“Progressives can talk all they want about the Bush administration’s disregard for the truth and their dangerous flights of fancy, but no one other than the converted is listening,” NYU Professor Stephen Duncombe writes in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. “And when no one listens in a democracy the alignment of power stays the same.”
“Progressives can talk all they want about the Bush administration’s disregard for the truth and their dangerous flights of fancy, but no one other than the converted is listening,” New York University Professor Stephen Duncombe writes in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New Press). “And when no one listens in a democracy the alignment of power stays the same.”
Duncombe’s words ring true after the 2006 mid-term elections. Now that the Democratic Party has captured at least one chamber of Congress, analysts agree that developing a leadership narrative to counter the one employed by the White House will be of fundamental importance to the opposition party.
Duncombe, an associate professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, proposes in the book that popular fantasies, such as advertising campaigns, video games, and celebrity culture, can help progressives define and make possible a new political future. He asserts that liberals, who largely depend upon reason to guide them, need to instead learn how to communicate in today’s “spectacular vernacular.” “For those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance,” Duncombe writes in making the case for a strategy that would create a form of progressive politics that uses imagination and spectacle.
“It may be that the pull toward the dramatic is basic human modus operandi,” Duncombe writes. “Jesus, after all, used parables instead of rational arguments to get his points across in the Gospels. But today spectacle is center stage, driven by a mass media and a consumer economy that panders to and profits off of emotional narrative and the over-hyped story Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belongs to those who tell the better story.”
Publishers Weekly writes that Duncombe’s work is “both inventive and exciting.”
Reporters interested in speaking with Duncombe should contact James Devitt, NYU’s Office of Public Affairs, at 212.998.6808 or james.devitt@nyu.edu.