#like they both insinuate themselves into power via 'service'

[leahsfiction]

mustard red and the divine comma arbitrage are each other's right hand arm man/confidante/companion/silly rabbit etc

[thisdaynews]

How Will History Books Remember the 2010s?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-will-history-books-remember-the-2010s/

How Will History Books Remember the 2010s?

Illustration by Max-o-matic; Photos: AP/Getty

We aren’t just approaching the end of a very newsy year; we’re approaching the end of a very eventful decade. To mark the occasion, Politico Magazine asked a group of historians to put all that happened over the past 10 years in its proper historical context—and literally write the paragraph that they think will describe the 2010s in American history books written a century from now.

Will the seemingly significant events we have lived through this decade be important in the grand scheme? Are there powerful historical forces playing out that we’re missing? Where will Black Lives Matter, the social media revolution, #MeToo, climate change, Barack Obama and Donald Trump fit into the history books?

Many described the 2010s, in the words of Andrew Bacevich, as an era of “venomous division,” characterized by massive racial, economic and political divisions. Some saw hope in the discord—as a catalyst for much needed reform, soon to come. Still other historians pointed out less-noticed trends—in technology and foreign policy—that will resonate far into the future.

How will the future remember the 2010s? Here’s what the experts had to say:

The innovation of white supremacy

Marcia Chatelain is a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University.

The 2010s were characterized by the seeming dissonance of the 2016 presidential election. In that election, Donald J. Trump expertly galvanized racial resentments, manipulated a bifurcated media landscape and utilized his alliances with foreign governments to become president. Although it was unremarkable for a racist to become president of the United States, the election of the former reality television star immediately after former Senator Barack Obama, the first black man elected to the office, led some observers to believe that his presidential win was a sign of racial backlash, a phenomenon repeated across American history since the end of slavery. Trump’s election was distinct in that it helped highlight the centrality of technology in the efficient reproduction and circulation of racist ideologies, and it forced the public to confront tensions between an expanding public sphere and its ability to galvanize narrow-minded and socially dangerous thinking. On the cusp of 2020, Americans alarmed by the spread of falsehoods via the Internet and the radicalization of racists through social media channels realizedthat the ideology of white supremacy—with its longstanding ability to shapeshift to meet the demands of the day—had innovated alongside the technology industry.

The end of privacy

Vanessa Walker is the Morgan assistant professor of diplomatic history at Amherst College.

At the close of the 2010s, political polarization, reactionary nationalism and escalating public conflict over systemic racism, gender inequality and climate change dominated characterizations of the decade. Less noticed, the decade marked the end of privacy. State surveillance was nothing new. The war on terror in the aughts had already ushered in new invasive profiling practices. But the pervasive, hyper-individualized, corporate-based collection and aggregation of personal data in partnership with government marked a new frontier in surveillance. The collection of personal information through individuals’ phones, computers and virtual assistants—and the social media and online platforms they utilized—informed almost every aspect of social and political interactions. Over the decade, these instruments insinuated themselves into peoples’ everyday lives for convenience, for entertainment, for basic daily information and communication in a way that made it difficult to imagine functioning without them. Like the proverbial frog being boiled alive, people became accustomed not only to trading their personal information for basic services, but also the idea that they were always being watched. Appeased by the pretense of being able to “opt out,” consumers accepted vague assertions that data collection was consensual, anonymous and secure. Yet, as the decade drew to a close, law enforcement officials, political campaigns and foreign governments increasingly used information gathered for commercial purposes in ways completely at odds with the assurances of privacy and consent. As scandals like Cambridge Analytica revealed, the data usagewas also at odds with the integrity of democratic institutions and confidence in the electoral process. Big data clearly contained potential benefits for society in terms of health innovations, service optimization and energy efficiencies. However, without meaningful transparency over what was collected, who had access and how it was used, the looming surveillance state’s threat to individual freedom and collective security dwarfed those potential benefits.

A democracy grapples with its success

Tom Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

FromA Century of Change: The United States from 1945-2045:

Historians have struggled to explain the paradox of the 2010s. On the one hand, it was a decade of economic and military recovery that was by any standard peaceful and prosperous, even under two very different American presidents. And yet, it was characterized by a poisonous anger and extreme polarization that is normally the hallmark of defeated and bankrupted states on the verge of collapse. In retrospect, the 2010s represented an unexpected and politically destructive synergy between peace, affluence and technology. Despite skyrocketing income inequality, for example, an array of technological advances narrowed the daily living standards between rich and poor compared with even a few decades earlier. These advances, in turn, spurred increasingly unattainable demands from the public on both government and industry for even higher living standards and more consumer choices. Universal education produced unprecedented levels of literacy, but electronic entertainment and media undermined the ability of literacy to create informed citizens; by 2020, it was fair to say that never in modern history had a more educated people rejected science and rationalism in such numbers. Abroad, America was still supremely powerful, with interstate war nearly unheard of, and terrorism mostly contained at great distances (albeit at great cost). Yet this increased security reduced the sense of shared threat among Americans and thus dissolved any chance that foreign affairs might prove to be an arena of common interest. And the “era of social media,” as we refer to it today, not only allowed Americans to peer into heavily edited versions of each other’s lives—thus fueling huge social resentments—but encouraged them to voice their views in the most extreme manner, with each citizen offered a chance at notoriety if even for only a moment. By their end, the 2010s raised a question which remains unanswered as America heads toward completing its third century of existence: Can democracies cope with success?

