The Music of the Spheres

The Civil Sphere is Jeffrey Alexander’s grand attempt to craft a non-Marxist utopian social theory that can both explain historical cases and inform contemporary political and social movements. He tries to situate it between the tradition of deliberative democracy flowing from Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and the radical materialism associated with Marxist sociology. The second tradition is the one he really takes aim at, insisting that an adequate social theory must take seriously the cultural and especially, for our purposes, the media activities that have enabled the advances in social justice that he characterizes as “civil repair.”

Alexander characterizes materialism by taking as its exemplar Thrasymachus, one of the interlocutors Plato has confront Socrates in the Republic. Thrasymachus voices a cynical version of materialist political philosophy by asserting that justice is simply the will of the stronger. He is a convenient straw man for the Socratic argument that justice represents a divine moral order refracted through the imperfections of the earthly order. Socrates humbles him in Book I of the Republic, and Thrasymachus meekly assumes the role of spectator for the rest of the dialog.

In another dialog, the Timaeus, Plato presents his cosmology. In his account of the way the universe came into existence, he again invokes a divine intelligence, whom he calls the demiurge, who fashions a mechanism of spheres nesting within spheres, with the planets and stars spotting their surfaces. As these spheres revolve within each other, their heavenly friction produces a sound, a hum of great beauty that Plato calls the music of the spheres.

Plato’s metaphor of the music of the spheres captures some of the beauty of what Alexander sees in the operation of a healthy modern social order. Like Plato’s cosmos, such a society is characterized by spheres of activity that are relatively autonomous. Here Alexander borrows from the Weberian notion of “value spheres” and follows Michael Walzer’s application in Spheres of Justice (1983), though with a gentle dissent from the communitarianism associated with Walzer’s approach. Walzer notes different social spheres with different distributive principles. The economy, for instance, obeys a distributive logic based on wealth: one dollar one vote. Politics is based on a very different distributive principle: one person one vote. Family relations entail striking inequalities and mutual obligations, but the social arena in which people find partners parses attractiveness in yet another very different way. Societies work well when few individuals lose in every sphere and when no sphere dominates the others. Societies malfunction when large numbers of individuals can’t make money, can’t support families, can’t find mates, and can’t get their government to give them a fair shake. They malfunction when the rich control every sphere: Take that, Thrasymachus! Alexander says, reasonably, that societies malfunction when a crude idea like material equality overrides the distributive mechanism in every sphere: Take that, Karl Marx! The interactions of the spheres should balance each other out, show the heavens more just, make beautiful music. Without the music of the spheres, no individual sphere really seems to work well: Every distributive principle lacks legitimacy if it cannot harmonize with the others.

Alexander’s account sees what he calls the civil sphere as the crucial sphere in which societies make their beautiful music. He describes it as “a solidary sphere, in which a certain kind of universalizing community comes to be culturally defined and to some degree institutionally enforced” (p. 31). In the civil sphere, a specific kind of solidarity is generated—not the kind the communitarians talk about, in which people recognize each other as sharing deeply in a value-centered thick social sphere, and not the kind the radical multiculturalists identify, in which members of specific social groups create identity around their shared difference from other social groups, but a rather abstract and universal solidarity based on a recognition of shared equality as rights-bearing citizens. The civil sphere is “a realm of structured, socially established consciousness, a network of understandings creating structures of feeling that permeate social life and run just below the surface of strategic institutions and self-conscious elites” (p. 54).

Here and in numerous other places, Alexander invokes the term “structure of feelings,” which he borrows from Raymond Williams, a Marxist to whom he does not object. Alexander’s emphasis is on feelings rather than structure, I think; I’d argue that Williams put the emphasis on structure, in that he sees patterns emerging from a “whole way of life” (Williams, 1961, p. 65). In any case, it is clear that Alexander thinks that the solidarity generated by the civil sphere is affective, something that citizens actually feel. This sets it apart from Habermasian notions of a discursive public sphere, which operates according to rational argumentation. In Alexander’s civil sphere, action is performative and produces ways of belonging that aren’t reducible to rational formulations. He does not explore what the affective dimension of the civil sphere really looks like, but clearly he means it to be more specific than the “imagined community” that Benedict Anderson (1983) identifies as the original moment of national identity and something other than the affective unity that is generated in the military spheres of dictatorships or the religious spheres of theocracies. But it does share with them a binary logic—a dualism.

