tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68360863903875320582024-03-05T00:52:10.450-08:00fieldworkJedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.comBlogger75125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-12268784015042227862018-09-20T14:32:00.000-07:002018-09-20T14:32:43.333-07:00Forward to George Scialabba
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It may strike
a reader new to George Scialabba’s writing as extraordinary that this
collection is not a response to Donald Trump’s presidency. Although the
President does not appear by name - he is decorously invoked, just once, as “a
famous social parasite” - Scialabba has never ceased to point out that the
United States is a plutocracy, administered mainly for the convenience of those
who control capital and jobs. His consistent themes have been the corruption of
language, the coarsening of imagination, the colonization of attention by
technology and commerce, and the seductions of power. The pathologies that the
present moment throws into relief have always been the occasions of his
warnings and laments. He writes lucidly about benightedness, vividly about
purblindness, so that his essays and reviews show thought as a thing possible
in a world that can seem a conspiracy against sense and reason.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is up to
Scialabba’s readers to observe this modest heroism in his work, because he will
not claim it for himself. He has long insisted on the political irrelevance of
criticism. Once, he says here and has said elsewhere, it was possible for the
amateur writer to announce a kind of judgment on the lies of the powerful, but
those days are gone, consumed by a world of experts and institutions too
recondite and sinuous to feel the stone of a judgment launched precisely from a
fine syntactic sling.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yet his
stones come flying. You can read Scialabba just for the satisfying crunch of
another Philistine’s deserving temple. Of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Republic</i> in the 1990s, when the touchstone liberal magazine
supported cuts in taxes and social spending, attacked affirmative action, and
published a cover article slandering health-care reform: “Though this rightward
move was opportunistic, it wasn’t unprincipled opportunism. Opportunism, after
all, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Republic</i>’s bedrock principle. Not the uncomplicated,
self-serving kind, but the well-meaning, deluded kind that believes above all
in maintaining credibility with the powerful, since how else can anything be
accomplished except by whispering in their ear?” It isn’t just that Scialabba
has insulted them in some satisfying way, for he loathes pseudo-clever
putdowns; it is that he has understood them better than they can abide
understanding themselves, connecting these elite liberals’ self-congratulatory
contrarianism and skepticism with their profound and distorting credulousness
toward power. Of one of Mark Lilla’s crusades against radical intellectuals who
allegedly defend and possibly adore totalitarianism, Scialabba remarks mildly,
“he refrains from naming anyone, and I, for one, have no idea who he means.” A
few exacting, quietly empirical sentences later, it is plain that Lilla is
wrestling with phantasms, or straw men. Scialabba is not out for blood. It is
just that exquisite fairness is more than some systems can take.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Scialabba
is angry at the looting and degradation of his country, the immiseration of its
working people, and the complacency of its elites, yet anger is not the leading
emotion of these essays. As with most great criticism, curiosity and appreciation
govern his eye more than umbrage. Scialabba works his way into the movements
and sensations of other minds like an explorer seeking the principles of newly
discovered worlds: What are the colors here? Which way is up? What do they live
for, in this new place? Catholic reactionaries, Protestant agrarians, libertarian
feminists, Catholic revolutionaries, and social-democratic social scientists
all get an attentive hearing and a sympathetic report. The only people he
scorns are those who pretend to think as they serve power, who drape heroic
banners on militarized, plutocratic centrism and, at the end of the week, check
their bank accounts and congratulate themselves on having held off the
irresponsibles.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Actually,
there is one other group he scorns: the slanderers of Enlightenment. Scialabba believes
that the one saving possibility in this country is rooted in our imperfect and
hypocritical adherence to two ideas: that people are radically equal and that,
as equals, they have to be the judges of their own interests and the authors of
their own laws. All intellectual melodrama about how we are too frail and
narrow to draw our own judgments or govern ourselves, Scialabba rightly takes
for a combination of juvenile philosophical elitism on the one hand, and, on
the other, unselfconscious apologetics for the political and economic orders
that have been profitably hollowing out our capacity for self-rule. In other
words, Scialabba is a democrat, and he sees that, in a world whose forces are
arrayed against democracy, a democrat more or less has to be a radical. If his
voice is unusual, that is a sign of how few like him there are - bad straits
for a principle of rule by majorities. Elitists can take comfort in the conceit
that they are above “the herd.” Not so democrats. If there is a political
stance more poignant than that of the genuine democrat who often feels that he
is part of a smallish minority, I do not know what it is.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What do we
live by while we slouch toward utopia - a peaceful, humane, socialist democracy
that Scialabba reckons five hundred years into the hoped-for future? Besides
freedom, reason, and solidarity with the living, there is the company of the
dead. Scialabba, a radical, is also an existence-proof of the actual virtues of
conservatism - the deeply felt love of the best that has gone before, of what
makes the world knowable and habitable. He is for that reason also living proof
that it need not be a posture of right-wing politics to believe, as he does,
that “for native English speakers, the single greatest moral resource in the
language is the nineteenth-century novel,” or that “the American citizenry as a
whole, if it ever rouses itself to reassert its sovereignty … will need Mill,
Ruskin, Wilde, Morris, Randolph Bourne, and Ernest Callenbach.” I am not sure
that I share either judgment in every particular, but I am quite certain that
they are the work of a mind whose temper is the very opposite of the time’s,
and a precious thing: self-doubting, passionately curious, and in love with the
capacity of the plainest language to disclose the most essential truth, or just
to remind us of something indispensable that, we realize upon the reminder, we
had almost forgotten.</div>
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</style>Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-74270937976483546192018-06-30T15:58:00.000-07:002018-06-30T15:58:33.547-07:00Beyond the Bosses’ Constitution:<br />Toward a Social-Democratic First Amendment<br /><br />Jedediah Purdy*<br /><br />“This Court would stray beyond its powers were it to erect a far-fetched claim, derived from some ultimate relation between an obviously valid aim of legislation and an abstract conception of freedom, into a constitutional right…. The notion that economic and political concerns are separable is pre-Victorian.”<br />~ Machinists v. Street, 367 U.S. 740, 812–14 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)<br /><br />“The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”<br />~Buckley v. Valeo (per curiam), 424 U.S. 1, 49 (1976)<br /><br /> “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The Government has muffled the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.”<br /> ~Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 130 S. Ct. 876, 907 (2010) (Kennedy, J.) <br /><br />Introduction<br /><br />I. The Court’s Political Economy of Speech<br /> A. Speech, Democracy, and Party Entrenchment<br /> B. A Theoretical and Historical Origin-Point for the Court’s View<br /> <br />II. An Alternative: The Tensions of Capitalist Democracy<br /> A. Distributional Contests and Class Entrenchment<br />B. Principles for a Democratic First Amendment<br /> 1.Neutrality, Right and Wrong<br /> 2. Democratic Will-Formation<br /> 3. Necessary Redistribution<br /> 4. Process and Substance: Democracy and Social Democracy<br /><br />III. Union Fees and the Shape of Economic Power: Further Defining the Alternatives<br /> A. The Court’s View of Workers’ Interests, and an Alternative<br /> B. Two Ways of Seeing the Inseparability of Politics and Economics<br /><br />Conclusion<br /><br /><br /> In 2018, American democracy is widely regarded as being in crisis. There is disagreement over whether the root of the problem is partisan polarization, norm erosion, racism, economic inequality, oligarchic capture, something else, or some combination. At a deeper level, there is disagreement over what, exactly, constitutes the crisis of American democracy. Is it the fact of a norm-defying President who has attacked institutions such as the free press, repeatedly questioned the integrity of elections, and openly mixed personal business with affairs of state? Is it the longer-running trend of legislative gridlock and the drift toward executive prerogative in matters ranging from war to immigration? Is it the equally long-standing fact that the views of middle-income and poor citizens have very little influence on government, while the donor class sets and constrains the political agenda? Implicit in these debates is disagreement over a more basic set of questions: What should we hope for from democracy? Is it merely a peaceful way to resolve elite contests for power by appeal to mainly ignorant voters, as Joseph Schumpeter argued? Must it be closely cabined to prevent selfish interest groups from interfering with the liberty and rationality of the market, as Friedrich Hayek and other neoliberals contended? Or does it represent the opposite, a necessary means of social self-defense against market depredations, as Karl Polanyi argued? Might it even be something stronger, a means of genuine self-rule? <br /><br /> Since the First Amendment’s doctrinal blossoming in the twentieth century, its interpretation has been shaped by just such ideas about democracy: what it aims at, what threatens it, how to preserve it. But these days it seems to many critics that the First Amendment has become part of the problem, a source of protection for oligarchic capture, and at best peripheral to other problems such as polarization and norm erosion. A good deal of doctrinal and historical work has addressed these developments. In this Essay, I pursue a line of interpretation that is related but distinct. I contend that in First Amendment doctrine the Justices operate from premises about the workings of markets and politics in a capitalist democracy that are often incompletely articulated, partly theorized, at times not even stated. My goal here is to pick apart the strands of that worldview, ask where they come from and what work they do in lending plausibility or obviousness to the doctrine even before it arrives at familiar modalities of interpretation.<br /><br /> More specifically, I develop this account of the following anti-distributional cornerstone of today’s First Amendment doctrine: “The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” This per curiam anathema on official distributional judgments in regulating speech—in this instance, the spending of personal wealth in electoral advocacy—has echoed down from the 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo to vindicate corporate campaign spending in Citizens United v. FEC and invalidate conditional public financing in Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, among others. This constitutional tendency is powered by a danger that certain Justices see as essential to avert: that current majorities will entrench themselves or their allies by setting the rules of future elections to pick their preferred winners. The Court’s stance against the deliberate allocation of political influence arises, then, from an aversion to democratic distributional and regulatory politics, particularly those concerning political influence itself. In support of this anti-distributional judgment, the Court also embraces optimistic claims about the market ordering of political persuasion: that more spending simply enriches the informational basis of an ultimately democratic decision. This optimism, however, is something of a dodge, a way of evading open acknowledgement that the market, too, will have its distributional effects. The heart of the principle is the Court’s choice of a wealth-based, market-mediated allocation of political influence over an expressly political allocation on the hunch that, in a capitalist democracy, the market allocation represents the lesser evil.<br /><br /> An effective response needs to show the problems with the Court’s idealization of market-mediated persuasion, but it must also address the Court’s anti-distributional political pessimism by making the case for active democratic engagement with the terms of political power itself, centrally including the political power that arises in economic power. In short, the question is what kind of interaction a democratic republic should build between economic and political power, and for what reasons. This Essay thus moves from reconstructing the worldview that supports certain doctrines to addressing the question of what arrangement of market power and political power First Amendment doctrine should aim to cultivate. It concludes in favor of a social-democratic jurisprudence, one that uses political power, democratically expressed, to bring economic power to heel.<br /><br />In Part I, I elaborate the argument that I have just sketched about the structure and sources of the Court’s campaign-finance cases. In Part II, I develop an alternative picture of the major democratic distortion in the decades since the Court began its current era in the political economy of speech: not the partisan entrenchment of economic regulation and social provision, but the class entrenchment of those with fungible economic-political influence. Turning to the question of what political economy of power is desirable in a democratic republic. I propose that a democratic republic must be able to achieve political will-formation around a creditable idea of the common good. This goal requires a modicum of civic equality, which in turn requires that the polity be able to set the terms of its own will-formation—that is, to legislate on the formation and distribution of political influence, the very topic the current Court puts out of bounds. I conclude by suggesting that this should not be a purely procedural matter, but that a doctrine of democratic permission for legislation may take notice—as the Court’s current jurisprudence furtively does—of the political-economic order it aims to make possible, here one of stronger democracy and greater equality and security. One might call it a social-democratic jurisprudence. In contrast, the Court’s recent First Amendment jurisprudence, with its conceptual annulment and practical embrace of class entrenchment, is the work of a bosses’ Constitution. In Part III, I develop this class-politics political economy further through the First Amendment cases addressing union fees. Viewed across decades, these cases show two sides of the same political-economic coin: recognizing that union advocacy is inherently political, Justice Alito today takes the neoliberal view that state neutrality requires members’ contributions to it to be purely voluntary, while Justice Frankfurter in 1961 argued from the same premise that unions must be able to impose a common voice on their members to perform their political-economic function of building class power in democracy.<br /><br /><br /> I. The Court’s Political Economy of Speech<br /> A. Speech, Democracy, and Entrenchment<br /> The Court’s reasoning in the political-spending cases adopts a metaphor of public, political speech as occurring in an efficient market, “the open marketplace of ideas protected by the First Amendment,” in which “ideas may compete without government interference.” In this marketplace, electoral “expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate,” an offering that “presupposes that the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials.” The purpose of the advertising is “advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests.” Within this image, political speech (including spending) is thus “an essential mechanism for democracy, for it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people” by presenting voters with competing accounts of their situation and interests. So understood, speech is the cornerstone of “a republic where the people are sovereign.” <br /><br /> These passages serve a specific doctrinal purpose: denying that limits on campaign spending may be constitutionally justified as remedies for “distortion” of political power or “corruption” in the form of undue political influence. The Court’s praise of advertising’s service to democracy serves less as a statement of conviction about the excellence of the marketplace of ideas than as a corollary of the Court’s real point: that government must not be allowed to make distributional judgments concerning political speech and influence. The reason is that “[l]eveling electoral opportunities means making and implementing judgments about which strengths should be permitted to contribute to the outcome of an election … and it is a dangerous business for Congress to use the election laws to influence the voters’ choices.” As the Citizens United majority sees it, the current government must not be empowered to allocate advantage in future elections, because that power would be tantamount to picking winners and a sure invitation to self-entrenchment and favoritism.<br /><br />It is avoiding this summum malum that powers the praise of political advertising and market-style voter choices as a democratic summum bonum. Elections and political debate more broadly are treated as if they were perfect markets because this premise secures them against the vices of political rent-seeking—the appropriation of future political opportunities to one’s own favored groups, outside of the market test of full political competition. So that the political advantage-seeking of lawmakers can be categorically condemned, that of moneyed advocates is categorically affirmed; the status of the latter as the lifeblood of democracy secures the status of the former as a parasitic threat.<br /><br /> This is not to claim that the metaphor of the political perfect market is merely decorative, but rather to point out that it does not carry the weight of the position unaided. Nor could it. The Court’s jurisprudence, accordingly, is not invested in the thoroughgoing coherence or adequacy of the metaphor. As David Grewal and I have emphasized elsewhere, modern arguments for elevating private economic power over competing democratic imperatives tend to have shifting, overlapping aspects: affirmative idealization of the efficiency of market arrangements; moralized identification of the rights and interaction of (a certain legally constituted marketplace) as uniquely compatible with liberty, equality, and dignity; a pessimistic or tragic register insisting that the predictable deficiencies of politics generally or certain democratic institutions in particular prevent us from doing better, even if we might wish otherwise; and a pre-argumentative “common-sense” dimension that implicitly dismisses certain alternatives as “off the table” before the serious argument has begun. It is typical to move among these different registers almost unselfconsciously because they hang together as an ideological worldview. Indeed, the political-spending opinions also invoke the “worth” and “voice” of speakers, as if corporations were marginalized populations in search of dignity, and liberally invoke the language of non-discrimination, almost reflexively borrowing the moral language of First Amendment liberties. So the Citizens United Court announced of the corporate-spending ban, “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach” and “muffle[s] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” <br /><br /> So interpreted, the jurisprudence under examination here confounds the conventional distinction between constitutional visions animated by “hope” and those shaped by “fear.” Rather than say that the Roberts Court and its predecessors in this line of cases have chosen fear of political entrenchment over hope for democratic self-rule, or characterizing the Court as simply hopeful about the role of markets in shaping political speech, it is more informative to appreciate that this vision is composed of selective strands of both optimism and pessimism. Both attitudes are doing work in lending plausibility to the doctrine overall by fitting it to a worldview with definite emphases and rough-and-ready lessons—be wary of this perennial danger (democratic entrenchment), look in a pinch to that institutional anchor of realism and good sense (markets). <br /><br /> The implicit standpoint of the campaign-finance cases, then, is the following. The chief danger in this domain, the constitutional evil to be avoided, is manipulation by the current political class of the rules for subsequent electoral contests, which would “deprive the public of the right and privilege to determine for itself what speech and speakers are worthy of consideration” and will receive majoritarian endorsement. Seen in this way, limiting campaign spending is a usurping attempt to predetermine the course of democratic self-rule, just like prohibiting anti-war pamphleteering or banning Karl Marx’s writings. But the Court’s way of averting this hazard involves it in a certain view of how democratic will-formation comes about. In this latter view, voting decisions are fairly characterized on the paradigm of the fully-informed economic agent of neoclassical modeling, who gratefully accepts the helpful data that advertising provides. This upbeat idea that the wealthy, whether through the corporate form or otherwise, are simply submitting arguments for assessment by their fellow citizens, is not an empirical claim about political persuasion and judgment. It is a half-theoretical, half-rhetorical premise. Current First Amendment doctrine tends toward this premise in good part to avoid the problems posed by its rejection of political allocation of political influence.<br /><br /> B. A Theoretical and Historical Origin-Point for the Court’s View <br /> The judicial outlook that I have been sketching emerged before the rise of the “conservative legal movement” that, today, furnishes most of its spokespersons on the bench. Its early articulation was owing to a less specialized, more widely shared sense of the distinctive problems of capitalist democracy and the role of a constitutional order in mitigating them. The world of its early spokespersons was the end of the post–World War Two “great exception,” the last years of a period of widely shared growth, the flattest distributions of wealth and income the country has seen, and a strong role for organized labor in the Keynesian management of the national economy. This period lulled center-left thinkers into imagining that equitably shared growth was a “new normal,” and that economic inequality would take care of itself going forward, at least to the extent that marginalized populations were fairly dealt into the system. The problem, that is, became one not of inequality but of exclusion. <br /><br />Here, I address a different perspective from that era: that of the worried center-right. From this standpoint, the post-War era presented a threat: Too much political control of the economy, bolstered by unions and by the left, would stifle personal liberty and initiative, leading to some combination of stagnation and tyranny. An emblem of this perspective from elite legal culture was Justice Lewis Powell’s notorious 1971 memorandum to Eugene Sydnor of the Chamber of Commerce, in which Powell called for a full-court press by business in politics, universities, media, and the courts for “the preservation of the system [of free enterprise] itself.” Justice Powell’s memo crystallized a development in twentieth-century conservative jurisprudence that has come to full flower in the twenty-first: an across-the-board resistance to the politics of distribution, in which political spending played a central role. <br /><br /> The laissez-faire, anti-statist strain in U.S. politics, of course, has been a frequently renewed resource since James Madison’s warnings against redistributive “factions” in Federalist No. 10. It defined the right wing of the classically liberal Republican party in the first Gilded Age, and the Liberty League and other enemies of the New Deal recast it for their purposes. When the conservative Reader’s Digest published a polemical summary of libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek’s already polemical Road to Serfdom, an anti-statist, market-first beachhead was announced at the apex of America’s (always incomplete and racially stratified) closest approach to social democracy. Hayek and his fellow Chicago economist Milton Friedman (whom Powell admiringly quoted in his 1971 memo) brought to the defense of markets theoretical sophistication and, especially in Hayek’s case, the ambition to synoptic social theory. By the early 1970s, these thinkers, like Powell, were developing the neoliberal response to a cross-national wave of labor militancy, social-movement discontent, and inflationary pressures (the last widely seen as connected with organized labor’s expectation of regular wage-hikes, even as productivity slowed), which among thinkers of the second Frankfurt School came to be known as the West’s “legitimation crisis.” Hayek and his allies helped the reflective wing of American business to formulate an imperative to restore competitive pressure throughout the economy, and, conversely, to roll back uses of the state that baffled or annulled market competition. <br /><br /> Hayek followed Joseph Schumpeter and other skeptics of robust democracy in holding that such ideas as “society” and “the political community” were merely sentimental mystifications, and distributional politics for that reason nothing better than a semi-organized form of looting. Because Hayek eschewed any claim that the market’s distribution of resources was peculiarly just, his complaint against state-led redistribution was not, despite its connotations, a directly moral defense of property. Rather, it linked a very broadly welfarist set of functional concerns with a libertarianism focused not expressly on claims to private property, but on personal autonomy. (The upshot, however, was to defend property claims very robustly, but at the level of the class rather than the individual.) Hayek contended that the price system’s alignment of incentives with marginal usefulness to others (as expressed in willingness and ability to pay) could not operate where resources were allocated by other means, such as political decisions. With price-coordination impeded, economic order would first slip into inefficiency, then veer inexorably toward outright political command—the only systemic alternative to price-coordination as a way of getting people to do unwelcome work or otherwise contribute to the needs of others. Hayek thus worked out in theory the position that Powell adopted in his memo: “The threat to the enterprise system … also is a threat to individual freedom … the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom—ranging from that under moderate socialism to the iron heel of the leftist or rightist dictatorship…. [F]reedom as a concept is indivisible. As the experience of the socialist and totalitarian states demonstrates, the contraction of economic freedom is followed inevitably by governmental restrictions on other cherished rights.” Hayek argued that, for democracy so conceived to be viable, the substantive scope of politically open questions must be closely restricted—specifically to exclude questions of distribution. <br /><br /> The Court’s worry about political entrenchment thus has a particular historical paradigm: the self-perpetuating rule of a bureaucratic state on behalf of certain well-organized or ideologically sympathetic interest groups, which Hayek and Friedman joined public-choice theorists such as James Buchanan in warning against as the distinctive hazard of democratic capitalism as seen in the ideologically and jurisprudentially pivotal 1970s. The key to staving off this danger, it was influentially argued on the reputable neoliberal right, was to cordon off questions of distribution from active political contestation.<br /><br /> It was in this setting that the Court announced per curiam that the refusal of distributional judgments was the essential commitment of the Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech. When one tries picturing the goal of averting political redistribution as a jurisprudential keystone, other doctrinal developments form an arch around it. The affirmative-action cases head off distributional judgments and political entrenchment along racial lines, as critics of race-conscious policies have argued from the opinions of Justices O’Connor and Scalia in Croson to Justice Roberts’s opinion in Parents Involved. The Court’s previous treatment of public-sector unions and the oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME (discussed in part III) suggest a pair of touchstone worries: that the support of public-sector unions might provide a means of political entrenchment, and that the political empowerment of such unions might enable them to foist ruinous distributional demands on local and state governments. The Spending Clause opinions in Sebelius v. NFIB (the Obamacare case), especially the partial concurrence for four conservative Justices, aim at heading off the prospect of Congress’s imposing a redistributional form of social provision on the states via the power of general taxation. In short, the anti-distributional nerve of Buckley v. Valeo and the subsequent campaign-finance cases connects that reasoning both to the rising neoliberal political economy of the 1970s and to a substantial body of post-Warren Court jurisprudence, in a line from the Nixon Justices’ halt of Warren Court and Great Society egalitarianism to the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts’ rollback of the same. Constitutional resistance to redistribution is the heart of the matter, and the constitutional affirmation of distributional decisions—both arising from and supporting democracy—is the nettle that must be grasped in response.<br /><br />This account is an exercise in historicization (showing how a certain First Amendment doctrine arose in relation to the suppositions of its times) and ideology critique (showing the gap between the world as effectively imagined in the doctrine and the world as it is). First Amendment doctrine here has developed a series of axioms. These include: that political decisions governing the distribution of speech and influence, such as campaign-finance laws, tend to be opaque and self-serving; that the free flow of money into political campaigning will maintain a circulation of arguments among voters and of power among their representatives (i.e., a circulation of elites, a minimalist conception of democratic self-rule); and that elevating the “voices” of the wealthy in particular will contribute to political circulation. From these premises there stems a doctrinal principle: that political spending should be fully assimilated to the marketplace-of-ideas doctrine of the First Amendment, which means treating all-but-absolute protection of campaign spending as a precondition of democratic sovereignty. These premises took their initial plausibility from certain historical conditions. As noted, one of these was the pervasive expectation of equitably distributed growth. Another was the worldview of the Nixon Justices as representative of a moderate, business-oriented elite formed before the new social movements of the 1960s: that anti-business and radically egalitarian politics had gone too far, and the balance had to be re-struck in favor of a stronger political voice for management and capital. <br /><br /> [Transition]<br /> <br /> II. An Alternative: The Tensions of Capitalist Democracy<br /> Capitalist democracy welds together two quite different principles for generating answers to the basic problems of social coordination: who plays what roles in cooperation, who gets what resources in distribution, and who has what authority in the meta-cooperative decisions that set the rules of further cooperation and distribution? Capitalist ordering, based on the private ownership of productive resources (including labor power) and their market-mediated allocation in pursuit of highest marginal return, tends persistently to produce inequality in wealth and income. It also produces class stratification, as different social groups play different roles, from investor and rentier to professional to laborer, also in accord with rates of marginal return. <br /><br />Democratic ordering, by contrast, presents a principle of majority decision-making by members of a community of political equals. To give a democratic response to the basic problems of social coordination is to say that any rules of cooperation and distribution must ultimately take their legitimacy from the collective decision of a community of equals, such as a principle of “social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics.” A democratic polity might have good reason to embrace market allocation for any number of purposes, but the use of markets would have its justification in a collective choice among equals; democracy would have to come first. The relation between the two principles of capitalist democracy is most fraught in the domain of political coordination: the allocation of authority in decisions that set further rules of cooperation and distribution, including whether and to what extent to deploy market principles. Here unequal wealth and class stratification tend constantly to undermine the strictly artificial, legally constituted equality of citizens, giving certain classes (the wealthy, professionals, investors) the capacity to set political agendas and control important decisions. This overriding of the democratic principle by the capitalist is the perennial tendency of capitalist democracy. American democracy demonstrates the tendency all too well.<br /><br /> A. Distributional Contests and Class Entrenchment<br /> American democracy is profoundly divided along class lines. As political scientist Martin Gilens concluded, summing up his own research and that of others, “[U]nder most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appears to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.” The policy preferences of wealthy Americans diverge systematically from those of the general public: significantly smaller shares of the wealthy support substantial redistribution (17% versus 52%), national health insurance (32% versus 61%), affordable college (28% versus 78%), and a living wage (40% versus 78%). Elected representatives themselves are predominantly professional and/or wealthy. Less than 2 percent of members of the U.S. Congress entered politics from blue-collar jobs. It is estimated that at least 50 percent of members of the same bodies are millionaires, and the median net worth of a member of Congress is over $1 million. The disproportionate representation of the wealthy reinforces their disparate influence: “lawmakers from different classes tend to think, vote, and advocate differently on economic issues,” with working-class representatives more likely to support progressive economic legislation and to attend to the priorities of less wealthy constituents. <br /><br /> The influence that wealth exercises over political judgment is not mostly transactional--it is not a matter of bribes, nor of anything resembling them--but structural and social. It is structural in the sense that costly campaigns require constant infusions of money, and political representatives and their staffers know to whom they must pay attention to secure it. It is structural, too, in that a high-dollar influence industry creates an increasing overlap in personnel between politics and lobbying, as politicians who have relied on money directed from the influence industry during their elected careers move over to influence-brokering upon leaving office. The social character of unequal influence is a product of these structural characteristics. Dependence of wealth, the fungibility of public and private roles in the influence industry, and the broader class segregation of American life. Those who hold power know, listen to, are connected with, care about, and are identified with those who--like them--have money. <br /><br /> This is a form of class entrenchment. Reflecting on it suggests that class entrenchment arises readily under capitalist democracy, and may even be fairly described as the default form of politics under that regime. The reasons for this are not obscure. The American political situation just described is an instance of a general tendency. Capitalist economies tend, historically and today, toward high and growing levels of economic inequality. An economy that distributes gains unequally tends to produce successful constituencies that want to sustain their success. They have the means to do so, by virtue of their being economically advantaged. The policies they support maintain or amplify the inequality-producing dynamics that generated their advantages in the first place. The pattern of class advantage will, of course, differ from polity to polity, depending in significant part on the ways in which economic power may be converted to political influence, and vice versa. For instance, campaign donation limits impossible for most voters but within the reach of professional and executives will empower a nexus of those classes and political brokers clustered around parties or their proxies, while unlimited independent expenditures will empower very wealthy political entrepreneurs such as Sheldon Adelson and Tom Steyer. The goal of the campaign finance legislation reviewed and weakened in Buckley v. Valeo was to empower a mix of parties and dedicated volunteers--the archetypical protagonists of “civil society”--to the relative disadvantage of both classes of large donors. <br /> <br /> In seeking to avert incumbent and partisan entrenchment, the Court has developed a First Amendment jurisprudence that shields and fosters class entrenchment. It has also made class entrenchment constitutionally invisible by characterizing political spending as a service to equal citizenship rather than undercutting it, defining the structural characteristics of class entrenchment as insufficiently problematic to justify campaign finance regulation, and declaring constitutionally out of bounds the redistribution of political influence toward greater equality. Such redistribution is the signal means for a polity to assert democracy against the default drift toward class entrenchment. Appreciating the structural character of class entrenchment and the roll of political spending in it help to underscore that actively pursuing political equality is the only alternative to that default drift. The Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence simultaneously knocks out this buttress of democracy and obscures why a polity would need it in the first place.<br /><br /> This is what qualifies the Court’s characterization of capitalist democracy as ideology. Its characterization of capitalist democracy generally, its praise of market-modeled elections and its wariness of partisan and incumbent entrenchment, is something less than an ideology. It might be characterized as an imaginary, or a worldview, or simply a set of heuristics: a way of organizing institutions and events into certain patterns of salience, bringing some features to the fore while relegating others to the background, highlighting certain priorities and dangers and discounting others. I take it that all social practices, including forms of reasoning such as legal argument and academic inquiry, occur within imaginative frames of this kind. When I say that the court’s characterization is ideology, I mean something more. These judicial characterizations obscure central features of social and political reality, and, indeed, render them legally unintelligible in ways that facilitate class entrenchment while denying the basic tension within capitalist democracy. To say that jurisprudence is ideological is to say that it mischaracterizes social and reality by denying one or more of its constitutive conflicts and, at the same time, takes sides in those conflicts. <br /><br /> B. Principles for a Democratic First Amendment<br />So, what should an egalitarian First Amendment jurisprudence do? Here I address this question through a characterization of self-rule under capitalist democracy.<br /><br />1.Neutrality, Right and Wrong<br />The first step is to recognize that class entrenchment is a perennial tendency of capitalist democracy, and arises from tensions between the regime’s two competing principles of social coordination. Appreciating this makes clear that, in one sense, the jurisprudential goal of enforcing state neutrality via the First Amendment is a chimera. Any doctrinal elaboration of the First Amendment will go toward forming a specific dynamic between the twinned principles of capitalist democracy, including facilitating or impeding certain forms of class entrenchment. Both neoliberalism and social democracy, for instance, in their American versions have been closely implicated in versions of the First Amendment. <br /><br /> This is not to say that neutrality is impossible or undesirable in doctrine, or that decisions must be outcome-oriented according to the justices’ feelings about in specific cases. If neutrality means avoiding this caricature of unprincipled decision-making, then neutrality is both desirable and achievable. But neutrality has multiple possible forms. It might be consistent with neutrality to permit no private expenditure on political campaigns, running them entirely through publicly financed forums on the strength of volunteer efforts and other shows of popular support; or neutrality might require the doctrines of Buckley and Citizens United. It might be, too, that the best version of neutrality would not involve the direct application of First Amendment doctrine to campaign-finance regulation, but rather would start from a constitutional presumption that such regulation is legitimate, subject to some constraint of reasonableness. Any of these doctrines would be neutral both (1) in the formal sense that they do not require free-roaming, case-by-case judicial judgments about the distribution of political power and (2) in the substantive sense they implement a version of the idea that the state is obliged not to make unfair distinctions among citizens. None, however, would be neutral in the sense of implying no relationship between the competing dynamics of capitalist democracy, economic inequality and political equality. An egalitarian First Amendment jurisprudence should seek a version of neutrality that aims at supporting the defense of political equality against economic inequality.<br /><br /> 2. Democratic Will-Formation<br />A First Amendment jurisprudence concerned to foster, or at least not inhibit, the vitality of democracy equality must be oriented toward collective will-formation that allows the majority to rule. The self-legislation of the majority, binding for all, is the normative core of modern constitutional democracy. Constitutional interpretation should take place with an eye to sustaining the conditions of popular sovereignty, preventing the drift of government into deep or irremediable elite or other minoritarian usurpation. <br /><br /> Collective will-formation requires that the political process be able to resolve disputes by authoritative decisions that produce a conception of the common good. While the content of any common good is notoriously indeterminate and, indeed, would contradict self-rule were it neatly fixed in advance, politics must be able to produce an account of the common good that will be generally recognized as legitimate even as it is contested through further politics. The political production of a common good becomes impossible if citizens pervasively mistrust the results of the political process—for instance, because they doubt the objectivity of voting, they regard the system as irremediably rigged by such means as gerrymandering and influence-peddling, or they come to regard their political opponents as so essentially hostile to their values and interests as to be disqualified from sharing in any common good. For a democratic republic to produce such an account of the common good, there must be no pervasive exclusion from political participation, and the distribution of political influence must not be so marked by inequality that the majority of people who must live under the law cannot regard themselves in any serious sense as having authorized it. A democratic republic requires for its legitimacy the consent of living generations, not simply the inheritance of past political acts. Any government that prevents the current political community from renewing or revising its own basic commitments usurps popular sovereignty. <br /><br /> Constitutional interpretation can play only a relatively modest part in any program to achieve these conditions, and this goes a fortiori for the interpretation of any one part of the Constitution, such as the First Amendment. That being said, the First Amendment has come to be closely connected with the structure of political contestation, and there are significant stakes in its interpretation. At present, First Amendment doctrine presents a substantial barrier to popular sovereignty–renewing measures. An alternative approach should lead First Amendment jurisprudence to permit, even facilitate, the renewal of popular sovereignty, partly by linking the desiderata of democratic will-formation to an account of the political economy of capitalist democracy that is both more realistic about market ordering and more committed to the prerogatives of a democratic polity.