Populist threats to the social order

David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

The 2010s posed resonant rebukes to established authority the world over. The decade opened with an eruption of grassroots social movements in the U.S. and abroad—the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring—and continued on through the anti-Trump marches, #MeToo and 2019’s Hong Kong, Iran and India uprisings. Though typically short-lived and sometimes unsuccessful, these movements and their underlying discontents destabilized political structures everywhere. Anti-establishment politics also fed the rise of outsider candidates and populist demagogues, left and right, and dramatically weakened venerable political parties in many countries. For many people, this upheaval offered hope for the advent of a more equal and just society—but as Donald Trump’s presidency and other right-wing nationalist regimes held fast to power, there seemed at least as great a chance that it would fatally undermine the liberal international order that had underwritten peace and prosperity for so long.

The collapse of vital infrastructures

Sarah E. Igo is a professor of history and political science at Vanderbilt.

In the 2010s, Americans reckoned with their neglect of vital infrastructures: political, technological and environmental. Their constitutional democracy was the most obvious system in disarray. Vulnerable to Russian cyberattacks during the 2016 election, U.S. political institutions suffered equally from the unchecked flouting of governing norms by the reality-TV star president, Donald Trump, who was the beneficiary of those attacks. Americans’ communications infrastructure also proved precarious. As news and exchanges of all sorts moved onto electronic platforms in that decade, they became ever-more captive to corporate profits, eroding individual privacy as well as the means for achieving verifiable facts. Finally, in common with people around the world, Americans grasped in that decade the potentially irreversible harm humans had done to the natural systems supporting life on the planet. Raging fires, hurricanes and floods; attacks on democratic processes; social media surveillance and fake news. These were the shocks that exposed the fragility of the systems Americans depended on—but that also galvanized citizens to repair them in the 2020s.

The emergence of an Obama-Trump foreign policy

William Inboden is associate professor of public policy at the LBJ School and executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, University of Texas at Austin.

During this decade, the United States elected two presidents who could not be more dissimilar in temperament, character and background: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Yet as history unfolded, it turns out that Obama’s and Trump’s different personas and governing styles obscured what were similar policy choices and convictions in the realm of American foreign policy. Both Obama and Trump disdained the foreign policy “establishment” and its prescriptions, trusting instead in their own instincts; both expressed skepticism about American exceptionalism; neither president forged close personal relationships with other foreign leaders. Both Obama and Trump voiced vexation with America’s allies and weakened America’s alliance commitments; both sought to reduce the American presence in the troubled Middle East; both were ambivalent about free trade agreements; both downplayed the promotion of human rights and democracy; and both attempted to reorient the United States away from being the dominant global superpower to instead adopting a more restrained posture in the emerging multipolar world. The Obama-Trump era of international politics, as it came to be seen, recognized correctly the need for a recalibration in America’s international role, especially given public discontent and the upsurge in global populist movements. But in time it proved to be the wrong prescription. Malign powers such as China and Russia filled the void left by American international leadership, contributing to the increase in global conflict and instability that characterized the unhappy decade of the 2020s.

A spotlight on state-sanctioned violence

Keisha N. Blain is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the African American Intellectual History Society.

On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman from Illinois, was found dead in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. Only three days prior, Bland had been stopped by a white officer while driving in Prairie View, Texas. The tense exchange between the two, which was recorded on the officer’s dashboard camera and on Bland’s cellphone, circulated widely across the nation. Thousands decried the circumstances that led to Bland’s tragic death, questioning the stop, the detainment and the officer’s repeated threats. Bland’s life and untimely death cast a spotlight on one of the social issues that dominated public discourse during the 2010s: state-sanctioned violence. The public awareness around this issue can be attributed to Black Lives Matter (BLM), a nationwide and global movement to end state-sanctioned violence. What began as a hashtag on social media—launched by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi in 2013—following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer evolved into a protest movement that shook the nation to its core. After the 2014 police shooting of Mike Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, BLM rose to national prominence, demanding justice for Brown’s family and the thousands of unarmed Black people murdered by the police. From uprisings in cities across the nation to organized acts of resistance on college campuses, BLM compelled Americans to acknowledge the systemic problem of state-sanctioned violence and take steps to bring about necessary changes. Despite backlash and a host of internal and external challenges, the BLM movement, led by young radical activists, transformed the American political landscape, shaping national discussions on race and policing, and forcing several presidential candidates during the 2016 elections to confront the issue.

The two faces of American democracy

Peniel Joseph is a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

The story of the second decade of the 21st century is one marked by the Janus-faced nature of American democracy. Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, ushered in his own version of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society through passage of sweeping health care legislation. The promise of a more just and fair society proved elusive however, undercut by growing disparities between the rich and the poor; the rise of mass incarceration; racial and economic segregation in neighborhoods and public schools; and an assault on the concept of American citizenship and democracy fueled by right wing social media, white nationalism, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. President Donald Trump’s ascension represented the literal and figurative inversion of the grand hopes of the Obama Era. Whereas Obama offered the hope of racial reconciliation based on a democracy expansive enough to embrace the historically marginalized and oppressed, Trump’s electoral coalition resounded with Americans longing for the sepia-toned past, one suffused with white supremacy. These dueling narratives of American democracy reverberated globally as well. The Obama Doctrine vowed to end international war through peace efforts (including the Iran Nuclear Deal) that at times upset allies. In contrast, the Trump Doctrine touted “America First” as a slogan that signaled the abandoning of longstanding alliances in favor of a more insular foreign policy—one that saw an American president openly courting authoritarian leaders in North Korean and Russia.

Polarization and the rise of politically active women

Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor at Boston College.