Duality is built into the language of the civil sphere. That language is based upon a set of binary distinctions between good citizens and bad ones, in which the good are, for instance, open, honest, and sincere and the bad are closed, dishonest, and insincere. At first glance, this language doesn’t seem very profound, but it is actually pervasive and quite powerful; in fact, in societies with a healthy civil sphere, political expression rotates around attempts to frame and reframe players and movements as virtuous or “polluted.” Elsewhere, Alexander provides more elaboration on the process by which he identified this language, which began with a research trip to Vanderbilt’s TV news archive in 1979, where he watched 2 years of Watergate coverage. He came to understand the binary codes in this coverage more fully when he read Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, encountered structuralism and poststructuralism in the 1980s, and influenced PhD candidates who did dissertation research on political discourse in China, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Spain, Britain, and South Africa (Alexander, 2007, p. 645). In other words, he claims that the dualism of the language of the civil sphere is something he empirically discovered, not something he theoretically reconstructed. It is the way people and institutions actually behave.

The civil sphere is not an analytically empty space, like Habermas’s public sphere. Rather, it is filled with institutions. Alexander says there are two categories of institutions: communicative, especially the “mass media” and regulative, like law and office. Regulative institutions operate by the same cultural logic as communicative institutions, implementing a structure of feelings that operates by the binary logic of virtuous versus polluted. In the historical accounts that Alexander gives, the communicative institutions, and especially journalism, have priority.

The communicative institutions of the civil sphere are public opinion and the mass media. Alexander has fairly specific notions of both of these. He astutely defines public opinion not so much as what people think—the common sense definition—nor as a Habermasian product of public deliberation, but as a representation of what the public thinks that works as a “regulating idea” or “regulative ideal” (p. 72). He doesn’t say so outright, but public opinion so understood does not exist unless it is represented. Public opinion can be represented in a number of different ways: by polls, of course, and by elections, but on a recurring basis it is represented most importantly by the media, where it emanates from content and, in circular fashion, informs and legitimizes creative and editorial processes. Public opinion is a key part of the affective life of a solidary citizenry and Alexander calls it “the structure that gives us the feeling of democratic life” (p. 75).

One feels Thrasymachus might have something to say at this point. I imagine him saying that “what is represented as public opinion is the will of the stronger,” or, if Plato relaxes the leash a little bit, “public opinion matters only inasmuch as it can be articulated with the agendas of the powerful.” Alexander’s public opinion is not Gallup’s: He doesn’t believe that polls give voice to the thinking of ordinary people, and he follows Susan Herbst (1998) in seeing public opinion as a construction. This could lead him to see public opinion as a fiction in service of a hegemonic order. But he is also eager to not see public opinion as a “phantom,” as Lippmann (1925) said, or as “manufactured,” as Herman and Chomsky (1988) point out Lippmann also said. It is in some fashion the legitimate expression of what the public thinks, if not what people think, and operates to regulate things that are said and done in the civil sphere.

The problem here is that the public opinion Alexander writes of is so 20th century. It is mass-mediated public opinion, as opposed to push polls; Astroturf polls; network public opinion; viral memes; and all the information about people’s tastes, attitudes, and behaviors that the digital media generate. Not that mass-mediated public opinion was the real thing either, of course. Still, in conjunction with relatively oligopolistic mass media organizations, it was in fact able to regulate the actions of the powerful. Twenty-first century techniques of representing public opinion seem to operate less as an obstacle and more as a resource for the powerful. But that argument will have to wait until we cover more of the basic ground.

Alexander’s notion of media is similarly rooted in 20th-century experience. He refers to both fictional and factual media as crucial to the operation of the civil sphere. By fictional media he means television and movies, which provide a basic affective framework for solidarity. He doesn’t dwell on fictional media, however. One wonders whether he considers TV shows, for instance, a lagging or a leading indicator of shifts in public opinion. David Marc (1984) pointed out 30 years ago that TV likes to play out the controversies of the previous generation and avoid those of the present, so that it is a big deal if a character contemplates a perfectly legal and, let’s face it, routine abortion. Fictional media are particularly misleading about class: Leading characters in mass market TV and movies all have more money to spend than their real-life counterparts. Of course, one could also argue that fictional media provide a better education in sociology than factual media. What would you think about African Americans if all you knew was what you saw on the news? There aren’t that many Black characters in mainstream fictional media, but they aren’t all criminals.