<br /><br /> 3. Necessary Redistribution<br /> Democracy requires the deliberate and ongoing adjustment of economic power—in a word, redistribution. The posture of distribution-blind neutrality that the Court has adopted in the First Amendment cases discussed here implicitly approves “private” ways of contesting democratic will-formation that tend to undercut democracy by systemically amplifying the influence of the wealthy and super-wealthy and weakening workers’ capacity to organize themselves for collective action. <br /><br /> What sort of constitutional proposal is this? In search of reflective equilibrium, it toggles between a general account of political economy and case-specific resolutions of current disputes—holding the First Amendment compatible with campaign-finance restriction and mandatory dues for represented non-members of public-sector unions. The account of political economy centers on the ideas, developed throughout this Essay, that (1) economic power matters a great deal in democratic will-formation; (2) constitutional neutrality toward the disposition of economic power is impossible in principle, though several different versions of “neutrality” might mark different (and differently permeable) boundaries between public and private orderings of power; and (3) the style of distributional neutrality that the Court has recently adopted undercuts the conditions of democratic will-formation, and (4) can be replaced by a democracy-strengthening alternative.<br /><br /> What judicial posture would draw the connection between these two poles of reflective equilibrium and stitch them together in a style of reasoning? Above all, it would be a posture marked by willingness to accept certain risks on behalf of democratic self-rule. The current Court’s jurisprudence of distributional neutrality in First Amendment law is intensely hostile to legislatures’ taking chances on distributional judgments regarding political power. As discussed earlier, the Court’s current doctrine formalizes (one might say dogmatizes) an interconnected set of political-economic premises: an optimistic one that the market tends of its own accord to achieve a tolerably non-oligarchic economic distribution, and a pessimistic one that democratic politics tends perennially to become mere looting and entrenchment. <br /><br />Part of the reason a democratic polity rules itself is so that it can address in ongoing fashion the very questions a popular-sovereignty–based constitution such as ours answers at its outset: how its self-rule shall happen, what forms of economic power shall register in political life, and what some of the terms of cooperation shall be among social members. The mere realist point that all public-law decisions are distributional can cut both ways in debates over regulating politics: For instance, one can point out that the post-Watergate statute that Buckley v. Valeo partially invalidated shifted political advantage in favor of those who, for whatever reasons, can commit themselves to canvassing, organizing, party participation and party-building. But from a more ambitiously democratic standpoint, this is precisely the point. A polity can decide, and for good reasons, to favor time-intensive and face-to-face activity over costly and heavily mediated forms of argument. In fact, that is just the sort of decision democratic republics should be able to make over their own future practices.<br /><br />Lawmaking inevitably and appropriately structures the political process to build up the constituencies and institutions that will channel energy and mobilization into future will-formation. Democratic institutions iteratively reproduce and revise themselves. If they are judicially impeded from revisiting the terms of self-rule, then other forces will establish those terms through drift, the accretion of economic power, and the strategic self-organizing of advantaged industries and classes. The configuration of economic power in relation to political power does not stand still over time, and someone (really many persons and institutions) will give it a shape. If a political community cannot do this work, the work will still happen, by other means and on other terms. What is needed now is not judicial prescription of basic distributional questions; it is only judicial recognition of the democratic prerogative to answer those questions.<br /><br />4. Process and Substance: Democracy and Social Democracy<br />Let me give this argument one more turn. It may be that all this concern with the character of democratic self-rule—the impossibility of its distributional neutrality, the affirmative reasons for engaging distribution as part of the ongoing activity of self-rule—is only half the story. Both historical and theoretical reflection suggest that the nexus of constitutional democracy with economic order goes further than democracy’s need for a modicum of egalitarianism, mobility, and responsiveness. In that familiar formulation (albeit one neglected for decades before its recent revival), the ongoing activity of self-rule is the end, and a measure of redistribution of political-economic power is the means. <br /><br />But earlier constitutional reorientation has also been about the substance of the economic order that it authorized. New Deal jurisprudence authorized a regime of partial corporatism, extensive unionization, social provision through an interweaving of state and private (often employer-based) obligations, and economic planning. It was not only a jurisprudence about the scope and forms of self-rule in a continent-sized and industrial economy, as official functionalist narrations tended to have it. It was also a jurisprudence of permission for (a modest and flawed) social democracy. Conversely, as sketched earlier, the current jurisprudence of distributional neutrality shares its origins with discourses, polemics, and programs that were aimed at blocking and rolling back the (perceivedly) statist egalitarianism of the New Deal and the Great Society, recast as a form of corrupting interest-group entrenchment.<br /><br />There are many reasons for a polity to deploy markets as its basic economic mode, from efficiency to personal autonomy; but it is quite another thing for the same polity to constrain itself constitutionally to give the resulting economic arrangements a major role in its own future will-formation. When market ordering is constitutionalized in this fashion, it tends to move from being part of a menu of governing strategies that a political community might adopt and pursue to being itself a key determinant of which options even appear on the menu, let alone get chosen. To press off the political table an ongoing engagement with the basic terms of economic cooperation and structure of economic power is to take away half of democracy’s reason for being.<br /><br />It may be that fairly formal definitions of democracy and constitutionalism are the most conceptually satisfying and judicially administrable, and that these considerations support a cautious approach to any jurisprudence that is self-consciously directed at a certain substance of economic and social life. But the cost of formalism is abstraction from the stakes of self-rule as citizens (and non-citizen social members) in capitalist democracy experience them at any time: as a matter of taming or eliminating arbitrary and overweening exercises and concentrations of power and building up the conditions of dignified, unfrightened existence and activity in a community of relative equals. At any time, these goals take specific institutional forms—unions, election laws, universal health care, the creation of public utilities, guarantees or bulwarks against harassment and exploitation—and constitutional adjudication turns to whether these measures are favored or suspect, authorized or forbidden. Today the issue seems to many of us to be a choice between oligarchy and a democratic-republican renewal. To break the link between economic and political concentrations of power, that renewal may have to move from the market-inflected state-skepticism of the 1970s and 1980s to a posture that understands the mutual constituting of political and economic citizenship in terms that are more social democratic, more committed to the organized power of working people and mobilized citizens in contradistinction to wealth and capital, than any that has counted for much in recent decades. We should consider what it might be like, not just to grit our teeth and acknowledge this conclusion as a lesson foisted on jurisprudence by recent political science and macroeconomics, but to embrace it as part of the horizon of a possible better world.<br /><br /><br /> III. Union Fees and the Shape of Economic Power: Further Defining the Alternatives<br />In June of 2018, the Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that the First Amendment forbids public-sector unions from charging non-member public employees in their bargaining units “agency fees” for employment-related services and advocacy. The Court framed the issue as one of individual liberty from state compulsion. Justice Alito invoked Justice Jackson’s great phrase, “no official … can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” Justice Alito warned, “Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable is always demeaning[.]” <br /><br />As in the political-spending cases discussed in Part I, the Court invoked the dangers of entrenchment and self-dealing, noting that the case arose from a political context in which Illinois had nearly $160 billion in unfunded pension and retiree healthcare liabilities and sought in bargaining to drive down employee costs. The defendant union instead “advocated wage and tax increases, cutting spending ‘to Wall Street financial institutions,’” and other left-of-center measures. Justice Alito’s presented this account as evidence that “[w]hat unions have to say … in the context of collective bargaining of great public importance” and amounts to political speech that agency fees subsidize, and noted that collective bargaining can also involve “controversial subjects such as climate change, the Confederacy, [and] sexual orientation and gender identity.” Nonetheless, his questioning in oral argument signaled alignment with the Hayek-Friedman-Powell line of concern about the proliferation of broader, materially redistributionist policies that might stem from the entrenchment of political influence. He worried aloud that an empowered public-sector union might “push a city to the brink and perhaps over the brink into bankruptcy.” <br /><br />Oral argument also indicated that at least one of the justices who joined Justice Alito’s opinion understood the agency-fee requirement in Janus as a violation of the anti-redistribution principle of Buckley. Justice Kennedy pressed the union’s lawyer toward the conclusion that the fee amounted to an impermissible redistribution of political speech and thus to the danger of entrenchment. Justice Kennedy pressed AFSCME’s lawyers to acknowledge that, “if you do not prevail in this case, the unions will have less political influence.” When David Frederick conceded the point, Justice Kennedy replied, “Isn’t that the end of this case?” <br /><br />In summary, Janus has the same logic as the political-spending cases. At its core is the plaintiff who wishes to determine how his money is disbursed, who aligns the expenditure with speech by showing its relevance to political debate. This individual-rights core, however, is buttressed by structural concerns: the worry that the regime the plaintiff is challenging distributes the power of political influence in a way that entrenches certain established interests--here not elected incumbents, but favored public-sector unions. The worry about distribution and entrenchment of political influence is linked, in turn, with resistance to a specific political outcome that the justices wish to avert: an empowered set of public employees with an agenda of general egalitarian redistribution. Public-sector unions are cast here in the same role as the self-entrenching officials and bureaucrats who figured as the bete noire of the Buckley-era turn to a First Amendment doctrine of anti-redistributionist principle.<br /><br /><br /> A. The Court’s View of Workers’ Interests, and an Alternative<br /> Seen in this bifocal fashion, the Justices’ account is acutely sensitive to some configurations of power—the undue pressure of unions on public officials—and conceptually blind to the non-individualistic form of collective power that unions aim at exercising, not as a dysfunctional side-effect, but as their essential purpose in a scheme of political economy.<br /><br /> The assumption that the associational interest to be protected in unions’ membership and political activity is a negative and individual one—an opt-out—excludes a different way of understanding the relationship of organized labor to democratic will-formation. The interest in refusing unwanted associations is, of course, a privacy interest, one that has great power in many legal domains, from the common-law guarantee against physical invasion to the personal rights of substantive due process. But is the institutional structure of bargaining power and advocacy between large employers and large bodies of workers best understood as a domain of private and voluntary relations, or as a domain of shared arrangements in which participation is in some important respects ineluctable once one is working there? If the economy is a concert of individuals, orchestrated by personal choice, then privacy rights are consonant with it; they protect the same processes that constitute the economic situations of individuals, just as privacy rights in sexual relationships protect the processes that bring us into bonds and take us out again (with no underlying natural law of gender or family giving these a mandatory shape). But on a different view, class structure is part of this economy. Who occupies what role is, of course, decided by the interplay of personal choice and social structure; but that there will be employers and employees, investors and day-laborers, is–for now—fate. <br /><br /> It is because of shared fate that processes of collective will-formation become essential. Politics is not an optional game. It is a response to the fact that for certain purposes people are trapped together—in shared economic regimes, shared regimes of legitimate violence, even partially shared regimes of fact-creation—and there must be some process for determining the rules of those regimes. Democracy is, of course, optional, at both the individual and the systemic levels; but its efforts at collective will-formation are not an alternative to no-politics, but to a different political dispensation. The right way to see unions, on this view, is as akin to political sub-communities. A vote on unionization is more like a constitutional referendum than it is like the election of representatives, and once a union exists it is a forum of collective will-formation within its workplace, appropriately binding on all who are, so to speak, within that jurisdiction. This is so because organized labor presents an essential political-economic counterweight to wealth and capital, an essential institution of rough civic equality. The First Amendment should not be interpreted as protecting personal rights that undercut this democratic institution. <br /> <br /> B. Two Ways of Seeing the Inseparability of Politics and Economics<br /> It is ironic that Justice Alito today and Justice Frankfurter toward the end of his career in 1961 should take the same conceptual view of unions’ activity—that it is impossible to separate bread-and-butter economic representation from political advocacy—while drawing opposite conclusions from that insight. For Alito, it means that even mandatory funding of representation is problematic under the First Amendment, because there is no getting politics out of it. Frankfurter’s course of reasoning was the opposite. Where Alito proceeds nominally from a conception of what is political speech (and so the concern of the First Amendment) and finds that it sweeps in all union advocacy, Frankfurter proceeded from the assumption that unions played a legitimate and important role in American self-rule, and reasoned that the activity in which they have historically engaged should enjoy a presumption of constitutionality. For Frankfurter, casting constitutional doubt on the standard legislative mechanisms for funding union advocacy “would be completely to ignore the long history of union conduct and its pervasive acceptance in our political life.” Frankfurter assumed the basically collective character of unions, with its consequence that they cannot do their work if they are unable to generate mandatory forms of collective action, analogizing the speech situation of the union dues-payer to that of the federal taxpayer, and offering as a premise for analogy that a union could not be said to violate its members’ speech interests when it called a strike. What, after all, would a union be if it were not a locus of collective action? It would be like a state that could not? make law. <br /><br /> I offer Frankfurter’s view as a kind of coda to this discussion, and also a bridge to an alternative, an exemplar of a democratic political economy in First Amendment doctrine. In this view, a democratic polity has an interest in structuring economic power and its translation into political power in ways that counteract the structural advantages of wealth and coordination that otherwise strengthen owners and employers. Institutions that balance the power of capital by enabling working people to combine for effective advocacy—in collective bargaining and in the broader contests of politics—should be assumed to be compatible with First Amendment interests unless there is a very strong showing to the contrary. But such a showing must not rest on findings that they impose unity on the voices of their members inasmuch as the union is authorized to represent them, nor that unions might make distributional demands on the state. That would be condemning them for doing their job in the constitutional order. <br /><br />Conclusion<br /> Progressive engagement with First Amendment doctrine should start by recognizing that any plausible version of civic equality and self-rule requires deliberate political engagement with the terms of self-rule itself. If appropriately constituted majorities cannot decide how majorities shall rule, than other drivers will. Thus point has particular bite in a regime of capitalist democracy, in which historical and contemporary empirics strongly suggest that unequal economic power tends to grow over time and to embed itself in political power. Some legally ordered relationship between political power and economic power is not just inevitable; its substance is of the first importance, because only it can sustain countervailing principles of equal citizenship, common good, and self-rule. In the face of a candidly neoliberal jurisprudence that advances the political domination of the wealthy, it is all the more important to recover and develop a constitutionalism of social democracy.<br />Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-26386409115396634692018-05-17T07:46:00.002-07:002018-05-17T07:46:11.413-07:00Aziz Rana on Chait <div class="_5pbx userContent _22jv _3576" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="js_9p">
As some of you will have seen, New York Magazine ran a piece yesterday in which journalist Jonathan Chait accused <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000275512321&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/aziz.rana.94?fref=mentions">Aziz Rana</a>
and me of representing a "left" that disrespects liberal political
values, doesn't care about institutions, hardly thinks American
democracy is worth defending, is unworried about Trump, that sort thing.
In haste in a busy teaching week, I wrote a quick Twitter thread
pointing out the ways this gets wrong both the recent Dissent
essay that Cha<span class="text_exposed_show">it was responding to and
my nearly twenty years of public writing, not to mention my political
engagement since Trump's election. Not surprisingly, <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100000275512321&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/aziz.rana.94?fref=mentions">Aziz</a>
has done more, writing an essential response that restates the
reasons--democratic, constitutionalist, American--for criticizing
Chait's centrism. While (as I'm sure Aziz is pleased to acknowledge) he
stands a bit to my left, and our voices and emphases are different, this
is a very important statement, and I wish I'd been able to do half as
much yesterday. (It should go without saying, but probably doesn't, that
Aziz is a scholar, colleague, and friend of the highest seriousness,
integrity, and generosity. I'm bummed to see him red-baited. If there's a
"democracy movement, we're both part of it. But if it has a black list,
and he's on it, then put down my name too.)</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">** </span> <br />
<br />
I
tend to avoid social media, but felt compelled to respond in some way
to Jonathan Chait's short essay in New York Magazine accusing <a class="profileLink" data-hovercard-prefer-more-content-show="1" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1032132619&extragetparams=%7B%22fref%22%3A%22mentions%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/jedpurdy?fref=mentions">Jedediah Purdy</a>
and me of being part of an illiberal or authoritarian left, unconcerned
with Trump and suspicious of American democracy wholesale. To begin
with, this characterization is clearly wrong about both the substance of
Jed's work over many years and his own personal political engagements
since Trump appeared on the stage. As for me, Chait seems to
misunderstand the nature of my arguments in "Goodbye, Cold War," the N+1
essay he references.<br />
<br />
My argument is precisely that the only
way to overcome the rise of a virulent and dangerous right in the U.S.,
embodied by Trump, is through an organized and mass political campaign
on behalf of *democracy,* in a way that mirrors the great labor,
feminist, black, and indigenous freedom struggles of the past.
Crucially, this campaign cannot simply be about going back to the
institutional status quo of American politics before Trump and calling
such return democracy promotion. This is because Trump in many ways is a
product of the long-term and anti-democratic structural weaknesses in
the American economic and constitutional system (complete with voter
disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, political overrepresentation, and
corporate dominance of the political process as a whole). Those
weaknesses helped to produce the social crises that gave birth to Trump.<br />
In the years before the Cold War, activists fully understood this and
sought to improvise -- within the landscape of American institutions --
democratic reforms that would ensure that poor and marginalized groups
enjoyed meaningful political and economic power. They understood their
reforms (collective bargaining, the right to strike, voting rights,
etc.) as democratizing a state that, despite the rosy rhetoric, in
reality tended to preserve the interests of the few. To me, one of the
great flaws of Cold War liberalism was to reject these structural
critiques and to deemphasize the domestic need to conceive of reform as
democratizing the society. Indeed, my whole point is that, to the
extent that the figures in Chait's "democracy movement" remain trapped
in Cold War thinking, they actually haven't reckoned with what
democratization in fact requires. I'm painting with a broad and perhaps
ungenerous stroke, but in my view much of centrist anti-Trumpism
remains too nostalgic for an institutional and ideological past that was
not up to the basic challenges facing society.<br />
Let me add a
couple notes on the Constitution and constitutionalism, as well as on
liberalism and capitalism, since I probably take a more critical
position than Jed. I personally am a strong believer in
constitutionalism and in the importance of rights to a free political
and economic order. I think some of these rights can be found in the
American Federal Constitution (free speech, equal protection, procedural
due process, etc.), and think those principles should be defended when
they are under assault, including through creative uses of existing
constitutional spaces. However, I also think -- like generations of
past activists -- that the design of the American Constitution has at
key moments in the national history preserved racial privilege and
strengthened economic oligarchy. Unless these facts are acknowledged
and engaged with, it is impossible to talk seriously about reform today.
One of the real problems of Cold War thinking was that cold warriors
embraced the American Constitution as the only way to combine democracy
and rights protections. But in truth the last half century has
witnessed the international proliferation of constitutional models. And
if anything the American approach -- with limited socio-economic rights
(health, education, food), an incredibly difficult amendment process,
extensive checks on popular decision-making, and easy susceptibility to
economic influence -- looks more like the global empirical outlier.<br />
<br />
In a context in which a racial and economic minority have basically
claimed comprehensive power over our institutions and are using that
power to separate immigrant families and turn over intelligence
gathering to torturers, it seems to me that caring about rights and
constitutionalism requires confronting the actual violence and
"illiberalism" of the current constitutional order. Again, this is a
point that labor and black activists in particular have been making for
over a century. Similarly, given the degree to which a
racially-inflected American capitalism has deformed rights commitments
and democratic politics, I do not believe that the latter two can be
defended without confronting the former. The American form of
capitalism is and remains a threat to both constitutionalism and
democracy.<br />
<br />
Finally, I take very seriously the danger of
political violence. Separately, I also think that a constitutional
convention at this moment in time would be more likely to be usurped by
destructive forces on the right. What I defend is a mass and nonviolent
democratic insurgency that focuses on concrete institutional reforms
within the landscape of our existing framework, reforms that elevate the
material power of marginalized groups. I named some of these in the
essay and will list a few here -- decriminalizing immigrant status and
pegging voting to residency not citizenship, ending felony
disenfranchisement, confronting corporate influence in elections and
government, systematically unionizing labor, etc. (In fact, since
Trump's victory, rather than being "unbothered by it," what I have
personally tried to do within my own local community is press for
similar practical improvements for those facing real threat.) Chait's
slippage from my critique of constitutional structure and of American
capitalism to the idea that I promote an anti-democratic and "illiberal
left" feels to me like an anti-communist holdover. And, as I contend in
the essay, this Cold War anti-communism is precisely the type of
approach that no longer makes sense of the times in which we live. <br />
For your interest, here is my essay and Chait's response:<br />
<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="asynclazy" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fnplusonemag.com%2Fissue-30%2Fpolitics%2Fgoodbye-cold-war%2F&h=ATPVNOeb_erRFfD_HoOzhD7iCAB_p7aDLxPRLjz96Nhhqi5ReJZVtB8mbr8ealRk1_IxvWiACPGPyomU66qLzUjMKCUX8TxiP3bo4pcub3lBSOKZeo6dgpwqsGbD2SYH7hDyHQtj27jEQKV_uVPFzbD2190" href="https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/goodbye-cold-war/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/politics/goodbye-cold-war/</a> <br />
<a data-ft="{"tn":"-U"}" data-lynx-mode="asynclazy" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fdaily%2Fintelligencer%2F2018%2F05%2Fthe-illiberal-left-and-trumps-assault-on-democracy.html&h=ATMqu4uJ5wbXE9pAgGzrlWe1zAH_3pBu2FEb0PDzsuIldT0vOAUV33DTNJRifKsPCVPvL1jOUWXf1HxTOTgAR8mVE5CIC7mnEIeODH009ed2PuFNnuSxFfXRTnH7EIMGZ_Kv1avN23AAHRUC_7xLe2vnYCM" href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/the-illiberal-left-and-trumps-assault-on-democracy.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://nymag.com/…/the-illiberal-left-and-trumps-assault-on…</a></div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-58145136047967847292017-06-27T08:38:00.004-07:002017-06-27T09:07:38.167-07:00Something or Barbarism: A Political Education, 1989-2017<style>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Jedediah Purdy</span></b></span></span></div>
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: right; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Preliminary First Draft, June 27, 2017</span></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A note to readers: This is an extremely
rough version of a possible first chapter for a book on the present political
crisis. This chapter is an attempt to sketch some of the significance of the
loss and recovery of visionary politics in the lifetime that many of us share,
and in which the rest of us overlap. Much is left out, including things of
first importance; in particular, it does not engage Trump or right-wing
populism generally. These and other urgent topics are left for future chapters,
which will, if written, be more argumentative and less interpretive. All errors
are mine, and I look forward to giving them up when prompted.</span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">SOMETHING
OR BARBARISM:</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A POLITICAL
EDUCATION, 1989 - 2017</span></span></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All the
Neoliberal Youth: Coming of Age in the Long 1990s<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">II.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Long
Emergency<span style="mso-tab-count: 7;"> </span> </span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">
<div class="MsoNormal">
III.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Barack Obama:
The Halfway Revival<span style="mso-tab-count: 5;"> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
IV.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Slow Crises:
Technocracy & Redemptive Constitutionalism<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
V. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Irruptions:
Occupy<span style="mso-tab-count: 7;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
VI. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Irruptions:
Piketty and the New History of Inequality<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
VII. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Sanders
Campaign and the Return of “Socialism”<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
VIII. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Wages of
Taking Democracy Seriously<span style="mso-tab-count: 4;"> </span></div>
</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;">IX.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Something or
Barbarism: Elements of a Deeper Democracy </span></div>
</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</span></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Donald Trump’s
calls to build a wall at the Southern border of the United States didn’t begin
in 2016, when he snatched the presidency from Hillary Clinton’s expectant
hands. His revival of white identity politics - white nationalism, if you
prefer - didn’t begin in 2011, when he made himself the mouthpiece of the
grotesque “birther” theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and
constitutionally disqualified to be President. To understand his inward,
backward-looking, conspiracy-minded version of America, you have to go back a
moment when it seemed - to many people, anyway - that the future was the very
opposite: nothing but transparency and openness, to the world and to the
future, in a time when it seemed that the suffering of history had ended and
living could begin.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Bernie Sanders’s
calls for all-American “democratic socialism” came astonishingly close to
winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but they didn’t begin
then. They didn’t begin, either, in 2013, when economist Thomas Piketty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital in the Twenty-First Century</i> confirmed
that wealth and income were flowing to the very richest, or in 2011, when
Occupy Wall Street raised the long-exiled banner of class warfare on behalf of
“the 99%.” In a 2011 Pew poll, more Americans between 18 and 29 said they had a
positive view of socialism than of capitalism; but the movement that gathered
around the Sanders campaign has its roots when some of those young people were
not yet born, and almost none had any awareness of politics, when it seemed -
to many people, anyway - that anything called “socialism” had been interred
forever, and the future was markets and more markets, to the ends of the earth
and of time.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">When the Berlin
Wall came down in November of 1989, Trump had published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Art of the Deal</i> two years earlier and was busily recasting his
real-estate enterprise into narcissistic branding strategy, a business model of
pure self-promotion. He first appeared on the cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time</i> - a hard-to-imagine big deal in that pre-Internet world - earlier
in 1989. Sanders, recently the two-term mayor of Burlington, a progressive
enclave within the larger progressive enclave of Vermont, was preparing his
first run as an Independent Congressman, which he won in 1990. Hillary Clinton
lived in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, where her husband was serving his
fifth term in the office, and she sat on the boards of the Children’s Defense
Fund and Wal-Mart. In Cambridge, twenty-eight-year-old Barack Obama was considering
a run for the presidency of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harvard
Law Review</i>. He became the first Black president to preside in Harvard’s
Gannett House nineteen years before he entered the White House with the same
distinction.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The fall of the
Wall ushered in the short epoch in which they all made the careers they will be
remembered by, the time that congratulated itself only half-ironically on being
the End of History: the Long 1990s. It was a time when elites and would-be
elites congratulated themselves on being post-ideological, and tacked toward
becoming post-political altogether. The market economy, whose enthusiasts
announced that it has bested all its rivals in a grand historical tournament,
rapidly became a market society, in which everything from government to
intimate relationships was marked by a new “common sense” of incentives,
opportunity costs, return on investment, and brand-building. A certain kind of
world came to seem natural and inevitable - at least to many people, most of
all the gatekeepers of respectable opinion, elite education, and policy-making.
It would take decades for even some of them to see that this world and this
vision were partial, happenstance, and incomplete. The American society that
congratulated itself on being the template for a universal nation, the natural
and unmodified condition of enlightened humanity, turned out to be the creation
of the same Cold War forces that relaxed, then disappeared, with the collapse
of the Soviet Union and its empire and the end of the ideological and
geopolitical contest between capitalism and communism. Because the forces that
had made it and held it together were leaving the field in giddy victory by the
early 1990s, this world was set to spin apart at very moment when it was
declared universal and eternal.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The return of the
conflicts that world had suppressed - the return of history, for better and
worse - is what we are struggling through now. The return of those conflicts
has been the long and tortuous political education of generations and
half-generations that were welcomed to the world with the announcement that
politics had just departed, that they would be the first to live in times when
all public questions were technical, and all personal questions ethical,
leaving nothing important to politics.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I. All the
Neoliberal Youth: Coming of Age in the Long 1990s</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">When the Wall
fell, I was about to turn fourteen. After spending my childhood at the fringes
of the Nuclear Freeze and Central American Solidarity movements, hearing
occasional dire warnings about Reaganomics and nuclear winter, I got my real
political schooling in the Long 1990s. Radicalism, such as it was, came to me
as a blend of aesthetics and ethics. Fugazi was against violence, and also
against lies; so was U2. Billy Bragg sang about a “socialism of the heart,” and
Czech president Vaclav Havel, also a long-imprisoned dissent playwright, wrote,
“My heart is slightly left of center.” Figures like Havel had tremendous moral
authority. They had peaceably resisted authoritarian regimes that were backed
by an empire most observers expected to last through the dissidents’ lives and
longer. Almost necessarily, they had worked without a plan beyond what Havel
called “living in truth” - being, like punks and some pop stars, against lies
and violence. Their stance harked back to a Cold War dilemma that Albert Camus
tried to navigate with an ethics of negation: If you could not save the world,
or even know which way to turn among the ignorant armies of your benighted
time, you could at least refuse to be on the side of the executioners -
especially the ones thought they had good reason to kill innocents. You could
not commit violence or tell lies on its behalf. [Camus’s doctor from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Plague</i>.] Satisfactory or not,
Camus’s stance had a concrete meaning and force when it meant refusing both
Stalinism and imperial wars in Indochina, or simply trying to hold the
integrity of one’s own life under an oppressive and undemocratic regime. Outside
those settings, however, it dissolved into a general humanitarianism,
admirable, still charismatic, but vague on what do, other than harm nobody and
tell no lies. The unparalleled appeal of the human-rights movement in the 1990s
stemmed from its being the closest thing to a programmatic expression of this
ethical-aesthetic substitute for politics. Its less heroic version was the work
that drew many young idealists: community service, international development,
projects that seemed incontrovertibly helpful to human beings, concretely
valuable and free of ideological entanglement. Indeed, under the influence of
muses such as Isaiah Berlin, systematic political thinking came under suspicion
of being ideological <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per se</i>, a morbid
intellectual preoccupation tending to violence and totalitarianism. [Berlin
quote from “Political Judgment.”]</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But that time had
its ideology, which was all the more effective because it could present itself
as non-ideological, even non-political, an ideology of pure,
touching-the-ground realism. There were no movements then [Consider: there was
the Right], and campus politics were tiny and self-involved. The dismaying
figures on the big, pre-internet podiums—Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd—were
materialists without dialectic, polemicists without politics, and I wanted to
make them impossible. Those two decades moved under the sign of Margaret
Thatcher’s iconic phrase, “There is no alternative.” You could define yourself
against the phrase, but still not escape the reality it called down.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The chief, and
maybe sole, task of neoliberal politics is to stand watch over the market
institutions—chiefly private property, free contract, and the right to spend
money however one wants—that give those bargains their home. Neoliberalism
welcomes market utopianism, wherein Bangladeshi factory conditions are automatically
legitimate because workers agreed to work under them; but neoliberalism won’t
be pinned down to a position where such conditions are celebrated. Challenged,
neoliberalism switches to the tragic wisdom of (adulterated) Burke,
(exaggerated) Hume, and (pretty faithfully rendered) Hayek. It might be nice if
the world were different, neoliberal realism intones, but it is what it is, and
so are we. Politics is no way out because, like the market, it is just the play
of passions and interests, only lacking the discipline of the bottom line.
Using politics to reorder social life is the dangerous dream of the utopian
engineer. To try would just set loose the selfish, vain, and ignorant on our
good-enough market system. Economic waste is the best we could expect from such
efforts; the worst would be piles of dead. The neoliberal mind is never far
from an interpretation of the 20th century’s worst disasters as symptoms of
visionary politics.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Neoliberalism’s
ideological premises are easy to name and quarrel with, even though they shift
opportunistically from market utopianism to the tragic sigh that, alas, we can
do no better than the market. What is more subtle is how neoliberal practice
disables personal attempts to escape it. The neoliberal condition gently enforces
an anti-politics whose symptoms are often in what doesn’t get said, or heard:
nationalizing banks, nationalizing health-care payments, proposing to arrange
work differently, naming class interests and class conflict as a reality every
bit as basic as opportunity cost. In a time when financial capitalism is
palpably endangering so many people, places, and things, you know neoliberalism
by the silences it induces. To be a neoliberal, even despite oneself, is to
come to find those silences natural.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The naturalness
of neoliberal premises comes in the way that, in a neoliberal world, to act is
to accept them. Neoliberalism is not so much an intellectual position as a
condition in which one acts as if certain premises were true, and others
unspeakable. It’s not doctrine but a limit on the vitality of practical
imagination. Acquiescing to it means accepting a picture of personality and
social life that pivots on consumer-style choice and self-interested
collaboration. This is the basis of the realism, so-called, that is the
neoliberal trump. It implies that market-modeled activity—ticking off the
preferences, going for the ask—is the natural form of life. </span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">There was an officially theorized version of these
ideas, although it was more a symptom of the time than a key to understanding
it. It was the End of History. All but trademarked, the phrase comes from
Francis Fukuyama's book of the same title, published in 1992 and based on a
1989 essay in the neoconservative foreign policy journal <i>The National
Interest</i>. Fukuyama argued that the collapse of the Soviet empire
revealed something much deeper than President Ronald Reagan's success
bankrupting the Soviet Union with an arms race, or reformist leader Mikhail
Gorbachev's failure to control events. Rather, Fukuyama argued, these were
events of philosophical significance.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to Fukuyama, 20th-century history had
been a three-way tournament among different visions of modern society. First
was socialism, with the state in charge of economic life. Second were nationalism
and its cousin fascism, which celebrated a strong state but were defined by an
exclusive identity at the center of national life — above all, the German <i>volk</i>.
