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badmousestuff-blog · 6 years ago

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The problem with Free Speech (Script)

One day I was helping out with the Free Palestine stall on Church Street. About an hour in a young dude came up to me, and gave us the usual conservative drivel.

He told me that he couldn’t support the left, because to him we were against free speech. Right below me were flyers detailing the extent of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, and how little the world still hears about their plight. He stated that he wasn’t interested in our campaign, and bid me farewell. For, of course we must have our standards.

(Rowan Atkinson speech)

There’s never been a more unshakeable dogma in my lifetime than that of Freedom of Speech.

The real test of a country’s standards is if it allows people to criticise one another, especially the regime. The foundation of Liberty and Freedom and Friberty, is the story of free expression, after all, if you want to know who has the power, just look at which group you’re not allowed to criticise. Right?

Well no, I’m here to say that Free Speech isn’t just some base, flatline, monolith from which all societies are to be judged like an angelical truth, its a political concept, thought up by human beings, subject to critique, and frankly is in great need of one.

Let’s start with something simple.

Your concept that Free Speech is good, is only possible if your opponent also agrees with you, i.e. they’re not going to kill you if you disagree.

So therefore if your opponent doesn’t ?? and will use aggression against you, then you can’t really argue for free speech can you?

The conditions around you need to be such that nobody is going to die.

Right, whats next, oh I gotta do the Hitler bit, right…

Y’know the story, Weiner Republic, Full suffrage, large democracy, massive instability and debt caused from the prior war, enter the Nazis, and the German Communist party. Yes everyone seems to forget that the Commies were there too, headed by Ernst Thalmann, and at their peak gained 16% of the vote in 1932. Whilst Ernst was forward in his Anti-Fascism, the Social Democrats, and their newspapers, didn’t seem to understand the concept of a united front, they refused to confront the Fascists in an effective manner and simultaneously denounced the KDP as being a bunch of Muscovites, sporting the famous Iron Front symbol, The third arrow originally meant Anti-Communism, mind.

The SPD’s failure to effectively confront Fascism aided Hitler’s rise to power, sent the KDP underground, and Ernst to 11 years in the hole, followed by a firing squad.

So don’t tell me free-speech exists in vacuum, it doesn’t. In this video we’ll ask the necessary further questions.

Who dictates the media, who controls which advertisements we see, which views are more profitable? Does the removal of speech in given scenarios serve a common good? And if the enlightenment was correct why did Liberalism fail in its mission?

(Rowan Atkinson)

This clip was one of the first main intro points for me as well as many others into the realm of Super Free Speech, and it’s strange looking back just how dated it is. It’s not like we didn’t have the arguments back then, but moreso that nobody really cared, we were all swept up in the dogma, to challenge free speech would be on the same level as strangling a baby.

Anybody can go around today and talk about the joy of free speech, but it means nothing to a person who has no power with that speech, Freedom to Beg? That's not a freedom; that’s institutionalised sadism.

I’m not a believer in Maslow’s hierarchy but hypothetically, this really wouldn’t go number 2, it’d be right down at number… 27. Why do I say this? Well in the words of some philosophy guy people say I look like, “No rights matter if you’re dead”.

Food, Water, Healthcare, and Housing. These are all things you need in order to survive, in other words fulfil the other things that we consider ‘rights’ - rights that are worth struggling for. And despite the fact that the millions end up dying from the lack of these rights, even when they’re universally agreed upon, ever notice how this struggle goes very very quiet… Suspiciously quiet.

Sargon on the Socialists

I wonder…??? I wonder why the left seems to be largely committed to these causes, it’s something you find scantly addressed in the middle and right spheres with the exception of private individual charity (OSCAR WILDE), and Carl may find himself wondering why it is that these ideologies can barely create a solid solidarity towards these topics.

You might be a Liberal and say “Yeah yeah, I support that too though” but fact remains there’s no confidence here.

I see no outpouring of condemnation coming from you when Politicians like Bolsonaro press forward their restrictive measures, unlike what you have to say about this powerless Redhead. Why is that?

Count Dankula, who interestingly I had a couple scuffles with a while back without realising it, last year taught his dog to do a Hitler Salute, and he got fined £800. Now that’s probably one of the most petty excuses for a sentencing I’ll admit, but again this isn’t about whether it was justified, it’s about people’s standards.

Dankula received enormous support from, well, everyone, and he’s now more famous than he ever previously was, enough to be at the forefront of the free-speech festival later that year, and even use his fame to help push the emergence of UKIP. This is attention that people would pay top dollar for, way more than £800. He should be proud that he got a court hearing.

Frankly, me and my colleagues didn’t really care about this whole thing too much, just ask my IWW friend who I was with when this all went down. What happened around the same time that did catch some of our attention though was the plight of the J20 protesters who got arrested back during Trump’s inauguration.

Some of these people are on the butchers list to serve 60 year sentences for standing against a president who’s, a real dick, like I get the whole Liberal opposition is fucking corny but still he’s a dick, they’ve all been dicks, he’s just continuing what every dick who ever stood on centre stage ever started, this is America, you think Bernie’s going to save you? You think reforming the democrats can change the number one imperialist power?

Apologies. If you’re at all concerned that I didn’t give a toss about Dankula’s pug joke, if you’ve ever had friends like him this stuff isn’t too surprising, I know these are highly political times but a guy who votes UKIP is really not our number one concern right now.

I didn’t give a toss, but I know somebody who did, Mike Stuchbury, who you’ll remember from his childish twitter ramblings and dealings with Watson. Who proclaimed that the left needs to stand with Free Speech, A free-speech that is largely in the teat of Right-leaning discourse.

Sargon who was there with him, earlier that year got de-platformed by lefty-liberals in his debate with Muke.

The dogma is enforcing itself here, the left is all supposed to throw up our hands in swich liquor, of which vertu engendered is the flour, and decide Whether we should allow freedom of speech to our enemies, or not allow it, when the actual thing we should be doing, is taking hold of the narrative and putting forward our own ideas as the new talking point of discussion, instead of fucking Nazi Pug.

“Hey, you, what gives you the right to determine the narrative?”

Thats a good question, the hegemonic propaganda of our status quo is already setting the narrative, Noam Chomsky “I’m bored bye”

How can I make this more interesting… Ah ha…

IT’S TIME FOR FILM THEORY!!1 WOOOO

The Pursuit of Happiness.

In 2006 Will Smith told the story of Chris Gardner, a black man who struggled through poverty, separation, and fatherhood whilst living in San Francisco.

He gets an internship with a sales company and despite having to put up with a lot, by the end of the film he passes and at this point, we’re supposed to feel happy and redeemed, but to those who’ve watched it (surely I’m not alone) was it really a happy ending?

I’ll say that I walked out of the viewing feeling very uncomfortable and sour, but why is that?

Well for starters, that Internship he got was a 6 month unpaid one, in the most expensive US city might have something to do with it.

Then he’s got to deal with his wife leaving him, then he’s got to take care of his son, then he loses his source of income, then he’s got to deal with eviction, sleeping rough, not sleeping at all, by the end of the movie sure he gets his redemption but the message of ‘when life gives you lemons, just keep getting pummelled with those lemons and don’t ask why’ ultimately seems hollow.

Contrast that a more traditionally Anti-establishment film which was made by a literal Communist, where the exploiters are treated as they should be and thats what comes across on screen, with surprise horse-dick, and while Happiness doesn’t treat them like saints, they sure don’t come across as devils either.

6 months of free labour he and 19 other people who did not make the cut that they are effectively giving away for free.

What about those other 19 people, who ever tells their story?

The way his superiors always act like total dicks pushing him around and getting him to be their lobby boy, they lost nothing. And now he’s going to work for them.

Is the message here supposed to be “Well if this guy can survive the moon falling on him, what the hell are you complaining about?” Actually yeah, I think that consciously or not, this is what’s being said… Don’t worry we’re getting to the point of all this.

The extent of exploitation is naked, yet in the way the movie is presented I’m inclined to agree to this, and take it into my home, and sleep with it.

Now name me as many pieces of media that regurgitate this same old theme of rags to riches through adversity, to look at the man on centre stage, yet pay no attention to the millions locked in a cage.

Sure, say it how you will, Art is merely what you make of it and there’s not necessarily any devious agenda being pursued at any time. That’s one perspective I guess, another might be that there’s no such thing as Art for Arts sake, it all gears itself to differing political lines.

In a society based on private, individual enterprise, it's no surprise that Art would also foster themes that would support society as the normal and natural, even if they appear on the surface as radical.

Case in point, well the entire Hollywood Catalog.

On the Waterfront is literally Mccarthyism on celluloid, The People vs Larry Flynt guises pornification and billionairedom with a story of libel and freedom of speech.

And ironically enough probably the worst offender is, well I’m gonna lose some of you now, Billy Elliot, the Movie.

In which 2/3rds of the way through Billy’s dad strike breaks as a way to pay for his son to go to a prestigious arts school, y’know rather than maybe having him stay and use his skills to improve, embolden and enliven the downtrodden community, rather than leaving it to die.

Jackie’s very sympathetic in his devotion towards his son, except Striking is caring for your family, you’re fighting for a better future, together, as one, and it’s thrown away in favour of a much more individualistic get out of your circumstances, go and live your dream.

Now I’ve read Lee Hall, I know he didn’t intend for this to come through, but he is also no more aloof than any of us, we’re all susceptible to this ‘Common Culture’.

Just see the way our ‘Common Culture’ infiltrates into how Communism is talked about, in 2015’s Trumbo. The Hollywood screenwriter who was blacklisted for 2 decades for being a member of Communist Party.

Could make for some groundbreaking stuff right?...

Well no, instead we’re left with a film that focuses entirely on freedom of expression, which is ironic because if they represented him truthfully it would’ve resulted in a much more nuanced movie.

All we get is a 2 minute scene talking about Communist ethics and god its done in the most sanitised, unradical, storybook tale way possible, that doesn’t in any possible regard represent who the actual Dalton Trumbo was.

“If a book or play or film is produced which is harmful to the best interests of the working class, that work and its author should and must be attacked in the sharpest possible terms.”

I think I have a case that profit incentives are steering the way in which media is presented…

We have no problem pointing out the subtle propaganda messages in Soviet children’s cartoons (Cheburashka) but reverse that onto our society, prepare for some awkward stares.

You may argue that none of what I’ve just spoken about here has anything to do with censorship of free expression but this is the problem, our notions of censorship are stuck firmly behind the Berlin wall, and thats far too simplistic not to mention outdated.

Undoubtably Coca-cola has a far greater reach of expression than I ever will be able to ascertain, what says who can speak on a public forum, decide the content of a documentary, of a publication, of a movie, or a political campaign?

If a book is blacklisted by all publishers for political reasons, what difference does it make having 1 publishing house or 100?

If 90% of the movie market alone is controlled by just 7 companies, what kind of advice is “Just start your own business”.

If we want to talk about the free flow of expression and information, what little are these flyers (Free Palestine) when Zionism has a whole nation, and 2 continents supporting it?

This is the kind of expression we’re dealing with today, not the voices of individuals, but of multinationals. The fact that we had in any way an outpouring of sympathies towards one of these companies, Sony, for having their movie The Interview possibly censored by DPRK agents is a testament to how lost in the plot we have become.

And if by chance the media cannot direct the status quo by monopoly, it brings out its tried and tested method.

Commodify it.

I present to you Guerrillero Heroico, this photograph was allowed such free spread not simply because its bloody badass, but because there was no IP designated upon it, by Korda’s intention as a Communist himself he agreed with the free-flow of art. And what did this result in at the behest of Capitalist Corporations? The pastiche of revolution, to be bought and sold many times over.

Take any form of media, word, an expression, it will be hoisted away, slapped on a shirt, and sold back to you at a handsome price. You cannot escape this.

The moment that this (my tattoo) becomes the new Che it loses all its power, resistance is reduced to at worst LARPing, at best Nerd Fandom, and the winners are the profiteers.

If profit is the aim of the game, the speech that is supported will inevitably favour that which nurtures the economy, not destroys it, unless in farce. Speech ain’t a level base of which a country is determined by, its an apparatus held by those that dictate the game.

This is why there is a necessity for us to control the narrative, control the message, because if we don’t, they’re still going to.

Obligations:

When armies with unequal numbers go into battle, a draw is a defeat for the lesser side.

Make believe it or not Radical Centrist politics have their political leanings as well, even if just by effect.

Look I like free speech, I love it, I’m a goddamn youtuber, but I’m not stupid, I know what’s coming, I know that groups would try and silence me if they could. That’s politics.

You might go “All we’re talking about is the legal sphere”. Firstly the legal is the political, pure ideology to say otherwise, but second it’s difficult for you to call yourself a fighter for free speech when as I’ve explained there’s sooo much more to it than simply the judicial.

Many proponents will even side-step the judicial boundaries anyway when monopoly becomes involved, and if I have to explain how Monopoly is not an externality of our system but an inherent part of accumulation then… sigh.

Strange how we’re usually all skeptical of an Economic Free Market but the Free marketplace of ideas unlocks your inner Libertarian.

Its when I see stuff like this that I begin wondering if this is all just a trend that will eventually die off when people realise the complexities of their circumstances. I remember just a few years ago how many Libertarians were speaking the merits of free speech until they discovered that methodological individualism wasn’t actually achieving their goals. I count down the days when Lauren Southern finally calls for limits on speech just like her limits on borders. After all freedom is not free it must be defended right?

And btw folks usually aren’t as brave to actively advocate limits so they’ll always present justifications, such as that these views are mental disorders, or they’ll destroy civilisation, or these people are Degenerates.

This is a historic moment in political discourse, at this point ultimately we’re interested in picking sides, and you’ll do this just as much as anyone will.

On the left we like to talk a lot about Left Unity. I’m not necessarily against the idea, but a lot of the time people make a religion out of it, glossing over the fact that many aspects of various factions (???) contradict. It might not be immediately obvious, but when push comes to shove these conflicts become very apparent. There are some principles in which each side certainly doesn’t see eye to eye.

“Politics is pervasive, everything is political and the choice to remain apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo”

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m a Communist, yeah yeah say what you want, I believe in the liberation of those who do all the work through armed struggle based upon material conditions. I’m going to therefore be in favour of real mass culture, the stuff that gets people focused on achieving liberating aims instead of just appealing to markets. Its for this reason that I’m not interested in defending the views of right-wing nationalists, fascists, reactionaries… my enemies in other words, the ideas largely speaking which regress the people and they’re not interested in defending me either, wouldn’t expect them to.

If all you’re talking about is the centre, you’re gonna get flanked, sorry.

You might bump in when I denounce Dankula stating “His punishment showcases the system is at fault” and I would agree. This system is at fault, its been at fault since before our constitution was written, and it’ll never stop being at fault until you solve the contradictions.

Liberalism did fail, its ideals never came to fruition and that’s the reason why Socialists bring forth the praxis to achieve it, sometimes that’ll involve using words, sometimes it’ll involve lots and lots of guns, but let me tell you, you can’t always fight a war by playing nice, sometimes you have to use a diversity of tactics to achieve it.

Maybe we need 11 of them? (Shows book)

But thats more of a material answer and I know that most you don’t give a crap about some dead Chinese guy., but getting back to the original idea about responsibilities behind our speech, well, here’s something to think about.

So… here goes nothing.

If you’re a straight white male aged 11-16 in the UK and weren’t brought up to fit into the standard male dynamic, chances are you got picked on, sometimes a lot, sometimes that’s every day, not necessarily violence but words from numerous mouths are highly unnerving.

I did not have a particularly fun time adolescence. Every day was horrible, I never had a feeling going in that this would be exciting or, this would be a day where things would be different, everyday was a total black smudge with no end in sight.

Unlike other people, I never got to have a group that I fit into, so I had no escape, nothing to take my mind off things.

Looking back I don’t know why I bothered going in, I wasn’t getting amazing grades anyway.

When I went to Drama school and other clubs on the weekends and after school, I would also get picked on, but it wasn’t in spite, it was just general, friendly teasing. But there wasn’t a difference in my mind, because when you’ve had to deal with so much constant abuse, and paranoia, and humiliation 30 hours a week, it fucks you up.

So when Id say to the weekend buds “I dont like this” theyd go “Oh come on man its just a bit of fun, its okay, dont worry about it, its just a joke, its all okay”

Back then I didn’t have the nerve, I just put up with it, but if I could go back, Id say. No, actually its not Okay, because you don’t know for the life of me how much I have had to deal with this shit, to me that doesn’t come across like you’re being funny, like your laughing with me, it comes across like you’re a psychopath who wants to get pleasure out of my misfortune.

Of course the response to this would be obvious “Well what am I supposed to do? Just talk to you like a robot. You should just get over it, leave it in the past. Your making it harder for everyone” or some other faux-victimised response.

And sometimes y’know they might be right, maybe I should’ve not made worse a bad situation, but fact remains I still bleed.

To you, this is just having fun and games, to you and your other friends its normal, but to me its a threat.

Now today you can call me what you want I don’t care, I’m out of that place now and I’m all the better for it,

But even though some 7 or 8 years since then I’ve been able to recover, I still carry a hangover of it all, and it affected my decisions later on in life sometimes to a dire extent,

Its had the effect of making me feel both distrustful of people, and also like Im a burden to be around other people,

I never feel I should hang around for too long, I never want to take chances in friendship for fear I’ll embarrass myself, I say one thing out of tempo and suddenly flashbacks and an enormous shadow of mordor conjures over me. And I think most of all its been very difficult for me to express my emotions because I used to do it a hell of a lot.

Those 5 years were the single handed worst years of my life. And if you were at any point responsible for adding to that devastation and humiliation, then a large part of me wants to lash your goddamn skull inside out.

Because as trivial and generic as my story may be, that part of my life has been stolen from me, and those 5 years I will never get back.

So what’s the point of all this?

“Ossidents are sometimes surprised that, instead of buying a dress for their wife, the colonized buy a transistor radio. They shouldn't be, the colonized are convinced their fate is in the balance. They live in a doomsday atmosphere and nothing must elude them”

I want you to place the relatively minor experiences I received as a child, and translate those into other groups, victims of domestic abuse, victims of colonialism, racism, sexism, queer phobia. Like I said I’m out of that place now, but others aren’t, for many people they still live day to day in this ever pressing struggle, trying to just tell people “Please, just don’t do this”.

It’s not okay. But maybe together you’ll help me out with solving these problems?