The perfect symbol of the 2010s came in February 2015, when an image of a dress went viral on social media as Americans fought over whether its pattern was #blackandblue or #whiteandgold. America was divided in this decade, with splits over economics, politics, religion and culture exacerbated by social media. A set of increasingly extreme Republicans stayed in power by convincing voters that Democrats under biracial president Barack Obama, whose signature piece of legislation was the Affordable Care Act making health care accessible, were intent on destroying America by giving tax dollars to lazy people of color and feminists who wanted to murder babies. And in 2016, Republicans leaders weaponized social media with the help of Russians to elect to the White House Donald J. Trump, who promised to end this “American carnage.”On the other side, in 2013, the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement helped galvanize those who believed the system was stacked against them. And in January 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March became the largest single-day protest in American history. By the end of that year, the #MeToo Movement took off as women shared their ubiquitous experiences with sexual harassment and demanded an end to male dominance. In 2018, when Republicans forced through the Senate the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who had been creditably accused of sexual assault, they helped convinced voters to elect a historic number of women and racial minorities to Congress in in the 2018 midterm elections, almost entirely on the Democratic side. The story of the 2010s is of increasing American polarization, but also the rise of politically active women to defend American democracy against the growing power of a Republican oligarchy.

Globalization as uniter—and divider

George H. Nash is a historian and the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.

The 2010s were a decade in which the forces of globalization pulled the nations of the world closer together—and began to drive them apart. It was a period in which more people were on the move in the world than at any time in the history of the human race (and more and more of them made America their destination). This unprecedented intermingling not just of goods and services but of peoples and cultures was accompanied by a revolutionary transformation in the structure and velocity of mass communication. The pace of life—especially public life—accelerated. Tribalization, polarization and combative populism permeated the political systems of many lands. In America itself, the apocalyptic language of war—even civil war—increasingly marked public discourse, and serious observers began openly to question whether the United States of America would remain indivisible in the years ahead. As the decade ended, no one could say with certainty whether the worldwide ferment was a passing spasm of discontent or a harbinger of deeper upheavals.

A period of paralysis

Kevin Kruse is a history professor at Princeton University.

The 2010s were a period of paralysis. From the Tea Party protests in 2010 through the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump in 2019, the American political system staggered from one partisan showdown to another. Amplified by the growth of partisan media, both on cable and the internet, Americans increasingly lined themselves into hostile camps with all political progress stalled. The federal government shut down three times due to funding impasses, while routine matters of housekeeping like the debt ceiling became, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2011, “a hostage worth ransoming.” As the government gridlocked, little progress was made on larger social concerns. There were, to be sure, notable changes such as the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, but on other issues little progress was made. The increasing crisis in climate change, which manifested in record temperatures and alarming levels of hurricanes, flooding and wildfires, only continued to worsen. Mass shootings accelerated as well, with four of the five deadliest incidents in U.S. history taking place in the decade, with little substantial action. The optimism over race relations that had marked the election of the first African American president, meanwhile, became dashed with the revival of white nationalist extremism and divisive fights over immigration from Muslim-majority nations and a proposed border wall with Mexico. By the end of the decade, the United States seemed more deeply divided and directionless than it had been in a half century.

The backlash against elites

Geoff Kabaservice is the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.

Decades rarely begin at neat decennial intervals. The 2010s, in hindsight, began with the 2007-08 financial crisis. The inability to foresee and prevent that crisis, combined with the subsequent lack of punishment for anyone behind it, served notice to much of the population that the establishment (whatever that was) was no longer doing its job (whatever that meant). As the crisis led to economic collapse in rural and formerly industrial areas, working-class and lower-middle-class citizens responded angrily to what they saw as a broader failure by elites (not just in politics but also in the media, think tanks and academia)to respond to the problems of globalization (including trade, immigration and crumbling communities) that primarily afflicted the left-behind regions. The result was a furious populist backlash—one that played out in country after country across the developed world, with movements that were more or less alike in their grievances and lack of coherent solutions. The real question of the decade was: Why did elites fail to see the reaction coming, and what would they do about it? The shape of the next decade was thus determined by whether parties of the center-left and center-right could revive anything like the post-World War II social unity and capitalism that produced steadily rising living standards for all, or whether the 2020s would look more like the 1930s.

A pathway to a new beginning

Jeremi Suri is a professor of public affairs and history at the LBJ School at the University of Texas Austin.

The decade began with the nation’s worst recession since the Great Depression and it ended with the worst political divisions since the close of the 19th century. The inherited institutions and practices of democracy in the United States took a repeated beating. In the last weeks of the decade, the House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump while his supporters defended near-monarchical powers for the commander-in-chief. Nonetheless, the crises that dominated the decade were transitional. They marked the demise of a still white, post-industrial, baby-boomer society filled with men and women resisting their decline. The decade opened a new America that was more racially and ethnically diverse, more feminine, led by millennials, and organized around artificial intelligence technologies. 2020 was a powerful new beginning built on the destruction of the previous years. The United States renewed its democracy through a messy, prolonged and ultimately productive generational change in leadership at all levels— from local businesses and schools to the White House. It was an ugly time that generated bright reforms thereafter.

An era of competing populist movements

Claire Potter is a professor of history at the New School.

The partisanship, and the populisms, that came to characterize the 2010s were already coalescing as the ball dropped in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2008. As Barack Obama, the first African American president, prepared to take office, disgruntled conservatives and libertarians began meeting in small, community groups—eventually forming the populist Tea Party movement, devoted to limiting the Obama legislative agenda to the expansion of public health care. By 2010, Tea Party-endorsed candidates were preparing to take their oaths of office in Congress as part of a new Republican House majority. By 2013, as many as 10 percent of Americans were said to identify with the movement. Fueled by similar grievances—economic despair, frustration with government, and the ability to organize and share ideas on social media—left populisms also flourished in the 2010s. By September 2011, protesters who identified as the Occupy Wall Street movement had established a self-governing encampment in Lower Manhattan, protesting economic policies that privileged the “1%” over the “99%,” forcing issues like student debt, workers’ rights and climate change to the center of political conversation and reviving the United States’ long-dormant socialist politics. In 2013, angered by the failure of a black president to stem violence against their communities, populists who were queer and of color coalesced under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to renew the struggle for racial civil rights. By the 2016 election, centrists in both parties suddenly found themselves besieged by new candidates who represented these competing populist movements. Socialist Bernie Sanders battered presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, nearly costing her the nomination; on the right, real estate developer Donald Trump recast himself as a man of the people, wooing nationalists and corporate America with conspiracy theories, and the promise of a country renewed by wealth and whiteness, to defeat Clinton in the general election. The final four years of the decade would see a United States defined by the collapse of the political center, by the consequences of moving conservative populism to the center, and by the determination of left populists to remake the Democratic Party—and retake the government.