Third was liberal democracy, which was defined by free elections, strong
individual rights, and a capitalist economy. Fukuyama argued that only
liberal democracy, a.k.a. democratic capitalism, had succeeded in producing
stable, prosperous societies, and so had proven itself the only desirable
social form, the only way a people would ever choose to live.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Saying that history had ended didn't mean nothing
more would ever happen, but that there was no more debate about how to organize
a large, complex society. The fight that had shaken the world in the 20th
century, from the struggle between right and left in European politics to the
wars of postcolonial Asia and Africa, was now done. The German novelist Thomas
Mann had summed up the 20th century's stakes when he wrote, "In our time,
the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms." Now,
Fukuyama argued, that fate was settled. The future would be like the present,
only more so. We knew this, not just historically but philosophically.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The New York Times Magazine called Fukuyama's
article "the hottest topic around." The president of the Council on
Foreign Relations speculated that Fukuyama might be "laying the
foundations of the Bush Doctrine." (George H.W. Bush had taken
office that January after eight years as Ronald Reagan's vice president.) Many
commentators compared Fukuyama's argument to foreign policy eminence George
Kennan's 1947 article — published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym
"X" — which laid out the doctrine of containment and did much to
shape the next 30 years of Cold War thinking. Fukuyama seemed to have provided
the frame for the world after the Cold War.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The heart of Fukuyama's argument was that
democratic capitalism — and no other system — satisfies two great human
appetites. These appetites, in turn, are the engines of history and the
arbiters of the success and failure of nations. The first was the drive for
material progress. Capitalism, Fukuyama argued, was the most powerful
engine of economic growth: Only a market economy could allocate resources
efficiently in a complex world to keep the fires of production and innovation
burning. Although state-controlled economies could get through the relatively
crude and stereotyped early stages of industrialization, they could never know
enough, or be nimble enough, to coordinate the multifarious economies that came
after. Only the free market could do that.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The second appetite was the appetite for
"recognition": pride, dignity, a sense of belonging. Following Hegel,
Fukuyama argued that most of human history had involved zero-sum answers to the
search for recognition: Rulers lorded it over peasants, masters over slaves,
men over women, chosen peoples over heathens. But democracy, for the first
time, established <i>mutual</i> recognition: the respect of equals for
equals. Ideally, it also based recognition on universal traits — the
individuality and rationality of a citizen — rather than an inherent exclusive
quality like nationality or religion. Waxing Hegelian, Fukuyama argued that its
potential universality made mutual recognition uniquely rational, and that its
rationality made it more stable.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Fukuyama also argued that capitalism served the
appetite for recognition. It brought people together as equals in principle —
self-interested bargainers in the market with no preexisting duties to one
another — rather than as, say, masters and slaves. It gave the state, and the
capitalists, an interest in universal education and training, if only to make
workers more productive. Everyone would flourish together, getting richer and
feeling respected.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">None of this meant that conflict would immediately
disappear. Less rational forms of recognition, such as fundamentalism, might
continue to flare up and do real damage. But according to Fukuyama, they would
burn themselves out: Attempts to organize nations around such principles would
leave their people poor and parochial and, most likely, hungry for the good
life of democratic capitalism. They did not present charters for the future to
compete with liberal democracy.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Not everyone
celebrated a young neoconservative's putative "Bush doctrine." The
journalist Christopher Hitchens, then still on the left, called Fukuyama's
argument "self-congratulation raised to the level of
philosophy." More systematic criticism followed from not-so-neo
conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington, who argued that the Cold
War's end would usher in a "clash of civilizations" across religious
and national fissures. But the Fukuyama’s argument, with its strengths and
weaknesses, its invocations of G.W.F. Hegel and Alexandre Kojeve and its
hurried account of the unfolding collapse of the Cold War world, felt so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i>.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Of course it did. Fukuyama's argument gave a
theoretical twist to what its audience already believed - and, more important
than nominal belief, what his readers lived. <i>The End of History</i>
crystallized much of the elite common sense of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
There was, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously put it,
"no alternative" to free market. This was soon a point of
postpartisan consensus as Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK
brought their countries' respective center-left parties firmly into the ambit
of market thinking and policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
served up an accessible version of Fukuyama's argument in <i>The Lexus and the
Olive Tree</i>, arguing that the global economy presented "golden
handcuffs": Only capital-friendly pro-market policies could survive the
pressure of globalization, but those who adopted them would be richly rewarded
in growth.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Political
thinking is as thoroughly <i>learned</i>, as entirely social, as anything
people do. It depends intensely on a sense of what history means, what
experience suggests is possible, uncertain, and if anything, debarred. To
believe that you know such things, you must rely on people who got here before
you, who seem to have sussed out the circumstances you suddenly share with
them. Political writing is an attempt to exercise judgment, but the grounds of
that judgment can only be a shared interpretation of common life that you try
to make your own. In the long 1990s, the traditions of the left became very
difficult to claim, or even feel, as part of the formation of political
judgment.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But there were
few grips to get hold of that world in that way. There was, for one thing, an
implicit prohibition: a seemingly unanswerable sense that the left of political
economy and universal emancipation from bad work, economic hierarchy, and
political oligarchy, was done, fruitless—if not, worse, guilty. The
no-longer-new radicalisms of the 1960s and 1970s, doubts about infinite growth,
and calls to reconsider the human place on the planet as part of the general
realignment of political economy were also implicitly shut down as nonsense,
assumed to have been refuted, so that whoever raised them would put himself
outside “serious” conversation. This limit on the substance of serious argument
reinforced the reduction of political seriousness to a rhetorical style: one
could point out, in all seriousness, that questions about how to shape an
economy were inescapable, and inescapably political; but when all the “serious”
answers are variations on one neoliberal theme, seriousness easily becomes a
sonorous way of posing an almost trivial question. Realism was the watchword of
the time—solving problems, wrangling facts, accepting “reality”—and although
that realism was always limited and normative and seems now to have played us
false, it made a great many alternatives seem fake or “improbable” along the
way.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>II.
The Long Emergency</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On September 11, 2001, I was in Washington,
DC, walking down Connecticut Avenue’s slope from Adams-Morgan into Dupont
Circle, when my friend David called from New Haven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He opened with, “You’re not near anything,
are you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t go near anything.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was a few minutes after 9 in the
morning, on a perfect day - a cloudless blue sky, dry, cool air - the kind of
day when the world seems formed just to welcome you into it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After I got a few fragmented details from
David, I saw that the operator of the a newsstand (yes, a newsstand) by the
sidewalk had set a TV in his window.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stopped
and watched one of the iconic images, the first tower burning. I was on the
cusp of two worlds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A couple passed me,
the first people I’d been near in the tens of seconds since the news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They carried themselves casually, and were
murmuring in the tones of ordinary intimacy about which video to rent for the
evening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next passer’s face was an
unformed but urgent question, his walk harried but directionless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He joined me at the newsstand window, trying
to gather something from the small screen and smoky image.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was a caesura, a break in the
flow of being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The human world is
generally shattered into millions of dimly glinting points of view, light-years
apart, which float in the same big milky way of experience. On that morning
there were briefly two galaxies, one where those who knew were gathered, the
other made up of the briefly left-behind, still at home in their worries and
plans. Then, as not knowing became impossible, we all re-gathered in a changed
world.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This memory, if it is sound,
confirms the myth of the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I also
remember not feeling at all clear about what it would mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most banal detail: I was to meet a
classmate at 10 that morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At 10.30 I
gave up waiting, went to my office, and heard a message that began, “I guess
it’s obvious we’ll call off catching up today.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What was obvious?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What were we
called away from our lives to do, besides sit vigil by the television?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How did people reach implicit agreement on
what the day meant, which soon coalesced into a mandatory blend of focused
piety and diffuse fear?</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was not by some common instinct.
Conversations that day were a cacophony: people weeping, wild speculation about
the identity of the attackers, reflection on the reasons people might have to
attack the Pentagon, free association to the history of iconic traumas (I heard
references to the Kennedy assassination, among others). Some people - most, I
hope - saw it as a time to seek out the company of family and friends. Others,
though (and I include people with influence, whom I will not name) declined
that, said affirming their ordinary lives in that way felt trivial, out of
proportion to the weight of the day. And so, in a time when the Internet was a
much smaller and more staid presence than today, they sat vigils by the
television, and talked on the phone with others who were doing the same.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The meaning of it did not come from
some organic American consensus, but from politics. There is a sense in which
the most basic questions of survival and security come before politics, and
must be in place before political life can happen - and, correspondingly, a
sense in which the first duty of the state is to keep its people safe. This is
easy to forget in safe times, and it returns with a shock when safety fails.
Its return taps into something real that breaks the crust of complacency. But
this is only half the truth. The other half is that security - preserving the
lives of people and the everyday public peace of communities - has its own
politics, the most dangerous politics. It is so dangerous because it defines
working agreements about the source and nature of threats and the proper, even
imperative response, that, once in place, will be treated as if they were prior
to and independent of politics. The politics of security is the most potent of
anti-politics, a political way of taking certain questions off the table and
discrediting those who would raise them: Questions such as, “Do we really need
this war, this state of emergency, this surveillance, these background checks,
interrogation, and torture?” Even raising those questions means running the
risk of seeming to betray the fundamental need for security. It is an opening
to charges of disloyalty, even treason, and to expulsion from the community.
The politics of security is existential, in the inaccurate but popular sense
that it involves survival, and in the strict sense that it involves defining
who we are, with the gravest consequences.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The
political rush to define the meaning of the day began immediately. With the
stakes so high, advocates did not always observe the bounds of decency. Many
prophecies, some more fatuous than others, came and went just after the
attacks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some commentators declared an
end to irony, as if a reminder of mortality would dampen the charm of double
meanings, sly commentary, and wry self-awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others predicted a new martial mood, induced
by awareness of perpetual threat. The forecasts were, of course, partly efforts
at self-fulfilling prophecy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“We are
all Israelis now,” wrote Martin Peretz, publisher of the New Republic, before
the smoke had cleared over Wall Street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile,
President Bush aimed for a fine balance, emergency without mobilization. He
told people to go shopping while he prepared for war.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Being
in Washington in those months, on the periphery of influence - entirely lacking
it myself, but thrown up against those who had some, or had reason to think
they might - it was impossible to miss that the politics of security continued apace
even as shopping resume. Some Americans felt weirdly called awake by talk of
blood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I heard a think-tank prodigy
recently graduated from Williams College argue to a roomful of pundits and
journalists that the attack had been too small to restore Americans’ warlike
virtues after decades of relativism had sapped our spirits; we needed more
violence, more testing, to become hard again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On October 7, 2001, the day the American bombing began in Afghanistan, I
ran past some sidewalk café seating, quite unaware that Operation Infinite
Justice, as the military named it, was underway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At a metal table sat two junior faculty from
my college years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were
conservatives, which in 1990s Cambridge seemed to mean that they liked old
books and doubted the value of Ethnic Studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One of them would turn up next in the pages of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Yorker</i> as a Hoover Institute fellow drinking at Christopher
Hitchens’ California summertime pool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The other led a campaign a few years later to harass and ostracize
scholars of the Middle East whom he considered anti-American.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of them – I think it was Hitchens’ pal –
looked up when I broke stride, and intoned – I swear he intoned it – “The war
has begun.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It came to me diffusely, in
a kind of mental slow motion, that their feelings on this new violence were not
divided. They were toasting the start of war.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The years that followed suffocated disagreement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact of the attacks took on a mandatory
meaning, as if to remember the ruin and death just was to embrace the appetite
for revenge, the manufactured fear, the whole enterprise of surveillance and
war and general criminality that came after. Here is President Bush in his
first State of the Union address after September 11: </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">“None
of us would ever wish the evil that was done on September the 11<sup>th</sup>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet after America was attacked, it was as if
our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were reminded that we are citizens, with
obligations to each other, to our country, and to history. …<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For too long our culture has said, ‘If it
feels good, do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now America is
embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘Let’s roll.’”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">“Let’s roll” is
not a repudiation of, “If it feels good, do it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s an addition: it adds the especially
seductive pleasures of righteousness and power to the creed of unbounded
action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the several years after
September 11, the president added to political language a recurrent “evil” –
saying of Saddam Hussein’s regime, “If this is not evil, then evil has no
meaning” – and a God who is always, always on our side. President Bush brought
evil into political language while exempting Americans - the right kind of
Americans, anyway - from any involvement in it, any temptation to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Evil is the moral equivalent of the enemy in
an all-out war: nothing you do against it will be wrong; and you can hate it as
much as you like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes your own
power and your own feelings righteous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It converts “If it feels good, do it” into “Do it, and let it feel
good.” It disowns the duties of reflection and judgment. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As the latitude to remake the world
widened, the single decisive choice was the Bush Administration’s definition of
its response not as a global police action, but as war, complete with all the
rhetoric, the alleged special presidential powers, and, in time, the grinding
bloodshed of occupied Iraq. The word “war” mattered because it shaped the
picture of the world in which all security politics proceeded afterward. It
mattered imaginatively and symbolically, then, but also forwhat it enabled the
administration to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Politics is never
written on a blank slate, even after a disruption as basic as the al Qaeda
attacks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Washington, like a nest of
aristocratic lovers, crawls with jealous and thwarted characters waiting for
someone to make a fatal misstep so they can claim their prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So when September 11 opened a new space,
familiar agendas rushed to fill it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The
extraordinary claims of executive power that President Bush and his lawyers
began to announce after September 11 ahad a political pre-history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why, critics asked, did the White House feel
compelled to claim inherent power to detain “enemy combatants” indefinitely and
without meaningful trial, to set its own standards for torture in the teeth of
the Geneva Conventions and American legislation forbidding the torment of
prisoners, and to launch a massive program of domestic surveillance that
sneaked around the procedures Congress had announced?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, Republicans controlled every
branch of government, and Congress would have given the President nearly
anything he requested in the first two years after September 11.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The history lay in the 1970s, when Gerald
Ford replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon and watched a wave of new legislation
impose Congressional oversight on the president’s control of intelligence and
law enforcement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Donald Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney served in that historically weak and embattled White House, and contemporaries
say that they were determined to restore the authority of the presidency
against congressional interference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps they realized that only a war could do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In any event, when a war dropped in their
laps, they knew what to do with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The greatest pre-existing agenda of
all was the centerpiece of these troubled five years, the invasion of
Iraq.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reporters’ accounts of the run-up
to the invasion make clear that Cheney and Bush drove the decision to take down
Saddam Hussein.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we may never know
is just how the two men understood a choice both were evidently primed to
make.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cheney was the temperamental
opposite of Bill Clinton, preferring silence to self-revelation, his dark
charisma lying in understatement, his fascination with concealment ranging from
his periodic disappearances into “an undisclosed location” to his declaration
that the war on terror would be fought in the shadows, an image that now seems
a perverse hint of the torture in the Abu Ghraib prison and the domestic surveillance
program.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bush was Clinton’s intellectual
opposite, a man whose chronic inability to explain himself suggests incapacity
to understand himself, although his admirers take it as evidence of instinctive
judgment too clear to require words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Both seem likely to die with their secrets, or their confusions.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As the mainstay of post-9/11
strategy, the Iraq invasion was the jewel in a fool’s crown. In humanitarian
terms, it was a disaster: more than 4,0000 American and allied troops dead,
nearly 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed in violence, half a million or more
“excess deaths” from war-related disease and the shredding of the country’s
infrastructure. Geopolitically, its chaos was the crucible for a second
generation of Islamist terrorism, as the self-styled Islamic State rose to
replace al-Qaeda as the focal point of anti-modern ideology and loosely
networked violence. In the United States, it was the centerpiece of a new
domestic politics of perennial wartime. There was a mobilization against the
long run-up to the Iraq War, but it proceeded in the face of massive consensus
among “respectable” voices that we lived, now, in wartime. The appetite for
violence that emerged with the new permissions of war sometimes found the
crudest and most brutal expression. Thomas Friedman, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> columnist, who was then still regarded by serious
people as a theorist of globalization rather than a joke, told </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charlie
Rose in March 2003. “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going
house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of
this sentence don't you understand?’ You don't think, you know, we care about
our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Meanwhile, disagreement was colored
as disloyalty. Skepticism about violence was recast as a lack of moral
seriousness, peace as a child’s dream..<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have a fragment that catches something of
how this faux-realist hegemony worked in micro-practice, even before the
declaration of wartime had turned to Iraq. Sometime in the fall of 2001, I was
in a room of journalists, commentators, and foreign-policy mavens at the New
America Foundation in Washington. (Fukuyama was then on the foundation’s board,
which seems, in hindsight, both astonishing and inevitable.) [Need to establish
that 9/11 had happened] Most were some kind of humanitarian realist, the sort
of person who would staff the short-lived 2004 Democratic presidential campaign
of Wesley Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, and four years
later the first Obama campaign. It was heady to be there; I felt I had arrived
where ideas mattered. The convener asked us to indicate whether we expected “another
major attack” on the US within seven years. About two-thirds of the hands went
up right away. The rest followed, in a few seconds that felt like a slow but
inexorable tug toward the far side of something. Mine was one of the last, but
it went up.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I remember this
vividly because I it shames me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
wouldn’t have said, even then, that this forecast justified restricting civil
liberties, the Iraq invasion, or the geopolitical vision of the “war on
terror.” But we weren’t being asked to assess an actual threat or responses to
it, but rather to consent to a view of the world. Such consent is not just the
product of sober reflection: What you treat as true is what you believe, no
matter what you think you believe</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>III.
Barack Obama: the Halfway Revival</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
January 26, 2008, I was in Columbia, South Carolina, after several days in Dillon,
an hour and forty minutes’ drive to the northeast, near the North Carolina
state line. Dillon is the hometown of economist Ben Bernanke, who was then
chair of the Federal Reserve, a position he held until 2014. It, and the small
towns nearby, are arrestingly segregated and poor. A two-lane main street with
two-story commercial buildings - some shabby, some closed, but they gave the
impression of keeping up appearances - gave way, one block back, to dirt
streets and tiny houses, the houses where entire families of mill laborers used
to live, which today could fit, porch and all, into an exurban living room. Most
were neat as pins - the antique phrase feels somehow appropriate, but the paint
was not usually fresh, and the cars parked in front were old. Everyone on the
streets I walked, and the trailer parks I visited, was Black.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
was canvassing for Barack Obama, who had stunned Democrats by winning the Iowa
caucuses decisively over Hillary Clinton and North Carolina senator John
Edwards. In an overwhelmingly white state, Obama had soundly beaten both his
opponents in caucuses that nearly doubled their turnout from 2004 to 2008. He
had huge support among young people, who had helped to swell those numbers,
confounding the political cliché that the youth vote is a non-factor because it
doesn’t show up on election day. Something was happening. But Obama then fell
back in the New Hampshire primary, losing to Hillary Clinton. South Carolina
was a test. If Obama lost there, in a state where more than half the Democratic
primary voters were black, Iowa would start to slip from memory, and the
supposedly inevitable Clinton nomination would begin to unfold.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
conversations were delicate. Massive canvassing efforts have become familiar
since then, and both the canvassers and the canvassed know the drill. But this
was the second full-scale Democratic primary in South Carolina, and the Obama
mobilization was something new. I found myself standing on the front stoop of a
woman who, the first time she voted, first had to pass a literacy test. Several
times, the person who met me at a front door let me know, politely, that the
house was “well aware, well aware” that the vote was coming and that Barack
Obama was on the ballot. There was a kind of civic diplomacy at work, a
negotiation over dignity and over <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whose</i>
campaign this was. I had driven from Durham to tell them what, exactly, that
they did not know, that they had not kept close and thought of for weeks?
Everyone was polite, even the night-shift workers who woke up to tell me I was
not the first volunteer to knock, and that they were well aware. I ended up
feeling, other than my campaign door hangers, courtesy was all I had to offer.
[Canvassing as a kind of civic sacrament, or not?]</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
few hours after dark on election day, we knew that Obama had won more than 55
percent of the vote, twice Hillary Clinton’s share. As in Iowa, turnout had
doubled over 2004; Obama had won more votes in 2008 than were cast at all in
the 2004 primary. Although the contest went on until May, Obama did not fade
again. In the downtown auditorium where the candidate spoke to some of his
supporters that night, the crowd chanted, “Yes we can,” and also a more awkward
slogan, “Race doesn’t matter.” There was no chanting where I stood with a few
fellow canvassers, next door in a small lobby at the Columbia Hampton Inn,
although the 60 or so people jammed into the room were giddy with the news. As
the speech began, though, the room was silent and attentive. No one murmured
into a cell phone, no one seconded the candidate.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The noise started
when Obama denounced</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A politics that
tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the
categories that supposedly define us. The assumption that young people are
apathetic. The assumption that Republicans won't cross over. The assumption
that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don't vote. The
assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate; whites
can't support the African-American candidate; blacks and Latinos can't come
together.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">With the next line, "That is not the
America we believe in," there came a collective release of breath, then
shouting, clapping, stomping. For the rest of speech, about half the room was
visibly in tears.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">As early as his
memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, Obama made cynicism, doubt
and fear the targets of his most important speeches. He was the candidate of
hope and "common purpose," of a country not defined by political
tribes of red and blue. “We have gay friends in red states,” he had said in
2004, “and we worship an awesome God in the blue states.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was understandable that critics - cynics? -
called his language vague uplift. And of course the South Carolina victory
speech could be parsed tactically, for the ground being staked out, the elbows
thrown and memes released. Obama’s theme of connection beyond “the categories
that supposedly define us” was a jab at doubters who talked down his South
Carolina campaign for relying on black votes. (Bill Clinton was one of those
doubters, comparing Obama’s campaign to Jesse Jackson’s runs in the 1980s.) But
those tactical considerations were not why these parts of the speech brought
that exhausted, celebratory crowd out of its attentive silence to cheers and
crying. They heard what Obama said as addressed to them, an announcement that
constraints they had been taught to see as inevitable were open to change: the
mandatory identities of race and party, the condescending assumption that you
can know someone by looking at her or that political beliefs are just the
tribal fetishes of Fox News and NPR, the awkward, pained politeness and
circumlocution of white people talking to and about black people, and the other
way around. The room was about half black, half white, with ages ranging from
the teens to the early eighties, and everyone seemed equally sick of the
pervasive, implicit idea that they had to approach one another through
inherited categories, and hold themselves out in the same way.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Was this really a
political impulse, or just wish-fulfilment? In a way it was elementally
political: it concerned whether political language was nothing but flat,
encoded, ritual vocabulary unanchored from everyday life, words as phrases on a
chess board, or something more, a way of speaking truths and turning them into
facts. It made wish for a more open engagement with other people the compass of
a political movement. It made solidarity - a word that then sounded old and
foreign - feel fresh, vital, and American.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
am staying with these early moments in Barack Obama’s astonishing presidential
campaign because they now seem so far away. The appeal to “Republicans” who
“cross over” sounded real for a little while, a prospect of a decent consensus.
But Obama’s eight years in the White House saw growing partisan polarization.
When he was done, Republicans and Democrats lived in different worlds -
neighborhoods, workplaces, news sources, religious lives - to a greater degree
than ever before in modern American life. Obama’s theme of racial unity, too,
hit rough waters. Critics observed from early on that enthusiastic talk of a
“post-racial society” was foolish or pernicious in a country where the color
line also marked vast differences in household wealth, incarceration, vulnerability
to crime, and health and life expectancy. In Obama’s second term, the
inequality and open violence along the American racial divide, which few black
people had ever been able to look away from for long, had become inescapable
for anyone with open eyes. Police violence was the immediate spur for Black
Lives Matter, the most vital racial-justice movement to emerge in decades, but
its activists also turned attention to subtler and slower forms of injustice,
from pollution to poverty, that diminish black lives.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yet
in 2008 it felt like a reawakening of politics. In hindsight, some of this was
simple excitability. The Bush years had been terribly dark, and the return of a
Clinton to the White House did not feel like a new dawn. At least for some of
the young people who threw themselves into his campaign, too, Obama’s campaign
fit a lived sense that our world had opened to possibility that had been
foreclosed. Some of this sense of possibility reflected real changes at the
level of experience. Categorical differences that had been everything for older
generations matter less, and differently - which is not to say that they ceased
to matter. In the politics of sexual identity, a scorned sexual caste had
become, in the main, just people, and many young gays and lesbians found
themselves refusing stereotyped style and affect, insisting that just as they
didn't have to be straight, so they don't have to be gay in any particular -
and expected - way. It was the very beginning of the gender politics of the
next decade, when “male” and “female” themselves got thoroughly queered up as
matters of performance rather than essential and authentic being.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Even race was
changing. A 2007 </span><a href="http://pewresearch.org/pubs/634/black-public-opinion"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Pew study</span></a><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> found that 44% of African-Americans aged
18-29 believed there was no longer a single "black" race in the
United States, but that class and other divergences had split black people into
different peoples. What Obama's own life expresses, after all, is not a diffuse
idea of being "beyond race", but a choice, half self-creation and
half self-discovery, to identify foremost with one community and tradition.
Joining in that way cannot but change the community that one joins. Choice and
authenticity, freedom and belonging, are the sometimes opposite ideals that
this kind of story tries to reconcile, and the seemingly successful effort was a
part of what made Obama an emblematic figure for a generation.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The
high point of Obama’s offer of new ways of talking about - and living - old
dilemmas was his “race speech,” delivered in Philadelphia in March 2008 after
his Chicago minister, Jeremiah Wright, was recorded saying in a sermon, “God
damn, America!” The sentiment would not have been strange to an earlier
Illinois politician: Abraham Lincoln had reflected in his Second Inaugural,
that the bloodshed of the Civil War might be a punishment for slavery, and
seemed to embrace the scourge:</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">If
God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop
of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword;</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But Obama, a
black man with a black minister, did not get the trust that enjoys in hindsight
(though Lincoln got little enough at the time), and as his polls began to
falter, he summoned the rhetoric of his memoir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreams from My Father</i>, and issued a tactical campaign speech that
was also a meditation on race, resentment, and mistrust in American life. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The speech aimed
to be as open and complex about race as private conversations among friends sometimes
are, but public language - then as now - hardly ever manages to be. It was, two
months after Obama’s South Carolina victory, a clear repudiation of "Race
doesn't matter", the chant that filled the Columbia hall then. In it,
Obama asked whether there might be paths out of old ways of experiencing it.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The candidate in
effect presented his own life and told the audience, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ecce homo</i>, behold the man, and check out America too. People are
injured, angry, afraid, irrational. They latch onto bigotry, grudges,
conspiracy theories and symbols of strength to keep them afloat. This is true
whether you're black or white, American or something else - as Obama knew
first-hand, having all of this and more in his immediate family. These deeply
flawed people are the same hopeful, generous ones who lived through, and
supported, or made, or finally accepted, the Civil Rights Movement’s Second
Reconstruction and other episodes that have made the country more nearly just
and decent. The same people may find themselves in very different postures.
Politics is one way that people call themselves into one shape or the other. A
politics of division, cynical tactics and small aims it keeps us small and
trapped in ourselves. From there nothing changes.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It was a
distillation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreams from My Father</i>,
a book populated by injured, angry people, halfway shut up in themselves, who are
sure they are the ones to teach the young narrator what it means to be a man.
Drunk, bitter, deeply literate old Black men in Hawaii whose wisdom is that
America will never be their country. An Indonesian stepfather, lucky to get
through Suharto's coup and purges alive, who taught that life is a boxing
match, a struggle for survival against endless assault. White grandparents
whose lives grew smaller, more scared and more racist as they grew older and
lost their middle-class hopes. Black-nationalist hucksters in Chicago,
somewhere between social entrepreneurs and pool sharks.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">By the end of the
book you can almost hear the author say, with Terence: "Nothing human is
alien to me." He gets there by digging into others' pain, asking, "Is
this me?" and concluding, no, his life is something else, larger - because
he's brave and smart, but also because he grew up in a different world than any
of his ancestors and mentors. He forgives them their distortions and
confusions, even their efforts to impart those to him, when he understands that
he doesn't need to become them. He came to see America as an unfulfilled
promise and a legacy of injuries that cannot be denied and must not be repeated.
Not only are we caught in this country together, he concluded; we're also
prickly and easily injured, and we don't always make a lot of sense. One reason
political language often seems both rarefied and sleazy is that it denies this
on the one hand, by nattering about principles, and panders to it on the other,
with code words and veiled appeals to fear. The gamble of Obama's address was
that that it is possible to look this in the face, call it what it is, and
decline to become it. As the candidate admitted, that wouldn't be enough. But
it was our only new beginning.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Obama’s
campaign seemed to promise redemption from a certain kind of fractious and
diminishing politics. “We are,” he said in effect, “more, better, something
else than this country we find ourselves in; and we - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i>
America.” “We are,” he said literally, “the people we have been waiting for” -
a brilliant phrase, impossible to pin down for specific meaning, but rich in
the feeling that an urgent promise can be kept, here and now, if only we find
the right spirit in ourselves. It was this appeal that led conservative
columnist Charles Krauthammer to call Obama’s speech a "brilliant
fraud" that used "Harvard Law nuance" to "bathe
[supporters] in racial guilt and flatter their intellectual pretensions." </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In the political
register as in the personal one - and the border is blurred - Obama rejected
handed-down ideas about who one has to be, and how the world has to be. When he
denounced the politics of pure tactics and received rules, he brought to
politics a sense that some of his ardent supporters had of their own lives:
that the world did not yet know its own possibility, or recognize theirs. From
this perspective, politics was trapped in tedious, spiritually oppressive forms
of conventional wisdom, in which cynicism was the mark of adulthood even among
twenty-four year-old staffers. People saw politics as a chess-game of huckster
knights, voter pawns, and elite kings. They were sure that politics could not -
or would not - change anything for the better. Cynicism was a point of bitter
pride: when people lie to you, you can at least have the self-respect not to
believe them. But relentless cynicism will leave you sick, not least of yourself.
"Under every no," wrote poet Wallace Stevens, "lay a passion for
yes that had never been broken." Obama has found a way to awake the
passion for yes. In his candidacy, people find themselves believing that being
American can add to the dignity and meaning of their lives - not just personally,
but also in a civic sense, binding them to other citizens and a common fate,
linking them to a heroic political tradition of partly redeeming a terrible
past and jointly creating a different future. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Obama's centrist critics,
especially the Clintons and their supporters and proxies, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> columnist Paul Krugman,
dismissed all the talk of unity and bridge-building as a fanciful story that
could produce nothing but disappointment. For Obama and some of us who believed
in his campaign, it felt like the beginning of a realignment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed that new voters and even formerly
Republican moderates might come together in a new, more generous idea of what
Americans owe one another. In this way, the campaign was more than flattery of
his young, diverse, often well-educated base. It was also an affirmation of the
very idea of politics as a vehicle of democratic self-rule. Hillary Clinton’s
consultant-heavy, data-based 2008 campaign (rather like her reprise right years
later) was premised on the certainty that winning elections was a game with
definite, fixed rules, which an expert could master. This idea has a pragmatic,
unillusioned note. At the same time, there is something unsettling in it, for
if elections can be gamed out for certain victory, then in a real way no
decision is being made, no choice is really open. It is the superior team of
experts that is really making the decision. Obama’s campaign created the real
and convinced experience of a different axiom about politics: that mobilized people,
with conviction and energy, can shift the ground, remake the rules, even become
- sometimes, to some degree - different people.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">IV. Slow Crises:
Technocracy and Redemptive Constitutionalism </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">As I said
earlier, part of the reason to recall Obama’s first campaign is that these
aspects of it now feel very far away. From the time he entered office, Obama
shifted tone, setting aside the democratic poetry of the campaign, hiring the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">realpolitik</i> centrist Rahm Emmanuel
(famously contemptuous of Obama’s idealistic supporters) as White House
political director, and declining to mobilize his supporters behind legislation
and other priorities. He proved a conservative in disposition: deferential to expertise
and hierarchy, including those of finance and the military, decorous in the
extreme, and a thoroughgoing anti-populist. In governing, the Obama style had
two pillars. First, he brought to apotheosis the American political tradition
of redemptive constitutionalism. This is the creed of Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address and Second Inaugural, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech,
and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s nationally televised speech the Voting Rights Acts
of 1965, in which he promised, “we shall overcome.” Redemptive
constitutionalism holds that democracy and equal freedom really are the
nation’s foundations, that slavery and Jim Crow were terrible deviations from
these principles, and that, if we manage to take them seriously, to live by them,
Americans will finally be free together.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In one respect,
Obama’s victory and inauguration unavoidably embodied a version of this idea: a
black man speaking the constitutionally prescribed oath, as Lincoln had done,
and invoking the Declaration of Independence, not to promise equality but to
pronounce it. Short-lived fantasies of a “post-racial” America were one symptom
of this moment. A Tom Toles cartoon quoted the iconic “all men are created
equal” and added, as if a note of legislative history, “Ratified November 4,
2008.” The fantasy of redemption was instantaneously ironized, of course—on the
election-eve episode of the <i>Daily Show</i>, Larry Wilmore informed Jon
Stewart, “We’re square”—as if the country’s black-white ledger were balanced by
one symbolic election. But the audience laughed precisely because so many
people wanted to feel it might be true.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">This redemptive
version of American politics was the aesthetic, the poetry, the moral sense in
Obama’s presidency. Both in his campaigns and in the public-facing aspects of
governing, he insisted on common principles and the possibility of a shared
perspective. His persistent refrain, from the career-launching speech at the
2004 Democratic National Convention to the elegiac address after the murders of
Dallas police officers in 2016, was that unity is deeper than division. Race
has always been a central preoccupation of the redemptive style of American
politics. That is partly because it has been the basis of national crimes and
savage inequality. But the redemptive style also promises that, if Americans
come together in the right ways, including but not limited to healing the angry
wounds of racial injustice, their shared principles can make them whole. This
tone carried forward the style and language of the first campaign, though in
muted ways and only on the highest occasions. More often in public Obama was
diffident, a bit inward, with an air of husbanding finite energy.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The second pillar
of the Obama style, his prose and practical compass, was technocracy. In this
respect, he broke sharply from the spirit of the first campaign, the idea that
people can remake their shared world in line with social and moral vision -
although he continued, in effect if not in intent, to flatter the more elite
among his core supporters, who were often experts themselves, or their children
or adjutants. The Obama administration was intensely deferential to the
expertise of conventional authorities: generals and national-security
professionals, political operatives like Emanuel, and, above all, mainstream
economists and bankers such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. Deference to the
professional culture of economists led, in particular, to open-trade policies commitments
to harmonize American regulations with those of other large economies, until a
political rebellion against the Trans-Pacific Partnership drove even Hillary
Clinton to repudiate it while campaigning. The technocratic approach to
governing rests on the idea that there is a right way to manage major policy
questions, and that much of the point of electoral politics is to keep the way
clear for expert administration. In practice, outside of questions of war and
security, this has meant managing the economy for maximum total growth. Even
Democratic wonks have tended to promote market-style competition. (The usual
difference is that the Democrats believe government has an important role in creating
and policing such competition, while Republicans are more likely to think that
rolling back government gives “the market” room to work.)</span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In very different
but curiously similar ways, both redemptive constitutionalism and technocracy
promise deep reconciliation between different groups of Americans. If they can
just take the right principles seriously, they’re square. If they can just plug
the holes in the economy, the rising tide will lift all boats. And it was in
this respect that both of Obama’s pillars of governance came under fissiparous
pressure during his two terms, and were shoved to the side in the 2016
elections. The promises of reconciliation were too simple, and they glossed
over too much. Insurgent campaigns from both right and left insisted, in very
different ways, that Obama’s reconciliation was a false promise, that distributive
conflicts remain inevitable in politics. These battles were simultaneously
fights over respect, honor, and standing among different racial and cultural
groups, and also fights over material resources.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[It needs to be
said, somewhere in here, that Obama’s first campaign was, among other things, a
kind of peace movement after the madness of wartime described in the last
portion of the manuscript; but what we got, consistent with the technocratic
and deferential tone of the administration, was war with less belligerence and
a security state with more of the forms of legality - civilizing and thus,
ironically, “normalizing” the very things we had opposed, and so making the
differences with the Bush years more aesthetic than substantive.]</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Redemptive
constitutionalism has always had two sets of enemies. Some are whites who have
benefited from concrete racial advantages—from formal segregation to access to
home loans to better police protection—as well as from the softer privilege of
feeling that the country is their own. People committed to white supremacy and
other kinds of formal hierarchy have resisted every wave of change toward
equality and inclusion. On the other hand, critics on the left, both black and
not, have criticized the redemptive story for the opposite reason: that it glosses
over deep inequality that does not recede just because the constitution’s
guarantees are extended to people who were once excluded. These critics point
out that racist settler-colonialism lay at the heart of the American founding, determining
both how the riches of the new continent were shared (or hoarded) and what, so
to speak, an American looked like - who was really in “We the People” and who
remained someone else, in 1789 and 2009.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">As Obama
championed redemptive constitutionalism, white resisters felt that something of
utmost importance was being taken from them - their place at the center of the
country - and poured their dissent into the Tea Party and the Trump campaign.