Alexander’s notion of how factual media operate emphasizes the professional autonomy of journalists. The sociologist who influences him most is Michael Schudson, whose stature as a sociologist of news can hardly be questioned. Herbert Gans and Gaye Tuchman also appear, and Alexander is clearly aware of the influences of work routines and the various “strategic rituals” that journalists engage in. He chooses not to engage Bourdieu, however. (He critiqued Bourdieu in an earlier work.) This is an unfortunate slight, I think, because Bourdieu’s (1998) analysis of the journalistic field could complement as well as complicate Alexander’s account of how journalism operates in the civil sphere. But Bourdieu is of the tribe of Thrasymachus: “No possibility for binding ties of a horizontal kind—much less the idea of a normatively regulated, constitutional democracy—appears in the work of Bourdieu, who created the most expansive sociological theory of recent times” (p. 40).

Journalists play a crucial role in Alexander’s civil sphere. They do so because they have some measure of professional autonomy and so can respond to events according to their own sense of what’s right and wrong. At the same time, they have a professional commitment to faithfully represent the facts. Because their work is recognized as factual, they claim the “ability to represent the public to itself” (p. 80). He continues: “In their very representation of social facts, in other words, the news media represent public opinion as well” (p. 81).

Obviously, Alexander is thinking of Walter Cronkite and not Matt Drudge. He’s referring to the kinds of factual media that claim to speak to and on behalf of the entire public:

To the degree that civil society becomes independent, which marks the degree to which there is a democratic social life, the audience for media of mass communication, whether fictional or factual, becomes the broad ‘society’, rather than the particular interests within it. (p. 83)

Civil society doesn’t work well if the media environment is fragmented by interest or identity; we all have to operate with the same facts and values or we won’t generate solidarity. If the media system serves to provide a baseline consensus, the various groups and interests in the society can maneuver to claim their place in the social order according to the values coded into the discourse of the civil sphere. Media like that work to achieve what Alexander calls “civil repair.” “As the messages they formulate relate to society at large, they become more truly media of persuasion and less masked instruments for hegemony and domination” (p. 83). Note Alexander’s backhanded acknowledgment of the hegemonic function of the media. Gramsci, like Raymond Williams, is a Marxist sufficiently remote from Thrasymachus for Alexander to like, but the Gramscian episodes in Alexander’s account take place offstage and are not strictly speaking part of the life of the civil sphere.

This point will bear repeating. Much of what the media do is not relevant to the civil sphere. Obviously there are media that are primarily or even purely part of some other sphere, like mail order catalogs or pornography. But even the media that play a useful role in the civil sphere, like the New York Times, aren’t entirely creatures of the civil sphere. They are hybrid organizations that have to have an economic life to have a civil life. And Alexander is aware that the economic life of the media can distort their civil life. He specifically cites Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi as “ideologically ambitious capitalists” who buy and instrumentalize media properties (p. 207). The implication is that they are the exception rather than the rule, and that for the most part the economic life of the media restricts itself to the economic realm.

Thrasymachus has trouble restraining himself here. But let’s shove him in the closet for a while. We want to give Alexander’s account of the media its best representation, which means giving it a better representation than Alexander offers. So let’s fill in a bit of what he doesn’t say. There are all sorts of media, and many of them we pollute as uncivil. What the uncivil media do affects the civil sphere. Alexander would not have us believe that it is not a matter of concern that there are media promoting a White supremacist agenda, for instance, or media that play on various forms of uncivil hatred: racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. And he clearly does not believe that speech is just speech. Uncivil speech needs to be condemned. We can fill in those blanks pretty easily. But what about the uncivil work of the mainstream media, which he refers to obliquely by saying that in the proper circumstances they do not work as “masked instruments for hegemony and domination?” Certainly, the media, factual as well as fictional, the Associated Press as well as Gone with the Wind worked as masked instruments for the construction and reproduction of a hegemonic representation of Black masculinity that justified racial repression in the pre-World War II (WWII) United States.

Clearly, the media stand in need of civil repair just as the rest of society does. But how do we expect the media to operate to effect their own civil repair? Here hope must lie in two agencies that figure in every story of civil repair: social movements and the professional autonomy of journalists. That sound you hear is Thrasymachus having a tantrum in the closet.

But in fact you can find plenty of examples of social movements dedicated to the civil repair of the media. In fact, it makes sense to argue that every modern social movement has also been a movement for media reform. If social movements succeed by reframing themselves as embodiments of civil virtue, then media activism is a key part of their strategy. So we can fill in this blank too. Media are battlefields as well as agencies of civil repair. Social movements can achieve civil repair only if they can pry media representations out of a previously routinized formation that supports the hegemony that the social movement contests.

