Most people know what going “dutch-treat” means. (Each person shares to the penny how much they spent on their own meal, for instance).
So what do I mean by double-dutched? What this signifies is how little is known about the New Netherlands, or New Amsterdam (not the tv show). It’s easy.
Think AJ (by that I do mean the 7th president – President Andrew Jackson. Read: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Apparently, one of New York Senator’s — William L. Marcy — said it referring to the 1828 election, not President Jackson.
I wonder why Trump’s.father decided to deny his German lineage and went for Sweden instead of Holland or the Netherlands). Trump, Tromp could’ve been Dutch.
I wonder even more what picture will adorn the Oval Office in 2025? Will we have a “repeat?”
I suppose Trump could put up his own official portrait. Not many presidents have skipped a beat and get a four year respite to learn.
What does AGriculture – not to be confused with Petroleum or API – pay their lobbyists and what does the sectors spend for the whole lobby? Ignore the AG reference for now, a despotic office if there ever was one, given its Dutch origins.
With the combination of 1) Weedpatch, and 2) being a U.S. Congressional Page from former Speaker of the House Kevin’s 20th district, plus Kevin McCarthy of Kern County, which has never elected a Democrat despite receiving massive agricultural subsidies since the New Deal because of a Dixie New Deal Democrat (The Camps of South Carolina). I remain perpetually confused. Perhaps that’s the petroleum in the water I drank speaking.
Industry sectors do brag about their spending, so no need to worry about the Ethics Committees being busy this winter.
Any one who knows me knows I’m rather persistent when it comes to physicał protests.
Anyone who really knows me knows if and why i ‘show’-up, for a protest or stage one with my Fred or follow my fearless sons, can figure out these photos.The where and when.
Too decide is an ordeal.
It’s always an ordeal, or better yet a calculation to determine if my physical body can “take it.”
When I arrived at CUNY I had a workplace injury as University of Denver (DU) –Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), I taught and published only that. I was the “negative” example, if you will.
No doubt about it!
How (not why because too obvious) is the question.
HOW is so much harder, though potentially counter-intuitive then way more interesting. Like ” “disinterest” not rational self-interest.
Indeed, I get tired hearing either the why — the justification disguised or ʼframedʼ as I write in at least one book racialized – en-cultured or -en-appropriated (Penelope). And if you wanna play the game, select 2 ids please. It is only fair Rudi.
What is my MO? Mother Courage or Reckless Ruthje? I love to name and to have acronyms like TAP (new-ish) and PRISM. I asked for over 23 years how a Germanic language like Dutch did not soften my name nor Ruudʼs. Happy to catch up with Gradi during the holidays. It is her cennential all year, after all.RPM taught me a lot about what radically changes meaning in transliteration. Being “lost in translation – is too obvious. Cultures are akin to climate(s). Get it?
Is Terry Gross a man? No. Does she behave like a man? In literature about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 this means that while Terry is not a man, she has behaved like one or perhaps treats other women like she herself is a man, a male interviewer.*
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have always enjoyed her interviews. So judging Terry by Terry, shame on her. She is acting like a man. Terry Gross is sadly treating other women like she is a man, when she is not. She is treating this one interviewee at least in effect like a man or a male interviewer does. Having her started her show Fresh Air many decades back is irrelevant. Or to be fair, is no longer relevant.
Don’t get me wrong. I listen to her show above all others.
And upon further reflection (as writing is wont to do, at least for me), I often skip her interviews when it comes to all the music or music business interviews that I don’t enjoy as much as book shows or shows in which an interviewer asks a book author or an artist a series of questions.
This show was both. Barbra Streisand wrote her first book in a very long time, and she wrote it over a very long time.
Rather than ponder this any more, why don’t you be the judge?
And to be self-disclosing or in the nature of full self-disclosure, I’ve got a male friend from Claremont Men’s College, who calls routinely to see if I’m still not so good at assessing pop culture. I’m not.
Dan’s absolutely right. Being in the third class of women admitted into the institution when it went co-educational, I actually got my degree from Claremont McKenna College, or as we joked they found a male “M” named donor.
Going back to Terry Gross and Fresh Air (now that so many guest interviewers or interviewers are on), seems more important than ever to weigh in. I was interested.
What’s more, a perfectly “rational” explanation for Terry Gross’s male-equivalent techniques are disappointing to me. But then, again, when I accepted the diploma with men on it, that was supposed to be evidence of my being what many (not all) women from Scripps said about us: we were called Amazon women.
Now, to be honest, that is down right offensive to me and the other women who decided to be trail blazers and even collect the degrees as evidence of this. Plus, what does this say about women who live in the Amazon? Not fair, either, at least in my book.
So, check out Terry Gross’s interview of Barbra Streisand in early November 2023. She is also featured on the “best of” segment over the weekend. Then, get back and to me and/or tell me National Public Radio and/or Fresh Air whether they can do better.
If Terry Gross does leave the show for a well-deserved retirement soon, or she starts to take even more time off (again deserved), perhaps they could open diversity up a wee bit more? Perhaps a person with a disability or two, along with a non-SCAM or SLAM identity could be given a go?
Remember: identity is not only about gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. Indeed, think big — there are more than enough folks who have at least two identities — those who are in retirement mode or nearing it, otherwise known as “seniors.”
A little “intersectionality” would go a long way, as Kimberle Crenshaw might write and/or say, no?**
In fact, I teach it as “compounding concentric circles” when a person comes to the table with multiple identities and disabilities.) Mind you, I teach politics at the largest public university in the United States – City University of New York. I am housed in only one branch of the thirty odd campuses in New York City, or the Graduate Center.***
* Ruth O’Brien, editor, Telling Stories Out of Court (New York: ILR Press, Cornell University Press).
**Kimberle Crenshaw on “intersectionality” in her classic late twentieth century legal article.
+We all get to hide behind theory.* “Theory’ for the uninitiated, the un-informed of my own public and academic or intellectual work, this means the whole body of my published work beginning in 1971, 2 or 3, not my published work in publications for and largely by adults.
And, it is inclusive of my letters to very well-know authors or author in the 1960s.
Indeed, my mother later apologized for shaming and therefore siilenc-ing me with the latter.** Virginia Frick O’Brien June 1927-December 2006)
*
**
Yes, the asterisks are the only way one could draw the picture or get A Political Perspective (APP) about what the heck I am “talking” about.
P.S., the + represents a book cover and/or artwork going forward.
I came/come from Kern County, the home of former Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America’s Congress: Kevin McCarthy. Who cares that I was educated, in part, in Pumpkin Center, and my mother’s family arrived in Kern County 16 years before the “dust bowl.” She grew up in Weedpatch, CA, at this time. (In 1932-1933 she was five or six, as opposed to 1935, when the great migration across the nation happened.)
I never got how or why, my mother did not want me to assort/consort or be friends with any children from the dust bowl. Indeed, I could not fathom how pre-Okie even came about in my child’s mind given this was her defense. Growers, ranchers, farmers, and drillers combined to call the migrants that name in attempts to break their spirit. Oklahoma, or what I saw of it in the 1970s, was all-white. Plus, men, not women ruled the roost. Meanwhile my mom supported Planned Parenthood. It made no-sense until I read Carey McWilliam’s Factories in the Fields published a couple of months after John Steinbeck’s penetrating The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.
Trusting her completely did not solve my dilemma. I could not comprehend the what and the why, where, and how could my mother even tell who was pre- and who was post- Okie? The dustbowl affected not one but at least three states: Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. I didn’t get “it.” I was mystified.
On top of that I was descended from the Swiss Frick fam(ily). Surprise, surprise, I start trying to unravel the body, mind, and the soul of what I can call the far-west Frick clan (yes-Henry Clay Frick’s branch, though not close enough to get free tickets, let alone free entrance to Henry’s former house that is a museum now on Fifth Avenue and East 70th Street, NY NY 10021).And lo and behold, one of my sister’s said that our family knew former Speaker of the House of Representatives as well as his family. And they too, would have considered themselves pre-Okie.
Close enough to play or sit and play with both him and/or his papa, daddy or father Owen had something to do with managing property along the grapevine – or the steep four thousand feet ascent from the San Joachim valley to the former ridge-route or as Shawn Casey O’Brien (no relation) it was Highway 66, Bob Dylan’s long and winding road across the U.S. It was American soldiers who wrested Fort Tejon from the Spanish who conquered it and stole it — now the largest contiguous piece of property going back to 1854 — Owen shared some part in.
Kern County Fair, 1961ish my first “cowboy” hat was for a “roper.”
What an AMAZING performance. Also I got to wave at my retired GC colleagues Lenny and Christa. Who would know we would all be in the “family” circle. Now it wasn’t my family (Frick’s) who got the subscription but Fred’s father, mother (Ruth Halper Schwarz) and her sister Harriet, along with her husband who worked at the “lab.” (FYI, Brookhaven). The Schwarz-Halper thinking was “platonic.” This is to say, that all scientists liked music, especially the opera. Can’t say, I’ve found that to be the case, though I do like Plato. The MET is finally getting modern, and after going for 12 years, I finally recognized a tune and have learned to like the opera.#
Take it from the Weasel-Zippers, as a woman “writing politics” I’m effective enough to try to silence. They want to silence me. I may seek shelter in scholarship sometimes, but I will not be silenced.
I appreciate the mirroring with CUNY Academic Commons that stems from my private site to my professional site. CUNY practices freedom of speech protection. No research and travel budget does not help. (Double negative intended.) Images are all mine.
The National Review trained me (via Frederic D. O’Brien, formerly Frederic. D. Schwarz — his mug name.).
Even more importantly, University of Chicago. Senior-sage-wise or the legendary academic editor John Tryneski helped me immensely. I forgot Out of Many, One: The Third American Political Tradition was almost pulped give the racket the late Rush Limbaugh made. This is an academic book with lots of footnotes, documenting former President Barack Obama’s first term
Being a Congressional Page and an American presidency scholar means one tends to get the panic of having two years (or 100 days) to pass a law. Executive orders have always existed but . . .
Please VOTE. I could write a silly or frivolous (“lame” is out, just as “denigrating” is out, I hope that doesn’t offend anyone) post.
What I do know is that my domestic and hopefully my international direct-action sons are each voting in their respective locations, though they get mad at me, if I say vote, please vote.
Congress may be crooked. And I do know this firsthand, having run off to Congress at 16 years old, and staying until I was 18 years old and I saw someone throw down cockroaches in a brown paper bag. It did create a stir, too, though when we were trained, constantly, not to carry boxes, bags . . . all those things that could contain anything from insects to rodents to the tools of violence.
Indeed, I recall the fun we had, running up and down a very specific set of marble steps and having one senior congressional page tell me these were bullets from the war of 1812. Imagine, I thought. So I went home that night having looked up the “story,” and while these marks may or may not have been from this origin, they were definitely bullets, and it was closed to all but members of Congress, their VIP guests, and then the congressional pages — we were treated early on no better than rodents.
I overheard two female staff members gossiping about people who were known, and the one said to the other, “shush.” and pointed at me. The rumor monger’s reply was “no matter, she’s just a page.” And we were, until none other than DEMINT (get url) got rid of them. Being underage meant we were jailbait. And DeMint wanted to get, not the girls out of the way, but the boys, after Mark Foley got caught and this didn’t play well with his district or his home state of Florida, as I recall.
Well, you gotta laugh or cry so I choose the former option 🙂
I learned the hard way to never, ever call an election. Now, its less that my colleagues across the nation with their little models and modeling get it wrong over and over. No, it’s more that when I was a Ph.D student UCLA couldn’t convince their female pollster to join our rolls. Faculty rules, go figure?*
*is fill in the blank and/or plank of the GOP or the Dems as NR refers to them. I used to call them both bourg.! This really got my mom . . .
It is rare, but not impossible for me to anticipate any GOP moves, having partially grown up in a spatial juxtaposition that is now facing the nation.
Named after “Mary B. Fletcher,” an English female preacher who convinced Methodism’s Founder John Wesley that women should preach in public born in 1897
First, I left home at sixteen and ran away to Congress, winning an essay contest that gained me entrance into the now defunct Congressional Pages on the GOP side. (No Democrat ever won this seat). But, second, I spent more of my life in Santa Barbara, or SB for short, which abuts the county of Kern, and was my parents choice, wanting to be near family in Weedpatch as well as Bakersfield and the Valley in Los Angeles, which also abuts Kern County which is now represented by the wanna-be Speaker of the House good ole’ or the honorable Kevin McCarthy.
Why honorable? Well we were trained to all all members of Congress honorable, not because we didn’t want to engage in a bracing heated argument or better yet, watch the members do, before and during debates.
What I’m getting at is everything in California is not as cut and dried as members of Congress representing SB, Kern, or any district within LA would like to admit. Nor is American foreign policy. Here, though this summer I got lucky.
Visiting Albania, which I told my travel companions was the North Korea of Europe — being so isolated and dominated by the totalitarian state. What is more, I called attention to the fact that a former Vice President (Pence) was in the country to none other than my husband’s political magazine — the National Review. They had invited or X us to write partisan pillow talk or dinner table discussions, all of course respectful or our own version of honorable that we practice when articulating our ideas about all sides of American domestic and foreign policy, whether it be from the left or the right.
In fact, former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who was a gifted statistician told me on the ride to the floor at Hunter College where they were giving me a Disability Community Outreach Award that rarely went to CUNY faculty or staff-I quickly explained why I asked my husband, Frederic Halper O’Brien (née Schwarz) to wish off my two sons, who while they came in matching polo shirts that they purchased together just before no logo Target were 13 and 15 years old. It wasn’t that a Deputy Managing Editor of the National Review would make faculty nervous. Loads of CUNY political scientists have written for them before. CUNY has faculty who write about all aspects, left, right and center. No, it was the CUNY PR nightmare I witnessed upon my arrival to CUNY 18 years earlier — and that was Heather MacDonald’s dreadful racist book about the College on a Hill.
Indeed, in 2004 the State Department had me read it. I was appointed the Director of a Summer Institute for Fulbright, which brought in 18 professors and scholars appointed by their own countries. Only four were from Europe, the rest came from China, India, Tibet, Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine . . . and I introduced them to the 42 scholars in the United States that spoke about our theme “neos & isms” America as Empire the way Amy Kaplan, as a former President of American Studies viewed the U.S. of A.
I was to read MacDonald’s book the acting director of the cultural part of the State Department, now deceased, told me so that I could understand the real purpose behind Summer Fulbright institute I directed alone, after being solicited by Peter B. (not Beinart)
This meant I had to know the backstory. Backstory, I told this director, is my favorite part of the assignment whenever I direct or administer anything. To me, there is nothing better than knowing the long, complex functions of an institution that exists beyond one generation, at least. as we congressional pages were taught to call all members of Congress sitting on the left or the right or any party in between.
Being a far west Frick and a Penelope Stout returning over 380 years later the very county she and Richard receives a land grant from the Duke of York means there is lots of backstory and that’s why it has taken me so long to finish American neotribalism from my own app or American Political Perspective, not Perspectives took so long to unravel and unwind. As the author of New Netherlands wrote teaching a seminar at Baruch College said the only thing one knows about their own family’s lineage is you’ve got it all wrong.
Ruth MacKay Finlayson around 18 years old, born in Polk County in the city of Des Moines where her father was an MD, had a JD and a BS from Bellevue and the University of Michigan respectively. He took the professorship of medicine and surgery in 1895 when Ruth was approximately 2 years old.
Kudos, David Nasaw! What a wonderful and insightful analysis, albeit a scary one.
Living on the late-nineteenth-century female muckraker journalist Ida Tarbell’s island– Roosevelt Island — which is under the 59th Street Bridge (as those in Manhattan call it, as opposed to the Queensboro Bridge, as those from Queens call it, though it was relatively recently renamed the Ed Koch Bridge after the late former New York City Mayor), gives one a lot of APP (American Political Perspectives).
The wet, dirty muck that Ida raked occurred after she checked herself into what was known as “Damnation Island” due to its appalling conditions and the way inmates from the all-male prison on the island took “care” of some of the women along with white male priests.
While now it remains Roosevelt Island, Cornell Tech dominates it. Former Mayor Mike (or Michael) Bloomberg awarded approximately 37 acres to Cornell, the only private-public Ivy League institution of higher learning.
So, I think I can speculate that Elon has been here at least once, if not more, and who knows? I might bump into him on the street.
I can envision Elon rallying or the bolstering the idea of creating Cornell Tech given its unique location, being controlled by New York State though operated by New York City and technically part of Manhattan. Perhaps he supported getting all tech, especially “tech” education, off the “left” coast and in the financial capital of the world — New York City in New York State, rather than any land mass “down under.”
As Cornell Tech changes Roosevelt Island, I’m glad to know I can count on insightful analysis by a CUNY Graduate Center historian, now retired, since I know his work on Hearst as well as Mellon and can rest assured that his historical analysis will include astute comments or make culturally appropriate comparisons to Robber Barons from one and two centuries ago, and how they dominated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
One of my cousins asked me a fun question. We were talking about Frick and Stout family artifacts from Iowa, Jacksonville Illinois, Des Moines, Grundy, and Polk Counties, all in Iowa, as well as Hopewell and Amwell, New Jersey, where Colonel Thomas Johnson Stout’s son left to head West.
See Critical Studies of Education, Vol. 5 “Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World” Nicola Pizzolato and John D. Holst, Editors (Cham, Switzerland, 2017)
My baby sister Kathleen even has the china washbowl this single man brought with him all the way to Morgan County, IL The pitcher had long broken, our grandmother Ruth Finlayson Frick explained, along with the Dutch family tradition of giving the most prized artifacts to the last daughter married. On the back of that bowl in very discolored paper is an explanation of who Col. Stout was.
Not only was he George’s (Washington) aide de camp, but he was a professor of religion and helped start Brown University too. But most of all, reading different newspaper accounts, the Colonel wanted nothing to do with receiving any Revolutionary War pension. Sure, he qualified, but he took it as an affront that anyone would think he would take money reserved for the poor.
Antonio Gramsci didn’t think like Thomas Stout. And I am not even sure I would label his left-right politics partisan, yet. That said, he may have been honoring Revolutionary War widows and orphans. To me this means, like Gramsci 250 years later, Thomas Stout recognized the family and the hegemonic power within the family like Gramsci, who not only supported women’s rights but also those of children, unlike his Marxist and Communist and Anarchist or Syndicated Anarchist did with his particular preoccupation with culture and all the jarring juxtapositions that exist and do lead to change, like the changes we are seeing in the United States of America today.
Now, Speaker’s (the first female)’s partners or kids and grandkids get no protection, and to top it off, all the harassment (sexual, again male/female, not male on female) is controlled by a man carrying a sink in San Francisco. Does he even have card that happens to be the color of not the sea, the sky, or deserts, or the clouds?
Check your own APP or “the” News. Seems to me the headlines are all you need, and they’re free! What glee. Horizontal thinking, spectrum or sliding supremacist acting, or heretical thought or simply the sport of misogynistic doxing that women, not men, are better at, or that’s just my personal and/or professional experience. Or could it be Kate Mann’s “whack-a-mole”thinking, describing misogyny as the enforcement arm of sexism, patriarchal, and hierarchical thinking — which is cultural, social, economic, political, and definitely going global and remaining local as the English “take” decisions, and Americans make decisions.
What do you think – @thegreenphantom2 or @jcaputi, the latter having published a book in OUP, USA’s Heretical Thought in which the part of the thesis that appealed to me was the America(s) origins of the notion of a “mother-f###er!@#$%^&!” Take a look.
One of the best things about RI (Roosevelt Island) is not only is it “open access” in terms of the environment, but I meet the most fascinating people with and without disabilities who believe in protest politics along the lines of my “bodies in revolt” and we have less need for signs like this! The secret is take the ferry”!
Here is a photo of my grandmother in 1913 in Des Moines Iowa– the caucus state. She would be thrilled-I think or should I say I speculate – to know not only was I given her first name by my parents but I am honoring her and her daughter Virginia Frick O’Brien in finally revealing Ruth’s married name.
Unlike so many false feminist’s books (often written by women who helped the 3 percent er pack stuff women in a sexist box often getting doxed, then get “misogonized” by the gamers of all sexes genders and trends, Anne Marie Slaughter’s book, the last book in the PUP Public Square series, is the real deal.
I was disappointed I didn’t get to write the foreword is all 🙂
I am using it in all my seminars, though, for sure.
Are they the new News’ Woodward and Bernstein? Ripping “headlines” from last night’s early or pre-news, two minutes before 5 PM, Paybarah and Brown pressed: “Trump signed legal documents that he knew included false voter fraud numbers, judge says” according to these two reporters. The 2024 presidential election is getting exciting!
Not until I met and married Fred (who honored my father and mother when my sons walked me down the aisle), I had none other than my colleague, Fred’s long-lost relative, unite us in marriage. I would’ve been the second Ruth Ann Schwarz. Instead, Fred is the first Frederic Halper O’Brien, though we began our journey as Fred and Ruth O’Brien. Only 9 states in this union allowed him to change his name as he did in the Brookhaven Town marriage-license office.
During our past tenth anniversary, we did another reciprocal thing. He suggested I stop hiding my direct lineage to Henry Clay Frick (named after a Speaker of the House, I presume). So here it is: I’m Ruth Frick (my grandmother’s first and last names) eschewing that middle name once my sons were grown. They too were burdened with English-Dutch-Swiss-Irish-Scottish-Swedish descent, though I am proud to say they speak, read, listen and have learned German and Dutch and only lack lessons in Swedish. But heck, knowing German/Dutch/English — it’s close enough.
* Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (ask Wendy and Sylvia, part of the far west Frick clan 🙂
Off Piazza Navona, in Rome, Italy, Summer 2022. I know very, very little about Catholicism, let alone the Pope, other than it is the largest or one of the largest Christian sects. I took the photograph and given how wonderful iPhones take snapshots inside one came out decent enough to use on wordpress.*
*I use my own photographs, largely or Wikipedia photographs. My favorite spin off of Wiki is not Ballotpedia. Try it. You’ll learn a lot about federalism, though this is NOT the federalism touted by the Federalist Society, that’s for sure.
This was written before the ADAAA was passed in 2008 as President George W. Bush (43, not 41) with Routledge, 2005 and sold as chapters or I can send PDFs per requests (robrien@gc.cuny.edu within each semester (approximately September to December and February to May) each year. I only have select chapters.
Finally, Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (USA: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Crippled Justice: The History of Disability in the Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, October 2001).
Oh please?!*&^ Meghan of Montecito. Or is it Megan of Montecito? You tell me? Having grown up and come of age in the county that houses this supposed woman of Montecito, I think it is no less than outrageous. Why? Because of all the work that all the proxies must do. Full disclosure: I have relatives in Montecito, my first sleep-over restaurant gala was in Santa Barbara (SB), I grew up on the beaches of SB, and decades later I was there for part of my COVID-isolation travels and adventures, when I got to renew my friendship with a Hope Ranch High School sister (we’d gone to Claremont Men’s College together before they shoved the M of McKenna in there). Phew. This friend told me that the best thing about Montecito is not the fully-in-view polo park, nor even the real SB ranch that was ranched by the fake-ranch movie-star president (yes, RR, not TR nor FDR). Phew again. Please. I have no problem about reporting on the British monarchy versus Meghan and Megan, the proxy (singular) for all of the colonial and United States of America since Pocahontas. Yep, I mean Meghan and Megan of Montecito and/or Hillary of FOB and BOB, or really FOB.
Let me use this to get more twists and turns in, something akin to the “Ana-baptists,” and by Ana I don’t meant those Santa Anna winds but rather the reference here to John Winthrop of, yes, you called it (if you remember it from your civics class), City on a Hill or my American Political Thought and/or American Political Development seminars and what I today refer to as APP, not APT + APD -AS = APP.^
I’m waiting for Michelle (Obama) to work with or support Meghan or Megan of Montecito, really, though it is actually Ronald Reagan’s stage screen in the SB county-side as well as being backed up to Kevin’s Kern, and yes, that’s potential Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s Kern of Kern County.
Now, where did I go next with FHO? Well that was Tejon Ranch, where Fred remarked: Did we really have to go back to that county where everyone “hated” (okay, banished) me? We did 🙂 And we enjoyed it, though not for all the reasons one, and that’s the Queen English’s “one” would understand.
Viewing and Reading Recommendations — check out Princess’ Di’s “authenticity”
Tejon Ranch is the largest …. Now I get it… This is how Hollywood remains Hollywood and why Oil remains oil and I mean petroleum oil, not black oil.
One of my cousins and I played “find the oil.” Now, I knew three things: 1. Oil was black and dirty — petroleum oil, that is, not vaseline that id; 2. Cotton has oil (it is not black); and 3. The Okies came “from them thar hills . . .” So imagine what happened when we tried to squeeze oil out of cotton. I was hoping it would be black. Sadly, cotton oil is not. When I asked, I got in trouble, of course.
So, I ask you: What is the difference between black and white or clear oil? It’s not “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair, but it is oil like former president, then former chief justice William Howard Taft, who got a route in the town of Taft to be called informally not “them-thar-hills” but Petroleum Hwy.
And—surprise, surprise—it connects Santa Barbara County to Kern, and must pass through some of TR’s Ranch and that’s not Teddy to you but Tejon Ranch** the largest . . . Forget that. It’s Kevin’s district. It was his daddy or a cousin that came to a congressional district that had never elected a Democrat, only Repubs. Better said, only those from the fake G.O. P. This is no longer Abe’s party. It’s our Speaker of the House wannabe’s party.
The talk of the town yesterday in Tirana, Albania, the nation’s capital, was Pence instead of Trump for President.
Pence is there to support the MEK militia, which seeks to undermine the Iranian government and has its headquarters in Albania. Opinionsvary about MEK’s work and whether the U.S. should support it, but for what it’s worth, former Democratic senator and VP nominee Joe Lieberman is also pro-MEK.
At any rate, my husband (an editor at the National Review, and I got to talking about the 2024 presidential election and the unappealing prospects on both sides. In particular, which Republican would be worse for the nation, Trump or Pence?
I said: while Trump would be scary and explosive, Pence would be a long-term disaster. He would be able to build a consensus in an FDR-like sweep of the presidency, only this time it would be far-right instead of center-left, commanding not only the support of the all-non-Protestant Supreme Court but control of the House and Senate yet again. Trump could never swing that much power now, as controversial as he has become.
He said: Pence counted the electoral votes honestly, and that alone makes him a far better man than Trump is capable of being. Enough said.
Social spheres colliding has now led to what I call ”sliding supremacies” or the idea that hierarchies never remain static. That said, SCAMs and SLAMs seem to remain at the top. Go figure?
In first chapters of Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Tradition (University of Chicago) I mix up Hannah Arendt’s expansive notion of the oikos with Jean Baudrillard’s postwar ideas about consumerism.*
A central theme is I can change the unit of analysis to the family. Not the family led by men alone but the New Netherlands interpretation of Hugo Grotius’s political/economic/social thought.
Being the 11th generation of the Stout/Frick family, I’m finishing my book manuscript on American neo-tribalism. I track how women crack the hegemony within my own family. To be sure, this power made them violent as they participated in coloniality as opposed to decoloniality, not post-colonialism.
Worse, the New Netherlands notion of the matrilineal conception of a family frees women more than women trapped by the English or the Scottish ideas about individuals, individualism, and individuality. After all, only with Princess Charlotte do we discover that Princess Di was the end of the line of male primogeniture.
Being the 11th generation of the Stout/Frick families gave me the freedom to explore what we did best: lots of power to their women. The Stout women did ”liberation as education” and ”education as liberation” and I’ve gotten to rely on Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for my whole career teaching graduate education or all but a few years.
The Frick-doers was what the Far West Fricks called us/them, whereas the Stout’s simply called the frontier women — household partners.
Penelope Stout (b. Amsterdam 1620, immigrated 1641) started a trajectory for me, though it was only in 2017 in cleaning out my basement that I found all all the documents, photographs, and many artifacts to piece it all together. My first and second cousins from my generation are generously sending me copies and photographs of their archives.
“The household (oikos) was the fundamental social, political and economic unit of ancient Greece (Arist.Pol. 1. 2), though its precise links into larger political and economic structures changed regionally and over time. At one level it was a co-resident group, many (though not all) of whose members were kin or affines (related by marriage). Patrilateral kinship was probably more common than matrilateral in household settings, since marriage was patrilocal, i.e. women tended to move into their husband’s house and household on marriage (see matrilocality). Though a nuclear family (parents and children) might form the household’s core, there is considerable evidence for the regular appearance of stem families (nuclear family plus a grandparent) and various kinds of extended families, especially incorporating unmarried female relatives (aunts, sisters, nieces, cousins, etc. ). The senior man in the household usually took charge of ‘official’ relations with the outside world and acted as the head of household (kyrios).”
Doing research in remote European country on anarchy, state(s), & political violence against “All others-and/or all Others.”
RuthOBrien.org temporarily dark or minimal content available. No access to plug ins by mirrored professional site. Professional IT retraining scheduled.
Relieved not professional political hackers, nor personal interference by Dutch Fulbright UCLA trained Islamic Center Ph.D.
Grants pending on above. IdeaImpact.org (non-partisan, non-profit est. 2914) grants available soon.
One would think sexual harassment(s) is/was/were un-becoming, no?*
* (Queen’s English, not the so-called “royal” we + SOP + all my scholarship from best poli-sci presses and/or in journals/magazines/zines/newspapers with over a million reach)
Assassinating AOC? Wow. Trump seems to have literally succeeded in hiring a hit man the Trump way (no need to pay for it when you can incite folks to do the dirty work for free). A good thing it didn’t work.
As a female professor in the nation’s biggest urban public university, at the campus with the strongest research record, years ago — in 2014 — I launched Heretical Thought, a book series I solo-edit with Oxford University Press, USA, that emanated out of my doctoral seminars in American political thought. Now we are up to 4 books: Assembly, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, by Catherine Rottenberg; Insurgent Universality, by Massimiliano Tomba; and Call Your “Mutha,” by Jane Caputi. This compounds my existing series, The Public Square, from 11 years earlier, including Jill Lepore’s award-winning The Whites of Their Eyes, about the Tea Party, and a forthcoming book by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The schtick about Heretical Thought is that if you don’t have a fatwa or witch-burning against you, your ideas aren’t significant enough to be published by the oldest university press in the world.
Global in nature, Heretical Thought takes an image my direct ancestor could relate to, since she was mentored by the only woman to be banished from the Mayflower community, who later got a patent of land in Gravesend (now Coney Island). Once the British took over, Penelope returned with her large family to the soil she had first landed on, in Sandy Hook, present-day New Jersey, where her first husband was killed and scalped, and Penelope herself was scalped and impaled but survived, being rescued by a matrilineal indigenous tribe.
I was taught this history by a great-aunt who disguised her own gender, not once but twice, in Esquire — to publish an article alongside Ernest Hemingway. I listened to Great-Aunt Mary, who heard my entire 600-page dissertation from UCLA when she was blind, as she advised me that I didn’t have to be a Frick; I could relate just as much to the Stouts. I have tried to live up to the Penelope Stout name. Like her, I’ve had a lot of firsts as a woman in academia in a field that practices systemic sexism — being a member of one of the first classes with women to graduate from Claremont McKenna College (as it is now known, though my diploma has the distinction of saying Claremont Men’s College even though I was born female), and the first female EO of the CUNY Graduate Center Political Science Ph.D. Program, where I hired three central lines, including Peter Beinart for the Writing Politics specialization that I designed. Meanwhile, APSA has only now started writing reports about PS misogyny, to some avail, and its journal now has 12 editors who reflect diversity. I have had the honor (dis) of being named a “doctoral major” haha.
Here are the names of the courageous ten GOP members impeaching Trump.
Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back the impeachment proceedings. Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the president’s role in an insurrection that caused “death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.”
Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”
Representative Fred Upton of Michigan issued a statement saying that he would vote to impeach after Mr. Trump “expressed no regrets” for what had happened at the Capitol.
Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State issued a statement saying, “The president’s offenses, in my reading of the Constitution, were impeachable based on the indisputable evidence we already have.” (An earlier version of this item incorrectly stated which state Ms. Herrera Beutler represents.)
Representative Dan Newhouse of Washington announced that he was backing impeachment, attacking his party’s core argument, that the process was being rushed. “I will not use process as an excuse,” he said during the impeachment debate, to cheers and applause from Democrats. Mr. Newhouse also offered a mea culpa, chiding himself and other Republicans for “not speaking out sooner” against the president.
Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan said that Mr. Trump had “betrayed his oath of office by seeking to undermine our constitutional process, and he bears responsibility for inciting the insurrection we suffered last week.”
Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio said Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers in the House and Senate “had their lives put in grave danger as a result of the president’s actions,” adding, “When I consider the full scope of events leading up to Jan. 6 including the president’s lack of response as the United States Capitol was under attack, I am compelled to support impeachment.”
Representatives Tom Rice of South Carolina and David Valadao of California also voted for impeachment.
