In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter. For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive.

It goes on:

It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic culture that they appeal to. The conservative foundations happily fund “big picture” work. … On the other hand, progressive foundations may understand that the organizations they fund have visions, but it’s not the vision that they will give money to. … If there is need for a vision, the foundation itself will provide this. Unfortunately, according to one source, the foundation’s vision too often amounts to this: “If we had enough money, and access to enough markets, and enough technological expertise, we could solve all the problems.”

Have I mentioned recently how happily superannuated Jacobin magazine makes me feel? You should all be subscribing.

The theme of the new issue is capitalist innovation and its problems. Quoting the framing piece by John Summers:

The fable that we are living through a time of head-snapping innovation in technology drives American thought these days – dystopian and utopian alike. But if you look past both the hysteria and the hype, and place the achievements of technology in historical perspective, then you may recall how business leaders promised not long ago to usher us into a glorious new time of abundance that stood beyond history. And then you may wonder if their control over technology hasn’t excelled mainly at producing dazzling new ways to package and distribute consumer products (like television) that have been kicking around history for quite some time. The salvos in this issue chronicle America’s trajectory from megamachines to minimachines, from prosthetic gods to prosthetic pals, and raise a corollary question from amid all these strangely unimaginative innovation: how much of our collective awe rests on low expectations?

There are some startlingly close parallels to the aspirations of the USSR, as described in Red Plenty, which I’ll be talking about at greater length in my contribution to the forthcoming seminar. There are also some claims that I disagree with. I’m not at all sure that this introduction has the diagnosis right. Much like the old Baffler, there are some good and excellently entertaining criticisms of specific elements of techno-boosterism, but also a little too much emphasis on the cultural rather than the political dimensions of techology.

In form, the new Baffler is different from the old one, which systematically refused to have truck with new technologies nearly up to the end. It not only has a website and a Kickstarter campaign, but a Twitter feed, Kindle and Nook versions, and online PDFs. Still, it rather awkwardly carries over some of the old attitudes about the technologies that it uses to communicate. The old Baffler was good at talking about how new economy boosterism served as an intellectual veil, obscuring real relations of power inequality. But it didn’t take any very particular care to distinguish new-technology-as-obfuscatory-rhetoric fron new-technology-as-phenomenon-shaping people’s lives. Sometimes, this worked. The last issue of the old Baffler had a lovely photo-essay on how the etherial Internet (more recently dubbed the ‘cloud;’ a term whose etymology deserves an essay in itself) was based on the squat physical reality of server farms. Sometimes, it didn’t. Like a bizarro-world Thomas Friedman, it seemed to lump new technology together with Nasdaq, globalization, free markets and financial capital. All were interlocking, all mutually reinforcing, all propelling us towards a future of misery and inequality.

This shared perspective (but reversed valences) allowed it to serve up a withering critique of the Friedman view of the world, and its underlying assumptions. It also made it hard to create a practicable alternative agenda. The old Baffler was great on the culture of capitalism, but not nearly as strong on its material underpinnings. It also, I think, systematically tended to misunderstand technology, treating it as a symptom of the culture wars, rather than as a phenomenon in itself.

The new Baffler is better on all of this (not that the old one wasn’t good – it really, really, was, but it had its limits too), and seems to be trying to figure out a different line of attack. That said, as the USIH seminar contributions suggest, it hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Again, when it’s good on critique, it’s very good indeed. Moe Tkacik’s piece on the Atlantic Conventional Wisdom Festival isn’t quite as strong as it could be (a couple too many personal hatchets to bury; some difficulties in capturing the transition from a world in which you have to have the CIA buying cultural institutes, to a world where private enterprise can do the job itself). Rick Perlstein’s article on Ronald Reagan is unsurprisingly excellent. But others don’t work. Will Boisvert’s attack on the MIT Media Lab is surprisingly unimaginative. The critique of Stupid Things That Nicholas Negroponte and His Mates Say could have been made any time in the last couple of decades, by more or less anybody who cared. And when Boisvert says

Last year, MIT posted a list of the Lab’s all-time “Top 25 Products and Platforms: …. Number 3 is Lego’s Mindstorms, a robotics kit beloved of school science fairs and adult hobbyists. Number 2? Guitar Hero. Yeah, they made that, one of the best-selling throw-away video games ever. Number 1 is the e-reader technology in Kindle, so give the Lab its due: it has spawned a subset of the video screens that are destroying the Republic of Letters.

he’s mistaking personal aesthetic peeves for general arguments. I’ll give him Guitar Hero if he really wants it (although I expect there’ll be dissenters in comments), but Mindstorms is as good a tool for engendering creativity in young folks as one could imagine. And e-reader technology as a destroyer of the Republic of Letters … really???

There are a couple of pieces that set out a more positive agenda. David Graeber’s piece I’ll mostly pass over, for fear of more unpleasantness – I think it’s fair to say that it’s provocatively Fourierist-utopian in both the positive and negative senses of that term. Kim Stanley Robinson provides an excerpt from 2312 that makes me really want to read the book – but while the solution to late capitalism may lie in quantum computers solving the socialist calculation problem (again: Red Plenty – Robinson has a joke about the “Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model”) we probably can’t count on this happening in the near-to-immediate future.