At the same time, activists on the left, especially young people mobilized by
police violence against black men, coalesced in new movements. The symbolic
apotheosis of racial reconciliation in the presidency of Barack Obama was
followed by a retrenchment of economic inequality - average white family wealth
was about nine times that of a black family when Obama won the 2008 election,
and eleven or twelve times greater than a black family’s four years later, as the
housing crisis reaped its unequal harvest - and intense awareness of pervasive,
persistent, often horrific police violence against young black men. The reality
of racial inequality was all the starker against the shining promise of
constitutional redemption, which now looked like a cruel lie. Words do not
shift wealth or stop bullets, no matter how perfectly arranged or intensely
felt. Black Lives Matter is the political expression of this insight. Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s <i>Between the World and Me</i> is its literary voice.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">At the same time,
the promised reconciliation of technocracy—market policies producing more
wealth for everyone to share—fell back before to a newly vital politics of
distribution. Bernie Sanders’s anti-oligarchic campaign was by far the most vivid
and consistent face of this politics, but Donald Trump’s attacks on trade
agreements also ripped open a distributional politics in a Republican party
that, officially at least, had been the country’s most adamantly
pro-free-market since the Gilded Age. Both campaigns insisted that politics is
about who gets what, not just how much there is. Sanders’s version was about
class struggle within the country, Trump’s more a kind of neo-mercantilist
nationalism, a view of global trade as a zero-sum affair where one country’s
gain is another’s loss; but both reject root-and-branch the strategy of letting
experts “grow” the national and global economies for everyone.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">None of this
means that there is some kind of symmetry between the Trump and Sanders
campaigns, let alone between Trump and Black Lives Matter. But these
kaleidoscopic developments, some hopeful, exemplify the crisis in Barack
Obama’s governing style. And the crisis is not only Obama’s, but a crisis of
the Long 1990s, which Obama’s campaign called into question, but his
administration ratified. Although he lent it a greater moral and historical
charisma, Obama’s economics-minded technocracy was just the defining technique
of the New Democrats, the faction of the party that Bill Clinton brought to
power in 1992, consolidating the Democrats’ neoliberal turn. Nor is redemptive
constitutionalism Obama’s special political métier, though he gives it a
particular dignity and force. Rather, it has been the major American register
of optimism and unity.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A zenith of
liberal politics passed when Barack Obama’s legacy slipped from triumph to
crisis. Even if Hillary Clinton had managed an electoral-college victory to
match her narrow but decisive majority in the popular vote, her presidency
would have been a transitional one, grappling with new movements that reject
failed promises of reconciliation and instead insist on asking who gets
what—money, jobs, resources, and respect and standing in the national
community. There is much to hope for here, in a realistic grappling with
problems of racial and economic inequality that are unsolved and, in some
cases, worsening. There is also much to fear in an angry, centrifugal, zero-sum
politics of wounded national and racial pride. It is the mixed fortune of the
present to face these two prospects entangled in a single pregnant moment.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The crisis of the
long 1990s that shook Obama’s legacy was a long time coming. Obama, however, intensified
it and hurried it along precisely by conjuring up the energy of democratic
self-rule and the impulse to deepened equality in a way that the Clintons and
their cohort of Democrats never did. The Clintons and the political world they
created embodied a variation on H.L. Mencken’s remark about Teddy Roosevelt,
that he didn’t care for democracy but loved government. Although Bill Clinton
had his reasons for enjoying campaigns, the upper echelon of think tanks,
financiers, consultants, and elite lawyers that they gathered around the
Democratic Party represented a profound division of labor between voters and
experts. Real authority came from expertise; electoral majorities simply
rotated sets of experts and organized interests through the institutions of
government - with certain continuities, as both the military and elite finance had
a seat at every partisan table. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed,
the Clintons took a certain pride in not promising too much to their more
demotic constituencies - publicly pressing black constituencies on criminal
justice and affirmative action, forcing organized labor and blue-collar workers
to accept trade deals that hurried de-unionization and the collapse of
industrial jobs - the pride of people enforcing what they were sure were the
correct rules. Their attacks on Obama during his run for the presidency were not
only in defense of Hillary Clinton’s run; they were also reproaches for
breaking the tacit pact of technocratic consensus and, in effect, going over
the heads of his fellow meritocrats to the people. They thought he was a smooth-talking
demagogue. (They had seen nothing, as yet.)</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In another sense,
though, the crisis simply confirmed that the long 1990s had not ended history.
There might be no world-historical competitor to democratic capitalism, but
democratic capitalism was not generating the stable, consensual order that
neoliberal optimism had expected, and which both enthusiasts and skeptics,
projecting the attitudes of their moment, thought Francis Fukuyama had
announced. Both of Obama’s promises - issued in the campaigns, withdrawn in
governance and under the exigency of opposition and events - would return as the
realities of inequality and stifled democracy became more vivid. They returned
in the strangest ways, and in unexpected places.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">V. Irruptions: Occupy</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Obama came into
office near the height of a global financial crisis that was also a debt crisis
for the most vulnerable: millions of mortgage-holders, especially working-class
and nonwhite people, who suddenly owed banks much more than the value of their
homes; students who had borrowed tens or hundreds of dollars for college or
graduate programs, now unemployed; and national government’s, such as Greece’s
and Ireland’s, that had found willing lenders after joining the European Union,
and now faced fiscal crisis and cruel austerity. There was a good deal of
moralizing about reckless, but it was clear that lenders had been eager to
extend credit, and had jeopardized whole economies with complex financial
instruments, such as derivatives and credit-default swaps, that mainly
benefited investment banks and certain of their wealthy clients. The incoming
Obama administration was understandable wary of making things worse while
trying to unravel a crisis that experts said could become a much worse
catastrophe. But the administration’s response also captured Obama’s deep
identification with the same elites who had the crisis. In a telling
conversation with Bloomberg news, he defended the heads of JP Morgan and
Goldman Sachs against criticism of their multi-million dollar bonuses: “I know
both these guys,” Obama said, marking how different his world had become from
his supporters’: “They’re very savvy businessmen.” He continued, “I, like most
of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part
of the free-market system.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Conceptually, it
is a fallacy to imagine that there is any natural and inevitable version “the
free-market system” that implies that super-complex financial transactions must
produce huge bonuses for top bankers. Politically, Obama’s comfort pretending
otherwise was an abdication of exactly the spirit he had called up in winning
the presidency: that the world we were born into was not the only possible one,
that politics could bring about better forms of fairness and cooperation. The
long 1990s continued in the form of more conscientious, modestly chastened
expert governance. Talk of inequality and the harms of economic precariousness,
where it came up at all, got quickly dismissed as “class warfare” and - as
Obama had hinted in his defense of bankers’ bonuses - un-American. The
democratic radicalism of the campaign retreated into the margins, only to
return in downtown New York in the fall of 2011.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In the few days
that I spent in Zuccotti Park that October, I learned that, as an approach to
library science, anarchism is at both its strongest and its weakest. The
volunteers at the Occupy Wall Street library “shelved” no book into the
waterproof bins that served open-air browsing without first cataloguing it
online and branding it with a Sharpie. This procedure created a complete
catalog of the books that sympathizers have donated, thanks to a small knot of
natty book-lovers, some of whom unroll their camping gear at night amid the
stacks of political theory, alternative economics, polemics on the financial
crisis, bodice-rippers, and spiritual charlatanism of every kind. Once
catalogued, the books went into an anarchist lending system, which is to say, no
system at all: take it if you want it, return it if you will, keep it if you
need it. The catalog disclosed nothing about the library’s present holdings. It
was an instantly obsolete memorial produced by tirelessly fastidious people who
declined to turn their fastidiousness into a rule for anyone else. It sat at
the meeting-place of the database, the civic institution, and public art.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers often tried to
understand society by imagining people without it – in a “state of nature.”
Philosophy developed a genre of just-so stories in which hairy, under-dressed
women and men meandered through forests and deserts, careening into each other
and producing fistfights and couplings. Although rightly wary of one another,
these semi-sociable monads soon find they do better together than alone, and
through a series of crises and discoveries they create language, law, property,
government, and the division of labor. Their natural freedom is gone, but the
ambiguous benefits of civilization have replaced it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voila!</i> – a natural history of how we live together.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
old stories came back to life, in diorama form, in Zuccotti Park. Friday night
featured a four-hour debate on how Wall Street’s Occupiers should govern
themselves. This constitutional crisis came out of a very state-of-nature
problem. It had rained for days, and although the sun was back, there was a
hill of wet laundry just west of the Information and Press tables, across the
path from Sanitation’s collection of brooms and dustpans, and blocking the
street from the orthodox-Marxist encampment that calls itself Class Warfare.
Revolution may require patience, but wet laundry does not tolerate delay. The
only way to requisition a couple of thousand dollars in quarters and detergent
money was by consent of the whole community, or, if that failed after full
debate, “modified consent” – a vote of 90 percent. It naturally seemed to the
Structure Working Group – a kind of constitutional drafting committee – that
this was an apt moment to give say-so over the quarters to some body less
unwieldy than the whole people assembled. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Every exchange in
the debate would have made good sense – with a little idiomatic translation –
to the propertied white men who drafted the United States Constitution in
Philadelphia in 1787. It turns out that, whenever you try to merge a loosely
self-governing multitude into a sovereign body, the same practical problems and
acute fears arise. If all power lies in the people, and they give it to a
Congress or committee to use, how can they control the government they have created?
What if it becomes corrupt, or turns around and tries to control them? What
happens if the bigger groups use the concentrated power against smaller ones?
(Class Warfare was already grumbling that some of its tents had been
“expropriated” – an ideologically awkward point made nonetheless with heartfelt
pissiness.) Who will watchdog the committees in winter, when it’s too cold to
sit through a General Assembly outside? If we just worked harder and were more
virtuous, couldn’t we deal with the laundry ourselves?</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These
debates took place through the community microphone, the no-amplification
technology for holding an open-air debate among 500 or more people: the speaker
speaks, a circle around her shouts her phrases in unison, and, when necessary,
a second circle repeats it again. This technical fix to a ban on amplified
sound has major side-effects in moral education. It has a liturgical quality:
the speaker has to break every ten words or so, to match the limits of
short-term memory. The crowd intones together for hours. Every position argued
in the assembly is literally embodied in the voice of everyone participating.
What’s most striking is to see those who disagree sharply, and palpably dislike
and mistrust one another, reciting each other’s attacks. Even when the speaker
was agitated, an audible care governed the phrasing, as if the anticipated echo
of the crowd and the memory of other voices in one’s own mouth dissolved the
ordinary narcissism of oratory.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
geography of Zuccotti Park resembled a Victorian ascent-of-man exhibit. At the
eastern fringe, a tree had been designated the community’s sacred space, where
all gods and sentiments were welcome. Icons, devotional cards, beads, incense,
and a poster of John and Yoko were prominent. Drum circles worked nearby, to
the east and northeast, and their rhythmic neo-tribalism throbbed into the
night, indifferent to what the General Assembly was debating on the other side
of the park. A third or so of the space belonged to long-term campers, unkempt,
tired, often sick or asleep during the day. There was some panhandling.
Idealists are hard to pick out from professional transients and freeloaders. At
night this part of the park closed up, a faceless field of blue tarps and
camping tents.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the middle, a division of labor had arisen to meet the most pressing human
needs. A kitchen ran at nearly all hours, and there was always a long line for
whatever was on offer. The medical tents and sanitation supplies were also
here, and on the edge of this zone the mound of laundry issued its mute call
for constitutional reform. These volunteers struck me as the salt of Zuccotti
Park, and they presented a practical challenge to radical democracy: they were
too busy to spend five nights a week in self-government. Yet as long as the place
was run by spontaneous action, they were as good as anyone else – indeed, they
were leaders, because they were the first to pick up soup pots and brooms when
the community needed those. The more decisions got concentrated in an efficient
government, the more they would be carrying out orders and doing someone else’s
work. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>At
the western end of the park, across from the Harriman Brothers banking house
and just down the street from the Federal Reserve, the diorama of stylized
human history emerged into Athenian democracy and learning, circa 500 B.C. The
General Assembly met here, with its back to Broadway, and the library huddled
in the park’s northeast corner. The General Assembly was not particularly a
gathering of the campers, let alone the drummers. Many of the debaters would
home late to apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn, then return to the park in
the morning. Many of the campers were under their tarps during the
constitutional convention on the laundry pile. Like Tolkien-esque tribes, the
different populations identified themselves by their hair, their dress, and
their manners. The stroll across the park felt like walking from Bonnaroo to
Debate Club, if Debate Club met in an alternative universe designed by the
Anarchist Gospel Choir.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
only articulate demands coming out of the park were on the buttons stamped out
at an artisanal and unofficial table between the General Assembly space and the
library, and these were in the broadest terms – democracy and equality.
Participating for a couple of days, though, can bring home a subtler insistence.
Plenty of Occupiers were vain and pleased with themselves, but most were also
trying to live out an ideal of equality and personal freedom while making their
little society work, albeit on a tiny scale with cops, subways, and wifi
provided from outside. When someone dropped and shattered a piece of plate
glass near me, I hurried to tell the sometime drummer I saw pushing a broom, a
mark that she was working with Sanitation. With perfect equanimity and
sweetness, she pointed me to the Sanitation station, not so that I could tell a
responsible person, but I could grab a broom and dustpan. By the time I got
back to the site – no more than 90 seconds later – the glass was gone.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
am dwelling on these features of the place, its strange, radically
experimental, charismatically humane qualities, because they seem to be me to
be as important as, and inseparable from, the parts of Occupy that are better
remembered. It has been reduced in memory to a slogan: “We are the 99 percent.”
Something in that phrase, applied to the extraordinary pressure of three years
of vivid inequality and precariousness under a humanely neoliberal regime, served
as a kind of permission for otherwise respectable people to say the recently
unsayable: that inequality mattered, that it was not somehow humiliating or
un-American to complain about the crushing debt a bank or college had
encouraged you to take with assurances of “return on investment,” or to resent
the bonuses of the people at the top of the economic order. Moments when these
kinds of permission arose, when the unspeakable suddenly became sayable, are
central to the political history of the last two decades. They are among the
signal effects of social-media politics. De-centered networks of communication
are brilliant at picking out what people are hungering to say, finding ways to
say them, and letting the speakers find one another and take courage in the
words - for better or worse. It is surely true that this new permission to name
inequality and to denounce it, not hunker down and accept it stoically as Obama
indirectly told “most of the American people” to do, prepared the way for the
triumphant procession of Thomas Piketty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital
in the Twenty-First Century</i> two years later, and the Bernie Sanders
campaign’s reorientation of Democratic politics to economic inequality two to
three years after that.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
these essential legacies of Occupy are incomplete without understanding how
much it was powered by a radical impulse to democracy, a commitment to
reexamining the terms of our cooperation, interdependence, and hierarchy, and
seeking ways to reshape these. It was, in a sense, the most concrete expression
of the political impulse that the first Obama campaign, three years earlier,
had conjured up in the most diffuse and rhetorical ways. Do it yourself – DIY –
is an aesthetic and also an ethic, which the Occupiers were trying to take from
the personal to the social scale. Our world is rich, convenient, and often
efficient because we parcel out tasks – governance, library science, cooking,
sanitation – in a set of more or less hierarchical roles. Things get done, and
there is time for private life and play. At the same time, we often deal with
one another as representatives of these roles and tasks: you make my food,
process my book, clean my floor, run my government, and, though I try to show a
polite interest, that pretty much exhausts my interest in you. In Zuccotti Park
a visitor realized that the person pushing the broom is not Sanitation, but
someone it would not be so bizarre to call by one of those old
liberal-revolutionary terms, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">citizen</i>,
and that you, too, citizen, might need to grab a dustpan right about now. Then
it is easy to accept that things are lost in our usual efficiency: equality,
and also intelligibility, a sense that you have to know how everything works –
cleaning, cooking, shelving, governing – because you, too, might have to take
responsibility for it at any moment. Nothing is someone else’s job, and – it
somehow follows – everyone is more than the job they happen to be doing. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
financial crisis, and the self-satisfied and esoteric industry behind it,
underscored not just how unfair our social life can seem, but also how opaque.
How many really understood what had happened, and, of those, how many
understood what we might do now about where the crisis has brought us? The
Occupiers were experimenting with the thought that inequality and opacity are
optional, or, at least, that there might be ways of living together that are
much more equally free, and much more intelligible, than those we have accepted.
Their contribution was to invite others to pursue the same thought. It was
really no more, or less, than the thought behind the Declaration of
Independence: that societies are erected by naturally free and equal people,
who are entitled to change the rules when they believe a different arrangement
would serve their freedom better. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">**</span></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[MORAL MONDAYS?]</span></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">**</span></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>VI. Irruptions: Piketty and the New
History of Inequality</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Thomas Piketty’s
unexpected best-seller, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capitalism in the
Twenty-First Century</i>, matter first of all because Piketty is an economist,
and economics is the master discipline of our time. You may not think you are
interested in economics, but whatever you care about — the environment, the
future of the university, race and poverty, or whether independent artists can
eat — economics is interested in you. It mattered, too, because Piketty’s book
was revolutionary. It rewrites the mission of economics, discarding claims that
the discipline is a super-science of human behavior or public policy and returning
it instead to what the 19th century called “political economy”: a discipline
about power, justice, and — also, but not first — wealth. The questions of
political economy are <i>political</i>: how should we freely organize our
interdependent economic lives?</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The book blended
empirical complexity and political urgency. How unequal is the division of
wealth and income? How did it get that way, and where is it going? How worried
should we be, and what can we do? And — check this out — are democracy and
capitalism in conflict? The answer - more arresting then than now: Yes. This
flew in the face of longstanding conventional wisdom, supported by economics
Nobel winners like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, plus lots of less
controversial characters, that capitalism is democracy’s best friend. Free
markets respect freedom by honoring personal choice, treat people as equals by
tying economic rewards to social contributions and opening paths to social
mobility, and check an overreaching government by dispersing power among
owners, workers, and entrepreneurs. They create widely-shared wealth, so no
one’s life needs to be hopeless or degraded.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">There was, and
is, something to each of these just-so stories, but Piketty’s vast stockpile of
new data, told another story that was just as important. It showed a world
getting radically more unequal, the return of hereditary wealth, and — at least
in the US — an economy so distorted that much of what happened at the very top
could be described as class-based looting. And he gave some fairly strong
reasons to suspect that this, not the relatively open and egalitarian economies
of the mid-20th century, is what “capitalism,” unmodified, looks like. As it
built its case for an inexorable conflict between democracy and capitalism, it
led readers to an urgent question that it didn’t do all that much to answer:
how could democracy prevail? </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The book’s</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> argument
was often stripped down to a controversial little inequality (in the technical
sense of that word): r > g. These three characters, which appeared on
tee-shirts and in graffiti that fall, mean that the rate of return to capital
(r) is greater than the overall growth rate of the economy (g). It’s a
shorthand for a historical observation: over the history we can measure (a
couple of hundred years, give or take a degree of confidence), financial
investments and land - that is, capital - have yielded returns of about four to
five percent a year on their base value. Growth in the economy as a whole, the
total pool of wealth, has been closer to one or two percent per year. That
means the part of the pie that capital represents is growing faster than the
pie as a whole, leaving a smaller share for everyone else. Although most people
know that wealth begets wealth, it’s worth working through the implications of
that difference on the largest scale, over the long haul. At a five percent
rate of return, the value of capital doubles every 14 years, while at a two
percent rate, the economy doubles in size after 35 years. That means that over
a century and change, wealth coming from capital would have doubled seven
times, to 128 times its starting size, while the overall economy would be only
eight times larger. At the end of that imaginary century, everyone would be
much richer; but anyone whose ancestors had been sitting on a pile of money or
a spread of land would be hugely richer. This wouldn’t matter if everyone had a
nice chunk of capital, so they shared in the gains. But ownership of financial
assets and land has always been highly unequal.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Capitalism,
purely by the numbers, looks to be a giant inequality machine. So why, more
than 200 years after the Industrial Revolution, don’t we live in a wildly
unequal world, divided between Scrooge McDucks swan diving into their cash and
Bob Cratchits pleading for a break (while squinting and trying to understand
Disney’s duck-ification of the archetypical job-creator)? Actually, we do.
Piketty and his fellow researchers concluded that in the US today, the
wealthiest 10 percent hold about 70 percent of assets, and the top one percent
alone 35 percent. Both those numbers have been climbing since 1970. Europe has
seen similar rises since 1970, although the share of the top 10 percent and the
top one percent are each about 10 points lower there. The lowest inequality
Piketty has observed was in Scandinavia in the 1970s: The top 10 percent held
50 percent of wealth, and the top one percent owned “just” 20 percent. For
about forty years, we’ve been living a world where r > g seems to be doing
its stratifying work.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It might be much
worse except that, as Piketty persuasively explains, the 20th century was a
very strange one, full of epochal destruction and singular progress. It started
with wealth inequality much more extreme than today. In Britain <i>circa</i>
the first episode of Downton Abbey, the top one percent controlled 70 percent
of wealth. But between World War I and sometime in the 1970s, r > g was
suppressed by the worst and the best of the century. In the 30 years before the
start of the first world war and the end of the second, the United States and —
especially — Europe liquidated a huge amount of capital, especially in great
fortunes, through devaluation, collapse, and the cost of war. For the next 30
years, taxes on asset-based incomes — profits, rents, royalties — and confiscatory
tax rates on the highest incomes kept capital concentration under control in
the US and continued to drive it down in Europe.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">There have been
two big runs, then, for r > g. The first one started sometime before 1810,
when Piketty starts most of his historical estimates, and climaxed in the
Gilded Age. Then the clock started again around 1970. Our new Gilded Age is the
consequence. Occupy had it right, more or less. The economy is rapidly becoming
more unequal, whether measured in terms of who owns it or in terms of how its
annual payouts are distributed. In the US today, a member of the one percent
has on average almost 40 times the income of the 90 percent who fall somewhere
below the top 10 percent — the “ordinary American.” Stratification increases
much more dramatically at the very top, where mere percentiles run out, and
inequality of wealth is much more extreme than inequality of income. Capitalism
is producing a new super-class of <i>rentiers</i> — those who live on income
from capital. They own the world, and they collect its dividends.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">What is the human
meaning of the changes that these numbers describe? If you live in a
dramatically stratified society — and Piketty’s point is that you do — you know
this class structure. There’s a small set of the super-wealthy, with powerful
influence in culture and politics. These people control capital. Then there is
a slice of professionals and mid-level executives, as well as some
small-business owners, who generally own their houses and save some significant
financial assets over their lifetimes – the nine percent. The true middle
class, 40 or 50 percent, owns a house but not much else. Many of the rest have
negative or neutral net value and live month-to-month.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Piketty’s book
charted the economic basis of cultural changes that had come to a head in the
long 1990s, as capital accumulation built up the financial power of the one
percent and the 0.1 percent, social life changes. Talent and ambition followed
the money, going where capital either trades (Wall Street) or ventures (Silicon
Valley). The professions seemed drab by contrast, and building up a good life
by working for wages looked increasingly impossible. Working-class security,
middle-class mobility, and stable, respected professions all gave way to a rush
for the big money. Remaining in the asset-holding middle class — the class that
was the real social innovation of the last century, and formed the rhetorical
(though not the actual) center of American political life — ceased to feel
desirable or even viable. Picking the right parents becomes the key to good
prospects — or marrying into the right family if you were born into the wrong
one. Piketty lingered over Jane Austen’s asset-oriented marriage comedies with
affection but also a certain horror: the need to marry someone with the right
capitalization level, a central assumption of those plots, no longer seemed a
quaint feudal relic by 2013. It was, instead, courtship in advanced capitalism.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Piketty’s new
history of inequality implied that mainstream economics for some sixty years
had succored a complacent folk tale, albeit with lots of mathematical
sophistication tacked on. Except for some discernible “market failures,” that
folk tale insisted that all was for the best in this best of worlds. What you
earned was what you were contributing; otherwise, the market would step in to
restore efficiency. As long as this machine was working, we could concentrate
on total wealth —the size of that tiresome, proverbial pie — and set aside
divisive issues about distribution as afterthoughts. These just-so stories
veiled urgent and inflammatory problems: Self-accelerating inequality was
splits society into privileged rent collectors and everyone else, who must
either get halfway rich ministering to capital or stay on the low end of the
pole doing the humanly necessary work of teaching, nursing, keeping the utility
wires humming, and so forth.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The new
multi-century portrait of wealth and income obliterated economists’ complacent
narratives. Or, more accurately, it historicized them. There was a period in
the twentieth century when profound inequality seemed a thing of the past,
growth was widely shared, and the division between capital and labor in
national income looked stable. Much of modern economics took shape in this
happy time. Those economists assumed they were living in Act V of a comedy,
watching history’s conflicts resolve into harmony. It turns out they were in
Act II of a tragedy, observing but failing to understand capitalist dynamics
that war and depression had recently re-set near the starting line. We are now
in Act III or IV of that tragedy. Tragedy demands altogether different
judgments from comedy. We have more important problems than accessorizing the
groomsmen for the marriages of liberty and equality, capital and labor, and
public and private.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Suppose you care
about civic equality, social mobility, the dignity of ordinary people, and the
long-term prospects of democracies that need all these values. What to do in
the face of rising inequality and oligarchy? Piketty recommended a small,
progressive global tax on capital to draw down big fortunes and press back
against r > g. He admitted that this idea wouldn’t get much traction, but urgeds
it as a fixed point in political imagination, a measure of what would be worth
doing and how far we have to go to get there.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It’s a fine
enough idea, but it shows the limits of Piketty’s argument. He had no theory of
how the economy works that might replace the optimistic theories that his
numbers devastated. Numbers — powerful ones, to be sure — were all he had. He
counted things that were harder to count before now — income, asset value — and
adorned the bottom line with some splendid formulas for holding onto their
importance. But r > g, as Piketty readily admitted, is not a theory of
anything; it is shorthand for some historical facts about money’s tendency to
make money. Those facts held in the agrarian and industrial societies of Europe
and North America in the nineteenth century and seem to be holding in today’s
industrial and post-industrial economies. But these are very different worlds.
Is there something constant that unifies different versions of inequality —
that unites plantation owners and Apple shareholders, in their shared privilege
above bondsman and Best-Buy techs — or is the inequality itself the only
constant? Without answers to these questions, we don’t have a theory of
capitalism, just a time-lapse picture of it.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">This is not only
a theoretical problem. It bears on whether past is prologue, whether inequality
yesterday forecasts inequality tomorrow. Without a theory of how the economy
produces and allocates value, we can’t know whether r > g will hold into the
future. This is essential to assessing Piketty’s warnings against the responses
of his critics, who argued that shouldn’t worry, that rates of return on
capital will fall toward that of the overall economy, as mainstream economic
theory would predict, or that the overall growth rate will spike with new
technological innovations. Either would blunt r > g. Piketty doesn’t really
have an answer to these challenges, other than the weight of the historical
numbers.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The lack of a
general theory is a bit of an epistemic irony. Piketty’s work is a triumph of
the Enlightenment aim to make the world intelligible, demystifying it by
showing us the patterns that emerge from millions of facts. But by calling for
economics to become a historical science, concerned with what has happened and
is happening rather than with evermore refined mathematical models, he carries
out a massive epistemic dethroning. History happens only once. Its “natural
experiments” are few and highly incomplete. And casting light on big and
inconvenient facts, he also points out an area of darkness; ignorance where we
had been lulled into thinking we had knowledge.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Going beyond
Piketty, but informed by his argument, how should we think about rising inequality? For one, we shouldn’t be complacent because he can’t prove that r
> g will hold in the future. Instead, as environmentalists have long argued,
we should use a version of the “precautionary principle”: with a clear
worst-case scenario in front of us, and plenty of evidence that things are
trending that way, we shouldn’t demand an airtight demonstration before we
start trying to prevent it. The precautionary principle is a useful compass
when the stakes are high and certainty is scarce. That is pretty much always
the situation of acting in real time, with only “historical sciences” like
Piketty’s economics to guide us.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Second, we should
grope toward a more general theory of capitalism by getting modestly systematic
about two recurrent themes in Piketty’s work: a) power matters and b) the
division of income between capital and labor is one of the most important
questions in any economy. Piketty makes much of the grabbiness of
crony-capitalist executives and the forgiving tax laws that help them get away
with huge hauls, but when he talks about the larger vicissitudes of labor and
capital, he is mostly interested in the effects of big shocks such as economic
crisis and war. Yet the period of shared growth in the mid-20th century was not
just the aftermath of war and depression. It was also the apex of organized
labor’s power in Europe and North America, the fruit of many decades of
organizing, not a little of it bloody, not a little under the flag of democratic
socialism. Various crises cleared the ground, but the demands of labor, and an
organized left more generally, were integral to building the comparatively
egalitarian, high-wage world that came after the wars, with its strong public
sector, self-assertive workers, and halfway tamed capital. There’s a lesson we
can learn here about what we might do to combat inequality, and how.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Why not
generalize a thought that surfaces in many of Piketty’s specific analyses: the
rate of return on capital is in part the product of struggles, between those
who own the world and those who just work here. Sometimes these are contract
negotiations, sometimes strikes, and sometimes elections and lawmaking.
Together these struggles decide what can be owned (slaves count as capital in
some of Piketty’s calculations), what the owners can do with it, and how much
bargaining power non-owners bring to the table. Maybe the basic question is
power, the comparative power of organized wealth on the one hand and organized
working people on the other. Focusing on this question means putting human
struggle at the very heart of any analysis of economic life. As the author of
an earlier book titled <i>Capital</i> put it (though not in that book), the
root is man.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">That author was
Karl Marx, of course. His name was unmentionable for a few decades, except as
kitsch or anti-utopian bromide. Today his charisma has returned, and the echo
of his title in Piketty’s has lent the latter a certain frisson. Some of the
Marxian revival is very serious, some is trendy, and much is symbolic. Whether
or not one wants to travel far with theories of surplus value, overproduction
crisis, and the proletariat as the universal class, Marx stands for essential
ideas that have been scorned but are back and vital again: economies are about
power; to understand an economy you have to ask who gets, and how; the ways
that economies undercut freedom and equality are cause for indignation; and
political democracy will not be complete until we find a way to extend its
commitments to economic life. Marx stands, too, for the conviction that, as
humans, we owe ourselves and one another more than mutual advantages under the
aegis of the invisible hand. Part of the power of Piketty’s argument, troubling
as his predictions are, is that he shows that the questions Marx addressed are
still on the table. This is important for those of us who for whom Marx’s
questions resonate, along with his refusal to believe that standard pro-market
answers should give us any satisfaction. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I am sure I am
not alone, among those who got some of their book learning in the last two
decades, in a particular memory of college. There were courses in which we
thought very hard about what kind of distributive justice would respect the
freedom and equality of every member of society. There were classes in which we
talked about how power, multifarious power, shaped everything from prisons to
sexual identity, and how one could hope to counter it. And then there was this:
an economics class, in my case taught by a former head of Ronald Reagan’s
Council of Economic Advisers, where we drew intersecting lines representing
supply and demand and learned to demonstrate that high tax rates on the wealthy
would diminish marginal productivity, plaguing us all with lost social wealth.
A thousand whispers and hints let us know that those other classes were for
stimulation, personal ethics, and literary aesthetics. The economics class,
though – that was the world. The real world.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Part of Piketty’s
important was that he went deeper into the real world than the people who
taught Economics 101, and his lesson was that it needs those other classes. It
needs the rich history of political economy, which includes not just Marx, but
John Stuart Mill, even Adam Smith, and a rich panoply of American reformers and
radicals. Piketty shows that capitalism’s attractive moral claims — that it can
make everyone better off while respecting their freedom — deserve much less
respect under our increasingly “pure” markets than in the mixed economies that
dominated the North Atlantic countries in the mid-20th century. It took a
strong and mobilized left to build those societies. It may be that capitalism
can remain tolerable only under constant political and moral pressure from the
left, when the alternative of democratic socialism is genuinely on the table.
Piketty reminds us that the reasons for the socialist alternative have not
disappeared, or even weakened. We are still seeking an economy that is both
vibrant and humane, where mutual advantage is real and mutual aid possible. The
one we have isn’t it.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Reading Piketty
gives one an acute sense of how much we have lost with the long waning of real
political economy, especially the radical kind. As mentioned, Piketty did not
expect his one real proposal, a modest wealth tax, to go far in this political
environment. Ideas need movements, as movements need ideas. We’ve been short on
both. In trying to judge what to do about Piketty’s grim forecasts, there was a
crevasse between “write op-eds advocating higher tax rates” and “rebuild the
left.” It wasn’t Piketty’s job to fill that gap, but he did show just how wide
it yawns, and how devastating is the absence it represents.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But in another
sense, it was not Piketty that demonstrated any of this. The scope and depth of
his work were extraordinary, but well-substantiated data about growing economic
inequality were not new. Stagnating working-class wages and the share of wealth
owned by the richest Americans were familiar complaints on the left, and
usually written off as crankishness or class warfare - the latter in a way that
implied class warfare was obviously un-American and irresponsible. Piketty
generated a longer story more convincingly than earlier researchers had done, and
he greatly refined the picture of how income was concentrated, not just in the
highest marginal tax brackets, but at finer levels of resolution - among the
top 0.1 percent, for example, as it turns out that the richest one-thousandth
of us take home a great deal of the nation’s income. But all of this mattered
in the way it did because enough people had been prepared for it to matter -
prepared by the growing sense that the forms of inequality they had been
habituated to were neither acceptable nor inevitable.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It is a mistake
to understand the significance of Piketty’s findings as being simply a matter
of the progress of knowledge, let alone a quirky publishing phenomenon. Pikettymania,
as it was wryly called, was a product of a long and difficult political
education. The language of solidarity and political redemption was not enough,
nor was the sentiment of democratic mobilization. The moral energy of naming
the distance between the “one percent” and everyone else would do nothing
toward closing that distance, nor would the theatrics of occupying public space
or anything else. The small and initial experiments in making a world, the
less-remembered impulses of Zuccotti Park, would have to grow and come into
politics. There had to be movements, and they had to try to win.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">VII. The Sanders
Campaign and the Return of “Socialism”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Still, when
Bernie Sanders formally announced his presidential campaign in late May 2015,
no one expected much to come of it. Hillary Clinton was already regarded as a
prohibitive favorite to win the nomination, and Sanders was running, with the
seeming perversity that he had never abandoned, under the banner of an idea
that had no place in American politics: democratic socialism. So when Sanders
won the Hampshire primary by twenty-three points, the rationale that he coming
from neighboring Vermont gave him a home-field advantage was small comfort to
the shaken Clinton campaign. Sanders won every group of Democratic voters in
New Hampshire other than households earning more than $200,000 a year, a
warning that Clinton’s support was “establishment” and that Sanders had managed
to appeal both to blue-collar and middle-class voters - the Clintons’
traditional stronghold - and the younger and more idealistic voters who had
supported Barack Obama in 2008 and anti-war maverick Howard Dean in 2004. In
the end, Sanders won thirteen million primary votes - about three-and-a-half
million fewer than Clinton - and twenty-three states, including Michigan,
Wisconsin, Indiana, and much of New England and the Pacific Northwest. He
overwhelmed Clinton among the young, and although large majorities among
non-white voters helped Clinton hold California and the South and take the
nomination, Sanders won voters of all backgrounds under age 30.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">What did
democratic socialism have to do with this extraordinary run? To understand
that, it is essential to understand what Sanders was doing with the term, and
what his supporters made of that. Speaking on his political philosophy at
Georgetown in November 2015, when he was posting strong poll numbers but had
not yet won a vote, he opened with a long invocation of Franklin Roosevelt and
the social protections that the New Deal created: minimum wages, retirement
benefits, banking regulation, the forty-hour workweek. Roosevelt’s opponents
attacked all these good things as “socialism,” Sanders reminded his listeners. </span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> He seemed, a bit oddly, to agree with
them, taking his definition of “socialism” from its nineteen-thirties
opponents, the people Roosevelt called “economic royalists.” “Let me define for
you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me,”
Sanders said. “It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought
for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans.” It wasn’t the first time
Sanders had defined his position from the right flank of history. Pressed in a
Democratic debate to say how high he would take the marginal income tax, he
answered that it would be less than the ninety (actually ninety-two) per-cent
level under the Eisenhower Administration. He added, to cheers and laughter,
“I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.” In substance, Sanders’s
“socialism” is a national living wage, free higher education, increased taxes
on the wealthy, campaign-finance reform, and strong environmental and
racial-justice policies.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Both Roosevelt
and Eisenhower distinguished themselves vigorously from “socialism,” which they
understood as a revolutionary program of extreme equality, committed to
centralized control of the economy, and a cat’s paw of Soviet power.