HANDOUT PHOTO: Ashli Babbitt, 35, was shot and killed in the Capitol Wednesday. (Courtesy of Timothy McEntee)
When women fought and won the right to fight, it wasn’t to then be romanticized as “poor her.” She got killed. No. She — Ashli Babbitt — was trained by the U.S. military.
She knew the difference between the police — who shoot to kill in America — and enemy combatants. There’s no exception for the U.S. Capitol Police. So stop gendering the woman’s right to die – by combat — her choice when she stormed the Capitol as a traitor.
It’s shameless for the GOP to invoke “due process” now. So, Senator Ted Cruz is trying to steal the flag and the constituents who followed Trump. Hopefully, he’ll thrown out by Texans who are now forming a blue wave in their state.
President Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “we are all Americans” came only after his election to office when he buried the Federalists — temporarily — and caught his own party wave as Jeffersonian Republicans captured both sides. The United States never planned on having political parties — and their existence is a constant extralegal — potentially disruptive — disastrous force. The GOP now can finally grab their party back from Trump. What’s stopping them? (Oh, the 75 million mob-sters — a gang of misogynistic white supremacists men and women — like Ashli they want to shamefully use and abuse to take power. Mob-ocracy. What a silly word.)
Trump’s no Teddy.Not only will the Trump coalition be way too old to facilitate another run in 2024, his departure from the Inaugural stage won’t be missed. And besides this is one time when he don’t be a first.Former President Theodore Roosevelt’s way of dealing with conflict was to take off to other conflicts.
The known eugenicists ran off the stage during President William Howard Taft’s Inaugural Address.He supposedly had to run off to Africa before was sworn in.
Where Trump and Teddy do see eye to eye is their white nationalism, white supremacy, with Roosevelt’s supported by a very strong platform of eugenics.Eugenics is so strong in the United States that the Nazi’s had to get schooled in it.I relied on Daniel Kevles work on eugenics in my book on the medical history of disability in Crippled Justice.
Finally some action from the Democrats who could, who knows, get bold? Let’s hope #BLM, #INCITE #WARN, #Desert on Anarchist Free Library. There should be impeachment so there is no impunity let alone immunity with Trump pardoning himself. Enough.
This is the very definition of overreach. Here’s where I think it is worth doing homework our homework at the Anarchist Free Library.
Boy, was I not thinking.I turned on the mainstream television news yesterday.It was hard not to.The images.*
I don’t know the details yet (the Capitol police are taking their time), but listening to them explain, I have to wonder, “Where were you?”Then, after 6 PM, how did they clear the Capitol so fast? It’s collusion, of course.Selfies between the police and the Trump mob say it all.
Defund the Capitol Police, Biden, for sure. If you can’t protect the Capitol, where you served most of your career, who are you?
By evening, when ABC and CBS were calling the pro-authoritarian, racist, misogynist white supremacists “anarchists” — anarchists,of all things — I went to sleep in defeat.Being a PwD will sadly do that.
Still, I am a mother, and a teacher of graduate students. I’ve spent my entire career in the only public university that is truly public — CUNY.This means we teach the very best.As a result, I’ve had a running argumentative discourse with my sons and with more than one fantastic seminar I taught several times called Contemporary American Political Thought. “Contemporary” means alive.** And this semester I’m teaching a hybrid version of it under a new name — Women of Color Impacting Politics.
I call it WIP for short, since women of color are included in the larger category of women, and it’s only women of color (which I like to think of as women and) or politicians who have at least two identities that put targets on their backs, like AOC and the rest of the Squad.
WIP differs from my other seminar, Power, Resistance, Identities and Social Movements (PRISM)***. None of that came to pass after Occupy Wall Street, so I retooled it, though not until I first went out to the more radical campuses led by sociologists to hear what the 18-year-olds had to say about the political time we all occupy — and not before I finally got to team teach with DP David Waldstreicher, a scholar not only of history but of American Studies too boot.
What’s the difference between the two?The latter seminar looks at social movements, whereas the former spends more time on the only political thought exported to Europe, as well as other nations that are active, such as Greece and a few more. More importantly, though, it shows the way for all those with energy to run for office — the flag wavers.
There are a tiny few in American politics, such as AOC, who, along with the aspirational Green New Deal and the Squad, are not leading the way, they are flagging it.Their teeny-tiny foothold in federal government has its consequences.They constitute the hopeful 1 percenters in this country.Sure, they can’t pass legislation, let alone a policy like the Green New Deal. That’s not why they’re there. They’re doing flag duty.
As that 1 percent in the House of Representatives, they are flagging the way to the fortress of American political representation — Congress.Not the Senate, but the House of Representatives, through which — if the corporate capitalist Democrats and Republicans had not been Tweedledee and Tweedledum for so many decades, with the highlight expressed in the 1924 GOP and Democratic platforms that included the KKK, delaying the New Deal for sure, but only by four years — we would have had a different country, a different New Deal.
Now is the moment of truth.The mob descended. And they took selfies with the Capitol police. What more indictment do we need than that? Biden, better defund the Capitol Police.
You can’t blame Trump for lighting the match, or can you? Well, if you do, quit.And quit today. Don’t delay. Stop being complicit in the GOP executive-branch machine.
Trump did not do this alone. I can’t hear that explanation one more time without demanding that all conservatives go back to class — civics, that is. It’s absurd when the executive branch has more than 4,000 partisan positions alone that have to be vetted and go before the Senate.Come on. That logic defies credibility in a country of almost 400 million. We have institutions, national ones at that, that deserve better protection from the police.
*Cleveland Lovett, one of my very best undergraduates that Bard College enticed away from the CUNY Bac program, is playing outside Hannah Arendt’s house.He understands not only Arendt’s The Human Condition but the triangulation of discrimination, public health, and jazz (or music in general) in New York.Plus the flood of memories from running errands from hall to hall in the Capitol for two summers and as many months from my junior year until I went off to college.(Then of course I selected a college with “men” in the title as a youthful rebellion against my mom, who insisted that I come back to California — and could apply and go anywhere except her alma mater, Berkeley, or the university that harmed one of her most beloved cousins, Stanford.). If I was going into politics, where better than into the belly of the beast?She raised me as a fierce feminist, more by her doings than by her sayings, to be sure.
**This led to my second solo book series, called Heretical Thought.Here the bottom line is if you don’t have a fatwa or aren’t in danger of being burned at the stake — or, like me, don’t like to open hate mail or have groups like the Weasel Zippers after you, going so far as to send people to the 92nd Street Y when my Obama book came out — then your ideas are not seismic enough. Gerry Martini was one of the most insightful members of this seminar, as I recall.#
I am still looking for a better quality list of the 118 that BuzzFeed suggests is now 126, who are committed to Trump to the point of overturning the Presidential Election today.It’s gotten extra nasty now that Georgia Senate upset occurred putting Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff into the Senate and knocking out Mr. Turtle, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky.
I was surprised when one of my colleagues didn’t know who Senator Chuck Grassley was.He had a long career first in the House of Representatives, and then later in the Senate, always featuring whistleblowers.
While I’m no fan of the Republicans and I’m sure if I looked closely at his record, I’d find many a person who blew the whistle given his legislation and it only put a target on her back.That said, at least the idea exists and Grassley spearheaded the campaign to make the federal government follow its own laws pertaining to employees, particularly discrimination against women and all other identities. Not everybody needs to escape to Vermont.
This category of posts is for all the blogs I write about PwD or Persons or People with disabilities as reflected in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 as well as the 2008 Amendments and the California law for self-advocacy, particularly in opening up public accommodations to PwD.
COVID has made everyone PwD now.
Indeed, the two words taken are “essential” and “remote.” Essential is no longer the essential functions of a job or position but the actual category of work in terms of being an essential worker or a worker on the front line serving all of us.
Remote work is a stand in term, a proxy, or a substitute for finding accommodations that are reasonable. Teaching via Zoom is an accommodation and in the case of higher education, which is different than K-12, students may learn well, especially self-motivated doctoral students, for instance. Whereas children in pre-school or K-third grade are not going to learn as well and will be harmed by the absence of the social aspects associated with learning to boot.
In 1977 and 1978, I got to walk with this brave Republican woman from New Jersey who knew Kevin McCarthy’s Dad — and/or The Grapes of Wrath managers who knew who Steinbeck named “the” book after
These posts reflect my original interest in American politics, history and political theory broadly cast.
What I call this is American Political Thought squared or (APT+APT). You guessed it, I’m not interested in APD — with the D standing for “development.”
I’m interested in exploring the nexus between American Political Development (APD) and American Political Thought (APT) as well as American Studies and Africana Studies or all regional “studies,” including working with Gajo Petrovic a leader in Praxis published in the former Yugoslavia. Now I found “Olde Good Things” where Fred and I can purchase “Americana” that is upcycled-not recycled nor antiqued. Check it out 🙂
Indeed, APT squared or APT/APT explains my Master-Slave Hegelian re-interpretation discovered in CAPT (C stands for contemporary) where “A perfect Martini” and I and other students first discussed the too long APT reading list that includes/excludes not PwD but people who are not part of “All Other Persons” found in Federalist Paper #48.
This was the reason I stayed in American practical or street level politics for my Ph.D. rather than leaving for law school, history, sociology or business school. To be sure, UCLA doctoral faculty kept trying to convince me to leave and write (who has a career in writing in the 1980s? Wives to be sure but . . . )
After working with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time propagator — longstanding IAS member and philosophy professor Gajo Petrovic (Zagreb) after being working with the Fulbright scholar who wrote the only working Yugoslavian Constitution (i.e. the one that stuck — written in the 1970s). The constitutional scholar attended the Sorbonne in the 1930s and ended his career as the Dean of the best law school in Belgrade after Claremont Graduate School.
In the 1980s the Fulbright funded his scholarship on Jefferson at Claremont Graduate School, which is similar to Jefferson’s table, I worked with him for my B.A. thesis — Beyond Reification — on Marx, existentialism, phenomenology and Yugoslavian self-management supervised by Claremont Men’s College’s public law professor Winston Fisk. Fisk’s daughter is a well-known labor legal scholar, who last I saw or talked to was at Duke Law School in labor-capitalism theory.
We left New York City after the Presidential Election of 2020. It was so odd that we had to hear President Elect Joe Biden’s not quite acceptance speech in a foreign city at a foreign time after traveling out of JFK. The whole plane clapped when we arrived. Fred and I were too tired to process until the next day — no not Wednesday — the day after the Tuesday of the election — but Sunday going into the next week.
Of course we bumbled with the not one but two large screen TVs. We are both hopeless when it comes to turning them on in a hotel room or wherever, so we opt for our own roving technology.
Now we’re leaving and taking not one but two days to get to a place that everyone else — people without disabilities — would drive in one day. I used to travel from Bakersfield to Weedpatch to UCLA or Claremont then Men’s College in one day. Of course I didn’t drive like a little ole lady with multiple disabilities. (Fred didn’t drive for 28 odd years so he’s only the east coast LI freeway or tollway driver).
COVID-19 is now almost COVID-21. And what’s my takeaway: We are all people with disabilities. We are all “Bodies in Revolt”. And we are all searching for what our “essential functions” are.
Essential functions (can you be an MD online? Yes but…) Accommodations (remote or not, then essential or not)
I hope as we move toward the light in COVID-21 after darkness descended over all those essential and non-essential workers (i.e. remote workers who have salaries like me) that we can understand what happened.
The U.S. is 4% of the world’s population and 19% of its deaths. New York City was an epicenter, now it’s Los Angeles CA. What a horrible statistic.
There are 3 ways to look at it: 1. We deserved it since we all participate and live in the political system that created President Donald J Trump. Sure, the GOP is way way way more responsible but . . . 2. We should be shamed for having so much wealth, being so awful to our essential workers putting them on the frontline without giving them proper life (i.e. salary, healthcare, education, higher education . . . 3. This shame or gotta blame situation in the corrupt system of American politics could change. But only if we do “Bodies in Revolt.”
Being a one stone, 2 birds person (short for one stone kills two birds), I always opt for option 3. Then, again, being a person with a disability that has morphed into disabilities since I was 33 years old, I depend on others to do my revolution. I’ve got two sons who can help me adopt “Bodies in Revolt”. My oldest keeps telling me I should but I can’t.
In any case, we — Americans — are all people with disabilities now — deciding our having decided for us if we are “essential” or not. The perversity is that those remote with salaries have the best accommodations, whereas those who are essential and on the front line have the worst situations — from doctors to take-out restaurant workers.
Sadly, this is NOT new. Crippled Justice — my history book shows that as does Voices from the Edge. It is only my third book on the Americans with Disabilities Act (now ADAAA) that offers me help and hope that one of my sons spilled beer on. He was taking so long to read it, that the beer got spilt and rather than getting mad, I saved it as one of my best memories.#
Let’s face it, being Veep* is a subservient position. But if you’re a historic first — a black woman and an Asian woman or a woman of color — it could well NOT be a stepping stone. Trump gets it.
To be clear, it being — Biden doesn’t get to call who gets the Democratic nomination, and both he and Hillary Clinton know that Harris has to begin running for president before the midterm elections of 2022, when the Democrats can expect losses in both houses of Congress. I mean, they already did poorly in this year’s congressional elections, and now you will have 66 million Trump Republicans waiting to cast their votes. While 65 percent is a GOOD thing, turnout goes both ways.
By contrast, being a historic first as a woman — as Hillary Clinton well knows — isn’t a great leadership role or thing. And by that I mean being seen as a leader (read male) who can afford to alienate any constituency.
Being a former First Lady, former junior senator from an important state, and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton knows that being historic only gets you so far.* But as President-Elect Joe Biden knows too well, being second in command, doing nothing other than waiting for bad news, is tricky when it comes to national and international leadership. Think 2010 from my epilogue in Out of Many, One or, better yet, Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes, which she wrote in the Princeton University Press’s Public Square book series, which I, in full disclosure, edit.
Selena Meyer’s experience in Veep showed us how perilous it is to be in Kamala Harris’s historical position. Sure, it’s fictional, and only HBO, but her years as Veep showed us not only that the officeholder is in a subservient service role but that you don’t want to be anywhere near your president for the midterm, or don’t necessarily get to be seen anywhere near by your president.
Kamala Harris is shoring up President-Elect Biden. It is way better to be one of two senators of an important state, or one of one as a governor who gets to call his own show or press conferences, the way New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo does. I mean, Biden already called it — he’s a lame-duck president who won’t tempt fate and seek a second term as an octogenarian. Kamala, like him, could be next. Or will she be? Is she just the token historic?
*Hillary Clinton is now doing something else historic — running a cool podcast talking to a lot of women like the recent show on Gloria Steinem. The Kamala Harris interview was even more revealing given the tough choices she had to make as first San Francisco’s District Attorney, then California’s Attorney General. Check out
We have to look at the gendered notion of roles of presidential and vice presidential leadership. If Kamala Harris does not get enough significant stuff to do (as Biden demanded from Obama in 2008) then where will she be as she runs for president beginning in 2022? So say it ain’t so, Joe, that you’re going to give the masculine leadership positions — Secretary of State and the Attorney General — all to men.
Why would Senator Kamala Harris give up being one of two senators from the most important state besides New York — California — to be historic, sure, but to get nowhere when it comes to the Democratic nomination in 2024? Worse, if Joe appoints Andrew Cuomo to be the next Attorney General, and we already have a male Secretary of State, he’s just gendered national leadership once again. AG and Secretary of State are the only bad-ass leadership roles.
FYI, most cabinet members only serve 18 months (Trump ruined these stats. by firing everyone so these are pre-Trump stats.) Cuomo has plenty of time, then, to be the bad-ass AG male leader and still jump out to prepare for 2024 well ahead of 2022. Plus he can and will blame Biden and, by association, his competition, Vice President Kamala Harris.
So is why is Biden giving it to Cuomo, other than the very shameless self-interested politics of getting him off the COVID stage? Governor Cuomo handles the COVID crisis correctly by speaking about it to his constituents almost every day. He bested Trump, no doubt. Leadership as crisis as political management is the way to go — for a man, not a woman. Not quite the same for a woman governor, like the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who literally got chased away into hiding by Trump’s people or Trump’s yelling fire in a theater — or what the FBI uncovered in terms of the plot to kill her and her family.
Being Secretary of State used to be the best route to the presidency. Being governor, particularly of a large state like New York is now. Making Governor Andrew Cuomo, the only strong leader against COVID, Attorney General is a mistake or is it? I’m too sleep deprived to tell. All I know is that for Biden to restore my faith that Democrats aren’t going to appoint women in all the service roles — he better not have a clean sweep of men in all the stepping-stone cabinet positions.
*Veep, the show, is closest to actual Washington, D.C. politics, or at least the politics that I saw as a Capitol Page, which is to say a fly on the wall, though a fly who had all her idealism about how the politics are made (i.e. how the sausage is made). I was an impressionable 16 to 18 years old, not even a college or university aged intern. Capitol Pages for the House of Representatives don’t exist anymore. since the Republicans (i.e. Speaker of the House John Boehner) realized they were jail bait. It was one thing when they were sexually harassing the girls and women (like my member of Congress who yelled “Ruthie” out to the whole of the Republican side of the floor — he was drunk — during one of Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s State of the Union addresses). I knew enough to run. My mom taught me well enough to avoid conflict, so I headed for the Republican cloak room. I knew Congressman William Ketchum was too drunk to chase me in there, and besides there was a wonderful woman who would protect me if it came to that. Veep, an inside-the-Beltway show, faithfully depicts how little politicians care about actual people, though they all care about the (or I should say now “their”) public (read their base, a base that only a Trumpster can afford to alienate). Women leaders have to practice an all inclusive ethic of care type of national leadership.
I’m now singing. Fred no longer giggles but says in my carefully poised question — is it possible that . . . (And he says yes, I can’t look too smug so as not to offend my partner).
Here’s what posed: With Senator Ted encouraging all those poor Texans to vote because the so-called “Hard Left” or as Trumpers say “the radical Democrats” who the Democratic Party ignores (read A.O.C.) you know the election could be a realigning sweep. We shall see.
It’s certainly not a mandate. We know that is “malarkey.” Read Walter Dean Burnham please.
*SNL “unprecedented” white supremacy skit. Nice word.
Click on URL below since the New York Times keeps adding to who President Donald J. Trump, our 45th, insults. Plenty of stories to tell with this material, hence Jim Phelan’s reference to Narratives as well as the ole’ machine folk is like me started using when we were in.
Stories We Told mode. (Check out https://atomic-temporary-94207862.wpcomstaging.com/2020/10/05/stories-we-tell-part-2/ ). I’ve been insulted for writing since I was 12 years old. The first insulter-in-power was my Principal Morrisey who ran Thompson Junior High School in Bakersfield CA. He told me to knock off writing letters that the Bakersfield Californian published. I ignored him and wrote at least one more to show him I would not be cowed.
What President Donald J. Trump’s supporters are referring to as his triumphant return from the hospital is all in his choice of a noun and a verb. President Trump is dominant and he is all about “dominating.” He is a zero-sum-game leader, not a collaborator or a facilitator.
Trump’s firsthand experience with COVID means he’s leading as a winner or a dominator, or a person who leads by destroying the enemy by energizing his base as a winner, not a loser. The virus did not defeat him, and he is potentially immune. Notice he says “dunno” a lot for deniability as he undermines both experts and members of his own political party within the institutions he leads, such as the Senate.
Leadership, as Machiavelli’s “Economy of Violence” shows, demands a “when.” Put differently, this is an Alexis de Tocqueville notion of leadership stemming not from Democracy but rather from the Ancien Regime. For example, the issue is not only who to guillotine but when. Guillotining Danton too late means you make a martyr and you will lose your own head, like Robespierre.
Most Unitary Executive scholarship can be broken down into nouns and verbs. Leadership is all about having and using power. Leading can be done as a statesman or as a demagogue (read rhetoric).
To differentiate one UE-ese (read Unitary Executive-ese), look at the difference in the verbs and the nouns.
The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have different types of leaders in two places: read in private, or inside your own political institutions, on one hand, and on the other hand, when this fails, or you want more success, you lead by leaving D.C., or the “swamp,” and go directly public, as Samuel Kernell argued with “going public,” and get voters to follow you by changing public opinion and the political party that you lead by default (e.g. Rule of Law Republicans vs. Trumpsters or Trump Repubs or Law & Order Repubs, or deputizing state sheriffs, such as the white-supremacy groups he calls out).
Put differently, Richard Neustadt is the man. Presidency literature is written more by men than any other type of qualitative AP scholarship and follows gendered language, as defined relatively by the late 19th, 20th and some could argue still the 21st-century conception of what it is to lead. As novelist Stephen King would argue in On Writing, it is all in the verbs.
Leadership Typology: What is power or leadership (a noun and a verb)?
Who, Where, What, Where, When, Why, and How? So Edwards believes in _______
Greenstein ______ Skowronek _________ Howell ________ et al
Cross-cut the who (in public or in your profession, which is akin to the liberal binary of private vs. public) with the when.
Richard Neustadt has two catch phrases— Inside Beltway (read professional reputation) + Public Outside Beltway (read public opinion, or whistle-stop tour to appeal to his constituencies or build his constituencies into a coalition).
What are Howell, Edwards, Greenstein, Skowronek, et al. (see reading we’re combining) nouns and verbs when it comes to leadership that by definition involves timing, or when to do something to maximize your power, authority and legitimacy? Presidential eras help us understand the issue of legitimacy more than power and authority, which are easier to spot. (Power means enforceability and authority means having the rules, regulations, laws, or simply SOPs to back you. SOP is standard operating procedure.)
The President persuades (Neustadt) how? Tactics, strategies, facilitates . . ,
Who — what group is what I mean — who/where/when means what constituency? (e.g. Senate, House, people in states, people who vote, people who follow political parties or like being independent of parties?)
Nothing better than that. Do I have to say Harris? We can certainly applaud Maya Rudolph, though.
FYI, Mama-ela or WOP (read Woman as President, okay, the O is off) but good enough for me and Fred, since we like our acronyms. (SLAMs, SCAMs, SLIMs – Fred coins them just as he coined PRISM when I taught it the second time around — it is Power, Resistance, Identities, and Social Movements, or my take on social movements in the United States and abroad.)
American social movements used to have an impact. Our social-movement leaders from the 18th and 19th and 20th and 21st centuries influence those in Europe and other continents as well.
Take a look at my favorite crossover — crossing the Atlantic backwards, in other words — and that is Gluing in Paris. Check it out. #BLM influenced them. I wrote about Bodies in Revolt a lot earlier in 2005 and never came up with a name as clever as Kamala asa Mammala — we can argue about the spelling. Certain people can complain about pronouncing WOP, though it is spelled WAP.
I am certainly teaching the American Presidency* from this perspective, not that I knew that Kamala would even become Mammala, let alone that WAP is pronounced WAP!!!!!!!!
Having waited 20 years and having been appointed EO three times, DEO two times, I never got picked to teach this. Of course I was required to teach it when in my tenure-track and tenured positions (I went straight from Ph.D. almost done to tenure-track positions.)
Oh yeah, and I wrote, what, 4 books that depend on the American presidency and involved me using documents from presidents (T. Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, not Eisenhower, but then JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and of course Obama). but I couldn’t convince the man who taught me about the American presidency to read my book on Obama (oh well) and abandon my original field of capitalism and political theory. He was a great inspiration, Sterling Professor at Yale University Stephen Skowronek, that is.
I’m now sufficiently presidential or senior to get this assignment. I’m thrilled. So, now I realize I gotta fill in and gain more presidents’ documents — so, having interviewed only Ronald Reagan, I am now looking at documents from George to William (that is, Washington to McKinley) in my 385-year history of heretical women who are my direct descendants. While only one of us got to vote (in New Jersey, where women could vote between 1792 and 1801) before suffrage, we found workarounds — means to participate in politics when men told us to shhhh or even shut the *&^%? up, like CMC’s club the GCO, led by faculty and students. I think all the faculty were men, but . . . . .
Scary stuff in the news, not only Trump’s call to arms against #BLM and others, like #portlandprotest and #portlandmoms, or NPR’s Morning Edition announcing different states thinking that folks will voluntarily surrender their firearms, but what is happening in the proxy war between the Turks and the Armenians, with the Russians negotiating.
States’ rights are getting more important in the election as borders are going back to policies similar to what the U.S. Constitution replaced (read the Articles of Confederation), and given how all elections stem from zero-sum all-state politics (think states and land and how many votes per state when you visualize conflicts, like the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state area; also remember Pennsylvania and how the middle states were so divided — unlike New England or the former Confederate South, and remembering where Delaware was in this same confederacy).
It is no wonder I like living in my once-safe apartment on Roosevelt Island, where we are governed by three jurisdictions, including being completely accessible for folks like me and Steve Kuusisto.
As such an odd rock (read entity under what Frederic Schwarz used to call the 59th Street Bridge rather than the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge), we are part of Manhattan, but EMTs come from Queens, given that we are also New York State and New York City, and we have Cornell Tech, a very expansive private/public university that is part of Cornell University. We also have no police, only “Public Safety,” a branch that when we moved here saw its chief forced to exit in disgrace after harming many PwDs (there were posters all over so I looked it up).
Getting my M.A., D.Phil., and Ph.D. at UCLA back when they had an active program on the Middle East and Rudolph P. Matthee’s dissertation sponsor was not only @BethBaron’s supervisor but the greatly talented Professor *Nikki Keddie https://www.gc.cuny.edu/…/History/Faculty-Bios/Beth-Baron, I was there during the Salmon Rushdie fatwa, inflaming the existing conflict at UCLA between faculty supporting the Turks and the Armenians, respectively, which was scary in a different way.
Then, in 1993, my very dear, dear friend was killed in a fatwa (the last one, Gary Sick explained, happened in Italy and was in fact the last one on European soil). I was spared hearing it on the news when Distinguished Professor Barbara Pfetsch and Cory Lieb accepted being my sons’ “earth parents.” https://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/…/bpfetsch/index.html (This was how I cemented the boys’ fluency not only in university-level Dutch but in German as well, given the summer camps they attended with their earth cousin Jonas).
I just told Frederic O’Brien that having been with a former partner who understood the Far East and the Middle East, and then having traveled extensively on my own — including hitchhiking everywhere — in the former East gives one-off sensibilities when you end up coming back to the UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History to be convinced to leave political theory for American Politics, first by @StephenSkowronek at Yale University (I didn’t know of Rogers Smith’s work).
I took pride back in the 1980s in traveling extensively on my own, not just in the former Yugoslavia but in all the other countries I could manage to get into.
Back then, one ride from Hamburg (when they still called it West Germany) got you to Berlin. I took my GRE’s in the former American embassy, not in Zagreb, where I was studying with Gajo Petrovic (the only existentialist who was sought by both the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Martin Heidegger Archiv, which he accepted) and then added another twist that Intellectual Publics might know about by hitchhiking down to Dubrovnik, Croatia, not only to hopefully meet @Habermas but also to bump into those I already knew about, including Andrew Arato (I discovered Joel Rogers as well).
Not wanting to be associated with the American graduate students, I hung out with the German graduate students, creating a bond with Uwe Toellner as well as one American professor, who wrote Alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Schacht I worked with this Dissent Magazine crowd — not New York but the ones who wrote Dissent in Serbo-Croatian and reprinted the likes of the International Herbert Marcuse Society — as well as channeling my book on Obama (Out of Many, One by Ruth O’Brien) through the likes of JohnDewey, Hannah-Arendt-Gymnasium, @ReinholdNiebuhr, Saul Alinsky, and W.E.B. DuBois — American iterations of the very Dutch Baruch Spinoza Study Group (not the traditional version of him by my former colleague’s notion of Baruch Spinoza but rather more the rendition that Alan Ryan would have supported, and heck, even the great academic StanleyFish liked). https://academic.oup.com/…/article…/87/5/1435/127532… How come there is no emoji for ambivalent? At least there is an activity called “watching.”
*Unlike posts, this one is derived from FaceBook’s Stories or “What’s on Your Mind” space that is similar to tweeting so it is full of URLs and most names were tags of those people (so you can look them up for yourself:) and sometimes I use foreign language spellings like the Heidegger Archiv. It is part of my seminars’ blogs series.
Is RBG* glaring outside my window on former Mayor Bloomberg’s scroll doing anything — 731 Lexington Avenue? Will Trump’s nominee (will take me quite a while to name names here, especially since one ABC commentator went so far as to say nothing was her fault. She accepted the nomination, that is how it goes) recuse herself if it gets to the Supreme Court like Gore v. Bush (2000) (which is doubtful)?
Trump thinks she won’t. Had I been Trump’s Jared or Ivanka, I would advise him to hold up the Golden Ticket. Don’t make the Senate Republicans pay the price (or should they, they should read Atlantic Monthly‘s A. Applebaum).
The Supreme Court is SO heavily conservative that do they even need her? Well, I suppose yes they do, since with her nomination — the ol’ “foxes in chicken coop” approach — and Trump’s last card — we not only ensure women’s right to sovereignty over their own bodies is likely gone; universal health care, even if it varies a lot from state to state, is gone, and every conservative issue the conservatives in the Federalist Society has been preoccupied with since 2000 is gone.
Watch the New Jersey election. If cannabis becomes recreational under New Jersey state law, we’re back in it — the Articles of Confederation, which caused the first government in the United States to fall apart less than 20 years in. Governor Cuomo is not going to like all those New Yorkers taking PATH; think of all the state revenue he will have lost. The tri-state area will become a tri-state mess.
The 2000 election did count (unabashedly shameful self-interest that contradicted the conservatives going for Bush, though they had long, long professed states’ rights, since it suited them as being anti-New Deal til they flipped), combined with the Seattle uprising, all over a year before 9/11, not only are we in partisan politics, but it’s the two-against-one game, not the Unitary Executive Branch that counts. When the President and Congress work well together, bills become laws. When the President and the federal judiciary get together, it leads to many different kinds of political equations. No need to worry about Congress and the Supreme Court separating against the Presidency — 545 + 9 members means they never get along or move in a consistent direction.
The U.S. Constitution has created only one national office and that is the office of the President.
Separation of powers, federalism, states’ rights, different kinds of sovereignties are all variable and up for interpretation, depending upon the politician. The definition of a politician is that they serve one constituency and harm another. Is Trump doing anything different? No, of course not.
We’re in this jam, as what I used to teach as the “Theory of Rotting Republics.” Most ancient political thought would tell you — you’ve got 250 years — and then it rots, from within. I hate to say it but has American representational democracy been irradiated like fruit in the United States? Bite into an apple in July, it’s not crisp. Chances are the fruit experienced irradiation or is rotting from within, it’s only the skin that looks properly ripe.
* Written before we knew about Trump’s 750 dollar per year, at most, tax bill.
I realize that A.O.C. tells it like it is. And putting it in a perverse way, we can ask if Trump’s 750 dollars he surrenders on federal court taxes or the I.R.S. will be the last straw? I dunno.
I did get one of my friends to laugh when I suggested we all pitch in — a 10-person pod — and pay his taxes this year. Think about it, wouldn’t that be fun?
Another way to look at it is that for all the white supremacy that is being mentioned and discussed, in the end, Trump has not passed any anti-Civil Rights legislation. To be sure, he has destroyed the lives of so many children and their parents who cross borders. But he has passed no legislation other than tax reform.
Yet do “the people” care? Trump will most likely prevail with getting his Supreme Court nominee on the bench. This is another nail in the coffin of a country that has lacked a national agenda, not just national leaders who reflect what most people want.
At the beginning of the millennium, the Rehnquist Court rolled back the extent of federal authority with little notice. The Court limited the central government’s reach, giving more rights to people wanting guns but not helping those PwD (read: people with disabilities) and women who need protection from violence.
Putting her on the bench will have a long-lasting effect, long past my years. But as A.O.C. just said, maybe we “deserve to decline.”
As one vote of 435, she has little power other than as a national spokesperson. She unpacks issues like intersectionality very well and has enraged the “progressive” Democrats as much as or more than Republicans. A.O.C. is closing the age gap.
So it seems to me that Separation of Powers no longer works. There are not three equal branches sharing powers. Nor is there one branch, like a unitary executive that can get much done. What we can see looking at the 20th and 21st centuries is that the U.S. government functions well only if a President is a national representative and does not rig the Supreme Court.
This joining of the Presidency and the Judiciary is toxic. The President should lead Congress or defer to Congress without the Judiciary striking down legislation on issues like gun control, violence against women, and protection of persons with disabilities.#
Hypo: a large animal that is ugly and looks like an American politician or a SLAM or SCAM — a “role model” (taken from MTP, allowing GOP from Wyoming to speak and allows him to keep propagating).
Hypo-cratic is not to be confused with Hippocratic oath — or is it? Hippo is not a hypo. Or maybe Hippo-publican — the Equality State has a few too many of those. Time for a new animal symbol for these forgetful elephants?