My conclusion to this is simple,

Free Speech is not just something you can fling around to score political points, it doesn’t materialise simply because we all decide it should. If we want free-speech we need to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

We need to be sure that the conditions in society don’t proliferate toxic ideas that might even lead to the downfall of said society.

This very Tattoo that 90 years ago would’ve been Anti-Communist as hell has become a Pan-Left symbol against Fascism. Its living proof that with the correct methods the conditions of words, symbols, ideas can be resolved.

When class struggle subsides, when our social divides have been solved, when the conflict doesn’t oppose the existence of certain folks, then maybe, we can well and truly say that we can have free speech, and we’ll stand at a comedy show and yell “Yes, lets talk about those BEEP BEEEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” and be met with cheering applause from all sides. But until then, Don’t be a dick.

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Why Is There Republicans And Democrats

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-is-there-republicans-and-democrats/

Why Is There Republicans And Democrats

How Things Got This Bad

Why Democrats and Republicans have different priorities on COVID relief

6) The Republican turn against democracy begins with race

Support for authoritarian ideas in America is closely tied to the countrys long-running racial conflicts.

This chart, from a September 2020 paper by Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels, shows a statistical analysis of a survey of Republican voters, analyzing the link between respondents score on a measure of ethnic antagonism and their support for four anti-democratic statements .

The graphic shows a clear finding: The higher a voter scores on the ethnic antagonism scale, the more likely they are tosupport anti-democratic ideas. This held true even when Bartels used regression analyses to compare racial attitudes to other predictors, like support for Trump. The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism, he writes.

For students of American history, this shouldnt be a surprise.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act cemented Democrats as the party of racial equality, causing racially resentful Democrats in the South and elsewhere to defect to the Republican Party. This sorting process, which took place over the next few decades, is .

7) Partisanship causes Republicans to justify anti-democratic behavior

This chart is a little hard to parse, but it illustrates a crucial finding from one of the best recent papers on anti-democratic sentiment in America: how decades of rising partisanship made an anti-democratic GOP possible.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

Reality Check 3: The Democrats Legislative Fix Will Never Happenand Doesnt Even Touch The Real Threats

Its understandable why Democrats have ascribed a life-or-death quality to S. 1, the For the People bill that would impose a wide range of requirements on state voting procedures. The dozensor hundredsof provisions enacted by Republican state legislatures and governors represent a determination to ensure that the GOP thumb will be on the scale at every step of the voting process. The proposed law would roll that back on a national level by imposing a raft of requirements on statesno excuse absentee voting, more days and hours to votebut would also include public financing of campaigns, independent redistricting commissions and compulsory release of presidential candidates’ tax returns.

There are all sorts of Constitutional questions posed by these ideas. But theres a more fundamental issue here: The Constitutional clause on which the Democrats are relyingArticle I, Section 4, Clause 1gives Congress significant power over Congressional elections, but none over elections for state offices or the choosing of Presidential electors.

Vaccine Advocacy From Hannity And Mcconnell Gets The Media Off Republicans’ Backs But Won’t Shift Public Sentiment

Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson

Amid a rising media furor over the steady stream of vaccine disparagement from GOP politicians and Fox News talking heads, a number of prominent Republicans spoke up in favor of vaccines early this week.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible” and asked that people “ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, got the vaccine after months of delay and then publicly said, “there shouldn’t be any hesitancy over whether or not it’s safe and effective.” And Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a widely shared video, declared, it “absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.” This was treated in the press as an unequivocal endorsement, even though the use of the word “many” was clearly meant to let the Fox News viewers feel like he’s talking about other people getting vaccinated.

Is this an exciting pivot among the GOP elites? Are they abandoning the sociopathic strategy of sabotaging President Joe Biden’s anti-pandemic plan by encouraging their own followers to get sick? Are the millions of Republicans who keep telling pollsters they will never get that Democrat shot going to change their minds now?

Ha ha ha, no.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Matthew Gertz July 20, 2021

Jefferson And Jeffersonian Principles

Jeffersonian democracy was not a one-man operation. It was a large political party with many local and state leaders and various factions, and they did not always agree with Jefferson or with each other.

Jefferson was accused of inconsistencies by his opponents. The “Old Republicans” said that he abandoned the Principles of 1798. He believed the national security concerns were so urgent that it was necessary to purchase Louisiana without waiting for a Constitutional amendment. He enlarged federal power through the intrusively-enforced . He idealized the “yeoman farmer” despite being himself a gentleman plantation owner. The disparities between Jefferson’s philosophy and practice have been noted by numerous historians. Staaloff proposed that it was due to his being a proto-; claimed that it was a manifestation of pure hypocrisy, or “pliability of principle”; and Bailyn asserts it simply represented a contradiction with Jefferson, that he was “simultaneously a radical utopian idealist and a hardheaded, adroit, at times cunning politician”. However, Jenkinson argued that Jefferson’s personal failings ought not to influence present day thinkers to disregard Jeffersonian ideals.

, a European nobleman who opposed democracy, argues that “Jeffersonian democracy” is a misnomer because Jefferson was not a democrat, but in fact believed in rule by an elite: “Jefferson actually was an Agrarian Romantic who dreamt of a republic governed by an elite of character and intellect”.

Reality Check #4: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the partys national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clintons 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Bidens 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call wasted votesDemocratic votes that dont, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.

The response from aggrieved Democrats? Abolish the Electoral College! In practice, theyd need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasnt seen support from a single red or purple state.

History Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

The Democratic Party traces its origins to the anti-federalist factions around the time of Americas independence from British rule. These factions were organized into the Democrat Republican party by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other influential opponents of the Federalists in 1792.

The Republican party is the younger of the two parties. Founded in 1854 by anti-slavery expansion activists and modernizers, the Republican Party rose to prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. The party presided over the American Civil War and Reconstruction and was harried by internal factions and scandals towards the end of the 19th century.

Since the division of the Republican Party in the election of 1912, the Democratic party has consistently positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party in economic as well as social matters. The economically left-leaning activist philosophy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which has strongly influenced American liberalism, has shaped much of the party’s economic agenda since 1932. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition usually controlled the national government until 1964.

The Republican Party today supports a pro-business platform, with foundations in economic libertarianism, and fiscal and social conservatism.

Adams And The Revolution Of 1800

Shortly after Adams took office, he dispatched a group of envoys to seek peaceful relations with France, which had begun attacking American shipping after the ratification of the Jay Treaty. The failure of talks, and the French demand for bribes in what became known as the XYZ Affair, outraged the American public and led to the Quasi-War, an undeclared naval war between France and the United States. The Federalist-controlled Congress passed measures to expand the army and navy and also pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien and Sedition Acts restricted speech that was critical of the government, while also implementing stricter naturalization requirements. Numerous journalists and other individuals aligned with the Democratic-Republicans were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, sparking a backlash against the Federalists. Meanwhile, Jefferson and Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which held that state legislatures could determine the constitutionality of federal laws.

Why Democrats and Republicans Are Claiming A Midterm Win

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They go further than merely believing the 2020 election was stolen, a nearly unanimous view among the bunch. Over 90 percent oppose making it easier for people to vote; roughly 70 percent would support a hypothetical third term for Trump .

The MAGA movement, Blum and Parker write, is a clear and present danger to American democracy.

2) Republicans are embracing violence

The ultimate expression of anti-democratic politics is resorting to violence. More than twice as many Republicans as Democrats nearly two in five Republicans said in a January poll that force could be justified against their opponents.

It would be easy to dismiss this kind of finding as meaningless were it not for the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill and the survey was conducted about three weeks after the attack. Republicans recently saw what political violence in the United States looked like, and a large fraction of the party faithful seemed comfortable with more of it.

These attitudes are linked to the party elites rhetoric: The more party leaders like Trump attack the democratic political system as rigged against them, the more Republicans will believe it and conclude that extreme measures are justifiable. A separate study found that Republicans who believe Democrats cheated in the election were far likelier to endorse post-election violence.

Early Life And Career

John Quincy Adams entered the world at the same time that his maternal great-grandfather, John Quincy, for many years a prominent member of the Massachusettslegislature, was leaving ithence his name. He grew up as a child of the American Revolution. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from Penns Hill and heard the cannons roar across the Back Bay in Boston. His patriot father, John Adams, at that time a delegate to the Continental Congress, and his patriot mother, Abigail Smith Adams, had a strong molding influence on his education after the war had deprived Braintree of its only schoolmaster. In 1778 and again in 1780 the boy accompanied his father to Europe. He studied at a private school in Paris in 177879 and at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, in 1780. Thus, at an early age he acquired an excellent knowledge of the French language and a smattering of Dutch. In 1780, also, he began to keep regularly the diary that forms so conspicuous a record of his doings and those of his contemporaries through the next 60 years of American history. Self-appreciative, like most of the Adams clan, he once declared that, if his diary had been even richer, it might have become “next to the Holy Scriptures, the most precious and valuable book ever written by human hands.”

Democratic View On Healthcare

Democrats have always been in favor of governmental involvement in the wellbeing of Americans, especially the most vulnerable among us. Healthcare reform has been a primary focus for the party since the middle of the Twentieth Century. Medicare, Medicaid, Childrens Health Insurance Program , and the ACA are all major reforms the Democrats fought for and got passed into law. During this election season, healthcare is arguably the hottest topic of debate, and Democrats are pushing for further expansion across the board. The key phrase to remember is quality, affordable health care for all Americans.

Obama And Trump Healthcare Policies Compared

There could not be a more radical divide between administrations than there is between these two. The Obama administration worked against almost insurmountable opposition from the GOP in order to pass the ACA. The Trump Administrations quest is to dismantle everything the Obama Administration has done. They even have court cases pending in order to do so.

When Was The Republican And Democratic Parties Formed

The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson Martin Van Buren on January 8, 1828, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He was the United States seventh president but the first democratic President.

The Democratic Partys shocking emergence can be linked to the countrys anti-federalist factions. It was during that time the United States of America gained independence from British colonial masters.

The anti-federalist factions, which democrats originated from, were also grouped into the Democrat-Republican party. This was done in 1792 by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other federalists influential opponents.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is pretty much younger than the Democratic Party. It was formed in 1854 by anti-slavery modernizers and activists.

The republicans were against the expansion of slavery in Western territories. They fought hard to protect African Americans rights after the civil war.

The Republican Party is often known as GOP. The meaning is Grand Old Party. The first Republican President was Abraham Lincoln. From Lincolns emergence, Republican Party started gaining ground in America.

The Legal Fight Over Voting Rights During The Pandemic Is Getting Hotter

Or as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, told NPR, there are no “fair” maps in the discussion about how to draw voting districts because what Democrats call “fair” maps are those, he believes, that favor them.

No, say voting rights groups and many Democrats the only “fair” way to conduct an election is to admit as many voters as possible. Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who has charged authorities in her home state with suppressing turnout, named her public interest group Fair Fight Action.

Access vs. security

The pandemic has added another layer of complexity with the new emphasis it has put on voting by mail. President Trump says he opposes expanding voting by mail, and his allies, including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, call the process rife with opportunities for fraud.

Even so, Trump and McEnany both voted by mail this year in Florida, and Republican officials across the country have encouraged voting by mail.

Democrats, who have made election security and voting access a big part of their political brand for several years, argue that the pandemic might discourage people from going to old-fashioned polling sites.

Democrats Or Republicans: Who Has The Higher Income

In the end, many people assume Republicans are richer based on these figures. Although, this is only a look at the richest families and politicians in America though. In everyday American households, it seems that Democrats have a higher mean salary. Its true that many of the wealthiest families in the country are contributing to Republican campaigns. On the contrary, families registered as , statistically speaking.

These findings still have some loopholes in them, of course. For instance, the data was collected over the last 40 years or so. Moreover, it is only based on the most recently collected information. As you know, demographics are constantly changing. These figures may have been affected as well. There is also a margin of error with every type of data collection like this. So, what do you think? Who is richer? Democrats or Republicans?

Where Do Trump And Biden Stand On Key Issues

Reuters: Brian Snyder/AP: Julio Cortez

The key issues grappling the country can be broken down into five main categories: coronavirus, health care, foreign policy, immigration and criminal justice.

This year, a big focus of the election has been the coronavirus pandemic, which could be a deciding factor in how people vote, as the country’s contentious healthcare system struggles to cope.

The average healthcare costs for COVID-19 treatment is up to $US30,000 , an Americas Health Insurance Plans 2020 study has found.

Presidential Election Of 1808

This mayor joining the GOP says theres no Democratic Party anymore’

Speculation regarding Madison’s potential succession of Jefferson commenced early in Jefferson’s first term. Madison’s status in the party was damaged by his association with the embargo, which was unpopular throughout the country and especially in the Northeast. With the Federalists collapsing as a national party after 1800, the chief opposition to Madison’s candidacy came from other members of the Democratic-Republican Party. Madison became the target of attacks from Congressman , a leader of a faction of the party known as the . Randolph recruited James Monroe, who had felt betrayed by the administration’s rejection of the proposed with Britain, to challenge Madison for leadership of the party. Many Northerners, meanwhile, hoped that Vice President could unseat Madison as Jefferson’s successor. Despite this opposition, Madison won his party’s presidential nomination at the January 1808 . The Federalist Party mustered little strength outside New England, and Madison easily defeated Federalist candidate . At a height of only five feet, four inches , and never weighing more than 100 pounds , Madison became the most diminutive president.

What Is Thomas Jefferson Remembered For

Thomas Jefferson is remembered for being the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. The fact that he owned over 600 enslaved people during his life while forcefully advocating for human freedom and equality made Jefferson one of Americas most problematic and paradoxical heroes.

Thomas Jefferson, , draftsman of the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the nations first secretary of state and second vice president and, as the third president , the statesman responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. An early advocate of total separation of church and state, he also was the founder and architect of the University of Virginia and the most eloquent American proponent of individual freedom as the core meaning of the American Revolution.

What Republican And Democrats Believe

Lets start with this example. There are one or more reasons why you chose that person to be your friend. It could be because of how he or she talks, sense of humor, intelligence, educational background, ideology, or other factors.

The bottom line is you made the individual your friend because of one or more factors you discovered in that person that pleases you. This explains why most people would prefer joining republicans than Democrats and vice versa.

Republicans and Democrats have diverse ideologies and beliefs. These beliefs or ideology is part of what draws people to join either political party.

Lets start with Republicans. What do Republicans believe in?

Republicans boast libertarian and centrist factions. But they primarily believe in social conservative policies. They abide by laws that help conserve their traditional values. These include opposition to abortion, marijuana use, and same-sex marriage.

So the Republican Partys platform is generally centered on American conservatism. It comprises establishment conservatives, Freedom Caucus, or Tea Party members, described as right-wing, populist, and far-right.

The Republican Partys position has changed over time. They now transcend beyond traditional values, which often includes Christian background. The Republicans evolved position now includes fiscal conservatism and foreign policy.

Heres a quick summary of what the Republican Party believes in:

Heres a quick look at what Democrats believe in:

Was The Donkey Originally A Jackass

Thomas Nast was an American cartoonist who joined the staff of Harpers Weekly in 1862. Nasts cartoons were very popular and his depiction of Santa Claus is still the most widely used version of the holiday icon we see today. During his career, Nast also drew many political cartoons that harshly criticized the policies of both parties.

Nast first used a donkey to represent the Democratic party as a whole in the 1870 cartoon A Live Jack-Ass Kicking a Lion in which Nast criticized the dominantly Democratic Southern newspaper industry as the Copperhead Press. While he did popularize the donkey, Nast wasnt the first person to use it in reference to the Democrats.

Over 40 years earlier during the presidential campaign of 1828, opponents of Democrat Andrew Jackson referred to him as a jackass. Jackson actually embraced the insult and used donkeys on several campaign posters. Nevertheless, cartoonist Anthony Imbert would use a Jackson-headed donkey to mock Jackson an 1833 political cartoon.

However, the donkey never really caught on after the end of Jacksons presidency, and Thomas Nast apparently had no knowledge that it ever was used to represent the Democrats.

Election Of 1796 And Vice Presidency

In the presidential campaign of 1796, Jefferson lost the electoral college vote to Federalist John Adams by 7168 and was thus elected vice president. As presiding officer of the Senate, he assumed a more passive role than his predecessor John Adams. He allowed the Senate to freely conduct debates and confined his participation to procedural issues, which he called an “honorable and easy” role. Jefferson had previously studied parliamentary law and procedure for 40 years, making him unusually well qualified to serve as presiding officer. In 1800, he published his assembled notes on Senate procedure as . Jefferson would cast only three in the Senate.

During the Adams presidency, the Federalists rebuilt the military, levied new taxes, and enacted the . Jefferson believed that these laws were intended to suppress Democratic-Republicans, rather than prosecute enemy aliens, and considered them unconstitutional. To rally opposition, he and James Madison anonymously wrote the , declaring that the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it by the states. The resolutions followed the “” approach of Madison, in which states may shield their citizens from federal laws that they deem unconstitutional. Jefferson advocated , allowing states to invalidate federal laws altogether. Jefferson warned that, “unless arrested at the threshold”, the Alien and Sedition Acts would “necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood”.

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isiswrites · 4 years ago

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a manifesto- a call for the end of liberalism, and an analysis of the 2020 election

10/18/2020

The hypocrisy of “both sides” of the political two-party system is impossible to ignore; every day the conservative and the liberal party become more deeply entrenched in their own self-produced agendas. While most critiques of “both sides” are often center-right leaning and are encoded with messages of propaganda against extremist factions (often misguided and identified incorrectly), leaving the reader with a dissatisfied sense of center extremism, this is a critique drawing heavily on a Marxist scholarship and grassroots activism. While most would classify these perspectives as “progressive”, that term has become synonymous with a Bernie Sanders “reform” driven ideology that relies heavily on blame and cultural classism. This critique of the modern political parties and the Liberal’s abhorrent approach to “voting fascism out” resides somewhere so far left that it may touch some ideology of anti-big government libertarians-- as the political “spectrum” is most likely shaped as a circle instead of a straight line with polarizing ends. What the libertarians would take up arms to (no pun intended) is the vehement anti-capitalist and anti-private ownership approach to modern socioeconomic and political matters. The only solution to a country in need of constant reform is a complete upheaval of all governing systems. Abolition is the only answer to a failing government-- this calls for the abolition of capitalism, the criminal justice system, and politics as we know it. The framework we need is anti-racist, anti-oppressive, anti-classist, and also pro collectivity, communism, and ultimately activist-driven.