In short, the new Baffler is very strong on describing the stunted possibilities of innovation under the current system, and the ways in which the rhetorics of globalization, the new economy etc cover over this stuntedness. It is less strong on describing alternatives, and has no very clear idea about how to get from here to there. Of course, it’s always much harder to come up with feasible alternatives than to describe the problems with the current system. But also, the new Baffler is still haunted by the ghost of the old one, with its generally dyspeptic attitude towards information technology as well as its more dubious prophets. This makes it harder to think through the relationship between innovation and change.

I’d be very disappointed to see the Baffler becoming techno-utopian, not that that’s at all likely. Still, I would like to see it publishing less articles that seem to dislike emerging technologies on principle, and more that try to figure out the precise circumstances under which they might help or hinder the process of moving towards a better society. For example: my dream Baffler would somehow magically persuade Richard Sennett to go to Foo Camp, and write a piece (likely partly critical, but also engaged) about the relationship between maker culture and his ideals of craftmanship. It would take on some of the hazier arguments about the joys of Government 2.0, but also talk to some of the very interesting things that e.g. the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

To put it a little differently again: the Baffler is right to keep pushing the case that technological rhetoric is no substitute for political and economic equality. But even if new technologies under actually-existing-capitalism are not (as some boosters would have it) inherently radicalizing and choice-enabling, they are not necessarily oppressive or choice-narrowing either. They can cut in either direction. It would have been nice to have had someone in the issue, who argued that technological innovation could be a lever for change in current society. Very likely they tried (putting together an issue of a low budget magazine depends a lot on who has the time and inclination to write for you). That Aaron Swartz is aboard suggests that they are aware of this skein of debate and want to engage with it.

Engagement is not agreement – there’s a lot to be said too for the culturally conservationist skepticism of e.g. George Scialabba (a debate between Geo and Aaron on these topics would be a lot of fun to watch). But this kind of engagement, which would differ a little from the Frank-era Baffler, might allow the magazine to keep what was really great about the old incarnation, while updating it for different times. The mission of the magazine, as Summers sets it out is:

to debunk the dogmas that discourage the intuitions of experience from fully forming in a critical intelligence. But we do not aim to conciliate any person, party or philosophy. We aim to unsettle, and, if necessary, to irritate.

And hence, presumably, to spur argument. I’m happy and excited that the Baffler is back, and look forward to being much unsettled, occasionally irritated, frequently delighted and often spurred to argument by reading it. Again, I encourage readers to subscribe, or to Kickstart, or both, as takes their fancy. I’ve missed it while it’s been away – it’s good to have it back.

Anyway, otherwise very intelligent people such as Radley Balko go weirdly off the rails on this one. (Whom you should all read all the time, even though libertarians annoy you, because he is the only person in the history of blogging to ever get anybody off of death row by blogging about it. We arrange some excellent book events, and we make nice covers and John typesets’em all purty, but I’m pretty sure Radley’s got us beat ten ways to Sunday on useful blogging and we will never recoup, not with a thousand book events. Anyway he’s not the annoying kind of libertarian. Er, rather, he’s one of the least annoying kinds. He actually cares about the rights of poor people and has noticed that corporations as well as governments can infringe upon your rights, although he doesn’t focus upon this latter point as much as a left-libertarian would. Did I mention he saves people’s lives? His blog is rushing into burning buildings and dragging people out, and then it wants to go back in, and the chief’s trying to hold it back, because it’s inhaled all this smoke and all, but it busts free and saves three more children, but it just has three cute smudges of soot on its face, and then it kisses Natalie Portman. Then maybe it links to Ilya Somin, and you think, the hell he did?! Our blog is just drinking a cup of coffee, and making plans to kiss…Clive Owen? I may need to re-do the polling on this one.)

The other day Radley Balko pointed to a Reuters story which said, basically, that George Zimmerman fed his dog, and was an altar boy (no, but a real one), and loved his momma, and his Black neighbor would say on the record he had always been a sweet boy, what with his lawn-mowing, and waving, and suchlike. Radley seemed to think this showed…something new. “Turns out, the guy is a three-dimensional human being.” I protested, saying, who ever doubted Zimmerman was an actual person, in the round, who was kind to people sometimes? (Because everyone is, so I’m told. Hitler, dog, etc.) Radley responded: “I saw Tweets and blog posts from otherwise smart, calm people who immediately jumped to the conclusion that Zimmerman was a racist.”

Loves your mom, is altar boy, has a Black neighbor with whom you live harmoniously…all these things are compatible with being a racist! For damn sure they’re compatible with doing some racist shit, which may be more pertinent. I was inclined to pursue only the latter point, but what have we here? Oh, dag, Mr. Zimmerman, take it away down south, to Dixie:

I dont miss driving around scared to hit mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft ass wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars when they aint around (what are you provin, that you can dent a car when no ones watchin) dont make you a man in my book. Workin 96 hours to get a decent pay check, gettin knifes pulled on you by every mexican you run into!

Aw, George, you didn’t have to miss none of that when you move from Manassas to Florida! You can just drive around scared to hit Cubans by the side of the road! Truth is, the demographics of the South are changing so much as an after-effect of construction jobs during the housing boom, there are plenty of Mexicans in Florida (plenty more when he wrote this, I imagine.) And of course there are always Black people. This tolls rather gloomily and out of spirit with the rest of the post all on a sudden. Ah, that’s because Mr. Zimmerman shot killed a Black teenager, isn’t it.

