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These Truths: A History of the United States (Jill Lepore) - 1 views

  • It was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.
  • It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.6 This was the question of that autumn. And, in a way, it has been the question of every season since,
  • I once came across a book called The Constitution Made Easy.7 The Constitution cannot be made easy. It was never meant to be easy.
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  • THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.
  • After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson’s draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words “sacred & undeniable,” and suggested that “these truths” were, instead, “self-evident.” This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.
  • The real dispute is between “these truths” and the course of events: Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?
  • The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that “Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments.”9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.
  • understanding history as a form of inquiry—not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting—was central to the nation’s founding. This, too, was new.
  • A new kind of historical writing, less memorial and more unsettling, only first emerged in the fourteenth century. “History is a philosophical science,” the North African Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in 1377, in the prologue to his history of the world, in which he defined history as the study “of the causes and origins of existing things.”11
  • Only by fits and starts did history become not merely a form of memory but also a form of investigation, to be disputed, like philosophy, its premises questioned, its evidence examined, its arguments countered.
  • Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let facts be submitted to a candid world.”
  • In an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the United States decided to begin their accounts with Columbus’s voyage, stitching 1776 to 1492. George Bancroft published his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present in 1834, when the nation was barely more than a half-century old, a fledgling, just hatched. By beginning with Columbus, Bancroft made the United States nearly three centuries older than it was, a many-feathered old bird.
  • In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment. Time alone would tell. But time has passed. The beginning has come to an end. What, then, is the verdict of history?
  • In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls. This book is chiefly a political
  • Aside from being a brief history of the United States and a civics primer, this book aims to be something else, too: it’s an explanation of the nature of the past. History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method.
  • The truths on which the nation was founded are not mysteries, articles of faith, never to be questioned, as if the founding were an act of God, but neither are they lies, all facts fictions, as if nothing can be known, in a world without truth.
  • Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other, lies an uneasy path, away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours. “We cannot hallow this ground,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. We are obliged, instead, to walk this ground, dedicating ourselves to both the living and the dead.
  • studying history is like that, looking into one face and seeing, behind it, another, face after face after face. “Know whence you came,” Baldwin told his nephew.17 The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.
  • Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind, which can be almost anything, so long as it survives the ravages of time and war: letters, diaries, DNA, gravestones, coins, television broadcasts, paintings, DVDs, viruses, abandoned Facebook pages, the transcripts of congressional hearings, the ruins of buildings. Some of these things are saved by chance or accident, like the one house that, as if by miracle, still stands after a hurricane razes a town. But most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept—placed
  • As nation-states emerged, they needed to explain themselves, which they did by telling stories about their origins, tying together ribbons of myths, as if everyone in the “English nation,” for instance, had the same ancestors, when, of course, they did not. Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.15
  • When the United States declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, having waged a war against England, the very last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Englishness.
  • Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history.
  • Against conquest, slaughter, and slavery came the urgent and abiding question, “By what right?”
  • Yet the origins of the United States date to 1492 for another, more troubling reason: the nation’s founding truths were forged in a crucible of violence, the products of staggering cruelty, conquest and slaughter, the assassination of worlds.
  • Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.
  • Unlike Polo and Mandeville, Columbus did not make a catalogue of the ways and beliefs of the people he met (only later did he hire Pané to do that). Instead, he decided that the people he met had no ways and beliefs. Every difference he saw as an absence.22 Insisting that they had no faith and no civil government and were therefore infidels and savages who could not rightfully own anything, he claimed possession of their land, by the act of writing. They were a people without truth; he would make his truth theirs. He would tell them where the dead go.
  • It became commonplace, inevitable, even, first among the Spanish, and then, in turn, among the French, the Dutch, and the English, to see their own prosperity and good health and the terrible sicknesses suffered by the natives as signs from God. “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you,” one French settler wrote: “it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.” Death convinced them at once of their right and of the truth of their faith. “The natives, they are all dead of small Poxe,” John Winthrop wrote when he arrived in New England in 1630: “the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.”
  • In much of New Spain, the mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women, known as mestizos, outnumbered Indians; an intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color, mixtures of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob. Later, the English would recognize only black and white, a fantasy of stark and impossible difference, of nights without twilight and days without dawns. And yet both regimes of race, a culture of mixing or a culture of pretending not to mix, pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?
  • Elizabeth’s best defender argued that if God decided “the female should rule and govern,” it didn’t matter that women were “weake in nature, feable in bodie, softe in courage,” because God would make every right ruler strong. In any case, England’s constitution abided by a “rule mixte,” in which the authority of the monarch was checked by the power of Parliament; also, “it is not she that ruleth but the lawes.” Elizabeth herself called on yet another authority: the favor of the people.48 A mixed constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people: these were English ideas that Americans would one day make their own, crying, “Liberty!”
  • In the brutal, bloody century between Columbus’s voyage and John White’s, an idea was born, out of fantasy, out of violence, the idea that there exists in the world a people who live in an actual Garden of Eden, a state of nature, before the giving of laws, before the forming of government. This imagined history of America became an English book of genesis, their new truth. “In the beginning,” the Englishman John Locke would write, “all the world was America.” In America, everything became a beginning.
  • England’s empire would have a different character than that of either Spain or France. Catholics could make converts by the act of baptism, but Protestants were supposed to teach converts to read the Bible; that meant permanent settlements, families, communities, schools, and churches. Also, England’s empire would be maritime—its navy was its greatest strength. It would be commercial. And, of greatest significance for the course of the nation that would grow out of those settlements, its colonists would be free men, not vassals, guaranteed their “English liberties.”
  • Beginning with the Virginia charter, the idea of English liberties for English subjects was planted on American soil and, with it, the king’s claim to dominion, a claim that rested on the idea that people like Powhatan and his people lived in darkness and without government, no matter that the English called their leaders kings.
  • Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain.
  • To build his case against the king, Coke dusted off a copy of an ancient and almost entirely forgotten legal document, known as Magna Carta (literally, the “great charter”), in which, in the year 1215, King John had pledged to his barons that he would obey the “law of the land.” Magna Carta wasn’t nearly as important as Coke made it out to be, but by arguing for its importance, he made it important, not only for English history, but for American history, too, tying the political fate of everyone in England’s colonies to the strange doings of a very bad king from the Middle Ages.
  • Magna Carta explains a great deal about how it is that some English colonists would one day come to believe that their king had no right to rule them and why their descendants would come to believe that the United States needed a written constitution. But Magna Carta played one further pivotal role, the role it played in the history of truth—a history that had taken a different course in England than in any other part of Europe.
  • The most crucial right established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury.
  • in 1215, the pope banned trial by ordeal. In Europe, it was replaced by a new system of divine judgment: judicial torture. But in England, where there existed a tradition of convening juries to judge civil disputes—like disagreements over boundaries between neighboring freeholds—trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury.
  • This turn marked the beginning of a new era in the history of knowledge: it required a new doctrine of evidence and new method of inquiry and eventually led to the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth. A judge decided the law; a jury decided the facts. Mysteries were matters of faith, a different kind of truth, known only to God.
  • The age of mystery began to wane, and, soon, the culture of fact spread from law to government.
  • There would never be very many Africans in New England, but New Englanders would have slave plantations, on the distant shores. Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.
  • One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and a half million Africans were carried there by force over that same stretch of centuries, on ships that sailed past one another by day and by night.42 Africans died faster, but as a population of migrants, they outnumbered Europeans two and a half to one.
  • In the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, English ships, piloted by English sea captains, crewed by English sailors, carried more than a quarter of a million men, women, and children across the ocean, shackled in ships’ holds.44 Theirs was not a ship of state crossing a sea of troubles, another Mayflower, their bond a covenant. Theirs was a ship of slavery, their bonds forged in fire. They whispered and wept; they screamed and sat in silence. They grew ill; they grieved; they died; they endured.
  • By what right did the English hold these people as their slaves?
  • Under Roman law, all men are born free and can only be made slaves by the law of nations, under certain narrow conditions—for instance, when they’re taken as prisoners of war, or when they sell themselves as payment of debt. Aristotle had disagreed with Roman law, insisting that some men are born slaves. Neither of these traditions from antiquity proved to be of much use to English colonists attempting to codify their right to own slaves, because laws governing slavery, like slavery itself, had disappeared from English common law by the fourteenth century. Said one Englishman in Barbados in 1661, there was “no track to guide us where to walk nor any rule sett us how to govern such Slaves.”46
  • With no track or rule to guide them, colonial assemblies adopted new practices and devised new laws with which they attempted to establish a divide between “blacks” and “whites.”
  • Adopting these practices and passing these laws required turning English law upside down, because much in existing English law undermined the claims of owners of people. In 1655, a Virginia woman with an African mother and an English father sued for her freedom by citing English common law, under which children’s status follows that of their father, not their mother. In 1662, Virginia’s House of Burgesses answered doubts about “whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree” by reaching back to an archaic Roman rule, partus sequitur ventrem (you are what your mother was). Thereafter, any child born of a woman who was a slave inherited her condition.
  • By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained. He also wanted to celebrate the United States, not as an offshoot of England, but instead as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world.
  • No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be established if allowed to do battle with lies. “Let her and falsehood grapple,” he urged, since, “whoever knew Truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?” This view depended on an understanding of the capacity of the people to reason. The people, Milton insisted, are not “slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”52
  • All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, was to establish, as fundamental to the political order, an institution at variance with everything about how Locke understood civil society.
  • Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, long before George Washington crossed the Delaware, long before American independence was thought of, or even thinkable, a revolutionary tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions. They revolted again and again and again. Their revolutions came in waves that lashed the land. They asked the same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?
  • Rebellion hardened lines between whites and blacks. Before Bacon and his men burned Jamestown, poor Englishmen had very little political power. As many as three out of every four Englishmen and women who sailed to the colonies were either debtors or convicts or indentured servants; they weren’t slaves, but neither were they free.61 Property requirements for voting meant that not all free white men could vote. Meanwhile, the fact that slaves could be manumitted by their masters meant that it was possible to be both black and free and white and unfree. But after Bacon’s Rebellion, free white men were granted the right to vote, and it became nearly impossible for black men and women to secure their freedom. By 1680, one observer could remark that “these two words, Negro and Slave” had “grown Homogeneous and convertible”: to be black was to be a slave.
  • Benjamin Franklin eventually settled in the tidy Quaker town of Philadelphia and began printing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in 1729. In its pages, he fought for freedom of the press. In a Miltonian 1731 “Apology for Printers,” he observed “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
  • But if the culture of the fact hadn’t yet spread to newspapers, it had spread to history. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had written that “The register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.”74 One lesson Americans would learn from the facts of their own history had to do with the limits of the freedom of the press, and this was a fact on which they dwelled, and a liberty they grew determined to protect.
  • Slavery does not exist outside of politics. Slavery is a form of politics, and slave rebellion a form of violent political dissent. The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure.
  • In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition.
  • This, too, represented a kind of revolution: Whitefield emphasized the divinity of ordinary people, at the expense of the authority of their ministers.
  • he wrote in 1751 an essay about the size of the population, called “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.”
  • Franklin guessed the population of the mainland colonies to be about “One Million English Souls,” and his calculations suggested that this number would double every twenty-five years. At that rate, in only a century, “the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water.” Franklin’s numbers were off; his estimates weren’t too high; they were too low. At the time, more than 1.5 million people lived in Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies. Those colonies were far more densely settled than New France or New Spain. Only 60,000 French settlers lived in Canada and 10,000 more in Louisiana. New Spain was even more thinly settled.
  • he wrote about a new race, a people who were “white.” “The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” Franklin began. As he saw it, Africans were “black”; Asians and Native Americans were “tawny”; Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans were “swarthy.” That left very few people, and chiefly the English, as the only “white people” in the world. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” Franklin said, adding, wonderingly, “But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”
  • Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE” did some of that, too: it offered a lesson about the rulers and the ruled, and the nature of political communities. It made a claim about the colonies: they were parts of a whole.
  • When Benjamin Franklin began writing his autobiography, in 1771, he turned the story of his own escape—running away from his apprenticeship to his brother James—into a metaphor for the colonies’ growing resentment of parliamentary rule. James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” Franklin wrote, had served as “a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.”7 But that was also the story of every runaway slave ad, testament after testament to an aversion to arbitrary power.
  • The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over. “The success of Mr. Lay, in sowing the seeds of . . . a revolution in morals, commerce, and government, in the new and in the old world, should teach the benefactors of mankind not to despair, if they do not see the fruits of their benevolent propositions, or undertakings, during their lives,” Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush later wrote.
  • There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.
  • The Revolution was at its most radical in the challenge it presented to the institution of slavery and at its most conservative in its failure to meet that challenge. Still, the institution had begun to break, like a pane of glass streaked with cracks but not yet shattered.
  • “I wish our Poor Distracted State would atend to the many good Lessons” of history, Jane Franklin wrote to her brother, and not “keep always in a Flame.”21
  • After Annapolis, Madison went home to Virginia and resumed his course of study. In April of 1787, he drafted an essay called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” It took the form of a list of eleven deficiencies,
  • it closed with a list of causes for these vices, which he located primarily “in the people themselves.” By this last he meant the danger that a majority posed to a minority: “In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?”27 What force restrains good men from doing bad things? Honesty, character, religion—these, history demonstrated, were not to be relied upon. No, the only force that could restrain the tyranny of the people was the force of a well-constructed constitution. It would have to be as finely wrought as an iron gate.
  • At the convention, it proved impossible to set the matter of slavery aside, both because the question of representation turned on it and because any understanding of the nature of tyranny rested on it. When Madison argued about the inevitability of a majority oppressing a minority, he cited ancient history, and told of how the rich oppressed the poor in Greece and Rome. But he cited, too, modern American history. “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, the ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”40
  • If not for the three-fifths rule, the representatives of free states would have outnumbered representatives of slave states by 57 to 33.44
  • Wilson, half Franklin’s age, read his remarks instead. “Mr. President,” he began, addressing Washington, “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them.” He suggested that he might, one day, change his mind. “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.” Hoping to pry open the minds of delegates who were closed to the compromise before them, he reminded them of the cost of zealotry. “Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.” But wasn’t humility the best course, in such circumstances? “Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution,” he closed, “because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”
  • Except for the Massachusetts Constitution, in 1780, and the second New Hampshire Constitution, in 1784, no constitution, no written system of government, had ever before been submitted to the people for their approval. “This is a new event in the history of mankind,” said the governor of Connecticut at his state’s ratification convention.
  • Nearly everything Washington did set a precedent. What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? He’d grown disillusioned with slavery; his own slaves, and the greater number of slaves owned by his wife, were, to him, a moral burden, and he understood very well that for all the wealth generated by forced, unpaid labor, the institution of slavery was a moral burden to the nation. There is some evidence—slight though it is—that Washington drafted a statement announcing that he intended to emancipate his slaves before assuming the presidency. (Or maybe that statement, like Washington’s inaugural address, had been written by Hamilton, a member of New York’s Manumission Society.) This, too, Washington understood, would have established a precedent: every president after him would have had to emancipate his slaves. And yet he would not, could not, do it.65 Few of Washington’s decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.
  • In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the constitutional convention lies an entire revolution—not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution. So far from establishing a religion, the Constitution doesn’t even mention “God,” except in naming the date (“the year of our Lord . . .”). At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one. Most Americans believed, with Madison, that religion can only thrive if it is no part of government, and that a free government can only thrive if it is no part of religion.
  • The replacement of debtors’ prison with bankruptcy protection would change the nature of the American economy, spurring investment, speculation, and the taking of risks.
  • as early as 1791, Madison had begun to revise his thinking. In an essay called “Public Opinion,” he considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold “counterfeit” opinions by persuasive men. (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan.)
  • The way out of this political maze was the newspaper. “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” he explained, “is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.” Newspapers would make the country, effectively, smaller.90 It was an ingenious idea. It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together. Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.
  • Newspapers in the early republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions. “Professions of impartiality I shall make none,” wrote a Federalist printer. “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”92
  • Washington’s Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.”
  • As to the size of the Republic, “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it.” The American experiment must go on. But it could only thrive if the citizens were supported by religion and morality, and if they were well educated. “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” he urged. “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”95
  • “Passion” or variants of the word appear seven times in the Farewell; it is the source of every problem; reason is its only remedy. Passion is a river. There would be no changing its course.
  • Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons. The idea of progress animated American independence and animated, too, the advance of capitalism.
  • The quantification of time led to the quantification of everything else: the counting of people, the measurement of their labor, and the calculation of profit as a function of time. Keeping time and accumulating wealth earned a certain equivalency. “Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin used to say.
  • The two-party system turned out to be essential to the strength of the Republic. A stable party system organizes dissent. It turns discontent into a public good. And it insures the peaceful transfer of power, in which the losing party willingly, and without hesitation, surrenders its power to the winning party.
  • Behind Madison’s remarks about “lessening the proportion of slaves to the free people,” behind Jefferson’s tortured calculations about how many generations would have to pass before his own children could pass for “white,” lay this hard truth: none of these men could imagine living with descendants of Africans as political equals.
  • If the battle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had determined whether aristocracy or republicanism would prevail (and, with Jefferson, republicanism won), the battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams would determine whether republicanism or democracy would prevail (and, with Jackson, democracy would, eventually, win). Jackson’s rise to power marked the birth of American populism. The argument of populism is that the best government is that most closely directed by a popular majority.
  • He was provincial, and poorly educated. (Later, when Harvard gave Jackson an honorary doctorate, John Quincy Adams refused to attend the ceremony, calling him “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”)68 He had a well-earned reputation for being ferocious, ill-humored, and murderous, on the battlefield and off. When he ran for president, he had served less than a year in the Senate. Of his bid for the White House Jefferson declared, “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”69 Jackson made a devilishly shrewd decision. He would make his lack of certain qualities—judiciousness, education, political experience—into strengths.
  • Eaton, who ran Jackson’s campaign, shrewdly revised his Life of Andrew Jackson, deleting or dismissing everything in Jackson’s past that looked bad and lavishing attention on anything that looked good and turning into strengths what earlier had been considered weaknesses: Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t uneducated; he was self-taught. He wasn’t ill-bred; he was “self-made.”
  • Watching the rise of American democracy, an aging political elite despaired, and feared that the Republic could not survive the rule of the people. Wrote John Randolph of Virginia, “The country is ruined past redemption.”
  • “The first principle of our system,” Jackson said, “is that the majority is to govern.” He bowed to the people. Then, all at once, the people nearly crushed him with their affection.
  • The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.
  • The great debates of the middle decades of the nineteenth century had to do with the soul and the machine. One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation’s original sin, the Constitution’s sanctioning of slavery?
  • Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation’s new democratic traditions survive in the age of the factory, the railroad, and the telegraph? If all events in time can be explained by earlier events in time, if history is a line, and not a circle, then the course of events—change over time—is governed by a set of laws, like the laws of physics, and driven by a force, like gravity. What is that force? Is change driven by God, by people, or by machines? Is progress the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?
  • A distinctively American idea of progress involved geography as destiny, picturing improvement as change not only over time but also over space.
  • If the sincerity of converts was often dubious, another kind of faith was taking deeper root in the 1820s, an evangelical faith in technological progress, an unquestioning conviction that each new machine was making the world better. That faith had a special place in the United States, as if machines had a distinctive destiny on the American continent. In prints and paintings, “Progress” appeared as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Writers celebrated inventors as “Men of Progress” and “Conquerors of Nature” and lauded their machines as far worthier than poetry. The triumph of the sciences over the arts meant the defeat of the ancients by the moderns. The genius of Eli Whitney, hero of modernity, was said to rival that of Shakespeare; the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamboat “a mightier epic” than the Iliad.18
  • To Jackson’s supporters, his election marked not degeneration but a new stage in the history of progress. Nowhere was this argument made more forcefully, or more influentially, than in George Bancroft’s History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present. The book itself, reviewers noted, voted for Jackson. The spread of evangelical Christianity, the invention of new machines, and the rise of American democracy convinced Bancroft that “humanism is steady advancing,” and that “the advance of liberty and justice is certain.” That advance, men like Bancroft and Jackson believed, required Americans to march across the continent, to carry these improvements from east to west, the way Jefferson had pictured it. Democracy, John O’Sullivan, a New York lawyer and Democratic editor, argued in 1839, is nothing more or less than “Christianity in its earthly aspect.” O’Sullivan would later coin the term “manifest destiny” to describe this set of beliefs, the idea that the people of the United States were fated “to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”23
  • To evangelical Democrats, Democracy, Christianity, and technology were levers of the same machine. And yet, all along, there were critics and dissenters and objectors who saw, in the soul of the people, in the march of progress, in the unending chain of machines, in the seeming forward movement of history, little but violence and backwardness and a great crushing of men, women, and children. “Oh, America, America,” Maria Stewart cried, “foul and indelible is thy stain!”24
  • The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion. To say that this marked a turn away from the spirit of the nation’s founding is to wildly understate the case. The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high.
  • The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish
  • The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions. Lacking an established state religion, Americans founded new sects, from Shakers to Mormons, and rival Protestant denominations sprung up in town after town. Increasingly, the only unifying, national religion was a civil religion, a belief in the American creed. This faith bound the nation together, and provided extraordinary political stability in an era of astonishing change,
  • Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine. Factories had mechanical slaves; plantations had human slaves. The power of machines was measured by horsepower, the power of slaves by hand power. A healthy man counted as “two hands,” a nursing woman as a “half-hand,” a child as a “quarter-hand.”
  • With Walker, the antislavery argument for gradual emancipation, with compensation for slave owners, became untenable. Abolitionists began arguing for immediate emancipation. And southern antislavery societies shut their doors. As late as 1827, the number of antislavery groups in the South had outnumbered those in the North by more than four to one. Southern antislavery activists were usually supporters of colonization, not of emancipation. Walker’s Appeal ended the antislavery movement in the South and radicalized it in the North.
  • The rebellion rippled across the Union. The Virginia legislature debated the possibility of emancipating its slaves, fearing “a Nat Turner might be in every family.” Quakers submitted a petition to the state legislature calling for abolition. The petition was referred to a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson’s thirty-nine-year-old grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who proposed a scheme of gradual emancipation. Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.
  • One consequence of the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the Second Great Awakening was the participation of women in the reformation of American politics by way of American morals. When suffrage was stripped of all property qualifications, women’s lack of political power became starkly obvious. For women who wished to exercise power, the only source of power seemingly left to them was their role as mothers, which, they suggested, rendered them morally superior to men—more loving, more caring, and more responsive to the cries of the weak.
  • Purporting to act less as citizens than as mothers, cultivating the notion of “republican motherhood,” women formed temperance societies, charitable aid societies, peace societies, vegetarian societies, and abolition societies. The first Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Boston in 1833; by 1837, 139 Female Anti-Slavery Societies had been founded across the country,
  • After 1835, she never again spoke in public. As Catherine Beecher argued in 1837, in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, “If the female advocate chooses to come upon a stage, and expose her person, dress, and elocution to public criticism, it is right to express disgust.”