So a more realistic account of the media sees them as always functional in some hegemonic order. From the outside in, media usually support a social common sense that legitimizes soft forms of domination. From the inside out, soft forms of domination are inscribed in news routines, in beats and desks, and in the journalistic field itself. We can augment Alexander’s account with Bourdieu, then. It works. Alexander may worry that Thrasymachus is chipping away, but let’s not forget that he’s a straw man.

The ideal-typical case for Alexander’s model of civil repair is the civil rights movement. It is not the first story of civil repair that he tells—that would be women’s rights—but it is the one that he tells in the greatest detail. It’s the story that gives the greatest hope for the capacity of the civil sphere to peacefully effect repairs in a flawed social order.

Alexander sets the stage by explaining how 19th-century emancipation failed to achieve the incorporation of African Americans into the civil sphere. Despite a mid-century mass movement against slavery, and despite the trauma of the Civil War, African Americans remained materially disadvantaged, to say the least, and politically disenfranchised; they were rendered as “polluted” in common sense, considered genetically inferior to Whites and incapable of moral self-control and political self-government. In terms of the communicative institutions of the civil sphere, then, “anti-civil public opinion—the particularistic, essentializing notions broadcast far and wide by the communicative media of the day” (p. 272) dominated discourse and worked against advancement. How did this situation change?

Alexander provides a complex account of changing conditions enabling civic repair. First, he notes, there was the North. Unlike in the South, in the North African Americans were relatively free and equal to the White population. At the same time, they were relatively few. This changed dramatically with the great migration of the interwar years. The rise of large Black electorates in the North brought into high relief the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South.

Prior to that point, though, African Americans had established another enabling condition by creating a counterpublic. The growth of an autonomous Black press as well as other African American communicative institutions helped “create opportunities for developing positive new identities and solidarities in opposition to the polluted and demeaning categories” used by dominant groups and their media (p. 276). The Black press provided a training ground for producing the kinds of discursive material that could impose a claim on mainstream media as well: “Alternative publics succeed because their intragroup activities have allowed them to learn the art of translating their particular injustices into the more universal language of civil justice” (p. 277). One might also point out that when Northern White reporters finally decided to report on the civil rights movement, veterans of the Black press were present and willing to show them how to (Roberts & Klibanoff, 2006). They also served to stiffen the resolve of their White counterparts in their encounters with recalcitrant editors. In other words, the Black press and its reporters helped effect a civil repair of mainstream journalism.

Historians of the civil rights movement have worked for a generation to show how the tactics and organizations of the movement had been painstakingly built over many years. As historians tend to do, they’ve uncovered many forgotten examples of transit strikes before Montgomery and sit-ins before Greensboro. Alexander is aware of this and notes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal initiatives as an important enabling factor for the mass movement. But it is the mass movement that he’s interested in, because it was the mass movement that changed the civil discourse and effected civil repair. The mass movement made it possible for African Americans to shift from polluted to civil status. The mass movement changed the limits of what it was acceptable to say in public. It’s because of the mass movement that even opponents of integration and enfranchisement began to cringe when confronted with the language of racial superiority. The change in the language was rather sudden and very dramatic. In the 1930s and 1940s, Southern Democratic Representatives and Senators routinely used the language of White supremacy in Congressional debates (Katznelson, 2013). The 1960s required, at least, more subtlety.

How did the civil rights movement achieve this? Alexander’s account emphasizes the dramaturgy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s performances. In addition to his considerable personal charisma, King understood well how to make news for the great Northern institutions of journalism. He succeeded in framing the movement as part of we, the people, rather than as a maneuver by an interest group. He helped journalists exercise their moral autonomy in recognizing the African American freedom struggle as part of the story of American freedom. In their accounts, Southern resisters became the Other. In Alexander’s own words, “From 1956 on, northern journalists were in the South, attracted by the Montgomery movement that caught the national imagination and catapulted Martin Luther King into an influential civil position.” Note the circle of causality: the Montgomery movement attracted national attention, and then reporters came and produced national attention. Put more believably, the movement and national news media interacted to create a rising level of newsworthiness. Alexander continues: “Once the northern journalists were there, they took sides” because the movement won the “struggle to define and maintain what the northern reporters viewed as their independent professional ethics” (p. 299).