The fundamental reality is that while the two party system controls the political realm in real applicable ways (which bills are passed, supreme court nominations, and public discourse), the social movements that are heavily categorized by “two party bipartisanship” are more nuanced-- instead of it being as simple as “the right” and “the left”, social movements and unrest derive from groups that are challenging to define. It is not so easily defined as Democrats and Republicans or Liberals and Conservatives-- while the real tangible implications of political decision making happens between these two parties, the discourse that motivates opinion, choice, and most fatal-- violence-- is hard to place. Social discourse, the “zeitgeist” of individual and collective political unrest, and thoughts are taking hold in somewhat of a makeshift fashion, thus producing a diaspora of political opinions.

This “diaspora” of political opinions, emotions, and identities is a tool intentionally weaponized by the establishment-- and I would argue, upheld largely by establishment democrats. Collectivism or true community cohesion is the largest threat to our government’s autocratic “democracy”. Liberalism and neoliberalism are founded upon a myth of the individual, and the power of communal spirit and collective action promise to turn those ideas on their head-- reminiscent of a Marxist approach to modern philosophy. The maintenance of the economic order of capitalism through the production and reproduction of us (citizens) as individuals is not the only or highest form of psychological violence our government commits against its own people-- establishment government representatives work to also uphold a cultural and sociopolitical order by restricting our ability to be communal beings. The fact that we cannot name or place these diasporadic social movements or bodies of thought and belief are intentional-- the two party system does not want us to know where to look to find others like us. The belief and acceptance by Americans that there are two boxes wide enough to fit us all is a condition of mass manipulation and the product of the most successful bi-partisan campaign our country has ever seen-- a campaign that prioritizes violent individualization and hypercapitalism above all else.

We see this belief in the establishment and ignorance of the emotional diaspora of political opinions in this county the most clearly when we depoliticize our emotions and identity politics and examine the inauguration of Donald Trump, and the Democratic outcry and downright hatred projected onto Trump supporters. Following the thread of deconstructing our communal emotions in a capitalist environment, and for the sake of definition, “liberals” refer to people who associate themselves with the Democratic party and work to uphold establishment liberalism. Many Democrats would not, on first examination, appear to be this sort of establishment liberal, and would not identify as such. Put simply, moderate Democrats denounce the violent BLM protests, are excited about voting for Joe Biden, and express their distaste for poor working class Americans through their cultural elitism. The “Trump supporters” I am most uniquely interested in are not the rich Republicans who have historically voted red for “economic reasons”, but those who voted for the loud mouthed, highly opinionated, and violently charged man on the grounds of social and cultural disenfranchisement-- justifying their vote and working to excuse casual racism and xenophobia through their own process of being cast off by mainstream culture. To define a type for easier identification, I focus on the poor, working class, blue collar white american men who feel an attachment through Trump and the alt-right through their inability to grapple with or find identity through the left-dominated mainstream media and “culture”. We see here a battle between white suburban mothers who first expressed collective action in the 2016 Women’s March and the rural mid-30s white man who has experienced unemployment and seen his neighbors die from opioid abuse. We see a struggle between class, culture, and the hypermasculinization of the “American Dream”; it's a battle between two individual identities, one highly rewarded by a “safe” community, and the other cast away from its long-standing supremacy. In this battleground we see how Trump’s racist hypercapitalism was elected, and will most likely be elected again.

Within a hyper-capitalist society, the only accepted form of communalism or tribalism is an association with one’s economic class. Liberals will denounce Trump and his policies, yet be the first to excuse their neighbor, coworkers, or dinner party guest’s choice to vote for him based on economic justifications. They will excuse the behavior of those within their class-- the judgement, conflict, and exclusion will only come at the expense of those above or below them. The problem is always “rednecks”, “hicks”, “billionaires”, and “the 1%”. Liberal communities refuse to acknowledge their own as evil-- a community of individuals that actively “other” anyone who does not fit into their morally righteous club. The problem is never “the soccer mom” or the dad who is awarded the economic privilege to be a “stay at home dad”. The problem lives somewhere beyond the gated community, beyond the voting booth, and far away from the public schools that are advertised as a selling point for property. Class solidarity trumps moral judgement or empathy. Class solidarity has been prioritized most effectively by the moderate liberal class; the villainization of poverty and a lack of education has not only worked to discredit an entire subsector of our society, but has also worked to produce its own supremacy.

The 1% did not elect Donald Trump. Donald Trump will maintain power and authority because of the lack of empathy, care, organizing work that moderate establishment democrats have ignored over the last four years. Since 2016, there has been no true investment into closing the wealth gap or the cultural gap between the rural/urban divide. There has been a lack of cross-aisle conversations in a true, radical approach to community healing and restorative justice. While restorative justice often refers to communally healing from a criminal act of harm, restorative justice in emotional political cultural settings are centered on a harm that is not inherently criminal, and has failed to be named by the current administration. Establishment Democrats are angry with the “right” and morally just aspects of Republican and alt-right rhetoric, but their approach to navigating these very real and impactful issues rooted in violence and oppression is ineffective, and at best, shallow. Liberalism is still upholding the same values we denounce in our Instagram stories and Facebook posts-- Trump and the alt-right are making an uglier and more violent face of what liberalism has been all along-- the reason people are denouncing Trump and his voters is rooted in a fear of their own racism, classism, misogyny, and hyperindividualism being more visible. Liberalism does not want to disappear racism and violence, it does not want to reestablish economic and cultural classes-- it wants to uphold these through a more clandestine approach. It does not want to understand economic and cultural oppression in an authentic way-- it is not asking the questions to uncover the implications of forgotten rural economic systems and how hypercapitalism has ruptured communities (both spatially and emotionally).

Liberalism has not only ignored the social and economic underclass, but has worked to intentionally create the diaspora previously referred to. While class solidarity exists across political party lines for affluent classes, the underclass is plagued with a lack of cohesive identity or central communal force. A true communist approach would be to respect the proletariat's outcries, understand their lack of identity and expression of hatred as a cry for help, and to mobilize to work towards a community that is not founded on class solidarity. Liberalism has rendered a unity in class struggle among the poor impossible-- there are new “layers” to class which have undermined the ability for a true proletariat uprising. This is intentional and has been done by the liberal class to establish difference and maintain “othering” among a shared experience. Poverty does not connect people in a meaningful way-- education, race, and culture (learned through exposure and privilege) have come to define the underclass on grounds more important than economic status. The unemployed newly college graduated art student has less in common with the rural construction worker than they do the aristocratic affluent class-- their sense of the world, culture, and their identity through their liberal education places them at a higher respected value than the “white trash” population-- even if they are at the same economic situation. Long over are the days of collective action on the grounds of economic oppression and exploitation-- class solidarity does not exist when the upper classes and the machine of neoliberalism has worked tirelessly to undermine class solidarity or communalism in general for the under class. Dismantling capitalism under a communist movement would have to include reshaping our interpretations of culture, class, and status.

--------------------------------------------

11/04/2020

The 2020 election should come to no surprise, although establishment democrats are wearing a mask of preformative outrage. Their anger-- although valid in the face of an outward and violent proclamation of violence and authoritative power, with the newly added layer of a conservative supreme court-- is misdirected. While around half of the votes counted have been cast for a man who stands on the platform of bigotry, it is not correct to assume that half of the American people agree with his dogma. The enemy is not southern voters. The enemy is not “uneducated” racist individuals-- the enemy is white supremacy. Liberalism's obsession with individualism ends up hurting its own cause. The overarching system of white supremacy is to blame for the overwhelming amount of “red states”. Trump country is not a collection of racist individuals, it is white supremacy in action. Liberalism will call into fault everything but this truth, because admitting this is the true source of our political reality would be calling into question the validity of liberalism itself.

“Red states” within the electoral college are not red because of the previously aforementioned “white trash” individuals-- voter suppression, gerrymandering, and state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies are to blame. Southern states are more diverse than Northern states (urban areas, which are more diverse, vote blue). Southern states have higher proportions of Black residents, which is a fact ignored by liberals in the outcry of the red wave. Our government has worked tirelessly to prevent Black people from voting. This is a highly successful bi-partisan state-sanctioned campaign against Black people. “Both sides” have worked to uphold systems like the electoral college, have worked to barr felons from voting (33% of Black men have felonies in the United States), and created systems which are hard to access physically as well as emotionally through a long history of redlining and segregation. Many people living in southern states cannot legally vote, and if they can, feel isolated from their government. Even for those who register to vote, polling stations are often far away from Black neighborhoods and white racists use scare tactics to prevent voting. While external influences restrict the coveted “Black vote” that liberals viscously pray on and weaponize during election cycles, the internal struggle of identity, isolation, distrust, and inherited trauma make it hard for Black voters to believe in anyone. And that is valid.

Trump’s tailing behind Biden in a “too close to call” race to the presidency should come as no surprise. Southern states do suffer from racism-- but not in the ways in which Liberalism is quick to accept. The violent individualization of people has manifested itself in the Conservative ideals-- freedom, private ownership, and small government are dog whistles for anti-Black rhetoric. Southern whites work to preserve the sham of freedom that Trump idealizes. They believe his empty promises of prosperity, recovering economics, and expanded personal rights. They see Black people, immigrants, queer people, and progressives as the enemy. They vote against their own interests because of neoliberalism’s fanatical obsession with the individual-- white supremacy as a guiding principle manifests itself as racism in the everyday person. This individual has access to voting in the South. Black people do not.

White supremacy and neoliberalism are the enemy of all. The systems in place in America work to suppress the working class and isolate people from one another through violent individualization. Misdirected anger from poor whites results in violence, racism, sexism, homophobia, and votes for a bigot. Misdirected anger from establishment democrats result in a protective elitism that excludes southern and rural whites and reinforces their “acts of resistance”. The working class is experiencing a diasporadic identity crisis which results in the impossibility of mobilization. Neoliberalism and white supremacy is strengthened by these internal and external tensions. It is our collective responsibility to dismantle these systems and rewrite a code of ethics for our country which prioritizes coalition building, community strength, and empathy-- and the voices of Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) should be central to this effort. It is the responsibility of white people in power (politically, culturally, and economically) to leverage their positionality to incite Real Change.

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jccamus · 5 years ago

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Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever

Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever https://ift.tt/2Sclqw8

As a camera crew set up, Harari affably told Pinker, “The default script is that you will be the optimist and I will be the pessimist. But we can try and avoid this.” They chatted about TV, and discovered a shared enthusiasm for “Shtisel,” an Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox family, and “Veep.”

“What else do you watch?” Harari asked.

“ ‘The Crown,’ ” Pinker said.

“Oh, ‘The Crown’ is great!”

Harari had earlier told me that he prefers TV to novels; in a career now often focussed on ideas about narrative and interiority, his reflections on art seem to stop at the observation that “fictions” have remarkable power. Over supper in Israel, he had noted that, in the Middle Ages, “only what kings and queens did was important, and even then not everything they did,” whereas novels are likely “to tell you in detail about what some peasant did.” Onstage, at YES, he had said, “If we think about art as kind of playing on the human emotional keyboard, then I think A.I. will very soon revolutionize art completely.”

The taped conversation began. Harari began to describe future tech intrusions, and Pinker, pushing back, referred to the ubiquitous “telescreens” that monitor citizens in Orwell’s “1984.” Today, Pinker said, it would be a “trivial” task to install such devices: “There could be, in every room, a government-operated camera. They could have done that decades ago. But they haven’t, certainly not in the West. And so the question is: why didn’t they? Partly because the government didn’t have that much of an interest in doing it. Partly because there would be enough resistance that, in a democracy, they couldn’t succeed.”

Harari said that, in the past, data generated by such devices could not have been processed; the K.G.B. could not have hired enough agents. A.I. removes this barrier. “This is not science fiction,” he said. “This is happening in various parts of the world. It’s happening now in China. It’s happening now in my home country, in Israel.”

Cartoon by Paul Noth

“What you’ve identified is some of the problems of totalitarian societies or occupying powers,” Pinker said. “The key is how to prevent your society from being China.” In response, Harari suggested that it might have been only an inability to process such data that had protected societies from authoritarianism. He went on, “Suddenly, totalitarian regimes could have a technological advantage over the democracies.”

Pinker said, “The trade-off between efficiency and ethics is just in the very nature of reality. It has always faced us—even with much simpler algorithms, of the kind you could do with paper and pencil.” He noted that, for seventy years, psychologists have known that, in a medical setting, statistical decision-making outperforms human intuition. Simple statistical models could have been widely used to offer diagnoses of disease, forecast job performance, and predict recidivism. But humans had shown a willingness to ignore such models.

“My view, as a historian, is that seventy years isn’t a long time,” Harari said.

When I later spoke to Pinker, he said that he admired Harari’s avoidance of conventional wisdom, but added, “When it comes down to it, he is a liberal secular humanist.” Harari rejects the label, Pinker said, but there’s no doubt that Harari is an atheist, and that he “believes in freedom of expression and the application of reason, and in human well-being as the ultimate criterion.” Pinker said that, in the end, Harari seems to want “to be able to reject all categories.”

The next day, Harari and Yahav made a trip to Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat. They invited a few other people, and hired a guide. Yahav embraced a role of half-ironic worrier about health risks; the guide tried to reassure him by giving him his dosimeter, which measures radiation levels. When the device beeped, Yahav complained of a headache. In the ruined Lenin Square in Pripyat, he told Harari, “You’re not going to die on me. We’ve discussed this—I’m going to die first. I was smoking for years.”

Harari, whose work sometimes sounds regretful about most of what has happened since the Paleolithic era—in “Sapiens,” he writes that “the forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do”—began the day by anticipating, happily, a glimpse of the world as it would be if “humans destroyed themselves.” Walking across Pripyat’s soccer field, where mature trees now grow, he remarked on how quickly things had gone “back to normal.”

The guide asked if anyone had heard of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—the video game, which includes a sequence set in Pripyat.

“No,” Harari said.

“Just the most popular game in the world,” the guide said.

At dusk, Harari and Yahav headed back to Kyiv, in a black Mercedes. When Yahav sneezed, Harari said, “It’s the radiation starting.” As we drove through flat, forested countryside, Harari talked about his upbringing: his hatred of chess; his nationalist and religious periods. He said, “One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”

We discussed the tall tales that occasionally appear in his writing. In “Homo Deus,” Harari writes that, in 2014, a Hong Kong venture-capital firm “broke new ground by appointing an algorithm named VITAL to its board.” A footnote provides a link to an online article, which makes clear that, in fact, there had been no such board appointment, and that the press release announcing it was a lure for “gullible” outlets. When I asked Harari if he’d accidentally led readers into believing a fiction, he appeared untroubled, arguing that the book’s larger point about A.I. encroachment still held.

In “Sapiens,” Harari writes in detail about a meeting in the desert between Apollo 11 astronauts and a Native American who dictated a message for them to take to the moon. The message, when later translated, was “They have come to steal your lands.” Harari’s text acknowledges that the story might be a “legend.”

“I don’t know if it’s a true story,” Harari told me. “It doesn’t matter—it’s a good story.” He rethought this. “It matters how you present it to the readers. I think I took care to make sure that at least intelligent readers will understand that it maybe didn’t happen.” (The story has been traced to a Johnny Carson monologue.)

Harari went on to say how much he’d liked writing an extended fictional passage, in “Homo Deus,” in which he imagines the belief system of a twelfth-century crusader. It begins, “Imagine a young English nobleman named John . . .” Harari had been encouraged in this experiment, he said, by the example of classical historians, who were comfortable fabricating dialogue, and by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams, a book “packed with so much good philosophy.” No twentieth-century philosophical book besides “Sources of the Self,” by Charles Taylor, had influenced him more.

We were now on a cobbled street in Kyiv. Harari said, “Maybe the next book will be a novel.”

At a press conference in the city, Harari was asked a question by Hannah Hrabarska, a Ukrainian news photographer. “I can’t stop smiling,” she began. “I’ve watched all your lectures, watched everything about you.” I spoke to her later. She said that reading “Sapiens” had “completely changed” her life. Hrabarska was born the week of the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986. “When I was a child, I dreamed of being an artist,” she said. “But then politics captured me.” When the Orange Revolution began, in 2004, she was eighteen, and “so idealistic.” She studied law and went into journalism. In the winter of 2013-14, she photographed the Euromaidan protests, in Kyiv, where more than a hundred people were killed. “You always expect everything will change, will get better,” she said. “And it doesn’t.”

Hrabarska read “Sapiens” three or four years ago. She told me that she had previously read widely in history and philosophy, but none of that material had ever “interested me on my core level.” She found “Sapiens” overwhelming, particularly in its passages on prehistory, and in its larger revelation that she was “one of the billions and billions that lived, and didn’t make any impact and didn’t leave any trace.” Upon finishing the book, Hrabarska said, “you kind of relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore—it’s O.K. to be insignificant.” For her, the discovery of “Sapiens” is that “life is big, but only for me.” This knowledge “lets me own my life.”

Reading “Sapiens” had helped her become “more compassionate” toward people around her, although less invested in their opinions. Hrabarska had also spent more time on creative photography projects. She said, “This came from a feeling of ‘O.K., it doesn’t matter that much, I’m just a little human, no one cares.’ ”

Hrabarska has disengaged from politics. “I can choose to be involved, not to be involved,” she said. “No one cares, and I don’t care, too.” ♦

https://ift.tt/39BhLOy via The New Yorker February 13, 2020 at 09:42PM

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nebris · 7 years ago

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America’s hidden philosophy

When Cold War philosophy tied rational choice theory to scientific method, it embedded the free-market mindset in US society

The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was worried. It was May 1954, and UCLA had been independent of Berkeley for just two years. Now its Office of Public Information had learned that the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner was preparing one or more articles on communist infiltration at the university. The news was hardly surprising. UCLA, sometimes called the ‘little Red schoolhouse in Westwood’, was considered to be a prime example of communist infiltration of universities in the United States; an article in The Saturday Evening Post in October 1950 had identified it as providing ‘a case history of what has been done at many schools’.

The chancellor, Raymond B Allen, scheduled an interview with a ‘Mr Carrington’ – apparently Richard A Carrington, the paper’s publisher – and solicited some talking points from Andrew Hamilton of the Information Office. They included the following: ‘Through the cooperation of our police department, our faculty and our student body, we have always defeated such [subversive] attempts. We have done this quietly and without fanfare – but most effectively.’ Whether Allen actually used these words or not, his strategy worked. Scribbled on Hamilton’s talking points, in Allen’s handwriting, are the jubilant words ‘All is OK – will tell you.’