  • Jacksonian democracy distributed political power to the many, but industrialization consolidated economic power in the hands of a few. In Boston, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 10 percent of wealth in 1689, 16 percent in 1771, 33 percent in 1833, and 37 percent in 1848, while the lowest 80 percent of the population controlled 39 percent of the wealth in 1689, 29 percent in 1771, 14 percent in 1833, and a mere 4 percent in 1848.
  • In New York, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 50 percent in 1845; the top 4 percent of the population controlled 63 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 80 percent in 1845.49
  • While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number—two and a half million—arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone. As a proportion of the U.S. population, European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation’s rate of immigration “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.”51 The largest
  • Critics of Jackson—himself the son of Irish immigrants—had blamed his election on the rising population of poor, newly enfranchised Irishmen. “Everything in the shape of an Irishman was drummed to the polls,” one newspaper editor wrote in 1828.52 By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic. As the flood of immigrants swelled, the force of nativism gained strength, as did hostility toward Catholics, fueled by the animus of evangelical Protestants.
  • The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. Like the extension of suffrage to all white men, this element of the American experiment propelled the United States ahead of European nations. Much of the movement’s strength came from the fervor of revivalists. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children. “It is our duty to make men moral,” read one popular teachers’ manual, published in 1830. Other advocates hoped that a shared education would diminish partisanship. Whatever the motives of its advocates, the common school movement emerged out of, and nurtured, a strong civic culture.56
  • With free schools, literacy spread, and the number of newspapers rose, a change that was tied to the rise of a new party system. Parties come and go, but a party system—a stable pair of parties—has characterized American politics since the ratification debates. In American history the change from one party system to another has nearly always been associated with a revolution in communications that allows the people to shake loose of the control of parties. In the 1790s, during the rise of the first party system, which pitted Federalists against Republicans, the number of newspapers had swelled. During the shift to the second party system, which, beginning in 1833, pitted Democrats against the newly founded Whig Party, not only did the number of newspapers rise, but their prices plummeted.
  • The newspapers of the first party system, which were also known as “commercial advertisers,” had consisted chiefly of partisan commentary and ads, and generally sold for six cents an issue. The new papers cost only one cent, and were far more widely read. The rise of the so-called penny press also marked the beginning of the triumph of “facts” over “opinion” in American journalism, mainly because the penny press aimed at a different, broader, and less exclusively partisan, audience. The New York Sun appeared in 1833. “It shines for all” was its common-man motto. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of everyone, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY,” it boasted. It dispensed with subscriptions and instead was circulated at newsstands, where it was sold for cash, to anyone who had a ready penny. Its front page was filled not with advertising but with news. The penny press was a “free press,” as James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald put it, because it wasn’t beholden to parties. (Bennett, born in Scotland, had immigrated to the United States after reading Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.) Since the paper was sold at newsstands, rather than mailed to subscribers, he explained, its editors and writers were “entirely ignorant who are its readers and who are not.” They couldn’t favor their readers’ politics because they didn’t know them. “We shall support no party,” Bennett insisted. “We shall endeavor to record facts.”
  • During the days of the penny press, Tocqueville observed that Americans had a decided preference for weighing the facts of a matter themselves: They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and study facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man’s authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to find out the weaker points of their neighbor’s doctrine.60
  • For centuries, Europeans had based their claims to lands in the New World on arguments that native peoples had no right to the land they inhabited, no sovereignty over it, because they had no religion, or because they had no government, or because they had no system of writing. The Cherokees, with deliberation and purpose, challenged each of these arguments.
  • Britain, Calhoun argued that if a state were to decide that a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, the Constitution would have to be amended, and if such an amendment were not ratified—if it didn’t earn the necessary approval of three-quarters of the states—the objecting state would have the right to secede from the Union. The states had been sovereign before the Constitution was ever written, or even thought of, Calhoun argued, and they remained sovereign. Calhoun also therefore argued against majority rule; nullification is fundamentally anti-majoritarian. If states can secede, the majority does not rule.78 The nullification crisis was
  • New York abolished debtors’ prison in 1831, and in 1841, Congress passed a federal law offering bankruptcy protection to everyone. Within two years, 41,000 Americans had filed for bankruptcy. Two years later, the law was repealed, but state laws continued to offer bankruptcy protection and, still more significantly, debtors’ prisons were gone for good. In Britain and all of Europe except Portugal, offenders were still being thrown in debtors’ prison (a plot that animated many a nineteenth-century novel); in the United States, debtors could declare bankruptcy and begin again.
  • A nation of debtors, Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle and not of fate or divine retribution or the wheel of fortune. The nation’s bankruptcy laws, even as they came and went again, made taking risks less risky for everyone, which meant that everyone took more risks.
  • the geographical vastness of the United States meant that the anxiety about the machinery of industrial capitalism took the form not of Marxism, with its argument that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” but instead of a romance with nature, and with the land, and with all things rustic. Against the factory, Americans posed not a socialist utopia but the log cabin.
  • Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? Thoreau thought not. He came to this truth: “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”112
  • Expansion, even more than abolition, pressed upon the public the question of the constitutionality of slavery. How or even whether this crisis would be resolved was difficult to see not only because of the nature of the dispute but also because there existed very little agreement about who might resolve it: Who was to decide whether a federal law was unconstitutional?
  • In the midst of all this clamoring among the thundering white-haired patriarchs of American politics, there emerged the idea that the authority to interpret the Constitution rests with the people themselves. Or, at least, this became a rather fashionable thing to say. “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” Daniel Webster roared from the floor of Congress.14 Every man could read and understand the Constitution, Webster insisted.
  • The Notes, it appeared, could be read as variously as the Constitution itself. As one shrewd observer remarked, “The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible.” And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it. Remarked New York governor Silas Wright, “No one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity . . . to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient.”22
  • A NATION HAS borders but the edges of an empire are frayed.23 While abolitionists damned the annexation of Texas as an extension of the slave power, more critics called it an act of imperialism, inconsistent with a republican form of government. “We have a republic, gentlemen, of vast extent and unequalled natural advantages,” Daniel Webster pointed out. “Instead of aiming to enlarge its boundaries, let us seek, rather, to strengthen its union.”24 Webster lost that argument, and, in the end, it was the American reach for empire that, by sundering the Union, brought about the collapse of slavery.
  • Although hardly ever reported in the press, the years between 1830 and 1860 saw more than one hundred incidents of violence between congressmen, from melees in the aisles to mass brawls on the floor, from fistfights and duels to street fights. “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs,” Dickens wrote, “to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.”
  • They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed. When northerners talked about the slave power, they meant that literally.32
  • If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. “I protest against the incorporation of such a people,” he declared. “Ours is the government of the white man.”
  • And yet, as different as were Wilmot’s interests from Calhoun’s, they were both interested in the rights of white men, as Wilmot made plain. “I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen,” he said. “I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
  • If the problem was the size of the Republic, the sprawl of its borders, the frayed edges of empire, couldn’t railroads, and especially the telegraph, tie the Republic together? “Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds,” said one House member in 1845, but “that doubt can no longer exist.”45
  • even Americans with an unflinching faith in machine-driven progress understood that a pulse along a wire could not stop the slow but steady dissolution of the Union.
  • the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States. The gain to the United States was as great as the loss to Mexico. In 1820, the United States of America had spanned 1.8 million square miles, with a population of 9.6 million people; Mexico had spanned 1.7 million square miles, with a population of 6.5 million people. By 1850, the United States had acquired one million square miles of Mexico, and its population had grown to 23.2 million; Mexico’s population was 7.5 million.49
  • The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the size of the United States. In gaining territory from Mexico, the United States grew by 64 percent.
  • the territory comprising the United States had grown to “nearly ten times as large as the whole of France and Great Britain combined; three times as large as the whole of France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, together; one-and-a-half times as large as the Russian empire in Europe; one-sixth less only than the area covered by the fifty-nine or sixty empires, states, and Republics of Europe; of equal extent with the Roman Empire or that of Alexander, neither of which is said to have exceeded 3,000,000 square miles.”50
  • Sentiment was not Fuller’s way; debate was her way. She was a scourge of lesser intellects. Edgar Allan Poe, whose work she did not admire, described her as wearing a perpetual sneer. In “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” Fuller argued that the democratization of American politics had cast light on the tyranny of men over women: “As men become aware that all men have not had their fair chance,” she observed, women had become willing to say “that no women have had a fair chance.”
  • In 1845, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller argued for fundamental and complete equality: “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”56 The book was wildly successful, and Greeley, who had taken to greeting Fuller with one of her catchphrases about women’s capacity—“Let them be sea-captains, if you will”—sent her to Europe to become his newspaper’s foreign correspondent.
  • Reeling from those revolutions, the king of Bavaria asked the historian Leopold von Ranke to explain why his people had rebelled against monarchial rule, as had so many peoples in Europe that year. “Ideas spread most rapidly when they have found adequate concrete expression,” Ranke told the king, and the United States had “introduced a new force in the world,” the idea that “the nation should govern itself,” an idea that would determine “the course of the modern world”: free speech, spread by wire, would make the whole world free.61
  • Unlike Thoreau, who cursed the railroads, Free-Soilers believed in improvement, improvement through the hard work of the laboring man, his power, his energy. “Our paupers to-day, thanks to free labor, are our yeoman and merchants of tomorrow,” the New York Times boasted. “Why, who are the laboring people of the North?” Daniel Webster asked. “They are the whole North. They are the people who till their own farms with their own hands, freeholders, educated men, independent men.”
  • This attack by northerners led southerners to greater exertions in defending their way of life. They battled on several fronts. They described northern “wage slavery” as a far more exploitative system of labor than slavery. They celebrated slavery as fundamental to American prosperity. Slavery “has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength,” Calhoun said. And they elaborated an increasingly virulent ideology of racial difference, arguing against the very idea of equality embodied in the American creed.
  • Conservative Virginian George Fitzhugh, himself inspired by ethnological thinking, dismissed the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence as utter nonsense. “Men are not born physically, morally, or intellectually equal,” he wrote. “It would be far nearer the truth to say, ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’—and the riding does them good.”
  • For Fitzhugh, the error had begun in the imaginations of the philosophes of the Enlightenment and in their denial of the reality of history. Life and liberty are not “inalienable rights,” Fitzhugh argued: instead, people “have been sold in all countries, and in all ages, and must be sold so long as human nature lasts.” Equality means calamity: “Subordination, difference of caste and classes, difference of sex, age, and slavery beget peace and good will.”
  • Progress is an illusion: “the world has not improved in the last two thousand, probably four thousand years.” Perfection is to be found in the past, not in the future.66 As for the economic systems of the North and the South, “Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves,” Fitzhugh insisted. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”67
  • HISTORY TEEMS WITH mishaps and might-have-beens: explosions on the Potomac, storms not far from port, narrowly contested elections, court cases lost and won, political visionaries drowned. But over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.
  • over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.
  • Douglas promoted the idea of popular sovereignty, proclaiming, “If there is any one principle dearer and more sacred than all others in free governments, it is that which asserts the exclusive right of a free people to form and adopt their own fundamental law.”75 Unfree people, within Stephen Douglas’s understanding, had no such rights.
  • the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial. The law, said Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive slave living in New York, marked “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.”76 Bounty hunters and slave catchers hunted down and captured former slaves and returned them to their owners for a fee. Little stopped them from seizing men, women, and children who had been born free, or who had been legally emancipated, and selling them to the South, too. Nothing so brutally exposed the fragility of freedom or the rapaciousness of slavery.
  • February 1854, at their convention in Philadelphia, northern Know-Nothings proposed a platform plank calling for the reinstatement of the Missouri Compromise. When that motion was rejected, some fifty delegates from eight northern states bolted: they left the convention, and the party, to set up their own party, the short-lived North American Party. Nativism would endure as a force in American politics, but, meanwhile, nativists split over slavery.
  • Lincoln’s was the language of free soil, free speech, and free labor. He grounded his argument against slavery in his understanding of American history, in the language of Frederick Douglass, and in his reading of the Constitution. “Let no one be deceived,” he said. “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms.”
  • As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
  • “That negroes, whether slave or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.” The implications of the ruling stunned his readers. Even Americans who held no strong views on the question of slavery—and they were rare enough—were nonetheless shocked by the court’s exercise of the authority to determine the unconstitutionality of the law.
  • “A large meeting of colored people” was held in Philadelphia in April, at which it was resolved that “the only duty the colored man owes to a Constitution under which he is declared to be an inferior and degraded being, having no rights which white men are bound to respect, is to denounce and repudiate it, and to do what he can by all proper means to bring it into contempt.”
  • “You may close your Supreme Court against the black man’s cry for justice, but you cannot, thank God, close against him the ear of a sympathising world, nor shut up the Court of Heaven.” Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution would be ignored, Douglass predicted. “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.”102
  • APHOTOGRAPH STOPS TIME, TRAPPING IT LIKE A BUTTERFLY in a jar.
  • No other kind of historical evidence has this quality of instantaneity, of an impression taken in a moment, in a flicker, an eye opened and then shut. Photographs also capture the ordinary, the humble, the speechless. The camera discriminates between light and dark but not between the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the noisy and the quiet.
  • portraits were also closely associated with death, with being trapped in time, on glass, for eternity, and, even more poignantly, with equality.3 With photography, Walt Whitman predicted, “Art will be democratized.”
  • Morse had long predicted that the telegraph would usher in an age of world peace. “I trust that one of its effects will be to bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war,” he insisted.8 War was a failure of technology, Morse argued, a shortcoming of communication that could be remedied by way of a machine. Endowing his work with the grandest of purposes, he believed that the laying of telegraph wires across the American continent would bind the nation together into one people, and that the laying of cable across the ocean would bind Europe to the Americas, ushering in the dawn of an age of global harmony.
  • But war isn’t a failure of technology; it’s a failure of politics.
  • Debate is to war what trial by jury is to trial by combat: a way to settle a dispute without coming to blows. The form and its rules had been established over centuries. They derived from rules used in the courts and in Parliament, and even from the rules of rhetoric used in the writing of poetry. Since the Middle Ages and the founding of the first universities, debate had been the foundation of a liberal arts education.
  • (Etymologically and historically, the artes liberales are the arts acquired by people who are free, or liber.)10 In the eighteenth century, debate was understood as the foundation of civil society. In 1787, delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed to “to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other.”
  • Some twelve thousand people showed up for their first debate, at two o’clock in the afternoon on August 21, in Ottawa, Illinois. There were no seats; the audience stood, without relief, for three hours.
  • They’d agreed to strict rules: the first speaker would speak for an hour and the second for an hour and a half, whereupon the first speaker would offer a thirty-minute rebuttal.
  • And, as to the wrongness of slavery, he called it tyranny, and the idea of its naturalness as much an error as a belief in the divine right of kings. The question wasn’t sectionalism or nationalism, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The question was right against wrong. “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” Lincoln said.16
  • The price of slaves grew so high that a sizable number of white southerners urged the reopening of the African slave trade. In the 1850s, legislatures in several states, including South Carolina, proposed reopening the trade. Adopting this measure would have violated federal law. Some “reopeners” believed that the federal ban on the trade was unconstitutional; others were keen to nullify it, in a dress rehearsal for secession.
  • “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there?”21 Proslavery southerners made these arguments under the banner of “free trade,” their rhetorical answer to “free labor.”
  • To George Fitzhugh, all societies were “at all times and places, regulated by laws as universal and as similar as those which control the affairs of bees,” and trade itself, including the slave trade, was “as old, as natural, and irresistible as the tides of the ocean.”
  • In 1855, David Christy, the author of Cotton Is King, wrote about the vital importance of “the doctrine of Free Trade,” which included abolishing the tariffs that made imported English goods more expensive than manufactured goods produced in the North. As one southerner put it, “Free trade, unshackled industry, is the motto of the South.”23
  • Darwin’s Origin of Species would have a vast and lingering influence on the world of ideas. Most immediately, it refuted the racial arguments of ethnologists like Louis Agassiz. And, in the months immediately following the book’s publication—the last, unsettling months before the beginning of the Civil War—abolitionists took it as evidence of the common humanity of man.30
  • The truths of the Confederacy disavowed the truths of the Union. The Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens said, but
  • “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”52 It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.
  • Opposition to free speech had long been the position of slave owners, a position taken at the constitutional convention and extended through the gag rule, antiliteracy laws, bans on the mails, and the suppression of speakers. An aversion to political debate also structured the Confederacy, which had both a distinctive character and a lasting influence on Americans’ ideas about federal authority as against popular sovereignty.
  • Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.55
  • By May of 1861, the Confederacy comprised fifteen states stretching over 900,000 square miles and containing 12 million people, including 4 million slaves, and 4 million white women who were disenfranchised. It rested on the foundational belief that a minority governs a majority. “The condition of slavery is with us nothing but a form of civil government for a class of people not fit to govern themselves,” said Jefferson Davis.
  • There would be those, after the war ended, who said that it had been fought over states’ rights or to preserve the Union or for a thousand other reasons and causes. Soldiers, North and South, knew better. “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper explained in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks,” a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade’s newspaper wrote that same year, “is either a fool or a liar.”
  • Lincoln would remain a man trapped in time, in the click of a shutter and by the trigger of a gun. In mourning him, in sepia and yellow, in black and white, beneath plates of glinting glass, Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves.
  • No president consecrated their cemeteries or delivered their Gettysburg address; no committee of arrangements built monuments to their memory. With Lincoln’s death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb, trapped in a vault that could not hold them.
  • People running for Congress didn’t have to meet property requirements; they didn’t have to have been born in the United States; and they couldn’t be subjected to religious tests. This same logic applied to citizenship, and for the same reason: the framers of the Constitution understood these sorts of requirements as forms of political oppression. The door to the United States was meant to be open.
  • Before the 1880s, no federal law restricted immigration. And, despite periods of fervent nativism, especially in the 1840s, the United States welcomed immigrants into citizenship, and valued them. After the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury estimated the worth of each immigrant as equal to an $800 contribution to the nation’s economy,
  • Nineteenth-century politicians and political theorists interpreted American citizenship within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights and the authority of the state, holding dear the conviction that a good government guarantees everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of political rights, equal and irrevocable.
  • The Civil War raised fundamental questions not only about the relationship between the states and the federal government but also about citizenship itself and about the very notion of a nation-state. What is a citizen? What powers can a state exert over its citizens? Is suffrage a right of citizenship, or a special right, available only to certain citizens? Are women citizens? And if women are citizens, why aren’t they voters? What about Chinese immigrants, pouring into the West? They were free. Were they, under American law, “free white persons” or “free persons of color” or some other sort of persons?
  • In 1866, Congress searched in vain for a well-documented definition of the word “citizen.” Over the next thirty years, that definition would become clear, and it would narrow.
  • In 1896, the U.S. passport office, in the Department of State, which had grown to thousands of clerks, began processing applications according to new “Rules Governing the Application of Passports,” which required evidence of identity, including a close physical description Lew Wa Ho worked at a dry goods shop in St. Louis; the photograph was included in his Immigration Service case file as evidence of employment. Age, _____ years; stature, _____ feet _____ inches (English measure); forehead, _____; eyes, _____; nose, _____; mouth, _____; chin, _____; hair, _____; complexion, _____; face, _____ as well as affidavits, signatures, witnesses, an oath of loyalty, and, by way of an application fee, one dollar.12
  • The Fourteenth Amendment, drafted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, marked the signal constitutional achievement of a century of debate and war, of suffering and struggle. It proposed a definition of citizenship guaranteeing its privileges and immunities, and insuring equal protection and due process to all citizens. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,”
  • “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”20
  • During the drafting of the amendment, the committee betrayed the national phalanx of women who for decades had fought for abolition and for black civil rights by proposing to insert, into the amendment’s second section, a provision that any state that denied the right to vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state” would lose representation in Congress. “Male” had never before appeared in any part of the Constitution. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” Stanton warned, “it will take us a century at least to get it out.”21 She was not far wrong.
  • Women protested. “Can any one tell us why the great advocates of Human Equality . . . forget that when they were a weak party and needed all the womanly strength of the nation to help them on, they always united the words ‘without regard to sex, race, or color’?” asked Ohio-born reformer Frances Gage. Charles Sumner offered this answer: “We know how the Negro will vote, but are not so sure of the women.” How women would vote was impossible to know. Would black women vote the way black men voted? Would white women vote like black women? Republicans decided they’d rather not find out.
  • In the federal census of 1860, 24,282 out of 34,935 Chinese toiled in mines. Although some Chinese immigrants left mining—and some were forced out—many continued to mine well into the 1880s, often working in sites abandoned by other miners.
  • An 1867 government report noted that in Montana, “the diggings now fall into the hands of the Chinese, who patiently glean the fields abandoned by the whites.” Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho’s settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state’s wage earners.
  • Their rights, under state constitutions and statutes, were markedly limited. Oregon’s 1857 constitution barred “Chinamen” from owning real estate, while California barred Chinese immigrants from testifying in court, a provision upheld in an 1854 state supreme court opinion, People v. Hall, which described the Chinese as “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown.”29
  • And what about the voting rights of U.S.-born Chinese Americans? Much turned on the Fifteenth Amendment, proposed early in 1869. While the aim of the amendment was to guarantee African Americans the right to vote and hold office, its language inevitably raised the question of Chinese citizenship and suffrage. Opponents of the amendment found its entire premise scandalous. Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky, fumed, “I want no negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.”33
  • Douglass spoke about what he called a “composite nation,” a strikingly original and generative idea, about a citizenry made better, and stronger, not in spite of its many elements, but because of them: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”36
  • Tilden won the nomination anyway and, in the general election, he won the popular vote against Hayes. Unwilling to accept the result of the election, Republicans disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
  • Eventually, the decision was thrown to an electoral commission that brokered a nefarious compromise: Democrats agreed to throw their support behind the man ever after known as Rutherfraud B. Hayes, so that he could become president, in exchange for a promise from Republicans to end the military occupation of the South. For a minor and petty political win over the Democratic Party, Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights.
  • As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the “Redeemers,” took control of state governments of the South, and the era of black men’s enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end. The Klan terrorized the countryside, burning homes and hunting, torturing, and killing people. (Between 1882 and 1930, murderers lynched more than three thousand black men and women.)
  • Black politicians elected to office were thrown out. And all-white legislatures began passing a new set of black codes, known as Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place, down to the last street corner. Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars. Georgia became the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891.
  • “Capital buys and sells to-day the very heart-beats of humanity,” she said. Democracy itself had been corrupted by it: “the speculators, the land-robbers, the pirates and gamblers of this Nation have knocked unceasingly at the doors of Congress, and Congress has in every case acceded to their demands.”44 The capitalists, she said, had subverted the will of the people.
  • In the late nineteenth century, a curious reversal took place. Electoral politics, the politics men engaged in, became domesticated, the office work of education and advertising—even voting moved indoors. Meanwhile, women’s political expression moved to the streets. And there, at marches, rallies, and parades, women deployed the tools of the nineteenth-century religious revival: the sermon, the appeal, the conversion.45
  • 1862 alone, in addition to the Homestead Act, the Republican Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act (chartering railroad companies to build the line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California) and the National Bank Act (to issue paper money to pay for it all). After the war, political power moved from the states to the federal government and as the political influence of the South waned, the importance of the West rose. Congress not only sent to the states amendments to the Constitution that defined citizenship and guaranteed voting rights but also passed landmark legislation involving the management of western land, the control of native populations, the growth and development of large corporations, and the construction of a national transportation infrastructure.
  • The independent farmer—the lingering ideal of the Jeffersonian yeoman—remained the watchword of the West, but in truth, the family farming for subsistence, free of government interference, was far less common than a federally subsidized, capitalist model of farming and cattle raising for a national or even an international market. The small family farm—Jefferson’s republican dream—was in many parts of the arid West an environmental impossibility.
  • Much of the property distributed under the terms of the Homestead Act, primarily in the Great Basin, was semi-arid, the kind of land on which few farmers could manage a productive farm with only 160 acres. Instead, Congress typically granted the best land to railroads, and allowed other, bigger interests to step in, buying up large swaths for agricultural business or stock raising and fencing it in, especially after the patenting of barbed wire in 1874.46
  • In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, “a sum so small,” he wrote, “that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.”48
