JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University and a Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale. His many books include The Civil Sphere and The Performance of Power: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. BERNADETTE N. JAWORSKY is a postdoctoral researcher and member of the faculty at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, under a grant for the Employment of Newly Graduated Doctors of Science for Scientific Excellence.