Allen’s victory ultimately did him little good. Unlike other UCLA administrators, he is nowhere commemorated on the Westwood campus, having suddenly left office in 1959, after seven years in his post, just ahead of a football scandal. The fact remains that he was UCLA’s first chancellor, the premier academic Red hunter of the Joseph McCarthy era – and one of the most important US philosophers of the mid-20th century.

This is hard to see today, when philosophy is considered one of academia’s more remote backwaters. But as the country emerged from the Second World War, things were different. John Dewey and other pragmatists were still central figures in US intellectual life, attempting to summon the better angels of American nature in the service, as one of Dewey’s most influential titles had it, of ‘democracy and education’. In this they were continuing one of US philosophy’s oldest traditions, that of educating students and the general public to appreciate their place in a larger order of values. But they had reconceived the nature of that order: where previous generations of US philosophers had understood it as divinely ordained, the pragmatists had come to see it as a social order. This attracted suspicion from conservative religious groups, who kept sharp eyes on philosophy departments on the grounds that they were the only place in the universities where atheism might be taught (Dewey’s associate Max Otto resigned a visiting chair at UCLA after being outed as an atheist by the Examiner). As communism began its postwar spread across eastern Europe, this scrutiny intensified into a nationwide crusade against communism and, as the UCLA campus paper The Daily Bruin put it, ‘anything which might faintly resemble it’.

And that was not the only political pressure on philosophy at the time. Another, more intellectual, came from the philosophical attractiveness of Marxism, which was rapidly winning converts not only in Europe but in Africa and Asia as well. The view that class struggle in Western countries would inevitably lead, via the pseudoscientific ‘iron laws’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to worldwide communist domination was foreign to Marx himself. But it provided a ‘scientific’ veneer for Soviet great-power interests, and people all over the world were accepting it as a coherent explanation for the Depression, the Second World War and ongoing poverty. As the political philosopher S M Amadae has shown in Rationalising Capitalist Democracy (2003), many Western intellectuals at the time did not think that capitalism had anything to compete with this. A new philosophy was needed, one that provided what the nuanced approaches of pragmatism could not: an uncompromising vindication of free markets and contested elections.

The McCarthyite pressure, at first, was the stronger. To fight the witch-hunters, universities needed to do exactly what Allen told the Examiner that UCLA was doing: quickly and quietly identify communists on campus and remove them from teaching positions. There was, however, a problem with this: wasn’t it censorship? And wasn’t censorship what we were supposed to be fighting against?

It was Allen himself who solved this problem when, as president of the University of Washington in 1948-49, he had to fire two communists who had done nothing wrong except join the Communist Party. Joseph Butterworth, whose field was medieval literature, was not considered particularly subversive. But Herbert Phillips was a philosophy professor. He not only taught the work of Karl Marx, but began every course by informing the students that he was a committed Marxist, and inviting them to judge his teaching in light of that fact. This meant that he could not be ‘subverting’ his students – they knew exactly what they were getting. Allen nevertheless came under heavy pressure to fire him.

Allen’s justification for doing this became known across the country as the ‘Allen Formula’. The core of it ran like this: members of the Communist Party have abandoned reason, the impartial search for truth, and merely parrot the Moscow line. They should not be allowed to teach, not because they are Marxists – that would indeed be censorship – but because they are incompetent. The Formula did not end there, however. It had to be thoroughly argued and rigorously pervasive, because it had to appeal to a highly informed and critical audience: university professors, whose cooperation was essential to rooting out the subversives in their midst. Ad hoc invocations of the ‘search for truth’ would not suffice. It had to be shown what the search for truth – reason itself – really was. Allen’s ‘formula’ thus became philosophical in nature.

Like the logical positivists of his day, Allen identified reason with science, which he defined in terms of a narrow version of the ‘scientific method’, according to which it consists in formulating and testing hypotheses. This applied, he claimed in a 1953 interview with The Daily Bruin, even in ‘the realm of the moral and spiritual life’: Buddha under the banyan tree, Moses on Sinai, and Jesus in the desert were all, it appears, formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them.

The Allen Formula gave universities two things they desperately needed: a quick-and-dirty way to identify ‘incompetents’, and a rationale for their speedy exclusion from academia. Since rationality applies to all human activities, the Formula could be used against professors who, like Butterworth, were competent in their own disciplines, but whose views in other fields (such as politics) had not been formulated ‘scientifically’. Moreover, and conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines. This meant that whether someone was ‘competent’ or not could be handed over to what Allen called members of ‘the tough, hard-headed world of affairs’ – in practice, administrators and trustees – rather than left to professors actually conversant with the suspect’s field. Professors thus found themselves freed from having to deal with cases of suspected subversion. Small wonder that, according to the historian Ellen Schrecker, Allen’s actions, and his rationale for them, set a precedent for universities across the country, and catapulted Allen himself to national fame – and to a new job at UCLA.

The Allen Formula was administered, at UCLA and elsewhere in California, through something called the California Plan. Imitated to varying degrees in other states, the Plan required the head of every institution of higher education in California, public and private, to send the name of every job candidate at their institution for vetting by the state senate’s committee on un-American activities. The committee would then consult its database of subversives and inform the university whether the candidate was in it. What to do next was, officially, up to the university; but the committee’s policy was that if an identified subversive was actually hired, it would go public, issuing subpoenas and holding hearings. As Schrecker notes in No Ivory Tower (1986), no college could hope to deal with such publicity, so the Plan effectively gave the committee ‘a veto over every single academic appointment in the state of California’.

The California Plan was supplemented at the University of California by a memo in April 1952 from President Robert G Sproul to department chairs and other administrative officers, directing departments to canvass the publications of job candidates to make sure that they ‘prohibited the employment of persons whose commitments or obligations to any organisation, communist or other, prejudiced impartial scholarship and teaching and the free pursuit of truth’. As the language here makes clear, it is not merely communists who are the problem, but anyone who is not ‘impartial’. Sproul, like other academics, followed the Allen Formula.

This official emphasis on scientific impartiality excluded adherents of a number of influential philosophical approaches from employment in California. Non-communist Marxists whose beliefs reposed on readings of history rather than on logic and mathematics were said to have abandoned what was rapidly defined as philosophy’s ancient concern with strict objectivity in favour of what Allen called ‘leading parades’. Existentialists and phenomenologists did not follow the experimental method (and the former tended to be atheists as well). Many pragmatists did not even believe that there was a single scientific method: true to their name, they believed that scientific enquiry should be free to apply whatever procedures worked. Moreover, whether a method ‘worked’ or not in a given case should be a matter of its social benefit, a dangerously collectivist standard in those difficult days. It was far safer to see the scientific enterprise as what Allen called it in Communism and Academic Freedom (1949): a ‘timeless, selfless quest of truth’.

The California Plan operated in the greatest secrecy. Ending someone’s career in public required extensive justification, multiple hearings, and due process, all of which could provoke damaging public outcries. The need for secrecy also explains why the Plan emphasised preventing hires rather than rooting out subversives already in teaching positions. As the committee noted in its annual report for 1953, professors already on campus had networks of friends and supporters. Efforts to remove them often produced loud backlashes which, in the committee’s view, invariably benefitted the Communist Party.

According to its advocates, the Plan was a great success. In March 1952, 10 months after it was implemented, the committee’s staffer, Richard Combs, estimated that it had prevented about one academic hire per day in the state. The next year, Allen himself declared that ‘so far, the arrangement is working to mutual advantage’.

As long as Allen remained chancellor, the Plan’s secrecy was successfully maintained at UCLA. Two years after he left, however, attacks resumed: the anthropologist John Greenway was fired in 1961 for suggesting that the Roman Catholic Mass exhibited traces of cannibalism. Three years after that, the philosopher Patrick Wilson was denounced by leading Los Angeles clergymen for the way he taught philosophy of religion. The seven years of silence while Allen served as chancellor at UCLA are testimony to his, and the Plan’s, success at tamping down controversy. We will never know, of course, the number of job candidates who lost their careers before they even started.

Things took a different turn at the university’s other campus, Berkeley. Unlike Allen, Berkeley’s chancellor, Clark Kerr, refused to cooperate with the Plan – with the result that, unbeknown to Kerr, a university security officer named William Wadman took it over. Wadman’s view of his job went well beyond merely forwarding the names of job candidates. It amounted to a general political policing of the faculty, and this attracted national attention. In March 1954, after Wadman’s activities became public, an article in the far-off Harvard Crimson quoted Richard Combs: ‘If, after looking over charges against a professor and investigating them, Wadman thinks the man should be removed, he goes to the state committee and discusses the case. If the … committee agrees with him, the information is passed on to the president of the university [Sproul], who calls for the professor’s resignation.’

The initiative in this arrangement clearly belonged to Wadman. The committee itself was known to be rabidly anti-communist and eager to justify its existence by capturing ‘subversives’, while Sproul’s assent to its findings is portrayed as virtually automatic. The Crimson article goes on to summarise Combs as saying that ‘any professor in the college – not merely those in classified research – can be dealt with in this manner’. Which means, if true, that every professor in the college – not just those in classified research – owed his job to the benign disregard, at least, of Wadman.

As all this was happening, US academics also faced the task of coming up with a philosophical antidote to Marxism. Rational choice theory, originally developed at the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s, was a plausible candidate. It holds that people make (or should make) choices rationally by ranking the alternatives presented to them with regard to the mathematical properties of transitivity and completeness. They then choose the alternative that maximises their utility, advancing their relevant goals at minimal cost. Each individual is solely responsible for her preferences and goals, so rational choice theory takes a strongly individualistic view of human life. The ‘iron laws of history’ have no place here, and large-scale historical forces, such as social classes and revolutions, do not really exist except as shorthand for lots of people making up their minds. To patriotic US intellectuals, rational choice theory thus held great promise as a weapon in the Cold War of ideas.

But it needed work. Its original formulation at RAND had been keyed to the empirical contexts of market choice and voting behaviour, but the kind of Marxism it was supposed to fight – basically, Stalinism – did not accept either free markets or contested elections as core components of human society. Rational choice theory therefore had to be elevated from an empirical theory covering certain empirical contexts into a normative theory of the proper operation of the human mind itself. It had to become a universal philosophy. Only then could it justify the US’ self-assumed global mission of bringing free elections and free markets to the entire world.

Scientific method was already installed as coextensive with reason itself – philosophically by the logical positivists, and politically by the Allen Formula. All that was needed was to tie rational choice to the scientific method. This was accomplished paradigmatically by the UCLA philosopher Hans Reichenbach’s book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). In a crucial paragraph, Reichenbach wrote:

a set of observational facts will always fit more than one theory … The inductive inference is used to confer upon each of these theories a degree of probability, and the most probable theory is then accepted.

Facts always underdetermine theories, and this requires scientists to choose from an array of alternative theories, under a preference for highest probability. Science thus becomes a series of rational choices. Which meant that by 1951 there was a unified intellectual response to the two pressures: appeals to science fought the domestic subversives, and when science was integrated with rational choice theory it entered the global conflict. The battle was on, and what I call Cold War philosophy began its career, not only in fighting the Cold War of ideas, but in structuring US universities – and US society.

To be sure, interest in the California Plan seems to have petered out well before California’s anti-communist senate committee was disbanded in 1971. Even before then, the Plan was not entirely successful, as witnessed by the hiring in 1964 of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the philosophy department at the University of California, San Diego. That hiring was not without problems, however; public outcries against Marcuse culminated, in 1968, in armed guards, organised by his graduate students, spending the night in his living room.

But to say that with the waning of McCarthyism Cold War philosophy itself vanished from the scene is far too simplistic. The Cold War lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Cold War philosophy is still with us today. Thus, humanists long ago abandoned McCarthy-era attempts to subject their work to scientific method (as New Criticism was held to do). But in universities at large, intellectual respectability still tends to follow the sciences.

Cold War philosophy also continues to structure US society at large. Consider the widespread use of multiple-choice tests for tracking students. Whether one takes an ACT or a SAT, one is basically being tested on one’s ability to choose, quickly and accurately, from a presented array of alternative answers – under a preference, of course, for agreement with the test designers. Rational choice thus became the key to one’s placement in the national meritocracy, as illustrated by what I call the ‘40’s test’: if you know that someone has got 440, 540, 640 or 740 on the SATs (under the scoring system in effect until March 2016), you usually know a lot about their subsequent life. Someone who scored a 440, for example, likely attended a community college or no college, and worked at a relatively humble job. Someone with a 740 was usually accepted into an elite university and had much grander opportunities. Many countries, of course have meritocracies – but few pin them as tightly to rational choice as the US does.

Cold War philosophy also influences US society through its ethics. Its main ethical implication is somewhat hidden, because Cold War philosophy inherits from rational choice theory a proclamation of ethical neutrality: a person’s preferences and goals are not subjected to moral evaluation. As far as rational choice theory is concerned, it doesn’t matter if I want to end world hunger, pass the bar, or buy myself a nice private jet; I make my choices the same way. Similarly for Cold War philosophy – but it also has an ethical imperative that concerns not ends but means. However laudable or nefarious my goals might be, I will be better able to achieve them if I have two things: wealth and power. We therefore derive an ‘ethical’ imperative: whatever else you want to do, increase your wealth and power!

Results of this are easily seen in today’s universities. Academic units that enable individuals to become wealthy and powerful (business schools, law schools) or stay that way (medical schools) are extravagantly funded; units that do not (humanities departments) are on tight rations. Also on tight rations nationwide are facilities that help individuals become wealthy and powerful but do not convey competitive advantage on them because they are open to all or most: highways, bridges, dams, airports, and so on.

Seventy years after the Cold War began, and almost 30 after it ended, Cold War philosophy also continues to affect US politics. The Right holds that if reason itself is rooted in market choice, then business skills must transfer smoothly into all other domains, including governance – an explicit principle of the Trump administration. On the Left, meritocracy rules: all three of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees attended law school at either Harvard (as Obama himself did) or Yale (as Hillary Clinton did). The view that choice solves all problems is evident in the White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s presentation of the Republican vision for US health care, at his press briefing last March 23: ‘We’ve lost consumer choice … The idea is to instil choice back into the market.’

Part of the reason for Cold War philosophy’s continuing dominance is that though it is really a philosophy, proffering a normative and universal theory of correct reasoning, it has never been directly confronted on a philosophical level. Its concern with promulgating free markets and contested elections gave it homes in departments of economics and political science, where it thrives today. Philosophers, for their part, have until recently occupied themselves mainly with apolitical fields such as logic, metaphysics and epistemology.

On a philosophical level, however, Cold War philosophy has some obvious problems. Its ‘ethics’, for example, is not a traditional philosophical ethics at all. From Plato to the pragmatists, philosophical ethics has concerned the integration of the individual into a wider moral universe, whether divine (as in Platonic ethics) or social (as in the pragmatists). This is explicitly rejected by Cold War philosophy’s individualism and moral neutrality as regards to ends. Where Adam Smith had all sorts of arguments as to why greed was socially beneficial, Cold War ethics dispenses with them in favour of Gordon Gekko’s simple ‘Greed is good.’

Another problem with Cold War philosophy’s ethics concerns what I will call ‘disidentification’. Whatever I choose has at least one alternative; otherwise there would be no choice. But if I identify myself at the outset with any of my plurality of alternatives, I cannot choose any alternative to it; doing that would end my identity and be suicidal, physically or morally. Therefore, any alternative I consider in the course of making a rational decision is something I can walk away from and still be me. This is not an issue for rational choice theory, which concerns cases where my identity is not at stake, such as choosing which brand of toothpaste to buy, or (usually) which candidate to vote for. But when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything, and everything about me becomes a matter of choice.

This in turn leads me to abandon my own identity, in the following way: suppose that what I am choosing is my religion, and that my alternatives are Catholicism and Hinduism. If I am already a Catholic, however, Hinduism cannot be a serious alternative, because one’s religion is (usually) part of one’s identity. If I am to choose between Catholicism and Hinduism, I must put both at a distance. I must ‘disidentify’ with them. And since Cold War philosophy bids us to take this stance on all things, at the limit the moral agent must be disidentified from everything, and can have no other fundamental identity than being a rational chooser, ie someone who first orders her preferences according to transitivity and completeness, and then opts for the highest utility. That is a pretty thin identity. Everyone has certain characteristics that they simply cannot or will not relinquish under any circumstances. What else is there to live for?

The widespread success of rational choice theory, coupled with the problems of Cold War philosophy, suggests that the problem lies in what differentiates the two: Cold War philosophy’s claim, inherited from Allen, to universal, and indeed sole, validity as an account of human reason. If we look at the history of philosophy, reason has been many things. For the Greeks, it was basically the capacity to grasp universals – to see present givens as instantiations of underlying structures. For René Descartes, it was the ability to provide an a priori and so ‘unshakable’ foundation for beliefs. For Immanuel Kant, it was the ability to generalise conceptions to the maximum, which provided the foundation for the absoluteness of the moral law. Similarly, freedom has not always been merely a matter of choice. For Aristotle, you act freely, are responsible for an action, when you desire to perform that action and your reason tells you it is the correct action in the circumstances. To act freely is thus to act from your entire moral being. This idea, that freedom is really the capacity for complete self-expression, is summed up in Hegel’s pithy remark that true freedom is the apprehension of necessity: it is to understand, in a particular situation, what it is that you have to do in order to be you.

None of this suggests that we should stop valuing freedom of choice. But we should stop assuming that making choices amounts to freedom itself, or that making them rationally is the whole job of human reason. Freedom of choice, like free markets and contested elections, is valuable only when situated within wider horizons of value. Divorced from them, it becomes first absolute and then disastrous. Free markets, for example, are wonderful tools for enhancing human life. So are MRIs; but you can’t just drop an MRI on a street corner and expect it to function. Both kinds of device require proper installation and constant tending. The penalties for ignoring this became evident in the financial crisis of 2008.

The absolutising of things such as freedom of choice – the view that free markets and contested elections suffice for a good society – is a view that came into prominence with the early Cold War, when the proliferation of choices was our main contrast with Soviet Marxism. In reality, there is much more to a good society than the affordance of maximum choice to its citizens. With market fundamentalism dominating the US government, and with phantasms being paraded in the media under the sobriquet of ‘alternative facts’ that you can choose or reject, forgetfulness of the McCarthy era and the Cold War philosophy it spawned is no longer a rational option.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-cold-war-philosophy-permeates-us-society-to-this-day

@catcomaprada

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insideanairport · 6 years ago

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Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism

❍❍❍

The central thesis of the book is focused on the relationship of art/culture to imperialism. Said is influenced by William Blake who famously said “the foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa.” Following the same topic in Orientalism Said asserts that what made the process of the colonialism possible was not just economically driven (capitalism) but also racial (superiority of white man to Arabs, Africans, etc.).