  • instability contributed to a broader set of political concerns that became Mary Lease’s obsession, concerns known as “the money question,” and traceable all the way back to Hamilton’s economic plan: Should the federal government control banking and industry?
  • No group of native-born Americans was more determined to end Chinese immigration than factory workers. The 1876 platform of the Workingmen’s Party of California declared that “to an American death is preferable to life on par with a Chinaman.”55 In 1882, spurred by the nativism of populists, Congress passed its first-ever immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China from entering the United States and, determining that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to people of Chinese ancestry, decreed that Chinese people already in the United States were permanent aliens who could never become citizens.
  • Populists, whether farmers or factory workers, for all their invocation of “the people,” tended to take a narrow view of citizenship. United in their opposition to the “money power,” members of the alliance, like members of the Knights of Labor, were also nearly united in their opposition to the political claims of Chinese immigrants, and of black people. The Farmers’ Alliance excluded African Americans, who formed their own association, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Nor did populists count Native Americans within the body of “the people.”
  • In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, under whose terms the U.S. government offered native peoples a path to citizenship in a nation whose reach had extended across the lands of their ancestors. The Dawes Act granted to the federal government the authority to divide Indian lands into allotments and guaranteed U.S. citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership.
  • In proposing the allotment plan, Massachusetts senator Henry Laurens Dawes argued that the time had come for Indians to choose between “extermination or civilization” and insisted that the law offered Americans the opportunity to “wipe out the disgrace of our past treatment” and instead lift Indians up “into citizenship and manhood.”58
  • But in truth the Dawes Act understood native peoples neither as citizens nor as “persons of color,” and led to nothing so much as forced assimilation and the continued takeover of native lands. In 1887 Indians held 138 million acres; by 1900, they held only half of that territory.
  • In 1877, railroad workers protesting wage cuts went on strike in cities across the country. President Hayes sent in federal troops to end the strikes, marking the first use of the power of the federal government to support business against labor. The strikes continued, with little success in improving working conditions. Between 1881 and 1894, there was, on average, one major railroad strike a week. Labor was, generally and literally, crushed: in a single year, of some 700,000 men working on the railroads, more than 20,000 were injured on the job and nearly 2,000 killed.59
  • In 1882, Roscoe Conkling represented the Southern Pacific Railroad Company’s challenge to a California tax rule. He told the U.S. Supreme Court, “I come now to say that the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and its creditors and stockholders are among the ‘persons’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
  • In offering an argument about the meaning and original intention of the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment, Conkling enjoyed a singular authority: he’d served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that had drafted the amendment and by 1882 was the lone member of that committee still living. With no one alive to contradict him, Conkling assured the court that the committee had specifically rejected the word “citizen” in favor of “person” in order to include corporations. (A
  • Much evidence suggests, however, that Conkling was lying. The record of the deliberations of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction does not support his argument regarding the committee’s original intentions, nor is it plausible that between 1866 and 1882, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had kept mysteriously hidden their secret intention to guarantee equal protection and due process to corporations. But
  • in 1886, when another railroad case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, reached the Supreme Court, the court’s official recorder implied that the court had accepted the doctrine that “corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”62 After that, the Fourteenth Amendment, written and ratified to guarantee freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, became the chief means by which corporations freed themselves from government regulation.
  • In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.
  • He devised an economic plan that involved abolishing taxes on labor and instead imposing a single tax on land. Tocqueville had argued that democracy in America is made possible by economic equality; people with equal estates will eventually fight for, and win, equal political rights. George agreed. But, like Mary Lease, he thought that financial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible. He saw himself as defending “the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.”72
  • Between 1889 and 1893, the mortgages on so many farms were foreclosed that 90 percent of farmland fell into the hands of bankers. The richest 1 percent of Americans owned 51 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 44 percent owned less than 2 percent.
  • For all its passionate embrace of political equality and human rights and its energetic championing of suffrage, the People’s Party rested on a deep and abiding commitment to exclude from full citizenship anyone from or descended from anyone from Africa or Asia.
  • Many of the reforms proposed by populists had the effect of diminishing the political power of blacks and immigrants. Chief among them was the Australian ballot, more usually known as the secret ballot, which, by serving as a de facto literacy test, disenfranchised both black men in the rural South and new immigrants in northern cities.
  • to deliberate at length over the secret ballot. Quickest to adopt the reform were the states of the former Confederacy, where the reform appealed to legislatures eager to find legal ways to keep black men from voting. In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional
  • Both by law and by brute force, southern legislators, state by state, and poll workers, precinct by precinct, denied black men the right to vote. In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910. In 1893, Arkansas Democrats celebrated their electoral advantage by singing,         The Australian ballot works like a charm         It makes them think and scratch         And when a Negro gets a ballot         He has certainly met his match.82
  • One Republican said, “I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth,” even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he “disagreed with almost all of it.”85
  • In 1894, Bryan tacked an income tax amendment to a tariff bill, which managed to pass. But the populist victory—a 2 percent federal income tax that applied only to Americans who earned more than $4,000—didn’t last long. The next year, in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the tax was a direct tax, and therefore unconstitutional, one justice calling the tax the first campaign in “a war of the poor against the rich.”
  • POPULISM ENTERED AMERICAN politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers.
  • After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96
  • For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achievement of civilization. The state also provided a bulwark against populism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, populism would yield to progressivism as urban reformers applied the new social sciences to the study of political problems, to be remedied by the intervention of the state.
  • The rise of populism and the social sciences reshaped the press, too. In the 1790s, the weekly partisan newspaper produced the two-party system. The penny press of the 1830s produced the popular politics of Jacksonian democracy. And in the 1880s and 1890s the spirit of populism and the empiricism of the social sciences drove American newspapers to a newfound obsession with facts.
  • The newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s were full of stunts and scandals and crusades, even as they defended their accuracy. “Facts, facts piled up to the point of dry certitude was what the American people really wanted,” wrote the reporter Ray Stannard Baker. Julius Chambers said that writing for the New York Herald involved “Facts; facts; nothing but facts. So many peas at so much a peck; so much molasses at so much a quart.”
  • Ballot reform, far from keeping money out of elections, had ushered more money into elections, along with a new political style: using piles of money to sell a candidate’s personality, borrowing from the methods of business by using mass advertising and education, slogans and billboards. McKinley ran a new-style campaign; Bryan ran an old-style campaign. Bryan barnstormed all over the country: he gave some six hundred speeches to five million people in twenty-seven states and traveled nearly twenty thousand miles.
  • But McKinley’s campaign coffers were fuller: Republicans spent $7 million; Democrats, $300,000. John D. Rockefeller alone provided the GOP with a quarter of a million dollars. McKinley’s campaign manager, Cleveland businessman Mark Hanna, was nearly buried in donations from fellow businessmen. He used that money to print 120 million pieces of campaign literature. He hired fourteen hundred speakers to stump for McKinley; dubbing the populists Popocrats, they agitated voters to a state of panic.108 As Mary Lease liked to say, money elected McKinley.
  • Turner, born in Wisconsin in 1861, was one of the first Americans to receive a doctorate in history. At the exposition, he delivered his remarks before the American Historical Association, an organization that had been founded in 1884 and incorporated by an act of Congress in 1889 “for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts and for kindred purposes in the interest of American history and of history in America.”110
  • like journalists, historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens. Where George Bancroft, in his History of the United States, had looked for explanations in the hand of providence, Frederick Jackson Turner looked to the census.
  • The difference between Turner’s methods and Bancroft’s signaled a profound shift in the organization of knowledge, one that would have lasting consequences for the relationship between the people and the state and for civil society itself. Like Darwinism, the rise of the social sciences involved the abdication of other ways of knowing, and, indirectly, contributed to the rise of fundamentalism.
  • Across newly defined academic disciplines, scholars abandoned the idea of mystery—the idea that there are things known only by God—in favor of the claim to objectivity, a development sometimes called “the disenchantment of the world.”111 When universities grew more secular, religious instruction became confined to divinity schools and theological seminaries.
  • theologian at the University of Chicago’s divinity school defined modernism as “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.”112 Increasingly, this is exactly what evangelicals who eventually identified themselves as fundamentalists found objectionable.
  • Influenced by both Jefferson and Darwin, Turner saw the American frontier as the site of political evolution, beginning with the “savages” of a “wilderness,” proceeding to the arrival of European traders, and continuing through various forms of settlement, through the establishment of cities and factories, “the evolution of each into a higher stage,” and culminating in the final stage of civilization: capitalism and democracy.114
  • “American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West,” by which he meant the experience of European immigrants to the United States in defeating its native peoples, taking possession of their homelands, and erecting there a civilization of their own. This, for Turner, was the story of America and the lesson of American history: evolution.116
  • Douglass, who, as the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, had represented the nation of Haiti at the Haitian pavilion, was the only eminent African American with a role at the fair, whose program had been planned by a board of 208 commissioners, all white.117 There were, however, black people at the fair: on display. In the Hall of Agriculture, old men and women, former slaves, sold miniature bales of cotton, souvenirs, while, in a series of exhibits intended to display the Turnerian progress of humankind from savagery to civilization, black Americans were posed in a fake African village. “As if to shame the Negro,” Douglass wrote, they “exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.”118
  • “A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance,” Douglass said that day, turning the idea of a ship of state to the problem of Jim Crow. “But when she spread her canvas to the breeze and sets out on her voyage, turns prow to the open sea, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. And so it is with the colored man.”
  • He paused to allow his listeners to conjure the scene, and its meaning, of a people struggling against the sea. “My dear young friends,” Douglass closed. “Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress and you will reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.”124
  • The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” The resulting legal principle—that public accommodations could be “separate but equal”—would last for more than half a century.
  • The sole dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, objecting to the establishment of separate classes of citizens, insisted that the achievement of the United States had been the establishment, by amendment, of a Constitution that was blind to race. “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan wrote, and it is therefore a plain violation of the Constitution “for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.”
  • What all these laws had in common, Harlan argued, was that they were based on race. And yet a war had been fought and won to establish that laws in the United States could not be based on race; nor could citizenship be restricted by race. The court’s opinion in Plessy, Harlan warned, was so dreadfully in error as to constitutional principles that “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.”128 This prediction proved true.
  • Four centuries had passed since continents, separated by oceans, had met again. A century had passed since Jefferson had declared all men equal. Three decades had passed since the Fourteenth Amendment had declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens.
  • And now the Supreme Court ruled that those who would set aside equality in favor of separation had not violated the nation’s founding truths. In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history—a chronicle not lacking for tragedy—the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.
  • Lippmann started out as a socialist, when even mentioning the masses hinted at socialism; The Masses was the name of a socialist monthly, published in New York, and, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolshevists to power (“bol’shinstvo” means “the majority”), “the masses” sounded decidedly Red.
  • But Lippmann soon began to write about the masses as “the bewildered herd,” unthinking and instinctual, and as dangerous as an impending stampede. For Lippmann, and for an entire generation of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats who styled themselves Progressives—the term dates to 1910—the masses posed a threat to American democracy.
  • This change was wrought in the upheaval of the age. In the years following the realigning election of 1896, everything seemed, suddenly, bigger than before, more crowded, and more anonymous: looming and teeming. Even buildings were bigger: big office buildings, big factories, big mansions, big museums. Quantification became the only measure of value: how big, how much, how many.
  • To fight monopolies, protect the people, and conserve the land, the federal government grew bigger, too; dozens of new federal agencies were founded in this era,
  • “Mass” came to mean anything that involved a giant and possibly terrifying quantity, on a scale so great that it overwhelmed existing arrangements—including democracy. “Mass production” was coined in the 1890s, when factories got bigger and faster, when the number of people who worked in them skyrocketed, and when the men who owned them got staggeringly rich.
  • “Mass migration” dates to 1901, when nearly a million immigrants were entering the United States every year, “mass consumption” to 1905, “mass consciousness” to 1912. “Mass hysteria” had been defined by 1925 and “mass communication” by 1927, when the New York Times described the radio as “a system of mass communication with a mass audience.”3
  • And the masses themselves? They formed a mass audience for mass communication and had a tendency, psychologists believed, to mass hysteria—the political stampede—posing a political problem unanticipated by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson,
  • To meet that challenge in what came to be called the Progressive Era, activists, intellectuals, and politicians campaigned for and secured far-reaching reforms that included municipal, state, and federal legislation.
  • Their most powerful weapon was the journalistic exposé. Their biggest obstacle was the courts, which they attempted to hurdle by way of constitutional amendments. Out of these campaigns came the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, the direct election of U.S. senators, presidential primaries, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition.
  • And all of what Progressives accomplished in the management of mass democracy was vulnerable to the force that so worried the unrelenting Walter Lippmann: the malleability of public opinion, into mass delusion.
  • Progressives championed the same causes as Populists, and took their side in railing against big business, but while Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies.6
  • Populists believed that the system was broken; Progressives believed that the government could fix it. Conservatives, who happened to dominate the Supreme Court, didn’t believe that there was anything to fix but believed that, if there was, the market would fix it. Notwithstanding conservatives’ influence in the judiciary, Progressivism spanned both parties.
  • Woodrow Wilson himself admitted, “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is.”7
  • Much that was vital in Progressivism grew out of Protestantism, and especially out of a movement known as the Social Gospel, adopted by almost all theological liberals and by a large number of theological conservatives,
  • The Social Gospel movement was led by seminary professors—academic theologians who accepted the theory of evolution, seeing it as entirely consistent with the Bible and evidence of a divinely directed, purposeful universe; at the same time, they fiercely rejected the social Darwinism of writers like Herbert Spencer, the English natural scientist who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” and used the theory of evolution to defend all manner of force, violence, and oppression.
  • argued that fighting inequality produced by industrialism was an obligation of Christians: “We must make men believe that Christianity has a right to rule this kingdom of industry, as well as all the other kingdoms of this world.”9 Social Gospelers brought the zeal of abolitionism to the problem of industrialism.
  • In 1908, Methodists wrote a Social Creed and pledged to fight to end child labor and to promote a living wage. It was soon adopted by the thirty-three-member Federal Council of Churches, which proceeded to investigate a steelworkers’ strike in Bethlehem, ultimately taking the side of the strikers.10
  • Washington, in the debate over the annexation of the Philippines, Americans revisited unsettled questions about expansion that had rent the nation during the War with Mexico and unsettled questions about citizenship that remained the unfinished business of Reconstruction. The debate also marked the limits of the Progressive vision: both sides in this debate availed themselves, at one time or another, of the rhetoric of white supremacy. Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.
  • “You are undertaking to annex and make a component part of this Government islands inhabited by ten millions of the colored race, one-half or more of whom are barbarians of the lowest type,” said Ben Tillman, a one-eyed South Carolina Democrat who’d boasted of having killed black men and expressed his support for lynch mobs. “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object.”
  • Tillman reminded Republicans that they had not so long ago freed slaves and then “forced on the white men of the South, at the point of the bayonet, the rule and domination of those ex-slaves. Why the difference? Why the change? Do you acknowledge that you were wrong in 1868?”14
  • The war that began in Cuba in 1898 and was declared over in the Philippines in 1902 dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States, who faced, at home, a campaign of terrorism. Pro-war rhetoric, filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds. “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903.
  • By one estimate, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson meant that there was no legal recourse to fight segregation, which grew more brutal with each passing year.
  • Nor was discrimination confined to the South. Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they’d been confined to just eleven. In Baltimore, blacks couldn’t buy houses on blocks where whites were a majority.
  • In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court availed itself of the Fourteenth Amendment not to guarantee equal protection for blacks but to guarantee what the court had come to understand as the “liberty of contract”—the liberty of businesses to discriminate.16
  • A generation earlier, he’d have become a preacher, like his father, but instead he became a professor of political science.23 In the academy and later in the White House, he dedicated himself to the problem of adapting a Constitution written in the age of the cotton gin to the age of the automobile.
  • “We have grown more and more inclined from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation. To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.” A president’s power, Wilson concluded, is virtually limitless: “His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.”24
  • the U.S. Supreme Court overruled much Progressive labor legislation. The most important of these decisions came in 1905. In a 5–4 decision in Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a state law establishing that bakers could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week, on the ground that the law violated a business owner’s liberty of contract, the freedom to forge agreements with his workers, something the court’s majority said was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.
  • The laissez-faire conservatism of the court was informed, in part, by social Darwinism, which suggested that the parties in disputes should be left to battle it out, and if one side had an advantage, even so great an advantage as a business owner has over its employees, then it should win.
  • In a dissenting opinion in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of violating the will of the people. “This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,” he began. The court, he said, had also wildly overreached its authority and had carried social Darwinism into the Constitution. “A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” Holmes wrote. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”
  • Wilson pointed out that the Constitution, written before mass industrialization, couldn’t be expected to have anticipated it, and couldn’t solve the problems industrialization had created, unless the Constitution were treated like a living thing that, like an organism, evolved.
  • Critics further to the left argued that the courts had become an instrument of business interests. Unions, in fact, often failed to support labor reform legislation, partly because they expected it to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional, and partly because they wanted unions to provide benefits to their members, which would be an argument for organizing.
  • conservatives insisted that the courts were right to protect the interests of business and that either market forces would find a way to care for sick, injured, and old workers, or (for social Darwinists) the weakest, who were not meant to thrive, would wither and die.
  • “No other social movement in modern economic development is so pregnant with benefit to the public,” wrote the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher pointed out in 1916.36 It would maintain that unenviable distinction for a century.
  • In California, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment providing for universal health insurance. But when it was put on the ballot for ratification, a federation of insurance companies took out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle warning that it “would spell social ruin in the United States.” Every voter in the state received in the mail a pamphlet with a picture of the kaiser and the words “Born in Germany. Do you want it in California?” The measure was defeated. Opponents called universal health insurance “UnAmerican, Unsafe, Uneconomic, Unscientific, Unfair and Unscrupulous.”
  • “Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing,” answered Taylor. “We are not . . . dealing with horses nor singing birds,” Wilson told Taylor. “We are dealing with men who are a part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.
  • Jim Crow thrived because, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, reformers who had earlier fought for the cause of civil rights abandoned it for the sake of forging a reunion between the states and the federal government and between the North and the South. This wasn’t Wilson’s doing; this was the work of his generation, the work of the generation that came before him, and the work of the generation that would follow him, an abdication of struggle, an abandonment of justice.
  • War steered the course of American politics like a gale-force wind. The specter of slaughter undercut Progressivism, suppressed socialism, and produced anticolonialism. And, by illustrating the enduring wickedness of humanity and appearing to fulfill prophecies of apocalypse as a punishment for the moral travesty of modernism, the war fueled fundamentalism.
  • Bryan’s difficulty was that he saw no difference between Darwinism and social Darwinism, but it was social Darwinism that he attacked, the brutality of a political philosophy that seemed to believe in nothing more than the survival of the fittest, or what Bryan called “the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak.”77
  • Germany was the enemy, the same Germany whose model of education had secularized American colleges and universities, which were now teaching eugenics, sometimes known as the science of human betterment, calling for the elimination from the human race of people deemed unfit to reproduce on the basis of their intelligence, criminality, or background.
  • Nor was this academic research without consequence. Beginning in 1907, with Indiana, two-thirds of American states passed forced sterilization laws.
  • In 1916, Madison Grant, the president of the Museum of Natural History in New York, who had degrees from Yale and Columbia, published The Passing of the Great Race; Or, the Racial Basis of European History, a “hereditary history” of the human race, in which he identified northern Europeans (the “blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe” that he called the “Nordic race”) as genetically superior to southern Europeans (the “dark-haired, dark-eyed” people he called “the Alpine race”) and lamented the presence of “swarms of Jews” and “half-breeds.” In the United States, Grant argued, the Alpine race was overwhelming the Nordic race, threatening the American republic, since “democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side.”79
  • fundamentalists were, of course, making an intellectual argument, if one that not many academics wanted to hear. In 1917, William B. Riley, who, like J. Frank Norris, had trained at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, published a book called The Menace of Modernism, whose attack on evolution included a broader attack on the predominance in public debate of liberal faculty housed at secular universities—and the silencing of conservative opinion.
  • The horror of the war fueled the movement, convincing many evangelicals that the growing secularization of society was responsible for this grotesque parade of inhumanity: mass slaughter. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” one fundamentalist argued in 1918, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”
  • “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be President,” Wilson said privately. “He kept us out of war” became his campaign slogan, and when Theodore Roosevelt called that an “ignoble shirking of responsibility,” Wilson countered, “I am an American, but I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality.”
  • Wilson had in fact pledged not to make the world democratic, or even to support the establishment of democratic institutions everywhere, but instead to establish the conditions of stability in which democracy was possible.
  • nearly five million were called to serve. How were they to be persuaded of the war’s cause? In a speech to new recruits, Wilson’s new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, ventured an explanation. “Were every people on earth able to express their will, there would be no wars of aggression and, if there were no wars of aggression, then there would be no wars, and lasting peace would come to this earth,” Lansing said, stringing one conditional clause after another. “The only way that a people can express their will is through democratic institutions,” Lansing went on. “Therefore, when the world is made safe for democracy . . . universal peace will be an accomplished fact.”88
  • Wilson, the political scientist, tried to earn the support of the American people with an intricate theory of the relationship between democracy and peace. It didn’t work. To recast his war message and shore up popular support, he established a propaganda department,
  • Social scientists called the effect produced by wartime propaganda “herd psychology”; the philosopher John Dewey called it the “conscription of thought.”89
  • To suppress dissent, Congress passed a Sedition Act in 1918. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had Congress so brazenly defied the First Amendment. Fewer than two dozen people had been arrested under the 1798 Sedition Act. During the First World War, the Justice Department charged more than two thousand Americans with sedition and convicted half of them. Appeals that went to the Supreme Court failed.
  • “If we want real peace,” Du Bois wrote, “we must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples.” But after the United States entered the war, Creel called thirty-one black editors and publishers to a conference in Washington and warned them about “Negro subversion.”
  • Du Bois asked black men who could not vote in the United States to give their lives to make the world “safe for democracy” and asked black people to hold off on fighting against lynchings, whose numbers kept rising.91
  • Wilson signed a tax bill, raising taxes on incomes, doubling a tax on corporate earnings, eliminating an exemption for dividend income, and introducing an estate tax and a tax on excess profits. Rates for the wealthiest Americans rose from 2 percent to 77, but most people paid no tax at all (80 percent of the revenue was drawn from the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of American families).
  • Wars, as ever, expanded the powers of the state. It rearranged the relationship between the federal government and business, establishing new forms of cooperation, oversight, and regulation that amounted to erecting a welfare state for business owners.
  • As the war drew to a close, the reckoning began. American losses were almost trivial compared to the staggering losses in European nations. Against America’s 116,000 casualties, France lost 1.6 million lives, Britain 800,000, and Germany 1.8 million. Cities across Europe lay in ashes; America was untouched. Europe, composed of seventeen countries before the war, had splintered into twenty-six, all of them deeply in debt, and chiefly to Americans.
  • Before the war, Americans owed $3.7 billion to foreigners; after the war, foreigners owed $12.6 billion to Americans. Even the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, which took 21 million lives worldwide, claimed the lives of only 675,000 Americans. The war left European economies in ruins, America’s thriving. In the United States, steel production rose by a quarter between 1913 and 1920; everywhere else, it fell by a third.98 The Armistice came on November
  • Wilson left a lasting legacy: his rhetoric of self-determination contributed to a wave of popular protests in the Middle East and Asia, including a revolution in Egypt in 1919; made the nation-state the goal of stateless societies; and lies behind the emergence and force of anticolonial nationalism.100
  • Thirty black men were lynched in 1917, twice as many the next year, and in 1919, seventy-six, including ten veterans, some still wearing their uniforms, having fought, some people thought, the wrong war.101
  • IN 1922, when Walter Lippmann turned thirty-two, he wrote a book called Public Opinion, in which he concluded that in a modern democracy the masses, asked to make decisions about matters far removed from their direct knowledge, had been asked to do too much. “Decisions in a modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive,” he’d once observed.108 Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.
  • The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.
  • Reporters chronicle events, offering facts, but “they cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions,” he said.109 To govern, the people need truth, sense out of the whole, but people can’t read enough in the morning paper or hear enough on the evening news to turn facts into truth when they’re driven like dray horses all day.
anonymous