The privileged strike back

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Irvine.

The 2010s, a decade that concluded the three-part movie trilogy of Star Wars, could be understood as an epic battle between good and evil, the small and seemingly insignificant against the dark forces and the imperial. There was the rise in protest movements for social justice: Occupy, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, Standing Rock, Mauna Kea, youth against gun violence and Greta Thunberg. Standing in opposition were those with privilege and power, who continued to consider themselves the victims and the marginalized. Their fears about having to share their society and the possible loss of authority generated hate violence, mass incarceration, the detainment and abuse of refugee children, and self-righteous anger. As the U.S. approached 2020, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, the nation had elected its first African American/multi-racial president but had yet to elect a female president. In fact, the backlash against President Barack Obama and what he represented led to conspiracy theories about his birthplace, a new visibility and escalation of racialized police brutality, voter suppression laws and the confirmation of questionable nominees at all levels of the political system. The 2010s was a decade of civil war in the United States. How did this battle end? Was it possible to resolve the conflicts, given the historical depths of these divisions? Might a sense of compassion and a belief in justice lead to a renewed society, one that built bridges and not walls? The 2020 brought the possibility of a faint, new hope.

An era of venomous division

Andrew Bacevich is professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University.

By the second year of Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, it had become apparent that his presidency would fall well short of transformational. While Obama’s two terms were not devoid of accomplishments, they tended to be incremental, for example his healthcare reforms, or short-lived, such as his efforts to stem the further proliferation of nuclear arms. Events quickly dashed expectations of the nation’s first black president ushering in a new forward-looking era of American politics. Instead, racial and cultural cleavages deepened, egregious inequality persisted and futile wars dragged on. Obama managed to prolong the life of the political consensus that had formed in the wake of the Cold War. Yet with the race to choose his successor in 2016, that consensus collapsed, the political novice Donald Trump prevailing over the far more seasoned Hillary Clinton. Former Secretary of State Clinton stood for unchecked individual autonomy, globalized neoliberalism and militarized U.S. “global leadership.” Although himself utterly devoid of principle, Trump presented himself as intent on repudiating all of these things. His election thereby brought to the fore divisions related to class, race and ethnicity that had been latent or ignored. A very considerable portion of the electorate wasted no time in dismissing his presidency as illegitimate. The signature of the ensuing Age of Trump was venomous division. In terms of policy, the theme of the 2010s became drift, with issues such as climate change treated as an afterthought, if at all.

The consequences of deregulation

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis professor emeritus at UC Berkeley.

The deregulation approved by many Democrats as well as Republicans in previous decades resulted in a series of seismic transformations of the life of the United States in the 2010s. The deregulation of the communications industry led to the tribalization of the news media, most prominently in the creation of Fox News as a semi-official propaganda organ of the wealthy, extremely conservative Republicans who rallied around President Donald Trump in 2016. Fox News and its smaller counterparts cemented the loyalties of millions of voters by disseminating a steady stream of deeply misleading and often downright false accounts of virtually every issue being contested in public life. The deregulation of the financial, fossil fuel and other industries had similarly transformative consequences, facilitating economic inequality on a scale unknown for many decades and contributing to global warming on a scale scientists found apocalyptic. President Barack Obama tried to reverse these developments when he first came into office, but it was late in the day, and too many of the leading Democrats refused to support the policies Obama tried to advance. Ultimately, it was the Democratic Party’s failure to use the political and cultural resources available to it to enact and maintain an appropriate regulatory structure as late as the mid-1990s—during the neo-liberal administration of Bill Clinton—that did more than any other single factor to determine the course of American history in the 2010s. Rarely in the history of industrialized societies had a political leadership equipped with such magnificent opportunities squandered them so spectacularly, and thus betrayed the nation of which they were entrusted to be the stewards.

Democracy under siege

Nicole Hemmer is author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.

Bookended on one end byCitizens Unitedand on the other by a president impeached for inviting foreign interference in U.S. elections, the 2010s were the decade of democracy under siege. Red states instituted strict voter ID laws and purged their voter rolls, while the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Super PACs fueled dark-money politics. State-house Republicans stripped power from their rivals, and congressional Republicans broke every institutional norm in an attempt to thwart a popular Democratic president. And social media, which techno-optimists hailed as a force of democratization at the start of the decade, ended the 2010s as a dystopian hellscape crawling with wannabe Nazis and disinformation campaigns. It was also a decade of grassroots pro-democracy movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Moral Mondays to Black Lives Matter to the Women’s March to March for Our Lives, reminders that some Americans were resisting democratic decline.

Groundwork for a Constitutional revision

Jack Rakove is a professor of history and political science, emeritus, at Stanford University.The decade of the 2010s placed the American constitutional system under the greatest stress it had known since the New Deal crisis of the 1930s. President Donald Trump demonstrated that he felt none of the “veneration” (to quote James Madison’s 49thFederalistpaper) required to sustain the norms of constitutional governance. Worse still, however, was the behavior of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Under Republican control, the Senate blithely ignored the well-documented charges under which the House of Representatives had impeached Trump. For its part, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court fulfilled its long-frustrated agenda: In two leading decisions in June 2020, it gutted the Affordable Care Act and authorized individual states to impose severe limits on the right to choice secured in the 1974 decision inRoe v. Wade.