In this work, Said focused on European works of literature and mainly the novel. As the professor of English literature, he was expert on both European classical literary works as well as non-European writers criticizing imperialism from inside or outside of it. He examined works by theoreticians, historians as well as fiction writers. The list of bibliography for the book is even bigger than Orientalism (with more than 400 different references). In this book Said expanded the prior thesis of Orientalism to a more global scale with including writers from the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Europe. He is moving beyond the simple binary of East and West, to present the role of art and culture in a series of global interventions that was fostered by the United States as the vanguard of the West, and other European imperialist powers such as England and France.

He references authors such as Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, Angus Calder, C.L.R James, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Neruda, Alfred Crosby in contrast to Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and V.S. Naipaul. At the same time, it’s very obvious that Lenin is somehow absent from the book, rather there is a shift of perspective towards thinkers who experienced imperialism from the other side of it.

Said’s position is completely against the so-called Western experts on the topics related to the east, especially politics. Said is definitely influenced by Fanon. In regard to the universalization of Western philosophy and myth of objective truth, Said is following Fanon, where he famously said: “for the native, objectivity is always directed against him.” (Fanon og Philcox 2004)

On the same topic and in regard to knowledge production, Said makes a compressing between Fanon and Foucault, but ultimately settles with Fanon due to the understanding of politics, and the geographic relationship to the Empire:

"Both Fanon and Foucault have Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Canguihelm, and Sartre in their heritage, yet only Fanon presses that formidable arsenal into anti-authoritarian service. Foucault, perhaps because of his disenchantment with both the insurrections of the 1960s and the Iranian Revolution, swerves away from politics entirely."

Culture and Imperialism is also published in an era following the fall of the Berlin wall and invasion of Iraq where Western Universalism is under direct criticism. Said emphasizes the failure of academy and intellectuals to bridge the gap of culture in preventing further military intervention and continuation of imperialism.

The urgency of the topic became evident when after 9/11, invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, suddenly the focus of the Western academies shifted to Middle Eastern writers and artists in search of an answer. The journals such as Bidoun was formed consequently to urgently fix an already-too-late problem. In the past 15 years, we have seen a bit more of scholarship on these topics regarding art and culture of the Middle-east. Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian: The Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism” is a good example of this.

In regard to the understanding of violence and Western promotion of War against terror (as George W. Bush called it, a crusade), Said similar to Eqbal Ahmad brings attention to the current and historical interventions that remain relatively unspoken. USA support of the valiant Afghanistani moujahidin (freedom fighters, today’s Taliban), Poland’s Solidarity movement, Nicaraguan “contras,” Angolan rebels, Salvadoran regulars are some examples mentioned in the book. Said takes us to the mechanics of Empire and its cultural devices. We gain an understanding on why the United States first supports Saddam, just to demonize him into an Arab Hitler (1991), yet to make friends with him again, just before his disposal (2003).

Representation and Primacy of Geography

“For the purposes of this book, I have maintained a focus on actual contests over land and the land's people. What I have tried to do is a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience, and I have kept in mind the idea that the earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”

“The theory I advance in this book is that culture played a very important, indeed indispensable role. At the heart of European culture during the many decades of imperial expansion lay an undeterred and unrelenting Eurocentrism.”

Unlike some descriptions, the book is not a collection of essays but a coherent whole carefully designed to construct a thesis. The book was relevant at the time of its publication in 1993 and became more relevant after 2001. Antagonistic to Said’s thesis on history many other conservative writers worked on similar topics from a Eurocentric position, works such as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996), Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West (1993) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

Based on works of Gramsci and focusing on the notion of geography, Said creates the term “Voyage in". It is a mode of resistance in Culture and Imperialism, which is defined as the conscious effort of Third World writers and critics to enter into and transform the dominant Western discourses so as to repatriate their marginalized histories. (Zhaoguo 2013) In the first look, Said’s methodology might seem a bit similar to Spivak’s “Strategic essentialism”, since the notion of “representation” is at the core of both strategies. After a closer look, we see a lot of differences between the two. DING Zhaoguo writes about the notion of resistance, “For Said, resistance lies neither in the simplistic strategy of constructing an exclusively essentialist identity nor in the autonomous operation of ambivalent colonial discourse and the endlessly deferred, irretrievable colonial subjectivity.” (Zhaoguo 2013)

Critique of Media

Towards the end of the book, we can see a gradual shift from the classical literature (novel & playwriting) to media and visual culture. In the late 1980s and 90s, with the coercive dominance of media, censorship and the atmosphere around the 1991 Iraq invasion, focusing on the critic of visual media and reporting seems to be more than appropriate. We can see the same critique coming from writers such as Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Mahmood Mamdani and Leila Ahmed. In the last parts of the book, Said cites Virilio, Adorno, John Berger and the conservative sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. These references are quick and could have been skipped for the sake of consistency. Although one might argue that Said is also proposing counter-arguments to these European male writers, (Ali Shariati to Adorno’s comment about the refugee), Said’s reference to Virilio (a Eurocentric and sometimes neocolonial intellectual) is naïve and somehow antagonistic to his claim.

In one sense, Said’s thesis is not radical enough, the inclusion of words such as democracy is not dissected from its Eurocentric roots. Said’s emphasis on secularism is yet without acknowledging the positive impacts of Islam in the East. Yet, said is acknowledging Fanon’s idea of “liberation” and Kwame Nkrumah’s “Neo-colonialism”. He reminds us about the natural outcome of “post de-colonialization” within a nation, where it covers not only internal conflicts and authoritarianism but post-colonial nationalism. A good example of this is in Jalal Ali Ahmad's Occidentosis, an influential Iranian tract published in 1978 that blames the West for most evils in the world.

Antagonistic to the thesis of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Oppressed (1968), Said refers to the Middle-eastern poets and intellectuals such as Adonis who are still preoccupied with modernity itself. Today, anti-Islamists such as Ibn Warraq (writer of Defending the West) who are living and working in Europe have actually proven Edward Said’s point on the question of colonialization and critic of objectivity similar to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Aside from the right-wing orientalists and racists such as Douglas Murray, Charles Allen and Edward Alexander who have been defending the Empire, the second group that is criticizing Said is the orthodox leftists (usually white male) who are hostile even to the word “culture”. With rigid economic-centered views, this group criticizes Said for lack of class-consciousness. (Habib 2005) However, the important distinction in the core of Said’s work is not an economic one but is rooted in geography and culture, from what Gramsci called the subaltern classes. Said’s influence is coming from Vico, Gramsci, Aimé Césaire and to some limited extent from Raymond Williams.

Comparing today’s state of the world (when US military tweets, about dropping bombs for the new year greetings) with the further imperialistic expansion of the United States in different parts of Middle East, to 1993, we can see that Said was very accurate in analyzing the cultural and political consequences of the Empire. (Starr 2019)

“Post-colonial Arab states thus have two choices: many, like Syria and Iraq, retain the pan-Arab inflection, using it to justify a one-party national security state that has swallowed up civil society almost completely; others like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, while retaining aspects of the first alternative, have devolved into a regional or local nationalism whose political culture has not, I believe, developed beyond dependence on the metropolitan West.”

“The United States occupied the island [Haiti] in 1915 (and Nicaragua in 1916) and set in place a native tyranny that exacerbated an already desperate state of affairs. And when in 1991 and 1992 thousands of Haitian refugees tried to gain entry into Florida, most were forcibly returned.”

"The world cannot long afford so heady a mixture of patriotism, relative solipsism, social authority, unchecked aggressiveness, and defensiveness toward others. Today the United States is triumphalist internationally, and seems in a febrile way eager to prove that it is number one."

(Photo: “In memoriam Edward Wadie Said, on the Israeli West Bank wall,” taken by Justin McIntosh - from Boundry2.com)

Bib.

Fanon, Frantz, and Richard Philcox. 2004. The Wretched Of The Earth. New York: Grove Press NY. Habib, Irfan. 2005. "Critical notes on Edward Said ." International Socialism. Starr, Zachary Cohen and Barbara. 2019. CNN. 1 1. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/31/politics/us-military-new-years-eve-bomb-tweet/index.html. Zhaoguo, DING. 2013. Identity, Text, Positioning: On Edward Said’s “Voyage in” as Politics of Resistance. Studies in Literature and Language (cscanada).

#reading #BetweenSheikhnRefugee

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yesweweresoldiers · 5 years ago

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What We’re Talking About: A MAHG Reading Roundup 3

Every summer, TeachingAmericanHistory brings together scholars and teachers from around the nation to our campus in Ashland to enjoy week-long seminars on focused topics in American history and government. These courses can be taken for graduate credit, or simply for your personal enrichment — some participants describe the experience as an “intellectual retreat” where they can enjoy both conversation and collegiality.

If you aren’t able to join us in person this summer, we hope you’ll consider joining us in spirit by checking out some of the myriad texts we’ll be discussing. If you’re reading along, we invite you to join the conversation using #TAHreading to share your thoughts!

Jason Stevens, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The American Revolution: A History, by Gordon S. Wood

Clocking in at fewer than 200 pages, Gordon Wood’s short history of the American Revolution is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about the birth of the United States. Amateur and professional historians alike will find something new and useful in this concise and precise rendering of the Revolution’s origins, battles, and social and political aftermath. For example, did you know that although only nine colleges existed in America by 1776, sixteen more were established over the course of the next twenty-five years? I didn’t. This fact alone reveals something true and beautiful about the uniqueness of America and Americans. A new nation founded on the principles of self-government, unlike all other nations that had ever existed in the history mankind, requires citizens be educated in those principles. Without this education, citizens will not be able to maintain their democratic republic through succeeding generations, and the success of the American experiment in self-government will fade out over time. Wood’s narrative not only stresses the importance of that education, but contributes to it in a much-needed way. All this and much more comes through in Wood’s brief yet brilliant rendering of the American Revolution, without ever collapsing into ‘history lite.’ It is a delightful little book that is a great pleasure to read. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

David Hadley and David F. Krugler, THE RISE OF MODERN AMERICA

David Hadley: I’d like to recommend an essay that we’ll be using an excerpt from Randolph Bourne’s The State. It is a fascinating consideration of the effect of war on a democratic society. Perhaps most famous for Bourne’s observation that “War is the health of the state,” Bourne wrote during World War I to explain the contradiction between the U.S. goal of making the world safe for democracy and the increasingly restrictive policies of the U.S. government at home amid the rising tide of anti-German sentiment. Differing from many progressives of the time, including his former teacher John Dewey, Bourne argued that the war could not be made to serve progressive ends; the war had its own logic, and while the power of the government might increase in ways the progressives approved, ultimately the war increased the symbolic power of the state in ways previously unknown in the American experience. The elevation of the state as the symbol of the nation, Bourne feared, could damage American democratic traditions.

Bourne died in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic while still refining “The State”, leaving an incomplete but still deeply considered and provocative essay behind him. One need not agree with all of his arguments or observations (as I do not) to find in it important questions about the meaning and potential implications of the United States’ rise as a global military superpower. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

Cara Rogers and Sarah Morgan Smith, COLONIAL AMERICA

Cara Rogers: When I teach the history of the Puritans and slavery, I use four primary texts that the National Humanities Center conveniently placed side-by-side in a combined document. Students read an antislavery pamphlet by Samuel Sewall (who was the only Salem Witch Trial judge to publically apologize for that affair), the counter-attack from proslavery Puritan John Saffin, a rebuttal by Sewall, and finally the compromise position taken by Rev. Cotton Mather. The Sewall and Saffin arguments are presented on the same pages, in two columns, so that students can easily see how Saffin attempted to rebut Sewall’s antislavery positions point-by-point. Because these Puritan writers were attempting to persuade their readers by utilizing stories from the Bible, students who are familiar with Christianity will quickly be able to engage with the relative strengths and weaknesses of the pro- and antislavery sides. I also encourage students to come to their own conclusions regarding whether or not Christian scripture approves, condones or condemns owning slaves, and this approach has led to robust classroom debates that both help students to understand the perspectives of the 1700s and to recognize the ways in which the Puritans’ arguments still resonate today.

Sarah Morgan Smith: Among the things that I like best about this class is the chance to highlight the connection between the ideas undergirding the seventeenth century English revolutions and the later American Revolution. Focusing some attention on colonial understandings of the overthrow of the Stuarts (first in the 1640s and then again in 1689) helps remind us that Jefferson, Adams and the rest were part of a much longer tradition of political resistance theorizing that had deep theological roots. We’ll be reading some of the 17th century texts directly, but we’ll also take a quick peek forward into the 18th century with Jonathan Mayhew’s classic Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers. Mayhew preached the sermon on the 100th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and he uses stirring theological arguments to remind his auditors that those who threaten their liberties are not only their enemies, but also the enemies of God, who ordained government for the good of humankind. He draws his rationale for political resistance not merely from the need for self-preservation, but from a deep sense of piety. See more of what we’’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

Jay Green, RELIGION IN AMERICAN HISTORY AND POLITICS

Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980)

During Week 3, I am teaching Religion in American History and Politics, which, in general, surveys encounters between conventional religious beliefs and institutions (Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, etc.) in American political life. But there’s another way of thinking about “religion” in American political history that is equally important but not always conceived of as religious: the practice of sacralizing and ritualizing elements of American culture and civic identity; what Robert Bellah labeled civil religion. It is civil religion that gives Americans a collective sense of transcendence about what it means to be “American.” To the extent that we treat our national symbols, heroes, and “holy days” with reverence and awe, we are participating in the rites of American civil religion.

Charles Reagan Wilson’s classic, Baptized in Blood, gives us a deep dive into the ways southern culture following Appomattox shaped and solidified its own distinct civil religion. A body of sacred myths—fueled by evangelical revivalism—provided a foundation for postbellum southerners to explain the meaning of the Civil War to themselves in ways that both softened the trauma of defeat and allowed them to suppress the moral difficulties of its origins in slavery. This “religion of the Lost Cause” gave the south a distinctive (and distinctively religious) character and system of values that still has resonance to this day. In an age of outrage over kneeling at the national anthem and rising demands to remove Confederate monuments, Wilson’s nearly forty-year-old guide to civil religion’s power is as relevant and helpful as ever. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

Mack Mariani and Sarah Burns, THE CONGRESS

Mack Mariani: I can think of no better source for a study of Congress than The Founder’s Constitution. Essentially this text provides the original source material that the Founders’ drew upon when crafting and debating the U.S. Constitution. The material is organized around each clause of the Constitution, so you can get a sense of the ideas, history and arguments of the Founders that went into each particular provision.

We have one reading that comes directly from The Founder’s Constitution, which is a section of Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention on the debate over apportionment. Students can access the entire Founders’ Constitution online or they can also get bound paperbacks of the five volumes for a reasonable price from Liberty Fund.

Reading Madison’s Notes on the Convention helps one understand why so many people revere the Founders. The Founders were extraordinarily well read and thoughtful about the decisions they were making. They drew heavily on history and political philosophy, applying lessons from these sources to the problems of the day. The depth and complexity of the Founders’ arguments is something to marvel at, particularly when placed in contrast to the comparatively low quality of the arguments and debates that seem to dominate contemporary politics. Madison’s Notes also give us a sense of the Founders as politicians and the fact that the Constitution can be viewed as a product of compromises made by politicians who were very aware of the interests that they served.

Sarah Burns: I would also add Herbert Storing’s excellent (and short!) book called What the Antifederalists Were For. Although The Federalist Papers always gets top billing, having some knowledge about the Antifederalists will enrich one’s appreciation of the period and the depth of the dialogue among the Founders. Storing is an expert in the Antifederalists, having compiled their works into a collection. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

Lucas Morel and Kathleen Pfieffer, THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

Lucas Morel: Two readings for the course on the “History and Literature of the Civil War” focus on how Americans should remember the Civil War. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who delivered the “Memorial Day Speech” (May 30, 1884), and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who offered the “Dedication of the Main Monuments at Gettysburg” (October 3, 1889) were veterans of the War, both having fought for the Union side but coming to opposing opinions on the significance of that cataclysmic event for later generations of Americans. Their reflections upon the meaning of dying for one’s country and the importance of the American experiment in self-government raise similar questions about our current debates over Confederate monuments and institutions named after slaveholders, as well as the ongoing debate over “the Lost Cause.” Why is the cause of the Civil War still a debated subject, and how could this inform current discussions over the justice of slavery reparations?

Kathy Pfieffer: The questions Lucas raises have an interesting parallel in post Civil War literature, particularly in popular short stories that tried to shape the legacy of slavery. On the one hand, the tales in Legends of the Old Plantation, written by Joel Chandler Harris (a white Southerner) tended to romanticize antebellum plantation life with nostalgic depictions of the kindly, genial Uncle Remus and his whimsical stories about Bre’r Fox and Bre’r Rabbit. In Harris’s fiction, everything was better before the War. Harris’s idealized vision was later reinforced through the Disney adaptation Song of the South, where beloved old Uncle Remus was so happy he broke into song — “Zip-A-Dee-Doo Dah.” By contrast, when African-American writer Charles Chesnutt crafted his Conjure Tales, he set the former slave character Uncle Julius firmly within the context of Reconstruction, with all of its broken promises. While Uncle Julius’s storytelling is masked in the quaint dialect and clever turns of phrase that characterized the tales of Uncle Remus, the stories themselves depict brutal violence and family separation, testifying to deep despair. Chesnutt’s vision challenges us to consider whose voices, and whose stories, are amplified, and asks what is lost when we silence, diminish, or suppress the painful parts of our history. See more of what we’ll be reading on the class syllabus.

The post What We’re Talking About: A MAHG Reading Roundup 3 appeared first on Teaching American History.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.”

That’s how President Donald Trump summed up his governing philosophy during his inaugural address last January. The phrase “America First” has been a feature of Trump’s rhetorical shtick since he began campaigning for the White House, but the phrase itself has a long and troubling backstory.

Sarah Churchwell is a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, and the author of new book titled Behold, America. It’s a timely survey of two of the most loaded phrases in the American lexicon: “America First” and “American dream,” and how they’ve evolved in opposition to each other.