Accusations of “socialism” trailed liberals for decades after Roosevelt parried
his opponents, from Ronald Reagan’s attacks on Medicare to the Republicans’
refrain against Obamacare. Democrats, like Roosevelt, have furiously defended
themselves against the charges. But now a candidate whose ideal American
economy does in fact look a lot like Eisenhower’s world—strong unions, secure
employment, affordable college—is waving the red flag, and finding favor with
large numbers of Democratic voters. Indeed, it is something of a fallacy to
imagine, as liberal historians sometimes do (and I have in other writing) that
we can identify Eisenhower with the policies and rhetoric that he accepted as
the reality of his time, rather than recognize the role of the Republican Party
he headed in the long business-led pushback against union power and the New
Deal. Sanders was not calling on an ideology that Eisenhower or even Roosevelt
held, but a whole condition of the world, the relatively egalitarian social
democracy that prevailed for many Americans, especially the rising middle class
and white, industrial working class in the decades after World War Two. This
was one seed of the commonplace charge of nostalgia against Sanders: that the
world he called for lay less in the future than in the past, and was less a
political vision than a memory of a safer historical order of things.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The 2011 Pew Poll
that found more respondents between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine
reporting a positive view of “socialism” (forty-nine per cent) than
“capitalism” (forty-six per cent) did not do much, either, to reveal a
thought-out commitment to an alternative economy. </span><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/125645/socialism-viewed-positively-americans.aspx" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Gallup polls</span></a><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> regularly find that a slim majority of
Democrats express a positive view of socialism, but an overwhelming majority
supports “free enterprise,” suggesting, charitably, some ideological
flexibility. Later polling did not show dramatic differences between Clinton
and Sanders voters on most economic questions, and where they did, Sanders
supporters were not always further to the left in conventional terms. Perhaps
more significant is that those under-thirty poll respondents, the same group
that voted for Sanders in huge numbers, are the first voters of the post-Soviet
era, whose formative experiences are of a not very heroic unipolar world of
American power and market-oriented ideas. They are the first wave of voters to
have lived all their lives in the long 1990s, and in 2016 they voted against
the world that formed them. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The fall of the
Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire put the word “socialism” up
for grabs again: it may have landed in history’s dustbin at first, but that
left it free for scavenging and repurposing. Meanwhile, in the same decade when
the Wall fell, the United States saw a sustained assault on the relatively
strong welfarist state that, from the middle of the twentieth century, had
supported public universities and other institutions of social mobility,
managed the conflicts between big companies and unions, and driven such
transformations as desegregation and the War on Poverty. After the Second World
War, leading American institutions and movements put into practice the core
idea of the earlier Progressive movement, which both F.D.R. and his cousin
Theodore championed: personal liberty, economic opportunity, and civic equality
could not survive in a laissez-faire industrial economy. Earlier in American
history these values had been associated with small government, at least
rhetorically, but they now definitively needed big government—the regulatory
state. So, in 1937, F.D.R. urged that government should “solve for the
individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization,” and, in 1965,
L.B.J. echoed him, warning that “change and growth seem to tower beyond the
control and even the judgment of men.” Strong government was the answer: a
counter-power to wealth and to economic crisis. Their world was also
Eisenhower’s.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Ronald Reagan’s
declaration, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “government is not the
solution to our problem; government is the problem” was the rhetorical flag of
an attack on the mid-century state that included sweeping tax cuts, an assault
on public-sector unions and license for private companies to elude or break
organized labor, and a retreat from anti-poverty and desegregation efforts. The
New Right agenda that Reagan once described as protecting an America where
“anyone can get rich” was, more relevantly in most lives, an embrace of
persistent and growing inequality. Government did not in fact shrink, thanks
largely to military spending and retirement benefits, but it became a much less
egalitarian and progressive force, no longer the vehicle of what F.D.R. had
called “a permanently safe order of things.” Bill Clinton, first elected in
1992, ratified the New Right’s program while giving it a humane gloss. He
declared, “The era of big government is over” and presided over the dismantling
of the family-support (“welfare”) system, a rise in policing and incarceration
(even after Reagan’s demagogic and racist “war on drugs”), and banking deregulation
that cleared the way for the financial crisis that later shadowed Barack
Obama’s presidency. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, by the mid-1990s, two figures had gone
into the wilderness: on the one hand, the American idea that a market economy
would be intolerable without strong, egalitarian government, public
institutions, and organized workers’ power; and, on the other, the word
“socialism” as a name for an altogether different kind of society. Exiled as
opponents, they returned as friends. Bernie Sanders’s socialism is Eisenhower’s
and F.D.R.’s world if history had taken a different turn in 1979: economic
security updated by the continuing revolutions in gender, cultural pluralism,
and the struggle for racial justice. In a word, Denmark; but also America with
a counterfactual history of the last forty years.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In the arc of
twentieth-century politics, Sanders’s program would most accurately be called
social democracy. Programs of social democracy, which formed the Northern
European states and economies that Sanders often calls on as models, do not aim
to replace the market, but to keep it in its place, using regulation and social
supports to police the line between economic competition and other values:
security and dignity in the workplace, independence and leisure at home, time
in life for family, learning, and retirement. Democratic socialism has always
stood for stronger political displacement of private economic power, including
public ownership of some industries, political decisions about aspects of
investment and other economic priorities, and, perhaps, a direct role for
workers in governing the workplace. These lines are blurry, of course, but the
point is that Sanders selected a name for his stance that, besides being long
treated as anathema in American politics, is some degrees to the left of what
he advocates.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">“Socialism” may
be an idiosyncratic name for Sanders’s politics, and may even obscure its
other, more radical meanings. But some of the term’s appeal is precisely that
it sounds more radical than it is. The radical label accentuates the feeling
that something has gone wrong in economic life. It marks the intensity of
dissent. It is a moral claim about the need for a different politics, aimed at
a different economy. In this way, Sanders’s use of the word harkens back to
pre-Soviet, even pre-Marxist socialism. Then the term named a clutch of
objections to industrial capitalism: the physical toll of the jobs, the equal
and opposite toll of unemployment and economic crisis, widespread poverty and
insecurity in a world where some lived in almost miraculous luxury. Assessing
the socialists of the nineteenth century, whose programs ranged from the
nationalization of industry to the creation of village cooperatives, John
Stuart Mill doubted that they understood how markets worked, but he admitted
their moral claims unreservedly: “The restraints of Communism would be freedom
in comparison with the present condition of the majority of the human race.”
Most of Sanders’s supporters might not say that, exactly; but they did seek a
way out a savagely unequal economy that leaves many of them indebted,
precariously employed at best, and generally anxious and powerless. In 2016,
defying nearly all expectations, “democratic socialism” became the exit sign
from this economy.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">VIII. The Wages
of Taking Democracy Seriously</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">As the Sanders
campaign became a threat to the Clinton nomination, its critics launched a mix
of dire warnings and condescending dismissal. Thomas Friedman called Sanders a
dangerous anachronism, an avatar of “an idea that died in 1989.” Friedman’s
line displayed indifference to both the actual course of twentieth-century
ideas and the actual content of Sanders’s campaign, but that is just what was
revealing about it. Having spent twenty years embodying the fast-arriving
decadent phase of the end-of-history consensus, Friedman seemed to take for
granted that the course of human events had justified his position to any
honest observer. He no longer bothered to give reasons or confront contrasting
evidence; it was enough to assume that any competing worldview had fallen with
the Wall, that the collapse of the unequal, anti-democratic, and often brutal
Soviet regime and its Eastern European empire had also been a thoroughgoing
philosophical vindication of capitalist democracy. But the leap from the
failure of one regime to the apotheosis of another’s flattering self-image was
a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">non sequitur</i>, perhaps the most
consequential of the late twentieth century, and certainly the most telling. It
was precisely what the events of 2016 were putting under pressure.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A more condescending line of attack came from Paul
Krugman, on the same page, who reprised his 2008 broadsides on Obama, now
taking aim at Sanders. Then, in a column titled “Hate Springs Eternal,”
Krugman accused Obama’s supporters of spewing “bitterness” and “venom” and
coming “dangerously close to a cult of personality.” But it was, candidly, a
little hard to describe the decorous Obama and his dewy-eyed base (and I
emphasize that I was one of those dewy-eyed canvassers who tracked every work
of his key speeches) as a bilious mob. The real danger for Democrats, Krugman
decided, was idealism: “On the left there is always a contingent of idealistic
voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up
the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support
a radical overhaul of our institutions.” This, he said, fairly enough, was part
of what drove the Obama campaign in 2008. By 2016, however, Krugman was pleased
that President Obama had broken with Candidate Obama and governed rather like a
Clinton: pragmatically, with the hand he was dealt.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sanders, said Krugman, was pandering to that
high-minded electorate of evergreen losers. Sanders’s “purist” positions, like
talk of truly universal health care, meant “prefer[ing] happy dreams to hard
thinking about means and ends.” To be political grownups, Krugman argued, we
had better put away these child things, as Obama had learned to do. He
contrasted high-minded but unrealistic idealism with “politically pragmatic”
governance, like Franklin Roosevelt’s during the New Deal. Roosevelt, Krugman
reminded readers, cut deals with Southern segregationists and introduced programs
like Social Security incrementally. This dirty-hands commitment to halfway
measures, not purity, is what it takes to get things done. Sanders might
flatter his enthusiasts’ moral sentiments but governing is messy, complicated,
grown-up. Krugman insisted, “The question Sanders supporters should ask is,
When has their theory of change ever worked?”</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The answer, of course, depends what you think the
Sanders campaign’s theory of change is. And this basic and crucial point,
Krugman was wrong. Like his colleague Thomas Friedman, his mistake stemmed from
being unable to see political events outside his own rather narrow worldview. The
Sanders campaign’s theory of change wasn’t that a high-minded leader could draw
out Americans’ best selves and usher in a more humane and egalitarian country.
It was that a campaign for a more equal and secure economy and a stronger
democracy could build power, in networks of activists and alliances across
constituencies. The campaign addressed itself to institutionalized inequality,
from gaps in wealth and income to racialized policing and incarceration, and
proposed policies to buttressed and expand the middle class, protect workers
from insecurity and exploitation, and open learning and training to everyone.
Sanders argued that economic power and political power are closely linked, and
that both need to be widely shared for democracy to work. This means, he went
on, a redistribution of effective citizenship from organized money to organized
people - beginning with the organizing that the campaign itself represented. If
it succeeded, it would build both a movement and a cohort—a political
generation—around the ideas and policies of this self-styled American
socialism. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was, in short, a campaign
about political ideas and programs that happened to have an adoptive Vermonter
named Bernard at its head, not one that mistook its candidate for a prophet or
a wizard.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Krugman’s appeal to Franklin Roosevelt’s example was
more instructive than he might have imagined, and not in quite the way he
intended. Yes, Roosevelt governed “pragmatically,” in the sense that he counted
votes and cut deals. Every sane politician does this. (The stipulation of
sanity seems especially pertinent at the time of writing.) But what made it
possible for him to pass sweeping changes in economic regulation and social
support, changes so radical that his enemies accused him of betraying the
Constitution and becoming an American Mussolini? The answer is in two parts: power
and ideas. His administration stood at the confluence of two great movements.
The first was the labor unions, which had been building power, often in bloody
and terrible struggles, since the late nineteenth century. The second was the
Progressive reformers who had worked in states, cities, and universities—and
occasionally in national government—trying to build economic security and
strengthen political democracy in an industrial economy.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> These movements were sources of both power and ideas. Why did enemies and
reluctant allies end up meeting Roosevelt halfway? The answer was not his
pragmatic attitude, his admirably adult willingness to compromise. The reason
that even some who hated him had to deal with him or give way was the political
force he could marshal. His theory of change was no more about compromise than
it was about high-minded words: It was about power. Compromise was a
side-effect, a tactic at most. But the central place of power does not mean
idealism had no place in the New Deal. Roosevelt explained what he was doing,
and why, in language that was more Sanders than Clinton, more vision than
wonkery. He famously called for a Second Bill of Rights, an economic program of
security, good work, and material dignity. And, while F.D.R. was willing to
compromise, he was also willing to draw hard lines, calling out “economic
royalists” and saying of his enemies, “They are unanimous in their hate for
me—and I welcome their hatred.” Roosevelt used the highest idealistic language
and the toughest words of conflict. They conveyed the vision behind his program
and forced other politicians to form battle lines on the landscape he defined.
Then, and only then, he compromised, on his terms. Indeed, Krugman’s portrait
of Roosevelt is so denuded and misplaced that it seems to be a historical substitution
in which Roosevelt stands in Bill Clinton or perhaps Barack Obama. The
historical Roosevelt stands for the stronger, older tradition of campaigns
based on ideas and programs rather than personalities, candidates run to build
power, and use idealistic language to explain why that power matters. Then, if
they get to govern, they use it.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This was different from anything Obama managed to
do, or really tried, which is it matters that the Sanders campaign was not a
reprise of Obama’s 2008 run. The first Obama campaign was an instant mass
movement, and it had the potential to produce widespread mobilization. In Durham,
North Carolina, to take one example that I happen to know well, there was an
active local Obama group, canvassing and registering voters, well before the
official campaign showed up. As I emphasized earlier, anyone who had a hand in
the 2008 campaign can remember the heartfelt sense of being part of something,
of moving history a little. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the
Obama campaigns were ultimately about the candidate: his intelligence,
charisma, integrity, and almost preternatural rhetorical gifts. After the long
darkness of the Bush years, he brought alive the wish for progress, solidarity,
and unity around a better version of the country. Nothing he said was
unfamiliar; it was just that he said it—embodied it—so well. [Because he
declined to turn his moving moral vision into a distinctive program, and
assimilated himself so readily to the technocratic centrism that the Clintons
had established, Obama ended up ratifying in governance the same long-1990s
political realism that he had defied in his campaign.]</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The most important question about Krugman’s
argument, which represented the views of a whole political and intellectual
class, is not how, exactly, it was mistaken, but rather what made the mistake
so irresistible. How did the political constraints of the long 1990s come to
seem so natural and inevitable that Sanders’s campaign, an effort to revive an
earlier style of American political mobilization, got assimilated to the recent
and narrow precedents of the Clinton years and the Obama-Clinton primary contests?
Some of the answer is surely that those who don’t learn history will
misunderstand both past and present, projecting backward the experience of
their own time and, just as surely, understanding their time in terms of its
own parochial events and conceits. But there is also an implicit view about
democracy - a deeply pessimistic, even cynical one - that this present-minded
parochialism cleaves to quite unawares. It is, however, the view that figures
like Krugman have in mind when they praise political adulthood.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To understand this picture, it helps to go back to
its intellectual origins. In the first half of the twentieth century,
influential intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter pressed
an argument that should sound familiar today. Political judgment was a
disaster. As Schumpeter put it in 1942, “the typical citizen drops down to a
lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He
argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile
within the field of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His
thinking becomes associative and affective.” Schumpeter went on to argue that
all of this meant that democratic decisions—majoritarian votes—were terrible
and dangerous things: shifting with emotional winds, subject to manipulation,
and basically “unintelligent and irresponsible.” Taking them seriously, he
warned, “may prove fatal” to a country. Schumpeter wrote as an Austrian émigré
to the United States, and these passages are easy to read as the tragic wisdom
bequeathed by the twentieth century’s totalitarian catastrophes. But that is
mostly coincidence. Lippmann had made all the same arguments, somewhat less
floridly, in the 1920s and with a mainly American scope of concern. The idea of
democratic self-governance was mainly myth, he argued. The motors of politics
were emotion and ignorant instinct, organized around symbolic catchphrases -
“socialism,” or “the big banks” - that produced electoral majorities
haphazardly or, worse, through manipulation. The actual business of
governing involved much more concrete, constrained, and complicated decisions.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">More fundamentally, there were two entirely
different domains of human judgment in politics: democratic contestation and
practical governance. They did not touch. Even the rare citizen who was earnest
and worked to be informed, Lippmann wrote, “is trying to steer the boat from
the shore.” But, tragically, democracies pretended that governing depended on
democratic will—something that, considered dispassionately, did not exist.
Influenced by logical positivists’ efforts to root out meaningless terms from
language, both Schumpeter and Lippmann argued that most of democratic politics
was as meaningful as a theological debate about the nature of God, as stable
and reliable as a dream recalled on an analyst’s couch, as rational as the
conversational dynamics of a family holiday dinner. The grown-up task of
governing was lashed to this flailing, preening, unmeaning mob that needed to
believe it was in charge.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is all too harsh for Krugman to affirm in as
many words. But consider the way this picture divides the world. On the one
hand, elections and political movements are psychological and symbolic: to
understand them, you need the skills of the marketing savant. On the other
hand, the real realm of expertise goes on, like the investment managers who
maintain university endowments while the undergraduates debate socialism. A
sophisticated person understands the difference tacitly (like so much in
refined understanding), though expressing it directly would be gauche. The
public has to be flattered and cajoled, yes, but political adulthood means
understanding that politics is emotional theater, while governing is like
banking or negotiating a merger.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Sanders campaign breached both sides of this
arrangement. It invited people to take politics very seriously indeed,
proposing to invade the realm of expertise with a new agenda: actually
universal health care, actually affordable higher education, a serious assault
on the political power of concentrated money. Above all, it proposed pressing
this agenda forward because, if—mirabile dictu—Sanders had won, the people
would have chosen it. Breaching the line between majority will and real
governance, Schumpeter and Lippmann argued, was like running together matter
and anti-matter: the results would be destructive, perhaps fatal. It was a
misunderstanding of the whole enterprise of politics. Both Schumpeter and
Lippmann concluded that the most plausible role of elections was to provide a
peaceful way for elites to circulate between government and their other posts
(such as business, finance, and universities). It is no surprise that our
current political, financial, and media elites are attached to a worldview that
imparts great power and tragic responsibility to them, the only ones who can
see the picture whole.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Misgivings about democracy are not groundless
slurs. It’s easy to point to evidence—people can’t identify their senators,
don’t know what’s in the Constitution, don’t understand how government works, elected
Trump. But it’s also true that anti-democratic attitudes and condescension
masked as respect tend to foster the very kind of polity they presuppose (and
worry over): ignorant, resentful of manipulation, but delighted enough when it
is flattered. In light of all this, it is remarkable that voters keep coming
back to an earnest effort to link democratic mobilization with real changes in
policy. Perhaps some of them have been underestimated, and they know it.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Hope was a quick high,
but fortunately the Obama movement stopped partying once its partisans had real
jobs. That is political adulthood’s story about the last eight years. And it’s
true that the last eight years have shown a great deal about the limits to what
any one candidate can achieve, about the deep power of finance, the military,
and the expert classes, and the intense mistrust of government in many parts of
the electorate. Two possible lessons come from this. The standard elite story
is that we fight our way back to business as usual: incremental change plus
playing defense. On this view, there is no middle ground between childish
emotion and the condescending, basically anti-democratic disenchantment of what
passes for political adulthood. The movement-building alternative is that we
need a motive in politics to keep us moving forward even in the face of elite
disapproval, and even when there is no promise of quick success. In the
tradition of social democracy, that alternative is not hope but solidarity. It
is the motive that keeps working for concrete and basic changes out of common
care for everyone they would benefit, even when the changes are not realistic
yet. It is the motive to build power and ideas together so that democratic
politics can give government its marching orders: fairness, security, and an
even stronger democracy.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>IX. Something or Barbarism:
Elements of a Deeper Democracy</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So far, I’ve painted the
Sanders campaign impressionistically, tacking between the pointillism of its
specific proposals and such grainy strokes as “solidarity” and “security.” But
between the invocation of Franklin Roosevelt at Georgetown and Sanders’s
endorsement of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention eight
months later, a richer set of themes emerged that distinguished the
campaign-movement’s politics from those of the long 1990s and the official
positions of the Democratic Party. Nine points go a long way toward filling in
what this new American politics represents.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b>1. The Economy is About
Power</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Any student of economics from the Reagan years
forward learned that everything is about efficiency. Self-interested parties
bargain for their personal benefit, and the invisible hand of the market makes
everyone better off. This was always a thinner reed than its scientific-sounding
apparatus suggested, but now we are re-awaking to a world many of us knew only
through black-and-white photographs of strikes and marches, clashes between
workers and bosses. A few companies control large shares of their industries,
and their big profits and pressure on suppliers and consumers reflect their
power to set the terms for everyone. A few banks are too big to fail and set
the terms of bailout and regulation. If workers want a living wage, they have
to fight for it, in the workplace and in politics, in the Fight for 15 and in
unionization drives. Economic policy is about the struggle for power, and
political contests are fights to control the distribution of power in economic
life.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>2. Expertise Is Not Legitimacy</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Consistent with their demotion of emotion-drenched
elections beneath technical governance, the Democrats are consummately the
party of experts, economics PhDs and Yale Law School graduates. They are the
party of meritocrats who do their homework. This is a fine thing, as far as it
goes, but the party of experts often forgets that expertise is a tool. It helps
you to get where you want to go. Politics is also about goals and worldviews.
It isn’t enough to be smart and trained. The first question for politicians
must be a twenty-first-century version of the old union challenge: which side
are you on? Those who do not ask the question will not avoid it, but simply
fail to give their answer deliberately and with self-awareness - and so, maybe,
avoid accountability for it, at least for a while.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>3. Economic Security Is a Valid Goal</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Americans in their early forties and younger have
heard all their lives about the value of “disruption,” the need for
“flexibility” and “reinvention,” the whole Silicon Valley/venture
capital/management consultant mantra. But, while this is very nice for the
lucky few who can treat economic ups and downs as the backdrop of a heroic
video game, for most people “disruption” is a nightmare. For much of the
twentieth century, mainstream liberal economists understood that security—whether
in a union, job tenure, or guaranteed health care and other safety nets—was a
widespread and perfectly legitimate goal. In fact, it was the first thing
anyone should want from an economy, because it was the precondition to feeling—and
being—safe enough to go on and take risks, or just enjoy life. We need to give
renewed meaning to this argument. For decades, economic security has been
derided as the goal of the weak, social sponges who can’t handle lifelong
competition. Once again, meritocrats, who excel at a certain kind of
competition, have aligned themselves with investors, who profit from it, in
advancing the idea that all-in competition makes a good economy. We need to
reject the moralism of competition and the charisma of disruption, and say it
is also right and good to want to be safe.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>4. You Are More than Human Capital</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A person’s worth is not what they can earn, and
“return on investment” is the wrong way to think about living, just as
“networking” is the wrong way to think about relationships. These ways of
valuing ourselves are cultural and psychic distortions, in which a market
culture colonizes the minds of the people living under it. But they are not
just mistakes or spiritual failings: they are imposed by all-in, all-pervading
competition and insecurity. Part of the point of an economy of safety is to let
people remember what else and who else they are. This is part of the meaning of
“free college”: treating learning and growth as part of the purpose of life,
something an economy exists to support, not an input to the economy that
teaches students to talk, and think, in terms of debt and dividends.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>5. Solidarity Is Different from Hope</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Not me, us,” a Sanders slogan that marked a
contrast with Clinton’s “I’m with her,” also announced a radical idea: politics
makes commonality where it wasn’t there before. There was some of this in
Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Yes we can” and “We are the people we’ve been waiting
for” were ways of saying this. But Obama’s other slogan, “Hope,” was more about
looking forward to a world that is coming. Hope may be shared, but it switches
easily to a personal register: your hope, my hope. Solidarity is different: it
looks around, and it acts with and for other people, because we are in this
thing together. Americans haven’t had a politics like this for a long time; but
the Sanders moment is a recollection of how it feels, and a move toward
rebuilding it.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>6. Democracy Is More than Voting</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Democracy in today’s world concerns the
relationship between economic power and political power. It is, in the old
slogan, about enabling organized people to grapple with and dominate organized
money. Ultimately, it is about organized people deciding how money should be
organized—in financial regulation, say, or campaign finance reform—rather than
the other way around.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>7. Not Everything Has to Be Earned</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bill Clinton often said that he wanted a fair
return for people who “work hard and play by the rules.” And of course working
hard and honoring the rules (at least where the rules are fair and legitimate)
deserves respect. But the national fixation on people getting what they
“deserve,” from meritocratic rewards in higher education to incarceration (“Do
the crime, do the time,” some prosecutors say) has gotten out of hand. It locks
us into a mutual suspicion of people getting away with something—pocketing some
perk or job or government benefit that they didn’t “really earn”—while ignoring
the way the whole economy tilts its rewards toward those who already have
wealth. What’s needed is to shift attention from zero-sum questions about who
gets what, and at whose expense, to bigger questions about what everyone should
get just for being part of the social order: education (including good higher
education), health care, safety in their neighborhood, an infrastructure that
works.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ironically, questions about who gets what should be
both less important and more important than they tend to be today. They should
be less important in the sense that we should worry less about whether some
people are getting things they don’t deserve. And we should care more about
what everyone gets as the groundwork of social life and what the big patterns
of distribution are. The two go together, as the reality of personal scarcity
and precariousness are the triggers for adamant policing of others’ undeserved
security and pleasure.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>8. Equal Treatment Is Not Enough</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like the rest of the Democratic Party and elected
politicians generally, the Sanders campaign came a bit late to the Black Lives
Matter movement. But the younger voters who overwhelmingly supported him, and
some of the older ones, too, are shaped by a moment in which it’s become
inescapable that the twentieth-century civil-rights revolution left many forms
of racial inequality intact, from wealth inequality to policing practices, from
de facto segregation into social “toxic” neighborhoods to exposure to literal
toxins. Some of this inequality comes from the persistence of personal bigotry
and implicit bias. But much of the persistent inequality is not individual but
structural. An economy that for forty years has given most of its new wealth to
the already wealthy has not offered much to people who were categorically
denied paths to wealth across the rest of American history. The economy
continued to deny many of its benefits even to those whom, formally speaking, it
treated evenhandedly.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A version of the same point holds for the victories
of the women’s movement. Women’s traditional exclusion and subordination gave
way to inclusion—into an economy in which working-class and middle-class
households were increasingly pressed from all directions. Individual inclusion
was better than old-style sexism, but in a world of compressed wages and no
affordable child care, entering the workforce produced new strains. Real
equality would have meant some social sharing of the costs of raising the next
generation, which had been shunted off onto women’s unpaid household labor.
Instead, while wealthy avatars of corporate feminism outsourced this work,
other families struggled.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It turns out that the American capitalism that long
took for granted a subordinated race at work and a dependent sex at home will
not automatically repair either historical injury. What has to happen now to
make good on both gender and racial emancipation is change in structures. The
structures we have now sometimes secure personally equal treatment; they also
produce persistent, predictable, inequitable results. It is these structures
that politics needs to change.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>9. We Have in Common What We Decide to Have in Common</b></span></span><br />
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This economy is hardest by far on the precarious
and displaced: undocumented workers, former factory workers whose industries
are shuttered, interns and young piece-workers just out of college and people
without college education who are all but out of the labor market. But it is a
strange bargain for people up and down the chutes and ladders of wealth,
income, and privilege. Meritocratic elites compete all their lives for the
prize of competing for more prizes, but who is really happier because they are
serving up more deliverables and satisfying all the relevant metrics? There
might be something—not a “grand bargain,” as policy mavens recently liked to
say, but maybe an alliance—to take us out of this situation. In 1958,
approaching the high-water mark of the social-democratic era in American life,
John Kenneth Galbraith argued that “the affluent society” was on its way to an
economy of widespread leisure, robust social provision, light workloads, and
new frontiers of activity undertaken for its own sake, whether work or play. It
was not the most profound vision of human liberation ever forecast, but it
described early a possible path from what Marx called the realm of necessity
into the realm of freedom. That vision was broken by a combination of
free-trade globalization, post-welfarist domestic reform, and the global growth
of inequality. Although it may not seem radical today as an end-state, steps
toward making it a real and palpable possibility
—and not just for a privileged plurality, but
really for everyone—would be radical indeed.</span></span><style>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Democracy or Barbarism</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These points, once taken as
obvious in political life, were obscured in the long 1990s to the point of
becoming unspeakable. Their return is a practical repudiation of neoliberalism
and a refutation of the crude version of the end-of-history thesis, the one
that held, in the manner of Thomas Friedman, that the regnant version of
democratic capitalism was both enough and the best a modern country could do.
The return of a demand for a different world, against respectable
discouragement, has reopened the left flank of modernity.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But the right flank has
been reopened also, in the United States and other democracies. The new
right-wing nationalism that came to power with Donald Trump has its own ways of
repudiating the authority of experts, and, indeed, of flouting empirics
altogether, disdaining inconvenient events as “fake news” while inventing its
own, such as the alleged millions of illegal votes that Trump claimed Hillary
Clinton had received in the 2016 election. It has its own recognition that
economics is entangled in power, in Trump’s populist attacks on elite collusion
and corruption and its doppelganger, his own merry path of self-dealing since
entering the White House. It has, too, its own version of solidarity, rooted in
a shifting mélange of ethno-national, religious, and racial loyalty and fear.
It is at once an extension of the modern Republican Party’s use of very old
American tropes of racial fear and an integration of those with the xenophobic
wartime mood, the perennial undercurrent of emergency and terror of disloyalty,
that the Bush administration cultivated after September 11<sup>th</sup>, 2001,
and that Obama muted but declined or failed to repudiate entirely.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In some circles one hears,
these days, a phrase from the French left of the early twentieth century,
repurposed for the clash with the new nationalism: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Socialism or barbarism</i>. If <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">socialism</i>
means the sense it has recently taken in the United States - a recognition that
democracy must be economic as well as political, that solidarity is an
essential political value that must be paired with civic equality and respect,
that the market must be subordinate to political choices and to non-market
values - than this does seem to be our choice. The politics of the long 1990s
cultivated their own insurrectionaries, by fostering and rationalizing
inequality and blithely accepting growing precariousness and loss of control in
every domain of life. The insurrections are, on the one hand, a grotesque
caricature of democracy, and, on the other, a genuine deepening of equality and
self-rule. If that is right, it would also be fair to say, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Democracy or barbarism</i>, but without making the mistake of imagining
that what we have now is a good enough democracy. Either way, the stakes are
the same.</span></span><br />
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Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-50946575704536030452017-06-23T13:02:00.003-07:002017-06-23T13:02:55.530-07:00The Long 1990s & the Present Crisis
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is a trailer for an essay that's now 24,000 words long. Spoiler alert: no flaming swords. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Donald Trump’s
calls to build a wall at the Southern border of the United States didn’t begin
in 2016, when he snatched the presidency from Hillary Clinton’s expectant
hands. His revival of white identity politics - white nationalism, if you
prefer - didn’t begin in 2011, when he made himself the mouthpiece of the
grotesque “birther” theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and
constitutionally disqualified to be President. To understand his inward,
backward-looking, conspiracy-minded version of America, you have to go back a
moment when it seemed - to many people, anyway - that the future was the very
opposite: nothing but transparency and openness, to the world and to the
future, in a time when it seemed that the suffering of history had ended and
living could begin.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bernie Sanders’s
calls for all-American “democratic socialism” came astonishingly close to
winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, but they didn’t begin
then. They didn’t begin, either, in 2013, when economist Thomas Piketty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital in the Twenty-First Century</i> confirmed
that wealth and income were flowing to the very richest, or in 2011, when
Occupy Wall Street raised the long-exiled banner of class warfare on behalf of
“the 99%.” In a 2011 Pew poll, more Americans between 18 and 29 said they had a
positive view of socialism than of capitalism; but the movement that gathered
around the Sanders campaign has its roots when some of those young people were
not yet born, and almost none had any awareness of politics, when it seemed -
to many people, anyway - that anything called “socialism” had been interred
forever, and the future was markets and more markets, to the ends of the earth
and of time.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When the Berlin
Wall came down in November of 1989, Trump had published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Art of the Deal</i> two years earlier and was busily recasting his
real-estate enterprise into narcissistic branding strategy, a business model of
pure self-promotion. He first appeared on the cover of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time</i> - a hard-to-imagine big deal in that pre-Internet world - earlier
in 1989. Sanders, recently the two-term mayor of Burlington, a progressive
enclave within the larger progressive enclave of Vermont, was preparing his
first run as an Independent Congressman, which he won in 1990. Hillary Clinton
lived in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, where her husband was serving his
fifth term in the office, and she sat on the boards of the Children’s Defense
Fund and Wal-Mart. In Cambridge, twenty-eight-year-old Barack Obama was considering
a run for the presidency of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harvard
Law Review</i>. He became the first Black president to preside in Harvard’s
Gannett House nineteen years before he entered the White House with the same
distinction.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The fall of the
Wall ushered in the short epoch in which they all made the careers they will be
remembered by, the time that congratulated itself only half-ironically on being
the End of History: the Long 1990s. It was a time when elites and would-be
elites congratulated themselves on being post-ideological, and tacked toward
becoming post-political altogether. The market economy, whose enthusiasts
announced that it has bested all its rivals in a grand historical tournament,
rapidly became a market society, in which everything from government to
intimate relationships was marked by a new “common sense” of incentives,
opportunity costs, return on investment, and brand-building. A certain kind of
world came to seem natural and inevitable - at least to many people, most of
all the gatekeepers of respectable opinion, elite education, and policy-making.