The events of the 2010s thus set the stage for the Great Constitutional Revision of 2024. Although Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, Republicans held on to the Senate and the Supreme Court retained its conservative majority. With the national government in a state of near paralysis, a coalition of blue states coalesced to demand a constitutional convention. A phalanx of 18 solidly red states, representing less than a fifth of the nation’s population, quickly rejected this proposal, keeping it two states shy of the two-thirds margin that Article V of the Constitution required. Invoking the precedent set in 1787, when the first Constitutional Convention threw out the amendment rules laid down in the Articles of Confederation, the blue states insisted that the meeting must be held. Rather than side with the smaller bloc of solidly red states, the now hotly contested states of Texas and Florida sent delegations to the Chicago convention.The dominant theme of the Convention was to make constitutional decision-making directly responsive to the one person, one vote standard. That was also how votes were allocated in the Convention itself. The resulting deliberations led to a radically revised Constitution. Among other changes, the president would now be elected by a single nation-wide popular vote. The House of Representatives was enlarged to 600 members, with all its districts designed by an AI process to be as competitive as possible. The Senate became an advisory body that could no longer vote down legislation enacted by the House, and senators were now elected on a regional basis, rather than by individual states. The Supreme Court was enlarged to 15 justices, who would serve 18-year terms on a staggered basis. When the bloc of small red states balked at ratifying the results, they were told they could form their own separate confederacy. A few months of considering how costly it would be to sustain their states government without the financial support of the far more economically productive blue states quickly led them to abandon their position.

Trump’s one inadvertent contribution to American history was to make these changes possible.

Read More

[olusegundare]

From Renard's World

Blogging Is Beautiful!

“Shannon, I would like your opinion on something,” Ashley said.

“Sure, Ashley. What it is exactly that you would like my opinion on?” Shannon asked.

“Well, I know that you are a blogger and I have been thinking about getting into blogging myself. I would like to know which blogging platform to use?” Ashley asked.

“Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” Shannon said.

“Huh?” Ashley blurted out loudly; she donned the facial expression of a woman who was confused.

“It doesn’t really matter, because it is all about publishing quality content,” Shannon said in a very confident tone of voice.

“But, if my memory serves me correctly, I believe that you have a blog on WordPress, right?” Ashley uttered.

“Yes, Ashley. You are right. I do have a WordPress blog,” Shannon said.

“Well, in that case, I am going to go with WordPress,” Ashley said.

“Good choice, Ashley,” Shannon said. “So, have you made up your mind as to what your blog is going to be about?”

“Yes, Shannon,” Ashley said with a wide grin on her face. “It is going to be based on book reviews!”

Both women laughed.

Shannon got up from the chair that she was sitting on and said, “Please follow me, Ashley. I am taking you to my computer room right down the hall.”

Ashley looked at a few of the beautiful paintings that hung majestically on Shannon’s white-coloured wall while she followed her friend, Shannon to the computer room.

Shannon opened the door for her friend, Ashley and said, “After you,” stating politely that she would like Ashley to be the first one to enter the computer room.

Ashley nodded and entered Shannon’s computer room. “Wow! This is amazing!” Ashley said looking at the three high-end computers in their respective workstations.

“Pick anyone,” Shannon said. “The computer to the right-hand side of the room is an Apple iMac with the latest macOS, the computer in the middle of the room is a Dell desktop computer with the latest version of Windows on it and to the left-hand side of the room, there is a HP desktop computer with Linux; it has the latest version of Linux Mint installed on it.”

“I will go with the HP desktop with the latest version of Linux Mint on it,” Ashley said.

“What?” Shannon said; she was pleasantly surprised by Ashley’s choice of computer and operating system. “We have been friends since kindergarten times and you never once mentioned to me that you use Linux.”

Ashley laughed and said, “Well, that is because you never asked. I started using Linux about three years ago. I have Linux installed on my computer at home — Ubuntu to be precise, and I chose to use Linux Mint, because it is based on Ubuntu.”

Shannon showed her friend, Ashley, how to set up a free blog on WordPress and she even went as far as helping her choose a lovely-looking theme for her blog.

“Thank you, Shannon,” Ashley said. “I will add a blog post to my new blog as soon as I find a new book to review.”

“You are welcome, Ashley,” Shannon said with a happy-looking facial expression on her face. “I have a strong feeling that you are going to be a very good book blogger and you are going to see for yourself how wonderful blogging really is!”

Ashley got up from the workstation and said, “Thanks for everything, Shannon. I will send you a text message as soon as I publish my first book review on my blog.”

“Good! I will be looking out for that text message, Ashley!” Shannon said.

You Are Free To Do Your Own Thing

Yes, my friend. You are free to do your own thing. If you want, you can even do like Ashley and create a blog that is based on book reviews.

Here are some of the things that people have been posting on their blogs:

Fashion

Blogging     advice

Spirituality

Philosophy

Science

Animals

Food

Music

Okay, you do get the general idea of the things that you can post on your blog.

However, I would like to inform you, that if the content of your blog is in violation of your blogging platform’s Terms of Service, your blog will be deleted — you will no longer have access to your blog (You can avoid that nightmare by going self-hosted).

You Are Free To Choose Any Blogging Platform

Shannon was correct when she told her friend, Ashley that it did not matter where she blogged and that the most important thing is to publish quality content.

The God’s/Goddess’ truth is, that your blog is going to do well once there is high-quality content on it. It does not matter if you are blogging on Weebly, Blogger or WordPress.

But, I would like to state for the record, that nothing really beats WordPress in the area of SEO — WordPress themes were created with SEO in mind.

However, having a blog on Blogger provides the person with the advantage of having their blog posts being indexed quickly by Google (After all, Blogger is owned by Google).

I had to wait a little under three weeks for Google to index the blog posts on my WordPress blog (I should consider myself lucky, because the folks at Automattic said that it takes approximately four to six weeks before Google starts indexing new WordPress blogs).