Boston Marathon Bomber Death Sentence Case To Be Heard By The Supreme Court : NPR - 0 views

  • The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will consider whether to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The 2013 bombing, which Tsarnaev carried out with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed three people and injured 264 others. The Chechen immigrant was convicted of all 30 charges brought against him in 2015, and a court imposed six death sentences and 11 concurrent life sentences.
  • But last year, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston threw out the death penalty sentences after finding that the trial judge had failed to ensure proper questioning of prospective jurors, including whether their opinions had been influenced by the wall-to-wall press coverage of the bombing.The Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, seeking to revive the capital sentences. And on Monday the justices, in a one-sentence order, agreed to consider reinstating Tsarnaev's death sentences. They will not hear arguments in the case until the next term.
  • Tsarnaev's defense team has not denied that he participated in the attack, in which two pressure cooker bombs were detonated as runners crossed the race's finish line. But they argued that he was under the strong influence of his older brother, who was killed during the massive manhunt that locked down most of the Boston metropolitan area in the days after the attack.Tsarnaev, 27, is being held at the high-security supermax federal prison near Florence, Colo.
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  • A decision in favor of Tsarnev would put President Biden in a difficult position. The initial decision to seek the death penalty in Tsarnaev's case was made by Barack Obama's administration — during Biden's tenure as vice president. But Biden pledged during his presidential campaign to push for the elimination of the death penalty in the federal system.
  • The appeals panel said the judge who presided over Tsarnaev's trial, U.S. District Judge George A. O'Toole, had rejected the defense team's request for a more distant trial venue, one where prospective jurors might be less likely to be biased against Tsarnaev than in eastern Massachusetts, and the panel maintained the judge committed other important trial errors that barred adequate screening of prospective jurors.
  • Appeals Judge Juan Torruella, who died late last year, said that the district judge stopped Tsarnaev's counsel from asking prospective jurors questions such as what they knew about the case before coming to court or what stood out to them from the media coverage they had seen about the bombing and its aftermath.
  • Torruella wrote that the district judge had relied on "self-declarations of impartiality" by prospective jurors, some of whom admitted before the trial that they were convinced Tsarnaev was guilty.For example, Torruella noted that the woman who became the jury's foreperson withheld from the court dozens of relevant social media comments that mourned the death of an 8-year-old victim, praised law enforcement officers and called Tsarnaev "a piece of garbage."
  • The ruling from last July ordered the District Court to impanel a new jury to hold a sentencing retrial for the death penalty convictions. But the appeals panel noted that Tsarnaev, who told the courtroom on the day of his sentencing that he was "guilty of this attack," would remain in prison for the rest of his life regardless of whether the death sentence is imposed.
  • The Trump administration prioritized carrying out federal executions in its final year — resuming a practice that had been paused for nearly two decades and prompting pushback from activists and lawmakers.In the final six months of the administration, 13 people on death row in the federal system were executed, including three in the week before Biden took office.
martinelligi

