The democratic struggle for power: the 2008 Presidential campaign in the USA

摘要

This essay makes both empirical and theoretical claims. Empirically, it develops one of the first sociological approaches to the recently completed 2008 Presidential campaign in the USA. Theoretically, it offers a cultural-sociological challenge to the kinds of instrumentalist, materialist, and institutionalist approaches that have been central to power studies. In democratic societies, the struggle for ultimate power is a symbolic conflict. The goal is to become a certain kind of collective representation, one that embodies the ideals of the civil sphere. The struggle to represent the civil sphere is performative, of sculpting an image and projecting it to fragmented audiences. Such efforts to fuse actor and audience are mediated by relatively independent interpretive processes, launched not only by political and social antagonists but by the very mass media upon which the successful projection of messages depend. For this reason, successful struggles for civil power are highly contingent. One must not only become a hero but a hero inside of civil society, working the binaries that confer and undermine legitimacy, but one must also work the boundaries, framing the relations that connect the civil sphere with such noncivil spheres as economy, race, gender, and religion, boundaries that are fluid and subject to construction.