What was the other information provided in the Reuter’s story, which Radley’s commenter’s found so salient? There had been a bunch of serious, sometimes daylight burglaries committed in the storied “gated community” committed by Black men. Yeah, and you know what percentage of the county is Black? 32 goddamn percent. 32%! How is this not evidence that Zimmerman thought Martin was one of the people breaking into the houses, maybe just casing the joints, got out of his truck to follow him, wanted to detain him till the cops got there (which is called false imprisonment, everybody), pulled the gun to keep Trayvon from walking away, and then…? Something bad happened.

I’m sorry, but Zimmerman strikes me as a) racist, b) so dumb he could throw himself down on the ground and miss. His defense team is going to earn every penny they get paid by a huge donation fund of racists conservative citizens concerned that he might not see justice due to Obama and Eric Holder and the New Black Panthers and Acorn and Akon and that one chick who tried to make us use only lower case letters, and L’il Wayne, and the Rev. Al Sharpton and Flo Rida, because damn that is played out; why are people still going for that? My money’s always been on Zimmerman’s escalating and then just fatally screwing up. And on his being racist. His grandmoms worked as a babysitter for two black girls that ate with the family when he was little. Did they inoculate him against racism when they passed the rice? No. Would he have followed and shot a white 17-year-old who tried to force him to taste the rainbow? No. Do I believe his self-serving story about getting lost in his own 2-street subdivision (OK, maybe that part, actually) and then getting jumped on and getting the beatdown from Trayvon, with the ninja skills he learned at Menacing Black Youths Summer Academy? No Sir, no, no and no Ma’am. R-a-c-i-s-t.

UPDATE: I should really scan some of the yam crate labels, but I should really really stop looking at the evil, makes me have to lie down watching the blood beat in the capillaries of the back of my eye computer. Anyway they’re framed. Some aren’t super racist. Like the Black guy throwing dice and it says “Don’t Cry” Louisiana Commercial Sweet Potatoes Packed By Irvin Wimberly, Church Point LA. (But we all know Irvin Wimberly never packed a single motherloving sweet potato in his damn life. He might not of touched a sweet potato. Could be he was toiling away in the sweet potato fields, infected, like Levin, with the general quickening of energy in the sweet potato packers. Could be.) Here the man just looks sad because he (and we) can tell the dice are about to turn on him viciously. The most racist one is “King” Brand Porto Rican Yams; the king is a kind of idiotic-looking 10-year-old with a plush crown whose lips are printed too big. Now, because his skin is printed dark this isn’t immediately apparent; he’s not Sambo. But once you look it it, boy howdy.

Proof that my daughter learned better than I taught her: she said “those are racist.” I said: “documenting history of racism blah blah.” She, fixing me with withering scorn (she’s only just 9 at this point) “Mom, if an African-American family were coming over for dinner, would you take them down?” I was defeated. 1930s yam crate-labels: racist.

She knew Nigerian people had been at our old place when I had them up. African-American, see, that was the kicker, though in her opinion I should have never have hung them up. (They look so cute in the kitchen!) Belle Waring, hanging racist 1930s yam crate-labels all up in everywhere: doing something racist. I was willing to amend. They’re all just moping behind the toaster now. I don’t know what to do with them, honestly. Maybe give them back to the lady who collects them, but in the beautiful frames.

The paradoxical result is that a piece that begins as a criticism of anti-white racism gradually morphs into something akin to an expression of white racism. It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag. Combined with class snobbery, as it usually is, anti-white racism produces bigotry and discrimination against innocent persons too, less viciously than past discriminations perhaps, but also more unanswerably because it operates under the virtuous disguise of anti-discrimination and social justice.

Obviously there is no paradox. I wish Yglesias would get off his moneybox soap box and revisit one of his evergreen themes of yore. But I guess I can do the honors. The appeal of banging on and on about anti-white racism (anti-anti-racism), even though it’s obviously silly to suppose it’s a gulag-grade social problem that is in some ways worse than old-fashioned racism ever was, is that it is akin to an expression of white racism. Historically, expressions of white racism have gradually morphed into expressions of anti-anti-racism, as it became less and less socially acceptable to express white racism openly. Republicans stand in steady need of rhetorical forms that are akin to expressions of white racism, but that afford plausible deniability against charges of racism. Thus: anti-anti-racism. But plausible deniability requires that you get in and out in a hurry.

And that’s why, as O’Sullivan says, the real problem with the Derb’s piece is not what it said but, paradoxically, the fact that it was said at such length. If something that hasn’t quite come into clear view quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s likely to morph into a duck, the longer you look at it. That’s just playing the odds. (Not really a paradox at all.)
Let me adapt a bit from comments to my other post. Here are two ‘spirits’ in which Derb could have talked the Talk:

‘Kid, once upon a time, good people had a noble, liberal dream of a color-blind society. But reality played a cruel joke on us all, and here’s the way things work and I doubt anything is ever going to change that. But anyway, you don’t want to be mugged …’ If he’d said that, he’d have kept his job, to say the least.

Here’s something more in line with what he actually said: ‘once upon a time, bad people had a warped, liberal dream of a color-blind society. And reality played a deliciously cruel joke on them. Now the rest of us have to live somewhat artificial lives, in the aftermath of this vain social engineering collapse, but at least we – who are not ultimately the butt of the joke – can derive some vicarious Schadenfreude from the sorry spectacle – which is no small compensation …’ Probably then you give the kid some de Maistre to read.