Justice Barrett's Vote Could Tilt the Supreme Court on Gun Rights - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A Second Amendment case decided last week by the federal appeals court in Philadelphia is a promising candidate for Supreme Court review, not least because it presents an issue on which Justice Barrett has already taken a stand.
  • It concerns Lisa M. Folajtar, who would like to buy a gun. But she is a felon, having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, which means under federal law she may not possess firearms.
  • She sued, arguing that the law violated her Second Amendment rights. A divided three-judge panel of appeals court rejected her challenge, saying that committing a serious crime has consequences. It can lead to losing the right to vote, to serve on a jury — or to have a gun.
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  • “Lisa Folajtar asks us to treat her as an equal member of society,” he wrote. “Though her tax-fraud conviction affects some of her privileges, it does not change her right to keep and bear arms.”
  • “History does not support the proposition that felons lose their Second Amendment rights solely because of their status as felons,” she wrote. “But it does support the proposition that the state can take the right to bear arms away from a category of people that it deems dangerous.”
  • Voting and jury service are different, she wrote, because those are “rights that depend on civic virtue.”
  • In 2017, for instance, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, wrote that they had detected “a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.”
  • In June, however, the court turned down some 10 appeals in Second Amendment cases. Since it takes only four votes to grant review, there is good reason to think that the court’s conservative wing was unsure it could secure Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s vote.Justice Barrett’s arrival changes the calculus. Should Ms. Folajtar appeal to the Supreme Court, it is a good bet that Justice Barrett will find her arguments persuasive.
  • Dissenting from that ruling, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. noted that the Heller decision “recognized that history supported the constitutionality of some laws limiting the right to possess a firearm,” including ones “prohibiting possession by felons and other dangerous individuals.”That last phrase, which did not appear in the earlier decision, may be significant. In shifting the focus to dangerousness, it seemed to open the door to the position taken by Justice Barrett.
  • For years, conservative justices have said the court disfavors the Second Amendment. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is likely to shift the balance, and a case to help her do so may be knocking.
  • ThanksgivingWelcome to Homeownership
  • In dissent, Judge Stephanos Bibas, a former law professor appointed to the court by President Trump (and the author of a scathing decision on Friday rejecting the president’s challenge to the election results in Pennsylvania), wrote that the framers of the Constitution would not have allowed lawmakers to bar felons convicted of nonviolent crimes from owning guns.
  • That dissent was written by Justice Barrett when she was a judge on the federal appeals court in Chicago. The law forbidding people with felony convictions from owning guns, she wrote, should not apply when the crimes in question were nonviolent.
  • Before Justice Barrett’s arrival, the court’s four most conservative justices had repeatedly written that the court should return to the subject of the Second Amendment
Javier E