Anyway, one of my favourite features is, the WordPress.com Reader; it allows the bloggers on their platform to easily locate the topics that they are interested in by typing in the topic of their choice in the “Tags” section.

Unfortunately, the “Next Blog” button does not always direct the users of Blogger to the types of blogs that the are interested in (When I was a Blogger, it took me over an hour to come across a blog that I was interested in via the “Next Blog” button and it directed me to a large percentage of abandoned blogs).

One of the best ways of finding like-minded bloggers is, to join a handful of blogging groups on social media (And, blogging groups usually do not care if your blog is on Weebly, Blogger or WordPress; all they care about is, that you follow the rules and that you share content that is of a high quality)

Interacting With Other Bloggers Is A Lot Of Fun

I do get a huge thrill out of interacting with my fellow bloggers.

Now, in addition to interacting with my fellow bloggers on WordPress, I do interact with other bloggers on Weebly, Blogger and TypePad.

I know for a fact, that a lot of bloggers on WordPress would not even dream of visiting blogs on other blogging platforms.

However, some of them would check out the blogs from their friends on Blogger (Mainly because, they themselves were once bloggers on Blogger).

Also, it is nice to see people from Blogger commenting on WordPress blogs.

To me, blogging is way more fun when I interact with other bloggers in the blogosphere.

Do you ever make it a priority of yours to interact with other bloggers in the blogosphere?

The Learning Never Stops

If you have been blogging for quite a while, you would know without a doubt, that the learning never stops.

Bloggers have learned the following things:

How to go     about writing a blog post.

How to     implement On-Page and Off-Page SEO in regards to their blogs.

How to     implement HTML and CSS codes to their blogs.

What are     the types of blog posts that their audience prefers.

How to go     about promoting their blogs on social media.

Blogging really involves more than publishing a blog post.

Thankfully, there are blogging experts who share this type of information freely online (So, you can learn them at your own pace)

Blogging Is Simpler Than Vlogging

Now, this might appear somewhat controversial since vlogging requires talking to one’s audience by being in front of a camera.

Some people will think, “Well, vlogging is easy. All I have to do is to talk in front of a camera and upload my content on YouTube.”

Vlogging requires way more work because of the following reasons:

You will     need to invest your money in a very good camera if you want to produce 4K     (Ultra-HD) videos.

You will     need to invest your money in getting yourself a very good microphone.

You will     need to invest your money in getting yourself a very good video editing     software.

You will     need to invest your money in getting a powerful computer — a high-end     computer with lots of RAM and computing power to finish the editing     process in record-breaking time.

Vlogging is actually more difficult than it looks.

Thankfully, blogging can be easily accomplished on the worst of computers and on the best of computers.

And, a person can also use their smartphone or their tablet computer to blog.

In my case, I am a bit camera-shy; so blogging is the ideal medium for me (Which is probably the reason why I made blogging easy for myself).

What about you? Do you think that blogging is easier than vlogging? Or is it the other way around for you?

There Are Countless Blogging Themes To Choose From

Another nice thing about blogging is, that you get to choose a beautiful-looking blogging theme for your blog; it can range from clean-looking to extravagant-looking (It is up to the blogger to choose which one they want).

When I was on Blogger, I used to upload a new theme to my blog approximately every six months (One of the perks of being on Blogger is, that you can upload your own theme if you do not like the ones that are readily available on Blogger).

Unfortunately, some of the blogging themes that I used back then were not all that SEO-friendly.

I have noticed that there are less free blogging themes to choose from on WordPress (especially for those people who are on the free plan); you will have to upgrade to the “Premium” plan or the “Business” plan in order to gain access to an unlimited amount of WordPress’ premium themes.

Back in 2012, there were more blogging themes to choose from on the free plan of WordPress. I remembered spending an entire hour looking at blogging themes; I wanted to choose the right one for my blog at the time (Oh well, those were the good old days of my first WordPress blog).

Over the years, I have learned that the most important thing is, having high-quality content on my blog.

Now, I am in no way insinuating that a beautiful-looking blogging theme is not important.

If you have high-quality content on your blog in addition to having a beautiful-looking blogging theme, then all is well with you.

But, it makes no sense at all to have mediocre content on your blog and have it all decorated with a beautiful looking blogging theme.

But, the most important thing is, that you are happy with your chosen blogging theme.

WordPress bloggers are lucky in the sense that the new themes that are available to them are both mobile-friendly and SEO-friendly.

There Is Money To Be Made In Blogging

Bloggers have been making money with their blogs for years (It is not a new concept).

You can make money blogging by doing the following things:

By     monetising your blog.

By getting     paid to write reviews.

By selling     eBooks on your WordPress blog.

By becoming     a blogging coach.

By     creating an Amazon shop on WordPress.

By     starting your very own consulting business on WordPress.

By selling     online courses.

Those are merely some of the ways that WordPress bloggers can bring in the additional income.

Please keep in mind, that some bloggers make way more money than others and that there are bloggers who actually struggle to make a decent living off of blogging.

Getting rich via blogging is not a guarantee (And, if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they are trying to mislead you).

Final Thoughts

So, my friend, you have learned some of the reasons why I think that blogging is beautiful.

Do you think that blogging is beautiful?

If your answer is, “Yes,” I would love to read all about it in the comments thread of my blog.

And, if your answer is, “No,” I would still love to read about it in the comments thread of my blog.

Thank you for checking out, Renard’s World and I do look forward to seeing you once again around my personal space in the blogosphere.