The Derb gave an interview to Gawker, in the aftermath of his firing, in which he pretty much took the mild, ‘more in sorrow than anger’ line:

Fix the schools! End poverty! Stamp out racism! Affirmative action! Fifty years ago a thoughtful person could sign on to those prescriptions. I know: I was around: I did. Yes (we said) once unjust laws had been struck down, and some social massaging of that sort been done for a few years, the races would merge in happy harmony, and the word “race” and its derivatives would drop out of the language. We all believed that. I believed it.

Plainly this hasn’t happened, except of course in the upper classes, which go by their own rules. For a thoughtful person today to believe that these social-engineering nostrums will (for example) bring black crime rates to a level indistinguishable from white crime rates, involves a strenuous act of what Orwell called “doublethink”—massive self-deception.

But plainly this isn’t the spirit of the Taki Mag piece he wrote. So what gives? You can’t BOTH think liberalism is a noble, albeit tragically failed dream of color-blind racial equality that only conservatives are keeping alive, by heroically protesting against anti-anti-racism AND be delighted by the mischievously self-delighted racism of the Derb’s version of the Talk. So will the real Derb please stand up?

Well, I don’t know. But I’ll bet they are both as real as houses. The thing to see is how easy it is for conservatives to be in this particular state of cognitive dissonance.

I’m curious to see how comments to Lowry’s post shape up. [UPDATE: no such luck. They’re closed.] What is wrong with Derb’s version of ‘the talk’, after all? He has the courage to speak Bell Curve truth to liberal power? He has the keen-eyed discernment to see race hucksterism and political correctness for what they really are? His remedy consists entirely of the rigorous practice of freedom of association? “Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.” I’m not seeing the problem here.

The Derb is a veritable Gandhi of passive resistance to injustice – compared to George Zimmerman, just for example. In a season in which reasonable conservatives are debating whether Zimmerman was is the right, surely they can at least come together in agreeing that the whole sorry situation – and the President’s shameful if perhaps inevitable insertion of race into the mix – could have been avoided if only someone had taken Zimmerman aside, at an earlier point in his life, and given him the Derb’s version of the Talk.

Pressing the Gandhi analogy: suppose this sort of thing were to catch on and be practiced widely. Couldn’t it have a salutary effect, embarrassing the ruling liberal elite by highlighting their hypocrisy? It’s not as though the government is going to force people not to do as Derb advises. (What are they going to do? Send in the National Guard to carry protesting white people, who have gone all limp, into the midst of crowds of black people they don’t know? It’s absurd. Even liberals wouldn’t dream of it.) At worst, then, the Talk keeps a few Zimmermans from becoming victims. At best, it might clear the air – slowly, quietly – in thousands of homes. That won’t result in a clearing of the air in the much more polluted public sphere, of course. But a virtuous citizenry is no more built in a day than Rome was. Mightn’t The Talk – at the knee of father and mother – be the first, tremulous baby step on the way to what we all always say we want: a frank, adult national conversation about race – by which liberals, of course, mean yet another lecture to conservatives about race, as if they are all a bunch of disobedient children? Give the liberals what they say they want – some Talk – and see if they like it!

What, exactly, is Lowry’s problem with that? Perhaps comments to his post will enlighten me.

UPDATE: Seems Derb’s fate at NR is in some doubt. Ponnuru and Goldberg have tweeted against him. I would be curious to hear them explain why they think this is over the line, not just that it is. To me, it looks to me like an assemblage of points, all of which are, by general and specifically Derbish precedent, accepted as mainstream conservative discourse. Admittedly, put them together and they look bad. Yes, I can see that now. (Did they never notice that the Derb thinks these things before now?)

2nd UPDATE: And he’s outa there!

Trayvon Martin was 17, and was staying with family in Sanford, Florida, in what is referred to by the obligatory monicker “mostly-white gated community.” He walked out to buy some candy and a can of iced tea at a local convenience store, and was tailed back by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, who deemed him “real suspicious” and “probably on drugs or something.” This joker George Zimmerman then got out of his truck to (perhaps) scuffle with Trayvon, and then shot him in cold blood, as far as anyone can figure, while Trayvon was pleading for his life. This (the pleading) can be heard in the background of neighbors’ 911 calls. I have to say it’s a little odd none of them stepped out on the porch with a shotgun to say “I’ve called the cops already, cut it out!” The number of people committing crimes who will just run away if you say “I see you down there, knock it off” is high IME. Zimmerman claims it is his high-pitched voice we hear begging for his life between the firing of the first and the second shot, after which there is silence. Take a look at a picture of the man. I don’t even know what to say.

UPDATE: I place this above the fold so everyone will see. I was sort of taking it for granted that people were reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blogging on this, which has been copious and excellent. But if you haven’t, you should.

Now, although I went to high school in D.C., and have lived a lot of other places, I was born in Savannah, GA, and lived in S.C. as a child, like unto L’il Soft Shell, the turtle chile (from Pogo). I always went home in the summertime, and always planned to spend my golden years on the screened porch with my brother and sister. John will be consulted about his preferences also be allowed to come. So let me tell you what those gated communities are.

They started in the 70s and 80s and I’d bet more than half of them are brazen enough to have “Plantation” in their names. Ha. No really! They let white people move into places where black people couldn’t enter, on account of the gate. There’s a two-bit security guard running a little…what do you call those things, gantries, whatever. You get stopped if you’re black and asked where you’re going and whom you’re visiting, and are held up for an embarrassing length of time, and if you’re get white you get waved through, unless you’ve gone all Swedish death metal or something. Many of them pushed black people out, off of land they owned, on Hilton Head Island especially. Or rather, I happen to know about it. If I lived somewhere else I’d know about that. There’s a history book waiting there. They made it so black people couldn’t visit their own family cemeteries, going back to slavery days, because they had enclosed them in a gated community. They privatized the damn beach and chased black people off! You can’t privatize the everloving beach?! Under the high-water line is public to all, there ain’t no exceptions for gates. They didn’t fix these problems till various lawsuits forced them to in the 1990s. OK, sorry, digression, but if you wondered what a “mostly-white gated community” was, it is that.

