of the reproduction of capitalist hegemony. On new theoretical grounds, the potential of the concept of “political spectacle” can be directed not to fix the political alienation of Western society, but to explain the capitalist political space as a system that can adaptively accumulate its own systemic deviations (fluctuations).

Disassembling Efforts to Legalize Opting-Out in Arizona: A Case Study of Legislative Politics

Background/Context Opt-out is a national movement based on local efforts as most notably expressed in New York. While studies have addressed opt-out demographics and local impact, fewer studies address the political activism that extends beyond the act of refusing specific tests to changing standardized testing policy. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This case study extends understanding of the opt-out phenomenon by examining and disassembling a case of efforts to legalize opting-out of state-mandated testing through a state legislative process. The policy reform efforts are framed and disassembled through the discourse of the New Right and elements of the political spectacle. Setting This study is set in the Arizona State Legislature's 2015 and 2016 sessions. Population/Participants/Subjects This study follows the efforts of state legislative policy actors including state legislators, state department of education officials, the state teacher association, and parent opt-out activists. Research Design This is a qualitative case study examining three bills intending to legalize opting-out introduced across two state legislative sessions. Data Collection and Analysis Data were collected utilizing progressive theoretical sampling to identify key legislative policy actors and collect public statements regarding the pending legislation. Data focused on legislative hearings and floor votes publicly archived on the legislature's website. Text of the bills along with contemporary social and traditional media statements were also collected, as were interviews with two state legislators. Data were analyzed for themes arising from the participants themselves, for elements of the New Right discourse, and for elements of the political spectacle. Findings/Results The generally White and affluent demographics of this case's opt-out movement leadership reflect national patterns. Likewise, the movement leadership focused on themes of local control and privacy rights. This vaguely symbolic language combined with casting big government as enemies suggests a fluency in the spectacle of modern legislative politics. Ultimately, opt-out proponents compromised in favor of a new policy initiative reflecting themes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, the Menu of Assessments. Conclusions/Recommendations The compromise with the experimental Menu of Assessments policy to gain more local control over tests while keeping the expectation of testing in place suggests a limited victory for democracy. However, the Arizona opt-out movement's legislative efforts might also be understood as tension within the hegemonic New Right coalition.

Poor Kids versus Bad Teachers: Vergara v. California and the Social Construction of Teachers

Background In the past decade, the laws governing teachers’ employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional because they exposed students to “grossly ineffective teachers.” Purpose The purpose of the article is to document and analyze how Vergara was presented in the print news media. It is important to understand how the print news media presents education policy debates to the public, because the print news media shapes the general public's understanding of education and other public policy debates by providing frames and themes for interpreting the issues in question and people associated with them. Research Design Using the social construction of target populations and political spectacle as conceptual lenses, we conducted a content analysis of print news media articles on the Vergara case published between June 2012 and November 2014. We provide a descriptive overview of the full corpus of articles published during this period and a thematic analysis of the 65 unique news articles published in the aftermath of the decision. The latter focuses on news articles because they are intended to provide more objective coverage of the case than opinions or editorials. Findings In the print news media coverage, the word “teacher” was often paired with a negative qualifier, which suggests that Vergara was an effort to change the relatively advantaged social construction of teachers. Similarly, metaphors and the illusion of rationality associated with political spectacle were used in ways that bolstered the plaintiffs’ claims. While Vergara consumed a substantial amount of philanthropic and public dollars, ultimately it did not change the policies that govern teachers’ employment in California. Vergara may have been more successful in shaping the general public's perceptions of teachers and the conditions of teachers’ employment in the period following the trial.

The specificity of using political spectacle technique in the Russian and U.S. politics

This article is dedicates to the relevant topic of using manipulative technique – the so-called political spectacle, which is implemented via the method of substituted governance/participation. The authors give a new perspective on the concept developed by the U.S. sociologists; introduce the category of dichotomy “governance/participation”; expose the essence of the revival of conservative sociocultural values. Comparative analysis is conducted on the political processes that take place in the United States and the Russian Federation. The article determines their common and specific features, which reveal the factors of accelerated modernization in the United States and factors that impede such processes in the Russian Federation. In conclusion, the author makes recommendations aimed at overcoming Russia's stagnation in this regard. The acquired materials are valuable for the experts in the field of international relations, political scientists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, as well as anyone interested in improvement of Russia–United States relations. Multiple Russian and foreign research are dedicated to the revival of the traditional forms of governance in modern Russia, as well as in the entire post-Soviet space, which distorts the fundamental elements of democracy. However, this is the first research on examination of the traditional form of governance and its application to modern realities in the context of political spectacle, introduced into sociology by the American scientist Murray Edelman. An attempt was made to apply M. Edelman’s methodology in the conditions of Russian reality; carry out a comparative analysis of the  political processes, functionality of the  institutions, political culture of the Russian and American societies; and offer the ways of overcoming difficulties and issues related to transition of the modern Russian society to a higher level of modernization development.

Racial Misdirection: How Anti-affirmative Action Crusaders use Distraction and Spectacle to Promote Incomplete Conceptions of Merit and Perpetuate Racial Inequality

Despite the marginal success that anti-affirmative action groups have had at paring back the use of race in college admissions practices, affirmative action has remained largely in-tact as a tool to promote diversity on college campuses. But what might happen if “diversity”—the very thing that heretofore has protected affirmative action—was used instead as proof of its supposed unfairness? In this paper, focusing on the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case, we will employ Political Spectacle Theory to analyze the strategies and tactics used by the anti-affirmative action groups to distract from their real aims and to divert focus away from mitigating structural inequality.

The Truth Society

This book seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. The book scrutinizes Italy's late-twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, the book examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the “post-truth” world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. The book argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. This book offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Manifest Disguise and Mediatized Politics

This chapter concentrates on a mystery of late-twentieth-century Italy, which recounts how Silvio Berlusconi enchanted citizens and dominated Italian politics for nearly twenty years despite widely shared agreement on his corruption and ineptitude. It analyses how a dazzling political culture changes how Italians discerned what counted as accurate and reliable information, and which actors might be trusted to offer the facts. It also focuses on Striscia la Notizia, one of the world's first fake news programs, and its plush mascot Gabibbo, a human-sized red puppet who is praised as a civil defender. The chapter uses Gabibbo to unravel why Italy became a site in which puppets talking politics were more reliable than puppet-like politicians. It suggests that postwar political spectacle gave way to a widespread popular cynicism capable of simultaneously propelling former prime minister Berlusconi's peculiar popularity and puppets seen as truth-tellers.

Leading Through the “Influx:” Leadership Responses and the Influence of a Political Spectacle

Principals encounter numerous crises, such as migration influxes. Relevant literature explains principals respond to these crises in a variety of ways. However, there is a dearth in the literature that examines what influences principals’ responses through a crisis. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative case study broadly asks, how, if at all, did principals respond to the “influx” of Puerto Rican students, and what factors influenced how the principals’ responded? By applying political spectacle theory, the findings of this study revealed two categories of response: preparing for the influx and recalibration after the influx did not occur. The insights gained from this study extend the knowledge base about principals and how political spectacles influence their responses during a crisis.