It would take decades for many to see that this world and this vision were partial,
happenstance, and incomplete. The American society that congratulated itself on
being the template for a universal nation, the natural and unmodified condition
of enlightened humanity, turned out to be the creation of the same Cold War
forces that relaxed, then disappeared, with the collapse of the Soviet Union
and its empire, and the end of the ideological and geopolitical contest between
capitalism and communism. Because the forces that had made it and held it
together were leaving the field in giddy victory by the early 1990s, this world
was set to spin apart at very moment when it was declared universal and
eternal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The return of the
conflicts that world had suppressed - the return of history, for better and
worse - is what we are struggling through now. The return of those conflicts
has been the long and tortuous political education of generations and
half-generations that were welcome to the world with the announcement that politics
had just departed, that they would be the first to live in times when all
public questions were technical, and all personal questions ethical, leaving
nothing important to politics.</span></div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-91654982008502456142017-03-13T20:44:00.002-07:002017-03-13T20:44:38.809-07:00Eight ways of looking at a landscape
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Speaking of
a part of the world as a landscape is to consider it in a specific way: as a
terrain that is viewed, seen, organized by the eye, even - especially - if it
is only the mind’s eye. A landscape is a place organized by the meanings it has
for people. I am going to talk about some of the ways that our meanings form
and organize landscapes.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmxvsVl_ZemWKH98DUjTKvRMKkATn90wKeMYx9nCo3Z90SjJDn5AfXeovmdMmENl_hgIcgYgJzY16ZechCBFPaerKMyBHSq5QRT8p9S8pdnrobusKXaLwuyWMjOBjeUpJ39lz0xLl7DOw/s1600/WISC_Native_Hill_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmxvsVl_ZemWKH98DUjTKvRMKkATn90wKeMYx9nCo3Z90SjJDn5AfXeovmdMmENl_hgIcgYgJzY16ZechCBFPaerKMyBHSq5QRT8p9S8pdnrobusKXaLwuyWMjOBjeUpJ39lz0xLl7DOw/s320/WISC_Native_Hill_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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First, as an origin. Famously, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nature</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nation, native</i>, all have the same root - birth, the place where
life arises and renews itself. [etymological image?] <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature</i>, in this sense, means the world, viewed in light of its
life-making powers, the origin of each of us and every other living thing, and,
ultimately, of every thought we could have about it, or one another. And by the
same token it is linked to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nationalism</i>,
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nativism</i>, and other doctrines that
have been demanding our attention.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I want to start at this etymology -
this common root of words that name the very idea of roots - because it is
especially vexed, and vexing. Talking of origins is always partly fictional. In
a sense, because we are born of nature, we come from the whole world. In a
sense, because we are born, we are native to just one other person. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nation</i>, with the same root, is famously
an imagined community, a story about an Us and a Them, a kind of story that has
done a lot of harm, and is not finished doing harm.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Saying these things about how
origins are fictional and nations, like nature, are constructed, is easy in my
generation of the academic humanities. You might even say it comes naturally,
that it is second nature. But I think there is something else also worth naming,
in the idea that a landscape of origin, of your birth, where you are native, is
also your nature, who and how you are. There is an image that people come to
again and again of being born from their terrain. A few examples:</div>
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E.P. Thompson’s great study, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Making of the English Working Class</i>, is very nearly the
antithesis of picturesque landscape writing. Nonetheless, the book has a steady
rhythm of place-names and terrain that infuses an earth-born quality into the
human action he details. One time he comes out and says it. Writing of Dan
Taylor, “a Yorkshire collier who had worked in the pit from the age of five and
who had been converted by the Methodists,” who “built his own meeting-house,
digging the stone out of the moors above Hebden Bridge and carrying it on his
own back” and went on to walk 25,000 miles to preach 20,000 sermons, Thompson
concludes: “he came from neither the Particular nor the General Baptist
Societies: spiritually, perhaps, he came from Bunyan’s inheritance, but
literally he just came out of the ground.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBojosZNshdtV_5SkJWYB1NFjB9iAutmfjMNpiV1nGsgblqwOXH975JK5bhmvbTK4B5ut3aTDzxpsAVC3Xa23aHoAvQhbpru0KIePMqfScnSMYUsPsbuXdhXXhj8TDk0KQIYaJ2RSHD7A/s1600/Hebden_Bridge%252C_Yorkshire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBojosZNshdtV_5SkJWYB1NFjB9iAutmfjMNpiV1nGsgblqwOXH975JK5bhmvbTK4B5ut3aTDzxpsAVC3Xa23aHoAvQhbpru0KIePMqfScnSMYUsPsbuXdhXXhj8TDk0KQIYaJ2RSHD7A/s320/Hebden_Bridge%252C_Yorkshire.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
And here is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky agrarian
writer, in an essay from the 1960s called “A Native Hill.” Berry writes of a
place “where his face is mirrored in the ground,” imagines his own death and
decay on his native hill, and concludes, “When I move to go, it is as though I
rise up out of the world.” </div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRCD6P1jgkd3uMj84-GpuYbhABIt8Rxr_CzKqUWnNiawAPU-4jhgjKviU8Ca0Y2TFN14Ra-LB7Ak0a2Wm2VouYG3xjXb1NlsSh0n_KAYUn64La90Jm061ccgz324hylYf3BBn9qDpBR7E/s1600/Native+Hill+WISC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRCD6P1jgkd3uMj84-GpuYbhABIt8Rxr_CzKqUWnNiawAPU-4jhgjKviU8Ca0Y2TFN14Ra-LB7Ak0a2Wm2VouYG3xjXb1NlsSh0n_KAYUn64La90Jm061ccgz324hylYf3BBn9qDpBR7E/s320/Native+Hill+WISC.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
I could multiply examples, but I think these will
specify the thought, or feeling, that I am after here. </div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Second, as a record of wounds. A
landscape is partly a place that is held in memory in a certain way. The
Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “It is possible that there is no
memory but the memory of wounds.” And it is surely true that the way a
landscape memorializes us, how it holds our memory, is largely in the harm we
do in our use and habitation of it. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the
passage where Wendell Berry imagines rising from the land of his “native hill,”
he also reflects that his walk is several feet below where he would have
walked, if his ancestors had not cut the land in ways that cost it all its
topsoil. The Appalachian hills where I grew up, which are steeper than his, are
a beautiful place of wreckage: mature red oaks collapse with their roots out
because the soil is so thin. Gullies slash the hillsides where people farmed
sheep during World War One, answering a booming demand for wool to make
uniforms. The streams are sluggish and muddy because all the topsoil has run
through them.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And that is nothing
compared with the condition of the coalfields, just an hour’s drive south -
less if you know exactly where you’re going. You may know some of the basic
facts about mountaintop-removal strip-mining, which combines dynamite to blast
mountains apart with earth-moving equipment that can pick up 130 tons of rubble
at a bite. You may know that the blasting lowers ridges and mountaintops by as
much as six hundred feet in a region where that is about the usual clearance
between valley and ridge. You may have heard that two thousand miles of
headwater streams have been buried under hundreds of feet of the resulting
rubble (a very conservative estimate); that five hundred individual mountains have
been destroyed, and that 1.4 million acres of native forest have been cleared
in the process. Where mining has been, the terrain is now something utterly
different from what it used to be. A terrain dominated by steep hillsides has
been replaced by a mix of plateaus with remnant or reconstructed hillsides that
are shorter and blunter than before mining. The most common pre-mining landform
was a slope with a pitch of 28 degrees, about as steep as the upper segments of
the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. Today, the most common is a plain with a
slope of 2 degrees, that is, level but uneven. Across the region,
mining has filled a steep landscape with pockets of nearly flat ground.<br />
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What does this terrain show
about us? Thoreau wrote about wild places that we go there “to see our serenity
reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them.” But what about
when what they show back to us is a breaking of the land on a geological scale?
What we find there is ecological derangement. What can we say that it reflects
of us?<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s partly because this
question is unpleasant that a third way of viewing landscapes has been so
appealing to many Americans. This is a painterly view of landscapes as
instances of aesthetic ideals. Viewed in this light, we may catalog the
qualities of landscapes in the way that Frederick Law Olmsted did those of
Yosemite Valley, which, he wrote in the 1860s, combined the following: beauty,
the look of a welcoming, regular, gentle world where you could feel at home;
and sublimity, the wild, strange, even frightening extremity of a world that
was not made for your comfort or safety at all, that was vastly bigger than
your powers and maybe even bigger than your imagination. These aesthetic
principles were also psychological, even spiritual principles: they tuned your
mind a certain way, toward peace and calm or toward inspiration and wonder.<br />
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<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If this is a painterly
ideal, what is the brush? Whatever made the world, of course, is one answer.
But another, also true, is the law that picks out these places as special and
preserves and manages them according to aesthetic principles. In national
parks, monuments, and wilderness areas, the law has picked out hundreds of
millions of acres of land as the exemplary American nature, the places where
what is best in the world reflects what is best in us, and the other way
around. In what I suspect is the most widely read of all his amazing and
invaluable work, Bill Cronon has now taught more than a generation of students
and scholars that the ideal of the exemplary, nearly sacred place is connected
with the willing sacrifice of the fallen place. In prizing what we prize, we
also give ourselves a license to neglect or wreck what we do not. More than the
atmosphere connects Yosemite with the coalfields.<br />
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<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Parks and wilderness areas
suggest a connection between the most abstract and literary ideas about the
nature of nature and why it matters to human beings, and the most material
facts about the world - the landscapes that compose it. The link between the
two, which completes the circuit, is often the law. The circuit that law
completes is very clear when we are looking at legislation as a kind of
landscape architecture - rather like the aristocratic gardens of England and
France, except that - as Olmsted emphasized - here they should be thought of as
parks for citizens, not for owners, and for that reason must be shaped by a
sovereign’s power rather than an owner’s. But just as law can perform landscape
architecture when it has a very clear, painterly template - in the same way it
can shape other landscapes in line with other ways of seeing.<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So, for instance, we might
see a landscape in a fourth way, as a stockpile of resources to use for our
utilitarian purposes. And this is the way of seeing that the US Forest Service
was created to implement in the almost 200 million acres of national forests
that it manages - an area almost the size of five Wisconsins. This idea was
very important to utilitarian reformers in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; the national forests dedicate terrain to the idea. They
make it real, as real as dirt.<br />
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<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Or you might see a
landscape as ratifying a national mission and identity. The idea was widespread
in the early republic that the world, by its nature, belonged to the people who
could make it bloom - and blooming meant being economically productive,
according to the paradigm of the agriculture and the commodity markets of
northern Europe. People who settled, timbered, and planted land could become
its owners; those who merely hunted and lives transient lives there were
owners; they passed over it like deer, the lawyers of the time said, or like
ships at sea. All of this doctrine had the convenient effect of showing that
Native Americans had never become, legally or morally speaking, rooted in the
place; only Europeans could do that. John Marshall, the second chief justice of
the US Supreme Court, explained in one of the more candid treatments of this issue
that although the European claim to North America offended one’s sense of
natural justice, it had to prevail: the alternative was to leave the continent
a forest, a wilderness.<br />
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<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This image of the continent
and the national mission it called forth is, of course, intimately linked with
the expropriation and genocide of Native Americans. And, contrary to certain
historical images, very little about the clearing and settlement that it set in
motion was spontaneous. Much of American law in the first century of
independence was dedicated to converting frontier into private property.
Federal statutes offered a series of bargains: you could become an owner, a
proprietor, by settling a place, by cutting trees in forest land or planting
them in grassland, by draining wetlands or irrigating drylands, by mining
valuable minerals or, in some cases, gathering stone. The thing was to
transform something, in a way that drew economic value from it and brought it
into the legal terms of ownership. The landscapes we mostly know, the private
land of the East and the Midwest, began in these ways. John Locke’s famous
parable, that people made property by mixing their labor with nature, happened
again and again under the aegis of American law - often via the labor of
enslaved people; in North Carolina and other Southern jurisdictions, settlers
could claim extra acres for each body the law said they owned.<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A few points are emerging
here. One is that different kinds of landscapes are produced by different kinds
of legal landscape architecture. Laws creating and managing parks are only the
most obvious example. In fact, for every part of every landscape - the soil,
the trees and other plants, the animals, the water, the oil or gas or metals
underground - the law has said, in some respects, what shall be done with it,
and, in every case, who will make that decision. The sum of these two questions
- what will be done and who decides - is our collective, often implicit
landscape architecture, whether it is the cathedral of Yosemite or Glacier or
the geology of wreckage in the Appalachian coalfields, which you can trace
through property deeds, the legislative compromise that produced the Surface
Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1978, and the interpretation of the Clean
Water Act that allows the burial of all those streams. Not every way of seeing
a landscape corresponds to a legal regime as neatly as the ones I have been
discussing; but when a way of seeing shapes a terrain, when ideas and
materiality rise to meet each other in a changing landscape, law is generally
the circuit that links them.<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A second point is that,
although I have been naming a landscape to instance each way of seeing, every
landscape in which people have taken an interest is also a landscape of
conflict. They are cross-cut by competing visions and narratives. In
Appalachia, for instance, my way of telling the story will run up against
another in which the survival of coal mining against environmentalist intrusion
is heroic. As recently as the 1970s, there was a third, advanced by the
insurgent labor movement the Miners for Democracy, which held that miners
should work in a way that preserved their own health and the health of the
land, and should strike when they were asked to dig coal in ways that either threatened
to give workers black lung or promised to destroy mountains and streams. Now
that version of the coalfields is gone, along with most of the power of the
United Mine Workers of America, and the meaning of this land is split between
two poles. From one, the sacrifice of a region for a few decades of
marginally cheaper energy is one of the great pieces of environmental injustice
in our age. From the other, the victims of environmental injustice are the
miners themselves, expelled from their work as farmers were expelled from the
land that became Shenandoah National Park, a few hours to the east of the
coalfields. I don’t share the second; I think it is ill-founded; but I do not
find it mysterious.<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In some landscapes, the
lines of conflict fall precisely along the boundaries of overlapping and
competing legal regimes. So on certain federal public lands, you find a
palimpsest like this one. A federal agency, which holds the land in the name of
all the people, both present and future generations, is directed by a statute
to plan access and resource use on - let us say - millions of acres - from
timbering and hunting and foraging to solitary camping and bird-watching. But
that land is also pocked with private claims: rights to graze cattle under the
1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which carried forward and regularized the remnants of
the old principle that public lands were open-access commonses for ranchers;
mining claims that still arise today, sometimes with huge environmental and
land-use effects, under the General Mining Law of 1872, which is the last of
the great national-mission-of-privatization laws still in effect. The land may
also be criss-crossed by public-access roads, which persist over and against
federal planners’ preferences, created under Revised Statute 2477 of 1866, part
of the general pro-development agenda that regulated American landscapes as
potential private property rather than public land, and which federal courts
have ruled are still governed by principles of private property. And those
older, use-and-development regimes interact with ecological and
environmentalist regimes from the 1960s and 1970s: designation of some of the
land as critical habitat for a threatened or endangered species may take
timbering or recreation off the table; the 1964 Wilderness Act may prohibit all
roads, motorized travel, or economic activity on some acreage, dedicating it to
what the Wilderness Act calls primitive solitude. Federal decisions to leave
flowing water in streams to preserve endangered species may conflict with
farmers’ legal right to use the same water for irrigation. And so forth. These
disparate legal regimes, overlapping on a single piece of terrain and competing
to shape it, are also practical expressions of competing landscapes, competing ways
to see, value, and inhabit a place.<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And the conflict is not
just notional or metaphoric. These overlapping, competing landscapes have their
constituencies, people invested in certain ways of relating to the natural
world, in the ways they make a living, but also at the level of identity. Those
militia types who occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon
last spring were carrying forward the view that the land really belongs to
those who work it and make it productive. There beef was with each ensuing
generation: federal land managers, Romantic aficianados of undisturbed beauty
and, of course, ecologists who can explain how cattle grazing can harm the
waterways where migratory birds rest. These landscapes are overburdened with
conflicting uses, conflicting laws, conflicting meanings, and sometimes the
lines of tension snap.<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These landscapes of
conflict, it seems to me, are very concrete expressions of something that is
often said in grandly abstract terms: that the world has entered a new
geological era, which some earth scientists and others call the Anthropocene,
the epoch of humanity. I think the Anthropocene idea is best broken down into
two ideas, which are distinct but entangled together. First is the Anthropocene
condition: the intensity and pervasiveness of human influence on the world’s
biological and chemical orders, which means that, from here forward, the world
we inhabit will be the world we have made, shared with the other life we have
valued enough to preserve it, on the landscapes our visions or, as with the
coalfields every climate-changed place, our unspoken priorities even if not the
ideas most of us would stand up to claim. Second is the Anthropocene insight,
the recognition that all these competing ideals of nature and the human place
in it are cultural creations, ways that we have learned to see and to be, and,
usually, ways of arguing about our political, economic, and cultural lives as
much as about the non-human world. Once we have peeled away the layers of human
activity that shape these landscapes, and appreciated the many angles of vision
from which they can make sense, there is no avoiding that they are Anthropocene
landscapes. What else could they be, as long as we are in them?<br />
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<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And what, then, could be
the value of imagining that you rise from a piece of land, continuous somehow
with its spirit and meaning - the idea of a landscape as an origin, the place
where I began this lecture? I would like to return to that idea now, but along
a different path, by thinking of a landscape not as an origin but, in one
sense, the opposite - as a sanctuary, a place of respite and reprieve: not the
place where you come from, but the place you flee to. “Without wilderness,”
said Senator Frank Church of Idaho, debating the Wilderness Act of 1964,
“Without wilderness, this country would become a cage.” “We need a place,”
Thoreau had written more than a century earlier, “where we feel our limits
transgressed,” a place outside our villages and subdivisions. This was
something that enslaved people understood when they escaped into the Great
Dismal Swamp, at the border of North Carolina and Virginia, and established
long-lasting settlements there with furtive ties to the solid ground where they
would quickly be reclassified as property. It was apparent to the peoples of
highland southeast Asia who resisted domination by lowland empires for many
centuries - a story Jim Scott tells in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Art of Not Being Governed</i>, a study in geographic imagination, that puts the
upland margins of empire at the center of a counter-imperial picture of
history.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I have my own way of thinking about
this question, which, as it happens, I developed while thinking about a series
of dreams that I began having a few years ago. <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
these dreams, I start walking up a wooded slope, and—departing from the low
terrain of the Carolina Piedmont where I live—the slope rises and rises,
through the loblolly pine into steep pastures, which level out into high
meadows, then rise again to crests of stone. Sometimes there’s no stone,
and the meadows are the top, sloping along a broad ridgeline, or there may be
just a couple hundred vertical feet of pasture, tufted with a mix of beech and
red oak.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Only waking destroys my new
geography. My sense that the dream showed something real is strong enough
that I have looked up topographic maps, just to see whether the hills are
there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think that the wish these dreams
express is for a way to get above a terrain without leaving it, to merge many
small horizons into one image. These dreams sketch a geography of
thinking, a way of seeing a place whole without being overcome by it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course my dream landscape is not the
only geography of thinking. It is the one that you might carry if you had
grown up where I did, in a very specific Appalachian landscape. From
anyplace that people lived, you could escape on foot to a higher spot: every
settled place contained its own upward exits. It was, really, not one
landscape, but two, a pattern of valleys (“hollows”) with its counterpart in a
second pattern of ridges. The pair of terrains were joined by steep, mainly
wooded hillsides. Knowing the valleys did not mean you knew the ridges. A
slight misstep setting off from a high place could land you in the wrong
hollow, with unexpected people, miles by road from where you meant to
be. The two landscapes had complementary logics, and moving between them
took caution and attention.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is a landscape
that would give its dissidents an upward path to escape on foot, at least for a
while, and lend its critics a commanding view. It is not a safe or certain
landscape, and moving across can always exact the price of confusion, the
likelihood of still walking the wrong way at dusk. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>With
this in mind, let’s return for a minute to those opening images of a landscape
as a point of origin. Take E.P. Thompson, whose radical collier “literally came
from the ground.” Actually, everyone in Thompson’s story feels as if they came
from the ground, and had some of it clinging to them, with its defining
chemistry, coloring, and scent, in the moment of their decisive acts. Without
saying so (not more than once, anyway), Thompson manages to conjure up that
most un-Marxist and un-academic thought, that the land itself was somehow
aligned with the populist and radical ancestors of English socialism.<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Berry, too, wants the land
to be with him for his dissent: from what he called, in the title of his most
famous book, “the unsettling of America,” the separation of identity from
place, pleasure from work, eating from knowledge. These claims of nativity are
really bids for sanctuary, for a piece of ground where the larger logic of the
world does not entirely rule, a seedbed for your dissent. What else are people
getting at when they say, “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know that we were
seeds”?<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It was a “maimed and
imperfect nature” that he was “conversant with,” Thoreau wrote in his <i>Journal</i>.
For someone who went into the landscape to see himself reflected, that is a
strong piece of self-knowledge. Walking to the ponds, as he put it, was never a
return to something pristine. It was, like politics, a way of joining in with a
record of damage, and of conceits and fantasies turned to material facts, which
then have to be inhabited.<br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The violence of
nationalism, and of nativism, is partly in their denial of this reality, their
torrid fantasy of a terrain that is theirs and no one else’s, that is home to
their meaning and no other. The violence is more concrete, of course, when it
comes down to it, in detention centers and airports and the building of walls;
but some of it belongs to this idea that any place in the world could belong
to, and ratify, just one way of being in it. A landscape that sides with its
dissenters, like a historical narrative or a constitutional culture that prizes
its dissidents and outsiders, may be a resource for a certain kind of
gentleness and self-restraint - at least for people like me whose minds are
already and always bent toward terrain. In landscapes whose meaning is as
crowded and conflictual as ours, there is room, at least, for strange kinds of
dissent, unexpected kinds of consciousness.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWQcesMilcsxjbvs0hO0RYYAq4gq9aW1yuomybC9MGlIzEGqerct6wEGdT_ya1LHStlPoFr6hOZoGQp23HkFXAU6tqDCfEVqEHhrGhjlOhW5LGbeChVGs58c7MIzlA0JvVebWgSs_rCno/s1600/uncanny2_wisc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWQcesMilcsxjbvs0hO0RYYAq4gq9aW1yuomybC9MGlIzEGqerct6wEGdT_ya1LHStlPoFr6hOZoGQp23HkFXAU6tqDCfEVqEHhrGhjlOhW5LGbeChVGs58c7MIzlA0JvVebWgSs_rCno/s320/uncanny2_wisc.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When I finish a reflection
like this one, I feel, like Berry or like E.P. Thompson’s collier, that I am
recollecting myself, rising up from the ground and reborn into my usual
consciousness. We might ask this question about any little ecological trip like
this one, any sojourn: when we return, does it make the question of how to live
among other people simpler or more complicated? If it makes it simpler, we
should mistrust where we have been. If it makes the question more complicated,
then we might, for the moment, be doing something right, no matter how difficult
making sense of it may be.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYbJ7HI69su4su-S2fcXEX-vnmBoAh8Z0nBywEpJXvSBPtorQ7peOrZXzEWbL55JD6cUb8HLJs2aGskVJC0pPLcbVjzWoelnwDOwm2DnU2fN_PtOG95iYPpVW3N1XSv8l_aJ9J20QjNs/s1600/uncanny3_wisc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYbJ7HI69su4su-S2fcXEX-vnmBoAh8Z0nBywEpJXvSBPtorQ7peOrZXzEWbL55JD6cUb8HLJs2aGskVJC0pPLcbVjzWoelnwDOwm2DnU2fN_PtOG95iYPpVW3N1XSv8l_aJ9J20QjNs/s320/uncanny3_wisc.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-37046170068847524362017-01-29T06:23:00.003-08:002017-01-29T06:23:56.321-08:00Nine days in: a sketch of Trumpism
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I. <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">Trumpism as a Style of Politics</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Donald Trump won the Republican
primaries by distinguishing himself sharply from more conventional contenders.
How much his November victory relied on his distinctive political style, as
opposed to his simply managing not to lose control of the Republican
electorate, is not the question of this paper; it is enough to say that his
success ratified his style and brought it to the very center of national politics.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What is that style? To summarize, it
relies on open irrationalism and indifference to fact, an ethno-nationalist
version of the nation that puts a friend-enemy distinction at the heart of
politics, a derogatory and belligerent manner that plays on misogyny and other
forms of bigotry, and a fantastical image of what it means to understand or act
in politics. There is a certain inadequacy in a laundry-list of particulars, as
the distinctiveness of Trumpist politics can seem (and seems to me) greater
than the sum of its parts. With that caveat stated, here is a list to get us
started.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A. The Characteristics of Trumpism</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>1. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Eclipse of Constitutionalism</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
quite specific (and possibly parochial) but, I think, telling point to begin:
in the course of his campaign, Trump scarcely talked about the Constitution. Not
all candidates do, of course; Bernie Sanders, the other signal insurgent of
2016, did not much.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a>
But there is a standard lexicon of American political rhetoric that centers on
the idea of constitutional community, the speaker’s preferred versions of
liberty and equality, and (not identical but snugly integrated into these), a
narrative of American history that vindicates these nation-defining principles
in a more or less straightforward fashion.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a>
Ted Cruz, who came as close as any opponent to stopping Trump in the primaries,
makes for an instructive contrast. Cruz’s stump speech was a paean to First
Amendment religious liberty, set within a familiar story of rag-tag colonists,
an emancipating Civil War, and Ronald Reagan’s restoration of constitutional
balance. In these respects, Cruz’s speeches presented held up a right-wing
mirror to Barack Obama’s center-left Lincolnian rendition of the same themes,
which emphasize the need for recurrent, cumulative redemption of principles of
liberty and equality that have often been betrayed.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a>
As this pairing suggests, the language of constitutionalism is in no way
politically neutral (whatever that might mean). Rather, as a mode of persuasion
it invokes a substantive version of political community, amplified by the claim
to transcend partisanship, aiming at an intimate form of intellectual coercion
by its appeal to identity: if you do not side with me, you are not really
(normatively speaking) an American, not who you say you are.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a>
Nonetheless, it does in some way call people together, or, perhaps better put, assume
a commonality that then has to be further built out of contest & struggle,
but locates that struggle within the premise of an under-specified, constitutive
commonality. Trump broke with the most familiar practice of American political
rhetoric, the constitutional language that braids every partisan assertion with
a symmetrical insistence on the defining, abiding commonality of American
identity. (A skeptic might contend that abandoning these forms of
constitutional rhetoric advantaged Trump precisely because of widespread
recognition that they are in fact partisan codes.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a>
Maybe so.)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">2.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Politics of Friends and Enemies</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Trump’s
rhetorical departure from American political convention chimes with a second
signature of his style, marking divisions within the political community with
the language of “friends” and “enemies” (and rather profligately deploying the
same language at the borders of territory and citizenship as well). It was
remarkable when Trump tweeted ironic New Year greetings to “my enemies” at the
end of 2016, but it was also a vivid instance of a pattern. Notoriously, he
threatened to put his general election opponent Hillary Clinton, in prison
after the campaign (and then won points for magnanimity when he withdrew this
astonishing provocation). In January of 2016, he told students at evangelical
Liberty University that Christians suffer from insufficient tribalism: “We
don’t band together, frankly. Other religions, they do. We’ve gotta band
together around Christianity. We’ve gotta protect [sic] because bad things are
happening.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a>
These contrasts were crystallized in an extraordinary pronouncement at a May
2016 rally: “The important thing is the unification of the people, and all the
other people don’t matter.” This sentence has become key evidence in political
theorist Jan-Werner Mueller’s argument that Trump’s populism shares with that
of the new European right a twisting of popular sovereignty that identifies the
normative “people” with a subset of the actually existing people - a subset
that may be identified racially, linguistically, religiously, ethically, or
through a series of slippages among these. The emphasis on slippages strikes me
as providing the best characterization: the internal enemy will always be, in
one specification, the indisputably bad or dangerous person - the rapist, to
take a notorious example - but the category will soon expand to include the
“Mexican” generally, or the political opponent, or whichever group the speaker
wishes to mobilize sentiment against. Another representative move in this
respect was Trump’s tweeted proposal after his victory that people who burn the
United States flag should be stripped of citizenship; everyone from George H.W.
Bush to Hillary Clinton has taken advantage of Supreme Court precedent to
propose consequence-free criminalization of flag-burning, but it was emblematic
of Trump’s political style to go further and propose expulsion from the
political community.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">3.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aggression and Love</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There
is an emotional corollary to this friend-enemy political rhetoric. Trumpism is
also marked by personalized aggression as a style of political confrontation:
personalized toward opponents, such as Trump’s demeaned and unmanned primary
opponents, and in his nakedly misogynistic attacks on Hillary Clinton and his
tweet attacking Indiana union leader Chuck Jones, who had criticized him during
the Carrier factory controversy there; and personalized in the attacker as a
style of self-presentation that is his signature. Trump offsets this
aggressiveness with pronouncements of “love” - for his audience especially, but
also for worthy members of whatever nationality or other group he has just
attacked.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a>
“We’re going,” he promised a North Carolina audience in October, 2016,
responding to new charges of sexually inappropriate conduct, “to be a unified
nation, a nation of love.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a>
The rawness of the emotional assertion, oscillating between incipiently violent
and embracing, is arresting. I am tempted to call it political emotion
unsublimated.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>4. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Ethno-national Polity</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Trump’s
friend-enemy contrast and personalized emotional rawness blend easily into another
characteristic of his political style, an ethno-national and/or religious
picture of national community. To be sure, he reliably falls back on assurances
that he embraces law-abiding immigrants (and all Americans), and his electoral
support among some immigrant communities indicates that plenty of people take
those declarations seriously. But Trump is also the candidate who called
repeatedly for a blanket ban on Muslim admission to the country, invoked an
explicitly Christian “we” in a call for intensified tribal solidarity, and moved
without any simulacrum of a logical transition from grim images of undocumented
criminals to the suggestion that a descendant of Mexican-American immigrants
could not fairly adjudicate a case involving Trump. Trump’s racially and
nationally selective friend-enemy language must be taken, too, in light of the
views of his chief political strategist, Stephen Bannon, who argues for a
“global Tea Party” of middle-class nationalist movements, explicitly invoking
affinities with Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharartiya Janata Party,
Marine le Pen’s National Front, and the advocates of Brexit - each in its way
an exclusionary consolidation of national identity in contrast to a religious
and/or racial other.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a>
There is a certain coherence between Trump’s indifference to constitutional
versions of national unity and his embrace of versions built of “the people” that
are partial and exclusionary. It is as if the ethno-national version of shared
identity filled the space previously occupied by the constitutional one.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a>
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">5.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Political Agency of the First-person
Shooter</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Trumpism
is also marked by a bizarre form of hyper-individualism in its approach to
political knowledge, judgment, and action. Trump’s famous “I alone” boast of
his unique power to change a compromised political and economic system, uttered
during the Republican National Convention, expressed an image of how political
action happens that has been recurrent in his campaign: a pumped-up great-man
image in which one special person, acting with force and decision, rips away
institutional barriers and other constraints. This is “strong-man” politics not
just in the sense of favoring a swaggerer and braggart as a candidate, but a
vision of what politics <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>, and how
one makes things happen in that medium.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
hyper-individualist image extends from political action to political knowledge.
It is emblematic that Trump began the current version of his political career
purveying the claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States and
was therefore constitutionally ineligible for the presidency. And he concluded
his presidential campaign with a two-minute television ad accusing Hillary
Clinton and her Democratic allies of “secret meetings” to “undermine American
sovereignty,” the stock-in-trade of right-wing conspiracy thinking in this
country since opposition to the League of Nations, if not since the French
Revolution scare of the 1790s. (The latter contributed to the Federalist
Congress’s passing the Alien Act, an early instance of ideological xenophobia.)
In between, Trump almost gratuitously suggested that primary opponent Ted
Cruz’s father had been connected with Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s
assassin, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">National Enquirer</i>-worthy claim
premised on an old photograph of someone who might have resembled the senior
Cruz.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Both
strongman imagery, which Trump takes to a comic-book super-hero pitch, and
conspiracy theory are basically forms of fantasy. The fantasy is that one’s own
powers could press back the opacity and resistance of the political world,
revealing patterns hidden to others and grabbing levers of effective action.