Is this an adequate explanation of how the movement came to be treated as normative by the mainstream press? Well, sort of. It is a bit too focused on King, a bit too accepting of northern White journalists’ memoirs, a bit too limited to a few national media outlets, and a bit too taken with a narrative that sees the climax of the action in the great acts of legislation in the mid-1960s—the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But we can fill it in a bit. We can do this by invoking three subplots: global decolonization, shifting political tactics, and indexing.

Global decolonization is the biggest of these subplots. In fact, it would make more sense to say that the civil rights movement is a subplot of global decolonization. The years following WWII saw the European powers and Japan shedding their colonial empires as movements for national liberation created the new nations that quickly tripled the membership of the United Nations. The language of the civil rights movement, as well as its nonviolent playbook, echoed these movements. King read Gandhi. The postwar world clearly rejected the primordial racism of the defeated fascist regimes of Europe and Japan. It became increasingly embarrassing to hear that very language in U.S. politics when the United Nations was itself headquartered in New York. Alexander sees this post-WWII revulsion against a racial and geopolitical order now tied to fascism as crucial to the marginalization of anti-Semitism, and so it is not much of a leap to augment his account by adding the postwar global anticolonial consensus to his list of enabling conditions.

On a national scale, political calculations also changed. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Democratic Party was required to defer to its Southern wing, a fact that inflected every element of New Deal social policy (Katznelson, 2013). In the 1950s and 1960s, it became possible for the national Democratic Party to win national office by supporting racial equality and winning northern Black votes even as Southern Democrats continued to resist. Alexander recognizes that John F. Kennedy’s election owed much of its success to this new calculus, but he resists seeing that as the result of frank tactical thinking, preferring to see it as responsiveness to national public opinion. Much has been made of Lyndon Johnson’s reported remark upon signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that “We’ve lost the South for a generation,” but it would be incorrect to think that L.B.J. thought of this as a noble political suicide. Rather, cold calculation held that it meant trading Southern power for national power. It now looks like political self-sacrifice only because the Democratic Party misunderestimated the forces of reaction.

Finally, inside the journalistic field, global decolonization and the shifting position of the national Democratic Party changed the indexing of the movement for news organizations. Alexander doesn’t try to incorporate the political science literature on framing, indexing, and agenda setting (Bennett, 1990; Entman, 1993; McCombs & Shaw, 1972) into his account of the communicative institutions of the civil sphere but that doesn’t mean that he can’t, though he may detect the aroma of Thrasymachus here. Clearly, he believes that the media, and especially the factual media, are an important part of the agenda-setting machinery of the civil sphere—that’s an unspoken piece of the argument for the importance of Northern journalists. Alexander is not interested in getting deep into the weeds on how the media agenda is formed, however.

Alexander uses the term framing throughout his discussion of the movement, but his use of the term owes more to Erving Goffman than to Todd Gitlin or Robert Entman. He thinks that it was crucial that movement activists, especially King, were able to reframe their marches and protests as civil. He does not dwell on the limits that professional journalism and its notions of what’s news impose on framing. “The media used a narrow ‘racial disturbance’ frame in its coverage of the movement,” Morris (2007, p. 622) points out. Sympathetic coverage deviated from this norm, but Alexander’s account is aware of just how tenuous this was. Alexander doesn’t pay much attention to post-1965 events, but even King became framed as a troublemaker when he joined northern open-housing activists, and his antiwar activism and Poor People’s Crusade slid him out of the mainstream and have since been excised from his official memory. Framing gives and it takes away.

Of this toolkit of journalism studies, the indexing function would seem the most Thrasymachean to Alexander, one supposes. Bennett’s (1990) indexing model holds that journalists and news organizations tend to index their coverage to the distribution of positions among governing elites. In the simplest cases, political reporters will present positions as representing “legitimate controversy” when the two major parties diverge; when the parties agree, other positions are treated as “deviant” (Hallin, 1984). In other words, for a position to be reported as legitimate, some significant segment of established governing elites must embrace it. The fact that the national Democratic Party embraced the civil rights movement made it immediately legitimate. The same could not be said of more radical race activism. As Alexander points out, though with somewhat different emphasis, when the radicals came to figure more prominently in the race news, the movement lost its positive press.

If we add these elements to Alexander’s account of the civil rights movement, does his theory of the civil sphere continue to apply? Civil repair still takes place through the intervention of the institutions, especially the communicative institutions, of the civil sphere, but the process comes to seem more like a strategic maneuver in a war of position during a crisis of hegemony. And the story comes to seem more extraordinary than exemplary: The circumstances under which racial civil repair occurred come to seem significantly more particular and significantly less likely to recur. We all like to believe in the power of truth over a candid mind, but when it takes this much work and good luck to produce a candid mind, it’s hard to blame people who will want to achieve their ends through other means.