Gun Toting Patsy
Hypo-crasy is similar to fake crazy behavior, though in American English they say crasy in a Patsy Cline-like drawl. Try singing it: “Crasy, I’m crasy, American People,” A euphemism for the few people in the United States who vote. Even more “crasy” is the Senate hypocrit from Wyoming that “Meet the Press” Chuck Todd was too weak to contain in his shallow pool. Guess the so-called neutral journal can’t deal with SCAMs.
We look to our mothers to save us from injustice and distress | Opinion
BY JANE CAPUTI, Special Contributor, Heretical Thought author of Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene
In times of greatest extremity, people cry out for their mothers. George Floyd, while being tortured and then killed by a white policeman, called out “Mama.” Hearing this, many instantly wept in recognition, as this calling to the mother touched on the universal experience of infant helplessness, need for care and the hope for succor and intervention.
In her remarkable poem “Weather,” Claudia Rankine notes that the ongoing uprisings responding to systemic racism, police brutality and a gamut of related injustices are a continuing continuation of that crying out to a mother. This call is for the restoration of values of community, reciprocity, sharing, equity, caring, fairness, nourishment, love and continuance, which are very different from those of a father-first or patriarchal culture.
Patriarchal values include authority, dominance, punishment and violent enforcement. These manifest broadly in the national symbolic father figure, Donald Trump. The 45th president stands his ground as a proudly unmasked proponent of white and male supremacy. His followers cheer the rule of someone with “balls” — tough, straight, manly and white, evincing a will to hurt, and with a sure sense of his own impunity. Trump famously bragged that if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he would get away with it. I doubt he was thinking of that “someone” as being anyone like himself or his family.
The same patriarchal values are manifestly operative in the death of George Floyd. The white policeman killed Floyd in full view of others. He must have known that a young woman was recording him. Nonetheless, he probably expected impunity as his birthright and because he was an official enforcer of the hierarchy.
By contrasting mother-associated values to those of the patriarchal father, I am not setting up a binary opposition. Nor am I asserting that all mothers evince these qualities and values. Rather, I am describing a realizable ideal whereby the mother is not only a birth giver, but someone of any sex and gender who takes it as their calling to love, teach, help, lead, feed, console, protect, guide, decide and create family and community. This understanding of mothers and mothering power is common to human heritage and evident in many cultures, including Pueblo Native peoples and Black and Latinx trans and queer communities.
Mothers and their children are specifically endangered in the system that long has disregarded Black lives. A recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted a disastrous effect of pollution and climate change on Black mothers and babies. Environmental racism enforces a reality where Black people live disproportionately in air-polluted areas. That, coupled with higher temperatures, puts pregnant women at risk of delivering premature, underweight or stillborn babies. Environmental injustices are the responsibility of the mostly white father figures who control world finance, corporations and militaries. Too often, it is just business as usual to exploit and poison peoples’ air, water, land, labor and natural resources. This, just as surely as a knee to the neck, chokes out life.
The assault against mothers extends outward to the planet, whose ancient and still telling name is Mother Earth. The conjoined philosophical, spiritual and practical meanings of that appellation is that all of us (human and non-human) issue from a common source, are connected, mutually interdependent and essentially equal — worthy of love, respect, care, safety and living in conditions that allow flourishing. This is the same message of all social justice movements.
The crisis of injustice — including racial, environmental, and sex- and gender-based — is all at once personal, community and planetary. As the righteous global uprisings demanding an end to systemic racism make clear, the time is now for a collective call to the mother. Mama. Call her. Act in her name.
Jane Caputi is the author of Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, published by Oxford University Press, 2020 in the Heretical Thought series, edited by Ruth O’Brien
Getting away from it all (i.e. the GOP). Or are we looking for GOP game two years early. We’re scouts. No Dick Cheney here. And more importantly no shotgun to kill quails or shoot your friends in the face. This requires a bit of history. I remember laughing with the New Yorkers’ “about town” piece by Larissa Macfarquhar on shooting your friends in the face etiquette. Let’s hope Anti-Presidency President Trump doesn’t shoot Pence figuratively of course next week. I’d replace him, if I were him, to add a little jolt to their party.
Eugenics 101 more than a centennial earlier, now that we’ve Eugenics.2.o under Anti-Presidency President Trump. Visiting Yellowstone brought back all the memories about how many presidents, let alone social movement leaders from Teddy Roosevelt to Oliver Wendall Holmes (Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough” in 1927 and Margaret Sanger of Planned Parent (sterilize the poor immigrants) to Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story – Yellow Wall Paper pitting progressive to radical white women against women of all colors.
Buying and reading “Alice Roosevelt Longgworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker” by Stacy Cordery got me thinking about how her bitterness was reserved not for eugenics but her father on a personal level. Surprise, surprise TR and his New Nationalism were reminiscent of the Anti-Presidency President Trump. Trump’s new nationalism is a bit scarier. While his neglect of Alice reveals his sexism, misogyny and “tough” love which is really code for hating all those who are weak – and not privileged (i.e. SLAMs, SCAMs and SLIMs) Indeed Mary Trump gives evidence of her Uncle Donald’s perversity since in the way he treated his mom, who broke bones all the times, spent alot of it in a hospital bed in their house and in hospitals shows where all his ugly neos and isms come from. Teddy, at least, got his own body in shape. Is this better, I wonder?
I am certainly not in Portlandia. Trying to load my personal photos in a location more than the 5-block radius my son must abide by as a no-go zone after being booked by the Feds, I discovered that almost all my photographs are blocked for “security” reasons.
While I’m not surprised that our Anti-Presidency President Trump tasks the Feds to beat up journalists, I am not surprised that this is not allowed. (Double negative intended.) The better question is: Why would Anti-Presidency Trump allow anyone to take pictures?
A bit surprised Trump missed the irony, though, of tasking all these Feds to protect the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. The irony drips and we don’t even need a statue. Misogyny first? Men first, even when Anti-Presidency Trump has a great Republican for law and order-bashing moment where he could get us all looking at disgraced 6-term liberal Republican Senator Hatfield assaulting so many of his female employees that he resigned almost as quickly as liberal Democratic Senator Al Franken from Minnesota?
Thought the alt-right was supposed to be so alt, even their young (or is he just so sloppy?) don’t get the irony that Hatfield’s not exactly a General Lee, but he should go. Why don’t they jump all over the hypocrisy of the old alt-left-and the Christie Todd Whitman Republicans for the Rule of Law? Why don’t the likes of @AndyNgo note that the 114 Feds (staying at the Marriott) are protecting a building named after a 30-year-serving “supposedly liberal” Republican Senator Hatfield, who left in disgrace? (His embarrassed wife. Antoinette, has quite a few things named after her a bit up the hill.)
I can only hope #MeToo would denounce him, given how many women he sexually harassed and assaulted during his career, ending in 1995. Part of the disgraced President Bill Clinton crowd.
Besides, I’m not here as a journalist but as a woman (mother) and an academic, who has had so many #MeToo moments that I don’t tell my graduate students so as not to discourage them from entering the academy. (My sons tell me that the reason they have so many girlfriends is that they are not “as****les” so not only the women but their mothers seemed to love them.)
Once the Feds jumped my second son and started flagging his mug shot everywhere (so he’d get beaten up by the likes of @AndyNgo and his crowd, I guess), I got on a plane despite being vulnerable as a PwD in a pandemic (having chronic disabilities and illnesses does tend to make a person vulnerable). My son’s brother already got beaten up and mugged by the Kent State PD in Ohio. I was thankful he didn’t end up in a coma, like the other protester against the gun-toting crowd at Kent State called into action again by a misogynistic alt-right woman, if memory serves well.
Talk about universities and the police — this is at least one tiny area where we could #defundthepolice #PortlandProtests as we get them off our grounds. With more Police Departments (PDs = 18,000) than McDonald’s (13,800) in the U.S., this will be hard.
While the city on the Columbia River is still sleeping, check out #portlandprotest photos from last night in July 31 to August 1, 2020 morning.
Quick Observations: Maybe Trump could learn a thing or two from the mail in Oregon (ballot-box mail). The name Pioneer Court sounds odd, but that’s if you’re coming from Manhattan. Oregon had an overtly racist state Constitution that was never tested in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Also, so what if the mayor got hit with a bit of pepper spray or tear gas? City Hall is literally across the street and one park away from the three federal buildings. So basically it means Mayor Ted Wheeler went outside City Hall. Wish I knew that before heading West.
#portlandprotest The Apple and Louis Vuitton luggage stores seem to want to have it all, upset about the loss of their goods but now letting #portlandprotest decorate their empty store fronts. Is this so Apple left-libertarians like Tim Cook or the late Steve Jobs couldn’t relate, or since they can’t relate?
I remember reading that in 2000 Matt Bai shows that they spent virtually nothing on lobbying and now 2020 they spend more than oil and gas lobbyists. Where is Christopher Buckley when you need him to update his movie?
Men don’t follow the rules; they make the rules. And by rules I mean political rules that do determine economics or the market, let alone society (norms, beliefs, values, et al.). Though women in power get to dictate in a multitude of directions (which is why they get called “uppity bitch” all the time). (My partner does not know what color of shoes to wear to what function.)
Put differently, SMIGS (straight male, Ivy, gender speak), instead of mugs (not to be confused with maiden names), who are not all smug (who again don’t know how to pair maidens with mugs any more than Ivies and their sisters — colleges that is).
At least my mug is not smug. He may have gone Ivy, and the only one in the largest city once controlled by the Dutch (New Netherlands), but he wasn’t about to attend HPY (our license plate – Harvard-Princeton-Yale connection, though we had no intention of being part of the “H’s: when it came to license plates).
My partner also helped me with SLAMs and SCAMs, though a great colleague thought this was insulting to men. With a 50 percent admission rate for legacy, we are talking about a very small group of smug people, and only one gender who could get in. Not only my partner but first generation of any nationality, let alone religion or tradition, or mixed first generation of any kind has this high of an admissions rate. (CUNY has a much lower admissions rate, in effect, than Harvard, Go figure.)
How do I know this? I went from CPS (Capitol Page School) to CMC (Claremont Men’s College), where they tried to “GCO” us (Get C-word Out). This is similar to the Princeton University Press book ”Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation.
A better way to look at gender, or women as the most trod-upon gender, is that when we enter the institution we make it stronger — intellectually first and foremost. No more need for Gentleman’s C’s. Having been disappointed by my mother’s notion that I only had to “earn” a Gentleman’s C, I was happy that I got into CMC instead of an all-female sister school, or the Western equivalent nearby. She transferred from Mills to Berkeley and regretted it. I got in via transfer and decided against going. I preferred understanding how socialism succeeded in the former Yugoslavia rather than attending a university with more men. I didn’t even accept an invitation to be the prototype or the type of professor — University Professor — since I found California less diverse than, yes, NYC, even though it is a one-Ivy town. UC Berkeley, or Cal, is over 85 percent privately funded with a public purpose, so where better to hide your former superiority to Harvard?
Before I forget, though I haven’t found the citation to this day to “Gov-Speak,” a Harvard thesis, MA thesis, or dissertation that gave us the rules of Gov-Speak, which is to say male speak. And while I’m the third professor in my 11-generation family, I’m only the second one who addresses religion. The first helped found Brown, was George Washington’s aide-de-camp, and practiced “pro-fessing,” not confessing, when he was a prof back in the 1790s. So the first prof in my family was a prof of religion. Back then Brown and other institutions were “liberal” (i.e. secular). Not only did I assume that this meant the religion professor helped clean Washington’s boots, but that the town he professed in must have been Princeton or New Brunswick, not Providence, Rhode Island. Being from a radical county of a radical state — New Jersey — (which allowed women to vote for a nanosecond or from the 1790s until 1807) — he helped found the community with Native Americans from one sovereign nation.
Anarchy finally caught up with Netflix. There is no such thing as an out-of-wedlock child, let alone “illegitimate,” but there is a parentless child, at least genetically. We live in an “on” world (i.e. computers have no or difficult to find on/off switches. Remember the radio?!). The surveillance state is old news.
More importantly, we now have genetically parentless children. This is to say it is not just government-sanctioned surveillance any more than it is a state or states that deem a child legitimate or illegitimate, like Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.
FYI, my book from 2005’s title is Bodies in Revolt, anticipating this situation by 15 years. Now the title is quoted back to me on Netflix, no less, or was it Acorn — in any case it is from the English empire (either Australia, Scotland, or England).
I gave this book the subtitle an “ethic of care” or bodily fluidity (it’s in the text) not necessarily from nature or requiring any performativity (i.e. Judith Butler). Stateless, genetically-less, “clon”-ish Bodies in Revolt are not revolting bodies.
The state is not only useless. The state is not only managed by state-managers, but the state of the state and the world at large more than sovereign and powerful states (i.e. empires) are not just order-less but facilitate a wonderful notion of boundary-less-ness that is transformative yet the form here means “many” (e.g. asexual, not sexual, can become a performative “they.” I too am “they.”*
* Fred and Theo accept my formation, though Max does not.
Where would our former New Yorker, or any of his loved ones, take a turn, looking for a bit of freedom of — no, oops — peace of mind? Lafayette Park? Church? A temple, or how about a mosque, a revival tent where they do indeed speak in tongues (not some Hollywood version of it, I mean the real Weedpatch kinda thing)? It certainly wouldn’t be my mom’s alma m. on that awful Left Coast. Nor even inland, where extended “folks” got Ronald Reagan to take a turn and visit, less than 100 miles from Los Angeles, and 30 minutes off the 99.
It would be the whitest park of all, in NYC. Now I could go gather data. Instead, I went straight to the source: CPPD (one Central Park PD), not to be confused with all the other PDs, even in NYC.
Let me digress one more minute — did you know there are fewer McDonald’s in the United States of America than there are PDs? I know at least where the two McD’s are within 3 miles of my apartment, but not where 2 or 4 of my PDs are. (13,800 McDonald’s and 18,000 police departments.). This is of course why it’s easier to reform McDonald’s than law and order, let alone the police.
Here’s what I was: hot and bothered, bothered enough to go ask not one person in one building in the park but three, to go find one of the Central Park’s PDs (and of course get thrown out for asking for badges and IDs and names. I did get two of three). And here’s what the gentlemen officers told me (after the white one called me a racist, since I referred to the people outside that I counted as whizzing by with the fewest masks on, or should I say covering their noses while perspirating).
Clearly, this poor officer has not heard of whiteness, white supremacy, or even Zadie Smith’s white labels in one of her novels. More importantly, all three men tried to tell me that Central Park has no rule about masks, only social distancing. So we can run/walk/jog/cycle in a space that holds very few people following social distancing. Sweat is flying, mouths open, moisture of all kinds, and yet Mayor de Blasio has the gall to ask us not to wear masks and social distance in outdoor funerals and demonstrations? Is this because Central Park is not only white, it’s Trump’s Peoples’ Park?
I can’t sing like Carol Nackenoff (terrific APD scholar) — though, being a PwD (Person with a Disability) since 1993, and one who has been “self-identifying**” and no longer plays the oboe (and certainly not on our rooftop terrace, though that’s where I hope to develop my diaphragm some day), Pilates and breathing — this is my singing.
Before I had the strength to do this, I tried to start every day with a laugh. Well, a former SUNY Geneseo professor in speech pathology, specializing in cognitive and linguistic psychology, helps keep the “sisterhood” in laughs that help me exercise my lungs — one of the exercises many can do who live in Manhattan apartments. Thanks, Joanie!
Given her speciality, I plan on deferring to her “laugh judgment” — for getting at least one of the many gut-wrenching laughs I need for my diaphragm exercise each day. Plus, it has the added bonus of preparing students who will be taking my class on the American Presidency — and will have to face the masculinity of the “Commander-in-Chief” (see below).
After you read below, remember you are only imagining a she/he/they as the last exercise. After all, we will have reviewed all the ways American Presidents have rarely treated anyone other than SLAMs and SCAMs (straight liberal Anglo-American men and straight conservative Anglo American men) fairly. Put differently, this is to say, many people who do not or are not SLAMs and SCAMs. (The “identify” part is there, you guessed it, since many white, straight, radical, liberal, moderate, or conservative men do not subscribe to the patriarchy. Similarly, many women do (more white women, to be sure). Plus, as my mother always said, women keep women from the dinner table where the straight white men of all political stripes are. Though if you watch Mrs. America, they do do lunch.
American Presidency Page (soon)
I like the explanation after the acronym, many of my colleagues, friends and family will tell you. This gives you creative license and people listen more to this than to the really terrible “disabled” person, and I’m bored with the debate about saying “a person with a disability” (as if any one person has only one identity 🙂 )
At minute 37:33 a ballet dancer appears in Swarthmore’s Sunday Services. Carol’s voice is low for soprano. The whole service was pulled together virtually by they music director. This is inspiring.
In these trying time, singing, as Carol, does not only strengths her lungs giving them the plasticity or strength to fight off the COVID-19. Whats more you can put a beautiful vision to the music to inspire us all.
Lights and Camera — Sunshine Laws and Shining Lights.
Few national political institutions open their doors to audio and camera and then shut them back down again, no matter how long our historic pandemic lasts.
Long before I knew that William Howard Taft designed the 1930 Supreme Court building and helped pass some of the most important reforms as the Chief Justice (his preferred position over the presidency), I got to wander the halls of the House of Representatives as a page in the late 1970s. I tried not to spend too much time underground (so I got stuck at the end of the day with errands as punishment, which was fine by me).
We went to school in the Cupola of the Library of Congress. I got to be the M.C. with the majority leader and future (now seen as corrupt) Speaker of the House, Jim Wright — who looked at me like I was “crazy” for suggesting that his tip to me would be to “imagine everyone in their underwear.”
Oh, and Jimmy Carter had already tipped my hat in the Rose Garden after I ratted out the corruption of the Capitol Page School. At the State of the Union address, my own congressman got drunk and called me “Ruthie” and we all lifted a bit of the new carpet for our scrapbooks, knowing that television was next.
I had to plead with my mother two years in a row, and Congressman William Ketchum finally gave us a couple of minutes and told her to let me apply. I’d never win the essay contest — he had no seniority, he had no standing — and this was the better way to shut me up.
I had the feeling that he felt sorry for my mom, though he was far from the first authority figure trying to shut me up — that distinction goes to the junior-high principal when I was 12, and before that to my mother’s siblings and her father. Plus I got to interview Ronald Reagan after he got denied the nomination in 1976 and the family thought that was a coup. I could only see how purple his hair really was.
And by the time I prepared to go to Claremont Men’s College — while our relatives established Brown University (in its pre–Rhode Island days) — Ketchum was dead (dropped dead on the tennis court). Then Congressman Chuck Grassley called my mom to say she should be proud of me.
We got briefed by the CIA, the FBI, and other types of security to watch out for cockroaches tossed down from the galley, and to look out for big and small packages that might carry explosives — we were, after all, overseen by the office of the Doorkeeper.
My mother’s bargain was that I agreed to be banned from going to any “corrupt” East Coast establishment, especially the Ivies. (Most of the 125 pages chose to go to “the city” or “the country,” which in California means Stanford or Cal, respectively; it had a different meaning on the East Coast.) The agreement was: no application to the dangerous-for-women Stanford, and why would you want to go to a college filled with engineers? No going to her alma mater, UC Berkeley; I could transfer there, but I decided going to England and Yugoslavia would be more fun than heading up to northern California.
My mom wanted me to go to Scripps (she regretted going to Cal and leaving Mills). It was only by the skin of my teeth on the campus interview that the Claremont-wide student tour guide said Claremont Men’s College was a better place for me, being interested in politics.
I, for one, will watch this even if I don’t watch the two hours of White House TV, DJT (reverse acronym, since I can’t punish my fingers to type the words).
PSC72009/Hist74900/WSC 81000-10Spring 2020*Gender, Race, and American Political Development:American Dream or American Dread?
Tuesdays 11:45 AM-1:45 PM until March 10, then remote via Slack (see announcements)
David Waldstreicher 5411.09Office Hour Tues 2:00-3:00 (remote and by appointment)
Ruth O’Brien 5200.01 Office Hour Tues. 2:00-3:00 (remote, and by appointment)
Course Overview:This course examines to what extent, in what ways, are exceptionalist understandings of U.S. political traditions a problem or a solution? Do accounts that stress race, or gender, or the confluence of the two, provide a necessary or sufficient theory or counter-narrative of political development? Do frameworks developed in European politics, in critical theory, in postcolonial thought, or in domestic vernaculars comprehend the roles of race and gender, or their relationship to each other, in the political past and political time now? What kinds of analytical scholarship and storytelling have been adequate to the task? Finally, given the recent resurgence of angry and martial rhetoric at the center of national politics, how might we understand the relationship between the revolutionary or Enlightenment dreams of justice, peace, freedom and progress, on the one hand, and the recurrent dread or nightmare of decline and oppression, as shaping facts of specifically political traditions?
Written Assignments:
•Weekly brief (1-2 pp.) reflections on the readings.
•A term paper of 12-15 pages, due May 8, that may take one of the following forms:
•A historiography or “literature review” that takes as its subject one of the week’s readings and incorporates the recommend readings and possibly others as well.
•A research paper according to the expectations of one’s discipline or the course one is registered for (political science, history, women’s studies etc.)
•A proposal for a more substantial research project. Consult with one of the instructors about expectations according to disciplinary specificities.
A 2-3 page PROPOSAL for term final paper is due on March 31.
Schedule and Readings
1 Jan. 28 Introduction: a discipline counts: histories (social, intellectual, political, economic, material, cultural); APD meets APT; theories of living and dead thinkers, significant social theory.
2 Feb. 4Defining Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Concepts: Definition of APD methods (historical institutionalism, regimes, epistemic communities);APD meets APT; APT themes, including settler political theory, West/Imperialism, Migration/Immigration
Reading: Stephen Skowronek & Karen Orren, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) chps. 1-2; Rogers M. Smith, “Ideas and the Spirals of Politics: The Place of American Political Thought in American Political Development,” American Political Thought 3 (Spring 2014), pp. 126-136; Jeffrey Checkel, Jeffrey Friedman, Matthias Matthijs, and Rogers Smith, “Roundtable on Ideational Turns in the Four Sub-Disciplines of Political Science,” Critical Review, Vol. 28, Issue 2, (2016), 171-202 [Read Rogers Smith only]; Brian J. Glenn, “Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America as Method.” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 2 (2005): 234–39.
Recommended: Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 1993): 549-566; Giacomo Gambino “‘Our End Was in Our Beginning’: Judith Shklar and the American Founding,” American Political Thought 8 (Mar 2019): 202-30; Ruth Abbey, “The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists, by Lisa Pace Vetter,” American Political Thought 7 (Sep 2018): 671-73; Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016): Chapters 1-4, pp. 1-57; Paul Pierson, “The Study of Policy Development,” Journal of Policy History 17 No. 1(2005): 34-51; Robert Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change,” American Political Science Review 96, No. 4 (2002): 697-712; Rogan Kersh, “Rethinking Periodization? APD and the Macro-History of the United States,” Polity 37: 4 (Oct. 2005), pp. 513-522; Aili Mari Tripp, “Historical Perspectives in Comparative Politics and Gender Studies.” Politics & Gender 3, no. 3 (2007): 397–408.
3. Feb. 11 Settler Political Thought: Land, Dispossession, Revolution, and Empire
Reading: Aziz Rana, “Introduction: Liberty and Empire in the American Experience” The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard UP, 2010), 1-19; Jack P. Greene, “The Symbiotic Relationship between Liberty and Inequality in the Cultural Construction of Colonial British America and the United States: An Overview,” American Political Thought 5 (Fall 2016), 549-66; Craig Yirush, “The Idea of Rights in the Imperial Crisis,” Social Philosophy & Policy 29 (Jul 2012): 82-103; Carole Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 52 (Jan. 1995), 104-45.
Recommended: Aziz Rana, “Settler Revolt and the Foundations of American Freedom,” The Two Faces of American Freedom, ch. 1, pp. 20-98; Nancy Isenberg,” Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World” and “John Locke’s Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia” ch. 1& 2 of White Trash: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Class in America (Viking, 2016), 18-63; David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); Peter S. Onuf, “American Exceptionalism and National Identity,” American Political Thought 1:1 (Spring 2012), 77-99
4Feb. 18 Constituting the Republic
Reading: David Waldstreicher, “The Mansfieldian Moment: Slavery, the Constitution, and American Political Traditions,” Rutgers Law Journal 43 (2013), 471-86; Jan Ellen Lewis, “What Happened to the Three Fifths Clause: The Relationship Between Women and Slaves in Constitutional Thought, 1787-1866,” Journal of the Early Republic 37 (Spring 2017), 1-46; Joshua Simon, “Alexander Hamilton in Hemispheric Perspective,” The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought (Cambridge UP, 2017), 48-88; Gregory Ablavsky, “The Savage Constitution,” Duke Law Journal 63 (June 2014), 999-1089
Recommended:Sanford V. Levinson, “On the Inevitability of ‘Constitutional Design,’” 48 Arizona State Law Journal 249 (2016); Elvin T. Lim, “Political Thought, Political Development, and America’s Two Foundings,” American Political Thought 3 (2014),146-56; David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Max Edling, “Peace Pact and Nation: An International Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,” Past and Present 240 (Aug. 2018), 267-303; David Brian Robertson, The Original Compromise (Oxford U. Press, 2013).
5. Feb. 25 Settlers: Labor(ing)
Reading:Christopher Tomlins, “Law, Population, Labor” in Tomlins and Grossberg eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America (Cambridge UP, 2008), 211-52; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), chapters 3-4, pp. 43-92; Nancy Isenberg, “Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters” and “Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare” chapters 6 and 7 of White Trash: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Class in America (Viking, 2016), pp. 135-73; Gunther Peck, “Labor Abolitionism and the Politics of White Victimhood: Rethinking the History of Working-Class Racism,” Journal of the Early Republic 39 (Spring 2019), 89-98; Gordon, Jane Anna, and Keisha Lindsay. “Black on Red: Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century New World Black Interpretative Uses of Native American Political Experience.” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 4, no. 2 (2019): 324–51.
Recommended: Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States” (1990/2011) in New Left Review (1990) or in Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life; David F. Ericson, “The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic.” Studies in American Political Development 31, no. 1 (2017): 130–48; Dana Frank, “White Working-Class Women and the Race Question.” International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (1998): 80–102; Catherine Carstairs, “Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History.” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 203–6.
6. March 3 Democracy in Theory and Practice
Reading:Reeve Huston, “Rethinking the Origins of Partisan Democracy in the United States, 1795-1840” in Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith eds., Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War (2016), 46-71; Andrew W. Robertson, “Jeffersonian Parties, Politics and Participation: The Tortuous Trajectory of American Democracy” in Peart and Smith eds., Practicing Democracy, 99-122; Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (Yale UP, 2015), Introduction and ch. 5 (pp. 1-12, 120-43); Laura Edwards, “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (Dec. 2019), 504-23; John L. Brooke, “Patriarchal Magistrates, Associated Improvers, and Monitoring Militias: Visions of Self-Government in the Early American Republic, 1760-1840” in Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf eds., State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States (UP of Virginia, 2013), 178-217
Recommended:David Waldstreicher, “The Nationalization and Racialization of American Politics: Before, Between, and Beneath Parties, 1790-1840” in Anthony J. Badger and Byron E. Shafer eds., Contesting Democracy: Structure and Substance in American Political History, 1775-2000 (University Press of Kansas, 2001), 37-63; Aziz Rana, “Citizens and Subjects in Postcolonial America,” The Two Faces of American Freedom, ch. 2, 99-175; Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (2017); Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., “Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest Convergence, and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy” Political Research Quarterly 62, No. 4 (Dec., 2009); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (2009)
7. March 10 Settlers: Migrating and Warring
Reading:Jason M. Opal, “General Jackson’s Passports: Natural Rights and Sovereign Citizens in the Political Thought of Andrew Jackson, 1780s-1820s,” Studies in American Political Development 27 (2013): 69-85; Laurel Clark Shire, “Turning Sufferers into Settlers: Gender, Welfare, and National Expansion in Frontier Florida,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (2013); Anna O. Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—Immigration Federalism and the Early American State.” Studies in American Political Development 28, no. 2 (2014): 107–28; Paul Frymer, “‘A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours’: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 12: 1 (March 2014), pp. 119-144
Recommended: Michael Paul Rogin, “Liberal Society and the Indian Question,” Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975), 3-15; Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2011), especially ch. 1 and 5; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2010); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
———————- Remote Instruction begins via Slack
8. March 17 Racial Orders, Mobility, and (Second) Civil War/Revolution/Reconstruction
Reading:Van Gosse, “Racial Orders in the United States, 1790-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic, forthcoming Spring 2020; Gautham Rao, “The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 26 (Spring, 2008), pp. 1-56; Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (2016), Introduction and ch. 2 “Becoming Mobile in an Age of Segregation,” pp. 1-9, 44-75; Amy Dru Stanley, “The Sovereign Market and Sex Difference: Human Rights in America” in Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, American Capitalism: New Histories (Columbia UP, 2018), 140-69.
Recommended: Gautham Rao, “The State the Slaveholders Made: Regulating Fugitive Slaves in the Early Republic” in T. Freyer and L. Campbell eds., Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands in the Age of Emancipation (Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), 88-108; Kate Masur, “State Sovereignty and Migration Before Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (Dec. 2019); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998); Carole Shammas, “The Household’s Civil War in an Era of Domestic Bliss,” A History of Household Government in America (UP of Virginia, 2001), ch. 5, pp. 108-44;l Woody Holton, “Equality as Unintended Consequence: The Contracts Clause and the Married Women’s Property Acts,” Journal of Southern History (May 2015), pp.313-340; Laura Edwards, “Reconstruction and the History of Governance” in Gregory Downs and Kate Masur eds., The World the Civil War Made (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 22-45; Aziz Rana, “Freedom Struggles and the Limits of Constitutional Continuity” 71 Md. L. Rev. 1015 (2012); William A. Blair, “Vagabond Voters and Racial Suffrage in the Jacksonian Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (2019), 569-87.
9. March 24 Manifest Domesticity & Imperialism
Reading:Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005),Intro and ch. 1; Desmond S. King, and Rogers M. Smith, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005): 75–92; Carol Nackenoff, “The Private Roots of American Political Development: The Immigrants’ Protective League’s ‘Friendly and Sympathetic Touch,’ 1908–1924.” Studies in American Political Development 28, no. 2 (2014): 129–60; Eileen McDonagh, The Motherless State, Women’s Political Leadership and American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Chp. 6; Mark W. Van Weinen, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “A Suggestion on ‘The Negro Problem,’” American Literary Realism 48 No. 1 (2015): 25-39.
Recommended:Gretchen Ritter, “Gender and Politics over Time.” Politics & Gender 3, no. 3 (2007): 386–97; Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581-606; Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease Cultures of United States Imperialism (Duke University Press, 1993) excerpts
10. March 31 Regressive Progressives
Reading:Alexander Sanger “Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: Reproductive Freedom for All?,” Hypatia 22 (2007): 210-17; Priscilla Yamin, “The Search for Martial Order: Civic Membership and the Politics of Marriage in the Progressive Era,” Polity, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), 86-112; Julie Novkov, “Bringing the States Back In: Understanding Legal Subordination and Identity through Political Development,” Polity, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 2008), pp. 24-48; Yvonne Pitts, “Disability, Scientific Authority, and Women’s Political Participation at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of Women’s History, 24 (2012): 37-61; Adolph Reed, “DuBois’s ‘Double Consciousness’: Race and Gender in Progressive Era American Thought.” Studies in American Political Development 6, no. 1 (1992): 93–139; 93–139.
Recommended: Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives,” American Quarterly 55 (2003): 61-88; Thomas C. Leonard, “More Merciful and Not Less Effective”: Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” History of Political Economy, 35 (2003): 687-712; Randall Hansen and Desmond S. King, “Eugenic Ideas, Political Interests, and Policy Variance: Immigration and Sterilization Policy in Britain and the U.S.” World Politics 53 (2001): 237-63; Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York University Press, 2006); Anna Stubblefield, Ethics Along the Color Line (Cornell University Press, 2005).
11. April 7New Deal Emoting or New Deal Buy Body Building
Reading:Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2014),. Intro & ch 1; Ruth O’Brien, Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal, Ch 1; Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol, Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (Norton, 2016), excerpt; Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 255-278; Jessica Wang, “Imagining the Administrative State: Legal Pragmatism, Securities Regulation, and New Deal Liberalism.” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 3 (2005): 257–93.
RecommendedCathy J. Cohen & David R Mayhew in “A Discussion of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, By Ira Katznelson,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 708–13; Margaret Weir,“States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 2 (2005): 157–72.
Spring Recess
12. April 21 Intertwining, embedding the CRA and the creation of the EEOCt
Readings: Ira Katznelson, “When Is Affirmative Action Fair? On Grievous Harms and Public Remedies,” Social Research, Vol. 73, No. 2, (Summer 2006), pp. 541-568; Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development 1960-1972 (Oxford University Press, 1990), Chp. 5 or pp. 125-152; Sarah Staszak, “Institutions, Rulemaking, and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment,” Studies in American Political Development 24, no. 2 (2010): 168–89; David A. Hollinger, “The Disciplines and the Identity Debates, 1970-1995.” Daedalus 126, no. 1 (1997): 333-51; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John Lapinski. “Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key’s ‘South in the House,’” Studies in American Political Development 29, no. 2 (2015): 154–84.; Gloria Anzaldua, “This Bridge Called My Back” in This Bridge Called My Back: The Gloria Anzaldua Reader (Duke University Press, 2009), excerpt; Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, Back Women, Rape and Resistance, a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, prologue or pp. xv-xxii.