Lust for Destruction - 0 views

  • many people now believe that Trump can defy political gravity - flouting conventions of propriety, embracing extremist positions, casually changing positions, all with no penalty. That won't work in a general election.
  • The key to understanding the Trump phenomenon - his ability to do all these things and pay no price - is that it has very little to do with Trump and almost everything to do with the portion of the electorate he is currently operating in. The current Republican party is built in large part on roughly 25% to 30% of the voting electorate which is radicalized and revanchist
  • We can think about the the nature of Trump's appeal in three basic ways.
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  • First is simple political substance.
  • the essence of Trump's campaign - beating back the external threat - the harsh anti-immigrant policies, Muslim bans, flirting with white supremacists, etc. It is the most visible and literal part of Trump's appeal.
  • Second is the appeal to power and force. Trump is the master of GOP 'dominance politics', the inherent appeal of power and the ability to dominate others. All of this has a deep appeal to America's authoritarian right, especially in a climate of perceived threat,
  • The third factor is I think the least obvious but for these purposes the most important. On the radicalized, revanchist right, provocation and transgression of norms isn't simply indulged. It functions as a positive good
  • Changing your positions, obviously lying, taunting enemies - none of these hurt Trump because his core supporters are not seeing them through the same prism you likely are. They're not signs of deception, bad character or untrustworthiness. They all signal a refusal to accept the norms of the threatening order and thus a willingness to overturn it.
  • what we are talking about here is a distinction between policy and political mentality, specifically a view of politics based on resentment and desire for revenge. And that operates with a large minority but not close to a majority of the electorate.
  • As long as there is not an organized conservative third party candidate in the election, I think the overwhelming power of contemporary partisanship will pull the vast majority of 'anti-Trump' mainstream Republicans into the Republican Trump-supporting camp.
  • a Trump v Clinton general election will be fought over the roughly 10% of the electorate which is not firmly anchored in the right/center-right or left/center-left blocs of American politics. It will likely be fought out over the contrast between Trump's policies and the Democrat's. But it will be fought out on conventional political norms - not ones in which rule-breaking and transgressive behavior are positive goods in themselves
clairemann

Court allows execution of Corey Johnson to proceed after COVID-19 diagnosis - SCOTUSblog - 0 views

  • The justices on Thursday night denied two last-minute appeals by Corey Johnson, who sought to postpone his execution so that he could recover from COVID-19, which he contracted in prison after spending most of his life on death row. Johnson also argued that he was ineligible for the death penalty on the basis of intellectual disability and that he should have been allowed to seek a sentencing reduction under a 2018 prison-reform law.
  • The two appeals were the subject of a flurry of last-minute litigation, in multiple federal courts, that reached the justices minutes before Johnson’s originally scheduled execution time of 6 p.m. on Thursday. In two unsigned orders issued around 10 p.m. (available here and here), the court denied both appeals.
  • Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan indicated that they would have put the execution on hold based on Johnson’s COVID diagnosis. Sotomayor and Kagan separately indicated that they also would have granted a stay based on Johnson’s other legal arguments.
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  • In their first appeal, Johnson’s lawyers raised two issues: intellectual disability and eligibility for resentencing.
  • In the second appeal, lawyers for Johnson and Higgs contended that putting their clients to death by lethal injection while their lungs were still recovering from damage due to the coronavirus would subject them to unconstitutional levels of suffering, in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
carolinehayter

House Democrats are still pursuing Trump's tax returns but Biden administration may not... - 0 views

  • After notching recent wins in their long hunt for material to help bring legal accountability to former President Donald Trump, congressional Democrats fear the Biden administration won't be helpful when it comes to obtaining the documents they covet the most: Trump's tax returns.
  • But four months into President Joe Biden's term, liberal advocates and some lawmakers are growing impatient that the Justice Department hasn't done more to expose the Trump administration's alleged misdeeds -- and in some cases has even tried to help shield them.
  • Last week, Garland's Justice Department partly sided with Barr. The department partially appealed a judge's order to release a 2019 memo written for Barr about how to handle Mueller's findings on Trump and obstruction of justice. The Justice Department tried to offer some transparency: A federal judge had slammed the department for considering the optics of the Mueller report's rollout, and the department made that section public.
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  • It's "a return to business as usual for DOJ -- and not DOJ swinging as frantically to an anti-Trump agenda as it did to the pro-Trump one that I and many other observers abhorred,"
  • "I appreciate the independence. I don't always agree with the positions," said Eisen, who would like to see more released by the Justice Department. "They're going to act with that same independence in defense of what they perceive to be in the long-term interests of the executive branch."
  • The Biden administration now has control over three high-profile documents that are still central to Democrats' court fights related to Trump: Trump's tax returns, held by the IRS; grand jury material underpinning the Russia investigation; and the key internal memo to former Attorney General William Barr justifying the decision not to charge Trump with obstruction in former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
  • Trump's taxes have been the white whale of Democratic investigators for years,
  • Trump's tax returns are no longer completely under lock and key, either. The Manhattan district attorney obtained them earlier this year through a lawsuit of his own.
  • In late April, federal agents executed search warrants on Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Democrats have also received some documents related to Trump's Washington hotel lease that the Trump administration had kept hidden. And on Friday, House Democrats will finally get the chance to interview former White House counsel Don McGahn about Trump's efforts to obstruct justice.
  • But the department is now fighting to keep redacted six-and-a-half pages of legal analysis on whether a criminal case against the then-President was merited, even if he could not be charged under Justice Department policy.
  • Congressional Democrats urged Garland not to appeal the judge's decision.
  • "There is this institutional rivalry between executive and legislative branches that overlays or perhaps underlays the misbehavior that the judge found within the department,"
  • The Justice Department's stance shouldn't be a surprise, given that Biden came into office with a team that was vowing to move on from the Trump-era controversies.
  • The House committees that investigated Trump, however, have vowed to keep pursuing their cases that are tied up in court.
  • The Supreme Court was set to hear an appeal from the administration as it sought to keep grand jury documents cited in the Mueller report under seal, after the House won access in court. That hearing has been postponed.
  • The House's push for financial documents and Trump's tax returns has another obstacle beyond the Biden administration: Trump himself. The former President's involvement in the cases, now as a private citizen who has several teams of lawyers protecting his interests, may be one reason for the stalemates.
katherineharron

Appeals court skeptical of Trump's effort to block subpoena for his tax returns - CNNPo... - 0 views

  • A federal appeals court expressed skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump can block a subpoena from New York state prosecutors for his tax returns, in a case that all sides agree is likely headed toward the Supreme Court for an election-year showdown.
  • The back-and-forth was an allusion to Trump's comment during the 2016 campaign that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."
  • "The premise is that this is a distraction. It distracts the President from carrying out his duties," federal Judge Denny Chin said. "Where is the distraction if the subpoena is served on accountants? The President doesn't have to do anything to comply with the subpoenas?
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  • The case is expected to make its way to the Supreme Court. Both sides struck a deal Monday to fast-track any Supreme Court petitions after the appeals panel weighs in, potentially teeing up a dramatic showdown in Washington before the 2020 election.
  • His critics have alleged that his tax returns could expose massive debts to foreign interests or that is he not as wealthy as he claims to be. A Forbes estimate from September said Trump is worth $3.1 billion, though Cohen has testified that Trump inflated his earnings in the past.
  • The case can be traced back to the hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and another woman who alleged extramarital affairs with Trump, which he denies. State prosecutors want to know if the Trump Organization, based in New York, filed false business records to cover up the payments.
  • Trump's team had asked the lower-court judge to block Vance from enforcing the subpoena, and to stop Mazars from sending over the tax records, until Trump leaves office. His lawyers argued that a criminal investigation of the sitting president is "unconstitutional." In a surprising move, the Justice Department got involved and also requested a temporary freeze on the subpoenas.
  • "You could invent scenarios where you could imagine it would be necessary or at least perhaps a good idea for a sitting president to be subject to a criminal charge, even by a state while, in office," Dunne said. "If he for example did pull out a hand gun and shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, well, what would be the impact of that? Would local police be disabled from restraining such a person? Or from processing such a person? Would we have to wait for an impeachment proceeding to be initiated?"
  • A federal appeals court expressed skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump can block a subpoena from New York state prosecutors for his tax returns, in a case that all sides agree is likely headed toward the Supreme Court for an election-year showdown.
Javier E

Black families pay significantly higher property taxes - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • State by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, black families pay 13 percent more in property taxes each year than a white family would in the same situation, a massive new data analysis shows.
  • Black-owned homes are consistently assessed at higher values, relative to their actual sale price, than white homes
  • To expose the structural and historical factors behind these discriminatory property tax assessments, the economists analyzed more than a decade of tax assessment and sales data for 118 million homes throughout the country.
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  • In almost every state, property tax assessments were higher in areas with more black and Hispanic residents
  • The gap between white families and minority households remains large — 10 percent — when you combine data for Hispanic and black families
  • “We’ve always considered that in addition to paying your regular tax, there was a black tax that goes along with it,”
  • “It’s almost like it’s in the soil,” he said. “It stretches all across the board. It’s not just real estate. It’s not just housing. It’s not just food deserts. It’s not just racism on the street. It’s not just that you can’t get a cab at night. It’s everything.”
  • “The structure of the property tax system operates to disadvantage black Americans,” she said. “That’s how structural racism is. It’s built into the system. The property tax system itself discriminates against black Americans.”
  • One in five black households have reported missing a mortgage payment since mid-March, compared with about 1 in 20 white ones
  • Facing the accumulated disadvantages of centuries of repression and systemic racism, black Americans are likely to earn less than similar white workers in lower-paying service jobs, a dynamic that makes it more difficult to buy a home. Now, by hitting those jobs first and hardest, the coronavirus pandemic has made a bad situation worse
  • “During the Jim Crow era, local white officials routinely manipulated property tax assessments to overburden and punish black populations and as a hidden tax break to landowning white gentry,”
  • white officials going to extreme lengths to hike black taxes. In one such case in 1932, a black North Carolina resident was taxed for the value of two stray dogs that had been seen on her property.
  • Many county assessors intentionally overvalued black properties, sometimes in direct retaliation for black political action
  • As early as 1901, W.E.B. Du Bois showed that because of their unequal tax burden, black people paid more in taxes than they received in public education funds,
  • The fiction that “black people take services but they don’t pay taxes” remains widespread,
  • The values of black-owned homes tend to grow more slowly than values of white-owned ones. The white people who make up the vast majority of home buyers tend to avoid black neighborhoods, which cuts black sellers off from many potential buyers.
  • Given that difference in price appreciation, if an assessor assumes a black-owned home gains value as quickly as a white-owned home, the assessed value of the black-owned home will quickly outstrip its market value.
  • Nearby white families benefit from the opposite trend: Their homes increase in value more rapidly than their assessments, giving them an ever-growing tax break.
  • the appeals process illustrates how much of the property tax system functions in a way that penalizes black wealth, even as it appears neutral on its face.
  • While neighborhood and race are the biggest drivers of the property tax gap, the economists found others
  • As part of their study, the economists reviewed 3.4 million property tax appeals from Chicago and surrounding Cook County and found black homeowners were significantly less likely to appeal their property tax assessments. When they did appeal, black homeowners were less likely to win. And when they won, they earned smaller assessment reductions.
  • “White people feel more comfortable working within the system that was set up to make them succeed,”
  • “It makes sense that a black family who has been disenfranchised from these systems wouldn’t challenge it.” It is also difficult to work within the system for Latinos, many of whom do not speak English as a first language, she added.
  • was not taught about appealing property taxes or any of the other small strategies white homeowners have used to accumulate generational wealth.
  • “They feel their property taxes were being used to push them out of their places, especially when communities started gentrifying,” Avenancio-León said. It helped him see how property taxation can be used as a means of social engineering.
  • the duo, then working on doctorate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, combined 118 million real estate transactions and assessments from 2005 to 2016 with maps of more than 75,000 local taxing entities — such as counties, school districts, airport authorities and utility districts.
  • They used the maps to sort homes into areas that faced the same property tax burdens, identified the races of homeowners using federal mortgage data, and looked at every time a dwelling was assessed and then sold in the same year. That allowed them to compare a home’s assessed value and its market value, alongside the homeowner’s race and ethnicity.
  • The property tax gaps are worst for low earners, but even the highest-earning black Americans pay more on average in property taxes than similarly well-off white peers living nearby.
  • Whether or not these gaps were caused by explicit racism, Brown said, “you should be just as outraged that this is going on, and we should find a way to fix it.”
Javier E

Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind 'Dilbert' explains why. - The Wa... - 0 views