[maxwellyjordan]

Power versus discretion: Extraordinary relief and the Supreme Court

In an overwhelming majority of the cases that the Supreme Court hears, the matter at issue has been adjudicated all the way through the lower courts, and comes to the justices only on the far side of a ruling by a federal court of appeals or the highest court of a state or territory. As the justices have reiterated often in recent years, “[o]urs is a court of final review and not first view.” By waiting for most cases to go through multiple layers of review by lower courts, the justices give themselves the benefit of several rounds of briefing, and, usually, lower-court rulings, on which to base their decision whether to take up the case — and, if so, how to resolve it.

But neither Article III of the Constitution nor many of the Supreme Court’s jurisdictional statutes require it to wait for proceedings in the lower courts to run their course fully. For example, the statute on which the court’s jurisdiction most often rests — 28 U.S.C. § 1254(1) — provides that “[c]ases in the courts of appeals may be reviewed by the Supreme Court … [b]y writ of certiorari granted upon the petition of any party to any civil or criminal case, before or after rendition of judgment or decree.” And as the justices have repeatedly held, a case is “in” the court of appeals from the moment an appeal is properly noticed. Thus, the court has long possessed the power to grant “certiorari before judgment” — and to decide a case before the courts of appeals have had an opportunity to do so.

Relatedly, the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651, authorizes the Supreme Court to issue “all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law,” including, most typically, writs of mandamus or prohibition – writs that order government officials, including federal judges, to take a certain action or prohibit them from doing so — to confine lower courts to the proper exercise of their jurisdiction. As the court explained in Ex parte United States, that authority allows the justices to issue writs directly to district courts, even in cases in which any appeal from the district court must first go to a court of appeals. And the federal habeas corpus statute, 28 U.S.C. § 2241(a), similarly allows the justices to issue writs of habeas corpus in any case in which a lower court has committed an individual to detention, whether or not the court can also hear a direct appeal of that decision. Although applications for such writs in the Supreme Court may appear to be invoking the court’s “original” jurisdiction (which the Constitution limits to a small class of cases), they are generally understood as invoking the court’s appellate jurisdiction so long as some ruling by a lower court is ostensibly at issue. Thus, these provisions have the effect of giving the Supreme Court extraordinary authority to supervise the entire federal judicial system — and some parts of state legal systems, as well. (“Extraordinary” relief is in contrast to “emergency” relief, such as a stay, which merely freezes the status quo while the ordinary litigation process continues.)

That the Supreme Court has such powers, however, does not mean that it likes to use them. To the contrary, both the Supreme Court’s rules and its case law stress, over and over again, that these authorities are to be used only in truly rare cases — that they are “drastic and extraordinary remedies … [that] should be resorted to only where appeal is a clearly inadequate remedy.” For example, Rule 11, which governs writs of certiorari before judgment, provides that such a petition will be granted “only upon a showing that the case is of such imperative public importance as to justify deviation from normal appellate practice and to require immediate determination in this Court.” The court has not granted such a petition since 2004 — and, excluding petitions in cases that were companions to other cases and summary decisions, it has not granted one since 1988.

To similar effect, Rule 20, which governs “extraordinary writs,” emphasizes that such a writ “is not a matter of right, but of discretion sparingly exercised.” Thus, “[t]o justify the granting of any such writ, the petition must show that the writ will be in aid of the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, that exceptional circumstances warrant the exercise of the Court’s discretionary powers, and that adequate relief cannot be obtained in any other form or from any other court.” The Supreme Court has not issued an extraordinary writ of habeas corpus since 1925. And it appears to not have granted a petition for a writ of mandamus since 1962. After all, if an appellate court wrongly denies a petition for mandamus to a district court, that decision can be remedied through certiorari — as the justices did just last term in In re United States.

The Supreme Court’s reluctance to grant extraordinary relief can be traced to a series of considerations, including its preference to decide cases on as full a record as possible; concerns about protecting its docket; and proper respect for the lower courts — which, even when they decide cases incorrectly, should still generally be presumed to be acting in a manner that is institutionally appropriate.

It is against this backdrop that the uptick in requests for extraordinary relief from the Office of the Solicitor General during the Trump administration should be measured. In the last year alone, the government has sought extraordinary relief from the justices in litigation arising out of the 2020 census, climate change, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program, and, most recently, President Donald Trump’s ban on military service by transgender individuals. And in some of these cases, the government has gone back to the justices for extraordinary relief on multiple occasions. In contrast, the Justice Department during the eight years of the Obama administration sought extraordinary relief from the court exactly once — a petition for certiorari before judgment in United States v. Windsor that was mooted when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled before the petition could be acted upon.

In recent filings in the transgender-ban cases, the solicitor general has insinuated that the uptick in requests for extraordinary relief is at least in part a response to the uptick in nationwide injunctions over the past two years. Perhaps the suggestion is that unusual intervention by the justices is warranted by unusual interference from district courts. But some of the requests have come in cases not involving such relief (such as the census litigation), and the same filings do not address why ordinary appellate review could not limit injunctions that are overbroad — such as the government’s pending appeal to the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit seeking to narrow the scope of the district court’s injunction against the government’s sanctuary-city policies. And if a majority of the justices are inclined to agree with the solicitor general, that could open the door to increased efforts from all parties, and not just the federal government, to short-circuit the ordinary appeals process and take especially important claims directly to the court.

To date, the justices have largely dodged the matter — treating a mandamus request in the census case as a petition for certiorari and avoiding up-or-down rulings on the merits in the other cases. But eventually, the court as a whole, or at least some of the justices, may have to address the propriety of such frequent requests for extraordinary relief head on.

The post Power versus discretion: Extraordinary relief and the Supreme Court appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/12/power-versus-discretion-extraordinary-relief-and-the-supreme-court/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[theconservativebrief]

One key political selling point of Medicare-for-all is that Medicare (the existing program for senior citizens) is well-known and well-liked. But Republicans are increasingly looking to jiujitsu Medicare’s popularity. They are arguing that Medicare-for-all will come at the expense of Medicare for those who already have it, and there’s some reason to believe it will work.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, for example, who won two terms statewide despite having run a business that perpetrated one of the largest Medicare frauds in history, is now running for Senate as a defender of Medicare against the evils of socialism.