If we augment the account to make it more adequately reflect what happened in what Alexander calls the civil sphere, though, it may yet remain both less convincing and less useful for subsequent social movements (Morris, 2007). One of the key critiques of Alexander’s account of the civil rights movement is its de-emphasis on the grassroots organizing of its great many participants. It was not the Northern media that put all those people in the streets or made them willing to go to jail. It matters that people decide to throw their bodies into the struggle. And it’s not just the dramatic confrontations that matter. Social change also happens block by block and one diploma at a time. That might be taken as the lesson of the third story of civil repair that Alexander tells.

The third story that Alexander offers involves the successful incorporation of Jews into the civil sphere. As in the case of the civil rights movement, a prevailing language of pollution was overcome with the help of the communicative institutions of the civil sphere. But in the actual telling, journalism and news organizations have a smaller role. The leading roles are played by the trauma of WWII and the Holocaust and, though Alexander doesn’t really dwell on this, social advancement. Jews in Europe and the United States achieved social equality, and a significant measure of wealth and status compared with other social groups, before they achieved incorporation into the civil sphere. African Americans still have not achieved equal economic status, which makes the civil rights story more impressive as a parable of civil repair.

Social advancement did not win Jews acceptance. Quite the contrary: Universities and the learned professions responded with what we might call reverse affirmative action, imposing quotas on Jewish membership, and social institutions like country clubs denied membership to applicants of the “Hebrew persuasion.” Rather, it was the dramatic presentation of the trauma of the Holocaust that proved decisive in the United States. Elisabeth Clemens (2007) points out the irony:

The centrality of trauma in Alexander’s argument renders the expansion of the civil sphere dependent on some moment of pure victimhood on the part of those excluded and defined as noncivil or polluted. This requirement stands in profound tension with the place of the agency of the oppressed at the heart of social movement analysis. At the critical moment, there is a break with all the work of creating a separate but civil sphere as well as mobilizing members of the excluded to confront the power of entrenched categories. At that moment, what matters is first, trauma inflicted by core members of the civil sphere, then translation by sympathetic members of that core group, and finally the recognition of the oppressed by the dominant group. (pp. 597–598)

It is true that in the cases of incorporation of African Americans and Jews, a drama of victimhood proved essential to the “translation” process in which the oppressed achieved recognition by the core. Critics are correct to point out that it is members of the core group who get to tell that story in Alexander’s accounts. But again an augmentation is possible. Commensurate attention can be drawn to the multitude of local settings in which recognition is achieved and the oppressed are reframed as civil rather than polluted. In the case of Jews, achievements in universities and learned professions, which might be thinkable as institutions with civil importance, certainly figured prominently in the reframing.

If Alexander were to choose a fourth story to tell, certainly it would be the emergence of homosexuality as an acceptable form of being in the civil sphere. The rate of change in the acceptance of same-sex unions has been remarkable, comparable to the swiftness of the success of the civil rights movement. Can this be explained in the same way as the incorporation of Blacks and Jews? Of course, one can point to the circulation of positive representations in popular culture, and the framing of the AIDS epidemic as a kind of Holocaust, but I think the key fact is that gays came out of the closet and suddenly everyone realized that they were related to one or worked with one or worshiped with one. The mediated discourse, in other words, has been a lagging indicator. As to why gay people began coming out, one supposes it’s because others had before them. In other words, the translation was the result of the agency of the oppressed.

If sexuality encourages optimism about civil incorporation, the momentum on race in the 21st century deflates it. The data on income and wealth disparities are not encouraging; the great recession wiped out painfully achieved gains in net worth. The data on the justice system are even more discouraging. As Alexander notes, progress is always precarious. Jim Crow is not too strong to describe racial divides in some school systems and courtrooms. Much attention in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act has been devoted to clever attempts at minority voter discouragement in the form of new identification requirements; at the same time, there has been a striking series of racially charged incidents of police violence. Young Black men in the United States are inclined to question whether civil repair ever actually occurred; an older generation’s tales of heroic victory seem out of reach and out of touch.

The 21st century might not produce many stories of civil repair of the sort that Alexander tells. There are many reasons why this would be so. I will only gesture toward globalization, the postmodern condition, neoliberal capitalism, new fundamentalisms, the war on terror, and the rise of the surveillance state. Each of these makes it more difficult for the mechanisms of civil repair to operate, though one could also argue that some open up new possibilities at the same time.