RecommendedIra Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005); S. Taylor, “The Body Is Not an Apology” (2013, March),https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7lKPdh_y-8 ;
13. April 28 Righting the Right under the Civil Rights Many Movement
Reading:Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, revised ed. 2015), selections; Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (Simon & Schuster, 2016), Lewis Powell memorandum excerpt; Kundai Chirindo, “Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Approaches to the Obama Presidency,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 19 No. 3 (2016): 491-504; Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party and the Battle for American History (Princeton University Press, 2010), Prologue; Stephen M. Engel, “Developmental Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Politics: Fragmented Citizenship in a Fragmented State,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 2 (2015): 287–311.
RecommendedThomas B. Edsall, Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Ruth O’Brien, Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), Chp. 3 and Epilogue; Andrew Marantz, Anti-Social, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopias and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (2019), (Identity Evropa) Chps. 12 and 27; Mark, Neven “Nixon Loyalists, Barry Goldwater, and Republican Support for President Nixon during Watergate.” Journal of Policy History 29, no. 3 (2017): 403–30.
14. May 5 Trump: A Departure?Reading: Students brainstorm readings
IdeaImpact.org’s project “Spiritual Sisterhood across States”
welcomes you. Until I get conversant with Zoom and lick this COVID-19 fully, we hope to begin with 12ish participants to whom we have extended invitations. Our initial topic will be how we are all coping in light of this isolating, alienating pandemic. We could all benefit from 45 minutes of discussing and sharing once a week/month/whatever helps. Think book club, only this will be a virtual coping club.
While we are not all girls and women, we are all sisters in openness. Spiritual Sisterhood Across States is for all those who are authentic and honest, and seek to understand or are searching for the nexus of their own epistemology/ontology, or what Socrates called “Know Thy Self.” In common theoretical lingo — try situated-ness.
Spiritual Sisterhood Across States could well appeal to atheists, agnostics, or those who study or find fascinating all the different religious traditions over time (three dominant world religions, such as mainline and non-mainline Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and of course Zen, Atheism and Agnosticism). This spiritual sisterhood is inclusive of all peoples in all ethical, spiritual, and religious traditions across all continents.
We are excluding those who believe in harming any group or category of peoples, forms of life, fauna and flora.
We’ve sent out the first round of invitations to those we think might be interested initially. We hope to expand, though we must figure out logistics to do that.
And by all means, please do not think this is limited to girls or women or trans — it’s those who practice some form of the Society of Ethical Culture’s “Deeds before Creeds” ethics that are inclusive of all bodies (or peoples), no matter how many different intersecting, overlapping identities they embody or could embody.
To that end, a current picture, space, email and phone number will be required to guarantee that our space remains open and safe. There will be zero tolerance of people, ideas or thoughts who profess white supremacy, white nationalism, other nationalisms, misogyny, institutional sexism, sexism, racism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-atheism as well as anti-agnosticism.
Good Deeds over Creeds is accepting of all peoples, all genders, all sexualities and non-sexualities, races, ethnicities — excluding white supremacists, supremacists, misogynists, sexists, racists, nativists, xenophobes, homophobes, abilists, and any other artificial human hierarchies or institutionalizations. (Note: auto-correct keeps changing “othering” to “mothering” haha). Also it is not limited to academics.
So if you’re interested in joining once we get Zoom up and working for break out groups, please identify your “hood,” culture, tradition, religion, set of ethics, or what you most call the intersection of your ontology/epistemology over time or from an experiential perspective. Drop me an email with the subject line “Spiritual Sisterhood Across States” at ruthobriencunygc@gmail.com.
To throw myself out there first, here is a short selection of ideas and thoughts from people, in books and in institutions or programs that I have read, edited, written, or heard. They greatly influenced my own ontology/epistemology nexus, helping me better “know” myself.
Been quiet for quiet some time. Out of deference to the President? No. Out of respect to this nation, he, Trump, Trumped, No. Borised? Blond locks unite? No? White locks and blond locks unite?
More mundane than that. Getting lots of my own work done.
Sure, I’m editing books and we’ve got some FABULOUS ones coming down the pike. Indeed, I’m behind in presenting Max Tomba’s Insurgent Universality, which came out just this fall.
Sure, I’m getting my own book written — 385 years of heretical women — my direct descendants or relatives, starting with Penelope who is not only scalped, impaled, left for dead, rescued, all on Sandy Hook where my sons learned their colonial history 400 years later. Then, she is sold or traded back to the Dutch, and marries her second Englishman (her first was scalped beside her and had the audacity to die in Jersey), and the fun begins — she’s one of the original 400 New Yorkers, and she’s got quiet a presence and even gets sued — when few women (certainly not the English) had standing. Good for her. Then, after cultivating the most land in Gravesend with her “man”, bearing two digits worth of children, they decide to skedaddle back to Jersey, when the English invade (again) where again she seeks shelter with the matrilineal, matriarhical, all around good gal tribe that helped her, helps her and her brood and crew, where again as a fam. they cultivate the most land … (Key here is not that they “own” the most as property is theft, or that’s what Penelope’s sisters taught her. To be continued….
No. I’ve been busy practicing my performances — I like to call them 1bottom or 1 body commotions with consequence. A sit down strike against those who bar PwD passage, or access, or acccommodation. It’s so common it’s almost trite.
Reading up on the Anthropocene for Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, I encountered repeated pat phrases about humans (really Man in Wynter’s sense) now being “the dominant force of change on the planet.” Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen even averred: “It’s no longer us against “Nature.” Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.”
The COVID-19 virus is laughing all the way to the emergency room. Nature/Earth, the formidable and indomitable force whom I understand as the “Mutha’” is the actual decider. She/They is disrespected, foundationally, in the Anthropocenic world that Man is trying to (re)make in his own image. Climate change, extinctions, pandemics; these are neither the wrath of a mythic punitive deity or a rape-avenging femme fatale. All those empty shelves in the grocery story serve as a vivid metaphor for what really going on — the withdrawal of the “Mutha’” – the force/source upon whom all of us depend for absolutely everything.
Ruth began our blogging dialogue (blogalogue?) with a Ruthian swing for the provocative fences: “American Political Development is history at its worst. At least, that’s what some historians who reside in the United States and teach in American history might say about our field — it’s “’presentist.’”
Time for me to reciprocate. Sometimes history is political analysis at its worst: not presentist but past-ist. As in, every historical moment is unique, and all comparisons are ideological if not teleological. In some historians’ hands, the result of past-ism is to both kneecap political arguments they don’t like and preserve history for those who know “the facts.” Facts which, on scrutiny, turn out to be made significant by interpretation.
I have objected to this tendency recently in an essay in The Boston Review about the 1619 Project controversy. One of the historians with whom I take issue, Sean Wilentz, has been doing the same thing with respect to Trump: insisting that Trump is de novo, has no historical parallels, and certainly not Sean’s main man, Andrew Jackson. This has the added benefit of shifting any blame away from Wilentz’s own political favorites, the Clintons. In other words, sometimes the insistence on historical incomparability is itself a political gambit.
But today I’d like to illustrate the important (and really, unavoidable) use of historical comparisons to illuminate and argue about the present by pointing to a 500 word op-ed, “Think the US is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history,” published on Feb. 14 by the Civil War historian Gary Gallagher on The Conversation, and republished by the History News Network today: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174331 [many annoying links within his article stripped out below]. Here’s Gallagher:
” It has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past. As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century.
Between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army at Appomattox in April 1865, the nation literally broke apart. More than 3 million men took up arms, and hundreds of thousands of black and white civilians in the Confederacy became refugees. Four million enslaved African Americans were freed from bondage. After the war ended, the country soon entered a decade of virulent, and often violent, disagreement about how best to order a biracial society in the absence of slavery.
To compare anything that has transpired in the past few years to this cataclysmic upheaval represents a spectacular lack of understanding about American history. A few examples illustrate the profound difference between divisions during the Civil War era and those of the recent past.
Today, prominent actors often use awards ceremonies as a platform to express unhappiness with current political leaders. On April 14, 1865, a member of the most celebrated family of actors in the United States expressed his unhappiness with Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head.
Today, Americans regularly hear and watch members of Congress direct rhetorical barbs at one another during congressional hearings and in other venues. On May 22, 1856, U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into bloody insensibility on the floor of the Senate chamber because Sumner had criticized one of Brooks’ kinsmen for embracing “the harlot, Slavery” as his “mistress.”
Recent elections have provoked posturing about how Texas or California might break away from the rest of the nation. But after a Republican president was elected in 1860, seven slaveholding states seceded between Dec. 20 and Feb. 1, 1861. Four of the remaining eight slaveholding states followed suit between April and June 1861. Americans were thus forced to face the reality that the political system established by the founding generation had failed to manage internal fractures and positioned the United States and the newly established Confederacy to engage in open warfare.
The scale and fury of the ensuing combat underscores the utter inappropriateness of claims that the United States is more divided now than ever before. Four years of civil war produced at least 620,000 military deaths – the equivalent of approximately 6.5 million dead in the United States of 2020.
The institution of slavery – and especially its potential spread from the South and border states into federal territories – was the key to this slaughter because it provoked the series of crises that eventually proved intractable. No political issue in 2020 approaches slavery in the mid-19th century in terms of potential divisiveness.”
Like the military historian he prides himself in being, Gallagher focuses on the horrifying, fratricidal violence of the Civil War, and rightly extends that back a few years to the caning of Sumner. He admits that the cause was slavery, the divide sectional. Surely we have nothing so violent, and no divisions so irrepressible, now. So comparisons of culture wars and party battles to real wars are irresponsible.
Gallager’s political motives seem benign enough. We could do with fewer pronouncements of doom and even fewer denunciations of each other. But what if it is Gallagher who is comparing apples and oranges – in his opening gambit, comparing a declared war to the cultural and political polarization, and violence, that led to a breakdown of the political system, secession, and armed conflict? Why does he want to isolate the Civil War and its violence from the violence of slavery itself and violent resistance to it – the border wars and anti-abolitionist mobs that became so controversial? I’m glad that Gallagher is (finally; he used to downplay it) centering slavery in his understanding of the nature as well as the causes of the Civil War. But by declaring historical analogies off limits, he makes it impossible for us to see and discuss long-term developments, continuities – and precisely the ones that the recent 1619 Project of the New York Times Magazine has highlighted. I won’t even go into how the entire Civil War generation, on every side, fought their political battles with reference to the American Revolution.
Note that the excruciatingly violent counterexamples Gallagher highlights are reactions against abolition: Rep. Brooks’ caning of Sen. Sumner and proslavery actor John Wilkes Booth’s murder of President Lincoln. If today’s polarization has anything to do with structural racism, if today’s battles are being fought in particular ways because, as David Brion Davis argued in 2001 [www.stratalum.org/nytimes82601.htm] “the Confederacy’s ideological victory following the Civil War,” then it might not be such a bad idea to analyze today’s politics in light of the central event of U.S. history. How much progress has been made – will be made? How free are the free? These were the questions of the 1850s, the 1890s, and remain the questions for 2020.
What’s a SLIM? I had trouble remembering it from yesterday’s post to today. Does the “I” stand for intersectional, I asked my SLIM husband (who is slim, btw, so perhaps my muse)? Or is it interdependent? It’s different from a SLAM or SCAM, the former being better than the latter, since with a liberal there’s at least some chance he’ll get the message someday, whereas a conservative is just hopeless.
Being an added plus or “and” person (improvising extemporaneously, though happy to re- and even re-re-improvise), I realize it’s gotta be “interdependent.” After all, we live in an interdependent world, with no left or right, no true or untrue, or even lies, since everything is, after all, persuadable, so we can’t pick sides. Take a look at the billion dollars that Dad, otherwise known as President Donald J. Trump to all of us but Jared Kushner, earmarked after allegedly learning the ropes from Jared (or is it the other way around?).
It’s a topsy-turvy world. The president who spent arguably the least of his own money and still opted out of public funding for the presidency has now earmarked the most (of other people’s money) to convince his followers (his fist-throwing, enter-the-fray followers) to keep up the false narrative.
All this is to say, it’s not topsy-turvy but tricky, and tricky means we’ve all gotta learn how to be interdependent, not intersectional (which has too much to do with ID-entity or the being of our being or existence), when we’re all simply socially situated in a society that includes the polity and the market. So here’s two cheers for the interdependents who can trust each other for good, and not for bad, let alone being led down a path full of tricks, or even worse a telos. #
To call a man feminine is interpreted as insulting. Now, this is different than someone saying “act like a man.” That’s even more insulting. Even worse, you’re “thinking like a woman.” So, David, I can easily concede that my phrase “SLAMs and SCAMs” is blunt, bordering on insulting. Yet that still begs the question of how do we make analyzing, scrutinizing, thinking, critiquing in ways all attributed to women, or feminism, or at least women being woke by feminism, universal? Or rather a language that boys, girls, women, and men will use? What is the vocabulary when we would like to observe and add our kudos to a boy or a man, or anyone of privileged status who acted like a person who made an ethic of care universal? Or that same person who made a “non-manalyzing” scholarly observation?
To be sure, blunt phrases like SCAMs and SLAMs can be off-putting. And perhaps I dampen the dialogue when I list privilege of straight conservative Anglo-Saxon men and straight liberal Anglo-Saxon men (SCAMs and SLAMs), aside from a predilection to try to shock or shake people into thought. These acronyms serve two purposes. Do-gooder liberal men are just as bad as, if not worse than, conservatives in exerting their privilege and reducing access to all those not sharing their privileged identity. Why? We know that by virtue of being, acting, doing what SCAMs do they are predators and probably at least complicit in rape culture. I’m challenging someone to give me a different vocabulary — and it’s more likely to come from SLAMs than SCAMs (unless they see the light).
When women scholars’ scholarship is heeded universally, admired by both men and women, often this proves disappointing too. This time it’s not about hope, but disappointment that so many women join the men in patriarchal thought. In many cases, though certainly not all, women and men use the male-dominated language of scholarship (i.e. “manalyzing”). There is no s/he said. (No need for the He said/She said, since after all it should always be the intersubjective and simple s/he said. All people fight within themselves. No one has a static gender, race, ethnicity, let alone body.
Nor do I like the scholarship that simply says “Well, what about the feminist perspective?” What? First there is no “feminist perspective,” as this scholar got it so wrong last night at the GC in criticizing Max Tomba’s exciting book Insurgent Universality in the Oxford University Press, Heretical Thought Series, which I solo edit. There are feminism(s), as another fascinating scholar of sociology at Hunter and the GC explains, Lynn Chancer, titled her latest book
Identity-speak should be no more exclusionary than Harvard’s “Gov Speak,” the language the Harvard Government Department got criticized for uttering years back that was tantamount to the exclusion of all but SLAMs and SCAMs. Sure, it is easy to say we do not speak who we are. One would be hard pressed to find an essentialist, these days in the academy, at least. At the same time, it’s hard to find a non-essentialist — or a scholar — be they man or woman, who does not “manalyze.” Manalyzing is practiced equally by male and female scholars. It’s a criticism of the academy not having a scholarly language enough to stop universalizing critique with the universality of men analyzing.
David Waldstreicher politely and appropriately called me out on SLAMs and SCAMs being a bit blunt (i.e. rude).
As the historian in this manalyzing duo, of course I feel less responsible for the limits of the field of American Political Development, more excited about how it might help compensate for some of the foibles of historians….
Yes, the lesson of Trump is that it’s corruption all the way down, corruption as a multigenerational (American Political) tradition, yet on a spiral that makes it somewhat different each time. The grandfather was all about railroad towns and hotels (brothels), and land, exploiting his fellow immigrants. The father about urban segregation and (un)creative destruction. The grandson about the simulacrum of luxury, leveraged gloss, and televised publicity as ponzi scheme. Party politics had to be the endgame because it undergirded the possibilities of profiting from infrastructure all along.
Alas, as the trigenerational story suggests, the other continuity in the Trumpian spiral appears to be the reliance on whiteness, which is why Trump so repeatedly doubles down on it, why he seized as no one else on the notion that Obama could not have possibly been born in this country. The surprise at the daily untruth or tweet covers over the primal lie of his politics, and the willingness of 40+% of voters to accept it so as not to have to accede to the other party’s kinder gentler corruption. After all, the system constantly tells us, in a democracy, origins and history don’t matter. The question is always, which of two sides are we on?
It’s funny today to hear both the president and allies trumpeting party loyalty against (Bain capitalist) Romney, when Trump ran against party and the establishment. Only a long-term approach to American politics can capture how he has recapitulated the Jacksonian art of turning from antipartisan outsider to enforcer of more party loyalty than ever, in just a few years. Partisanship relies on, feeds on, putative outsiders, sometimes in order to contain the real insurgencies. Part of Trump’s appeal is to perform and capitalize on American ambivalence about the problems that result from the normal workings of the system. It is tempting to conclude, for the moment, that he fits all too well into institutional patterns even as he shatters norms. We’ll see — and we’ll study…..
American Political Development is history at its worst. At least, that’s what some historians who reside in the United States and teach in American history might say about our field — it’s “presentist.” We throw in any American teleology, or pull any trajectory into reverse. But is it reverse engineering?
As we start from the present and move backwards, digging and delving into all those institutional nooks and crannies, tracing, mapping, and locating the so-called origins of any public policy that spans the United States, from the laws establishing the defunct ICC to the EEOC, are we really being presentist, or are we “institutionalists”? (The damn autocorrect makes me put this in quotes.) It’s not a search for APD; it’s a search for the American nation-state, or at least that cozy social-welfare policy state, which today seems like magical thinking, or (heaven forbid) what the so-called conservatives call the “nanny state?”
In fact, though, it’s not the search for the American nation-state, nor the American states. It’s closer to home than that. And aside from “manalyzing” with David Waldstreicher in the course we’re team-teaching this semester, I’d say Trump has managed to localize the nation-state — for me, that is. It’s the localization of the State — the Sovereign, not the states.
And it only makes sense, if you study corruption. From Papi Trump (the German?), to Papa Trump (the Swede, haha), and now baby Trump (not Donald J., but the one with the comb-over hair), they all bribed politicians in the states, as well as serving the State, let alone all the neighboring municipalities in greater New York. So it comes as no surprise that Penn Station would house all those lobbying the nation-state, foreigners and domestic lobbyist no matter.
After all, how did robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt have so much money after receiving so much public land? The business of America has always been business. That said, we have to remember that Trump is a developer of “real” estate (i.e. physical property). There’s no other eviction that hurts so much as what a landlord can do by making one homeless. So why do so many liberals believe Congress could ever evict Trump out of the White House?
Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity was published this fall in the Oxford University Press Heretical Thought series, where I serve as the book series editor.
Max’s book He will be presenting a lecture on this book at the Graduate Center, Thursday, February 13 at 6 PM (double check). Everyone is invited, not only the Graduate Center Community. Max’s talk will be riveting, I’m sure.
“Aims to bridge European and non-European contexts in alternative trajectories of modernity and radical political experiments
Challenges the dominant conceptualization of juridical “universalism” and proposes a conception of insurgent universality that is rooted in alternative traditions of modernity
Provides a new historical-theoretical framework in which multiple temporal layers coexist and conflict with each other.”
Several years ago, Max served as a Fellow at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center. Max left his university professorship in Italy and recently moved to the well-known, and iconic, University of California, Santa Cruz, Historical Consciousness Department.
We’ll see if we get more female politicians today. A minimum of 20 percent women, an old law-school study said, is necessary in any institution to change the agenda. In the outgoing Congress, the House has 19 percent and the Senate has 23 percent. While more women than ever have run for office, the amount of violence (i.e. death threats, harassment) is enough to turn anyone away from reading the news. I’m beginning to hear women from Hollywood to Washington start to roar.
Brilliant. Well done. Talk about lemons and lemonade. House of Cards did it. They turned Kevin Spacey’s sexual-harassment death (i.e. Netflix had the strength to fire him) into a great piece about women and the humiliation of intimate-partner violence, misogyny, and sexism. Robin Wright and Diane Lane gave powerful performances as women who like being extremely powerful and even in charge — the oligarch and the president. They are bitter rivals and — spoiler alert — both of them are going to survive, and the strongest will kill the embodiment of the system of misogyny, sexism, and intimate-partner violence.
To be sure, Michael Dobbs wrote a three-part play out of real life in Maggie Thatcher’s court and Netflix turned it into 70-odd episodes; still, it was quite masterful in that it went from being your typical inside-the-court White House drama to one that tries to slay misogyny. I could not help but wonder about the chicken and the egg when it came to the choice of Robin Wright and Diane Lane, who themselves had to fight for their own dignity in real life as they both were married to men who were accused of intimate-partner violence.
This was obviously timed to try to influence the election. New seasons used to be released in the spring, but now it’s the fall, for all those people who dive into fiction rather than watching CNN or Fox News or daring to read a newspaper that contains all the evidence that we live in a rape culture, i.e. the Trump presidency.
Congratulations, Martha! Here is the University of Chicago’s story about their faculty member and Public Square author Professor Martha Nussbaum.
As editor of the Public Square series, which has won over 17 prizes for only 9 books published over 14 years, I do not find this surprising. After all, Professor Nussbaum’s Public Square book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, was a great success in more ways than one. Not only does her work help democracy by helping to save the humanities, but the book sold exceedingly well. As Rob Tempio, the in-house Princeton University Press senior editor of Philosophy, Classics, and Political Theory, explained it to me: Many philanthropic boards and universities bought copies of Not for Profit for their whole board to make the point that is in the title — Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. It’s a vital message, and I’m glad The Public Square was able to help Professor Nussbaum spread the word.
Let the Games begin! As a nation, the United States (yes, all the states) of America (the continent we share with Canada and Central America), we have hit rock bottom — or very close to it.
Here are the Headlines: Kavanaugh (a.k.a. “the Trigger”); Democrats take Midterms; and 2020 goes to . . . the Democratic nominee, of course.
Social movements against Trump are NOW thriving. Two cheers for that.
P.S. I was sorry I missed my U.S. Capitol Page High School Reunion. I’m not going to share the graduation date, haha.
The brave woman who appeared before the Senate, Senator Rick Santorum, Mr. “Man on Dog,” was “authentic.” Before he could utter the “but,” I turned CNN off. Well, this says it all. We don’t have to hear any more. Or Brett shouldn’t have to hear any more; he needs to withdraw.
Ruth O’Brien, editor, Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination
I, for one (among the many who are now demonstrating in the #MeToo social movement), have experienced too much harassment and assault. Having gone to the local police and family courts for protection from a harasser — where if I sat in the chair I always received relief — was hard.
My last memory in the Domestic Violence Hearing Officers room less than five years ago was hearing the chains rattle on the men incarcerated in the basement below. I asked the hearing officer what that noise was and she explained: The men below were chained so that everyone in the room above could hear them.
For me, this only heightened my fear of reprisal from this man, a former husband, a father, and a respected scholar. Then I had to sign something saying that I knew I would increase my chances of being killed violently and having my sons killed if I proceeded to ask the State of New Jersey for help. Again, it was hard.
All we know now is that even Senator Susan Collins is having reservations. She can see, too, that no public servant like him should be confirmed.
Representative (now Senator) Chuck Grassley called my mother when I was 18 years old. Why? I had just graduated from the Capitol Page School, with the nation’s highest-paid teachers in terms of money per student, with a 99.999999% graduation rate not just from high school but from some of the best universities in our nation. I ratted the school out for the inferior instruction it offered.* Congressman Grassley said my mother should be proud of me for being a whistleblower — and I guess he knew what I had weathered. I don’t know.
A good friend of mine says he is evil. She is a litigator and understands how Grassley is “gaslighting” Professor Christine Blasey Ford. I agree — what could I say other than “he called my mother”? But to be honest, when he called my mother, she was not impressed, as I remember. Only impressed enough to relay the quick call. I didn’t think a thing about it until I spoke with my litigator friend (why would I?) — he became a Senator, and while he supports whistleblowers, they are largely the ones who whistle the Republican tune. Look what he’s doing to Ford now!
When it came time for college, most of my relatives faced a choice — the farm (Stanford) versus the city (Berkeley). For me, the choice was not the farm versus the city. My mom wanted me to go to a small women’s liberal-arts school, preferably the one she had attended, not one of those Seven Sisters schools. Not only the Sister schools were excluded; my mom was also down on the Ivies, even though my ancestor helped start one — a proFESSor of religion, no less, helped found Brown University by proFESSing religion at the Hopewell Academy, which later moved to Rhode Island (Anabaptist country). No one was going to the East Coast Establishment.
Meanwhile, Stanford — where they ruined women, I was told — and anything east of Los Angeles were out. So I came home, back West to California, as was appropriate. My mother managed to get me/allow me (she had no control, since I was writing my own applications far from home) to go to an all-male college that was turning co-ed. Now that was no fun -— or was it fun? Actually, I enjoyed it. It had been Claremont Men’s College, and after coeducation they found a donor whose name began with M, and it became Claremont McKenna College, preserving the CMC acronym.
But first they had to deal with the GCO Club — Get Cunts Out — of diehard misogynists. Seems kinda like the club that Brett Kavanagh would join — or was that only in high school?
Why won’t he allow the FBI to do a full investigation, anyhow? Why does he want to enter the Supreme Court with a rapist cloud over his head? After all, Clarence Thomas didn’t even speak in court for over a decade, knowing how little credibility he had/has. Who made the last phone call to Anita — his wife, no less? Wasn’t that bizarre? My only guess would be she got hammered one night and is still mad about how Clarence cheated on her — or didn’t tell her the full story that she knows/suspects, and that’s about his predilection for pornography.
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* I ratted them out despite being threatened in front of the whole school for maligning a 150-year-old institution, since I was the rat “going” over there — the Doorkeeper’s Door — and complaining that we weren’t getting enough education. All the House of Representatives pages followed the few Senate pages’ problem — that pages could no longer go to school from 6:00 to 9:00, but instead from 6:00 to 6:30 or 7:00, including the breakfast break. Then they reduced our classes to five, but we still only got as far as roll call before leaving. I was in school, yet I was learning absolutely nothing, and the principal’s and vice principal’s defense was — anyway, full circle. I ratted them out. I was not the first or the last, and it was under Speaker of the House John Boehner that they got rid of House pages in 2011.
How is $120 million different from Roger Ailes’s $45 million? Zero tolerance for media means that the harassers get rich or richer, whereas the victims of their harassment and violent sexual assault (i.e. rape) are lucky not to get blackballed from their profession or remain powerless. Even if you’re a journalist, like Ronan Farrow, they can drive you out or into a different medium. (The New Yorker being the out, and lucky for The New Yorker.)
What does this mean for the American government? Brett will not cash out, will he? Certainly the good citizen Professor Ford will be destroyed. But here’s what we can take away this morning.
The religious right is happy to practice toleration when it comes to Trump. Unlike the Catholic Church — which does give its victims real cash outs — the religious right uses its harassers to exert pressure — to get politically what they want. This story is as old as the religious right’s entry into politics (see Garry Wills’ book on Nixon).
Meanwhile, Brett has been buttering up the feds — Senators, House, etc. — for months, while they call the citizen doing the right thing having “terms.” What a contradiction in terms (i.e. hypocrisy) this is, no?
No wonder Congress got rid of House pages or jail bait before they gave in and adopted anti-harassment rules. Republican speaker John Boehner got rid of them in 2011 so the House would not have to pay the parents of these largely legacy kids (not me, though) huge settlements for harassing their own children. If that’s the situation, why would Paul let his kids be pages any more than Ted would let his?
Now-former NYROB editor Ian Buruma pledged to practice democracy after replacing longtime editor Robert Silvers, whom Buruma criticized for being monarchical. Yet, Buruma forgot that democracy includes women (which includes our sensibilities). So, by the way, does monarchy.
And when you pledge to practice democracy and then accept self-pity for sexual assaulters and harassers, it should not include sniveling self-pity. All editors should set an open and inclusive tone. Stopping women, men, or children from practicing anything in public by sexually harassing or assaulting them (and then later whining about getting caught) hinders their ability to write, publish, earn a living, and provide for their family, does it not? The self-pity of admitted harassers is offensive. Full stop.
In the United States, publishing has always been a privileged white man’s profession. Hopefully the current furor means this can and will diminish or even end — at least in this important and significant publication.
I have to admit I had not heard of rape epistemology, though I read Susan Estrich’s book Real Rape — as you can imagine, right away, or should I say the moment I knew about it and it was published — as I and another person in my nuclear family had it happen to us. (This is their story to tell). Witnessing the aftermath being washed away is almost more horrific when it happens to someone else than when it happens to you.
That said, I witnessed before I experienced — aftermath only — as for this person I was not ashamed but outraged — or at least enough to watch . . . I remember feeling powerless, and being afraid. Given the absence of clothing (i.e. pants), I figured it was a gang — so my only comfort years and years later was that mine was not. We, who were awake, were all agog.
Now, decades upon decades later — I was a child, a minor, therefore was I agog or we were encouraged — to do this was to do the “right” (i.e. wrong) thing.
Rape epistemology — as I sat there in a friendly audience of most, not all, who accepted the premises — is just remembering: Rape jurisprudence means that it was the men — fathers, sons, brothers, uncles — who were to blame.
We lived in a household with no brother, uncle, son, let alone father — had no one to ask, therefore my nuclear-family member and I simply did the right thing — not report it so as not to bring shame to THE family — THE big family or the extended nuclear family.
What I can now see — and this echoes one of my mother’s favorite expressions — is that curiosity kills cats, and we knew better than to ask — only do the right thing. In this case, the right thing for the family was to swallow it all, if you were a witness, or had gained this terrifying experience. How is this different than honor killing — this took me years and years to face — and then neotribalism said it all.
My mother made sure that we remained silent — and all did the right thing. I had an early lesson learned that I would not need for 5ish years, as my situation took that long. I was no longer a minor, nor was s/he/they.#
I woke with a start after only four hours. I had been listening to a podcast late at night, when the name of my own #MeToo surfaced. I had also seen a map of the town this week where he came from (it’s small enough that I’m sure I could track him down. Being a smart neocon, I bet he’s probably successful. Who knows? I don’t have the strength to look it up, yet).
I lived through Anita Hill’s debacle. Do we have to go through it again? I lived through Christine Blasey Ford’s nightmare. I too could not face what I knew, what every woman my age knew: that reporting leads to escalation, and escalation leads to the victim — boy, girl, woman, man — and you’re thrown out. I told about it only to intimate figures in my life — husband, boyfriends, children who came of age.
On Saturday I couldn’t look at the press. My husband, Fred, an editor who knows politics, had spared me the news of nominee Brett Kavanagh’s rape (which at that point was still an anonymous accusation) until after work on Friday. (Fred says: “I waited to tell Ruth because I knew it would disturb her, especially in view of her history, and would distract her from her work.”)
Now the question was whether it would derail his nomination. I knew the news that was released on Friday would be played out by Monday, with three possibilities in the “blame the victim” rape culture in which we live:
The information that came to light will be dismissed, and the rapist will be put on the Supreme Court. This seemed the most likely outcome on Saturday, when the story was not on the front page above the fold of theNew York Times.
The vulnerable hero will bravely come forward and will be roundly belittled and dismissed. (This is the nightmare that all persons who have been raped fear the most.)
The vulnerable hero will bravely face the nation, as Anita Hill did. She will be put on trial in the court of public opinion, and her loved ones, colleagues, and most of all she herself will have to field all the horrific comments, death threats, etc., for doing the right thing, the brave thing, that very few victims of rape can do.
It’s no excuse that “men think with their dicks” or “boys will be boys” or any other outrageous statement that a content, complicit man will say, think, or do.
How can Christine Blasey be so brave, is all I need to know. Plus two other things:
We cannot shield children from allegations that their fathers are rapists, and witnesses will testify no matter how many decades old — then it’s time for them to step back to resign for “family” reasons. (Think of your children, Brett).
Congress could institute real, national changes in laws to protect women now. Recess for Mid-terms, or no.
Enough is enough. #MeToo should now flip into #Enough. Meanwhile, Congress — Democrats and Republicans — should amend (ERA) and legislate. After all, it had to make lynching a federal crime though murder has and had always been illegal and a state and local crime.
Vice President, Pence – Please. I’m losing patience. Let’s get it over with. Out of 253 articles today, you and your willingness (along with your staff’s) to sit happily in this chair wins. You prevailed.
Hey you could be our VEEP preview. Who said the dog wags the tail? And how is this woman alone in a room with a “man?!*”
#TFA. Thanks Omarosa!! I “get-it” — the 25th Amendment, and Trump’s fear of fear or fear of his Cabinet’s fear gives me hope. #hashtag Trump’s hopeful future #THF.