If you want to protect Medicare, vote Republican. If you want a socialist experiment with Medicare, by all means vote Democrat.

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) September 6, 2018

President Trump, rallying last week in Indiana, put his own typical spin on the argument by lying directly about Democrats’ proposals rather than vaguely insinuating something false.

So it’s worth being clear.

There is no Democratic proposal to cut Medicare to pay for anything; the Medicare-for-all proposals that exist in Congress would actually make Medicare benefits more generous, not less; and the vast majority of Republicans currently serving in Congress have voted in the recent past to phase out Medicare and replace it with a less generous private voucher scheme.

Nonetheless, over time, elderly Americans have become increasingly hostile to redistribution precisely because they fear it will come at the expense of the existing welfare state for the elderly, and Republicans have become increasingly reliant on old people’s votes to win elections. So this flashpoint could very much be the future of American politics.

An interesting and sometimes missed quirk of internecine Democratic Party health care debates is that the main Medicare-for-all bills — Keith Ellison’s Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, Bernie Sanders’s somewhat different Medicare for All Act, and the somewhat more incremental Medicare Extra for All plan from the Center for American Progress — all give patients a benefits package that’s somewhat different from Medicare as we know it today.

That’s largely because Medicare is actually a little bit stingy compared to private health insurance, with more affluent seniors often supplementing it with so-called “Medigap” plans and poorer ones using Medicaid to accomplish the same goal.

Democrats’ plans address this by making Medicare cover a lot more of existing patient costs, expanding the range of services it covers, and opening up these benefits to more seniors.

On its face, at any rate, Democrats are offering senior citizens a more generous package of benefits. But many elderly people already enjoy comprehensive benefits, and so they fear that any further efforts at economic redistribution will come at their expense.

In an important 2015 paper, Vivenkian Ashok, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Ebonya Washington investigate the question of why public support for economic redistribution has not risen since 1970 despite the large increase in economic inequality.

They show that the overall flat levels of support for redistribution actually mask significant shifts among different subgroups. In particular, African Americans and the elderly have become substantially less supportive of redistribution, while non-elderly whites have become moderately more supportive. Looking more precisely at African Americans, the biggest driver turns out to be a decline in support for race-specific modes of redistribution. For senior citizens, however, the biggest issue is that the elderly “have grown increasingly opposed to government provision of health insurance.”

The authors posit that “older Americans worry that redistribution will come at their expense, in particular via cuts to Medicare.”

This does not factually describe the structure of current Medicare-for-all proposals, though it arguably does describe the structure of the Affordable Care Act, which did reduce payment rates for some Medicare sub-programs — though this was supposed to be designed in a way that wouldn’t harm patients.

A larger question about the impact of Medicare-for-all on existing Medicare beneficiaries, however, concerns the impact on health care providers. The Democratic proposals don’t contain any mechanism that would conjure up additional physicians or hospital beds, but would increase the utilization of health care services by non-elderly patients. Thus it’s at least plausible that elderly people currently covered by Medicare would find it harder to secure appointments.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that the actual GOP agenda is to substantially cut programs benefitting the elderly.

When George W. Bush was president, he tried — with the enthusiastic support of then-Rep. Mike Pence — to phase out Social Security and replace it with a system of privatized investment accounts.

That proved to be toxically unpopular and contributed to his political unraveling, so when Republicans made their comeback after the 2010 elections, they stopped talking about Social Security cuts. Instead, under the leadership of not-yet-speaker Paul Ryan, they pioneered a plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with a system of less generous vouchers to buy private health insurance. This also proved to be very unpopular and after 2012, Republicans largely stopped talking about it too.

One of Trump’s signature insights during his 2016 primary campaign was that instead of shuffling, embarrassed, away from the issue of Social Security and Medicare, he could state his loud and proud opposition to cutting programs for the elderly. That helped him win the nomination and the presidency.

But note that pre-Trump Republicans weren’t talking about cutting these programs just for fun. The issue is that because of population aging and structurally rising health care costs, both Social Security and Medicare spending are steadily rising as a share of GDP. At the same time, Republicans want to spend more rather than less on the military and immigration enforcement. And they want to cut taxes. There simply isn’t nearly enough in the rest of the budget to make the math work.

That’s why Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney told Politico’s Michael Grunwald that “he plans to keep pressing for Medicare and Social Security retirement reforms, even if Trump keeps shooting him down” and why Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), a key Trump ally in the House, still says that “Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be at the center of any serious proposal to return spending to sustainable levels.”

For now, Trump has threaded the needle by simply not caring that the numbers don’t add up. The budget deficit has exploded on his watch, and given the background economic conditions, that’s been totally benign. Interest rates and inflation have both been low by historical standards, and since business leaders only pretend to care about the deficit per se, when a Democrat is president, there’s been no problem.

But much of this fiscal running room represents the legacy of the Great Recession of 2007-’08. By now, the economy has recovered enough that while inflation is by no means out of control, it’s not unusually low either. The Federal Reserve is raising short-term interest rates as the labor market heals, and the interest on longer-term debt is going up too.

There’s no immediate fiscal crisis, but the trajectory of rising spending and flat or falling taxes isn’t indefinitely sustainable. Both possible fixes — tax increases or entitlement cuts — are politically dicey, but Democrats at least aren’t marketing themselves as the party of low taxes. Republicans, by contrast, have hit on “save Medicare” as the key argument against expanding health insurance coverage, even as their own ideological priorities are inevitably going to force them to cut Medicare if they stay in power.

Original Source -> Republicans are arguing that Medicare-for-all will undermine Medicare

via The Conservative Brief