The real problem with the situation is not that George Zimmerman, the man who shot an unarmed 17-year-old, is racist. He is racist as the day is long, as can be deduced from his thoughts on the nature of “being suspicious,” oh, and by his saying “fucking coons” while on the phone to the goddamn police dispatcher. Which he did, as plain as dishwater. There is no doubt there. I’ve heard all this “the young people don’t say ‘coons’ now what with the ipods and the friendsters and the series of tubes.” Bullshit. The problem is not that Florida has some poorly drafted law that either re-enshrines existing self-defense claims or grants justice to whoever shoots to kill first in any altercation. The problem is not that knee-jerk defenders of the powerful over the powerless of the Megan McArdle type would, in her words “have to acquit” if the case came to trial.

The problem is the cops didn’t arrest Zimmerman at the scene. They didn’t take his gun. They didn’t test him for drugs or alcohol, although they did do so to Trayvon’s dead body. They didn’t run Zimmerman’s records. They didn’t look at Trayvon’s phone and call the contact marked “Dad,” or note that he was on the phone within minutes of the death, and dial that number to see who that was. It was Trayvon’s girlfriend, and she recounts that he told her he was being “followed” by someone. She urged him to run, but he said he was not going to run, he would just “walk fast.” That just breaks my heart right there, as a mother. “I’m not going to run. I’ll just walk fast.” He was too brave as a young man to run, maybe, or he knew enough to know that running would make him look “real suspicious,” or both.

The problem is that the government of Sanford, Florida has given its official sanction to any white guy* who failed out of mall cop school, and sits home at night jerking off to back issues of Guns and Ammo, and has appointed himself neighborhood defender, to shoot a black teenager armed with candy, and walk away from the scene. That’s the thing: walk away from the scene. I know we’re all tired of hypotheticals, but we all know black Zimmerman wouldn’t have walked away from the scene after shooting an unarmed white kid. They didn’t breathalyze this asshole, they didn’t have him pee in a damn Dixie cup, they didn’t take his gun away temporarily just till “things got cleared up.” If an actual real-live cop shot somebody to death they would have taken his gun and put him behind a desk, even if the IA investigation was cursory bullshit. Higher level investigations are welcome, from the state of Florida, from the Feds… But nothing will change the fact that the cops thought Zimmerman was on their side. They were going to fix things for him. Those bastards had his back so hard his spine was right up in his beer gut. Nothing will change for the next black teenager walking “suspiciously,” i.e. at all, down some Florida street. Justice means more than just the Feds showing up the Sanford PD for a bunch of Skoal-using morons who couldn’t govern their way out of a wet paper bag. Justice means actual freedom for Trayvon Martin to walk down the street and not be in danger of losing his life to someone with no badge and a gun. Not just hypothetical freedom, like the kind of voting rights black people used to have before the 1950s and 1960s. Real freedom.

*I am aware that Mr. Zimmerman is, at least in part, a s33kr1t mexican so it’s not about race and white people are the real victims here Hispanic, a non-racial classification used by the US census to…uh…help people who are “passing” go through a middle stage? Make sure we can keep track of which Hollywood actresses are “smoldering”? I honestly have no idea.

Why should our capacity to reason require anything more than disinterestedness within one’s own group? Since the interests of my group will often be better served by ignoring the interests of members of other groups, the need for a public justification of conduct should require no more than this. Indeed, shouldn’t we rather expect the need for public justification to prohibit justifications which give the interests of my group no more weight than the interests of other groups? This suggestion overlooks the autonomy of reasoning – the feature I have pictured as an escalator. If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The idea of a disinterested defense of one’s conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.

I think it’s fair to say that Stanley Fish is shaky on the concept of an escalator, in Peter Singer’s sense.

Here’s a bit of Gunnar Myrdal Singer quotes. What do you think of this general line?

The individual … does not act in moral isolation. He is not left alone to manage his rationalizations as he pleases, without interference from outside. His valuations will, instead, be questioned and disputed. Democracy is a “government by discussion,” and so, in fact, are other forms of government, though to a lesser degree. Moral discussion goes on in all groups from the intimate family circle to the international conference table …. In this process of moral criticism which men make upon each other, the valuations on the higher and more general planes – referring to all human beings and not to specific small groups – are regularly invoked by one party or the other, simply because they are held in common among all groups in society, and also because of the supreme prestige they are traditionally awarded. By this democratic process of open discussion there is started a tendency which constantly forces a larger and larger part of the valuation sphere into conscious attention. More is made conscious than any single person or group would on his own initiative find it advantageous to bring forward at the particular moment. … The feeling of need for logical consistency within the hierarchy of moral valuations – and the embarrassed and sometimes distressed feeling that the moral order is shaky – is, in its modern intensity, a rather new phenomenon. With less mobility, less intellectual communication, and less public discussion, there was in previous generations less exposure of one another’s valuation conflicts. The leeway for false beliefs, which makes rationalizations of valuations more perfect for their purpose, was also greater in an age when science was less developed and education less extensive. These historical differentials can be observed today within our own society among the different social layers with varying degrees of education and communication with the larger society, stretching all the way from the tradition-bound, inarticulate, quasi-folk societies in isolated backward regions to the intellectuals of the cultural centers. When one moves from the former groups to the latter, the sphere of moral valuations becomes less rigid, more ambiguous and also more translucent. At the same time the more general valuations increasingly gain power over the ones bound to traditional peculiarities of regions, classes, or other smaller groups. One of the surest generalizations is that society, in its entirety, is rapidly moving in the direction of the more general valuations.