Of course this means Paul will be President when you fail. Or some Speaker. Hmm… this is even more hopeful. The new Speaker will be President. First Trump, then Pence, then — not Paul or Nancy — but . . .
Who said the Democrats needed to wait to 2020 to get there?
One of my colleagues, now long retired, put it this way. Frankly, I can’t remember who said what — who gets the credit. Or who gets the blame, depending, of course, on your perspective. Anyway, the question is this: Why do Republicans own red?
When I was a U.S. congressional page for the Republicans, they wore red. Red neckties and red party dresses abounded. Later, when I switched sides, I began to relate more to my friends from the other side of the aisle. This wasn’t hard, since Tip O’Neill was the speaker of the House when I was a page, and the Republican party was so small (circa 1977–78) that my friends were pages borrowed from the other side: Southern Democrats, Blue Dog Democrats, bold Democrats, or just plain curious Democrats coming from the closest city to red that we had: San Francisco. The Republicans, in other words, did not have enough leg power, or person power, to run all their errands. So, back in the day, the Democrats were gentlemen* and would help them out — at least at the level of running errands to the House floor.
Getting back to the conversation at hand, I didn’t turn blue for long. The Democrats, I quickly learned at Claremont Men’s College, were not as, but almost as ______ (fill in the blank) boring in the absence of agents of change as the Republicans. In a two-party system, they were Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
So, I moved left. Moving left after college meant leaving the country. Going abroad, I ended up in the one country that could be counted back then as dissident, or had a dissident history — the former Yugoslavia.
Here we all embraced the red. Indeed, one of my going-away gifts was a basket of red stuff — red nail varnish, lipstick, etc. — and the biggest movie that spring, when I got to decide if I wanted my diploma to read Claremont Men’s College or Claremont McKenna College, was Reds, by Warren Beatty.
Back then, red was the color of communists — and I never quite put it together why it was also the color of Republicans.
Anyway, listening to Max Boot on a Forum podcast got me thinking: Now we do know — not why they, but at least he, wears red. And this got a laugh out of me.
It made me think: “Better dead than red” made sense to my relatives and I decided to resist my relatives with “Better red than dead.” But today’s Republicans are so anti-intellectual that you might say: “Better-read? Then dead.” Whose color is it anyway? Or are we all seeing red, knowing that some say or dance around it that our president is committing treason.
——————–
* I say gentlemanly because the House was a gentlemen’s club. We were taught that the number-one reason a woman sat in the House was because her husband had died in a plane crash. I still have yet to check the veracity of that statement.
Why do I find the liberal media so annoying?It isn’t that they’re dominant — they ARE NOT.It isn’t that they’re not critical if we want to remain a REPRESENTATIONAL democracy — they ARE.It is that they let the Republican Party elite (the fringe, the not-so-fringe, the land Repubs or Trump Land — divided into rural and urban — or the used-to-be-suburban or ruraburian).No, that’s not it either.
It’s all the room that the so-called liberal media (i.e. tepid Republicans) give to the faith-based . . . and here I won’t insult people with cognitive problems, so let’s just call them the faith-based fringe who belong in tents where so-called tongue is a language . . .
Having a Weedpatch/Santa Barbara (Buckaroo/yacht club) — heritage gives me some insight.I come from the land of opposites.And yes, you can just call it land power politics.
It’s the type of land that dictates the power that the developer (a nice word for landlord of land, buildings . . . the people who pillage, evict, and decimate whole communities) will have, which is annoying.
The liberal media should stop allowing those who have raped and pillaged this nation to keep redefining themselves.
We are all suffering from some form of Trump-induced PTSD. Emergency-room visits were up the day after 11/9, as a creative-writing friend of mine pointed out this perverse inversion of 9/11 after the presidential election of 2016. I have friends and colleagues in all disciplines — Spanish literature, comparative political thought, literary theory, interdisciplinary pedagogy taught in Dutch and international English, let alone American politics, law and society, American political development (APD), and American (or better yet, comparative) political thought (APT & CPT). We would all laugh at the buffoon if he were not so scary. When you’re terrified, you can only titter.
So, what now? I, for one, am going back in both time and thought. Like many of my friends, I have to put my head into history for a time.My sabbatical is being spent writing about American tribalism, which references merging APT/APD and CPT, though there is no CPD, since APD is CPD. Huh? Really, what I’m doing is streamlining inter- and intradisciplinary research on comparative political thought and politics and history broadly cast over eras and epochs.How do you get to comparisons that are global, given our now-embarrassing global American empire?Easy: We must go abroad and note the other perspectives, even if we don’t put them in more than our footnotes or register the comparisons with European Union nations, particularly the Netherlands.
The Dutch, after all, had more legitimacy and authority in the colonies that became the United States over 150 years later. Dutch-Anglo, not Anglo-Dutch, thought is more persuasive when you think of the founding canon in American political thought. It’s just that the English, in 1661, knocked those pesky merchants’ republican ideas out of enlightenment and post-enlightenment Anglo-American political thought. The Dutch not only predated the English, but also the English, Scottish and French Enlightenments.
This is all academese, I know, that will be explained later. For now, I must explore the history of the texts, Baruch Spinoza and heretical thought. Indeed, I saw the first book in Heretical Thought — Assembly, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — in a radical bookshop, or boekhandel, near Spinoza’s likeness where he lived in Amsterdam.My college-age son and I are not the only fans of Assembly.According to Rebecca Goldstein, it took 200 years before any scholar could comfortably cite his heretical thought.
Comparing history of thought or schools of thought — not just heretical thought or Dutch-Anglo-American political thought, where Hugo Grotius is possibly more important than William Blackstone — could be considered heresy — or not.* There are many academic and public historians, from Joyce Goodfriend to Russell Shorto, who show how the British rewrote American colonial political thought.
* The references here, I admit, are academic and yet not obscure if you follow the train of hyperlinks or references to the plethora of different or multiple schools of thought and political traditions.
Sad, mad, eating glass. Like we didn’t know this was what was going to happen? I mean, really, Trump reveres nothing. Take a quick peek at that video of Ivanka on his knee if you don’t mind feeling the creeps, again.
Okay, we knew, and that’s why so many voters tried to make sure he didn’t get elected. Then again, many SLAMs wanted to make sure she didn’t get elected.
I guess my point is: What do you expect in a two-party system nestled in a misogynistic culture? Call it rape culture if you want to be crude, not blunt.
This is what folks outside (e.g. experts from European or international arenas with their own patriarchal cultures) don’t get about the United States. Why do we put up with this? Why not pass another constitutional amendment? Have we stopped amending the Constitution?
Let’s start first with changing our culture: Equal Rights Amendment, please. If that’s too ambitious, how about resurrecting the Violence Against Women Act, and if that’s too tough, where are we? We should start with the study of American politics, no?
Now that we have a president who should not be impeached but goes so much further, and we’ve had a female candidate for president who lost not once (i.e. Democratic nomination, then general election) but twice, why is the actual study of the presidency — like math — still controlled by men? Why should American politics, particularly the study of the presidency (which is less revered by the sports/math/music statistics crowd, like Nate Silver), be dominated by men? Why is there a gender gap in citations?
Political science as a major is not filled with men. Women, too, study politics. And they study more than “women and politics” — a parochial course, not by choice but by . . . you fill in the blank.
So let’s go back to who controls the American-politics curriculum in the United States? It’s the chairs of political-science and government departments, and whoever they select to run their curriculum committees. The chairs happen to be 87 percent male, so it’s math culture, no less. At least my institution asked me to reapply for a research in the classroom grant about this very question. Yay CUNY.
Having just passed the new Institutional Review Board (IRB) test got me wondering: Why don’t journalists have to do this, let alone their editors (who, after all, set the agenda, “alt” or not)?
The idea that experimental subjects have rights was started by the United Nations and promoted by human-rights activist Eleanor Roosevelt (who didn’t like the United States using information from Holocaust victims, no less).
Ethical training is especially needed by the New York Times, the “paper of record,” which, at least in this one article, was practicing “alt” ethics (promoting parents who teach their young how to discriminate against vulnerable people while they’re still in single digits).
This one even comes with a photo of this so-called nurturing mom, and then publishes some “alt” rubbish (that later contradicts it) articulating the absurd argument that providing elevators to mass transit can be considered unsafe in these terrorist-provoking Trump times.
Why does the NYT feature this overt parental prejudice, and publish the vulnerable child’s photo too? The only fact in the piece is how this is bunk (duh!) and that NYC mass transit is worse than that in other cities (another duh). So what’s new or news?
President Trump’s doctor says he may be eating too many fries at his global golf courses His so-called physician never named what food or when, naturally. Still, Trump’s clearly winning at Davos given double digit growth for double digit wealthy nations who have global leaders who are saying my how we’ve grown.
Well this is a surprise (not!)
Review Boardwalk Empire’s portrayal of 1-buck-Andy — Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon — if you don’t have the time and/or patience to read about him or his salary or compare Trump to Tricky Dick (Nixon) and his attempted firings and more.
Preface Sneak Preview (Ruth O’Brien, Series Editor)
In recent years, feminism has seen a resurgence in the popular media, with celebrities proudly declaring themselves feminists and best-sellers teaching women how to shatter the glass ceiling without neglecting their families. In this book, however, Catherine Rottenberg shows us how such “neoliberal feminism” forsakes the vitally important goals of emancipation and social justice, substitutes positive affect for genuine change, and adopts the theory and often the very language of neoliberalism—which, in turn, needs feminism in order to resolve its own internal contradictions. With passion and rigor, Rottenberg reveals that neoliberal feminism is not a philosophy but rather a self-help program for upper-middle-class women, one that leaves behind those who do not fit the template of a privileged professional.
She begins by mercilessly dismantling neoliberal feminism’s preoccupation with maintaining “balance” between family and career. Rottenberg shows how this focus on the self dovetails with neoliberal rationality, particularly in its emphasis on the individual’s “cost-benefit calculus” of personal fulfillment (which relies on low-paid, outsourced care work to make the numbers come out right). Instead of benefiting all women, neoliberal feminism divides women into aspirational and non-aspirational cohorts, with different roles and expectations for the two groups.
Rottenberg carries this provocative analysis further with her counterintuitive exposure of the way neoliberalism needs feminism. In neoliberal rationalism, people are “human capital” consisting of ungendered productive units—yet for the neoliberal system to be sustainable, women must also play a reproductive role by creating future workers. To resolve this contradiction, neoliberalism embraces “a new ‘technology of the self’ structured through ‘futurity,’” which encourages women to postpone maternity (notably by freezing eggs) until a time when it will interfere less with their productive capacity. The popularity of neoliberal-feminist books by women from across the political spectrum shows how widespread approval of this brand of feminism is.
In detailing the deficiencies of neoliberal feminism, and the fissures within the feminist movement that its rise has accentuated, Rottenberg eschews any calls for unification based on compromise, accommodation, or commonly agreed-upon goals. Instead she advocates “alternative feminist visions [that] not only challenge but also constitute a profound threat to our contemporary neoliberal order. Indeed, given our grim and frightening reality, it is precisely such a threatening feminism that we need to cultivate, encourage and ceaselessly espouse.” She concludes by invoking Judith Butler’s concept of “precarity” as a unifying factor—not only for women, but for all who are marginalized or who struggle for social justice. With the times ripe for converting neoliberal feminism into a more vigorous and inclusive ideology, women can turn around the unfortunate “mutual entanglement of neoliberalism with feminism”—and subvert neoliberalism by killing it from within.
Like all works that challenge convenient untruths, this book will disturb some readers and ruffle some feathers. By disputing a widespread notion of what feminism is; by elucidating the insidious ubiquity of neoliberal thought; by demanding that we pay attention to the oppressed and marginalized; and by paradoxically finding hope in the current dark times, Catherine Rottenberg gives us the hard truth, takes us to the edge of a cliff, and then maps the way back. For all these reasons, her book makes an outstanding addition to the Heretical Thought series.#
My son is spending his junior year abroad, in one of those strong social-welfare states where they not only take care of everybody, but they care about the world (and put their national dollars toward it), even if it is an insufferably smug nation with a “golden” past.
Now we’ve got our own chance (finally), and we won’t ever be considered smug. It’s the Big O or Omm — Oprah — for president, and “Big” has everything to do with vision, not meditation. There is no “omm” here. O is for openness — inclusivity — intersectional issues that will resonate and reverberate as we navigate the long, long recovery of our nation’s character, its integrity, its soul.
We should elect Oprah Winfrey as a person who turns everything she does into gold — or is impeccable in knowing her limits, and of course knowing how to delegate with dignity, let alone authority and impact. Rather than spending any time disabusing anyone of the obvious, she’s not a TV star but rather an international, global phenomenon of Rupert Murdoch proportions in terms of impact — impact that counts more, impact that can affect all of us (Americans) and “them” more or all the people we other in a shameful way.
It’s as simple as 1-2-3. Trump set her up. She’s the backlash president to the backlash president (i.e. Trump to Obama) — though not a one-issue president, given that she’s a restore-the-social-welfare-state president, all while she’s going to resuscitate our international reputation. And she’s that charismatic president who not only knows how to bargain but has vision, presence or what Max Weber would be proud to call a classic charismatic leader. (And charisma, btw, is something you can’t learn.)
It’s not just for the U.S. — think of us and them, though please consider yourself a them given we live in less than courageous times despite the Millenials. That’s what we are now to those in all nation-states: a “them.” You could argue that Trump was our comeuppance. I for one would rather forget about this and move on to elect the Big O, all the while saying “omm” to ensure my own peace and tranquility.
Why doesn’t someone just do the math, or complete the recipe?
The Democrats are looking for an issue. Income inequality is a biggie. Harassment is a biggie. So get in the kitchen and start stirring. The fact that we have Minnesotans like Senator Al Franken to contend with in terms of paying off, shaming, or threatening women into submission of different forms just makes the issue all the more politically delicious. A bipartisan issue is a rarity, in other words. Look, even Trump is deciding it’s such an issue he has to “alt” his reality to face up to his Bush trailer brag session found on tape.
Here’s the recipe:
Four ingredients —
Obama’s EEOC change in rules that would require employers of over 100 workers to list gender/race/ethnicity according to rank or job title.
One part combined with public unions being gutted. The AFL-CIO may be the largest group for women and women of color and different ethnicities, but their record of propagating discrimination is historically and currently outrageously awful.
Then, combine with non-disclosure agreements and any form of voluntary (ha) enforced arbitration or yellow-dog contracts — and violà, you have a multi-layered cake with a multitude of overlapping constituencies at the state and federal levels.
Start shaming corporations, CEOs, whoever follows the new yellow-dog contracts or shaming women out of the workplace with their harassment. Any company, corporation, or mom-and-pop place that does not publicly fire a harasser should themselves be outed, no?
I know too many small entrepreneurs and large public and private non-profit institutions who play this game of pass-along-the-harasser (who have daughters too, and granddaughters), particularly in Silicon Valley or shall we say California. And besides, I’m still trying to figure out what happened to Governor Jerry Brown vetoing salary disclosure information by gender.
It’s easy to pick upon the vulnerable and the weak, who are disproportionately women, children, and persons with disabilities. It’s so cheap, tacky, and tawdry that only a leader like Conquistador Loot-and-Pillage Donald J. Trump could stoop that low.
For our convenience, the New York Times puts it all above today’s front-page fold.
All we can do is document the horrors in his dismantling health care, in blaming the Dominicans for hurricanes or for not controlling climates, and in re-urbanizing drug addiction that started in the suburbs.
And finally, we can also ascribe this leadership to another faceless collective culprit — the 50 white men who live in a 50-mile radius of San Francisco, who try to control even more of our lives as their algorithms impact our society, our politics, and our economies.
There is not much room for hope when the vulnerable lie between the leadership of Trump and the techno-testosterone-y-geeks who do not just see people as targets to prey upon but target all people by dehumanizing them as 0’s and 1’s.
So long Silicon Valley. So long sexual harassers and non-diverse SLAMs — who live or work in the 50-mile radius Time Well Spent blogger Tristan Harris is talking about — in San Francisco. Tristan is now a social-media design ethicist who is outing how social media unaccountably design our local/global lives. And so long auto traffic. This is the new Silicon Alley — Cornell Tech.
Now, having grown up in California, I appreciate the lack of traffic, and the benefits of serving four boroughs in this new innovative institution that serves all of us in New York City. But what I noticed only recently that is truly remarkable and worthy of note is Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York, or WiTNY.
It’s a program or blog that the New York Public Library (NYPL) — the one with the lions — produced over a year ago. I, myself, missed the announcement and am only now catching up how the largest public university in one city — CUNY1st — is now collaborating with Cornell Tech, which itself is part of Israel’s Technion in Haifa on an initiative that gives women a chance to lead in the traditionally male macho field of technology. I would hope Lean-In Sheryl Sandberg will pay us a visit too, as the venerable public and private higher-education institutions serve one of our most neglected pool of leaders — women.
More on women and leadership (e.g. American workplace politics) later. For now, follow the links.#
It is doing the opposite, or what is called “Gov Speak” or Harvard’s legacy of exclusion by people who practice, preach, and profess government.
Today’s theme = intolerance, under what one could call Kennedy-watch, or what one could say is watching the past government actors and politicians in recent and/or previous administrations. (Congratulations Marti Gould Cummings!)
Why is everything/anything a “lesson” when it’s bad/not good (e.g. intolerant news; forget alt-news, either from the right or the left)?
One could call it “gov-speak” –– although I was told years and years ago (circa 1980s) that Harvard only spoke “gov speak,” which is to say a coda, a culture, a special language of exclusivity — which means exclusion of women, or anyone who is not in the mainstream of government (which is all white, mainly propertied men) or what I call SCAMs and SLAMs.
As a courageous student, Pranav Reddy, put it, the school named after the Kennedys is “kowtowing to the powers that be.” That’s not just bad for all of us who know that Chelsea Manning should remain honored. (She was pardoned). It’s not very courageous of the Kennedys, who last May honored President Barack Obama with the Profile in Courage Award.
Obama’s words ring hollow, even if the JFK Presidential Library, situated near the public University Massachusetts, Boston, is a different institution from the private sometimes venerable Harvard.
Do two queries equal a right, not a wrong? Or is it right or wrong or vengeance or justice (in French with the accent)? Human rights or the French definition of good citizenship: liberté, égalité, fraternité? We could go on and on. What are costs of imperialism(s) or conquests — not just one, but of the whole globe and around again? Or as one of my colleagues put it about a certain Scottish professor who came west (first New York University, then Harvard, then out to a farm — not Princeton but Stanford), David Marquand’s The End of the West.
For me it’s about reading the New York Times with a sociological lens, yet again. Nowadays the headlines and sub-headlines do all the work (of reading).
Circle the literary action or the verbs and adverbs on the Page Ones — of the physical paper, section by section, BTW.
backs
surviving
soaring
shamed
spurs
can lead to
rise
fall
restores
blue-chip (names)
speak (Mountains)
Then, the nouns
anomaly
signals
Eve
Mother!
necktie
laxity
rationality
(an) indiscretion
Rebels
reboot
Finally, kudos to Jon Hamm for the flower that gives us a thousand words, or at least one — and that word to think about — over a weekend is peace. #
One can pair, compare, triangulate or juxtapose this still of a video that says a __ (fill number of views) with President Barack Obama’s JFK100 Profile in Courage Award acceptance speech. It is a speech within a speech (listen), and Hillary Clinton (of all people) substantiates it in her new must-read book entitled What Happened. What do you think (not feel)?
I’m not. Trump is a Big Public Spending, Big Subsidy Corrupt Party Politician — otherwise known as a Republican . . . or, oops, is that a congressional Pelosi-like issue-corrupted Democrat who has not served urban America, let alone the urban poor (i.e. women and children) or any other constituency since the 1970s-80s? (See Chapter 3 of my Out of Many, One.)
Though Trump is desperate to shape one party or another as he tries to come up with a plan other than getting all the vulnerable congressional Republicans canned, I’m not surprised at the people he breaks legislative bread with. He’s got to eat. And by that I mean as a president who should lead the legislative branch.
The next question is how many trolls does $100,000 buy? No one is surprised by the Facebook fakeout. What’s interesting here is that, as the New York Times article points out, it’s all in the issues, not the candidates. Could this help Republicans and Democrats start choosing sides in terms of defining what is conservative and what is liberal? FYI, it’s not liberal in any sense of the word to have abandoned those who reside in urban areas from the 1970s onwards.
And when it comes to harming actual employees — of course — of the new class of white propertied men who live in or like rural areas (for second homes — say, on Long Island if you’re a Scaramucci), Trump is not going to help them unless they take the bait that they’re entrepreneurs who can’t be fired, not employees who might like overtime and benefits. (Take a look at the Solicitor General’s shocking turnaround from Obama’s Solicitor General’s support of upcoming Supreme Court cases. Then triangulate this with the “reverse discrimination” cases coming out of Attorney General Jeff Session’s or the AG’s office in education and employment.) This is an aside for later, and material for at least 3 dissertations or books BTW.
Why do we study a woman’s every move? Some women can speak, and some women cannot speak. Or if these women dare to speak when they shouldn’t, we see how they say nothing. Their generic bland words convey a static form of silence.
Husband by their side, they shake their heads in agreement, as all the while their bodies are screaming no. Their bodies betray their words, undercutting their veracity.
Picture Mommy on the steps of her house, smiling to her 3-year-old son who is frightened by the noise of his father’s rising anger, indicative of pending violence. She’s says Daddy’s not mad, Mommy’s okay. She smiles. But the terror behind her smile reveals her lie. She convinces no one, and her son associates smiles with lies and terror.
I had a teacher like this, the only teacher I remember from elementary school. Mr. T smiled and spoke softly when he was mad, and he would hurl abusive insults at anyone who disturbed classroom peace. Whereas I can’t remember one of the “yellers,” as we called the female teachers who expressed their anger. Expressing their anger was direct. No mixed-up signals, no ambiguous social cues. Unpleasant . . . it was true.
The most an abused woman can do is sneakily shout for help. Melania certainly did with her highly interpreted wrist-flick rejection of Trump. You have to watch it 5 or 6 times, but it’s there.
And of course there is the infamous happy/sad façade or the creepy or skin-crawling meme of Melania at her husband’s 2017 Inauguration. No mistaking that face.
Whether it is Melania’s wrist or her quick frown-of-relief smile we all see, what we see is real, albeit subjective.
Crazy counternarratives can be spun, for sure. These narratives will be heard in captions by those in their part of the polarized political valley. But these narratives will be twisted and counterintuitive. Bodies are visceral. Bodies express feeling more freely than words. The difference between recoiling and rejecting someone’s spontaneous touch is immense. We don’t need words to know something strange is going on. The movement requires explanation. The movement is significant.
So if politics includes bodies in movement, not just words, how can we read American Political Thought that does not cover bodies of thought, but only words — let alone published words from eras when white men with property had a monopoly?
There are no bodies in thought. Yet bodies moving in emotional reaction can be pegged as triggers.
Listen to this exchange, elevating and advancing the most significant postwar political thinker – Hannah Arendt — who happens to be a woman in the United States. Indeed, a newly vacant seat is named after her. This woman spoke truth to power in 1963 in The New Yorker, and took a lot of flak for it — so much so that she passed away tired at another venerable institution that hosts her name – Bard College.
What I’m talking about is that Chelsea and Corey got into it this weekend. Chelsea Clinton tweeted that the burning of an LGBT youth center in Phoenix reflects Hannah Arendt’s most famous and infamous phrase — “the banality of evil.” Corey Robin, my esteemed colleague, a full professor at the City University of New York, corrected Chelsea, saying that she had misunderstood and that Arendt was actually saying the exact opposite of what she thought.
Now, no one likes a correction, so Chelsea took Corey’s bait, and they went back and forth at some length, she maintaining that the Arendt phrase was apposite and he maintaining that it wasn’t.
This is, according to two more political scientists (Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler), an example of the “backfire effect” — which is fodder for another blog, so going back to the Chelsea/Corey brainy brawl, Chelsea repeatedly stood up and defended herself, only to be corrected by Corey again and again.
Corey has the better argument, though Chelsea (who initiated the discussion) is doing us a civil service, as Corey points out. Chelsea, as the author of a bestselling children’s book (She Persisted), is really setting the agenda to let women speak as leaders — really saying women are leaders.
How could Chelsea not be right in instigating and showcasing the most heretical political thinker who happens to be a woman in the United States? To top it all off, Hannah Arendt was an immigrant, a refugee, in exile – and she can no longer defend (i.e. correct) how understood and misunderstood is her political thought – though we have all benefited from it and a new book series is launching with other heretical thinkers, men and women alike.
Chelsea Clinton is right. Corey Robin is right. Chelsea is showcasing how women happen to lead. I’m going to get Chelsea’s book, and reread Corey’s analysis.
What an amazing accommodation. What an amazing compromise between the Repubs and the Democrats.
Or should we call it a lose-lose proposition? Senator Chuck Schumer’s “STRONG” bill? What a proposition (or poison pill, if Trump fails to take his medicine?). In any case, if I were not at the beach, in 3 minutes I would be watching all the D.C. morning shows broadcast from the supposed SWAMP.
Who knew Trump could be in the position of being a “human rights president” if he signs this law restricting Putin, helping the Crimea, and assistng other human-rights victims?
Who knew all these backdoor dealings in Trump Tower and other Trump locations could backfire and lead to a bipartisan consensus making the Trump administration the toughest human-rights-police president, enforcing sanctions against his pal, Putin?
Guess Putin will have to think before he puts an American president in this position again.
Trump doesn’t need any advisors today (good thing, since Sean Spicer quit and Jeff Sessions is surely packing). Trump knows there are only three words for a bipartisan bill (or contract on property) this good — sign, sign, sign. And sign it before everybody comes back from the beach.
We all know the New Jersey Turnpike is tacky. Hey, the Soprano’s even embodies the “what exit” line of SNL from decades back. (For those who do not live in NJ or have to travel on the Christie-beleaguered NJT (given the Obama-Christie Tunnel Tussle (or was it a hustle?). All this is by way of saying that land developers never know how to “do the right” thing. They only “alt-right,” no?
Here’s how you preorder Assembly out in September 1, 2017
In recent years leaderless social movements have proliferated around the globe, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Some of these movements have led to impressive gains: the toppling of authoritarian leaders, the furthering of progressive policy, and checks on repressive state forces.
1st book In Heretical Thought Book Series ~ Book Series Editor, Ruth O’Brien, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
1st Review of Assembly out!
In recent years leaderless social movements have proliferated around the globe, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Some of these movements have led to impressive gains: the toppling of authoritarian leaders, the furthering of progressive policy, and checks on repressive state forces.
Thought is heretical when it threatens our idea of universality, or our notion of the self or selves. Such threats can occur in the face of advances in science, human science, governance, or media. Regardless of purpose or intent, heretical ideas shape and determine our bodies and our consciousness and/or the ways we communicate about them. They also embody seismic or significant breaks in sclerotic contemporary political thought.
This series is shaped by the notion that contemporary political thought that advances significant or seismic ideas, independent of purpose or intent, and also threatens our ideas of universality, is heretical. Books in the series expose contemporary ruptures in thought, or a break in a school of thought. In doing so they will make visible, or apparent, threats that are observable, empirical, biological, chemical, or physical in the universe — suggesting not only how such threats can compel new ways of thinking, but also how they can lead to productive political action.
Series editor, Ruth O’Brien, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
We are close to re-achieving what CUNY once had, and extending it to SUNY — that is, free tuition. Unlike the way it was before the fallout of the New York City bankruptcy in 1976, this time around the state is making qualification for free tuition income-dependent. Tuition is free to families making under $100,000 per year today, and up to $125,000 by 2018. Almost a million families qualify (940,000 to be precise). Wow!
Just think if all the tri-state public colleges got in on this, giving free tuition to residents of all three states, allowing students to attend CUNY, SUNY, Rutgers, and U Conn, to name a few of the public institutions. What an educational powerhouse the New York City area would be. Perhaps New Jersey’s next governor might start thinking like a big progressive too. No matter what, Bernie Sanders started something.
I’m beginning to think that I romanticized the Progressives, after hearing the claptrap of the one-party state attacking itself.
The Progressive movement had progressive republicans and progressive Democrats. There was a lot of infighting. Intraparty conflicts led to my first book, about the Republican origins of the New Deal. But naturally, I wasn’t there during the battles — hearing the fights in person (no radio, let alone other media) or reading the magazines that popped up, like The New Republic.
What Trump’s whining reminds me is that he’s no party, nor can he even have a party, given his unsuccessful practices slamming the First Branch, headed by Speaker of the House Ryan (himself a Republican with awful policies — possibly more awful than Trump’s healthcare).
Still, I’m not watching much (TV that is), since Trump moves everything to the ALT Right — and to listen to them is like watching a funny-but-not-really-funny horror movie, or a formulaic disaster movie — all bunk.
What we do know is that the Progressive Era couldn’t have been this bad. Was it?
Trump is knocked off the right-hand column as Judge Derrick K. Watson gives the death stare — defying the president. Hawaii and multiculturalism win this round, as pompous populists like Geert Wilders, too, are knocked off their populist pedestals. Don’t feel sorry for him; after all, Geert (pronounced more like heert) is not hurt, as he has better service (secret-service bodyguards), free limousines, and social-media time for tweeting now that he has his snow-blowing or cocaine problem presumably under control. Folks in no longer tolerant Holland (never, really — don’t think Anne Frank, rather remember those who ratted her out, and that the Dutch had 30,000 folks volunteer to be “volks” after the Germans captured this supposedly civilized nation) (think Puritan and puritanical, not tolerant and cool) found Geert a bit wilder than they were looking for.
But back to the point: Sessions — our attorney general, the most important cop in the capital — called back his lies in less than 24 hours about the absurdity of Hawaiian former President Barack Obama planting bugs in Trump’s beloved Tower. Today, at least, is one for the reasonable, emotionally stable team cheering for tolerance and civility, not bellicosity.
David Cay Johnston does it again. That is, he investigates hard facts that someone will have to “alter” (make fake again). It must be exhausting for Kellyanne Conway, the most powerful woman in the United States. Trump’s income taxes came over his transom, or Trump’s taxes were dumped in David’s box. What a leaky, leaky White House.
Bottom line: He paid a 24% rate, not the 35% rate for the wealthy. Trump should have paid not $38 million in taxes, but about $55 million. Meanwhile, whenever Trump is strapped for cash, he finds somebody to buy something from him. Guess who.
My family and I don’t communicate with our realtor. Does this mean the realtor won’t get us a marketable — what the market won’t bear — price?
Neither, he tells us, does Jared Kushner talk with anyone at his family business. This recusing business is not very surprising, though the logic of it, in terms of thinking they are fooling the public, is confounding — so confounding that it makes Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon roll over. Why didn’t he think of this when he worked for Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover? He survived the Teapot Dome scandal, Silent Cal, and Herbert Hoover’s engineering corporatism, all on his one-dollar-a-year salary?
At least Jared does appear to be catching his dad-in-law’s aging rays, as he is getting that raccoon look. Time to hit the slopes, or at least the tanning salon.
What’s next? Be gone with the legacies. Be gone with the big anti-Trump marches. Let Hillary go. And let’s get down to business.
The real business is not one of placards, no matter how politically pleasurable. How easy it is to get out the defensive false facts, lying red/white/blue bots, and bruisers (Conways and Spicers et al). But we don’t have time to try to hit CNN. They are not effective. Sure, they’re fun, and so are the fashion police. Trump is the proverbial younger brother who can’t control himself, but bribes a crew of poor bullies from down the street to do his dirties . . .
Civic unrest is key. It’s essential. But let’s wait — or at least go into planning, though not out in public. The best-laid plans can’t be up for show yet; you don’t want to share your modus operandi. More on this later, but do drop the self-phones, i.e. cell phones (read about the Arab Spring putdown).
First, read your civic lessons. High-school social science or college American Politics 101 — go find it. Buy it. Read it. And what you will remember is HOW BORING it all is.
It was boring for one reason — the federal government was created to preserve the SQ — the Status Quo. Most of its principles (federalism, bicameralism, rule of law, separation of powers, etc.) are about power — containing and compartmentalizing power. It’s all about power. But it grants the opposition the biggest power — the power to oppose.
How a bill becomes a law is SO cumbersome. We don’t have laws, or rather we have 2,000-page laws and logrolling — bad laws, laws containing legal payoffs or giving perks to those in power. Laws complicated by those who read what’s in the weeds (lobbyists, big-money political activists, big media/PR).
My point is that if you read, and put into practice, these books, we can at least mitigate Trump and make sure he’s a four-year president — with a big kick, or ONE large achievement. Tearing down the GOP from within their walls will be your bonus, and that’s a biggie. This is our Goldwater watershed reflective moment to reshape the Left. It’s the redo of the new century — the chance to refashion or reform progressivism, giving it that necessary radical edge.