In this interview, we discuss that evolution and what these century-old slogans have meant to the people who have co-opted them. Language matters, Churchwell argues, and the words we use carry their own historical baggage, whether we’re aware of it or not.

In the case of America First, that history is dark but also deeply instructive. And in the case of the American dream, it’s a history that needs to be understood afresh if we want to reclaim it’s original meaning.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Let’s start with “America First,” a phrase our current president has frequently used to sum up his worldview. Where does this phrase come from?

Sarah Churchwell

It was a Republican campaign slogan in the 1880s, which means it appeared much earlier than most people think. But it didn’t become a national catchphrase until President Woodrow Wilson used it in 1915. He was using it to try to keep America out of the first World War. But he was kind of doing a tap dance, because he wanted to placate the isolationists, although he was himself an internationalist.

So Wilson was using America First as a way to maneuver his way through a political minefield by saying America would be first to lead the world, and that it should stay neutral so it could pick up the pieces in Europe after the war. It was ostensibly about maintaining neutrality in the name of leadership.

But then the phrase gets taken up in the name of isolationism almost instantly, and it is quickly connected with other ideas that were also on the rise at the time, especially the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It became linked to anti-immigration movements, and sympathizers of fascism, and was popularized by Charles Lindbergh, the famous American pilot who lead the “America First Committee” — a group of some 800,000 Americans who wanted to keep us out of WWII.

“Trump represents a strain of American thinking that goes back a long, long way”

Sean Illing

So it began as an antiwar isolationist slogan, and then morphed into an explicitly xenophobic and fascist slogan?

Sarah Churchwell

Yeah, and it happened pretty predictably. If you’re in an anti-immigrant and xenophobic debate, then “America First” will kind of magnetically accrue those anti-immigrant sentiments. Put America first, native-born people first. It connects back to the nativism of the 1840s and 1850s, and it sounds broadly anti-immigrant. In a moment where people were very concerned about waves of immigration, which was a big motivating force for the KKK, it was only natural that America First would become a rallying cry for nativists and racists.

Sean llling

To be clear, who did the America First-ers want to keep out?

Sarah Churchwell

Anybody who’s not white, not Protestant, not what they saw as a native-born American, an old-style American. And that was their notion of what America was supposed to be.

So America First did have very strong resonances with ideals like “Make America Great Again,” which was a phrase that they nearly echoed as well. The idea then, as now, was that the true version of America is the America that looks like me, the American fantasy I imagine existed before it was diluted with other races and other people.

America First spoke directly and powerfully to that segment of white America that felt they were losing their power, their dominance. It was a way of saying me first, only my version of America should be allowed to have any sway here.

You have to remember, too, that there was this notion at the time of “100 percent American,” which meant 100 percent Anglo Saxon blood. And that coincided with the so-called one-drop rule, which was an old racist rule in America in which one drop of black blood made someone legally black and therefore subject to slavery or Jim Crow or miscegenation laws. So all of these ideas were used interchangeably, and they folded neatly into the America First movement.

Sean Illing

I want to pivot to this idea of the “American dream,” which intersects with the America First movement.

So the American dream, as initially conceived, was very much rooted in a working-class social democratic aspiration for equality and upward mobility, but you describe how this notion was gradually co-opted and turned upside down. What happened?

Sarah Churchwell

We associate this phrase with ideas of free market capitalism and with conversations on the right about individual opportunity and liberty and all this small government stuff.

But when you search for the origins of the phrase “American dream,” it turns out it emerged on the progressive left to argue the opposite side of the case — to say that unchecked capitalism and huge increases in private wealth would destroy the American dream of opportunity, because of inequality.

The meaning of the phrase started to change after WWII. The newfound emphasis on individual economic liberty was in tension with the idea of justice for all, and this became more of a problem as economic inequality increased and the spoils of capitalism were restricted to a privileged few later in the century.

So what we had was a series of debates as the country tried to keep liberty and justice in some kind of uneasy equilibrium, but ultimately the emphasis on individual liberty and free market capitalism trumped everything else.

Sean Illing

In the book, you talk about how these two phrases, “America First” and the “American dream,” naturally collided and came to represent the struggle between liberal democracy and authoritarian fascism.

Sarah Churchwell

Well, the collision was inevitable, especially when America First shifted from an isolationist slogan to an explicitly nativist, white nationalist slogan.

Early on, the American dream was being used all the way up to WWII as a way to describe not free market capitalism, but the rights of everybody within a democratic society, and the dreams of America for fairness and self-government. Those ideas were bound to collide with the America First movement.

What I found so interesting was that people were speaking of the American dream as a concept that had racial equality built into it, that was inimical to anti-Semitism and other kinds of bigotries or racial prejudices, as early as the 1930s.

Most people would say that we first started to have a conversation about social justice related to the American dream with Martin Luther King in 1963, but people were arguing this from at least as early as the 1930s, and saying if this anti-Semitic America First thing starts to take hold, it will be the death of the American dream. Racial injustice would be the death of the American dream.

Sean Illing

When you hear President Donald Trump declare the American dream dead and promise to put America first, what do you think?

Sarah Churchwell

I think it would be good if we all read more history. Trump’s version of the American dream is a cartoon version from the 1950s, when guys like him had it really good, even better than today. But other people are pushing back, and saying you can’t dominate everybody, and Trump feeds into this resentment and he has unleashed it as well as anyone.

And when he says he’s going to put America first, he specifically means this vision of America first. His advisors know this stuff. Steve Bannon knows this stuff. Bannon has read history, and he uses phrases like “economic nationalism” which were also associated with America First in the 1920s. It’s not a coincidence.

They chose the phrase “America First” pretty late in the campaign, and it seem pretty deliberate. Donald Trump didn’t stumble on it. One of the things I talk about in the book is that Trump was very well aware of what it meant, at least in the 1990s when he talked about it in relation to Pat Buchanan’s campaign, and called Buchanan an anti-Semite and said that he was using the phrase to curry favor with the right-wing wacko nut jobs, which he obviously decided was a good tactic in 2016.

“America First spoke directly and powerfully to that segment of white America that felt they were losing their power, their dominance”

Sean Illing

Trump personifies one side of the moral and political tension this book describes, and maybe that’s the most important fact about his political existence — that there is nothing new about him or what he represents, that he is simply the latest expression of a core feature of the American psyche.

Sarah Churchwell

I totally agree with that. Indeed, I wanted this book to make that very point. Trump represents a strain of American thinking that goes back a long, long way, and the debate we’re having now about what kind of country we want to live in, and who has the right to be here, is hardly new.

We’ve always been divided and we’ve also been divided along exactly these lines. And at that moment, the side that wants America to go backward, to include fewer people, is in the ascendancy, and it’s important that we recognize that and realize that we’ve been here before, and that nothing is inevitable.

Sean Illing

If knowledge of history is truly emancipatory, and I think it is, what does knowledge of this history — the history of America First and the American dream — emancipate us from?

Sarah Churchwell

Well, it emancipated me from the belief that the American dream was always what we say it is today. It used to be so much bigger, so much more inclusive, and the version we inherited isn’t the original version or the most inspiring or just version. It reminded me that our aspirations can be bigger and better, and that the story of America can always change.

Knowing history also has a way of clarifying the fight you’re in. It’s important to know what America First means and what it represents, because that’s what we’re up against right now, and it’s a very old fight. So in a way, it’s liberating to know that, to know that the struggle is ongoing and has to be continually waged.

Original Source -> How “America First” ruined the “American dream”

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Why Is There Republicans And Democrats

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-is-there-republicans-and-democrats/

Why Is There Republicans And Democrats

How Things Got This Bad

Why Democrats and Republicans have different priorities on COVID relief

6) The Republican turn against democracy begins with race

Support for authoritarian ideas in America is closely tied to the countrys long-running racial conflicts.

For students of American history, this shouldnt be a surprise.

7) Partisanship causes Republicans to justify anti-democratic behavior

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

Reality Check 3: The Democrats Legislative Fix Will Never Happenand Doesnt Even Touch The Real Threats

Vaccine Advocacy From Hannity And Mcconnell Gets The Media Off Republicans’ Backs But Won’t Shift Public Sentiment

Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson

Ha ha ha, no.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Matthew Gertz July 20, 2021

Jefferson And Jeffersonian Principles

Reality Check #4: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

History Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

The Republican Party today supports a pro-business platform, with foundations in economic libertarianism, and fiscal and social conservatism.

Adams And The Revolution Of 1800

Why Democrats and Republicans Are Claiming A Midterm Win

Voxs German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administrations burst of policymaking. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday.

The MAGA movement, Blum and Parker write, is a clear and present danger to American democracy.

2) Republicans are embracing violence

Early Life And Career

Democratic View On Healthcare

Obama And Trump Healthcare Policies Compared

When Was The Republican And Democratic Parties Formed

The Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson Martin Van Buren on January 8, 1828, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He was the United States seventh president but the first democratic President.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is pretty much younger than the Democratic Party. It was formed in 1854 by anti-slavery modernizers and activists.

The republicans were against the expansion of slavery in Western territories. They fought hard to protect African Americans rights after the civil war.

The Legal Fight Over Voting Rights During The Pandemic Is Getting Hotter

Access vs. security

Even so, Trump and McEnany both voted by mail this year in Florida, and Republican officials across the country have encouraged voting by mail.

Democrats Or Republicans: Who Has The Higher Income

Where Do Trump And Biden Stand On Key Issues

Reuters: Brian Snyder/AP: Julio Cortez

The key issues grappling the country can be broken down into five main categories: coronavirus, health care, foreign policy, immigration and criminal justice.

This year, a big focus of the election has been the coronavirus pandemic, which could be a deciding factor in how people vote, as the country’s contentious healthcare system struggles to cope.

The average healthcare costs for COVID-19 treatment is up to $US30,000 , an Americas Health Insurance Plans 2020 study has found.

Presidential Election Of 1808

This mayor joining the GOP says theres no Democratic Party anymore’

What Is Thomas Jefferson Remembered For

What Republican And Democrats Believe

Republicans and Democrats have diverse ideologies and beliefs. These beliefs or ideology is part of what draws people to join either political party.

Lets start with Republicans. What do Republicans believe in?

Heres a quick summary of what the Republican Party believes in:

Heres a quick look at what Democrats believe in:

Was The Donkey Originally A Jackass

However, the donkey never really caught on after the end of Jacksons presidency, and Thomas Nast apparently had no knowledge that it ever was used to represent the Democrats.

Election Of 1796 And Vice Presidency

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rabbiandrewrosenblatt · 7 years ago

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Personality and Leadership

Contrary to the sabre-rattling rhetoric of certain national leaders, the size of the nuclear missile launch button is the least relevant thing about a potential nuclear engagement. Kim Jung Un is widely believed to promote the North Korean nuclear program as a pathway to legitimacy in the international community. I am genuinely puzzled by the idea that his tough talk would be a strategy to gain respect. To me it rings of narcissism and drips with insecurity. I would be more swayed by the philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt: speak softly and carry a big stick.

On the other hand, contrary to my own distaste for it, narcissists seem to be a popular leadership choice in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, and North Korea to name a few. Even open democracies have freely chosen overpoweringly narcissistic leaders.

While the research is highly critical of narcissistic leadership in both business and political contexts, narcissism does seem to have an occasional advantage. Dr. Jerrold M Post, a professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University argues, “at moments of societal crisis, otherwise mature and psychologically healthy individuals may temporarily come to feel overwhelmed and in need of a strong and self-assured leader. But when the historical moment passes, so too does the need.” (see Post, Jerrold M. “Narcissism and the Charismatic Leader-Follower Relationship.” Political Psychology, vol. 7 1986).

Post’s prime example of the benefits of narcissistic leadership was Turkey in crisis at the beginning of the 20th century. Post considers Ataturk the ideal leader for his time because he was able to use his dominant personality to be “a force for healing.” The founder of modern Turkey imparted on a fractured society a sense of wholeness by forging a “special relationship with his ‘ideal-hungry’ followers.”

Could we say the same of the today’s elected [or quasi-elected] narcissists? Is Putin the answer to a Russia struggling for progress and legitimacy after the fall of communism? Is Duterte the tonic for a Philippines beset by poverty and corruption? I think Post is onto something arguing that when people perceive themselves to be in crisis, anyone who seems ultra-sure of himself provides comfort and security regardless of how ill-informed or badly conceived his plan. However, the confidence that such men [always men] broadcast to the masses is merely ‘fake news’.

Things were no better in ancient times. Pharaoh was a narcissist, projecting himself as a god. The Book of Ezekiel says that he described himself as the Great Crocodile that patrolled the river Nile. Like today’s despots, he had to create a crisis from which to save his subjects. He created paranoia of extreme proportions by forecasting a future alliance between the growing Jewish population and a fictitious enemy. Worst of all, Pharaoh clung to his ‘divine’ authority and rejected the ever-clearer pattern of the “signs and wonders” of the Gd of Heaven and Earth. In the face of such evidence, people then were no more fooled than we are today by the bluster of our own dictators and autocrats. The Egyptians said to Pharaoh, “we will soon know that Egypt is lost.”

Moshe represents the diametric opposite of Pharaoh. Moshe is the humble and self-critical leader. He refuses to believe in himself as the source of his power. He refuses to take all the credit. Moshe’s selection as leader is based on his ability to feel the pain of others and to intervene on their behalf to his detriment. He gives up his palace career and status to save the oppressed. Moshe does not own the treasure taken out of Egypt. He must solicit gifts from the tribes, for he is beholden to them. Moshe will wear a tunic with no pockets, because he wishes to demonstrate that he has not taken for himself even a shekel. Pharaoh owned it all. Moshe owned nothing.

Throughout the narratives of the Bible, Moshe is humble. He will reveal to the daughters of Tzelafchad that he does not know the answer to the question of their inheritance. He will reveal in the case of the wood-chopper who gathered wood on the Sabbath that he does not know how to proceed. He will also confess his ignorance to those prevented from taking part in the Passover offering because of impurity. In each case, he must ask Gd for an answer. He could have faked it – who would have known? The Torah tells us that the single most important leader in Jewish history is thus defined by humility not by arrogance.

In light of the stark differences between Pharaoh and Moshe, I stand by my gut instinct that humility trumps self-confidence in leadership. Moshe inherited a crisis that could match that of any leader. As Jerrold Post says about the virtue of narcissism in leaders “when the historical moment passes, so too does the need.” Moshe’s leadership needed to be enduring. Thus, there was no place for leadership based on “it’s all about me” because that is just plain narcissism. Moshe is the opposite of the poor players of history who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. Those are the leaders full of sound and fury – full of themselves – who will ultimately signify nothing. That the leadership style exemplified by Moshe has preserved the Jewish people since the Exodus is proof that humility is Gd’s archetype for enduring leadership.

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esprit-de-corps-magazine · 7 years ago

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WEAPONS OF MASS CONSUMPTION: The Information War Is Raging

(Volume 24-11)

By Col (Ret'd) Pat Stogran

Sadly, just like my article in the last issue of EdeC, I will start off with an expression of condolence to those affected by another terrible mass shooting in the United States. My thoughts and prayers are with the casualties, families and friends of the latest tragedy in Texas.

I love the CBC! Let me qualify that. I love a lot about the CBC, particularly the documentaries. I listen to a lot of radio — The Current, Quirks and Quarks, Ideas, Day Six, The 180, and Q, just to name a few. I also listen to BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle (English) and National Public Radio out of the United States. I don’t watch much television, but when I do investigative documentary shows like the Fifth Estate are tracked closely on my radar, and Vice, Russian Television and Al Jazeera (English) are my regular channel haunts. French language television in Ontario has some tremendous documentaries and investigative news shows, and of course the Internet is replete with reputable and legitimate sources of news, although I will admit that, as a dinosaur, I am relatively inept at tracking them down. Surfing the net feels to me more like trying to catch a wave in a swamp than carving a path inside a breaker that is barrelling to the beach, so I stick to the sites that I know to be credible or are referred to me from people I trust. I subscribe to as many or more noteworthy independent new outlets on the web, like Canadaland, The Tyee, APTN, and the National Observer, to name just a few.

You may wonder why I am offering comment on my news consumption in a column that is supposed to be about war, warfare, and military theory and doctrine. Last month I talked about terrorism, emphasizing that it should be considered an act of war and not just another word for seemingly senseless violence. That article was in keeping with a theme in this column that we must be more sensitive to the revolution in military affairs, that we are in the midst of a revolution that the military-industrial complex is acutely aware of but either incapable or unwilling to deal with. My narrative has entered into a discussion of information and cyber warfare, so I think it is useful to introduce readers to the relevant battlespace. That battlespace is inside your head!

Some people have been critical of the eclectic array of news sources I follow, particularly RTV and Al Jazeera, even CBC, arguing that I am consuming propaganda. I would submit, however, that would only be the case if I was to take anything any source has to say as ground truth. Information is as much a matter of perspective as it is accuracy and honesty of the source, so it requires an iterative process with continuous feedback and course corrections on the part of the consumer to rise above raw data and information to a modicum of understanding and ultimately wisdom and sound judgement (for more on this see my column on the DIKW pyramid in Volume 24 Issue 8).

On CBC, I dismiss everything to do with politics and politicians unless there is corroborating evidence from other sources. However, I find that the vast majority of their programming, particularly on the radio, whether it is economics, culture, crime and corruption, national security, and even the arts, offers their audience tremendous insight into the changes and challenges to our society. I look to Russian Television and Al Jazeera to tell us everything that our own governments and corporate media outlets are reticent to tell us, just as I check in on MSNBC to find out what Russia is up to in their information and cyber operations against the United States. Of course, that information is revealed through criticism of their presidential incumbent and cries of foul against Vladimir Putin. I take everything I see and hear with a grain of salt, and everything that RTV says about Ukraine and the Baltic States is treated with a pound of salt.

I am always on a quest to increase my knowledge and understanding of the issues and therefore ready to modify my opinions when new evidence is presented or when someone points out flaws in my reasoning. Consequently, my opinions and inferences are as fluid and flexible as my sources might appear to be obscure or unorthodox, and often critical of and contrarian to status quo to the point of being considered by some as unreasonable. Mais, c’est la guerre!

From my interactions on social media, particularly Facebook, I like to see what issues are pertinent to my friends, fans and followers. I am grateful for the array of articles they share on various issues, some of which are hugely informative, but a great deal of which is clearly biased and of dubious credibility. The problem is that biased and incredible information is virtually an epidemic in the world today. Indeed, anybody with a smartphone and a Google account can establish a web presence that appears on the surface to be highly credible while, in reality, they are often sources of misinformation and disinformation. The former refers to information that is deemed by the originator as accurate although incorrectly so, and the latter are utterances made knowing full well they are false with the intent to deceive. I admit to having been caught sharing what amounts to “fake news” and recycling old news, but that has become part of the learning process.