The feature that is more central to the parochial concerns of journalism and communication scholars is the changing media environment. The legacy media that seemed so important to the success of the civil rights movement, especially broadcast television news, have suffered from the weakening of their business model. The journalism of professional expertise associated with the legacy media has lost territory to the encroaching “journalism of assertion” (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999) found on cable news channels and talk radio and in the blogosphere. Younger generations look to a new form of network journalism, in which checking on the news means reading your Facebook feed. Accompanying new media forms are new practices of public opinion, of representing public opinion, and of monitoring people’s attitudes and behaviors. All of these factors make it harder to represent a supervising public intelligence that commands and effects social incorporation or civil repair. The media environment produces opportune fragmentation more than universalizing civil discourse.

Alexander’s success stories occurred in a world where public opinion, in part represented by professional journalism, could operate as a regulative ideal. I don’t think that happens much anymore. In fact, partly because of advances in understanding how media work that our colleagues in communication studies have achieved, the powerful no longer seem to believe that “the public” will ever come to judgment in a way that matters.

The most stunning case here involves climate change. In the face of a remarkable scientific consensus, the members of one of the two great U.S. parties almost unanimously deny that human activity causes climate change. And, answering to a well-funded stream of subsidized information and simple public relations, news organizations have shown a tendency to move climate denialists from the realm of deviance to the sphere of legitimate controversy. Public opinion, at least as measured by polls, has wavered in response, with the percentage of denialists—particularly those identifying as Republican—increasing. I consider this a story of the vulnerability of the civil sphere in a new age of representing public opinion, in which the communicative institutions no longer generate a regulative ideal.

Also diagnostic is the story of class. If we take organized labor to be the voice of the working class, then we can conclude that, in the last 40 years, the working class has been silenced. This occurred in both the regulative and the communicative institutions of the civil sphere. Decades of microaggressions in courtrooms and workplaces have taken their toll. And, as organized labor has declined, so has reporting in mainstream news media on both organized labor specifically and the lived experience of working-class folk generally. Working-class audiences have defected from the news media as the news media have abandoned them. Again, this seems to me to be a story of weakness in the civil sphere: A newly energized coalition of interests at the top of the socioeconomic scale has been able to set the agenda for both the media and the political parties. One doesn’t expect a story of civil repair to come about.

On the contrary, because of the discursive construction of working-class manhood, the misrecognition of class politics produces a striking affective reaction. The language of politics in the United States and elsewhere has become characterized by a wounded masculinity that demonizes minorities and supports an anti-immigrant populism that echoes the old disharmonies of anti-Semitism. The music of the spheres it ain't. Meaningful solidarity cannot be maintained or achieved without recognition of unfairness across class lines, but the current affective structure of feeling treats mentioning inequalities as an act of class war.

The structures of feeling and institutions that, in Alexander’s account, worked to make happy stories in the 20th century don’t have the same purchase in the 21st century. You can argue that the civil sphere continues to exist, and so offers the promise of civil repair, but it seems to me that it will continue to be harder to find redemptive narratives. Without, that is, a social movement to achieve civil repair in the media environment.

This gets us back to Thrasymachus. Plato introduced him in the Republic as the voice of a fashionable cynicism; he had used him up by the end of Book 1. Five books later, in the center of the dialog, Plato has Socrates present the Myth of the Cave, in which he allegorizes the general human condition to prisoners chained in a cave watching shadows on a wall. Walter Lippmann used this passage of the Republic as the frontispiece for Public Opinion (1922), a book that is considered by many to inaugurate the field of communication research. In Lippmann’s account, public opinion cannot do the work democratic theory requires, because it is distorted first by the defective cognitive machinery of ordinary human beings and then by the defective organization of the press. He calls the resulting sphere of misinformation and stereotypes the pseudo-environment, and he means it to resemble the cave in Plato’s allegory. Lippmann, like Plato, concludes that good government requires better intelligence. He proposes that this intelligence come from expert bureaus, which would provide data to decision makers. Plato, of course, posited that philosophers should run his Republic.