The problem is that Trump will gain political leverage by tearing out the heart of all Obama’s legislation. He’s already stripped clean LGBTQ, Climate Control, and Gender off of WhiteHouse.gov, making it perilous for most of the nation’s (non-Trumpers’) health to check how many of Barack Obama’s Executive Actions have already been overturned.
I cannot bear to look yet, and prefer to take comfort in the hows — the “back at yas” that the mainstream Republicans and then the 2010 Tea Party Republicans did, practicing death by due process. We don’t even have to do the delegitimacy dance, as Trump’s Inauguration shows how he already did that for us.
So now, it’s our turn. To block and outmaneuver every move Trump makes — INSIDE the Beltway, not outside. Then combine this with across-the-country demonstrations on key issues — reproduction, health, energy, and money. And it’s our turn to be “pure” (principled).
But don’t spend the energy to go to D.C. (okay, some core college kids should have summer internships — “Freedom Summer”camps funded by progressive organizations like the Center for American Progress, which will undergo a great transformation under Neera Tanden’s leadership as it pulls away from the 2016 past, and Andrew Rich’s Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, to demonstrate on all holidays, and for the whole summer). Stop being the Dumb American and find your Congress member’s home office, and get all the kids from your civics class, and a grandmother/father or two — and target demonstrating each and every action this individual member of Congress plans on approving/considering/etc. . . . It’s all online, after all. Hey, here’s a notion — bring your high-school social-science teacher too.#
As the protests continue, all I can do is collect documents and pictures — happily, my son sent a few from the inauguration so I could feel the good energy by extension. Not that I ever did much more than this after exiting my twenties. Still, while being relegated to the physical sidelines is hard, accepting that one’s children have the urge for action makes one proud. Yet it’s also hard to wait, hoping that no serious physical harm comes to him, and that he will be disciplined enough to engage in non-violence. Violence begets violence. Clearly Trump’s election is causing violence as I write this, but that is not the point. Protest is more effective, and harder to criticize through persistence and presence, without violence. Take your pick of philosophies from Hegel to Gandhi — it’s all hard. But who said changing the world was supposed to be easy?
Unbent? Not bent or twisted. The New York Times headlines are getting more creative with the paper’s 2020 report out. Despite all the white faces on the front page above the fold, and the fact that there may soon be more tenured or tenure-track political-science professors than staff journalists (who are being halved again after already being halved 10 years ago, though their ranks are more diverse than political science, by far). Alas, the white men in power with Trump are white men . . . now even the one white woman went down for plagiarism . . . and now all others are relegated to victimhood as they face us above the fold.
What really gets me, though, is the New York Times‘s and the Washington Post‘s nostalgia. Really? I supposedly drank the Obama Kool-Aid in not supporting HRC, but rather Barack first — in 2008, and certainly got Hillaried/Romneyed for it.
At least as we hit rock bottom, or will see the Faces at the Bottom of the Well, we will be getting great comedy, and real progressivism, or — dare I say it? — even leftism. And who knows, maybe all the SLAMs will admit that women can be funny, (or not,) as there will be no women to parody in this administration. But at least there might be a few women to grope — or I guess we have to wait until those pics start floating in clouds that come down to earth. Time will tell. And even then, it’s rather unseemly to do a pile-on parody of them. Or should it be: Wars tell all — eventually — even domestic ones.
Texas A&M student Harsimran Singh, from India, signs a message board outside Kyle Field where an “Aggies United” event is scheduled for Tuesday evening at Texas A&M University Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in College Station, Texas. David J. Phillip / AP
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — White nationalists are not just using divisive language, but they’re also using incorrect terms. The latest one is “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer’s use of “European” as a substitute for white.
On Dec. 6 I attended Spencer’s controversial talk at Texas A&M University, where I teach political theory and ethics. Most of my colleagues joined the boycott of his visit and were part of the large protest group that rejected his hate speech.
As a political theorist, I wanted to hear what Spencer had to say, knowing that he had been a graduate student in intellectual history at the University of Chicago and Duke University, well-respected institutions in my field of study.
Since I teach “Immigration Ethics” and “Latin American Political Thought,” I told my students to attend either the talk or the protests, including the well-organized “Aggies United” event at the football stadium to counter Spencer’s divisive speech.
Race is a central topic of discussion in my classes, so most of the students found it amazing that white nationalist ideas were going to be discussed at major national university, especially one at a majority-minority state.
Before Spencer’s talk even started, crowds waited in long lines. We could hear a growing number of protesters, megaphones, and chanting against the public voicing of ideas that seem straight out of a rally at Nuremberg in 1938.
The protesters swelled to a huge crowd of hundreds, while riot police attempted to control them, sometimes with excessive force, at the entrance to the student center, where the speech was going to take place.
Inside the ballroom full of hundreds of people, Spencer proceeded to speak. He said America “belonged to white men,” and kept repeating that he was a “European,” equating “Europeans” with the “white race.”
After he said this about four times, I could not hold back and yelled out, “Europeans are not a race.” He heard me clearly, since I was sitting to his left, in the front row. He responded by saying “Europe is also a place.” With this non sequitur, it was obvious to me now that he is an intellectual lightweight.
Teaching Latin American theories of race has made me realize that most of these white nationalist types do not understand that race is a fluid, permeable category that is made through political and social processes. Spencer has attached himself to an outmoded concept of racial identity that sees it as fixed and immutable and possessing hard boundaries.
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That hierarchy of race that he adheres to begs the question: If other, non-white races are inferior to so-called ‘whites,’ then is there an internal hierarchy within this putative ‘white’ race? Are some ‘white’ groups superior to others that seem ‘less-white’?
For instance, are all Finns superior to all Iberians, who tend to be of a darker skin tone? Is a low-education Swede automatically “better” than an intelligent, highly-educated tan-colored Greek? Alternatively, didn’t a ‘darker’ Latin peoples, the Romans, conquer and civilize less-developed barbarian tribes of Britons?
Britain itself is made up of highly-intermixed peoples, the product of encounters with Romans, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Danes, Gaelic Celts, Jutes, Frisians, etc. We also see this in countries such as Spain, where Moors, Jews, Roma, Celts, Basques, Catalans, African Guanches, and others coexisted and undoubtedly intermixed for centuries. As the early twentieth-century Venezuelan sociologistLaureano Vallenilla Lanz said in 1919, there is no purity of race in Spain.
This idea was grounded in the prescient words of Cuba’s founder, Jose Martí, when he uttered the words “there are no races” in 1891. These Latin American perspectives on race lay bare the absurd claims of alt-right demagogues. For Martí, Cubans were an amalgam of racial and ethnic origins.
Similarly, we could say that Americans (in the U.S.) are not simply “Europeans.” In the U.S., Anglo-Saxons mixed with the Irish, Germans and Scandinavians, groups that used to be considered separate “races” within Europe in earlier times, as the historian Nell Irvin Painter tells us in her 2011 work The History of White People.
All this goes to show that the best defense against incendiary racial rhetoric is education. The more we know about the fluidity and synthetic nature of racial identities, the more we will see the empty shell that is the language of the “alt-right” or white nationalism.
Students throughout the country ought to learn about not just racial mixing in the U.S., but also about fluid racial lines throughout the world. And Latino immigrants coming to the U.S. should not lose the more malleable conceptions of race that are present in thinkers such as Bartolomé de las Casas and José Vasconcelos.
To be sure, racism and hierarchy exist in Latin America and some of its history of ideas. But some traditions from Latin America that see race as always changing and as the product of inter-mixed ethnic origins are a good starting point to disarticulate the longstanding idea that races are rigid categories, what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “color line.”
Texas A&M’s president Michael Young must be lauded for his immediate response to the Spencer affront. The Aggies United event, a celebration of Texas A&M’s diversity and growing awareness that race matters, was an excellent idea.
Going forward, major national universities ought to also be more proactive. Many of the students in my class said that we must be ready before these inflammatory events occur.
The best way to do this is to invest in enhancing diversity at the faculty, student, staff, and administrative levels. We need to choose heads of departments who value cultural pluralism and promote the best professors to the highest levels of the university, especially those of minority groups that have shown academic excellence.
As students in my immigration ethics class voiced this week, these changes ought to occur now, not only after provocateurs like Spencer tarnish our public sphere with divisive, and simply incorrect, ideas.
For over two hundred years, the United States has defined itself, to a significant extent, in opposition to the rest of the Americas. Appropriating the term “America,” it has come to be seen as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and equality, in contrast to its neighbors to the South for their chaotic political traditions. Populism, authoritarianism, personalism, machismo, racialism, and caudillismo — or strongman rule — have been historically seenBy Diego Von Vacano is associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University.
Donald Trump sits with U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, U.S., October 7, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo REUTERS
With the election of Donald Trump, we can now see that the U.S. is indeed part of the Americas as a whole and shares in those pathologies. And while Latin America has been on a path to ever-greater democratization for about sixteen years, prospects for democracy in the U.S. are more gloomy.
The roles have been reversed, and it is perhaps up to Latino immigrants to teach the U.S. about deepening democratization.
When Latin American politics is discussed, the term ‘populism’ is the first concept that pops up in a lot of people’s minds. Getulio Vargas of Brazil and especially Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina are the archetypal cases from the 1950s.
Charismatic leaders with a knack for demagoguery, these populist leaders tapped into economic anxieties by promising all manner of radical reforms. They lacked a particular ideology, and used nationalism to rally popular support, especially from disaffected lower classes. Just as Perón mobilized the ‘descamisados’ (shirtless ones) in Argentina, so has Trump galvanized members of the working class, especially those wary of socialist alternatives.
This demagoguery was also tied to personalism. Instead of relying on institutions, Perón and other populists in Latin America used their networks of clientelism, friendships and family ties to generate a basis for support. Famously, Perón’s second wife, Eva Duarte, gained immense popularity during his first presidential term. His third wife, Isabel, succeeded him as president upon his death in 1974.
We have seen similar ‘dynastic’ politics in the U.S., with the Bush and Clinton families becoming powerful political players. But with the rise of the Trumps, nepotism and personalism seem more central factors. Trump has relied on his family on his rise to power, and it is no secret that Ivanka and her husband Jared wield unusual influence.
The recent demotion of Chris Christie within the Trump inner circle is likely connected to Christie’s prosecution of Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, and his conviction in 2005. It would not be surprising if Trump’s adult children were to seek official positions within the White House, or if Ivanka were to run for office in the not-so-distant future.The peculiar relationship between Trump and his adult children is emblematic of a patriarchal form of politics that was closely associated to Latin American machismo.
Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies, countless dictators exemplified the metaphor of the pater familias to generate legitimacy for their brand of authoritarianism. Mario Vargas Llosa gives a most graphic account of this gendered dimension of power in his masterpiece The Feast of the Goat. The novel recounts the sexual exploits of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, connecting them to the tyrant’s desire for power. The use and abuse of women as objectified commodities was pervasive. Trujillo was married thrice, had multiple mistresses, and boasted of his sexual prowess as a way to gain stature as a strongman.
The use of the eros of power (part of what Machiavelli called virtu, a term rooted in the Latin word for man) has been evident in Trump’s public persona, from his fame as playboy in the opulent NYC scene of the 1980s, to his ownership of the Miss Universe pageant to his marriage to Melania, a former model. Even the crude comments in the Access Hollywood tapes may have actually made him more popular among certain groups. Trump’s behavior recalls a stereotypical machismo.
What all this amounts to is the rise of a Latin American form of politics, caudillismo, or strongman politics, now in the U.S. The recent selection of particular individuals for cardinal posts in Trump’s government suggests that loyalty is what he values most. Men like General Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Pompeo are possible beneficiaries of this logic.
Caudillismo arose in nineteenth-century South America among men like Facundo Quiroga and Juan de Rosas, as recounted in the classic work Life in the Days of the Tyrant, written by a founding father of Argentina, Domingo Sarmiento. In it, Sarmiento explains the rise of authoritarianism out of personalistic fealty and racialized politics in Argentina, largely driven by support from rural communities. This phenomenon led to a deep chasm between cities and the countryside, which Sarmiento characterized as a battle between civilization and barbarism. The blue/red lines that now divide the U.S. recall this chasm.
Latin America sees change
Ironically, much of Latin America now is at the forefront of democratization in many respects. Dictatorships, with the exception of Cuba, are a thing of the past.
Authoritarianism, with the exception of Venezuela, is on the wane. Most Latin American states are subject to regular, free, and fair elections.
But the democratization is not merely formal; there is great depth to it.
Latin America has the highest regional rate of women’s participation in legislatures outside of Scandinavia, with countries like Costa Rica leading the way. It has massive popular participation by once-excluded racial and ethnic groups, in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador. And it has a long history of advocating for more open borders in terms of migration, going all the way back to nineteenth-century thinkers such as Simón Bolívar.
These include Juan Egaña, Juan Martínez de Rozas and Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile, Francisco de Miranda in Venezuela, José Cecilio Díaz Del Valle in Central America, and Bernardo Monteagudo and José San Martín in Perú and Argentina. They saw migration not just as a matter of distributive justice, but about as a matter of making the demos more porous and expansive.
How can the U.S. avoid what seems like a looming threat to its democracy? Perhaps the solution is counter-intuitive.
It is up to Latino-American immigrants to not assimilate to the U.S.: In terms of political culture, assimilation would mean becoming tolerant of the current state of low voter turnouts, decreasing interest in politics, proneness to media distortions and exacerbation of racial color lines.
Immigrants from Latin America ought to learn about the historical bases and current trends of Latin American democratization. From their past mistakes and current achievements, these lessons could be transmitted to native-born U.S. citizens.
In particular, younger generations, who may be especially concerned about the present path of U.S. politics towards plutocracy and authoritarianism, might be interested in the migration of ideas on how to deal with these problems. #
1. American Political Development – 35248 – P SC 82210 – 0
35248 CRN
Graduate Center Campus
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: This course will help prepare American Politics students for the first exam by covering the standard texts and approaches that the subfield expects on the exam. American Political Development, more properly titled Neos, Isms, & Information Imperialism, is an American Politics and Women’s Studies seminar that crosses political-science disciplinary divides and approaches political history by relying on ‘political development’ as a comparative-politics and international-relations good-governance methodology with two analytical axes: the role of ideas, and hybrid institutionalism in the increasingly horizontal global social sphere. The seminar is also informed by Women’s Studies literature, given its emphasis on difference as the United States built a relatively strong nation-state and became a global hegemon. It pays particular attention to masculinity and misogynistic nation-building by focusing on what I call neotribalism – intersections in inequality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and bodies in re-volt (volt refers to the energy derived from creative difference), who resist despite our president who may continue waging the ‘war on women.’
Teaching Political Science – 35659 – P SC 77904 – 0
35659 CRN
Graduate Center Campus
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: All first-year doctoral students in our program whose fellowships entail teaching on the campuses are strongly encouraged by the EO to enroll in this class. All other students, doctoral or M.A. from political science or any other program, who are interested are also welcome to enroll. Teaching Political Science is teaching power & teaching 2 power & includes the power 2 teach. While the EO assigns you to your campus — from Hunter to Brooklyn or beyond, in our wonderfully engaging, diverse, and democratic CUNY system, it is your campus chair who sets your specific teaching course assignment. Indeed, the EO gave me the privileged assignment to teach you about teaching power & teaching 2 power & power 2 teach, which is a course introduced to domesticate the Political Science Program 20 years ago that has been running ever since. Now more than ever this seminar is indebted to Pedagogy of the Oppressed so that you can teach your students how to resist repressive intersectionalities and latent cultural supremacies. Such supremacies could soon boil over as the American president-elect overtly represents the humiliation and disrespect of women, LGBTQers, immigrants (documented and undocumented), and persons with dis-abilities in our classrooms. We will view these groups, and their intersections, in terms of both who is teaching and who is learning as we discuss how to supplement the Socratic method with Aristotelean ethics. I will also help you integrate your scholarly research — from any field — into your first teaching assignment. Critical-thinking pedagogy and research-in-the-classroom notwithstanding, we do not neglect the practicum or “how to” aspect of teaching (i.e. writing syllabi, prepping lectures, grading practices, using CUNY1st Blackboard, and mentoring students.) Appropriate guests will be invited from management and the PSC to address Chancellor Milliken’s recent directives, ensuring how you, the instructor, and your students, can gain the most from your experience. http://www1.cuny.edu/sites/news-chancellor/2016/11/a-message-from-chancellor-milliken-3/
Getting Grants: A short course (5 sessions) on how to write grants for your individual research, following my success in securing grants for the Graduate Center (Fulbright; Andrew Mellon; private donors et al.). Feedback and personal guidance on grant proposals will be offered, and guests will be invited.
Putting aside the Democrats’ reassessment — or the irony that it’s not the GOP that has to open its tent — and putting aside that we’re no longer a polarized nation . . . and that a realignment of sorts occurred — a more dramatic realignment than most, since it sweeps into power the GOP on every level, the most important one arguably being their clean sweep in the states, as well as the municipalities . . . federalism organized under one party has not been so powerful since the Civil War. Bracketing all that — another way to look at the polarization/realignment/Democrats as donkeys now all braying is — in conversation, or as a binary.
As President Barack Obama’s politics and identity politics — or the universality of his identity-less politics — put him in the position of being betrayed by many American people, or should I say demonized — denigrated — as the Antichrist, as a boy, as an illegitimate president given the Birther controversy — it’s only fitting that Donald J. Trump (DT) was in conversation and was given Obama’s warm seat.
DT not only participated in the Birther movement, and led it to some extent; he embodies the exact opposite of our sitting lame-duck president, Barack Hussein Obama. As one friend noted, 9/11 has now been replaced by 11/9 — the day DJT got proclaimed president(-elect).
I hate to pour more oil on the burning fire of fear – the impending Trump presidency – but to have a united government that is dedicated to destroying the few laws President Barack Obama managed to pass – Dodd-Frank, Obamacare – is worse than having had the whole GOP for Trump would have been.
Put negatively, all the non-GOP Trump supporters get to quibble — “he’s not my president” . . . “maybe he’s not going to be that bad” . . . or “look, every time he’s good, he’s great.”
It’s time for us to hit the streets, and work within the confines of the American political system. Don’t burn, don’t bully. Rally and participate – effectively, quietly, without violence or being triggered into spontaneous violence by agents provocateurs. After all the uber wealthy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side have a underwear store (lingerie, they call it, thinking it’s better to resist in French?!!!).
P.S. iRevoltblog (on wordpress, connected to https:// RuthOBrien.org or https://iRevoltblog) will be up and running sometime this January, 2017 — before the Inauguration.
Looks like it’s gonna be a second Clinton in the White House. This time, though, I’m confident that, given all, President-Hopeful (or To Be) Hillary Rodham Clinton will do it right. That is, much better than her husband, who started out O.K. and then became one of the Presidents in the Reagan Revolution. Yes, a supposedly progressive Democrat. A shame. But forget that now that we’re moving forward.
President HRC can be so much more effective than Bill now that the following governing tools are at her disposal. Our first female president has the capacity to transform the United States as a civil nation that does not harm “others.” O.K., we will be seen as harming others, but I mean harming our own citizens — U.S. citizens — and anyone living in our nation — U.S. visitors, including those here with papers or not.
I wrote about these tools in Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition. The tools are the same, though they could be strengthened and modified for her to serve as tools on “steroids.” That is, Obama already weathered all the complaints when he got any traction in governing with these tools. More importantly, Obama had NO choice. It was the GOP plan all along to obstruct, sabotage, delay, and mislead the public — from day one. He was never going to get anyone to the table, though trying to was not naive, it was smart (more on another blog).
How President HRC can use these tools are in my book. So you don’t have to look them up, I’m rolling out a complimentary blog, iRevoltblog, on WordPress. Take a look after HRC’s election.
Meanwhile, here are all the tools in her arsenal of reform:
• qui tam,
• class action,
• federal rulemaking (and any form of executive action),
• amending existing legislation,
• increasing social-stake participation of public-citizen groups,
• amending existing legislation that requires authorization,
• redirecting social programs that are federalist,
• obviously, appointing all the “right” or progressive bureaucrats, White House counselors, cabinet members, international counselors (including ambassadors), and federal-court judges.
And I leave the best for last:
• As the right worries rightly, President HRC will nominate (and hopefully the Senate will confirm) at least anywhere from one to three Supreme Court justices in her first term. If the Senate does its job, this alone means we will have a more successful nation.
The latest S.L.A.P.P. against a former porn star is especially egregious. I’d share the details but this is a G. audience blog. And most people watching the U.S. election have already heard or read this latest American presidency race to the bottom. So just think about what G.R.O.P.E. could stand for — either GOP Reprisal Opposing Public Exposure; or Grotesque Retribution Opposing Public Exposure.
No matter what, this goes way beyond a civil war against women: It’s now criminal.
Terrific presentation at THOUGHTworks last night. Cathy O’Neil gave a stimulating presentation on her new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, about the many misuses of algorithms in business, education, the judicial system, and many other areas.
And Professor Augustin Chaintreau gave a riveting analysis containing seeds of ideas that that can be grown into ethical operating principles — or what I like to call EOP — that will rival others, particularly among those ethicists in the industry (as opposed to Professor Chaintreau being in the academy). I look forward to more dialogues as I finish my book on Juris-Diction-ALL: Informational Imperialism.
Director and co-Founder Emmanuel Letouzé asked questions that lead us to explore issues of agency (people, not IoT) and the dilemmas with efficacy. To me it’s all about how we can find humanity as we calculate and communicate in zeros and ones, given the elites’ designing power that alters or effect places, peoples, and things or what I call Informational Imperialism that stems from social spheres colliding.and creates Juris-Diction-ALL Discrimination.#
Forget about Barack Obama’s ‘Silly Season” and watch Hillary Republicans. It’s high time or Hillary’s time as the list keep’s growing, growing, growing . . .
Steve Bartlett (R-TX)
Bob Bauman (R-MD)
Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY)
Jack Buechner (R-MO)
Tom Campbell (R-CA)
Bill Clinger (R-PA)
Tom Coleman (R-MO)
Geoff Davis (R-KY)
Mickey Edwards (R-OK)
Harris Fawell (R-IL)
Ed Foreman (R-TX, NM)
Amo Houghton, Jr. (R-NY)
Gordon Humphrey (Senator, R-NH)
Bob Inglis (R-SC)
Jim Kolbe (R-AZ)
Steve Kuykendall (R-CA)
Jim Leach (R-IA)
Pete McCloskey (R-CA)
Connie Morella (R-MD)
Mike Parker (R-MS)
Tom Petri (R-WI)
John Porter (R-IL)
Claudine Schneider (R-RI)
John “Joe” Schwarz (R-MI)
Chris Shays (R-CT)
Peter Smith (R-VT)
Edward Weber (R-OH)
Vin Weber (R-MN)
G. William Whitehurst (R-VA)
Dick Zimmer (R-NJ)
And here are some more, many who are in office . . .
Unlike most Americans Hillary Clinton knows the identity and accomplishments of the nineteenth century lawyer Belva Lockwood. It was not always the case that men and women in the United States could not I.D. Lockwood. She was, after all, the first woman to run a full campaign for the U.S. presidency, with electors pledged to her and votes tallied. She ran in 1884 on the Equal Rights party ticket, and again in 1888. (Victoria Woodhull announced her candidacy in 1870 but did not organize a full campaign. She ran afoul of federal obscenity laws and spent Election Day in prison).
Lockwood entered the 1884 race as an expression of ambition and ego but also a clear-sighted move to show women’s serious intent to become full citizens in the American democratic experiment. She campaigned across the country, the candidate of the newly formed Equal Rights Party. Her costs were covered by giving speeches. One of her most popular was titled, “The Political Situation.”National and local newspapers covered Lockwood’s talks, and her platform. Magazine cartoonists initiated her into the brotherhood of male candidates by including Lockwood in their satirical drawings. After the election parents were known to name a daughter Belva in the candidate’s honor. And, like other famous people of her day, including Clara Barton, she was asked to endorse commercial products.
Lockwood was also one of the pioneering women lawyers of her day. In the early 1870s she attended the National University Law School in Washington, D.C. She and several other women were admitted as a kind of fluke. When it came time to grant her degree university administrators refused. Lockwood had to wage a fight to get it and to win local bar status. Later, when a client needed her to argue before the U.S. Court of Claims, which would not admit her to its bar, she went to Congress, lobbying for a law to guarantee that all qualified women lawyers would be admitted to the bar of the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. That contest took five years but Congress finally sided with her. On March 3, 1879, appearing in a plain black velvet dress, Lockwood was admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar, the first woman to have that privilege.
This successful fight was broadly covered by the press.
So, how did Lockwood lose her fame? It certainly did not occur quickly. She lived until 1917 and maintained an active law practice into the first years of the twentieth century. She also remained an active member of the peace movement. A new generation of women lawyers kept her photograph in their offices. As late as 1958 the U.S. Government and the Advertising Council of America ran a U.S. Savings Bond ad in well-subscribed magazines using Belva Lockwood as an example of a “gallant” democrat. (See, e.g., Holiday Magazine, January 1958, p. 124)
By the 1990s, Lockwood was an historical unknown. At an evening gathering of several hundred political scientists playing Trivial Pursuit, only one woman could give the answer to the question I had posed: “Who was the first woman to run a full campaign for the U.S. Presidency?”
I can only guess at how Lockwood’s star dimmed. First, and perhaps most important, textbook authors chose to make the iconic Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton the focus of the women’s rights story. Somewhat astonishingly, Lockwood (and Woodhull), as early presidential candidates were not mentioned. Similarly, discussions of women and work in the nineteenth century focused upon exploitation of poor and working class women, and said little about the struggle of upwardly mobile women to become professionals. Surely, the story of Lockwood’s successful fight to drag anti-discrimination legislation out of the U.S. Congress might have presented a heart-warming civics lesson in any high school or college textbook.
Twentieth century publishers also account for some part of the dimmed star. Until NYU Press showed its support for biography and women’s studies, and put out my adult-reader biography of Lockwood in 2007, publishing houses had deemed her only worthy of biographies meant for children. Documentaries and museum exhibits also largely ignored Lockwood and her contemporaries, again using Stanton and Anthony to cover all historical bases.
Hillary Clinton’s fame, of course, is currently worldwide in scope. Like Lockwood, she has been active on a national and international stage for several decades. But she differs significantly from Lockwood in having held several formal positions of note before becoming the presidential nominee of a major party: first lady, senator, and secretary of state. She has been much written about in these roles, and has herself written several memoirs. Television and social media, unknown of course in Lockwood’s day, are awash with Clinton text and images. Could a woman candidate such as Clinton be washed from history in a hundred years as Lockwood has been? It is, thank goodness, not likely. While authors still have considerable work ahead of them with respect to writing the role of women into history, the multi-fold nature of Hillary Clinton’s public roles and achievements seem to guarantee her place in that history.
As we congratulate sexually harassed former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, I hope she can carve off a million or so and start a free-speaking foundation for women, or at least give a few talks at free-thinking public institutions like the City University of New York (CUNY). A foundation for the non-marginalization of women speaking freely about politics! After all, look at what the Koch brothers did with three million.
Not that there aren’t already those organizations. It’s just they don’t seem to have much impact or many thought leaders, other than the ones who are, as they say in England, news readers — the face of the news, when women need much more to be in the news (or at least behind the scenes in the editorial rooms, deciding which pretty men to put outside to read the news), not just influence it.
Political science remains one of the most female-unfriendly disciplines in the social sciences. We’re happy to have Gretchen speak for us. I promise no “I told you so’s” if/when she addresses students at the Graduate Center of CUNY about the conservative nature of this subject (read neotribal/patriarchial, etc.). After all, we’re the only public university in town, and we happen to have more women faculty than in the discipline nationwide.
Hopefully, Gretchen won’t pick one of the old Ivies after reading Nancy Wise Malkiel’s book about higher education in the United States, appropriately titled Keep the Damned Women Out.
Of course they beat their wives – Trump’s advisor(s) that is. There is already a link between terrorism and domestic violence, so why not the Alt Right media heads, like Bannon? Ailes uses sexual harassment as a negotiating tool. (Think about this for a moment if Trump appointed Bannon or Ailes as Secretary of State? Chris Christie gets to be the new AG, or is he also angling for it?)
Are these floating heads of state(s)? Or are they intimidating, free-floating heads on bodies that are simply fear-mongering? To be sure, they are a few of Trump’s advisors and campaign staff who already knocked off the GOP. (Remember Trump’s finger incident, when he couldn’t stop poking congressional Republicans on the Hill?) So now the question is: Is Trump’s gang trying to intimidate all of us non-SCAMs and SLAMs?
It’s striking how the New York Times this summer started adopting the American academy’s language (“othering” or “us versus them”) more and more. After, what, more than half a century, it’s fascinating to see this in the paper. And it’s odd that it took so long to figure out the neotribalism aspects of being what Frantz Fanon called Wretched of the Earth. (The idea that fear is not part of the American electoral discourse? Fear is, and was, always a factor for getting folks out to those polls. FDR got electoral mobilization based on that emotion.)
Nonetheless, if you’re interested in reading about theories of violence, vitriol that uses petrol, or the politics of violence and intimidation, you don’t have to grab a copy of Wretched of the Earth. Fanon happens to be one of the far-right wing’s (right righteous revolutionaries) favorite books to bash and then burn.
Burning books, however, is better than burning at the stake actual women, children, immigrants, the ill, or persons with disabilities, and different genders and sexualities, who were the “wretched” or the inspiration undergirding this postcolonial book, among others. The fact that it took so long for “the print authorities,” or the Paper of Record, to notice is hardly new news.
What is new news is that the caring equation increased. Others need protection in an “us and them” equation long before “them” can become “us,” if that makes sense. And the authorities are not just those taking office, executing offices (police), but especially those in the Fourth Estate practicing or selling our freedom of speech.
Why did it take so long for the United States to realize it’s not #BlackLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter, or that the police triage their violence all the time (raping prostitutes into silence so as not to report anything)? False hope is always dangerous. It’s not just retaliation, it’s blowback.
We know why it took so long for Trump to get his gang in place as he is developing another property called the White House. Trump being a landed businessman (developer) is supposed to intimidate us, and he needs a gang.
The false hope stems from the news claiming to be new, when it’s actually age-old. Intimidation tactics don’t work so well without the element of surprise. The mainstream (not just right-wing) media is so good at reporting bride burnings and honor killings in the East, but not at our ideological home patrolled by dead white men.
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 women and children have to go to the ER each day because of domestic violence. (Four million per year, and that’s a low guesstimate, since it’s only the ones willing to admit they didn’t run into doorknobs that get reported).
The only thing new about police brutality is that some folks are starting to document it, and therefore care, though only if they’re one of us (immigrants already on our shores, not abroad).#
Contributions by Alan I. Abramowitz, Emory University; Andrew E. Busch, Claremont McKenna College; Peter Juul, Center for American Progress; Lawrence Korb, Center for American Progress; William G. Mayer, Northeastern University; Ruth O’Brien, City University of New York Graduate Center; John J. Pitney Jr.. Claremont McKenna College; Danielle Pletka, American Enterprise Institute; Daniel E. Ponder, Drury University; Steven E. Schier, Carleton College; Raymond Tatalovich, Loyola University Chicago; and John Kenneth White, Catholic University of America. « less
This is the first book to present both the arguments for and against Barack Obama’s presidency and its policies. In it, prominent political scientists and Washington think tank scholars address Obama’s domestic, economic and foreign policies and his political legacy. Contrasting perspectives assess the consequences of the large aspirations of the Obama presidency and the political and policy challenges Obama encountered in the pursuit of those aspirations. Barack Obama’s project in the White House involved installing lasting changes in national policy and politics. Institutionally, the Obama administration sought to preserve control of Congress through maintenance of reliable partisan Democratic majorities, and enhance influence over the federal courts through a steady stream of liberal judicial appointees. The administration sought increased autonomy over the executive branch by a reorganizations spawned by a national economic crisis and an ambitious domestic policy agenda. Politically, the Obama administration sought the entrenchment of consistent Democratic electoral majorities. Such large ambitions have generated enduring controversies surrounding his presidency, controversies that receive a full airing and debate in this volume.
Look. Gretchen Carlson’s Title VII civil-rights lawyers do not have to look far to find evidence of how Gretchen’s been treated as a sexual commodity selling bad boy/moralistic mama in 2016’s horse-race politics. MSNBC follows Roger Ailes’s recipe in a New York Times advertisement, making Nicolle Wallace the centerfold.
The MSNBC producers – the supposed opposite of Fox News – present their “Codebreakers” with pride. The code, to me, seems to be protecting our commodification of women newscasters. It’s more akin to custom keepers, not breakers of any idea or thing.
Whether it’s covering or uncovering women, it’s neotribal to me when both supposed sides of the supposedly polarized news treat their women* the same way. Bare or veiled, it’s all about commodifying women.