A predisposition for or against certain facts or evidence makes a person vulnerable to deception, which is compounded by a propensity for people to make unreasonable inferences. For this reason I find it particularly distressing that ignorance and unreasonableness is widespread when it comes to information consumption. I don’t know how many times I have seen posts that are so biased on the surface that they are not to be believed. More often than not people allow themselves to fall victim to their own confirmation bias by ignoring data and information that might be contrary to one’s extant opinion. Indeed, the human mind has developed some complex mechanisms to protect it from information overload and cognitive dissonance — where one’s reality and behaviour differs from one’s fundamental beliefs. It takes mental discipline to make sure those defence mechanisms do not pervert our perceptions.

While the old garbage-in/garbage-out dictum applies to human decision-making, the quality and diversity on the information feeding the process is not the only critical vulnerability being exploited in information warfare. Unreasonable, illogical thought processes are an insidious and pervasive threat. Indeed, a person should not need a PhD in philosophy to understand that false dichotomies are a type of logical fallacy, one that is at the centre of the Left Wing versus Right Wing divide upon which politics is based. Inductive reasoning abounds, whereby broad conclusions are drawn from specific observations, but it is a process that is far from infallible and much less certain than deductive reasoning. And of course non sequitur logic fallacies fuel governments’ false dichotomies of binary solutions to very complex problems. While the assertion that fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq will prevent them from launching terror attacks might not be completely false, it is most certainly an unreasonable expectation in the face of the terror attacks that continue to plague Western democracies. When factored in with the phenomenon of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, it is no wonder that the Vulcan Star Fleet Officer Spock had such a terrible time tolerating the illogical behaviour of his human colleagues.

Another critical vulnerability that information operations seek to exploit is that of crowd behaviour and groupthink. Whether it is a price war that once pushed the per unit price of tulip bulbs to the equivalent of thousands of dollars, or the referendum that compelled the United Kingdom to exit the European Union that was then followed by a flood of enquiries on Google by Britons wondering as a consequence what they got themselves into, it is widely accepted that groups of people tend to act and react irrationally. And with the plethora of information technologies and platforms, it is increasingly easy for insurgents to set up cognition minefields and booby traps in the battlespace of our brain-boxes.

While our presumed adversaries may have had a field day with the last elections in the United States, our politicians are equally adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities in the general population that are posed by crowd behaviour and groupthink. What is alarming in this day and age is that, in order to win, politicians have progressed well beyond from simply twisting the truth to articulating planks for their platforms that are ambitious to the point of unachievable to the point of outright lying and provocative actions.

Military forces have traditionally liked to lay solitary claim to being masters of the battlefield, but I would submit that, today, there are many, many new and very powerful actors in that domain. Mainstream media has in large part been guilty of bias such that they and the digital-industrial complex have become full-fledged combatants in the information war. The U.S. government has also claimed that one of the weapons that Russia used to interfere in the last presidential election was the promotion of propaganda through social media giants within the United States. I would submit that the digital-industrial complex has become so large and adept at dragging for data and sensitive information that, collectively, they pose a critical vulnerability to the security of the United States and Canada. It seems to me that, in the U.S., a major breech of huge private databases is almost as regular an occurrence as the mass shootings of innocent civilians. However, not only do our governments seem to be reticent to regulate those multinationals in order to protect that vulnerability, but in the United States they have established a monstrously huge network of fusion centres to exploit the information themselves.

When you add to that the thousands of computer geeks, who are arguably as inept socially as they are socially conscientious and have set out to defeat government and the corporate oligarchs they perceive are subjugating and exploiting the masses, I think it is reasonable to infer that the information war is raging, and we are all the target audience for those operations.

As usual I look forward to your comments and critiques. Until next time ...

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whenpraxisbecomesunbearable · 7 years ago

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True Rainbow Thinking

The Marriage Equality Act was approved by Parliament last Wednesday. The Civil Unions Act came into being on April 14, 2014, and April 1, 2015 marked the establishment of the Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics Act.

Although hugely important, the true measurement of progress is not just legal recognition by the powers that be.

Marriage, that is, a legal contract that socially governs a relationship between two individuals (and it’s always just two) is an old and traditional act. When one opts for marriage, and one has all the liberty to do so, one is embracing a pretty conservative practice that does not rattle the economic powers that be; rather it extends its logic.

This is not an argument against marriage equality but simply a call to recognise that the ultimate value of a relationship does not lie in marriage.

I agree with the reaction of Aditus, that “the Bill is essentially a law of language”.

At least symbolically, most of the rights the new law establishes have existed since the 2014 law on civil unions.

On a legal basis, it was claimed the new law was not perfect and that perhaps more openness should have been adopted in its drafting, not least to give people with an irregular migration status access to marriage rights.

Other arguments have been made about how the Prime Minister is using civil rights in utilitarian ways.

These arguments, repeated since 2013, state that Joseph Muscat is pushing for civil rights to be popular with the LGBTIQ lobby, to deviate public attention from pressing criticisms surrounding his governance or to alienate people from the PN because of its hesitancy to embrace liberal policies.

It is important to entertain these arguments, but let us not reduce all politics, including good moves, to suspicion.

Over the past few weeks, critical debate on marriage equality was botched somewhat unsurprisingly, unfortunately.

We have seen the radicals marching for the preservation of the Christian definition of marriage. People who should know better wrote vitriolic articles. Homophobic comments were posted on social media.

Some called the new law Marxist legislation destroying Mother’s and Father’s Day. North Korea was invoked unnecessarily.

People decried the dismantling of the concept of traditional family (and thank goodness for that; the same argument was made a couple of decades ago when women demanded a right to a career, to sexual freedom and to vote). Some even decided that the most pressing matter concerning this new law is pronouns and a certain pragmatism when it comes to legal terminology.

While some of these arguments raised pertinent matters, others were simply inane comments that reminded me of when, in 2014, the PN gave itself the power to speak on behalf of everyone in society when it argued against the gender identity law on the basis that “society is not ready” for such radical changes.

But I have also seen some LGBTIQ activists dismiss outright well-meaning and informed individuals who voiced concerns respectfully and intelligently.

In many ways, this is a symptom of the so-called liberal left, with which I identify, that calls for openness and plurality while being increasingly defensive and intolerant. In various regards, we, as a society, need to be kinder and wiser in our reactions and attitudes.

Edwin Vassallo made the headlines for an unpopular view. He was the only MP who voted against the law, citing a discrepancy he saw between his principles and the immorality of what was being proposed.

I do not agree with his position, and although I think he should have made his position clearer before the election, I do not classify his vote as undemocratic or stupid.

I concur with Nationalist MP Claudio Grech’s stand that politics must not be reduced to a robot-like automatic agreement with the party line. I also concur with Grech’s repeated claim that it is time local politics be elevated beyond reality TV politics to the level of ideas, research and the involvement of civil society.

Politics has an ability to confer urgency on an issue. Just a couple of years ago, some discourses now employed on a daily basis were not even in social circulation.

Yet making something an issue is a complicated matter. Activism and struggles for civil rights are misguided when they are solely focused on one set of issues.

The wonder of politics is that most issues are interrelated, and interesting things happen when one starts seeing different political affairs as related, not just on a national level but also globally.

So, alongside the importance of civil rights, when shall we make critical debate in the public sphere or democratic transparency an issue, for example?

When shall we deal with environmental destruction and overdevelopment?

When shall we start talking of the discrepancy between topping LGBTIQ-friendly statistics on the one hand and the rampant homophobia and racism in our society on the other? When shall we attempt to speak seriously of pinkwashing?

When shall we analyse the tensions of a religion which preaches love while some of its representatives practise hate?

When shall we, the people, demand a more appropriate and less rude form of political language?

When shall we recognise that having our democratic representatives engaging in ethically dodgy behaviour disqualifies them from continuing in their role?

Politics should not be a matter of dates and names, in the same way that democracy is not just a matter of procedures and elections.

Political struggles must be accompanied by creative and colourful thinking: true rainbow thinking beyond black-or-white approaches. Only in this way can we start to enjoy the fruits of a truly radical and functioning democratic politics.

Kurt Borg is a Philosophy PhD candidate and member of the Institute of Utopian Studies.

Published on Times of Malta on 17 July 2017:

https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20170717/opinion/True-rainbow-thinking.653462

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clubofinfo · 7 years ago

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Expert: Personally, I don’t think “the left” ultimately represents much of anything coherent, but rather constitutes a historically contingent coalition of ideological positions. Bastiat and other free market folks sat on the left of the french assembly, and while we might try to claim that as part of a consistent leftist market tradition, we should be honest that one’s position in that particular revolution — much less revolution in general — is hardly indicative of very much. There are always revolutionaries who desire systems far worse than our own, and similarly there have been many broadly recognized “leftists” whose desires were utterly anathema to liberation. It’s popular these days to paint the left and right as egalitarian versus hierarchical. But not only is this an imposed read on a far messier historical and sociological reality, but it’s honestly quite philosophically contentless. No one is particularly clear on what egalitarianism means, or even hierarchy, and many interpretations are not only mutually exclusive, they reveal supposedly identical claims as actually deeply antagonistic. Does egalitarianism mean everyone gets precisely the same wealth (however that’s supposed to be measured)? Does it mean mere legal or social equality in the abstract realm of relations before The People or The State’s legal system? Does it mean equal opportunity for economic striving or does it mean equal access to the people’s grain stores? Does equality supersede all other virtues like liberty? Is it better to all be oppressed equally than to have some achieve greater freedom? I’m not being facetious. We paper over these deep issues with “well but common sense” and the wishful assumption that our comrades will come down on the minutia the same way we would, sharing our intuitions on various tradeoffs, but that’s empirically not the case. We constantly differ. People talk about “collective direct democracy” as if something being the near unanimous will of some social body constitutes an egalitarian condition. And, sure, it does under some definitions. But the moment I see some collective body trying to vote on my life I don’t want to “participate” I want to chuck a bomb at it. Leftists use both the slogans “power to the people” and “abolish power” — this should be an intense red flag to everyone that completely different conceptual systems and values are at play. It’s delusional in the extreme to suppose that if we sat down and talked about things we’d all end up on the same page. The assumption of pan-leftist solidarity or a shared common goal is a comforting lie. The left isn’t defined by some set of axioms in ethical philosophy that we can all agree on and than argue about derivations of strategy or implementation from. The left is a historical coalition thrown together by happenstance. As with revolution we tend to self-identify as the underdogs and build our coalitions from the classes we recognize as underdogs against the classes we recognize as ruling but this leads to all kinds of contortions. We are for the right to choose because women are the underdogs in patriarchy. But at the same time we’re pro vegan because animals are the (sometimes literal) underdogs in human domination. Wait, do we value all living things? What counts as a discrete living thing? Do we value them equally or is the level of consciousness/sentience important? Is it the level of dependence or strain it places on another person? Suddenly the responses we have in situations with family members versus the overdogs of christianity seemingly start to come into conflict with the responses we have in situations with disabled people (underdogs!). I’m not saying there isn’t a way to thread all these dynamics, to find a core ethical guide and nuanced attentive implementation — I think there is one (although my particular approach of ultimately recognizing a vast spectrum of sentience/consciousness between zygotes/nematodes and anyone remotely close to a conscious human is denounced by a number on the left as “unegalitarian”). I’m pointing out that our responses rarely arise from an ethical analysis but from instinctual responses to any appearance of an underdog. The left is rarely a philosophy, more often a coalition, with theory tacked on to serve the goals of binding that coalition together. One could easily imagine universes with different historical paths where outlawing abortion is a core leftist plank, seen as deeply interrelated with opposing queerphobia, patriarchy, ableism, etc. Or the left could oppose legal sanction, but support and build grassroots social and cultural sanction against abortion. (Again, for the record I’m pro-choice.) Underdogism is a really dangerous approach to the world. It’s a good “rule of thumb” but if you know anything about me it’s that I abhor such heuristics and see them as the opposite of radical analysis. Underdogism is how you get things like zionism, leninism, poc nationalism, TERFs, SWERFs, etc. Its failures are manifold. There’s a good case the left is nothing but underdogism — in which case fascism is almost always leftist. MRAs don’t approach politics like a reactionary on the right side of the French Estates General, consciously seeking to preserve an established ruling structure, they see themselves as the underdogs. Sure, they’re not (in almost everything besides some fringe contexts like some bits of divorce law), but fuck it they’re potential underdogs, and that status is more than enough to reproduce much of the standard structures of underdogism. One might interject that the problem with underdogism of the alt-right is not just their misidentification of underdogs but their hunger for power, and this is certainly broadly true (although a fraction of the alt-right actually seem less in it for power but more in it to drink outgroup/”overdog” tears). But this certainly applies to much of the left in good standing. Certainly many authoritarian leftists have hungrily latched onto underdogism as a potential ladder to power. I’ve met feminist writers who openly admitted to me they’d be patriarchal if they were men, or own slaves if they were antebellum rich whites. Yes, any set of smart persons who recoil at clear instances of oppression are gonna broadly converge on a number of positions or analyses. But the way they reconcile or hold together these things may differ dramatically. Just because the left is a stable coalition in our present context doesn’t mean aspects of it that seem in perfect harmony won’t break in wildly different directions should certain conditions change. I have repeatedly encountered leftists who’ve claim that valuing some things above other things is hierarchical and thus right-wing (leftism being in their minds representing something more like stoicism or buddhism). Similarly you find epistemic pluralism common in the most heads-up-their-ass sectors of left academia who think thinking some models of the world are more true than others is “unegalitarian” or even “totalitarian.” It’s tempting to just laugh about hippies and move on, but these sort of horrifically bad definitions of “egalitarianism” will sometimes come out of the mouths of smart people who generally have their heads on straight the moment they move to a context they’re unused to. Now I hate the NAP, but everyone laughs at the NAP these days for being “unpragmatic” and this has increasingly become tied to a casual indictment of all ethical philosophy itself. A turn that has been encouraged by the twin interrelated scourges of the modern internet far left: tankies and nihilists. This makes sense if — as per social justice — you see the point of the left to create a social framework of etiquette and loose ideology that can bind a coalition of underdog classes together. Thus the increasing refrain of “you can’t compare!” that happens whenever someone tries to tease out commonalities or contradictions between various claims, positions or planks. There is, from this perspective, no common root or unifying ethos to the left and we should not look for one lest the whole project fall apart. Philosophy, ethics, and core values or principles become the enemies, as does both methodological individualism and universalism. There are neither individual experiences nor universal ones, just relatively simplistic classes of people with incomparable experiences. And we bind them together into common cause by badgering, social positioning, poetic affective appeals, and threats of violence. The left isn’t unified by anything. Marxism is half discredited by idiocy and monstrosity and the half that survived became a wildly contradictory mess more preoccupied with obscurantism, irrationality and anti-realism to hide its own failures than getting anything done much less charting a path. Most of the concerns of the left refer to opposing mythologized superstructures that we are left flailing in the absence of or whenever their composition and behavior change. The left is, in short, utterly allergic to radicalism. Fending off its inadequacies with short puffs of extremism instead. As social and ideological complexities compound through the runaway feedback of the information age these internal tensions and the laughably frail taping over we’ve done will only become more clear. There is still hope for a radical anarchism that is willing to root its discussions of freedom and ethics concretely and explicitly. But this will necessarily involve casting off from many allies who we share some limited intuitions or momentary prescriptions with. Or at least dissolving the comforting delusions of a deep camaraderie. The only reason the lie of “the left” has persisted for two centuries is that its grand Manichean narrative of two more or less uniform tribes — one enlightened and one indecipherably morally corrupt — enables a sense of community that provides psychological comfort to many. To many on the left (as well as on the nationalistic etc right) a hunger for “community” is actually their primary motivation. When chatting at the bar it’s better to not look too deep into why you both oppose capitalists lest you discover something that sunders rather than binds. But the format of present internet technologies has had the reverse effect. Inescapable contact with The Enemy has led us to put up hostile discursive walls that naturally end up cutting out our traditional allies too, causing both right and left to fracture in desperate attempts to find purity, trustworthiness, or some kind of deeper binding. The happenstance points of unity that worked when we had little choice in who to befriend are now fracturing in all directions. This is largely a good thing, the last two decades have seen all manner of horrors lurking among our own ranks exposed. But the process that brings to light our lack of commonality with the anti-science leftist deep ecologist who wants to kill all humans is also a process that will ultimately rip “the left” to unsalvageable shreds. This ship is sinking. And just because many of the rats are fleeing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t either. http://clubof.info/

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cabiba · 8 years ago

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Reading “How I Left the Left” is a solid reminder that there’s not much intellectual heft remaining on that side of the fence. If an ideology sets out to isolate the locus of evil in people’s very identity, it is pretty well spent. This, in addition to the failure of the socialist model everywhere it has tried, explains why the Left has suffered so much at the polls and now faces a serious backlash in campus and public life.

With the failure of action comes reaction, and now the Western world is dealing with something far less familiar to most people: the rise of the alt-right as the alternative. It is attractive to some young people due to its taboo-breaking, rebel ethos that so easily inflames teachers and protectors of civic conventions.

The movement is more than that, however. It has a real philosophical and political history, one that stands in violent opposition to the idea of individual liberty. It has been largely suppressed since World War II and, because of that, most people assumed fascism (and its offshoots) was gone from the earth.

As a result, this generation has not been philosophically prepared to recognize the tradition, the signs, the implications, and the political application of the ideology so many are stumbling to embrace.

Here is a prehistory of what we call the alt-right today, which is probably better described as a 21st-century incarnation of what in the 19th century would have been called right-Hegelianism. I’m skipping over many political movements (in Spain, France, and Italy), and clownish leaders like George Lincoln Rockwell, Oswald Mosley, and Fr. Coughlin, to get right to the core ideas that form something like a school of thought which developed over a century.

Here we have a lineage of non-Marxist, non-leftist brand of rightist but still totalitarian thinking, developed in fanatical opposition to bourgeois freedom.