Then again, there’s Stanley Fish. I keep thinking he can’t get any more Stanley Fish-like than he already was. But then he goes and does it. Oh, and there’s RedState.

A lot of people probably won’t like this because they won’t be impressed by the whole Octopi Wall Street-as-Burlesque aesthetic. But who cares! Don’t give money! Anyway, it’s already fully funded. You don’t like it? Sit n’ spin on your sense of aesthetic superiority!

But maybe there is a slight problem: how to denounce a new Gilded Age while indulging a taste for gilding and, frankly, indulgence. Then again: nope. Not a problem. Because there’s no problem liking to make/look at this sort of stuff while disapproving of a lot of things going on in the world today. There’s no hypocrisy or error I can see. The tension, if any, is not between Crabapple’s hotsy-totsy illustration aesthetic and her political message; rather, between her message and its medium, in light of the fact that the financial medium for the aesthetic medium is a patronage model. If the medium of the medium were a ‘we need the 1%!’ message, that would tend to undermine the message. But Kickstarter kicks her loose from that.

What I wanted to figure out was a way to create work that was funded neither by rich collectors, nor by grant committees, nor by someone’s supportive sugar daddy. I wanted to make giant, fancy, glittering art, paid for by small donors, all of whom, even if they couldn’t afford the pieces I was making, got something of value in exchange. I wanted to make and fund art with the democracy and speed of the internet.

What do you think about Kickstarter? Obviously, it’s mockable. Here’s a game we can play in comments. Write Kickstarter-style proposals for classic works of literature. Mock-proposals, obviously – these works all being fully-funded, indeed long-since already made at this point. The joke shall, of course, consist in the composition of the pitch. William Shakespeare proposing to write Hamlet. James Joyce proposing to write Ulysses. How would Jane Austen have pitched Pride and Prejudice for Kickstarter? Devise an appropriate, ascending ladder of swag plus (perhaps) spiritual attainment. “$50 gets thou a bobble-head mannikin, like unto the Danish Prince himself, a PDF ‘fair copy’, and an ironic sense of the tragedy of existence.” More money buys more. For example, for $1 you get a sense of righteous indignation that Nabokov’s Lolita is smut about a dirty old man and underage girl. For $10 you get the smut. For $25 you also get fridge letter magnets L-O-L-I-T-A. For $50 you get that it isn’t smut. Plus magnets, plus a set of synaesthetically author-approved colored letter blocks, with which you can compose short passages from the text, seeing them as the author himself would. And a sense of superiority. So on, up the critical ladder. For $5000 Nabokov will kill and pin a butterfly for you, plus send you a PDF, explaining what the hell is going on in Pale Fire. Lots of artists could offer up empty alcohol bottles, if nothing else. Van Gogh could have sold that bit of ear rather than just giving it away to someone who, frankly, probably didn’t want it.

A Kickstarter proposal for Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit or for Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra could have exquisitely ramified levels of swag. Dante’s Divine Comedy? The Bible as Kickstarter project? (The rewards could be great, indeed.)

Also, great works of (non-literary) art and architecture. And historical events. Write a Kickstarter proposal for the Enlightenment, or The French Revolution, say. For $5,000,000 you get … it’s still too soon to tell what you get. But for $50 you definitely get a Rameau’s Nephew action figure.

All kidding aside. It’s very nice that artists like Crabapple have this more populist market model, so they don’t have to sell only to the wealthy and/or rely on public funding. (Why should the taxpayers be funding gilded denunciations of gilding? That is an excellent question and I, for one, would not care to take up the other side of the argument.) I do wonder whether Kickstarter is running largely on self-reflexive wonder at the fact that Kickstarter is running so well. I hope it is still running as well in 5 years.

I’ve gotta think Rick Santorum’s latest line is not going to play, without adjustment, in New York or Los Angeles: “Because you don’t live in New York City. You don’t live in Los Angeles. You live like most Americans in between those two cities, and you know the values you believe in.”

What will the pivot be? And remember: one week before California’s 172 delegates go up for grabs the candidates have to be banging for all they’re worth about how awesome Texas is (152 delegates).

On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also guilty of the outsourcing of even viler forms of torture through the extraordinary rendition of individuals to regimes notorious for torturing prisoners (including the dispatch of Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, to the torturers of Syria). The Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for prosecuting Cheney, or other Bush senior officials, for their crimes. While Obama has effectively admitted that they were torturers, he has indicated, both through public statements and continued inaction, that he would prefer to let bygones be bygones.

On the other, we have Bradley Manning. He appears to be a confused individual – but his initial motivation for leaking information, if the transcripts are correct, were perfectly clear. He was appalled at what he saw as major abuses of authority by the US, including incidents that he witnessed directly in Iraq. There is no evidence that his leaking of information has caused anything worse than embarrassment for the US. Yet he is being pursued by the Obama administration with the vengefulness of Greek Furies. While Manning was being kept in solitary confinement, and treated in an inhuman fashion, Richard Cheney was enjoying the manifold pleasures of a well-compensated private life, being subjected to no more than the occasional impertinent question on a Sunday talk show, and the inconveniences of being unable to travel to jurisdictions where he might be arrested.