  • What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.
  • Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”
  • His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.
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  • he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams, contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”
  • what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.
  • “The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational,
  • “The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”
  • Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing to win campaign hearts and minds
  • 1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.
  • 2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.
  • Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play.
  • 3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.
  • “There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.
  • 4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”
  • “If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).”
  • “Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?” Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place in the hearts of conservatives.
  • 5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
  • Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale” so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.
  • 6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.
  • “The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”
  • : “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.
abbykleman

Federal appeals court maintains suspension of Trump's immigration order - 0 views

  •  
    A federal appeals court has maintained the freeze on President Trump's controversial immigration order, meaning previously barred refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries can continue entering the U.S. A panel with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the ruling of U.S.
grayton downing

U.N. Appeals for $301 Million for Typhoon Response in the Philippines - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The United Nations appealed Tuesday for $301 million in emergency assistance to help millions of people in the Philippines affected by the typhoon that struck on Friday.
  • Hampered by impassable roads, obliterated seaports and severely damaged airstrips, international aid groups mobilized to rush food, water and sanitation equipment to the region.
  • United Nations officials in Geneva said more than 11 million people were in need of assistance and around 670,000 people had been displaced.
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  • “There are still many places that are not accessible yet,”
  • The $301 million appeal is to meet projected needs over six months, but disaster relief experts estimate the damage to the Philippine economy at between $12 billion and $15 billion, equivalent to about 5 percent of its gross domestic product.
  • “This is the worst typhoon in the modern history of the Philippines,” said German Velasquez at the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva.
  • Ms. Amos, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs and the emergency relief coordinator, released $25 million from a special fund to help pay for immediate assistance and was beginning what aides called a flash fund-raising drive. At least $35 million in additional aid was pledged by other governments on Monday.
  • The George Washington, which carries 5,000 sailors and more than 80 aircraft, was ordered to depart from a port visit in Hong Kong, and the crew was recalled from shore leave immediately. Mr. Hagel also reiterated the American intent to help the Philippine government determine “what, if any, additional assets may be required.”
Javier E

Have you got erotic capital? - Prospect Magazine « Prospect Magazine - 0 views

  • erotic capital is what economists call a “personal asset,” ready to take its place alongside economic, cultural, human and social capital. It is just (if not more) as important for social mobility and success.
  • Erotic capital goes beyond beauty to include sex appeal, charm and social skills, physical fitness and liveliness, sexual competence and skills in self-presentation, such as face-painting, hairstyles, clothing and all the other arts of self-adornment. Most studies capture only one facet of it: photographs measure beauty or sex appeal, psychologists measure confidence and social skills, sex researchers ask about seduction skills and numbers of partners.
  • men still rank sex as more important than women. Indeed, rocketing global demand for sexual activity of all kinds (including commercial sex, autoeroticism and erotic entertainments) has been far more pronounced among men than women.
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  • This creates an effect that should be familiar to any economist: the laws of supply and demand raise the value of women’s erotic capital, in particular their beauty, sex appeal and sexual competence. It is happening in Scandinavia as well as Mediterranean countries, in China and the US. The pattern is confirmed even in countries that are sexually “liberated” such as Finland and France. Men are two to ten times more likely to have affairs, buy pornography, seek lap-dancing clubs and erotic entertainments. And call girls’ earnings can exceed wages in nearly all the professions, despite working shorter hours.
  • This is an implicit rebuttal to feminist thinkers (like Sylvia Walby, Mary Evans, Monique Wittig or most recently Kat Banyard) who argue that men and women are “equal” in their sexual interest, as in everything else. This is obviously not true, which is why it should not surprise us that some women do use sex, and their erotic capital more generally, to get what they want.
  • The economic benefits of being physically and socially attractive can be substantial, especially in marketing, public relations, television, advocacy in the courts, as well as for actors, singers and dancers. But it’s broader than this: people working in the better-paid parts of the private sector are more attractive than those in the public and non-profit sectors. Tall and attractive people are more likely to be employed in professional jobs, like law or banking. For the ugly and short, it gets worse. Good-looking people can earn 10 to 15 per cent more than the average-looking, who in turn can earn 10 to 15 per cent more than the plain or ugly. The tall earn more than the short; the obese have earnings 10 to 15 per cent below average. Statistical analysis shows this beauty premium is not really just about cleverly disguised differences in intelligence, social class or self-confidence. Studies of lawyers reveal that there is always a premium for attractiveness that varies in size, but is not due to employer discrimination. The most attractive can earn 12 per cent more than the unattractive, and are 20 per cent more likely to achieve partnership in their firm, because they are more effective at pulling in customers.
  • there is a 25 percentage point difference in average earnings between unattractive and attractive minorities. This impact can be as big as the gap between having a degree and no qualifications at all—although it ranks well below intelligence as a determinant of life outcomes.
  • erotic capital—if seen as an economic endowment—is an especially important asset for people with few intellectual abilities and qualifications. In Brazil, investing in cosmetic surgery is seen as a sensible way of getting ahead in a culture where looks and sensuality count. In Britain, too, a 2009 survey of teenage girls found that one-quarter think it is more important to be beautiful than clever.
katyshannon

Texas Court Tosses Criminal Case Against Former Gov. Perry - ABC News - 0 views

  • The felony prosecution of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry ended Wednesday when the state's highest criminal court dismissed an abuse-of-power indictment that the Republican says hampered his short-lived 2016 presidential bid.
  • The 6-2 decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is dominated by elected Republican judges, frees Perry from a long-running criminal case that blemished the exit of one of the most powerful Texas governors in history and hung over his second failed run for the White House.
  • A grand jury in liberal Austin had indicted Perry in 2014 for vetoing funding for a public corruption unit that Republicans have long accused of wielding a partisan ax. The unit worked under Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, an elected Democrat. Perry wanted her to resign after she was convicted of drunken driving.
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  • Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.
  • "Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."
  • Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.
  • "I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."
  • The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.
  • Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.
  • Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.
  • Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.
  • Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.
  • Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.
  • Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.
  • Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.
  • The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.
Javier E

On Grand Strategy (John Lewis Gaddis) - 0 views

  • minds. Ordinary experience, he pointed out, is filled with “ends equally ultimate . . . , the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.” The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives—good versus evil, for instance—than between good things we can’t have simultaneously. “One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State,” Berlin wrote, “but not always both at once.”
  • We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult: Berlin emphasized the “necessity and agony of choice.” But if such choices were to disappear, he added, so too would “the freedom to choose,” and hence liberty itself.24
  • only narratives can show dilemmas across time. It’s not enough to display choices like slivers on a microscope slide. We need to see change happen, and we can do that only by reconstituting the past as histories, biographies, poems, plays, novels, or films. The best of these sharpen and shade simultaneously: they compress what’s happening in order to clarify, even as they blur, the line between instruction and entertainment. They are, in short, dramatizations. And a fundamental requirement of these is never to bore.
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  • When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him: [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms
  • chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?
  • The real Lincoln, as far as I know, never said any of this, and the real Berlin, sadly, never got to see Spielberg’s film. But Tony Kushner’s screenplay shows Fitzgerald’s linkage of intelligence, opposing ideas, and the ability to function: Lincoln keeps long-term aspirations and immediate necessities in mind at the same time. It reconciles Berlin’s foxes and hedgehogs with his insistence on the inevitability—and the unpredictability—of choice:
  • Whether we approach reality from the top down or the bottom up, Tolstoy seems to be saying, an infinite number of possibilities exist at an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously. Some are predictable, most aren’t, and only dramatization—free from the scholar’s enslavement to theory and archives—can begin to represent them.
  • what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that’s the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.
  • I think he’s describing here an ecological sensitivity that equally respects time, space, and scale. Xerxes never had it, despite Artabanus’ efforts. Tolstoy approximated it, if only in a novel. But Lincoln—who lacked an Artabanus and who didn’t live to read War and Peace—seems somehow to have achieved it, by way of a common sense that’s uncommon among great leaders.
  • It’s worth remembering also that Lincoln—and Shakespeare—had a lifetime to become who they were. Young people today don’t, because society so sharply segregates general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.
  • This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top.37 There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.
  • A gap has opened between the study of history and the construction of theory, both of which are needed if ends are to be aligned with means. Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations
  • Theorists, keen to be seen as social “scientists,” seek “reproducibility” in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability. Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking.
  • concrete events in time and space—the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment—this alone contained the truth,
  • Collaboration, in theory, could have secured the sea and the land from all future dangers. That would have required, though, the extension of trust, a quality with strikingly shallow roots in the character of all Greeks.
  • The only solution then is to improvise, but this is not just making it up as you go along. Maybe you’ll stick to the plan, maybe you’ll modify it, maybe you’ll scrap it altogether. Like Lincoln, though, you’ll know your compass heading, whatever the unknowns that lie between you and your destination. You’ll have in your mind a range of options for dealing with these, based—as if from Machiavelli—upon hard-won lessons from those who’ve gone before.
  • The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected.
  • The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.
  • Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver: [W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down. Opposites held in mind simultaneously, thus, are “the strategist’s keys to victory.”
  • it was Pericles who, more than anyone else, unleashed the Peloponnesian War—the unintended result of constructing a culture to support a strategy.
  • By the mid-450s Pericles, who agreed, had finished the walls around Athens and Piraeus, allowing total reliance on the sea in any future war. The new strategy made sense, but it made the Athenians, as Thucydides saw, a different people. Farmers, traditionally, had sustained Athens: their fields and vineyards supplied the city in peacetime, and their bodies filled the ranks of its infantry and cavalry when wars came. Now, though, their properties were expendable and their influence diminished.
  • If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town.
  • Pericles used his “funeral oration,” delivered in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War’s first year, to explain what he hoped for. The dead had given their lives, he told the mourners, for the universality of Athenian distinctiveness: Athens imitated no one, but was a pattern for everyone. How, though, to reconcile these apparent opposites? Pericles’ solution was to connect scale, space, and time: Athenian culture would appeal to the city, the empire, and the ages.
  • The city had acquired its “friends,” Pericles acknowledged, by granting favors, “in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in [its] debt; while the debtor [knows] that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.” Nevertheless, the Athenians had provided these benefits “not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.” What he meant was that Athens would make its empire at once more powerful and more reassuring than that of any rival.
  • It could in this way project democracy across cultures because insecure states, fearing worse, would freely align with Athens.22 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity.
  • The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.
  • Equality, then, was the loop in Pericles’ logic. He saw both it and empire as admirable, but was slow to sense that encouraging one would diminish the other.
  • Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal.
  • as Thucydides grimly observes, war “brings most men’s character to a level with their fortunes.”
  • “Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries.
  • For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection.
  • if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable: that’s why walls exist in the first place.
  • he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.
  • But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both.
  • No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many.
  • Clausewitz’s concept of training, however, retains its relevance. It’s the best protection we have against strategies getting stupider as they become grander, a recurring problem in peace as well as war. It’s the only way to combine the apparent opposites of planning and improvisation: to teach the common sense that comes from knowing when to be a hedgehog and when a fox.
  • Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities. Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation. Small triumphs in a single arena set up larger ones elsewhere, allowing weaker contenders to become stronger.
  • The actions of man, Kennan concluded, “are governed not so much by what he intellectually believes as by what he vividly realizes.”
  • Nor is it clear, even now, whether Christianity caused Rome’s “fall”—as Gibbon believed—or—as the legacies of Augustus suggest—secured Rome’s institutional immortalities. These opposites have shaped “western” civilization ever since. Not least by giving rise to two truly grand strategies, parallel in their purposes but devised a thousand years apart
  • Augustine shows that reality always falls short of the ideal: one can strive toward it, but never expect to achieve it. Seeking, therefore, is the best man can manage in a fallen world, and what he seeks is his choice. Nevertheless, not all ends are legitimate; not all means are appropriate. Augustine seeks, therefore, to guide choice by respecting choice. He does this through an appeal to reason: one might even say to common sense.
  • A peaceful faith—the only source of justice for Christians—can’t flourish without protection, whether through toleration, as in pre-Constantine Rome, or by formal edict, as afterward.20 The City of God is a fragile structure within the sinful City of Man. It’s this that leads Christians to entrust authority to selected sinners—we call it “politics”—and Augustine, for all his piety, is a political philosopher.
  • Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself? Was the expenditure of force proportionate to its purposes, so that it wouldn’t destroy what it was meant to defend?
  • No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war. This could be done only within an inclusionary monotheism, for only a God claiming universal authority could judge the souls of earthly rulers. And only Augustine, in his era, spoke so self-confidently for Him. The
  • Augustine’s great uncertainty was the status of souls in the City of Man, for only the fittest could hope to enter the City of God. Pre-Christian deities had rarely made such distinctions: the pagan afterlife was equally grim for heroes, scoundrels, and all in between.25 Not so, though, with the Christian God: behavior in life would make a huge difference in death. It was vital, then, to fight wars within rules. The stakes could hardly be higher.
  • Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God. Each capability brings an aspiration within reach, much as Sun Tzu’s practices tether his principles, but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged. This, then, is Augustine’s tilt: toward a logic of strategy transcending time, place, culture, circumstance, and the differences between saints and sinners.
  • a more revealing distinction may lie in temperament: to borrow from Milan Kundera,37 Machiavelli found “lightness of being” bearable. For Augustine—perhaps because traumatized as a youth by a pear tree—it was unendurable.
  • “I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” Fifty percent fortune, fifty percent man—but zero percent God. Man is, however precariously, on his own.
  • States, Machiavelli suggests, operate similarly. If governed badly, men’s rapacity will soon overwhelm them, whether through internal rebellion or external war. But if run with virtù—his untranslatable term for planning without praying40—states can constrain, if not in all ways control, the workings of fortune, or chance. The skills needed are those of imitation, adaptation, and approximation.
  • Machiavelli commends the study of history, “for since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation . . . , a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.”
  • What, then, to do? It helped that Machiavelli and Berlin had lightness of being, for their answer is the same: don’t sweat it. Learn to live with the contradictions. Machiavelli shows “no trace of agony,” Berlin points out, and he doesn’t either:
  • Eternal truths have little to do with any of this, beyond the assurance that circumstances will change. Machiavelli knows, as did Augustine, that what makes sense in one situation may not in the next. They differ, though, in that Machiavelli, expecting to go to Hell, doesn’t attempt to resolve such disparities. Augustine, hoping for Heaven, feels personally responsible for them. Despite his afflictions, Machiavelli often sees comedy.42 Despite his privileges, Augustine carries a tragic burden of guilt. Machiavelli sweats, but not all the time. Augustine never stops.
  • “Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry. It’s not to locate logic in misfortunes, or to show that they’re for the best because they reflect God’s will.
  • Augustine and Machiavelli agree that wars should be fought—indeed that states should be run—by pre-specifiable procedures. Both know that aspirations aren’t capabilities. Both prefer to connect them through checklists, not commandments.43
  • Augustine admits, which is why good men may have to seek peace by shedding blood. The greater privilege, however, is to avert “that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.” Machiavelli agrees, but notes that a prince so infrequently has this privilege that if he wishes to remain in power he must “learn to be able not to be good,” and to use this proficiency or not use it “according to necessity.”51 As fits man’s fallen state, Augustine sighs. As befits man, Machiavelli simplifies.
  • As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”53
  • princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know. For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains,
  • Machiavelli embraces, then, a utilitarian morality: you proportion your actions to your objective, not to progress from one nebulous city to another, but because some things have been shown to work and others haven’t.60
  • Who, then, will oversee them? They’ll do it themselves, Machiavelli replies, by balancing power. First, there’ll be a balance among states, unlike older Roman and Catholic traditions of universality. Machiavelli anticipates the statecraft of Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck,
  • But Machiavelli understands balancing in a second and subtler sense, conveyed more explicitly in The Discourses than in The Prince: [I]t is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out; and, however much this or that private person may be the loser on this account, there are so many who benefit thereby that the common good can be realized in spite of those few who suffer in consequence.64 This idea of an internal equilibrium within which competition strengthens community wouldn’t appear again until Adam Smith unveiled an “invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations (1776), until the American Founding Fathers drafted and in The Federalist justified constitutional checks and balances (1787–88), and until Immanuel Kant linked republics, however distantly, with Perpetual Peace (1795).
  • Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.” Statecraft, therefore, can never balance realism against idealism: there are only competing realisms. There is no contest, in governing, between politics and morality: there is only politics. And no state respects Christian teaching on saving souls. The incompatibilities are irreconcilable. To deny this is, in Berlin’s words but in Machiavelli’s mind, to “vacillate, fall between two stools, and end in weakness and failure.”
  • And approximation? “[P]rudent archers,” Machiavelli points out, knowing the strength of their bow, “set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.”41 For there will be deflection—certainly from gravity, perhaps from wind, who knows from what else? And the target itself will probably be moving.
  • Augustine’s City of God no longer exists on earth. The City of Man, which survives, has no single path to salvation. “[T]he belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,” Berlin finds, “is itself in principle not true.” Machiavelli thus split open the rock “upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded.” It was he “who lit the fatal fuse.”
  • Machiavelli’s blood ran colder than was ordinary: he praised Cesare Borgia, for example, and he refused to condemn torture despite having suffered it (Augustine, never tortured, took a similar position).75 Machiavelli was careful, however, to apportion enormities: they should only forestall greater horrors—violent revolution, defeat in war, descent into anarchy, mass killing, or what we would today call “genocide.”
  • Berlin sees in this an “economy of violence,” by which he means holding a “reserve of force always in the background to keep things going in such a way that the virtues admired by [Machiavelli] and by the classical thinkers to whom he appeals can be protected and allowed to flower.”76 It’s no accident that Berlin uses the plural. For it comes closer than the singular, in English, to Machiavelli’s virtù, implying no single standard by which men must live.
  • “[T]here are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,” Berlin insists, “capable of understanding . . . and deriving light from each other.” Otherwise, civilizations would exist in “impenetrable bubble[s],” incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. “Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs.”
  • Perhaps there are other worlds in which all principles are harmonized, but “it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”77 By shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”
  • Posterity has long regarded Augustine and Machiavelli as pivots in the history of “western” thought because each, with enduring effects, shifted long-standing relationships between souls and states.
  • Philip promises obedience to God, not his subjects. Elizabeth serves her subjects, fitting God to their interests. The king, looking to Heaven, venerates. The queen, feet on earth, calculates. The differences test the ideas of Augustine and Machiavelli against the demands of statecraft at the dawn of the modern age.
  • Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination—a requirement for pivoting—never to be pinned down.
  • Pivoting requires gyroscopes, and Elizabeth’s were the best of her era. She balanced purposefulness with imagination, guile, humor, timing, and an economy in movement that, however extravagant her display, kept her steady on the tightrope she walked.
  • Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion.
  • princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”46
  • What we like to recall as the Elizabethan “golden age” survived only through surveillance and terror: that was another of its contradictions, maintained regretfully with resignation.
  • The queen’s instincts were more humane than those of her predecessors, but too many contemporaries were trying to kill her. “Unlike her sister, Elizabeth never burned men for their faith,” her recent biographer Lisa Hilton has written. “She tortured and hanged them for treason.”60 Toleration, Machiavelli might have said, had turned against Elizabeth. She wanted to be loved—who wouldn’t? It was definitely safer for princes, though, to be feared.
  • “The failure of the Spanish Armada,” Geoffrey Parker has argued, “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans, and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” If that’s right, then the future pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588—owing to a favorable wind, a clever lord admiral, and a few fiery ships. Had he succeeded, Philip would have required Elizabeth to end all English voyages to America.4
  • In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.”10 That made it a hodgepodge, but also a complex adaptive system.
  • The principles seem at odds—how can supremacies share?—but within that puzzle, the modern historian Robert Tombs has suggested, lay the foundations of England’s post-Stuart political culture: [S]uspicion of Utopias and zealots; trust in common sense and experience; respect for tradition; preference for gradual change; and the view that “compromise” is victory, not betrayal. These things stem from the failure of both royal absolutism and of godly republicanism: costly failures, and fruitful ones.
Javier E