1820: Georg Friedrich Hegel published Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which spelled out the political implications of his “dialectical idealism,” an outlook that departed dramatically from the liberal tradition by completely abstracting from human experience to posit warring life forces operating beyond anyone’s control to shape history. It turns out that the politics of this view amounted to “the state is the march of God through the world.” He looked forward to some age in the future that would realize the apotheosis of State control. The Hegelian view, according to a 1952 lecture by Ludwig von Mises, broke into Left and Right branches, depending on the attitude toward nationalism and religion (the right supported the Prussian state and church, whereas the left did not), and thereby “destroyed German thinking and German philosophy for more than a century, at least.”

1841: Thomas Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, which popularized the “great man” theory of history. History is not about marginal improvements in living standards by using better tools, but rather about huge episodic shifts brought about through power. A champion of slavery and opponent of liberalism, Carlyle took aim at the rise of commercial society, praising Cromwell, Napoleon, and Rousseau, and rhapsodizing about the glories of power. “The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men.” Carlyle's target was Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment generally. Hitler’s biographers agree that the words of Carlyle were the last he requested to be read to him before he died.

1841: On the continent, meanwhile, Friedrich List published The National System of Political Economy, celebrating protectionism, infrastructure spending, and government control and support of industry. Again, it was a direct attack on laissez faire and a celebration of the national unit as the only truly productive force in economic life. Steven Davies comments: “The most serious result of List’s ideas was a change in people’s thinking and perception. Instead of seeing trade as a cooperative process of mutual benefit, politicians and businessmen came to regard it as a struggle with winners and losers.” Today's economic nationalists have nothing new to add to the edifice already constructive by List.

1871: Charles Darwin left the realm of science briefly to enter sociological analysis with his book The Descent of Man. It is a fascinating work but tended to treat human society as a zoological rather than sociological and economic enterprise. It included an explosive paragraph (qualified and widely misread) that regretted how “we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment… Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” At the very least, he suggested, we should stop the weak from marrying. This is the “one check” we have to keep society from being taken over by inferiors. Tragically, this passing comment fired up the eugenicists who immediately began to plot demographic planning schemes to avoid a terrifying biological slide to universal human degeneracy.

1896: The American Economic Association published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro by Frederick Hoffman. This monograph, one of many of the type, described blacks as intractable criminals who are both lazy and promiscuous, the influence of whom in national biology can only lead to a decline of the race. Their mere presence was considered an existential threat to “uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.” Such views were embraced by Richard T. Ely, the founder of the American Economic Association, and came to dominate the academic journals of this period, providing academic cover for Jim Crow laws, state segregation, business regulation, and far worse.

1904: The founder of the American eugenics society, Charles Davenport, established the Station for Experimental Evolution and worked to propagate eugenics from his perch as Professor of Zoology at Harvard University. He was hugely influential on an entire generation of scientists, political figures, economists, and public bureaucrats, and it was due largely to this influence that eugenics became such a central concern of American policies from this period until World War II, influencing the passage of wage legislation, immigration, marriage law, working hours legislation, and, of course, mandatory sterilizations.

At this point in history, all five pillars of fascist theory (historicist, nationalist, racist, protectionist, statist) were in place. It had a theory of history. It had a picture of hell, which is liberalism and uncontrolled commercial society. It had a picture of heaven, which was national societies run by great men inhabiting all-powerful States focused on heavy industry. It had a scientific rationale.

Above all, it had an agenda: to control society from the top down with the aim of managing every aspect of the demographic path of human society, which meant controlling human beings from cradle to grave to produce the most superior product, as well as industrial planning to replace the wiles of the market process. The idea of freedom itself, to this emergent school of thought, was a disaster for everyone everywhere.

All that was really necessary was popularization of its most incendiary ideas.

1916: Madison Grant, scholar of enormous prestige and elite connections, published The Passing of the Great Race. It was never a bestseller but it exercised enormous influence among the ruling elites, and made a famous appearance in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Grant, an early environmentalist, recommended mass sterilization of people as a “practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem” that should be “applied to an ever-widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.” Hitler loved the book and sent Grant a note praising the book as his personal bible.

1919: Following World War I, German historian Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, which met with huge popular acclaim for capturing the sense of the moment: the cash economy and liberalism were dead and could only be replaced by the rise of monolithic cultural forms that rally around blood and race as the source of meaning. Blood beats money all over the world, he argued. The interminable and foggy text broods with right-Hegelian speculations about the status of man and predicts the complete downfall of all lovely things unless the civilization of the West dispenses with its attachment to commercial norms and individualism and instead rallies to the cause of group identity. The book kicked off a decade of similar works and movements that declared freedom and democracy to be dead ideas: the only relevant battle was between the communist and fascist forms of state planning.

1932: Carl Schmitt published The Concept of the Political, a brutal attack on liberalism as the negation of the political. For Schmitt, the political was the essence of life, and the friend/enemy distinction is its most salient feature. Friends and enemies were to be defined by the State, and enemy-ness can only be fully instantiated in bloodshed, which should be real and present. Mises called him “the Nazi Jurist” for a reason: he was a party member and his ideas contributed mightily to the perception that mass death was not only moral, but essential to the preservation of the meaning of life itself.

1944: Allied troops discovered thousands of death camps strewn throughout Nazi-captured territories in Europe, created beginning in 1933 and continuing through the duration of the war, responsible for the imprisonment and death of upwards of 15 million people. The discovery shocked an entire generation at the most fundamental level, and the scramble was on to discover all sources of evil–political and ideological–that had led to such a gruesome reality. With the Nazi forces defeated and the Nuremberg trials underscoring the point, the advance of fascist dogma in all of its brooding, racist, statist, and historicist timbres, came to a screeching halt. Suppression of the ideas therein began in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, creating the impression that right-Hegelianism was a mere flash in the pan that had been permanently doused by state power.

The same year as the death-camp discovery began, F.A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, which emphasized that it was not enough to reject the labels, songs, slogans, and regimes of Nazism and fascism. Also necessary, said Hayek, was the rejection of the ideas of planning themselves, which even in a democracy necessarily led to the end of freedom and the rise of dictatorship. His book was met with critical acclaim among a small group of remaining classical liberals (many of whom were involved in the founding of FEE two years later) but was otherwise denounced and derided as paranoid and reactionary by many others.

For the duration of the ensuing Cold War, it was the fear of communism and not fascism/Nazism that would captivate the public mind. After all, the latter had been defeated on the battlefield, right? The genesis and development of rightest totalitarianism, despite the earnest pleadings of Hannah Arendt, fell away from public consciousness.

Liberalism Not Yet

The Cold War ended 25 years ago and the rise of digital technology has given liberal forms of political economy a gigantic presence in the world. Trade has never been more integrated. Human rights are on the march. Commercial life, and its underlying ideology of harmony and peace, is the prevailing aspiration of billions of people around the world. The failures of government planning are ever more obvious. And yet these trends alone do not seal the deal for the cause of liberty.

With left-Hegelianism now in disgrace, political movements around the world are rooting around in the pre-war history of totalitarian ideas to find alternatives. The suppression of these ideas did not work; in fact, they had the opposite effect of making them more popular to the point where they boiled up from below. The result is what we call the Alt-right in the US and goes by many other names in Europe and the UK. (The transition from the 1990s to the present will be the subject of another essay.)

Let us not be deceived. Whatever the flavor – whichever branch of Hegel we choose to follow – the cost of government control is human liberty, prosperity, and dignity. We choose mega-states, strongmen, national planning, or religious and racial homogeneity at our deep peril.

For the most part, the meme-posting trolls who favor stormfront-style profile pics on their social accounts, and the mass movements calling for strongmen to take control and cast the other from their midst, are clueless about the history and path they are following.

If you are feeling tempted toward the Alt-right, look at your progenitors: do you like what you see?

What is the alternative to right and left Hegelianism? It is found in the liberal tradition, summed up by Frederic Bastiat's phrase "the harmony of interests." Peace, prosperity, liberty, and community are possible. It is this tradition, and not one that posits intractable war between groups, that protects and expands human rights and human dignity, and creates the conditions that allow for the universal ennoblement of the human person. (For more on the history of despotic ideas in the 20th century, I suggest Mises's epic 1947 book Planned Chaos, now available in epub.)

The last word on the correct (freedom-loving) path forward was framed by the great English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, a statement that would be loathed by every fascist in history:

“It is not by the intermeddling of an omniscient and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has hitherto been carried forward in civilization; and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.”

#alt right #fee.org #Thomas Carlyle

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simonclaires · 8 years ago

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Re-Attributing the Fundamentals of Sovreignty

This essay was assigned for my Advanced College Essay class. Prompt: Investigate a newsworthy, controversial issue that matters to you, in order to consider the following questions: What larger cultural and philosophical conflicts are driving this controversy? How does your own research, and/or other texts you’ve encountered in other courses, inform and enhance your understanding of the issue and its implications? Finally, what does this controversy tells us about American culture?

“I knew a boy called Ala’a. He was only six years old. He didn’t understand what was happening. I’d say that six-year-old boy was tortured more than anyone else in the room . . . He wasn’t given food or water for three days, and he was so weak he used to faint all the time. He was beaten regularly. I watched him die. He only survived for three days and then he simply died. He was terrified all the time. They treated his body as if he were a dog” (Save the Children). This is the account of a sixteen year old boy named Wael who was a witness to a horrific atrocity in Syria. The Syrian civil war started as pro-democracy protesters demanding President Assad’s resignation. It quickly escalated into a brutal civil war in which all sides have committed horrific war crimes. The BBC estimates that more than 250,000 Syrians have lost their lives as a result of the war (Rodgers, et al). Many countries have intervened on both sides (Russia and Iran back the Syrian government, while the U.S. coalition and Turkey back the rebels), and insurgents such as the Islamic State have invaded, only creating more chaos.

Public opinion is sharply divided on this issue, especially when it comes to U.S. intervention in stopping ISIS. In the Pew Research Center’s survey of Americans on this issue, they reported, “While 49% say their bigger worry about U.S. military action is that it will not go far enough in stopping Islamic militants, nearly as many (46%) say their bigger concern is that the U.S. will go too far in getting involved in the situation” (Pew). The U.S. 2016 presidential election has brought issues of foreign intervention to the forefront, as candidates on both sides of the issue attempt to gain voters. The establishment candidates such as Cruz and Clinton support intervention, while non-establishment candidates like Trump and Sanders would prefer to take a step back. Clearly, intervention is a touchy subject that divides Americans into two camps.

The recent turmoils in the Middle East raise an important question: is the U.S. justified in intervening in sovereign nations in order to stop human rights abuses? Ever since the 1990s, this question has lied at the heart of United States foreign policy. From Bosnia, to the Iraq War, to Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, the U.S. has grappled with these issues. People are now more divided on this issue than ever, due to doubts stemming from the 2008 Great Recession and the rise of third-party non-state groups such as ISIS. Because the U.S. is one of the most important leaders in international relations, the decision by the U.S. to invade sets a precedent that is followed by other nations. Similarly, if the U.S. decides to not invade, this also sets a precedent. Thus, questions of sovereignty and intervention are critical to how the United States will position itself in the future.

Eliav Lieblich, writing for the Boston University International Law Journal, defines intervening in the political process of another nation. His definition starts with the physical process of intervention:

“In the physical sense, intervention takes place whenever party C engages in a conflict between opposing parties A and B. Thus, whenever a state engages parties to an internal armed conflict--using forcible or non-forcible measures, illegally or illegally--it intervenes” (Lieblich 344). Lieblich does not just stop at physical intervention. Rather, he makes the distinction between the physical process of intervention and the symbolic nature inherent in the term: “However, the term intervention encompasses an additional, separate meaning connoting the unlawful, coercive interference or encroachment upon the territorial integrity or internal political affairs of another state.”

This definition describes intervention as being unlawful and coercive. However, much of the current literature on foreign policy actually favors intervention in stopping human rights abuses and genocide. For example, Manuela Aguilar, a scholar writing in the journal Social Alternatives, explains that sovereignty can be used as an excuse by violators of human rights. Aguilar’s perspective is that states have a duty to protect their citizens, and if they do not, they lose their privilege to sovereignty. “Today’s discussion over the concept of sovereignty… makes sovereignty a responsibility, not an impunity” (Aguilar 18). Aguilar argues that governments should not consider sovereignty (freedom from outside intervention) to be a natural right, but rather a privilege. If a state abuses this privilege by harming its own citizens, it then loses its sovereignty and another nation intervenes.

Of course it is important to examine what exactly the nation is intervening for as well. Some say that certain human rights abuses always justify intervention from other nations. Claudia Card, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains that genocide always necessitates intervention: “When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors… become… no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations” (Card) Thus, the argument goes that the United States must protect universal human rights and do everything in its power to stop genocide because as Card explains: “The special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one’s life and even of its termination.” Genocide is an evil act that results in social death, and because it’s not just individual rights but entire cultures on the line, intervention must always be considered justified.

Opponents of intervention disagree and state that no matter what violation of human rights is performed, sovereignty outweighs the responsibility to protect. Intervention necessarily violates sovereignty, and opponents of intervention, especially Michael Walzer, writing in his article The Politics of Rescue, believe that this is wrong:

“Ever since Roman times, empires have expanded by intervening in civil wars, replacing ‘anarchy’ with law and order, overthrowing supposedly noxious regimes. Conceivably, this expansion has saved lives, but only by creating in the process a ‘prison-house of nations,’ whose subsequent history is a long tale of prison revolts, brutally repressed… people who have lived together in the past and will have to do so in the future should be allowed to work out their difficulties without imperial assistance, among themselves.” (Walzer)

Like Walzer, many believe that intervention robs a state of its natural right to emerge from internal conflict on its own terms. Countless nations, including the U.S., have emerged from internal conflict. The process of resolving conflict is incredibly tricky, and decisions of how to rule, what system of government to use, and who should govern should ultimately be left up to the people who actually have a stake in the outcome. The citizens of those countries that are in conflict ultimately have the most understanding of their own culture and belief systems, thus it would be unfair and condescending for a country with no knowledge to come in and explain how things “really work.”

Besides the problem of sovereignty, non-interventionist scholars have suggested that intervening nations use human rights as a way to exploit non-white nations. In his influential book called The Racial Contract, Charles Mills explains how notions of egalitarian morality have only ever been applied by western nations as a way to assert their dominance over non-western nations: The Racial Contract is that set of agreements between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated as “white,” and coextensive with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons. . . the general purpose of the contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. (Mills 11)

According to Mills, the Racial Contract is extremely harmful to non-white nations and embracing this contract in the form of “justified intervention” would actually be unjust. By its nature, the Racial Contract is an exploitative contract, and upholding human rights only entrenches the exploitation of non-whites. Some scholars argue that the notion of human rights itself was created by imperialist powers as an excuse to meddle in other countries’ affairs. For example, Anthony Pagden recalls the 1947 drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human rights. The Saudi Arabian delegation to the drafting protested that the committee had “for the most part taken into consideration only the standards recognized by Western civilization” and that it was not its task “to proclaim the superiority of one civilization over all others or to establish uniform standards for all the countries of the world” (Pagden 172). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not actually universal; it was drafted by Western nations to have an excuse for invading other poorer, non-Western, non-white countries. Thus, the argument goes that because a truly just nation would not exploit third world countries, the U.S. is never justified in intervening in nations even for the sake of human rights.

However, this argument can be flipped on its head when you consider that human rights themselves, regardless of whoever came up with the concept, are the reason why sovereignty even exists. Anne Peters writes: “It has become clear that the normative status of sovereignty is derived from humanity, understood as the legal principle that human rights, interests, needs, and security must be respected and promoted, and that this humanistic principle is also the telos of the international legal system” (Peters). The very reason why sovereignty is so important is because it is derived from the concept of human rights itself. Thus, no matter who ‘created’ the notion of human rights, human rights are the very reason why sovereignty is important, so ignoring human rights in favor of sovereignty seems counterintuitive.

What both proponents and detractors of intervention don’t seem to understand is that the way that conflict is viewed in terms of good versus bad is ultimately detrimental to our understanding of said conflict. Complexity that is inherent in conflicts on the scale of nations makes effective intervention impossible. As Walzer writes, “We are extraordinarily dependent on the victim/victimizer, good guys/bad guys model. I am not sure that any very forceful intervention is politically possible without it… the politics of rescue is certain to be complex and messy” (Walzer). Humans, by their very nature, often use shortcuts to process information. These shortcuts are called heuristics. It is easy for humans to look at conflict as being a contest between good and evil. This mindset occurs on both sides, with the interventionist side claiming that the nations abusing human rights are evil and the U.S. is good, and the non-interventionist side claiming the opposite.

Proponents of intervention must consider that, as in the case of the Syria, both sides of the intervention may have committed atrocities, from mass killing to other human rights abuses. This may seem like a cynical view of human nature, but when you consider that humans don’t do things without good reason, you end up with a more nuanced (and more accurate) view of conflict. An important concept in psychology is the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is basically the idea that human beings tend to attribute their own mistakes to being outside forces, while demonizing other humans for making the same mistakes. Consider this example: Bob is driving on his way to work. As he is about to pass an intersection, a car suddenly cuts in front of him. He gets very angry at this car, complaining about the driver’s poor skills. What Bob fails to consider is that the person driving the car may have a very good reason for cutting in front of him, such as taking a patient to the hospital. The fundamental attribution error is something we all experience, and it turns any conflict, whether it’s as small as a traffic issue to as large as international relations, into a binary conflict: good versus bad.

Proponents of intervention claim that the U.S. is good and that developing nations are bad, while opponents of intervention state the opposite. Both sides are attributing the fault to one specific pinpointed source, which is just not how the world works.

Several researchers, such as Robert Ricigliano (a mediation expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), are attempting to break this mold of good/evil: “One of the key lessons of the systems mindset is to stop approaching conflicts as problems that need to be fixed, says Ricigliano, and instead think of them as systems with underlying dynamics that need to shift. “Success doesn’t mean that we’ve ended the conflict,” he says. “It means we’ve engaged a system so that violence declines over time”” (qtd in Jones). Ricigliano believes that by shifting the perspective from good vs. bad to an ever shifting system with multiple parties and grey moralities, conflict can be resolved more easily.

Humans have complex motivations. There’s no one reason why any of us do anything. Extrapolate the complexities of one person’s mind to a whole nation, and you see just how thorny the problem is. Some people advocate for simplifying the problem by using binary thinking and clever rhetoric. Those people only add to the problem, and often have motivations of their own. To reduce a situation with thousands of factors and motives behind it is to disrespect the situation. Only when we look at the world in a complex and nuanced light are we able to truly help solve the problems facing our world.

#academic sample

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