Trumpism appeals, evidently, to people who find this fantasy charismatic rather
than ridiculous, who would like to identify themselves with it even if they do
not quite believe they can embody it. If I may speculate, it seems plausible
that such a view appeals to people who experience the world’s obstacles as
obdurate and opaque, and nonetheless have a sense of themselves as meant to
enjoy mastery over it, or at least feel frustration rather than resignation at
lacking that mastery.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">6.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Irrationalism and Emotion</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
indulgence of conspiratorial thinking and fantastical images of political
agency, which I have suggested might be in part a form of compensation for
despair of affecting or even understanding politics in ordinary ways, can serve
as synecdoche for a larger pattern in Trumpist politics: an abandonment of even
the appearance of adhering to canons of empirical fallibilism, consistency in
assertion of fact, rationality linking one’s assertions, and the openness to
challenge and disagreement that are implied by taking these standards
seriously.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span></span></span></a> It
is important, of course, not to make this contrast with pre-Trumpist politics
too categorical or self-congratulatory. It is almost too banal to say that
political speech is always instrumental and always aims partly at manipulation
of feeling. Nonetheless, there is something arresting in the degree of Trump’s
defiance of the normative canons of public argument, from shifting sands and
disappearing streams of his syntax to the casual reversal of factual assertions
and indifference to evidence in favor of the intuition of the moment. The
consequence is a switch in the goal of political speech from persuasion to
emotional trigger, from an invitation to believe what is proffered to
permission to feel something - often, as in the case of deliberate violations
of “political correctness,” something Trump’s supporters may believe they are
otherwise prohibited from feeling.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">7.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hyperbole, Irony, and Deniability</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Trumpist
politics is hyperbolic. Its hyperbole, however, relies on a quite different
quality that complements it. This is a self-aware, even halfway ironic
understanding of political utterance as a kind of performance, deliberately
overwrought for effect, and to be indulged because it is, after all,
performance. Here it feels pertinent that Trump has been, among other things, a
promoter of professional wrestling - a vulgar-operatic exercise in friend-enemy
hyperbole <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par excellence</i>. If it has
become cliché that politics is merged in a series of ways with entertainment,
the introduction to politics of this genre of entertainment is at least worth
noting. Part of the point of professional wrestling, after all, is that taking
it in any way literally would be a sure sign of failing to understand it. Even
as audiences at Trump’s campaign speeches were invited to feel that the country
was in “disaster” and that the candidate would soon set everything right, there
was another sense in which they were in on the joke of a performance whose key
elements included the appeal of the overwrought, the quick conjuring of extreme
emotions, but with the ready antidote of the self-checking shrug, the stock
line. (“Not going to happen. Not going to happen.”) The genius of the
observation that Trump’s supporters took him seriously but not literally was
that the element of performance kept up the option of disowning the entailments
of what the candidate said. A menacing or inflammatory statement might be, from
one instant to the next, or even in the same moment, the sort of thing everyone
must take seriously and the sort of thing one knows better than to take
seriously. This rhetorical manner is crystallized in the familiar double move
of provocative breaches of “political correctness,” which Trump’s supporters
often called a major part of his appeal: one the one hand, the Trumpist urges, the
dangers of liberal thought control are urgent truths that honest people ignore
at their peril and dishonest elites labor to conceal; on the other hand, what,
brah, can’t handle a joke?<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>B. A Trumpist Worldview: Threat,
Identity, and Legitimacy</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
now want to attempt a general interpretation of Trumpist politics, focused on
two connected parts: the picture of the world in which this style of leadership
purportedly makes sense and the sorts of claims to legitimacy that Trumpist
politics makes. I argued near the beginning of the first Obama administration
that presidential rhetoric across eras of American politics portrayed the
nature of political community, its defining capacities, threats, and tasks, in
ways that tended to justify one mode of governance or another.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span></span></span></a>
For instance, between Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson (with some continuity
into Richard Nixon), it was a characteristic presidential refrain that complex economic
and social life would overwhelm individual agency without the counter-force of
a strong regulatory state. Ronald Reagan perfected a reversal of this mode, in
which the site of effective agency moved to individual initiative and
community-level cooperation, and the image of the market economy switched from
alien, opaque, and potentially threatening force to homelike nexus of mutually
beneficial collaboration. Bill Clinton adjusted the register, with a bit more
emphasis on community and a bit less on the market, but kept the basic picture.
For another example, consider the Lincolnian narration of American history as a
long struggle to redeem elemental but compromised principles of equal liberty,
which Barack Obama perfected in a tradition that runs through Martin Luther
King, Jr., in contrast to a Goldwater-Reagan line of historical interpretation
in which redemption would be superfluous because the country has been, with
some wrinkles, right from the start.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span></span></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Judged
by the history of American presidential rhetoric, Trumpist politics is singular
in its portrayal of country as besieged at every point, its ordinary
inhabitants under threat from (to take a few stock examples from his speeches)
criminal immigrants, terrorists admitted as refugees or allowed across porous
borders, violent criminals escaped from prisons, and residents of their own
dysfunctional neighborhoods. A typical Trumpist name-check of the Second
Amendment ignores the doughty armed patriots of a Ted Cruz speech in favor of a
frightened couple with “a gun on every table, they’re so afraid” of roving
criminals.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span></span></span></a>
Absent from his speeches are Ronald Reagan’s Springsteen-appropriating,
Whitman-hinting images of steelworkers and farmers whose work is the strong and
healthy heart of America. Trump portrays a country traduced and abandoned by
its elites, infiltrated by enemies and domestic rot, and in need of strong
defense. Not since Woodrow Wilson gave the first inaugural address to describe
the lives of women and children, factory workers and dwellers in urban slums,
whom he called on a strong government to protect from savage market forces, has
a president portrayed Americans as so pervasively victimized and essentially
vulnerable. Wilson’s portrait, however, was of social vulnerability created by an
order of economic power, which needed a counter-order of political regulation
to mitigate it. Trump’s is of infiltrating invasion and moral rot, in need of a
strong leader to defend its good elements against the bad, the truly national
against the literally or figuratively alien.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is also a zero-sum world, in
which the purpose of “deals” and strong leadership, particularly in the
international realm, is to take a larger share for one’s own people, at the
expense of others. A recurrent theme of Trump’s accusation that political
elites has disserved and abandoned Americans was this zero-sum image of trade
deals and other international accords, in which the premise was that one side
must always be left short - frequently ripped off - and the goal was to be on
the winning side. “We will bring back our wealth and bring back our dreams,”
which had been “redistributed around the world” by disloyal elites, he
explained in his hyper-nationalist inaugural address, whose slogan was “America
first!”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span></span></span></a>
This is, of course, a dramatic rejection of Barack Obama’s theme of globalist
reciprocity in trade and political cooperation. More basically, it is an
imaginary political economy in which the themes of tribalism and friend-enemy
contrast make an inevitable, pseudo-empirical kind of sense. The image is of a
country in crisis, set within a world tending to crisis by virtue of its
perennial and inevitable qualities of tribalism and zero-sum distribution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In this world, presidential
leadership serves the following role: to serve as uniquely powerful and
effective individual tribune of “Americans,” defined normatively as those who
are on the right side of the friend-enemy distinction, who are loyal to the
proper vision of the country, who participate in the version of “unity” and
“solidarity” that Trump defined as the keys to national identity in his
inaugural address. The basis of legitimacy here is the virtual representation,
in the person of the president, of a country whose membership is nominally
all-inclusive is also recurrently defined with reference to ethno-national,
religious, ideological, and ethical lines of authenticity, loyalty, and desert.
Substantive alignment with a tendentiously partial version of American
identity, expressed aggressively, and powered by the sentiment of belonging
(and of rejecting what does not belong) forms the basis of the right to rule. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I have argued elsewhere that Sanders’s
relative lack of interest in constitutional framings for his egalitarian claims
reflected his attachment to, and revival of, a version of left politics for
which American identity is not especially central, an approach that Aziz Rana
argues has been little seen since the early twentieth century. [Purdy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Atlantic</i> essay; Rana, intro to current
book manuscript]</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Jeff Tulis on presidential rhetoric;
Purdy, Presidential Popular Constitutionalism; Rana on “creedal” rhetoric.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Rana’s superb treatment of this; maybe
my Guardian pieces from back then.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Siegel, Post</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Pozen, Constitutional Bad Faith. </span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Speech details.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> For instance, a relatively scripted and
disciplined speech on immigration, delivered in Phoeniz, Arizona on August 31,
2016, included the following: “I love the people of Arizona”; “I am a man who
loves my country”; Mexico’s president is “a man who truly loves his country”;
Trump’s opposition to immigration is mitigated by “my love for the people of
Mexico”; “our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think
are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us”; “to make sure that those
we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people”; and “I
love you.” </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-donald-trump-immigration-speech-transcript-20160831-snap-htmlstory.html"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-donald-trump-immigration-speech-transcript-20160831-snap-htmlstory.html</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><a href="http://time.com/4532181/donald-trump-north-carolina-accusers-speech-transcript/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">http://time.com/4532181/donald-trump-north-carolina-accusers-speech-transcript/</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Bannon’s Vatican speech.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> As Aziz Rana points out, constitutional
conceptions of political community were relatively unimportant for Progressives
of the Teddy Roosevelt era, who were attached to an ethno-national
understanding the United States as connected with England and other Anglo-Saxon
settler colonies, such as Australia and South Africa.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I have in mind, of course, Jurgen
Habermas’s reconstruction of communicative practice in his discourse ethics,
especially Volume Two of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Theory of
Communicative Action</i>.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Other features of Trumpist politics
stand out, of course: One is the casual attitude to the blending of public
power and private wealth and influence, the familist inner circle. The familist
blending of public and private authority and advantage resonates with a larger sense
of the bending or breaking of form-giving limits on the pursuit and exercise of
power.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Purdy, Presidential Popular
Constitutionalism </span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> One half of this account in Aziz Rana’s
essays on constitutional redemption in Obama’s politics.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> [Cite to the speech in which he said
this.]</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn16" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6836086390387532058#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Inaugural address.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-28055653280337330532017-01-01T11:27:00.001-08:002017-01-01T11:27:16.711-08:002016 writing
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I wrote a
lot outside scholarship this year, and decided to put what I think holds up in
one place, in categories: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I wrote a lot on the Sanders
campaign, the ways that certain establishment liberals resisted it, and what I
think we can learn from its remarkable success.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bernie, Socialism, and Liberalism</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/bernie-sanders-not-new-barack-obama">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/bernie-sanders-not-new-barack-obama</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/bernie-sanders-theory-of-change-response-to-paul-krugman">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/bernie-sanders-theory-of-change-response-to-paul-krugman</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-paul-krugman-liberal-political-grown-up">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-paul-krugman-liberal-political-grown-up</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/eleven-theses-bernie-sanders-generation-democratic-socialism">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/eleven-theses-bernie-sanders-generation-democratic-socialism</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/bernie-sanders-kenosha-chris-hayes-msnbc-town-hall-trump/">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/bernie-sanders-kenosha-chris-hayes-msnbc-town-hall-trump/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
More generally, I wrote on the rise
of populism and where it seems to be leading, in the US and around the world:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/136328/red-state-blues">https://newrepublic.com/article/136328/red-state-blues</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-bundys-occupy-oregon">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-bundys-occupy-oregon</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-two-populisms/">https://www.thenation.com/article/the-two-populisms/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.scalawagmagazine.org/articles/what-west-virginia-is-saying">http://www.scalawagmagazine.org/articles/what-west-virginia-is-saying</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I wrote on Trump before he was the
nominee, and before he was the president-elect, trying to understand what was
distinctive about his campaign and what it portended:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/donald-trump-ted-cruz-gop-primary-tribalism">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/donald-trump-ted-cruz-gop-primary-tribalism</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/andrew-sullivan-trump-concern-trolling-for-democracy">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/andrew-sullivan-trump-concern-trolling-for-democracy</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/donald-trump-supporters-left-strategy">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/donald-trump-supporters-left-strategy</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wrote a bit about the Trump aftermath:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/donald-trump-victory-tomorrow-fight-socialism">https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/donald-trump-victory-tomorrow-fight-socialism</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
about North Carolina politics:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-north-carolina-governor-pat-mccrory-stumbled-on-transgender-rights">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-north-carolina-governor-pat-mccrory-stumbled-on-transgender-rights</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/north-carolinas-partisan-crisis">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/north-carolinas-partisan-crisis</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-voting-rights-victory-in-north-carolina">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-voting-rights-victory-in-north-carolina</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
about Constitutionalism & legal theory:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/127955/constitution-tuck-sleeping-sovereign">https://newrepublic.com/article/127955/constitution-tuck-sleeping-sovereign</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/scalias-contradictory-originalism">http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/scalias-contradictory-originalism</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As always, I wrote on environmental politics, in Appalachia,
in history, and for the future (and am sneaking in Katrina Forrester’s
wonderful review of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Nature</i> in
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nation</i>)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/the-violent-remaking-of-appalachia/474603/">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/the-violent-remaking-of-appalachia/474603/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/how-the-environmental-movement-can-recover-its-soul/509831/">https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/how-the-environmental-movement-can-recover-its-soul/509831/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-anthropocene-truism/">https://www.thenation.com/article/the-anthropocene-truism/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/130791/wild-way-save-planet">https://newrepublic.com/article/130791/wild-way-save-planet</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and What I love - an essay on Gillian Welch’s music, one on
Thoreau and making sense of the world in a time of political alienation and
fear, and another cheat, this one an essay on growing up under neoliberalism,
which n+1 brought out from behind the paywall this year.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/twenty-years-of-listening-to-gillian-welch">http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/twenty-years-of-listening-to-gillian-welch</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/what-i-had-lost-was-a-country/">https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/what-i-had-lost-was-a-country/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/politics/the-accidental-neoliberal/">https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/politics/the-accidental-neoliberal/</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-88530483630980182442016-08-04T05:16:00.002-07:002016-08-04T05:16:22.039-07:00To Artemis
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sunset at Lousi,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The temple of Artemis the Tamer,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Protectress of herds.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Below the edge of the hill, invisible,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The quick, bright bells of sheep traverse northward,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And a grumbling laugh from their shepherd.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then, at the same slope, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
West end of the temple, short edge of the rectangle,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A golden eagle rises into sight, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just before us – you could throw a rock –, finds a thermal,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Holds, regards the temple, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Rises, wheels to the west, ending</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A dark speck against pale orange</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the last edge of sight.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Huntress and the scourge of hunters, she</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Turned Actaeon to a stag, her beast, and sent</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
His own hounds to tear him to pieces.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Orion, whom she loved, she shot to prove her aim,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tricked by her jealous brother, Apollo,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then placed his belt and club among the stars.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Adonia, the Aloadae, Agamemnon,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She punished for boasting they could out-hunt her,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For slaying sacred deer,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For pursuing her.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter, she snatched from her own
altar</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And took for a companion,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Substituting a stag before the knife.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
According to Callimachus, she took her bow and arrows</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From Hephaestus. Her dogs</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Were a gift from Pan, whose panic could not reach her.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Preceding the Greeks, echoing Persia’s mother of nature,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arta</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">art</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">arte</i>,
“excellent and holy,”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As she was worshipped at Ephesus: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The many-breasted goddess.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arktos</i>, “bear,”
her cult in Attica,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Home to young adepts called the little bears of Artemis,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Who left her to rejoin their cities as women.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Always and everywhere goddess of the forest and mountains, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Who accepted in sacrifice “a holocaust of beasts,”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whose violence sheltered wild things and herds.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Guide in the coming of age, and always</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Parthenos</i>, the one
who brings through the new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gyne</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And stays behind.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Twin sister of Apollo,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Who preceded him in birth,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Does she pause on the narrow, green ledges</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of Obraxos, the rock, two-thousand foot cliff</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Over Aiges, the village of the goats,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And consider double-peaked Parnassus, her brother’s home,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Snowy and bare across the Gulf of Corinth?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-18373445634984319772016-06-30T09:28:00.001-07:002016-06-30T09:28:18.030-07:00NYT oped examYear 2700. Qualifying exam for the doctoral degree in historical methods.<br />
<br />
A. Based on a close reading of Frank Bruni's Brexit commentary, "A Bachelor Named Britain, Looking for Love" (reproduced below the question),<br />
<br />
Please describe the bearing of the New York Times op-ed staff on
the collapse of serious political argument in American establishment
institutions in the early 21st century.<br />
<br />
1. Their Geocities blog-worthy nattering straight-up caused the collapse. (Great Persons Theory of the Collapse)<br />
<br />
2. Their writings were a symptom of the economy's turn to emotional
labor and the rise of chatty, engaging forms of Artificial Intelligence.
(Marxist Theory of the Collapse)<br />
<br />
3. They were simply one
semiotic eddy in the discourse-field of the pandering think-piece, which
came to embody thought itself in thinking bodies. (Foucauldian Theory
of the Collapse.)<br />
<br />
4. Their work attracted paying readers and
was, just for that reason, the best its time could produce. The collapse
was caused by the $15 minimum wage, maybe? (Neoclassical Economic
Theory of the Collapse.)<br />
<br />
5. It was the job they had. They had
been good reporters, in some cases. None of them knew how to code. They
could practically taste retirement. Maybe some of them had dirt on the
publisher? (Contingent Theory of the Collapse.)<br />
<br />
6. They were
already zombies. (Theory of Sacred History, derived from the recovery of
the works of George R.R. Martin after the Collapse.)<br />
<br />
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="108" data-total-count="108">
It has been forever since <a class="meta-loc" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/unitedkingdom/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about United Kingdom.">Britain</a> was single, and there will be many lonesome and disorienting nights ahead.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="108" data-total-count="108">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="43" data-total-count="151">
Maybe we should fix it up with Switzerland.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="43" data-total-count="151">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="338" data-total-count="489">
Not immediately, of course. The divorce from the <a class="meta-org" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/european_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the European Union.">European Union</a>
was just announced. The paperwork hasn’t been filed. There could be a
loss of nerve, a relaxing of conjugal rules, tulips from Holland,
chocolates from Belgium. Greece and Portugal could promise to stop
leaving dirty dishes in the sink, Germany to quit hogging the remote.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="338" data-total-count="489">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="321" data-total-count="810">
But
as things stand now, Britain will soon stand apart, and we all know how
that goes: exhilaration, followed by panic, leading to an
age-inappropriate Tinder account. Oh, look, here’s Iceland, flashing its
most voluptuous volcanoes. Nah, too stony and lugubrious, and you can
listen to only so much Björk. Swipe left.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="321" data-total-count="810">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="350" data-total-count="1160">
Britain
on its own is unfathomable. Think of its relationship history: epic
trans-Atlantic romances, audacious trans-Pacific affairs, flings in this
jungle, hookups on that dune. It was usually dominant, occasionally
submissive but always coupled — if not tripled, quadrupled or
quintupled. It had a lust for entanglement if no talent for fidelity.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="350" data-total-count="1160">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="194" data-total-count="1354">
But
it’s not the overlord it once was. Those imperial pheromones are gone.
Where a crown once rested, a bald spot spreads. Britain’s going to need
primping, prodding, perhaps a prescription.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="35" data-total-count="1389" id="story-continues-1">
And introductions. So: Switzerland?</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="35" data-total-count="1389" id="story-continues-1">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="195" data-total-count="1584">
If
marrying rich is the goal, marrying Switzerland is the jackpot. And
Switzerland won’t do what Britain loathed in its current spouse and
encourage poorer, darker people to drop in for fondue.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="308" data-total-count="1892">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="308" data-total-count="1892">
But
it’s so worryingly petite. So wearyingly standoffish, resisting the
E.U. even while enveloped and protected by it. And it’s sure to insist
on a prenup longer than all of the <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry_potter/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="Recent and archival news about Harry Potter.">Harry Potter</a> novels combined. Britain needs freer and easier love than that, especially as its jowls sag and its pound droops.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="308" data-total-count="1892">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="176" data-total-count="2068">
Maybe
that means Albania, Montenegro or Macedonia. They’re the mail-order
brides of the continent, dreaming of an “I do” from the E.U. Surely
they’d settle for Britain.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="427" data-total-count="2495">
But
would Britain settle for them? The bloated pride that brought it to
this juncture won’t allow for a significant other that’s <em>too </em>other
and insignificant, and most outsiders can’t locate Albania on a map.
(Go south to the heel of Italy, turn left, cross the Adriatic, hope for
the best.) There are better charted, more ego-salving corners of Europe
that haven’t bedded down with Brussels and are still on the market.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="427" data-total-count="2495">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="267" data-total-count="2762">
Like
Norway. It and Britain have plenty in common — they’re both wintry,
watery, fishy, boozy — but also bring different, complementary assets to
the table. In Norway’s case, oil. In Britain’s, Adele. If that’s not a
recipe for global domination, what is?</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="267" data-total-count="2762">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="130" data-total-count="2892">
Britain isn’t a bachelor like most. It has been married so many times that it has pretty much run through the available options.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="130" data-total-count="2892">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="332" data-total-count="3224">
Its predicament reminds me of the movie “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9stplJF1ek">What’s Your Number</a>?,”
which I saw so that you wouldn’t have to. Anna Faris plays a Bostonian
who believes that she has reached her maximum allotment of sexual
partners and that her only hope for a husband is to circle back and
reconnect with someone she disconnected from previously.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="332" data-total-count="3224">
</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="368" data-total-count="3592">
For
Britain that could be India. Australia. Much of Africa. Some of the
Middle East. Its exes are everywhere, though approaching any of them
would require a new humility, as the Britain of yesteryear wasn’t a
particularly modest or accommodating suitor. It typically got the better
end of the deal, until the E.U. came along and the arrangement wasn’t
so lopsided.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="368" data-total-count="3592">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="371" data-total-count="3963" id="story-continues-2">
America
is Britain’s most prominent ex of all: the Elizabeth Taylor to its
Richard Burton. Should our onetime colonial master become our 51st
state? If we acted quickly enough, Boris Johnson could be tapped as
Donald Trump’s running mate, creating a tandem of tresses so perversely
dazzling that it alone makes the case. This may have been Johnson’s plan
all along.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="371" data-total-count="3963" id="story-continues-2">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="186" data-total-count="4149">
Britain
is no more geographically nonsensical for us than Hawaii or Alaska,
though it’s probably too long a cultural stretch. It simply lacks the
requisite prevalence of gun ownership.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="292" data-total-count="4441">
Which
makes it a better fit for Canada. Canada is saner, except about ice
hockey. It’s Britain’s obvious match: comparably affluent, sufficiently
English-speaking. Together Britain and Canada can laugh at the crudeness
of us Americans, a favorite shared pastime and an understandable one.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="292" data-total-count="4441">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="200" data-total-count="4641">
Britain
is suddenly leaderless, while Canada suddenly has a leader, Justin
Trudeau, who’s an international heartthrob. He can expand his portfolio
to two continents, and has tidy hair. Sorry, Boris.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-node-uid="1" data-para-count="228" data-total-count="4869">
And
the monarchy survives! Canada never ceased its ceremonial fealty to it,
and bows before Queen Elizabeth II much as Britain does. It’s a source
of puzzlement, but it’s a bridge to Britain, which is going to need the
love.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-47082370980659276252016-05-12T21:54:00.000-07:002016-05-12T21:54:31.209-07:00Bootleg John Darnielle, aka The Mountain Goats, played an amazing solo show at Durham's Pinhook tonight to raise money for groups working against North Carolina's anti-trans (and anti-Fight for Fifteen) HB2.<br />
<br />
He finished with "Home on the Range." And his version of that cowboy song included this excursus, which I've reproduced here as faithfully as I can because it brought me joy, and I wanted others to feel that as well.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
“<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How often at night when the heavens are bright,<br />
With the light from the glittering stars,<br />
Have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“Here the author of ‘Home on the
Range’ makes a grave error. There are inconceivably many stars. And if even a
billionth of those stars contain life, the lives they are living there must be
so different we could not even imagine them. Maybe their ways of tolerating and
living with one another are so far beyond ours that our most radical forms of
openness and kindness would seem cruel and draconian to them. (Probably we
would make war on them for that.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“And he
asks a question of the stars: if their glory exceeds that of ours.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I think
we can answer this in the affirmative. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“They are stars. We are flesh and
bone. We could not even approach a star. We could not even approach the Human
Torch. His touch would consume us in fire. And he’s just the Human Torch, not
some star that has been sitting in the firmament for longer than you can
imagine. Like, even if you understand math, you can’t really imagine how old
the stars are.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“If their
glory exceeds that of ours.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Oh, give
me a home, where the buffalo roam…”</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-56649873636015174962016-04-14T12:18:00.002-07:002016-04-14T12:18:31.745-07:00America"Make America Be Great America Again":<br />
<br />
A Donald Trump Pastiche on Langston Hughes's great poem.<br />
<br />
In this version, Trump rewrites the first few stanzas, then begins inserting his own language in capitals.<br />
<br />
Make America be America again.<br /> Make it be the tremendous business model it used to be.<br /> Make it be the deal-maker on the plane<br /> Seeking a deal where he himself owns the plane.<br />
<br />
(America still isn’t America enough for me.)<br />
<br />
Make America be the dream I’m going to tell you about —<br /> It’s a strong dream, a great dream, you will love it,<br /> Believe me, you will feel like a king,<br /> And there will no room at the inn for losers.<br />
<br />
(It isn’t America enough for me yet.)<br />
<br />
O, make my land be a land where Liberty<br /> Doesn’t have to listen to embarrassing, incompetent so-called leaders,<br /> Or anyone, really, and opportunity is real, and life is free,<br /> Or not free, but let me tell you, you get what you pay for.<br />
<br />
(There’s never been a price or subsidy big enough for me,<br /> And, can you believe, it some people still want stuff for free?)<br />
<br />
[Switch to Hughes's original in lower case, Trump interjections in caps.]<br />
<br />
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?<br /> And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?<br />
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, <br /> I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. <br />
(I MEAN, NOT LITERALLY, BUT THE NEGROES LOVE ME, YOU KNOW. THEY LET THEIR FRIENDS CALL THEM THAT.)<br /> I am the red man driven from the land,<br /> I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—<br />
PSYCHE!<br />
And finding only the same old stupid plan<br /> Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.<br />
<br />
THAT’S RIGHT, SUCKER.<br />
<br />
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,<br /> Tangled in that ancient endless chain<br /> Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!<br /> Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!<br /> Of work the men! Of take the pay!<br /> Of owning everything for one’s own greed!<br />
NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE.<br />
<br />
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.<br /> I am the worker sold to the machine.<br /> I am the Negro, servant to you all.<br /> I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—<br /> Hungry yet today despite the dream.<br /> Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!<br /> I am the man who never got ahead,<br /> The poorest worker bartered through the years.<br />
<br />
AND I’VE GOT YOUR BACK, AND WE ARE GOING TO GET OURS.<br />
I MEAN, WE ARE GOING TO RIP THEM.<br />
<br />
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream<br /> In the Old World while still a serf of kings,<br />
(ACTUALLY, WE WERE NEVER SERFS.<br />
I COME FROM A VERY SUPERIOR FAMILY, VERY HIGH-TALENTED,<br />
PROBABLY KINGS, OR MADE SOME GREAT DEALS WITH KINGS.)<br />
<br />
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,<br /> That even yet its mighty daring sings<br /> In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned<br /> That’s made America the land it has become.<br />
BUILDING STUFF, THAT’S RIGHT.<br />
<br />
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas<br /> In search of what I meant to be my home—<br /> For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,<br /> And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,<br /> And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came<br /> To build a “homeland of the free.”<br />
The free?<br />
<br />
I’VE ALREADY SAID, YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.<br />
Who said the free? Not me?<br />
<br />
THAT’S RIGHT.<br />
<br />
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?<br />
THAT’S RIGHT.<br />
<br />
The millions shot down when we strike?<br /> The millions who have nothing for our pay?<br /> For all the dreams we’ve dreamed<br /> And all the songs we’ve sung<br /> And all the hopes we’ve held<br /> And all the flags we’ve hung,<br /> The millions who have nothing for our pay—<br /> Except the dream that’s almost dead today.<br />
<br />
I’M STARTING TO FEEL A LITTLE CONFUSED.<br />
THAT DREAM ISN’T EVEN SLEEPING.<br />
WE ARE GOING TO MOW THEM DOWN.<br />
WE ARE GOING TO WIN SO MUCH,<br />
YOU WILL WANT TO LIE DOWN BESIDE THE DREAM AND TAKE A NAP.<br />
BUT I WON’T LET YOU. I’LL KICK YOU AND SAY<br />
<br />
O, MAKE America be America again—<br /> The land that never has been yet—<br />
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.<br />
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s (CASINOS! NOW I GET IT.
THEY ARE ACTUALLY VERY GOOD BUSINESSPEOPLE, VERY SAVVY. LET ME JUST
SAY, I KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT CASINOS. Negro’s, ME— [capitalized in
Hughes’s original]<br />
<br /> THAT’S RIGHT, ME. LANGSTON HUGHES HAD THAT RIGHT.<br />
<br />
Who made America,<br /> Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,<br />
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,<br /> Must bring back our mighty dream again.<br />
<br />
<br />
PRETTY FANCY, THERE, A LITTLE TOO FANCY FOR ME.<br />
I AM VERY CLASSY BUT NOT FANCY, YOU KNOW, NOT LIKE THOSE BOYS.<br />
BUT A MIGHTY DREAM IS RIGHT,<br />
A DREAM THAT WE WON’T EVEN LET SLEEP, IT IS SO MIGHTY,<br />
AND HAS WINNING TO DO.<br />
<br />
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—<br /> The steel of freedom does not stain.<br /> From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,<br /> We must take back our land again,<br /> America!<br />
<br />
ISN’T THAT WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING?<br />
<br />
O, yes,<br /> I say it plain,<br /> America never was America ENOUGH FOR me,<br /> And yet I swear this oath—<br /> America will be!<br />
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,<br /> AND WE KNOW WHO WE’RE TALKING ABOUT, DON’T WE?<br /> The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,<br /> THAT’S RIGHT, THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH,<br /> We, the people, must redeem<br /> The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.<br /> The mountains and the endless plain—<br /> AND I KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT THAT,<br /> All, all the stretch of these great green states—<br /> AND WHAT’S THE COLOR OF MONEY, FRIENDS, WHAT’S THE COLOR OF MONEY?<br />
And make America GREAT again!Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-68833719305341267202016-04-09T12:14:00.001-07:002016-04-09T12:14:10.750-07:00Five Theses on North Carolina's HB2
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>1. LQBTQ & LABOR:
HB 2 may be the most objectively radicalizing thing the North Carolina
legislature has done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By explicitly
tying together anti-labor provisions forbidding local governments to set
minimum wages or working conditions, it strikes at the Fight for Fifteen movement
and other living wage campaigns in the same gesture as its attack on LGBTQ
people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The commonality of the many
groups and agendas at North Carolina’s progressive Moral Mondays rallies – from
the NAACP to the states’ scant unions to queer folk to immigrants and
environmentalists – has always struck me as moving but also somewhat thin and
aspirational.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With this law, the NC
Legislature explicitly names the progressive movements around both labor and
sexuality as a common enemy, which is to say, as objective allies.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>2.