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny -- NYMag - 1 views

  • my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic.
  • Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become.
  • Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
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  • This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehendin
  • when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy
  • The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
  • when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
  • He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt
  • If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee
  • Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities
  • He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
  • Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.
  • Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished
  • The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones
  • Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded
  • further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.
  • “It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,”
  • Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud.
  • it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.
  • What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse
  • The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
  • Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
  • The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting
  • The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before
  • what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness
  • Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin
  • Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.
  • Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.
  • The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.
  • Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.
  • The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.
  • The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexisten
  • Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded
  • It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.
  • For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome
  • Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.
  • Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?
  • In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.
  • But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.”
  • what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.
  • Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion
  • what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans
  • Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.
  • Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect.
  • Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.
  • The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.
  • “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”
  • Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events.
  • I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.
  • His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton
  • the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic
  • All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crac
  • like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape
  • And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance
  • The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.
  • But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.
  • Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that.
  • Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands
  • Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate suppor
  • e. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.
  • Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
carolinehayter

Judge must reconsider third-degree murder charge against officer for George Floyd killi... - 0 views

  • The Minnesota court of appeals has ordered a judge to reconsider adding third-degree murder to charges against the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is accused of killing George Floyd last year.
  • The development could delay Chauvin’s trial, which is due to begin with jury selection on Monday.
  • The killing, which a bystander recorded on video, sparked the biggest civil rights uprising in the US since the 1960s, spilling over at times into rioting but reinvigorating the Black Lives Matter movement and forcing a fresh reckoning on police brutality and broader, systemic racism.
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  • Cahill should have followed the precedent set by the appeals court when it affirmed the third-degree murder conviction of the former Minneapolis officer Mohamed Noor in the 2017 shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, the court said. The Australian woman had called 911 to report witnessing a possible sexual assault. Noor is appealing to the state supreme court.
  • It was not clear on Saturday whether Friday’s ruling would delay Chauvin’s trial. He is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter. Chauvin has the option of appealing the ruling to the state supreme court, which would force Cahill to delay the tria
  • A reinstated third-degree murder count would increase the odds of a murder conviction. Floyd’s family originally urged a first-degree murder charge and outrage is likely if Chauvin is not convicted.
  • Legal experts have said reinstating third-degree murder to the case could be a strategic move by the Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, leading the prosecution, to give jurors more chances to convict, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
  • The charge could be viewed by jurors as a middle ground. It would also allow the prosecution to present multiple theories based on different elements that must be met to convict on the respective charges
  • Donald Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, last year rejected a deal for Chauvin to plead guilty to third-degree murder, partly out of concern that it would be seen as too lenient, the New York Times reported last month. The paper added that Chauvin wanted to be spared federal civil rights charges after his murder trial.
  • The Minnesota national guard has been placed on alert, although the authorities insist peaceful protest will be allowed.
anonymous

California gun ruling: A federal judge, who compares an AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife, ov... - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • a federal judge overturned California's longtime ban on assault weapons on Friday, ruling it violates the Second Amendment's right to bear arms.
  • Assault weapons have been banned in California since 1989, according to the ruling. The law has been updated several times since it was originally passed.
  • According to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego, the assault weapons ban deprives Californians from owning assault-style weapons commonly allowed in other states.
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  • In his ruling, the judge also criticized the news media, writing, "One is to be forgiven if one is persuaded by news media and others that the nation is awash with murderous AR-15 assault rifles. The facts, however, do not support this hyperbole, and facts matter."
  • However, as CNN has previously reported, AR-15 style rifles have been the weapon of choice for numerous mass shooters,
  • Last year, Benitez ruled California's ban on high-capacity magazines was unconstitutional. He also struck down the state's restriction on remote purchases of gun ammunition. California Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized the ruling Friday, calling AR-15's a "weapon of war."
  • He said in a statement that the comparison made by the judge between a Swiss Army Knife and the AR-15 "completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who've lost loved ones to this weapon."
  • The ruling and injunction are stayed for 30 days, during which time the Attorney General may appeal and seek a stay from the Court of Appeals.
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he will be appealing the ruling. "Today's decision is fundamentally flawed, and we will be appealing it," Bonta said in a news release.
saberal

Opinion | Will the Supreme Court Write Guantánamo's Final Chapter? - The New ... - 0 views

  • The Guantánamo story may finally be coming to an end, and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, the question is who will write the last chapter, the White House or the Supreme Court?
  • President Biden has vowed to close the island detention center, through which nearly 800 detainees have passed since it opened in early 2002 to house some of the “worst of the worst,” in the words of the Pentagon at the time
  • President Barack Obama also wanted to close Guantánamo but couldn’t manage to do it. Circumstances are different now
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  • One of the court’s newest judges, Gregory Katsas, is recused, presumably because he worked on Guantánamo matters while serving as deputy White House counsel in the Trump administration. The two other Trump-appointed judges are Neomi Rao, who wrote the panel opinion, and Justin Walker, who was not yet on the court when the case was first heard. The appeals court’s longest serving judge still in active service is Karen LeCraft Henderson, appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990
  • “The majority reads our precedent as foreclosing any argument that substantive due process extends to Guantánamo Bay. But we have never made such a far-reaching statement about the clause’s extraterritorial application. If we had, we would not have repeatedly assumed without deciding that detainees could bring substantive due process claims.”
  • especially the 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush that gave the detainees a constitutional right of access to a federal court, enabling them to seek release by means of petitions for habeas corpus. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2010, Judge Randolph compared the five justices in the Boumediene majority to the characters in “The Great Gatsby,” Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “careless people who smashed things up” and “let other people clean up the mess they made.”
  • The case in which Judge Randolph forcefully presented his argument against due process on Guantánamo, now titled Ali v. Biden, has already reached the Supreme Court in an appeal filed by the detainee, Abdul Razak Ali, in January. The justices are scheduled to consider whether to grant the petition later this month, but last week, Mr. Ali’s lawyers asked the justices to defer acting on the petition until the appeals court decides the al-Hela case. Clearly, the lawyers’ calculation is that a favorable opinion by the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would put the issue in a better light.
  • It’s a safe bet that there are not five justices on the court today who would have joined the Boumediene majority. The only member of that majority still serving is Justice Stephen Breyer. Three of the four dissenters, all but Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016 (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito), are still there.
Javier E

The flawed case for American nationalism - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • “The Case for Nationalism” is not really a Trump book, Lowry writes, though it was, he admits, “occasioned by him.” Lowry says he became interested in the subject after the president’s inaugural address and now wishes to acknowledge the “power and legitimacy” of Trumpian nationalism
  • his brief for nationalism can be vague, facile and inconsistent, built on a selective reading of argument and history.
  • Nowhere are those shortcomings more evident than in his sanitized interpretation of the nationalism emanating from the White House.
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  • Trump’s nationalism involves the adoption of immigration and trade policies “with our own interests foremost in mind,” he writes. America should protect itself “with the utmost vigilance” from external threats. And finally, Lowry asserts, “our country, not any other nation or international body or alliance, should always come first.”
  • Lowry is disdainful of the notion that America is an idea, one based on those self-evident truths of the Declaration. No, he counters: “America is a nation, whose sovereignty and borders are dear to it, whose history and culture are an indispensable glue, whose interests guide her actions (or should).”
  • Lowry distances himself from the unsavory aspects of nationalism by defining them away
  • The role of nationalism in bloody European conflicts? No big deal. “When Europe went off the rails in the early twentieth century, nationalism as such didn’t cause its crash so much as social Darwinism, militarism, and the cult of charismatic leadership,”
  • Fascism may “appeal to nationalistic sentiment,” he admits, but it is a “distinct phenomenon.” Racism can “infect” nationalism, he acknowledges, but they are not the same thing. He frequently resorts to this slippery formulation, suggesting that because two things are not synonymous, none should dare point out their links.
  • He worries that the country is too divided over individual and group recognition to embrace a truly national identity. But if unity is your overriding concern, why promote a vision of the nation so heavy on exclusion?
  • Lowry decries as a “smear” the notion that “nationalism inevitably leads to fascism or other forms of authoritarianism.”
  • He quickly dismisses dissenting views as “nonsense” or “foolish” or “frankly absurd.” Nationalism cannot be bad because Lowry has defined it as good, rendering “The Case for Nationalism” a book-length study in begging the question.
  • the founding is reinterpreted as a nationalist project in which ideas and ideals mattered far less than the specific “religio-cultural attributes” of those who came here.
  • He concludes that the civil-rights movement succeeded because it had “such ready access to our national identity and made such a compelling appeal to it,” sidestepping how the movement had to appeal precisely to the nation’s professed ideals to show the hypocrisy of its practices.
  • while Lowry defends nationalism as the “opposite” of the quest for dominion over people and territories, he looks back approvingly on America’s westward expansion. “It was a stupendous boon to our nation, to our people, to our interests, to our wealth, and to our power,” he writes, despite some “regrettable” treatment of Native Americans. Lowry stresses that American Indians weren’t “the peace-loving innocents of contemporary popular imagination.”
  • Lowry, who says he finds little “practical distinction” between patriotism and nationalism, does not leave space to quote the distinction Lepore makes in her book. “Nationalists pretend their aims are instead protection and unity and that their motivation is patriotism,” she writes. “This is a lie. Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.”
  • Inherently. Intrinsically. Inevitably. Those words seem to add authority to Lowry’s statements but actually leave them hollow. Just because nationalism isn’t always racist or violent or militaristic, that hardly offers license to disregard how it often stokes those sentiments
  • Lowry trashes intellectuals on the left and corporate and political leaders holding anti-nationalist views as not just misguided or wrong, but as treasonous.
  • “The Case for Nationalism” seems part of a larger effort on the right to create an after-the-fact framework for Trumpism, to contort the president’s utterances and impulses into a coherent worldview that can outlast him
  • It risks turning conservatism into an ever more exclusionary and yet malleable concept, with limited appeal and even more limited principles.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views

  • picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
  • The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
  • Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
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  • over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
  • Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
  • I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
  • Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
  • On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
  • Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
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