It would appear then that the administration is rather more prepared to let bygones be bygones in some cases than in others. High officials, who ordered that torture be carried out and dragged the US into international disrepute, are given an ex post carte blanche for their crimes, while a low-ranking soldier who is at most guilty of leaking minor secrets at the lowest levels of classification, is treated inhumanely and likely, should he be convicted, to face life imprisonment.

So here’s my proposal. It’s perfectly clear that Richard B. Cheney will never be prosecuted because a prosecution would be politically inconvenient. If that’s the Obama administration’s decision (and it’s pretty clear that it is the Obama administration’s decision), then the administration should own it. The president should grant Richard Cheney a pardon for his crimes. Simultaneously, as an acknowledgement that the high crimes of state officials should not go unpunished while the lesser crimes of those who opposed the Iraq war are exposed to the vengefulness of the military tribunal system, Bradley Manning should receive a complete pardon too.

I can’t imagine that Richard B. Cheney would like getting a presidential pardon. Indeed, I rather imagine that he’d vigorously protest it. It would serve as the best formal acknowledgment that we’re likely to get that he is, indeed, a criminal. Obviously, it would also be an unhappy compromise for those who think that he should be exposed to the full rigors of the law. But I personally think that it would be an acceptable compromise (others may reasonably disagree), if it were applied to both sides rather than just one.

Michigan unions are fighting back with a sweeping proposal that would enshrine collective bargaining rights in the state constitution and put them beyond the reach of state lawmakers. The measure would serve as a pre-emptive strike against a possible right-to-work movement in Michigan, and potentially could undo some of what the state Legislature has done in the past 14 months related to unions and bargaining powers. It also could serve as a get-out-the-vote rallying point for Democrats as they seek to re-elect President Barack Obama this fall.

… Union members and other supporters would need to collect at least 322,609 valid voter signatures by early July to put the proposed constitutional amendment before Michigan voters in November. The measure reads that “no existing or future law of the state … shall abridge, impair or limit” the collective bargaining rights outlined in the proposal. That could nullify possible Michigan efforts to pass a right-to-work law, which would prohibit labor contracts that require workers to pay union representation fees. Michigan Republicans are divided on the issue, but debate has intensified since Indiana recently became the first Rust Belt state to adopt such a measure.

I have no expertise at all in Michigan state politics, but this seems a hopeful step. Rick Kahlenberg has a recent op-ed and a new book (PDF of first chapter) arguing that the right to unionize ought to be included in the Civil Rights Act. That’s a long term project, but state-level efforts like the one starting in Michigan might help it along a bit (it would be nice to see Scott Walker go down too while we’re at it).

I’ve come around to support Americans Elect now, but only because I believe it could be a platform for a real reform candidate. If it doesn’t produce such a candidate, I won’t support supporting the candidate it produces. But in this spin, I have never been too worked up about “their transparency problem.” …When we hear that an anonymous contributor has given $10 million to a superPac supporting a particular candidate, we are and should be concerned about that contribution. But that’s because of two distinct, and independent reasons: We assume that even though we don’t know who the contributor is, the candidate will, AND We assume that the contributor’s contribution will lead the candidate to be responsive in ways that we won’t understand. If those two conditions are not met, however, our concern about anonymity should be different, and, in my view, much less significant. … What could the contributor be getting if the candidate couldn’t know who the contributor was? … If there is no plausible way in which the contributions would affect the work or the positions of the candidate, the cost of anonymity is different. … This second point is why I don’t think #AmericansElect has a “transparency problem.” I can’t begin to imagine how the identity of the contributors could possibly matter to the positions that any candidate would take on any of the issues. AE is building a platform to select candidates. They are promising a process to get access to the ballot in all fifty states. Whether a candidate is selected to be on that ballot depends upon his or her winning in the primary/caucus process. A candidate’s alignment with or against the substantive issues of one of the anonymous contributors isn’t going to affect that candidate’s ability to get nominated by AE at all.

I don’t think that this response does justice to Hasen’s position, which is, in fact, that the donors’ views on the substantive issues will affect candidate alignment. See this op-ed of his from a few months ago.

While it is providing voters a path to choose a presidential ticket through the democratizing force of the Internet, the process can, in fact, be overruled by a small board of directors, who organized the group. This board is to have unfettered discretion in picking a committee that can boot the presidential ticket chosen by voters if it is not sufficiently “centrist” and even dump the committee if it doesn’t like the direction it’s heading. … One of the group’s leaders, Elliot Ackerman, told The Christian Science Monitor that the committee will allow only a “centrist” candidate to be chosen. … Perhaps one reason Americans Elect is hiding the names of its donors is that people might draw conclusions about the group’s interests based on the contributors — especially given the rumor that most of its money comes from the hedge fund industry.

… only those who can provide sufficient voter identification that will satisfy the organization — and, of course, who have Internet access — will be allowed to choose the candidate. These will hardly be a cross section of American voters. … Under the group’s bylaws, [the vetting] committee, along with the three other standing committees, serves at the pleasure of the board — and committee members can be removed without cause by the board. The board members were not elected by delegates; they chose themselves in the organization’s articles of incorporation.