UNCONSTITUTIONAL: HB 2 is very probably unconstitutional by plain-vanilla
doctrinal analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Supreme Court
decisions in 1996, 2003, 2013, and 2015 have established a principle that laws
aimed at picking out and burdening a particular identity group – especially
sexual minorities – are invalid, basically because dislike is not a legitimate
motive for lawmaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are the most
humane and admirable opinions the Court has issued in the last two decades.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>3. SPELLINGS & UNC:
Because the law is probably unconstitutional, and because its unconstitutionality
is rooted in its picking out – and picking on – a group of North Carolinians
that includes many students – it would have been appropriate and admirable for
Margaret Spellings, the head of the UNC system, to direct her campuses to
disregard it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decision would have
exercised the schools’ responsibilities as champions and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in loco parentis</i> of their students and as bastions of independent
thought about questions of public principle.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>4. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>FEAR AND DISGUST: HB 2 shows that the oldest
hateful motive – sexual fear – is still very much in play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bid to suggest that “women and children”
need to be “safe” in bathrooms picks up directly on demagogic warnings about
molestation (gay teachers and scoutmasters), rape by black men, and interracial
marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915
cinematic valentine to the Ku Klux Klan, one of the radicals holds up a sign
reading “Equal Marriage.”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bigotry
mingles disgust and fear, and these images of intimate assault seem to be the
trigger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s awful, but let’s hope it’s
also a sign that the resistance is driven back to its dregs.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>5. BOYCOTTS
AND BANKS: The boycotts are great, and they show that, while LQBTQ people are
distinctively vulnerable in a bunch of very important ways, they also have a
special level of political support right now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Of course these two are linked: the acute vulnerability makes the call
to boycott stronger.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As far as
possible, it’s important to take the corporate boycotts, in particular, as
merely tactical alliances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paypal and
the big banks would not be boycotting over the attack on Fight for Fifteen, and
they won’t be here – or they’ll on the other side – for many progressive
issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So welcome them, but know that
they’re in it partly for the moral and political credibility, and give them
back what they’ve earned from you and no more.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Forward
together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let this be one of the last
steps back.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-82966269852211523492016-03-22T13:52:00.002-07:002016-03-22T13:53:18.097-07:00The Durham Height<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is a found poem made up of reports on Durham from Booker T
Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauli Murray, and the (red-lining) Home
Owners' Loan Corporation, as well as Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge
(praising American expansion in 1898, the year North Carolina
reactionaries broke Reconstruction). Washington and Du Bois visited in
the decade afterward, when African Americans had been effectively
disenfranchised. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Durham Height </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[Booker T]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I found here the sanest attitude of the white people toward
the black.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Disabused long ago of the “social equality” bugbear, the
white people,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and the best ones, too, never feared</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to go among the Negroes at their gatherings and never feared
to aid them</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in securing an education, or any kind of improvement.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Major Guthrie said to the other members of the board,<br />
“I
think it is better to buy land and build a schoolhouse for the Negroes</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
than to shoot them down.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thirty years of experience </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
has proved that he was correct.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mr. Fitzgerald has supplied the material for many of the
largest brick</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
structures in the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I cannot refrain from emphasizing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
once more the absence of color discrimination</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in a work of this sort.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fitzgerald owes his success almost entirely to Southern
white men.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One man in particular, Mr. Blackwell,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the great tobacco manufacturer, said to him,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Fitzgerald, get all the Negroes and mules you can, and make
brick.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I will take all that you can make.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[PM]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Uncle Richard Fitzgerald was known as the town’s leading
brick manufacturer </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and was considered wealthy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When my aunts went to town men of good breeding tipped their
hats</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and used courtesy titles in transactions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They went</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
where they pleased with little restraint and were all</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
grown women before the first law requiring separation on
trains and streetcars </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
appeared in North Carolina.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Fitzgeralds had downed roots in North Carolina</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
at the very moment the Ku-Klux Klan was rising over the
state.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Grandfather’s school had only eight scholars at first.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the mornings they found the ground almost cut to pieces
from horses’<br />
hoofs where the Ku-Kluxers had ridden round and round</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the empty little cottage and the schoolhouse.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He killed pigs, cured hams, and traded the hams at Brown’s
store</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in Hillsboro for stockings, cloth, and groceries.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He mended shoes and even tried making a pair.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
His price was $3.50 and he took payment in flour</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
at five cents a pound.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then he went down to Raleigh to see if he could not get more
contracts.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“The morning was dark and rainy and there being no station
or platform</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
we had to make a fire along the road in the darkness &
rain, &</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
when the train came in sight to stand on the track and wave</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a light to and fro across the track.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first trip</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
yielded no returns but on the second he got a contract</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“to make the 4,000,000 brick for the penitentiary.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Grandfather was almost delirious with joy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was as if the town had swallowed more than it could hold</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and had regurgitated, for the Bottoms,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
was a odorous conglomeration of trash piles, garbage dumps,
cow</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
stalls, pigpens and crowded humanity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You could tell it at night</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
by the straggling lights from oil lamps glimmering along</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the hollows and smell</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
of putrefaction, pig swill, cow dung and frying food.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, my family would never admit </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
we lived in the Bottoms.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They always said we lived</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Behind Maplewood Cemetery.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
People whose kin were buried close to our house</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
often came to the fence to borrow scissors, a jar or hoe</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to fix up their graves.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We never refused them and often they would stand at the
fence</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
for a while talking of their dead</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
as if it eased them to have a listener so close by the
grave.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Aint—ee,” she said, kin you lin me a hoe?”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Grandmother walked to the back door.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Don’t you ‘aint’ee’ me, you pore white trash. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
none of your kinfolks!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[WEB]<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Many honest Southerners fear to encourage the pushing,
enterprising Negro.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Durham has not feared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It has distinctly encouraged</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the best kind of black man by active aid </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and passive tolerance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The rise of a group of black people to the Durham height</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and higher, means not a disappearance, but, in some
respects,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
an accentuation of the race problem.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But let the future lay its own ghosts; to-day there is</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a singular group in Durham where a black man may get up</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in the morning from a mattress made by black men,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in a house which black men built out of lumber</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
which black men cut and planed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He may earn his living working for colored men, be sick</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in a colored hospital, and buried from </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a colored church, and the Negro insurance society</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
will pay his widow enough</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
to keep his children in a colored school.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is surely progress.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[HOLC]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First Grade (A): Almost synonymous with the areas where</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
good mortgage lenders with available funds are willing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They are homogeneous; in demand as residential locations</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in “good” times or “bad.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Third Grade: Yellow areas are characterized by age and
obsolescence</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and change of style; expiring restrictions</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
or lack of them, infiltration of</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
lower grade population.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Jerry” built areas are included, as well as </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
neighborhoods lacking homogeneity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Good mortgage lenders are more </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
conservative in the Third grade.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
During the depression years the tobacco and cigarette
factories</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
did not seem to suffer, but on the contrary</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
their business increased, which offset</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the decline in knitting mills and cotton mills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This apparently</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
was the chief reason for continued activity in </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
lower-priced properties.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While there are many desirable homes in area B-4,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
it is a very old part of the city,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
adjoins part of the main business district on the south,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a section largely populated by Negroes joins it on the east.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is almost in the “C” classification.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[AB]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We do need what we have taken in 1898,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and we need it now.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fellow citizens – it is a noble land that God has given us,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a greater England with a nobler destiny.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is a mighty people He has planted on this soil;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
a people imperial by virtue of their power,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
by right of their institutions,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes –</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the propagandists and not the misers of liberty.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shall the American people continue their resistless march</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
toward the commercial supremacy of the world?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern people</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
without their consent.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I answer, the rule of liberty that all government</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
derives its authority from the consent of the governed,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
applies only to those who are capable of self-government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shall we turn these peoples back to the reeking </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
hands from which we have taken them?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The march of the flag!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The infidels to the gospel of liberty raved,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
but the flag swept on!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
[PM]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is little wonder, then, perhaps, that I</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
was strongly anti-American at six, that I</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
hated George Washington, mumbled the oath</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
of allegiance to the American flag.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do not know how long this lack of patriotism might have
kept up</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
if Grandfather Fitzgerald had not died.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a Union veteran, Grandfather</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
was entitled to a United States flag for his grave</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
so every May I walked proudly</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
through a field of Confederate flags.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was little identity in my mind between</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the Union flag which waved over my grandfather’s grave</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and the United States flag on which I looked</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
with so much skepticism at West End School.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It would be a while yet before I realized </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
that the two were the same. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I spent many hours digging up weeds, cutting grass, and</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
tending the family plot.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was only a few feet from the main highway</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
between Durham and Chapel Hill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
the white people who drove by to see this banner</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
and me standing by it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-23611786186214226882016-03-05T06:47:00.001-08:002016-03-05T06:47:14.274-08:00Jim Webb & Generalissimo TrumpI found it weirdly poignant when, late this last week, former Virginia Democratic senator Jim Webb said that he could imagine voting for Donald Trump, but not for Hillary Clinton. Maybe Webb, who lasted about 10
minutes in the primary with a resenting-affirmative-action populist
deal, and used to be a Republican (as a military official in the Reagan administration), is just an opportunist hoping for a VP slot. But there
was a time when his victories in Appalachian Virginia, where other
Democrats lose and Trump dominated last week, were seen as a hopeful
front for the party.<br />
<br />
It also got me thinking. One of the provocative but under-developed claims in Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the Worl<span class="text_exposed_show">d
and Me is that "white" people, if they want a heritage, should look to
what their families were before they were "white." It's attractive,
but, unlike much of what Coates writes, simplistic. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
I think of this because Webb is a literary practitioner of a certain
kind of white-ethnic identity politics. He wrote a book about the
Scots-Irish called "Born Fighting." These descendants of lowland Scots
and northern English folk were settled in Ulster to displace the
Catholic Irish after the colonial wars of the late c16, then moved to
the colonies, where they fought in Washington's armies and settled the
frontier. (My four-greats grandfather was one: he wintered with
Washington at Valley Force.) They have always been the foot soldiers
for blue-blood wars, right down through Vietnam, and they have always
been reliably, even belligerently patriotic. As an ethnicity, they were
formed by serving as the bleeding edge of two colonial projects - the
Anglo-Ulster and the American.<br />
<br />
Given the bloody and racially
hierarchical history of this country, there are a lot of "white" people
whose inherited cultural identity basically comes out of the violent
crucible that made "whiteness," without a lot more left back there to
recover. In a time when many of those people are economically abandoned
and feel culturally displaced, it's not surprising that they are
reasserting what they've got. Which, as a matter of culture and (as
they like to say in the South) "heritage," is pretty much restricted to
fighting for the winning side and getting some spoils (material and
symbolic) of victory.<br />
<br />
I think this is a reason to want politics
to be about principles and programs - including programs of economic
fairness and inclusion. I'm a Sanders voter. I know Coates agrees, and
I think Webb once did, too. But the identity politics of whiteness,
intensified by a time when there have been no economical alternatives on
the table, may have closed that door for tens of millions. Whether you
can bring yourself to care about them or not, that is a bad end to a bad
story. Washington's troops are fighting for Generalissimo Trump.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-35889261504187696572016-03-04T11:10:00.001-08:002016-03-04T11:10:06.118-08:00The Second ComingThe Second Coming (W.B. Yeats), adapted for 2016<br />
Turning and turning in the widening gyre <br /> The drone cannot hear the operator; <br /> Things fall apart; the center has been sold; <span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> Some dick-pic talk is loosed upon the world, <br /> The Twitter feed is loosed, and everywhere <br /> The ceremony of democracy is drowned; <br /> The best run out of sick burns, while the rest <br /> Convict them with passionate intensity. </span><br />
<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
Surely some revelation is at hand; <br /> Surely Hamilton will save us now? <br /> His Second Coming! Hardly are those words out <br /> When a vast image out of Spiritus Dealio <br /> Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of upscale Queens <br /> A shape with lion body (corpulent, zoo-kept) and the head of a man (lion-maned), <br /> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, <br /> Is moving its small hands, while all about it <br /> Reel shadows of indignant Romney tweets. <br /> The darkness drops again; but now I know <br /> That demagoguery’s stoned sleep <br /> Was vexed to nightmare by a country it did not care to recognize<br /> Or feel itself recognized by. <br /> And what rough beast, its hour come round again, <br /> Slouches towards Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Center to be born?</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-77963096059751352792016-02-14T15:44:00.001-08:002016-02-14T15:44:08.628-08:00The Tragedy of Antonin Scalia<br />
Much of the dislike of Scalia
(whom I disagreed with and saw as a force for harm on many many
questions) is also a side-effect of how our undemocratic Supreme Court
works. Partisan disagreements get played out in the weird lexicon and
theoretical debates of legal elites, and views fading from influence and
acceptability hang on there as long as life tenure lasts. It's the
flip side of the adoration of RBG: we treat the Justices half like title<span class="text_exposed_show">d aristocrats authorized to rule us, half like maddening older family members whom we can't escape and can't stop resenting.</span><br />
<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
But within that weird elite world, Scalia started with a perfectly
cogent view: as the least democratic branch of government, the courts
should interpret their authority narrowly to leave more room for
legislatures and the executive to make and revisit political judgments.
This, not ancestor worship, was the basis of his originalism and his
"textualist" way of reading statutes. (His motives for developing this
view must have had plenty of conservatism in them, but general theories
of legal interpretation tend to grow from, or alongside, other
commitments - another weird feature of this whole institution.)<br />
Yet Scalia's vanity undid him. That's not a slur on him. People are
vain, the culture is vain, and life tenure being addressed as "your
honor" must foster it. As time went on, he wrote more and more in a
voice intended for the papers, the blogs, and the conservative presses
that republished his dissents. He appealed half-nakedly to the biases
of the GOP's conservative constituents. He mercilessly mocked writers
of majority opinions, who were not always as smart as he and certainly
wrote less engagingly (but also less floridly). He helped to make the
Supreme Court, in the public's eye, not just a political body, but THE
SAME KIND OF POLITICAL BODY as every other. That is just what he would
not have wanted, had he been able to reflect on it in advance, and had
he meant what he said about the Court's role.<br />
<br />
His opinions as
time went on also lost some of their quality of principle. I believe a
genuine conservative would not have reached for the desperate and novel
theory that almost knocked out the Affordable Care Act in 2012. I would
like to think he would have been much less certain about the lessons of
history that aligned conveniently with NRA propaganda in creating a
personal right to bear arms in 2008. Scalia joined the aggrandizement
of an increasingly conservative court. Perhaps he was growing more
cynical about the possibility of doing anything else. If so, he was not
alone, and the particular quality of that cynicism was something he had
helped to cultivate, quite against his own better intentions.<br />
<br />
May he find more peace than he offered to most of the vulnerable who
came before his Court. Like most of us, he meant well once.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-48005090973577814622015-12-30T11:35:00.001-08:002015-12-30T11:35:56.414-08:00Poems of the Climate, I
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(After Eliot's Waste Land, of course) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
December is the weird-ass month, raising</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Daffodils from dozing land, mixing</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hallmark cards and bafflement, mudding</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Up our seasons with spring rain.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Winter kept us warm, no joke there,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Earth in forgetful grey, not even</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bothering to freeze the ticks.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
…</div>
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I read, the long evenings, drive north and it stays warm.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is the tropic here, what equinox</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
orders this unfrozen scene?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Son, hey son,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You’re quick to say, or guess, for you know only</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A heap of broken images, affixed to tweets,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the almond gives no shelter, the Gulf Stream no relief,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the Arctic the sound of water.…</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I will show you fear in a season of rain.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-39350081211530982732015-12-03T11:59:00.000-08:002015-12-03T11:59:00.632-08:00Poem: Tongue-tied leavesWhy shouldn’t all things be oracular<br /> for one whose words<br /> get swallowed or perch<br /> on the tip of the tongue?<br />
<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
Tongue-tied leaves,<br /> pleading in sworls<br /> of orange, green, and crinkled brown;<br />
<br />
Beech-bark maps<br /> of coasts, swamps, broken lands,<br /> the wen or burl of settlement;<br />
<br />
Ridges spelling out lines for the sky,<br /> and even clouds, old tricksters,<br /> dropping their sticklebacks and mouses’ ears to say,<br /> Hear me down there, listen and <br /> lend me what you have.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-82522129626537454212015-11-24T07:05:00.000-08:002015-11-24T07:05:21.506-08:00Talk About the WeatherReasons to talk about the weather.<br />
1. It gives you feelings.<br />
2. It's a metaphor for mood and consciousness.<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
3. Its event seem to imply personality.<br />
4. And polytheism.<br />
5. It reaches you through all the senses.<br />
6. It links the global and regional scales through your own horizon and personal sensations.<br />
7. It's now a real-time newsfeed of planetary history.<br />
8. Light changes everything, all the time.<br />
9. Clouds are amazing.<br />
10. The only boring thing about the weather is the mind it can't reach.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-61127081602154354292015-10-30T10:15:00.003-07:002015-10-30T10:15:53.248-07:00Benevolent Authoritarian Reviews
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> Amused to pieces by </span>an Amazon review that complains about After Nature's support for democracy and asserts, "An authoritarian leader with a real commitment to solving these problems could be more effective," I decided to apply the benevolent authoritarian standard to a sample of reviews and commentary.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Other
Amazon review: “<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What this pattern-weave bathmat lacks
is a commitment to benevolent authoritarianism. Three stars.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yelp review
of new Thai restaurant: <span class="uficommentbody"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"I liked the
drunken noodles, and the appetizers came out quickly; but the service showed a
distinct lack of grit; I left still hungry for the feel of the iron fist within
the velvet glove. Two stars."</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
RateMyProfessor Review of male
professor: “Obviously very knowledgeable, even though he couldn’t always answer
our questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes intimidating,
but that’s his job! LOL Didn’t beat us enough, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three stars.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>RateMyProfessor
Review of female professor: “Great shoes!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Didn’t seem self-confident, sometimes couldn’t answer our questions,
which made wonder if she’s really an expert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>LOL. Didn’t beat us enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two
stars.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>David
Brooks column: Will you people please tell me how to live my life meaningfully,
already?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Have I mentioned that freedom
is a burden?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m giving you all two
stars; no, three, because I’m still the friendly conservative.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Yelp review of old Chinese restaurant:
“The egg rolls were fine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nice to have
forks as well as chopsticks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The General
Tsao’s Chicken did not lay to waste my stomach and burn the fields of my
intestines, nor did it build a new society on the ashes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three stars.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Focus-group
review of Bernie Sanders debate performance: “Liked his clear talk about
inequality, political corruption, prison reform.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Felt good to be harangued a little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I was really hoping a so-called socialist
would assign me a job and tell me which uniform to wear to work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They don’t make ‘em like they used to!
Two-and-a-half stars.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Focus-group
review of Donald Trump’s campaign: Five stars.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-3742223702477487102015-10-27T15:29:00.003-07:002015-10-27T15:29:55.107-07:00#OtherNerdyHulks Postmodernist Hulk prove you always already smashed.<br />
<br />
Foucaultian Hulk interpellate you to smash self, agonizingly, invisibly.<br />
<br />
Marxist Hulk smash bourgeois state. Marxian Hulk take long view,
dissect changing means and relations of production, new class
formations.<br />
<br />
David Brooks Hulk: last good smash was Princeton
class of 1910. We are Hulks with hollow chests. Email Hulk tips on
living with your green self.<br />
<br />
Ross Douthat Hulk: Do not make me moral panic. You not like me moral panicked.<br />
<br />
Antonin Scalia Hulk smash how Founding Fathers smashed.<br />
<br />
Historian Hulk smash contingently; how differently it might all have turned out! Too late: all is smashed.<br />
<br />
Hobbesian Hulk rationally smash first.<br />
<br />
Humean Hulk have always smashed before, but maybe not this morning.<br />
<br />
Kantian Hulk not understand moral formula whether or not to smash. Kantian Hulk head hurt.<br />
<br />
Walt Whitman Hulk smash multitudes.<br />
<br />
Emily Dickinson Hulk contemplate mote of dust, beam of light, ephemeral insect, and fleeting feeling: impulse - to smash -!.<br />
<br />
Academic Hulk table smashing motion pending re-consideration by committee.<br />
<br />
Hillary Clinton Hulk, given what we now know, could not prudently endorse own earlier smashing.Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-91938579907966499252015-09-27T11:56:00.001-07:002015-09-27T11:56:51.535-07:00Equality, Emancipation, and Anthropocene Futures: A reply to Andreas Malm
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Writing in <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/">Jacobin</a> earlier this
year, Andreas Malm launched a broadside attack on “the Anthropocene narrative”
about climate change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this polemical
essay, Malm makes some essential points about the distortions, evasions, and
hidden complacency in the most “serious” and urgent-sounding climate talk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What he is describing, though, is only one
strand of Anthropocene thinking, the neo-liberal one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s also a left Anthropocene that is
essential to engaging planetary crisis in a way that doesn’t give up on
egalitarian and emancipatory aims.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“Anthropocene,” a portmanteau word
meaning roughly “the age of humanity,” refers to the fact that human impacts on
the earth now amount to a geological force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Exhibit One is that the global atmosphere, and so all the weather and
the regional climates, are now parts of a Frankenstein hybrid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mass extinction, toxicity, synthetic hormones
in marine environments, and the agricultural-urban-suburban surface of a
densely inhabited planet are all supporting details.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Malm slams the Anthropocene for
what he calls “species-level thinking.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He means two things by this, and he’s right about both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one, simply talking about “humanity” as
the agent of global change conceals difference and conflict among people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wasn’t humanity that put most of the
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last couple-few centuries, but
the industrial economies of the rich countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are still vast differences between the richest and poorest populations
in carbon impacts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the effects of
climate change and other environmental disruptions will intensify inequality:
they promise, at least for the first couple of centuries, intensifying
inconvenience for the rich, accelerating catastrophe for the poor.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Second, some scientists have
treated the Anthropocene as part of natural history in very dubious sense: by
tracing it to allegedly permanent human qualities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These, conveniently, are often the same
qualities that are often used to prove that there is no alternative to a
certain style of market capitalism, including infinite acquisitiveness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Malm objects to these in particular, and he
also to the idea that any invariant human nature can account for, hence
naturalize, the economic order that is driving the present crisis.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Universalizing the Anthropocene as
simply a “human problem” encourages two kinds of pernicious response.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One, which Malm emphasizes, is moralizing
about how “we” caused this crisis and now “we” have to overcome it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since there isn’t a “we” that caused it, this
simply adds symbolic insult to structural injury for the world’s poor and
exploited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, being willfully
blind to actual avenues of cause and potential response, this universalizing
approach fosters a spuriously individualistic kind of lesson: “we” must improve
our consumer behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Besides ignoring
inequality, this kind of non-program vastly exaggerates the autonomy of
individuals living within systems of energy production, transport, shelter,
food provision, and relations of production that all presuppose cheap,
profitable fossil energy and an extractive relation to the planet (and, often
enough, to other people).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only a
democratic engagement with these systems themselves can provide the pivot to
shift to an economy that does less damage – off all kinds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that implies conflict, since some people
are doing very well in the present economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But there is no room for conflict in a moralized “we.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There’s also another neoliberal
response to the Anthropocene, which Malm doesn’t really address, but which is
just as inadequate as the first and probably more influential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the managerial attitude that proposes
that a certain kind of market-minded technocracy needs to take over the
problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the one hand, this means
geo-engineering measures such as changing the atmospheric mix or limiting the
amount of sunlight that reaches the earth (and so reducing warming from the
greenhouse effect).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand,
it means the “green bottom line” approach of economists, corporate
sustainability officials, and business-oriented conservationists such as the
Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist, Peter Kareiva.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They propose to build a higher valuation of
“natural capital,” or “ecosystem services” into corporate accounting so that
profits, at least, will be sustainable in a thoroughly monetized and privatized
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This, approach too, embeds the
current economic order more deeply than ever and hurries political alternatives
off the table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its practical effect is a
market-based confirmation of inequality – for instance, in the contracts
committing decades of agricultural production in parts of Africa to Chinese
consumers (at least as long as the Chinese can pay).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This response uses the Anthropocene story to
say, in effect, If we are remaking the world in our image anyway, then we might
as well be intentional about it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Malm does not distinguish between
these neoliberal uses of the Anthropocene and its democratic potential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He writes as if there were only one
Anthropocene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that is not so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Calling this age the Anthropocene means
recognizing that the shape of what used to be called the natural world is,
increasingly, a product of political economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This fact expands and gives an ecological dimension to the process that
Marx described in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communist Manifesto</i>:
global capital involves all of humanity for the first time in a single system,
with rules and relations that span the planet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The point of the famous exhortation – “Workers of the world, unite” –
was to turn a new material reality into a basis of self-conscious political
activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was present people’s new
reality to their minds so they could reclaim it as theirs by remaking it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This remaking was, of course, ultimately
concrete material work, but a critical step was an insight into how the world
had changed, in the ways that it bound people and in the ways it bound them
together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To borrow a somewhat clunky
distinction, Marx presented workers with the reality that the world economy had
made them into a class in themselves – they objectively had the same relation
to capital, wherever they were – so that they might become a class for
themselves, aware of their situation and able to act without illusion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Anthropocene idea does the same
kind of work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It points to a condition
that binds every region and people of the world – not so much in a common
humanity as in relations of unequal contribution to the planet’s changes and
unequal vulnerability to those changes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In this respect, invoking the Anthropocene issues a challenge to
construct a political humanity that is commensurate to the scale of our unequal
and often terrible material commonality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is “species thinking” – hence that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anthropo-</i> - in the sense of what it points toward trying to build,
not for sentimental reasons or because “humanity” sounds heroic, but because
the global material scale of unequal interdependence requires a global
political scale for any reconstruction of interdependence along egalitarian
lines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This ambition marks the
difference between a neoliberal Anthropocene, which naturalizes and reinscribes
inequality in a global material order, and a democratic Anthropocene, which aims
at making the future of a shared condition into a question for common decision
among equals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing in the idea of
Anthropocene requires the neoliberal version, or fosters sentimental blindness
to the real conflicts present in a transition to a democratic approach to
global ecology as a problem of political economy, emphasis on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">political</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This is all frustratingly imprecise,
but so is the “environmentally responsible socialism” that Malm cites as his
alternative to today’s capitalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
is the condition of alternatives now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And making the political economy of the Anthropocene a democratic
question – is certainly a precondition of Malm’s alternative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For now, a democratic Anthropocene is mostly
likely to begin, like the labor movements Marx was addressing, in local,
national, and regional politics, the self-organizing of hopeful – and just
desperate – protest and alternative that Naomi Klein calls Blockadia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even with a blend of local motives and
internationalist vision, such movements are still likely to have their most
important forum in national governments, because these, for all their failings,
are still the best institutional approximations of anchoring real political
power to some kind of popular will.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
One of the most important political
projects is to press against austerity, neoliberal changes to labor law and
social provision, and economic inequality and insecurity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The effectively limitless appetite for
material things that has become a strut of political stability from the US to
China is one of the major barriers to the plausibility of a democratic
transition to a fairer and greener world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But this appetite is a political artifact of economies that produce
insecurity at every point in the human life-cycle, and so force human appetites
into ever-more intrusive (and profitable) incursions on all the other
life-cycles that are entangled with ours.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It’s true: talk of the “global” and
the “human” can be soporific and hazardous all at once, and that the impulses
to conceal inequality while naturalizing market capitalism are so pervasive
that those who do it are often quite unaware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Malm’s frustration with all of this is well taken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But a democratic politics, aimed at a
democratic political economy, now has to include humanity and the globe among
its problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t about a choice
among narratives, but about how to begin making history in circumstances that
we didn’t choose.</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-79500191231213525222015-07-23T22:22:00.001-07:002015-07-24T04:58:13.971-07:00The Supreme Court, a literary exchange"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." ~Chief Justice John
Roberts, quoting Faulkner while dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges (the
marriage equality case),<br />
<br />
suggesting...<br />
<br />
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." ~Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
<br />
"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race." ~Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy <br />
<br />
"What fresh hell is this?" ~Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito, in unison, entering from opposite directions<br />
<br />
"What I'm trying to do is save your ass, gorgeous." ~Associate Justice Elena Kagan <br />
<br />
"Hell is empty, and all the devils here." ~Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor <br />
<br />
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." ~Associate Justice
Clarence Thomas, spurring his horse into a sulfurous pit in the heart of
Rome<br />
<br />
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in
my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how
he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as
another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he
asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my
arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts
all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I
will Yes.” ~former Chief Justice William Rehnquist<br />
<br />
"Words, words, words." ~Associate Justice Antonin Scalia<br />
<br />
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy." ~Associate Justice emeritus John Paul Stevens<br />
<br />
"Hell is other people." ~Associate Justice emeritus David Souter</div>
Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6836086390387532058.post-3250270300235285432015-07-15T06:00:00.000-07:002015-07-15T06:00:11.084-07:00Field notes on reality (+ Elena Ferrante, Greek gods, landscape aesthetics, and Antonin Scalia)
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“We are each tiny
parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I read a sentence like that one, from James
Rebanks’s much-praised <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Shepherd’s Life</i>,
I grow suspicious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is it to claim
that a place, an experience, a practice, is real?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As opposed to what?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then I grow pedantic:
real as opposed to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nothing</i>, I insist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Real” means “actual.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brand-new suburbs are real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So are plastic trees, made-up religions,
neurotic projections and hallucinations, and every page on the internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every last one, an actual thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is so specially real about sheep that
descend from earlier sheep owned by your ancestors in the same place where you
live now?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, this kind
of thinking will not get very far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Calling something real pays it a certain kind of compliment, marks it
for distinction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so, the same
question again: real as distinct from what?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well, usually as
distinct from those other words that Rebanks uses: false or insincere rather
than true; insubstantial rather than solid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Fair enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But calling these
qualities <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i> raises the
stakes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It draws an ontological
borderline and expels to its far side everything flimsy, fleeting,
disingenuous, and unconvincing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
practice, what is convincing is often what is familiar: old, well-trodden, with
chthonic notes in the bouquet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So what “feels real”
will often be an object of nostalgia, and in that respect a fantasy and flight
from the real present – which may feel oppressive and inspire flight precisely
because it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really is</i> flimsy,
fleeting, full of halfhearted work and disingenuous words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The real can be the mortal enemy of the
actual, route of an attempted escape from it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What counts as “real”
in this sense will often be conservative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Collective nostalgia, in particular, is likely to seek after a golden
age of real men and real women, real faith and real causes, as opposed to the
shifting and hybrid genders and compromised movements and institutions that we
live with in fact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this is not
always true: some trans activists insist specifically on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reality</i> of their non-traditional
genders, as opposed to the false and constraining actuality of hard binaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Talk of reality can be revolutionary rather
than conservative, abruptly recasting all that merely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> as artificial and obfuscating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Marx did something similar in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>
when he invited readers to follow him into capitalism’s basement workshop,
where they could envision the extraction of surplus value, which no one had
ever seen or touched, but which, he argued, was more real than all the
contracts and property rights of the marketplace.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">**</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Reality” has often
had affinities with “nature” and all that is “natural.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Real food is food from the earth, whose
sources you can touch, whose taste you recognize, food for which your language
has an old and perhaps colloquial name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Real
work is work with material things, tied to the rhythms of seasons, animals, and
crops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Americans, in particular,
wilderness, the most natural place, has often seemed the most real place, the
place to encounter both the world and one’s self unmediated and unmodified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Never mind that the places we call wilderness
are designated as such by law, and managed by federal agencies to preserve a
prescribed set of “wilderness values.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Wild nature, as a paragon of reality, takes work to produce and
maintain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is unavoidably artificial.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The very idea of
nature is under pressure these days, and rightly so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scientists and humanists alike argue that the
planet has entered the Anthropocene, a geological era when humans are a force,
maybe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> force, in the earth’s
development.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this time, there is no
more nature that is independent of human action: from the upper atmosphere to
the chemical composition of soil to the mix of species in an age of mass
extinction, our mark is everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
world we find can only be the world we have made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question cannot be, as environmentalists
have often put it, how to save the world, but only what kind of world, with
limited powers and foresight, to try to shape.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Anthropocene has
a brute empirical dimension, based in the great and growing human effect on the
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also has a more theoretical
dimension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The discovery that there is
no more nature comes along with the insight that “nature” has always been a way
for people to talk to – and about – one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nature has always been cultural and
social.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So aesthetic concepts of the
beautiful and sublime have been bids for status by social groups that prized
them, and attempts to vindicate experiences that were precious to them – such
as scaling mountains to admire creation’s wild and dangerous place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the Lockean idea that nature was made to
fulfill human needs, if only people would clear, plant, and develop it,
rationalized the displacement and expropriation of native peoples in the
settler colonies of the Americas and Oceania, entering the political and
religious culture of early United States and the law of Australia and New
Zealand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such opposites as monarchy and
democracy, slavery and revolution, have all been celebrated as the favored
principles of nature, depending who is interpreting it, and with what purposes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, these
motivated interpretations of nature do not feel strategic to those who
undertake them: they feel natural, sincere, real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nature has always stood for what comes before
politics and culture, is not susceptible to their judgments, and so sets their
limits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, talking about the
principles of nature has been a self-concealing mode of cultural politics, a
politics premised on denying – with a pure heart – that it is a politics at
all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Followed through,
embracing the Anthropocene would mean giving up this unearned purity of heart,
and surrendering the happy protest, “It’s just natural!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would mean embracing the necessary
artificiality of every version of the “nature” that is a joint product of human
activity and the rest of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
would require finding new and clearer ways of talking about what is precious in
the forms of halfway artificiality that have been called natural.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The same goes for the
real.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">**<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
a rare interview earlier this year, the reclusive Italian novelist Elena
Ferrante told the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paris Review</i> that
sincerity and accuracy, the hallmarks of the real, ironically falsify writing
that relies on them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“The most
urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my
material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The
more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the
sentence, what tone best suits the things I know? … It’s not enough to say, as
we increasingly do, These events truly happened, it’s my real life, the names
are the real ones, I’m describing the real places where the events occurred. If
the writing is inadequate, it can falsify the most honest biographical truths.
Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a
police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the
plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a
matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able
to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or
cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything
to its needs.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
other words, we should accept that the real is an aesthetic achievement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Appreciating this point preserves the value
of accuracy, the fidelity to fact that should be the standard for a piece of
reporting or a police report.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also
preserves the real from the enervating confusion with mere accuracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, instead, an achieved resonance between
expression and experience, or between subjective experience and its objective
setting, that seems to clarify and dignify both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What makes the real, in this sense, is a
circuit linking self and world in a feeling of mutual fit that seems to touch
something timeless, even as it is, itself, fleeting.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Understood
this way, the real is the antidote to a banal literary and aesthetic realism
that amounts to literalism – the kind of storytelling that wants you to know it
really happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Making literary reality
is not unlike making Anthropocene landscapes: only the materials and certain
formal constraints are given, and the goal is an aesthetic excellence that
stems from self-consciousness about what experience one is trying to produce,
and how the materials and craft can sustain or undermine those.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
way of praising the real leaves room to doubt it where it doesn’t belong or its
use is, as Ferrante puts it, falsifying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For instance, in American constitutional law, the “originalists” who
insist that the constitution’s phrases must mean today what they meant in 1789 are
engaged in an aesthetic interpretive exercise that falsifies the nature of
legality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Justices such as Antonin
Scalia gather scraps of old legal text and dictionary definitions, assemble
them in the soft light of claims about the ethos of the American Revolution,
and conclude, with an air of inevitability, that the constitution guarantees
the right to own a gun, or contains no right to abortion or same-sex marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it is done well, the effect can be
exhilarating: total persuasion!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
judge opens his hands, palms out to show that they are empty and innocent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reality made me do it!</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
originalist’s achievement mystifies the ways that law should be transparently
artificial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes a world that was
not there before, by forming rules – such as liberty and equality – that are
pure human creations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes a
dwelling-place, as surely as civil engineers make a city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its power should be lucid and open, hence
potentially democratic, or at least open to criticism at every point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Concealing its world-creating work by
cloaking it in an old “reality” mystifies the workings of power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even when the execution is impressive, the response
should not be admiration.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>**</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Recognizing
reality as an aesthetic achievement can also liberate world-making as a form of
play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think again of nature and its
landscapes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recognizing that they are
doubly artificial – made or preserved by human power and interpreted in human
experience – need not leave them flattened and lifeless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The suspicion that this is so, that new and
palpably artificial landscapes offer nothing, is what drives people back to
familiar kinds of “real” places, places with sheep and cottages and old
paths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But creating and interpreting
those is a way of inventing the real, not finding it!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so, with that in mind, we should be able
to invent it elsewhere, and in other ways.</span><br />
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A week in
the Peloponnesian countryside recently showed me something about how
landscapes, stories, and the mind can play together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought all the time of the gods and spirits
that were supposed to have animated the peaks, forests, and streams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The history of the place invited these
thoughts, of course, but so did its shape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
instinct that gods live in high came alive in a terrain with steep slopes that
open up into broad terraces and generous mountaintops, level meadows shaped for
revels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why would there not be a life up
there, inaccessible but imaginable?</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is a
place of intense microclimates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A slot
canyon rips a lush, dusky line into an arid mountainside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surrounded by dry pines, backed against a
thousand-foot cliff, a vertical stream throws out a fan of hanging grasses,
then comes to ground at the roots of big, gnarled figs and planetrees (also
called sycamore maples).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It reminded me
of Northern California, and also of the Banias, a river cleft at the base of
the Golan Heights in northern Israel, named by Roman occupiers for Pan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the spring, cold, blue-tinted meltwater
races through a green, heavily shadowed rent in a near-desert baked in gold
Mediterranean light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where a blade of
that gold slices between wood and leaves and strikes the water, two worlds
meet.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This kind
of anomaly is a place for spirits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
a product of a place vitally unlike itself, always generating its own
exceptions and inviting imagination in its interstices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a home for something of the place yet
not entirely of the world – a dryad, say, or river spirit. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the
modern west, the aesthetics of landscape generally comes down to two
categories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is beauty, the quality
of a restful and regular place – a lovely farming landscape, for instance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other is sublimity, the half-frightening,
half-elevating power of huge, alien nature: a volcano, a whirlpool, the ocean
in a storm, lightning in the Sierra Nevada.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Both beauty and sublimity have been traditionally figured as emanations
of the real, emblems of a unified and given world, the product of monotheistic
creation.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
animated landscapes I’m describing fall into a third aesthetic category: the
uncanny, the place we aren’t sure what to make of, which may or may be looking
back at us with eyes like but also unlike ours.</div>
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These are the landscapes of the
strange familiar, where we recognize ourselves but are also frightened and
baffled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are inhabited, personal,
vital, and alien, all at once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Animist,
pagan places, they have a variegated vitality that fills me as I race and
stumble across them, trying to reach the next strange grove.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, they invite play more than
reverence, and the reverence they elicit is only one of their moods, another
form of play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In them, the mind plays
tricks on itself by invitations – some serious tricks, some not so serious.</div>
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I would welcome a world where such
experience is more common.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This does not
mean returning to the real, but it does not mean rejecting it, either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It means learning the safe ways to have
dangerous play with it. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Jedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07077628902165628366noreply@blogger.com0