Being veiled makes women personal property, whereas being bare-armed and bare-legged makes them corporate sales commodities. Here’s the newscaster-women-commodification custom recipe: Place woman in the center, showing her décolleté, legs, and bare arms, surrounded by five men (one African-American as a token of Obama’s presidency, and one just this side of 40 wearing frat-boy tennis shoes, a nod toward Bernie Sanders millennials).*
Isn’t this what Gretchen’s brief describes, protesting sexual discrimination? MSNBC producers cannot see or sense how out of sync they are. Oh, I forgot, they fired Melissa Harris-Perry when she complained about her show being bumped one time too many for the 2016 political-circus travesty, when she too was discussing politics.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton’s insistence on wearing pantsuits is cheeky and counterculture after all.
* Token outspoken progressive lesbians like Rachel Maddow exempted; she gets to wear pants and don sleeves in a different ad in this series. Oh, and I forgot the morning-show housewife who puts up with Morning Joe Scarborough’s put-down banter, who gets to wear unflattering sweater sleeves as long as those legs remain exposed.
Murder is not the only way to deprive our most vulnerable citizens of their lives, or their quality of life. Each politician, after all, is akin to a jobs center, and now they dole out the jobs with no accountability in the shadowy subcontractor hybrid, or private-public, state.
I could talk about education and other social services delivered by the states, and how deep the shadow subcontractor hybrid state goes. Here it gets messy and counter-productive to the point of absurdity. The very policies that politicians are elected to pass and implement to serve our most dependent people — foster children — end up being used to do things as mundane as pave our roads.
How does this happen? State governments rely on private industry — contractors — and those contractors hire subcontractors. We contract out services and deliveries and many other things.
In a book called The Poverty Industry, Daniel Hatcher exposes how most states partner with private contractors or consultants to get federal-government payments intended to serve foster children, women and children on what we commonly call welfare, persons with disabilities, and those in poverty over 65, and use those payments for their own purposes.
The citizens supposed to be served — the intended beneficiaries — receive at best services worth pennies on the dollar. Instead, the states and the private contractors and subcontractors collect the money from the feds and divvy it up among themselves.
Since the 1990s, the United States accepts this practice of states “contracting” out services under the illusion that it is more efficient and cheaper. In reality, it takes the monies for services that we all agree are necessary through the representational democratic system of elections and governance and puts them in darkness.
The shadow falls in the states. The darkness occurs in the states’ use of a hybrid shadow subcontractor state that has little or no accountability — by design. Federalism amounts to the states’ accepting federal dollars from SSI, etc. . . . you name it, and then states spending it upon what they will — but they do not will it to be spent on these dependent, quiet, uniformed, not-yet-old-enough-to-understand citizens, or too-old-to-protest citizens.
Let me give you one graphic example. A foster child who has both parents die does not get the Social Security death benefits. Rather, the private contractors notify their state supervisors that a foster child is eligible for Social Security benefits, turning this child into an orphan rather than a foster child. They file the paperwork with the Feds.
The perversity happens next, when the states and the private companies split up the monies — the private company for profits, and the tax-starved states for state revenue needed to pave the roads. Not one penny goes to the intended beneficiary of the program — the foster child. It’s a “rob Peter to pay Paul” arrangement by the states, as designed by our nation-state — or the federal government.
In the 1990s we didn’t just privatize prisons, as that wonderful book, The New Jim Crow, illustrates — we created For-Profit Orphanages. The American state and the 50 states took the Charles Dickens Oliver Twist turn by hiring contractors who hire subcontractors, or the Fagins of government (the criminal boss of boys), who must beat Nancy (the prostitute who tries to rescue the boys by shedding light on the Fagins of this state).
The states’ continuing revenue shortfalls, which must be made up by shady means like these, raise another question: Why are the 50 states afraid to tax their citizens? The U.S. system of federalism is a race to the bottom among states that live in fear of highly paid citizens and their high-paying companies leaving the state — that is, in the absence of strong national or federal regulations to harmonize taxes. Often they don’t go to different regions, or abroad, just to a neighboring state. For instance, top employees at the pharmaceutical company Merck share a “helicopter-pool,” like a car-pool, from their homes in Pennsylvania to Rahway, New Jersey, so they won’t have to pay New Jersey’s high taxes when Pennsylvania’s taxes are so low.#
The police kill citizens in the United States. The bodies speak for themselves. And we should not turn them into mere body counts; we should know their names. Even so, some type of blinking counting calculator, like the one that tracks the national debt, would help place this state-sanctioned violence into perspective.
The horror is that the very people who are supposed to protect you can kill you. This undermines, overturns, overthrows all that we believe in as Americans. When the blue line gets defensive — and, before the dust settles, asks for justice for their families, though they did not speak in the same language about the families of the people that their officers just shot — it rings hollow. The gap between citizens and their protectors turns into a ringing noise that echoes through a Death Valley, or a Grand Canyon, bouncing off cliffs in unexpected ways.
As Norman Stamper, Seattle’s police chief during the 1999 anti-globalism uprising, said, we don’t want to be civilians — we are citizens. And we don’t want our 18,000 police precincts to be militarized, making us all just what — collateral damage?
The ringing noise indicates how great this crisis of legitimacy is in the United States — including not just the sitting government, the presumed elected government, or the hopeful government. It’s a crisis on both sides of American politics — the political process (elections), and what the election achieves (governance). Police brutality betrays the most basic relationship — that between the citizen and the state.
The national election is not legitimate when Republicans nominate someone like Donald Trump — who scares the whole world, not just Democrats or “Feel the Bern Democrats.” Even Republicans who get poked by Trump refuse to back down and won’t support him. Even the Koch brothers refuse to give him any of their $898 million.
This is not to say you can relax. No. No. No. The Republican money is going darker, it’s getting shoved into little dark holes — that is, smaller races. Think of this like rats — nesting, gnawing, biting babies or the elderly in the deep caverns of government — municipal elections where no one participates, where corruption runs rampant from Minnesota to Texas, from New York and New Jersey to Louisiana, and from Nevada to Montana, then down to Arizona, and back up to Oregon.
It is the politicians from these races that cause the most harm — kill the most people they were democratically elected to serve. Balanced as they were President Obama’s words can not console the nation enough. Meanwhile, Democratic contender Hillary Clinton is out of step in referencing President Lincoln‘s words. They do not resonate — at least this the July convention month. #
Violence begets violence. It is escalating across this land. As I watch with horror, however, I am heartened by the impact this beloved man — Philando Castile – is making in death. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, in her shock, schooled this nation into shame.
Like Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, Diamond is standing up for all black men murdered by vigilantes deputized in effect by the police. In Philando’s case being murdered by the police is one step closer than vigilantes, and one large step worse than it was in 1955. Sixty-one years of not enough progress, for sure.
Barack Obama should come home to attend all the funerals, in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas, so that this will trigger the right type of mobilization – real citizen participation for real reform.
Obama needs to use his last days in office to lead the nation, with the heavy hand of executive action superseding municipal, local, and state actors like the police, whom the United States of America funds on a national level.
Given today’s and yesterday’s police-brutality news, the O’Briens’ family-first policy will soon revolve around a First Amendment freedom search. And by search, I mean a journey. What this means is that each member of our family unit (4) will explore or figure out what we individually mean when we say we are all for freedom of expression (speech, press, assembly, association, and expression).
Fred and I will undoubtedly disagree. We reside on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Yet I know this does not mean we will be disagreeable, or even uncivil, in our dinner-time discussions. We’re not shy about searching for core primary values (i.e. substantive values, not due-process ones, like hollow terms such as meritocracy, freedom, liberty, or fairness). No one in this family sees eye-to-eye on fairness, since it depends upon each person’s perspective.
Now, the other two members of our nuclear family will be more reluctant to write it down. Being age-appropriate argumentative teens, I suspect, they will not “necessarily” think this is a good dinner-table discussion, and will argue throughout the meal how onerous (and unfair) a demand Fred and I are imposing.
At least it beats my “design your own dystopia” request of a few summers back. Being in Italy at that time, I thought it only fair that the junior members of this nuclear family should think about this topic. After all, they could feel the presence of Antonio Gramsci, Machiavelli, or even the ghost of St. Augustine. Alas, no one followed up on their dinner-table assignments, but we did have a lively discussion about political utopias and dystopias — enough of a discussion to know that we’re leaning more toward the dys- than the u- in these long, hot summer days of 2016’s horrors.
Here’s a picture that won’t surprise you. By picture, I mean read the lawsuit. A sample: “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you would have been good and better and I would have been good and better.”
What I mean by “better” is more effective in hiring, targeting, harassing, and then firing their loyal women announcers (who undoubtedly don’t believe in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, protecting them from discrimination, until it “suits” them).
A tragedy for us all, though we are not all equal in tragedy.
How does one explain this graphic murder to anyone? Can we hope to stop the killing of our fellow American citizens by state actors hired and funded (in part) by the sovereign American nation-state? This is a question for one national leader — who I used to think did not lead from behind.
Ahmed Salah said it well – activism is activity. The Egyptian revolution didn’t fail, the Egyptian political process post-revolution failed – in Egypt. Why? The political process – the infrastructure, the institutions, the constitution or the lack thereof – failed. Good institutions, specifically a viable constitution, did not/does not exist in Egypt. It does exist in Salah’s newfound country – the United States.
Egypt is different from the United States. Or the United States (a wealthy nation) is different from Egypt (a non-wealthy nation). In the United States we do have the political infrastructure – both the institutions and the American Constitution.
What’s wrong? We’ve got the wrong people leading these institutions. And worse, we’ve got the wrong people appointed for life, interpreting how these institutions operate (e.g. the John Roberts–led, religiously minded Supreme Court).
Put differently, we have the structure, just not the leaders. Even if Citizens United exists – throwing all sorts of funding into corrupting the process, as Salah said – just have a constitutional amendment not allowing any politician in any state, on any level, to contribute more than 100 dollars to a campaign.
Now this won’t work because the religious, big-business, pro-state-when-it suits-the-black-robed members Supreme Court will strike down this constitutional amendment as unconstitutional, won’t it? Or will they? As long as we don’t get another Scalia it won’t.
Or will it? The point is that this would mean the Supreme Court is really flouting the representational democratic process. And when all those voting folks get together to pass a constitutional memory on 27 so far, would this least democratic institution within the representational democracy do it? I bet not.
But before I bet on this, I should bet on whether or not the youth in the United States could do what is really called for with the Bernie Sanders phenomenon – and this is have a Tahrir Square in the United States, where the post-revolution (all right, let’s call it reform) would work – where a revolution is worth the effort.
What Salah was saying, he said in the title of his book — You Are under Arrest for Masterminding the Egyptian Revolution. In the United States you might get in trouble for masterminding something, but it would not be a revolution, or a real reform.
The Forum’s host, Michael Krasny, an English professor, is a great listener and interviewer who rarely interrupts his guests, didn’t listen. Nor did the call-in listeners pay attention to this fundamental difference between Salah’s experience and what happened in Zuccotti Park (site of the first Occupy Wall Street), which closed when they got hosed out on November 18, 2013 (a hose, not bullets, mallets, or rubber bullets).
If the youth want change, they have to stay standing for change. But most important, they don’t need to revolt for a revolution – all they need to do is use the existing political process – our political institutions — to invoke lasting and permanent change – like the real progressives* at the turn of the last century – that is the 20th century. And that is — Tahrir Square, which symbolized the Egyptian revolution, did not fail – the Egyptian political process post revolution failed — in Egypt.
Egypt – a Middle Eastern nation-state — did nor does not have the infrastructure if you will to become a Scandinavian nation instantly**
Let’s take this apart. First let me start with the conclusion that my older young moralistic person who currently resides in our home saw before s/he was a major (not a minor) – and that is: Why are those in open mike people talking revolution when we already had one. Then, s/he looked at me and said didn’t we? That’s when I told him to read another book.
—
^Or Bernie Sanders’ Youth Could if they have the staying power.
*The real progressives are John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, the latter of whom contributed greatly to the magazine Chris Hughes just ruined – TNR or The New Republic. Shame on him, or them who reign or are the new robber barons from Silicon Valley.
**Key point most get wrong about Karl Marx too. The former Soviet Union could not jump from being an agrarian nation to a communist nation, skipping over urbanization and industrialization, let alone post-industrialization. Even citizens have to do their homework (i.e. progressing from one grade to another or one political economic era to another.)
What time is it? Certainly not time for Bernie to step out. It’s time for him to step up and capture the global sentiment of revolutionary reform (a contradiction in terms, if there ever was one). But Bernie’s voters could do it.
But who cares? It’s more than American potential voters. The youth across the world – from Rio de Janeiro to Las Vegas is on a tear. They care (about global political and economic corruption or global political economy, please).
And it feels (I’m not saying it is) like it’s going to be a bigger tear than Occupy Wall Street. The students from Wall Street, New York City to Madrid picked up something in their failed attempt to do anything other than sell t-shirts when they chickened out with their leader-less, supposedly horizontal, go-nowhere (easy to suppress) so-called movement.^
So hey, NYTimes.com stop editorializing and calling it news on the “front page” – and telling us that Bernie is like Teddy (Roosevelt). That’s apples* and oranges.
And to think Jonathan Mahler and Yamiche Alcindor call him liberal just because he’s old (and old-fashioned) and rails against economic inequality and for social justice – creating the biggest leftist, “not liberal,”** mailing list?
What’s wrong with a good mailing list? Isn’t this the place to start? Bernie’s not going to win, and he well could cause Hillary’s defeat (or he will, most likely).
Pouty-prince Trump will win. President big-rump Trump being a bully mobilizes Bernies’ people in the United States, at least.**** But hey again, it’s not really about 2016.
The race, as I hear it best described in the United States, is about 2020 – the year of the census, or the year of possibilities for real representational democratic change given redistricting that determines voting rules on a state by state basis.
No – if Bernie is like anyone, he’s like Eugene (Debs that is) in 1916 and so the capitalists, and their thugs (known as politicians who follow different forms of the Wall Street inequalities – like Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer – engineer of the Red Scare) will have to beat down***, and control the press while they’re doing it.)
And to think that the NYTimes.com prints this on the very same “front” page as they call out conservative billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson; and Jeff Bezos (who bought their competition, the Washington Post) for interfering with free press.
The Times is clearly afraid of Times – political time that is. *****
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^The moralistic youthful temporary resident in my domicile thinks I’m too harsh, and folks who have nothing to lose and are now this individual’s age have been on a rant for years.
*Who can eat apples these days anyway – either you can’t afford organic or you can’t find organic in blue stores like Costco given our hegemonic system of global inequality or the billionaire shut-the-rest-of-us-up-economy. Plus, we all know their either smothered in pesticides, unfairly picked by little children, or irradiated so way out of season—as to be best called Frankenfruit).
**liberal is the old-fashioned word for what progressives now call progressive thought, though Hillary Clinton has commandeered this terms.
***Who said the sovereign state wasn’t large? New York City alone has the largest number of people with guns in the world, commandeered by one politician, Mayor de Blasio.
**** A President Trump will undoubtedly weigh in and try to get them to change their headlines but again, who cares? It’s better for freedom of press to have more of it, than to have to read the front page of the New York Times for anything other than the early-morning-outrage factor.
*****Non-chronological time – time to do something (i.e. political time in terms of American Political Development, a subfield in the study of politics or present-ism in history, otherwise known as contemporary history – another oxymoron which is really code for juxtapositions that produce counter-intuitive thought or critical thinking).
Not since I was in Switzerland — on my way to Unterwasser — have I seen an all-white, male, middle-aged road crew. And I saw it in New Jersey, no less — not just New Jersey, but the Plainfields. North Plainfield, Plainfield, and Watchung are divided by Highway 22. It’s hard to find the bridge over the highway that literally separates wealthy Watchung from the largely poor, demographically diverse Plainfields (South Plainfield is more prosperous).
Together, North Plainfield and Plainfield are about three-quarters non-white, and Watchung is the mirror opposite — three-quarters white. Or put it this way, South Plainfield and Watchung have T R U M P signs in their front yards, whereas the Plainfields do not (with the exception again, of South Plainfield)
The Plainfields’ poverty rate seems unremarkable without putting it in statewide context. New Jersey is the wealthiest state in the nation; it beats Connecticut. Yet in this wealthy state are some of the poorest cities in the nation, including Camden and Plainfield. In Plainfield, even the building where Planned Parenthood is housed is marked “for sale.”
Plainfield, what is more, is home to a historic Quaker house museum and a Unitarian congregation, with the relatively new kid on the block, so to speak, being one of the many physical homes across the nation of #BlackLivesMatter.
Why does it matter that the municipal work crew I saw was all white, middle-aged men? Because as jobs diminish and municipal public-works jobs are even more difficult to find, connections, favors, and favoritism must matter even more.
So this got me thinking, why all of a sudden are municipal public-works road jobs (possibly; this is an unfounded social science hypothesis, after all, an observation) going to what is demographically categorized as, or the embodiment of, Trump supporters? Or put more plainly, why all the signs in the border town South Plainfield –- even the wealthy Watchung did not have that many T- R- U- M -P* signs.
*The spaced out letters work well we all have vision problems in middle age. The lettering reads like a general practitioner’s eye-exam.
Boom. What am I talking about? That I anticipated President Barack Obama’s actions by virtue of developing a study about his modus operandi — or his ideas as political thought — in Out of Many, One: Barack Obama and the Third American Political Tradition. Put differently, I drank the Kool-Aid — which isn’t to say I wasn’t disappointed by Obama at times (especially his stance on civil liberties).
Four of the six articles on today’s New York Times front page reflect Obama’s legacy or the body of our President’s political thought, in this order:
Representational democratic reform via social media (as an extension of Occupy Wall Street or OWS) (chapter 6)
Obama being a hawk, not a dove, left a vacuum in foreign policy when he could not get Congress to give him enough authority to effect real change in the Middle East. He inherited not one but two wars in the Middle East when all he wanted to do with his administration was concentrate on Asia. (chapter 5)
Obama is an economic progressive — and he used executive action to achieve it. If Congress refuses to play ball and raise the minimum wage, so what? Obama just did a due-process reform by raising the limit for time-and-a-half pay for salaried employees. Sure, this helps the middle class, but Obama was always a middle-class reformer. (chapters 1 and 2)
Finally, it’s great that Antonin Scalia is dead. Now, this could not have been predicted — at least, not the timing. And I do not mean as a man, only as an aged Supreme Court Justice who reflected a small portion of rebel rousers — called rednecks and religious rednecks — the kind that reside in Oildale CA, where my relatives lived.
Talk about a real Tea Party! Or should I say an improved Tea Party, one that will practice only civil disobedience Henry Thoreau style?
Elizabeth Arnold, who started EDGE*, and Nina Turner, a Sanders surrogate, got it right, whereas Harry (Senator Reid, NV) and Roberta Lange** (NV Democratic chair) got it wrong.
Barbara got it even wronger (Senator Boxer, CA). She doesn’t want the Sanders supporters to protest because “it’s distressing.” Really!!?!*&?
Our youth are finally practicing Occupy Wall Street–like tactics for the upcoming Democratic convention. I doubt that many “chairs will fly” in Philly, so why doesn’t the Democratic party stop whining?
A candidate cannot be opposed to Citizens United while others are staging a demonstration that enacts the real protest against Citizens United and not be labeled a hypocrite. Yes, HC, that’s you. Hillary Clinton’s got to win this primary election the fair way if she expects to win the general election against Donald Trump.
Otherwise, what always happens will happen again — voters will turn away from the American polls the American way (with their feet), and the rest of the world will get to call us an “apathetic nation.” For our enemies, the emphasis is always on the root: pathetic. I, for one, would like to be free of that.
* End Dirty Gas Exploitation, an environmental-justice group.
Fred and I disagree on almost everything “substantive” about American politics*, especially in 2016. But we do agree on ten things: Here’s the list:
Nate Silveris a political scientist, and a social engineer, given that during election #3 he categorically failed to predict Trump (538’s prediction was in the margin of error, according to their statistics or data crunch).
Anthony Weiner is a man’s man within the male-dominated political world of scandals, no matter how many scandals people postulate Hillary Clinton is embroiled in.
Men, and women, and all genders, who act like men, are self-serving egotists who will hopefully begin having their own public scandals while in public service, thereby achieving parity of all sexes.**
Former NY Representative from Queens Anthony Weiner should get a Ph.D. but not teach ethics or the politics of scandals, let alone practice the latter, unless it is an extension course on the politics of the need for more men in childcare and parenting.*** (Alec Baldwin’s interview deserved an A of sorts for his interview of Weiner)
Academic freedom is a subset of First Amendment freedom of expression.
The pen is mightier than the sword, even if it takes a few years for the youth to read enough (or for middle-aged rednecks to read enough) to get incited.
Barack Obama’s transgender passports also unleashed a world of opposition. Yay for my civil-rights causes.
* within bounded rationality — two-pole ethic — right in representational democracy, the operative word is representational. (“Bounded rationality” is one of my current favorite social-ethics terms.)
** but more likely to be fixers (like Shonda Rhimes’s protagonist inScandal)
Note: This message is sponsored, in part, by Fred Schwarz/Fred O’Brien (and no, I am not a bigamist but we reside in a bi-bounded rationality informal institution)
Republicans are now only in the third stage of grief about the Donald candidacy. That is, they are bargaining. The Donald is brokering a deal with the “reasonable (?*!)” Honorable Paul Ryan. Paul, as Mr. Republican deux (for the House, not the Senate), is playing hard to get while triage-ing and trying to keep a Republican Senate majority. Ha! Or should I say we can sing along with JLO about it.*
I can’t wait to see Stage 4 — when the GOP’s well earned “depression” begins! And just think about the possibilities when they hit Stage 5: Acceptance. That’s when Hillary’s schadenfreudereally begins.
*JLO = “Jennifer Lopez” for the “millennials” who see her as a movie/TV star, not a pop star.
Every time I go to the gym,* I figure I’ll treat myself with some TV. I’m going to listen to TV news. Exciting. World-spanning. I can catch up** on my pop-culture deficit during my 20 minutes of exercise (which resembles PT more than exercise, but hey).
And then I turn on the dreck. I start with Fox (why not?). Fox and Friends had on one Bush daughter and the Bush mom (not to be confused with the real Barbara Bush, who would never read, let alone write, a children’s book on Texas, or rather American clichés for the youngest minds to consume).
Switch that off. Let’s go to those supposedly liberal cable shows that big media and the G.O.P. are always whining about. It’s even worse. Mom and Pop are arguing. Plus Pop puts down Mom: He’s the intelligent one in the family, after all, who gets to reverse poor Mom — who has to keep saying to her supposed co-host, “No, you’re wrong” (or something to that effect).
Well, that’s when I gotta end. My PT, after all, works only in 20-minute increments, and at least I put in my 7 minutes learning why everyone — populists on the right and the left — is so gosh-dang-it angry — no, enraged. Let’s hope my PT recovery is better than the Democrats’. The Republicans, naturally, did it to themselves, and I’d listen to more backstabbing and whining if I just had the patience to finish.
#
* for PT, now exciting, energizing, strengthening . . . just 2 decades of recovery from self-induced PC compulsion
** TV was banned in our house when I was growing up, unlike my cousins. We had a working television but we couldn’t watch until we hit the junior-high ostracization years, when I accidentally revealed (to my horror) my ignorance by responding “Who?” to a mention of Keith Partridge of The Partridge Family. That was the last time I unwillingly hid under a pop-culture rock.
Watch the blowfish for 2.4 minutes of fun! Then, in case you have trouble pronouncing Schadenfreude, which is a uniquely German word defined as — deriving pleasure from others’ pain — hit the iconic sound image for more fun. In this case you can hear the robot pronounce Schadenfreude, which is fun to watch in conjunction with, or after you view the Washington Post’s video of the pain in the top 10 Republican Trump haters’ body language. Their smiles are particularly pained fun given the Trump Rump monster they built. Feel me?
While I don’t like wading through advertisements, this version is the best song for Hillary Clinton, the General whose fighting the GOP’s War against Women, now waged by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Not quite sure why Rubio Robot keeps attacking Obama. Hit Hillary (rhetorically) for undoubtedly following in Obama’s footsteps, sure. Cast a stone at Christie or Cruz, why not. But Barack? Robot Rubio is no drone. Do we want him in charge of the drones given he lacks direction?
The BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) is so dull that even professors in American Political Development took years to publish a book on the origins of this statistics-collecting agency formed in 1906.
But information is power, and President Barack Obama will exercise his executive power to force medium and large firms to “report to the federal government what they pay employees by race, gender and ethnicity . . . to crack down on firms that pay women less for doing the same work as men.” Wowsa. Hillary Clinton just scored an executive power worth following if she’s elected.
If American businesses start reporting what women, Latinos, African-Americans, LGBTQers, persons with disabilities, and (best of all) any employees — including white men — who are over 39 years old (and thus protected under age discrimination) are paid, we can all count on getting a pay raise, no? All of us but white men who are under 40 and older than 18 years old — many of whom make up Trump’s voting base — will have the data reported for potential lawsuits. In other words, less than 20% of the American workforce is not protected, or 80% can sue for discrimination.
The Lilly Ledbetter Law, the first law Obama signed, has had little to no effect. The neotribal Roberts Court (religious, anti-woman, anti-union . . .) undermined class-action suits as a means of helping those who were discriminated against to get paid fairly, so Obama found another way — new rules that capitalize on the reparations movement re-energized by Ta-Nehisi Coates. African-American women, historically paid the least, should be the first in line for raises.
How does this Bill, a hopeful Latino presidential candidate from 2008, wish to woo them back? Charging women a higher discrimination tax? Is it because white women went from 59 to 78 cents in three generations, and he thinks that’s moving too fast? Or is it because the SLAMs (straight, liberal, Anglo men) are starting to identify only with the SCAMs (straight, conservative, Anglo men)?
Since they are just 5 percent* of the American population, why should any politician coddle them? To be sure, 5 percent is not 1 percent, but really. (Five percent is the figure given to represent those who the police regularly, repeatedly serve when they’re fighting crime.)
And in identifying with SCAMs, are the SLAMs also going to become more obsessed with our bodies? Is this really only about money? Or is there a cultural fear permeating here?
I mean, another recent New York Times headline was about how women and their daughters can start sharing uteruses with temporary transplants, so that more women can give birth. Now isn’t that cool? Rent a uterus. What does Hobby Lobby mean for this reproductive transplant, particularly if it’s temporary?
Being temporary also means it facilitates women having their own biological children, and keeping this part of the process “in the family.” At the very least this should please Jeb!, who eschews that state, particularly when it comes to the family.
This Bush argues for “parental consent over government intrusions into families.” He knows about being neotribal, making sure who in each family retains supremacy and remains “chief.”
Talk about neotribal, and women, girls, boys, and the 95 percenters fear. What if “family first” puts them in danger? No, safety first, family second, or so I say.
Maybe these white Democratic men should start beating on drums again to gain a bit of perspective, if not consciousness. Male consciousness-raising might help them out of this self-esteem progressive pity party, so that they don’t have to increase my discrimination tax to make themselves feel better.
Maybe SLAMs and SCAMs should spend more time in male-dominated China — domination defined here in sheer population numbers, though the nation finally loosened its one-child policy (read one-boy policy). Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” leadership clearly scares the former heads of the village, particularly since this village contains a rainbow umbrella that Obama, after all, built.
* Italian men are part of the 95 percent, being in a protected class in some locales, such as New York City.
How does this Bill, a hopeful Latino presidential candidate from 2008, wish to woo them back? Charging women a higher discrimination tax? Is it because white women went from 59 to 78 cents in three generations, and he thinks that’s moving too fast? Or is it because the SLAMs (straight, liberal, Anglo men) are starting to identify only with the SCAMs (straight, conservative, Anglo men)?
Since they are just 5 percent* of the American population, why should any politician coddle them? To be sure, 5 percent is not 1 percent, but really. (Five percent is the figure given to represent those who the police regularly, repeatedly serve when they’re fighting crime.)
And in identifying with SCAMs, are the SLAMs also going to become more obsessed with our bodies? Is this really only about money? Or is there a cultural fear permeating here?
I mean, another recent New York Times headline was about how women and their daughters can start sharing uteruses with temporary transplants, so that more women can give birth. Now isn’t that cool? Rent a uterus. What does Hobby Lobby mean for this reproductive transplant, particularly if it’s temporary?
Being temporary also means it facilitates women having their own biological children, and keeping this part of the process “in the family.” At the very least this should please Jeb!, who eschews that state, particularly when it comes to the family.
This Bush argues for “parental consent over government intrusions into families.” He knows about being neotribal, making sure who in each family retains supremacy and remains “chief.”
Talk about neotribal, and women, girls, boys, and the 95 percenters fear. What if “family first” puts them in danger? No, safety first, family second, or so I say.
Maybe these white Democratic men should start beating on drums again to gain a bit of perspective, if not consciousness. Male consciousness-raising might help them out of this self-esteem progressive pity party, so that they don’t have to increase my discrimination tax to make themselves feel better.
Maybe SLAMs and SCAMs should spend more time in male-dominated China — domination defined here in sheer population numbers, though the nation finally loosened its one-child policy (read one-boy policy). Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village” leadership clearly scares the former heads of the village, particularly since this village contains a rainbow umbrella that Obama, after all, built.
* Italian men are part of the 95 percent, being in a protected class in some locales, such as New York City.
Before you hear the “news” tonight, or watch your late-night nightly satire – here are a couple of clips for comparison with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s morning-to-afternoon professional performance at a GOP political shindig.
And what about former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who came to regret and publicly disavow his testimony on Weapons of Mass Destruction before the UN?
Do Democrats want to put a Democrat in the White House? Why complain about the absence of Democratic contenders now? If you’re a self-interested member of the GOP, sure — that GOP-someone who wins the White House will get to nominate four to five Supreme Court justices on what is already an ultra-conservative Roberts Court.
A long time ago, the Literary Digest existed to distill the news from within towns, and from town to town. Social-media news-gathering devices do that now. It’s the algorithms that get your blood boiling about the misinformation, the superficial or cynical, self-serving spins, or the outright fabrications. I’d collect them all, but that would be defeating the purpose of Democrats who want to put a Democrat into the White House, with Bernie playing his part of pushing Hillary leftward. (Thanks, Bernie!)
Here are a couple of outliers to substantiate my neotribalism/SLAMs-and-SCAMs viewpoint. “Hillary Clinton Takes Epic Tumble While Boarding Airplane.”
I’d say the mainstream media, which pretends to be in the middle, and objective, of course does the most damage. Never mind the less-than-subtly negative New York Times. What about the New Yorker’s “How to Beat Hillary Clinton” headline? (Who cares if it’s ironic or doing the switcheroo to get you to read past the headline.)
Do the Democrats need to be more disciplined? Do we really need our national political gender diversity to come from locking-and-loading, gun-toting GOP women contenders, like incumbent Renee Ellmers, who is fending off Kay Daly, in their fight for Congress?
Take a look at Renee Ellmers’s opposition. Kay Ryon Daly is running against the Honorable Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s 2nd congressional district. Not only is she pro-gun (obviously, and undoubtedly not an issue that divides their two candidacies), but Kay is also pro-fidelity (surprise, surprise), whereas Renee is in theory but perhaps not in practice.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s shop (the New York Post) is, as always, very anti-Hillary Clinton. It’s been suggesting that she is not really “human.”Is it worse to be called a fem-N…, which Rush Limbaugh et al. coined during Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s?
Or is worse to say that Hillary is an old-fashioned feminist, and not an intersectionalist (which, to be fair, contradicts the underlying “ist” behind her two-minute official declaration of candidacy on YouTube)?
Or is it worst of all to articulate that certain Democrats and Republicans practice neotribalism (patriarchy, etc.), and can’t help being SLAMs or SCAMs?
Aren’t we getting too picky about presidential candidates if we say that Hillary’s not intersectionalist enough when she’s clearly a feminist and . . . (yes, this means you — the Millennials who made fun of Oberlin graduate Lena Dunham’s latest mouthpiece, I mean platform)?
I’m talking about the 5 percent — The Donald’s Fans; or I suppose within the Democratic party Joe’s fans; and then those who are not very political or partisan — that is, the number of people in the United States who are not protected under federal civil rights legislation is very small. It is around 5 percent.
Contrary to how we view civil rights in the affirmative action mindset, most people are in one protected class or another. There are civil rights protections for women, children, persons of color, persons of certain ethnicities in different locations (including Italians in New York City) persons with disabilities, persons who are pregnant, persons with predispositions to genetic diseases and illnesses, persons over the age of 39, and persons who are LGBTQers.
The best political line I heard this February was not in House of Cards but in Downton Abbey. Dowager Countess Grantham Maggie Smith said something poignant to the effect that: “Men don’t have rights.” What Julian Fellowes, creator of the series, really meant was that SLAMs and SCAMs — or, in the American context, men between the ages of 18 and 39 — don’t need rights.*
You don’t have (or need) rights if you control the social, economic, and political processes, as the aristocratic class in England did until their Empire’s end.
Even acknowledging the existence of rights puts you in the kind and self-deprecating column, which goes a long way when you want to claim you even understand the need for rights. (That’s code for ahh shucks, SLAMs and SCAMS realizing they are gonna have to share and can’t bully everyone off the playground.)