In Alexander’s utopian politics, the communicative institutions of the civil sphere would have the wisdom of Plato’s philosophers and the expertise of Lippmann’s intelligence bureaus. He knows, as we do, that in real life they don’t. Plato knew this too; the key communicative institution of the civil sphere in his Athenian polity was rhetoric, and Thrasymachus was an effective rhetorician—much of what we know about the actual historical figure comes from attributions in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Plato and Lippmann came by their disillusion honestly—Lippmann by observing the making of sausage at Versailles after contributing to the U.S. propaganda effort in WWI, Plato by surviving the Peloponnesian War, participating in, and quitting the group of “30 Tyrants” that governed Athens afterward, then watching his teacher Socrates put to death by the restored democracy.

Plato’s Republic is a utopia. So fragile is it that, even in its pure imagined form, it falls apart when the strict governance of mating cycles fails to be observed. If Plato ever believed that it could exist on our earth, he lost that belief when he observed the limits of philosophy as he advised Dionysus II, the ruler of Syracuse. And, of course, his Republic was not a democracy, a form of government that he thought produces only disorder, class warfare, and eventually tyranny. Thrasymachus was the democrat in the bunch, apparently.

Plato’s core idea, though, remains dear to democratic political theory. It is simply that politics should be able to think straight. Put in other words, in a legitimate governing system, you should be able to win by being right, rather than by appealing to the interests of the powerful or the passions of the ignorant. This same concern animates De Tocqueville and Habermas. For media scholars, the key arena for thinking straight should be the media system.

Does Alexander’s theory of the civil sphere give us a way of seeing democracy thinking straight? Does it allow us to see the good guys winning by being right? The Obama years haven’t been encouraging in this regard. (I haven’t read Alexander’s book on Obama’s election, by the way.) Obama’s election should have been the triumphant denouement to the story of the civil rights movement. Instead, in a very short time, Obama had to perform damage control after criticizing the Boston police in his response to a question about the arrest of his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr. for being “uppity” in his own home. Not only did this episode mark a backward step in the national conversation on race; it also interrupted other national conversations. The initial question came in a press conference meant to reset the public discussion of health care reform.

Does Alexander’s approach offer us a way out of this particular conjuncture? I would argue that Gramscian analysis of hegemony offers a better way to understand what has actually been happening in the political arena, as the topic of the racial angle of policing exemplifies. Certainly, everyone taking any position uses Martin Luther King, Jr., as a rhetorical mask, but we would be mistaken if we were to take all those performances as sincere and would be smarter to read them as maneuvers in a war of position about shaping and maintaining historical blocs. This doesn’t make the performative aspect irrelevant, but it does cast its relevance in a different and usually not very civil light.

As for the normative dimension, I prefer Habermas. The Habermasian approach to the public sphere has its weaknesses, but it also has the virtue of providing some clear guidelines for normative media theory, media reform, and media activism. It allows us to identify and condemn the kinds of behavior that have supported climate and class denialism, for instance. Alexander’s theory wants democracy to work well and celebrates its institutions when it does; a media system that took the civil sphere as its raison d’être might be a good thing and would have the advantage of taking the performative and affective more seriously. But even the most superficial glance at contemporary politics shows us the ways in which performances of civil virtue cloak the most cynical schemes in righteous affect. Media action is a losing game; the rules need to be changed.

What would it take to turn the media system more decisively toward civil repair, in Alexander’s terms, or thinking straight, in Plato’s? I’ve already invoked the idea of a social movement for the civil repair of the media. This would have to come more from the bottom than the top: not from elite organizations like the New York Times and BBC, but from an energized mass public with a significant representation from the working class. The 20th-century version of professional journalism no longer has the capacity to regulate the news environment. The multiplication of channels and the fragmentation of the audience weaken the moral force of the media system and cripple its ability to cultivate solidarity: For the indefinite future, it seems, people will be able to choose the facts they have to reckon with. Today in most advanced countries, people choose to live in different ideological and social spheres, segregated informationally and culturally from fellow citizens. To overcome this segregation, movements of solidarity will have to gather force from the support and common sense of ordinary people and reshape the media environment as they work their way toward the centers of power.

Ideally, solidarity will come from a recognition of common humanity. In practice, it tends now to be built on a feeling of collective insecurity. Fear is a thin basis for solidarity, but that is what seems to work best at creating affective energy: fear of immigrant hordes, fear of terrorists, fear of government bureaucracy and surveillance. The current media environment is good at spreading fear.

But the media environment will continue to change. We can hope that when the currently available technologies are fully implemented and cheaply available, a new mass public will be able to recognize its common humanity on the basis of certain universalistic values. We can hope that a media system that is closer to the ground and more integrated into the lived experience of ordinary people will help us think straight about each other. We can be encouraged that this seems to be happening for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.