All identity politics (including Hillary) is first about power, not rights or duties, let alone obligations (the latter, being cultural, social, economic, political and legal, are more comprehensive than a combination of duties and rights). The group that has the power to make the rules does not need rights.
So any time any group starts belittling rights (e.g. conservative commentary on the Selma march, and about using its 50th anniversary to honor the civil-rights movement by marching), beware. And any time any group starts reversing rights, beware. Reversing rights is simply the conservative way of hitting the less powerful the hardest where they live.
Look what happened to Frank Underwood (FU) when First Lady Claire Underwood stood her ground. House of Cards raised many issues this season that involve women, power, and violence — and the season spoiler is: Who will come out on top?
As is the case with most TV shows, it ends with a strand of three — three women – 1) Heather Dunbar (Elizabeth Marvel), FU’s rival for the 2016 Democratic bid; 2) FU gets Rep. Jacqueline Sharp (Molly Parker), who betrayed Claire by backing out of sponsoring legislation against violence against women in the military; and 3) Rachel Posner (Rachel Brosnahan), the call girl FU used to engineer a debased and debauched no-nothing SLAM member of Congress. FU’s fixer and enforcer, season three’s Chief of Staff, Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), obsessed with protecting the religious, demure, repentant-lost-call-girl, finally comes to Chief of Staff senses when she nearly beats him to death. He beats her back, taking his”right”-ful position as FU’s Chief of Staff after not only digging the grave all by himself, but putting the religious and demure Rachel in it personally after she almost tricked him out of it one last time. Will FU do Claire in; or does Claire control the upper hand to do an FU (making Claire a proxy for HC’s humiliation during BC’s impeachment)?
When groups belittle and reverse rights for protected classes — those who did not historically control the entire political process — and/or reverse rights, there can be only one reaction — violence or the threat of violence against women and all protected others.
When the GOP pokes Hillary, along with all the not-so-properly-blue men who retreat from the Democratic party, she should not react. HC has learned what my boys learned on their very first playgrounds — and that’s that you have to stand there and take it, protect your friends and especially your brother, but don’t poke back. Stand your ground.
And of course this means releasing great reports for CSW, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. Hillary must. But this does not mean that HC is framing herself, does it?
Is HC launching her campaign with Women’s History Month? I doubt it was more than a trial balloon now that she’s faced the full blowback while giving her email speech from the UN podium.
Hillary wouldn’t dare do that officially, any more than Barack Obama relied on Black History Month. Obama has to speak for everyone, which pretty much sums up the main frustration of the Obama presidency.
While women account for 51 percent of the population, there is a much stronger argument. But HC knows better than most the perils of being a “first.”
We are now set up for season four (the finale in February 2016) with three women and one ghost while Downton Abbey devolves turns into a feel-good prime-time PBS soap opera with one Dowager Countess making us feel good about how women have collected their “rights.” Don’t think so. No matter what: On February 27, 2016, the new season of House of Cards will set the tone for Hillary’s run against whatever GOP candidate has emerged by February’s end after Iowa: New Hampshire; Colorado caucuses, Minnesota caucuses; New York; Utah; Nevada caucuses; South Carolina; North Carolina; and Michigan have been decided. Prof. #RuthOBrienGC*
^This is reprinted since the Weasel Zippers deleted it from all sites but one. So, from this I conclude it had “Idea Impact”
—————————–
Ruth and the dowager countess are correct that if you have privilege (from the Latin for “private law”), you don’t need rights. Custom is stronger than any legislation — until it isn’t. And by the same token, when a privilege decreases or disappears, rights that were created specifically to oppose it should decrease or disappear as well.
To be sure, some privileges don’t go away. People with disabilities, by definition, require accommodation, and they have a right to it (though as my favorite political scientist has pointed out, the best solution is to make “disability rights” universal by recognizing that everyone is a member or potential member of this protected class). Women need more restroom space in public places than men do, and should have it written into the building code; no amount of consciousness raising will change this.
By contrast, consider the Voting Rights Act. When Congress passed it in 1965, the Selma march had taken place just a few months before, and the official ballot symbol of the Alabama Democratic party still contained the slogan “White Supremacy.” Things changed greatly over the next few years, and in the ensuing decades, and now in much of the South, black voter-turnout rates exceed those of whites. Yet the VRA’s burdensome pre-clearance rules and other bureaucratic requirements are still in effect in nine entire states and assorted localities (including New York City) because those places had voting problems back when LBJ was president. And there’s no serious chance that the VRA will be repealed anytime soon: The Democrats won’t let it happen, because that would require admitting that it isn’t 1965 anymore.
And the Republicans? They oppose repeal too, not only because they would be portrayed as racist, but because the VRA effectively mandates the creation of heavily black and Hispanic districts for Congress and state legislatures, to ensure the election of black and Hispanic officials. This isolation of non-GOP voters in a handful of districts works in the Republicans’ favor. The best estimates are that if congressional districts were drawn in a race-neutral fashion, the Democrats would have a dozen more seats.
In other words: If an identity group relies on rights, it will get what the rights require — and nothing more. The best way to eliminate privilege is to make rights universal and apply them equally to all. Editor #FredOBrien**
*House of Cards Season 3 Spoiler alert
**Frederic O’Brien are entirely his own, not reflective of Ruth O’Brien.org CUNY Politics Professor views or those of any campus of The City University of New York(CUNY)
All this Hillary-versus-Joe talk got me thinking: Misogyny knows no American political party — that is, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties within the American two-party system both have strands of misogyny, or what I call neotribalism.
The Biden-promoting or Joe-talking Democrats don’t acknowledge this, any more than the Democrats serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee realized during now-Justice Clarence Thomas’s nomination hearings that the former head of the EEOC being accused of sexual harassment was political dirt-digging gold for undermining his nomination. The GOP, after all, was shamelessly self-serving in putting Thomas up for Marshall’s seat. So is the GOP now.
What the Biden-talking Democrats are counting on is the inside-the-“progressive”-party misogyny in the American two-party legacy of neotribalism. That is to say, all those folks who vote in their self-interest — which is to say, the 5 percent who are NOT in protected identity categories (i.e. women, children, men and women between 18 and 21, LGBTQers, persons with different abilities or disabilities, as well as those older than 39 (age discrimination is for everyone 40 years old and older).
Hillary Clinton may be just as centrist as Joe, and Bernie is pushing her properly progressively leftwards (plus he’s being a good partisan by squashing all third-party rumors, unlike the Donald).
So this is how Hillary is harmed by talk of Joe running? This would be how her Ready for Hillary team could lose control?
Put differently, the 5 percent I’m addressing are SLAMs and SCAMS. Shouldn’t democracy — with a small D or a big D — protect 95 percent of the American populace? That’s my definition of small-d democracy, even if all those who are for Joe say it ain’t so.
As a Monday-morning experiment, I clicked a lot of buttons that supposedly indicated my advertising preferences, so I got to edit “out” the most annoying aspects of global capitalism — tracking advertising. We will see what ads follow me, since my preferences are largely political non-profits and politics. So it’s not like I won’t be asked for anything.
I figured it was worth experimenting with the newly tweaked FB, even with all of MZ’s antics (consorting with Modi, which was well covered by all mainstream sources, like). WSJ gets it — though you have to realize that all 5 reasons are unsafe at any speed for democracy.
Since I still haven’t found the “dis”-like button. I guess my preference foray is too much found freedom and authenticity. If it were this easy to refine my ad-line, then . . .
Here it is — the letter written by Honorable Walter B. Jones to Honorable Cathy McMorris Rodgers Oct 6, 2015 writing that
“With all the voter distrust felt around the country, I’m asking that any candidate for Speaker of the House . . . withdraw himself from leadership election if there are any misdeeds he has committed since joining Congress that will embarrass himself, the Republican Conference, and the House of Representatives if they become public.”
This letter, naturally, became public immediately, and Kevin McCarthy stepped out of the Speaker of the House race.
Why didn’t Kevin get the big seat in the House of Representatives — Speaker of the House? What was the tipping point for the GOP? (The Speaker of the House wins by majority and sits behind the President of the United States when he gives the State of the Union Address, typically. It is a non-partisan position.)
Well, it was reported last January that Kevin had an open secret — an affair with the Honorable Renee Ellmers, a Republican member of the House from North Carolina. Who ratted them out? Renee, of course.
My item on the affair got erased from my site — ruthobrien.org — around late January or February when the Right tried to snip me into silence – or, put more precisely, delete evidence of this tawdry tell-all affair between two allegedly professional members from the GOP’s side of the House (who both had families and constituencies and are Tea Party conservatives).
Yet, if the conservative “Got News” is similar to “RedState” or other sketchy right-wing sites, this link will not last long. Check it out now.
Trump’s no Teddy. Not only will the Trump coalition be way too old to facilitate another run in 2024, his departure from the Inaugural stage won’t be missed. And besides this is one time when he don’t be a first. Former President Theodore Roosevelt’s way of dealing with conflict was to take off to other conflicts. 
This category of posts is for all the blogs I write about PwD or Persons or People with disabilities as reflected in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 as well as the 2008 Amendments and the California law for self-advocacy, particularly in opening up public accommodations to PwD.
These posts reflect my original interest in American politics, history and political theory broadly cast.
While the city on the Columbia River is still sleeping, check out #portlandprotest photos from last night in July 31 to August 1, 2020 morning.Quick Observations: Maybe Trump could learn a thing or two from the mail in Oregon (ballot-box mail). The name Pioneer Court sounds odd, but that’s if you’re coming from Manhattan. Oregon had an overtly racist state Constitution that was never tested in the U.S. Supreme Court.Also, so what if the mayor got hit with a bit of pepper spray or tear gas? City Hall is literally across the street and one park away from the three federal buildings. So basically it means Mayor Ted Wheeler went outside City Hall. Wish I knew that before heading West.#portlandprotest The Apple and Louis Vuitton luggage stores seem to want to have it all, upset about the loss of their goods but now letting #portlandprotest decorate their empty store fronts. Is this so Apple left-libertarians like Tim Cook or the late Steve Jobs couldn’t relate, or since they can’t relate?I remember reading that in 2000 Matt Bai shows that they spent virtually nothing on lobbying and now 2020 they spend more than oil and gas lobbyists. Where is Christopher Buckley when you need him to update his movie?
Anarchy finally caught up with Netflix. There is no such thing as an out-of-wedlock child, let alone “illegitimate,” but there is a parentless child, at least genetically. We live in an “on” world (i.e. computers have no or difficult to find on/off switches. Remember the radio?!). The surveillance state is old news.
Lights and Camera — Sunshine Laws and Shining Lights.
IdeaImpact.org’s project “Spiritual Sisterhood across States” 
Been quiet for quiet some time. Out of deference to the President? No. Out of respect to this nation, he, Trump, Trumped, No. Borised? Blond locks unite? No? White locks and blond locks unite? 
Blog (and Book) by Jane Caputi
Congratulations, Martha! Here is the University of Chicago’s story about their faculty member and Public Square author Professor Martha Nussbaum.
As editor of the Public Square series, which has won over 17 prizes for only 9 books published over 14 years, I do not find this surprising. After all, Professor Nussbaum’s Public Square book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, was a great success in more ways than one. Not only does her work help democracy by helping to save the humanities, but the book sold exceedingly well. As Rob Tempio, the in-house Princeton University Press senior editor of Philosophy, Classics, and Political Theory, explained it to me: Many philanthropic boards and universities bought copies of Not for Profit for their whole board to make the point that is in the title — Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. It’s a vital message, and I’m glad The Public Square was able to help Professor Nussbaum spread the word.
Let the Games begin! As a nation, the United States (yes, all the states) of America (the continent we share with Canada and Central America), we have hit rock bottom — or very close to it.
Here are the Headlines: Kavanaugh (a.k.a. “the Trigger”); Democrats take Midterms; and 2020 goes to . . . the Democratic nominee, of course.
Social movements against Trump are NOW thriving. Two cheers for that.
P.S. I was sorry I missed my U.S. Capitol Page High School Reunion. I’m not going to share the graduation date, haha.
How is $120 million different from Roger Ailes’s $45 million? Zero tolerance for media means that the harassers get rich or richer, whereas the victims of their harassment and violent sexual assault (i.e. rape) are lucky not to get blackballed from their profession or remain powerless. Even if you’re a journalist, like Ronan Farrow, they can drive you out or into a different medium. (The New Yorker being the out, and lucky for The New Yorker.) 
Vice President, Pence – Please. I’m losing patience. Let’s get it over with. Out of 253 articles today, you and your willingness (along with your staff’s) to sit happily in this chair wins. You prevailed.
One of my colleagues, now long retired, put it this way. Frankly, I can’t remember who said what — who gets the credit. Or who gets the blame, depending, of course, on your perspective. Anyway, the question is this: Why do Republicans own red?
We are all suffering from some form of Trump-induced PTSD. Emergency-room visits were up the day after 11/9, as a creative-writing friend of mine pointed out this perverse inversion of 9/11 after the presidential election of 2016. I have friends and colleagues in all disciplines — Spanish literature, comparative political thought, literary theory, interdisciplinary pedagogy taught in Dutch and international English, let alone American politics, law and society, American political development (APD), and American (or better yet, comparative) political thought (APT & CPT). We would all laugh at the buffoon if he were not so scary. When you’re terrified, you can only titter.
Sad, mad, eating glass. Like we didn’t know this was what was going to happen? I mean, really, Trump reveres nothing. Take a quick peek at that video of Ivanka on his knee if you don’t mind feeling the creeps, again.
Having just passed the new Institutional Review Board (IRB) test got me wondering: Why don’t journalists have to do this, let alone their editors (who, after all, set the agenda, “alt” or not)?
President Trump’s doctor says he may be eating too many fries at his global golf courses His so-called physician never named what food or when, naturally. Still, Trump’s clearly winning at Davos given double digit growth for double digit wealthy nations who have global leaders who are saying my how we’ve grown.Well this is a surprise (not!)Review Boardwalk Empire’s portrayal of 1-buck-Andy — Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon — if you don’t have the time and/or patience to read about him or his salary or compare Trump to Tricky Dick (Nixon) and his attempted firings and more.
Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism
My son is spending his junior year abroad, in one of those strong social-welfare states where they not only take care of everybody, but they care about the world (and put their national dollars toward it), even if it is an insufferably smug nation with a “golden” past.
Why doesn’t someone just do the math, or complete the recipe?
Sovereignty-schmovereignty of Kings? Read alt Truth by President Donald J. Trump. Or DJT, to you.
*
It is doing the opposite, or what is called “Gov Speak” or Harvard’s legacy of exclusion by people who practice, preach, and profess government.
One can pair, compare, triangulate or juxtapose this still of a video that says a __ (fill number of views) with President Barack Obama’s JFK100 Profile in Courage Award acceptance speech. It is a speech within a speech (listen), and Hillary Clinton (of all people) substantiates it in her new must-read book entitled What Happened. What do you think (not feel)?
I’m not. Trump is a Big Public Spending, Big Subsidy Corrupt Party Politician — otherwise known as a Republican . . . or, oops, is that a congressional Pelosi-like issue-corrupted Democrat who has not served urban America, let alone the urban poor (i.e. women and children) or any other constituency since the 1970s-80s? (See Chapter 3 of my Out of Many, One.)
Listen to this exchange, elevating and advancing the most significant postwar political thinker – Hannah Arendt — who happens to be a woman in the United States. Indeed, a newly vacant seat is named after her. This woman spoke truth to power in 1963 in The New Yorker, and took a lot of flak for it — so much so that she passed away tired at another venerable institution that hosts her name – Bard College.
What an amazing accommodation. What an amazing compromise between the Repubs and the Democrats.
We all know the New Jersey Turnpike is tacky. Hey, the Soprano’s even embodies the “what exit” line of SNL from decades back. (For those who do not live in NJ or have to travel on the Christie-beleaguered NJT (given the Obama-Christie Tunnel Tussle (or was it a hustle?). All this is by way of saying that land developers never know how to “do the right” thing. They only “alt-right,” no?
Hillary Clinton is like a raincoat* — she’s reversal or should I say politically versatile |ˈvərsətl|as she protects Trump from . . .versatile |ˈvərsətl| adjective1 able to adapt or be adapted to many different functions or activities: a versatile sewing machine | he was versatile enough to play either position.2 archaic changeable; inconstant.*Lame joke warning : )
We are close to re-achieving what CUNY once had, and extending it to SUNY — that is, free tuition. Unlike the way it was before the fallout of the New York City bankruptcy in 1976, this time around the state is making qualification for free tuition income-dependent. Tuition is free to families making under $100,000 per year today, and up to $125,000 by 2018. Almost a million families qualify (940,000 to be precise). Wow!
I’m beginning to think that I romanticized the Progressives, after hearing the claptrap of the one-party state attacking itself.
My family and I don’t communicate with our realtor. Does this mean the realtor won’t get us a marketable — what the market won’t bear — price?
What’s next? Be gone with the legacies. Be gone with the big anti-Trump marches. Let Hillary go. And let’s get down to business.
As the protests continue, all I can do is collect documents and pictures — happily, my son sent a few from the inauguration so I could feel the good energy by extension. Not that I ever did much more than this after exiting my twenties. Still, while being relegated to the physical sidelines is hard, accepting that one’s children have the urge for action makes one proud. Yet it’s also hard to wait, hoping that no serious physical harm comes to him, and that he will be disciplined enough to engage in non-violence. Violence begets violence. Clearly Trump’s election is causing violence as I write this, but that is not the point. Protest is more effective, and harder to criticize through persistence and presence, without violence. Take your pick of philosophies from Hegel to Gandhi — it’s all hard. But who said changing the world was supposed to be easy?
Unbent? Not bent or twisted. The New York Times headlines are getting more creative with the paper’s 2020 report out. Despite all the white faces on the front page above the fold, and the fact that there may soon be more tenured or tenure-track political-science professors than staff journalists (who are being halved again after already being halved 10 years ago, though their ranks are more diverse than political science, by far). Alas, the white men in power with Trump are white men . . . now even the one white woman went down for plagiarism . . . and now all others are relegated to victimhood as they face us above the fold.
Putting aside the Democrats’ reassessment — or the irony that it’s not the GOP that has to open its tent — and putting aside that we’re no longer a polarized nation . . . and that a realignment of sorts occurred — a more dramatic realignment than most, since it sweeps into power the GOP on every level, the most important one arguably being their clean sweep in the states, as well as the municipalities . . . federalism organized under one party has not been so powerful since the Civil War. Bracketing all that — another way to look at the polarization/realignment/Democrats as donkeys now all braying is — in conversation, or as a binary.
I hate to pour more oil on the burning fire of fear – the impending Trump presidency – but to have a united government that is dedicated to destroying the few laws President Barack Obama managed to pass – Dodd-Frank, Obamacare – is worse than having had the whole GOP for Trump would have been.Put negatively, all the non-GOP Trump supporters get to quibble — “he’s not my president” . . . “maybe he’s not going to be that bad” . . . or “look, every time he’s good, he’s great.”It’s time for us to hit the streets, and work within the confines of the American political system. Don’t burn, don’t bully. Rally and participate – effectively, quietly, without violence or being triggered into spontaneous violence by agents provocateurs. After all the uber wealthy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side have a underwear store (lingerie, they call it, thinking it’s better to resist in French?!!!).P.S. iRevoltblog (on wordpress, connected to https:// RuthOBrien.org or https://iRevoltblog) will be up and running sometime this January, 2017 — before the Inauguration.
Looks like it’s gonna be a second Clinton in the White House. This time, though, I’m confident that, given all, President-Hopeful (or To Be) Hillary Rodham Clinton will do it right. That is, much better than her husband, who started out O.K. and then became one of the Presidents in the Reagan Revolution. Yes, a supposedly progressive Democrat. A shame. But forget that now that we’re moving forward.
Terrific presentation at THOUGHTworks last night. Cathy O’Neil gave a stimulating presentation on her new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, about the many misuses of algorithms in business, education, the judicial system, and many other areas.
Forget about Barack Obama’s ‘Silly Season” and watch Hillary Republicans. It’s high time or Hillary’s time as the list keep’s growing, growing, growing . . .Steve Bartlett (R-TX)Bob Bauman (R-MD)Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY)Jack Buechner (R-MO)Tom Campbell (R-CA)Bill Clinger (R-PA)Tom Coleman (R-MO)Geoff Davis (R-KY)Mickey Edwards (R-OK)Harris Fawell (R-IL)Ed Foreman (R-TX, NM)Amo Houghton, Jr. (R-NY)Gordon Humphrey (Senator, R-NH)Bob Inglis (R-SC)Jim Kolbe (R-AZ)Steve Kuykendall (R-CA)Jim Leach (R-IA)Pete McCloskey (R-CA)Connie Morella (R-MD)Mike Parker (R-MS)Tom Petri (R-WI)John Porter (R-IL)Claudine Schneider (R-RI)John “Joe” Schwarz (R-MI)Chris Shays (R-CT)Peter Smith (R-VT)Edward Weber (R-OH)Vin Weber (R-MN)G. William Whitehurst (R-VA)Dick Zimmer (R-NJ)And here are some more, many who are in office . . .
Jill Norgren is Professor Emerita of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She is the award winning author of many articles and books, including Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (NYU Press, 2007) and Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers (NYU Press, 2013).
Twenty million ain’t bad.
Edited by Steven E. Schier
Murder is not the only way to deprive our most vulnerable citizens of their lives, or their quality of life. Each politician, after all, is akin to a jobs center, and now they dole out the jobs with no accountability in the shadowy subcontractor hybrid, or private-public, state.
The police kill citizens in the United States. The bodies speak for themselves. And we should not turn them into mere body counts; we should know their names. Even so, some type of blinking counting calculator, like the one that tracks the national debt, would help place this state-sanctioned violence into perspective.
Violence begets violence. It is escalating across this land. As I watch with horror, however, I am heartened by the impact this beloved man — Philando Castile – is making in death. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, in her shock, schooled this nation into shame.
Ahmed Salah said it well – activism is activity. The Egyptian revolution didn’t fail, the Egyptian political process post-revolution failed – in Egypt. Why? The political process – the infrastructure, the institutions, the constitution or the lack thereof – failed. Good institutions, specifically a viable constitution, did not/does not exist in Egypt. It does exist in Salah’s newfound country – the United States.
I saw something exceptional yesterday.
Boom. What am I talking about? That I anticipated President Barack Obama’s actions by virtue of developing a study about his modus operandi — or his ideas as political thought — in Out of Many, One: Barack Obama and the Third American Political Tradition. Put differently, I drank the Kool-Aid — which isn’t to say I wasn’t disappointed by Obama at times (especially his stance on civil liberties).
Talk about a real Tea Party! Or should I say an improved Tea Party, one that will practice only civil disobedience Henry Thoreau style?
Fred and I disagree on almost everything “substantive” about American politics*, especially in 2016. But we do agree on ten things: Here’s the list:
Republicans are now only in the third stage of grief about the Donald candidacy. That is, they are bargaining. The Donald is brokering a deal with the “reasonable (?*!)” Honorable Paul Ryan. Paul, as Mr. Republican deux (for the House, not the Senate), is playing hard to get while triage-ing and trying to keep a Republican Senate majority. Ha! Or should I say we can sing along with JLO about it.*
Every time I go to the gym,* I figure I’ll treat myself with some TV. I’m going to listen to TV news. Exciting. World-spanning. I can catch up** on my pop-culture deficit during my 20 minutes of exercise (which resembles PT more than exercise, but hey).
In this case you can hear the robot pronounce Schadenfreude, which is fun to watch in conjunction with, or after you view the Washington Post’s video of the pain in the top 10 Republican Trump haters’ body language. Their smiles are particularly pained fun given the Trump Rump monster they built. Feel me?
Watch the 5.08 visual version of Jennifer Lopez Singing for Hillary Clinton
Not quite sure why Rubio Robot keeps attacking Obama. Hit Hillary (rhetorically) for undoubtedly following in Obama’s footsteps, sure. Cast a stone at Christie or Cruz, why not. But Barack? Robot Rubio is no drone. Do we want him in charge of the drones given he lacks direction?
The BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) is so dull that even professors in American Political Development took years to publish a book on the origins of this statistics-collecting agency formed in 1906.
“We are losing the white male vote in droves,” said former Democratic New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. And the issue is — wait for it — “economic inequality.”
Before you hear the “news” tonight, or watch your late-night nightly satire – here are a couple of clips for comparison with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s morning-to-afternoon professional performance at a GOP political shindig.
The Case for Big Government
Hidden in Plain Sight:
Not For Profit:
Not for Profit:
On the Muslim Question
The Politics of the Veil
The Posthuman Dada Guide:
Uncouth Nation:
The Whites of Their Eyes:
Do Democrats want to put a Democrat in the White House? Why complain about the absence of Democratic contenders now? If you’re a self-interested member of the GOP, sure — that GOP-someone who wins the White House will get to nominate four to five Supreme Court justices on what is already an ultra-conservative Roberts Court.
I’m talking about the 5 percent — The Donald’s Fans; or I suppose within the Democratic party Joe’s fans; and then those who are not very political or partisan — that is, the number of people in the United States who are not protected under federal civil rights legislation is very small. It is around 5 percent.Contrary to how we view civil rights in the affirmative action mindset, most people are in one protected class or another. There are civil rights protections for women, children, persons of color, persons of certain ethnicities in different locations (including Italians in New York City) persons with disabilities, persons who are pregnant, persons with predispositions to genetic diseases and illnesses, persons over the age of 39, and persons who are LGBTQers.The best political line I heard this February was not in House of Cards but in Downton Abbey. Dowager Countess Grantham Maggie Smith said something poignant to the effect that: “Men don’t have rights.” What Julian Fellowes, creator of the series, really meant was that SLAMs and SCAMs — or, in the American context, men between the ages of 18 and 39 — don’t need rights.*You don’t have (or need) rights if you control the social, economic, and political processes, as the aristocratic class in England did until their Empire’s end.Even acknowledging the existence of rights puts you in the kind and self-deprecating column, which goes a long way when you want to claim you even understand the need for rights. (That’s code for ahh shucks, SLAMs and SCAMS realizing they are gonna have to share and can’t bully everyone off the playground.)All identity politics (including Hillary) is first about power, not rights or duties, let alone obligations (the latter, being cultural, social, economic, political and legal, are more comprehensive than a combination of duties and rights). The group that has the power to make the rules does not need rights.So any time any group starts belittling rights (e.g. conservative commentary on the Selma march, and about using its 50th anniversary to honor the civil-rights movement by marching), beware. And any time any group starts reversing rights, beware. Reversing rights is simply the conservative way of hitting the less powerful the hardest where they live.Look what happened to Frank Underwood (FU) when First Lady Claire Underwood stood her ground. House of Cards raised many issues this season that involve women, power, and violence — and the season spoiler is: Who will come out on top?As is the case with most TV shows, it ends with a strand of three — three women – 1) Heather Dunbar (Elizabeth Marvel), FU’s rival for the 2016 Democratic bid; 2) FU gets Rep. Jacqueline Sharp (Molly Parker), who betrayed Claire by backing out of sponsoring legislation against violence against women in the military; and 3) Rachel Posner (Rachel Brosnahan), the call girl FU used to engineer a debased and debauched no-nothing SLAM member of Congress. FU’s fixer and enforcer, season three’s Chief of Staff, Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), obsessed with protecting the religious, demure, repentant-lost-call-girl, finally comes to Chief of Staff senses when she nearly beats him to death. He beats her back, taking his”right”-ful position as FU’s Chief of Staff after not only digging the grave all by himself, but putting the religious and demure Rachel in it personally after she almost tricked him out of it one last time. Will FU do Claire in; or does Claire control the upper hand to do an FU (making Claire a proxy for HC’s humiliation during BC’s impeachment)?When groups belittle and reverse rights for protected classes — those who did not historically control the entire political process — and/or reverse rights, there can be only one reaction — violence or the threat of violence against women and all protected others.When the GOP pokes Hillary, along with all the not-so-properly-blue men who retreat from the Democratic party, she should not react. HC has learned what my boys learned on their very first playgrounds — and that’s that you have to stand there and take it, protect your friends and especially your brother, but don’t poke back. Stand your ground.And of course this means releasing great reports for CSW, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. Hillary must. But this does not mean that HC is framing herself, does it?Is HC launching her campaign with Women’s History Month? I doubt it was more than a trial balloon now that she’s faced the full blowback while giving her email speech from the UN podium.Hillary wouldn’t dare do that officially, any more than Barack Obama relied on Black History Month. Obama has to speak for everyone, which pretty much sums up the main frustration of the Obama presidency.While women account for 51 percent of the population, there is a much stronger argument. But HC knows better than most the perils of being a “first.”We are now set up for season four (the finale in February 2016) with three women and one ghost while Downton Abbey devolves turns into a feel-good prime-time PBS soap opera with one Dowager Countess making us feel good about how women have collected their “rights.” Don’t think so. No matter what: On February 27, 2016, the new season of House of Cards will set the tone for Hillary’s run against whatever GOP candidate has emerged by February’s end after Iowa: New Hampshire; Colorado caucuses, Minnesota caucuses; New York; Utah; Nevada caucuses; South Carolina; North Carolina; and Michigan have been decided. Prof. #RuthOBrienGC*^This is reprinted since the Weasel Zippers deleted it from all sites but one. So, from this I conclude it had “Idea Impact”—————————–Ruth and the dowager countess are correct that if you have privilege (from the Latin for “private law”), you don’t need rights. Custom is stronger than any legislation — until it isn’t. And by the same token, when a privilege decreases or disappears, rights that were created specifically to oppose it should decrease or disappear as well.To be sure, some privileges don’t go away. People with disabilities, by definition, require accommodation, and they have a right to it (though as my favorite political scientist has pointed out, the best solution is to make “disability rights” universal by recognizing that everyone is a member or potential member of this protected class). Women need more restroom space in public places than men do, and should have it written into the building code; no amount of consciousness raising will change this.By contrast, consider the Voting Rights Act. When Congress passed it in 1965, the Selma march had taken place just a few months before, and the official ballot symbol of the Alabama Democratic party still contained the slogan “White Supremacy.” Things changed greatly over the next few years, and in the ensuing decades, and now in much of the South, black voter-turnout rates exceed those of whites. Yet the VRA’s burdensome pre-clearance rules and other bureaucratic requirements are still in effect in nine entire states and assorted localities (including New York City) because those places had voting problems back when LBJ was president. And there’s no serious chance that the VRA will be repealed anytime soon: The Democrats won’t let it happen, because that would require admitting that it isn’t 1965 anymore.And the Republicans? They oppose repeal too, not only because they would be portrayed as racist, but because the VRA effectively mandates the creation of heavily black and Hispanic districts for Congress and state legislatures, to ensure the election of black and Hispanic officials. This isolation of non-GOP voters in a handful of districts works in the Republicans’ favor. The best estimates are that if congressional districts were drawn in a race-neutral fashion, the Democrats would have a dozen more seats.In other words: If an identity group relies on rights, it will get what the rights require — and nothing more. The best way to eliminate privilege is to make rights universal and apply them equally to all. Editor #FredOBrien***House of Cards Season 3 Spoiler alert**Frederic O’Brien are entirely his own, not reflective of Ruth O’Brien.org CUNY Politics Professor views or those of any campus of The City University of New York(CUNY)
All this Hillary-versus-Joe talk got me thinking: Misogyny knows no American political party — that is, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties within the American two-party system both have strands of misogyny, or what I call neotribalism.The Biden-promoting or Joe-talking Democrats don’t acknowledge this, any more than the Democrats serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee realized during now-Justice Clarence Thomas’s nomination hearings that the former head of the EEOC being accused of sexual harassment was political dirt-digging gold for undermining his nomination. The GOP, after all, was shamelessly self-serving in putting Thomas up for Marshall’s seat. So is the GOP now.What the Biden-talking Democrats are counting on is the inside-the-“progressive”-party misogyny in the American two-party legacy of neotribalism. That is to say, all those folks who vote in their self-interest — which is to say, the 5 percent who are NOT in protected identity categories (i.e. women, children, men and women between 18 and 21, LGBTQers, persons with different abilities or disabilities, as well as those older than 39 (age discrimination is for everyone 40 years old and older).Hillary Clinton may be just as centrist as Joe, and Bernie is pushing her properly progressively leftwards (plus he’s being a good partisan by squashing all third-party rumors, unlike the Donald).So this is how Hillary is harmed by talk of Joe running? This would be how her Ready for Hillary team could lose control?Put differently, the 5 percent I’m addressing are SLAMs and SCAMS. Shouldn’t democracy — with a small D or a big D — protect 95 percent of the American populace? That’s my definition of small-d democracy, even if all those who are for Joe say it ain’t so.
Why didn’t Kevin get the big seat in the House of Representatives — Speaker of the House? What was the tipping point for the GOP? (The Speaker of the House wins by majority and sits behind the President of the United States when he gives the State of the Union Address, typically. It is a non-partisan position.)