In short – Hasen suggests that it’s not so much Americans Elect as America’s Elect. And if the preterite are so impertinent as to disagree with the stated preferences of their betters, the Elect will take away their ball and go home. Perhaps Hasen is wrong on the substance (although he’s an election law specialist) – but if not, it suggests that the problems go rather deeper than Lessig acknowledges in his post.

There are some broader conceptual issues here too. Lessig has done, and is doing, a lot of good work on the problem of corruption in American politics. But he also seems to agree with Americans Elect that the problems of the current system are bound up in partisanship.

As AE becomes more and more relevant, there will be an increasing clamor from both parties to delegitimize it. Partisans get very angry when you question the two party system.

The problem that Lessig seems partly insensible to is that Americans Elect plausibly reflects a kind of purportedly non-partisan corruption that is more subtle but also more damaging than direct graft, or even the implicit quid-pro-quo relationships that he rightly excoriates. Mark Warren gets at this nicely.

If corruption professionals look upon democracy as an ambiguous force at best, one reason may be found in our received conception of political corruption—the abuse of public office for private gain. … This conception is by no means irrelevant, not least because of the enormous weight of administration within modern democracies …[but it] marginalizes the political dimensions of corruption -in particular, corruption of the processes of contestation through which common purposes, norms, rules are created; the institutional patterns that support and justify corruption; and the political cultures within which actions, institutions, and even speech might be judged corrupt.

…The norm of democratic political equality follows: democracy requires that every individual potentially affected by a collective decision should have an opportunity to affect the decision, proportionally to his or her stake in the outcome. The corollary action norm is that collective actions should reflect the purposes decided under inclusive processes. In short, the basic norm of democracy is empowered inclusion of those affected in collective decisions and actions. … In a democracy, meanings of political corruption gain their normative traction by reference to this basic and abstract norm of democracy. Political corruption in a democracy is a form of unjustifiable exclusion or disempowerment, marked by normative duplicity on the part of the corrupt. Corruption is marked not only by exclusion — there are many modes of exclusion — but also by covertness and secrecy, even as inclusive norms are affirmed in public. Stated otherwise, the norm of inclusion is not denied, but rather corrupted. Corruption within a democracy is thus a specific kind of disempowerment that I shall call duplicitous exclusion. Thus, in addition to the substantive harms often associated with corruption in democracies—inefficiencies, misdirected public funds, uneven enforcements of rights, etc.— we can think of corruption as damaging democratic processes.

Hasen’s critique suggests that Americans Elect is corrupt in just this sense. Even as it publicly affirms norms of inclusion, it provides a tiny and unaccountable group with a veto power that will be exercised to ensure that a ‘centrist’ candidate is chosen. And what exactly does ‘centrism’ mean in this context? Harold Meyerson tells us

While almost all the other donors remain anonymous, Americans Elect includes on its Web site a “leadership” list, and of the 69 people named who are not the organization’s staffers or consultants, fully 20 either head or hold senior executive positions with financial institutions, chiefly hedge funds or private-equity firms. The leaders of Americans Elect know what they’d like in a candidate. Maine politico Eliot Cutler, who sits on the group’s board of nine directors, says he wants a ticket “that looks like the Bowles-Simpson Commission in terms of approach — people who reflect my own biases toward social progressivism and fiscal discipline.”

One of the ways in which American politics is corrupt in Warren’s sense is that voices (typically belonging to, or funded by, people who’ve made their money on Wall Street) calling for more fiscal austerity, the ‘rationalization’ of Social Security etc are massively overrepresented in public debate. Americans Elect is quite transparently and explicitly a vehicle for continuing, and, if possible, extending this overrepresentation. Furthermore, there is a strong prima facie case that its funders’ allergic reaction to transparency has a lot to do with the fact that they are the kind of people who would discredit the initiatives if their true identities were known. The chances of Americans Elect pushing a candidate who is genuinely interested in freeing up American politics through e.g. the kinds of funding reforms that Lessig would like are low-to-zero (if money were to count less, Wall Street billionaires would have considerably less clout than they do). The chances of it pushing a candidate with ‘centrist’ preferences that in fact represent and perpetuate the corrupting force of money in American politics is extremely high. I don’t think that it will come to anything, if for no other reason than that it is an exercise in astroturf politics. But I don’t think that lefties or progressives should be supporting it either.

Update: I should note that there are some parallels between Lessig’s idea of ‘dependence corruption’ and Warren’s ideas expressed above – the interesting question for me is why he sees Americans Elect as part of the solution rather than the problem.

Update 2: Title updated to improve atrocious pun

Introduced by state Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R–Monroe), the legislation will restrict graduate students from achieving status as public employees, thereby preventing them from claiming collective bargaining rights and obtaining representation from a union. Yesterday’s vote comes just one day after it had passed through the Senate Government Operations Committee, and the bill will now move on to the state House of Representatives. The vote also comes on the heels of an emergency meeting by the University’s Board of Regents to pass a resolution in opposition to the bill. The regents voted 6-2, along party lines, to approve the resolution and instructed Cynthia Wilbanks, the University’s vice president of governmental affairs, to garner support among state legislators to vote against the bill. Bob McCann, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D–East Lansing), said Senate Republicans approved the bill so quickly — it was introduced last week — to avoid interference from negative public feedback.

The negative public feedback bit is where you come in. I don’t know how many CT readers are Michigan residents – I strongly encourage those who are to contact their state level representatives, whether Democratic or Republican, politely but firmly telling them what a horrible idea this is. I’d also be grateful if those who have useful information (i.e. relevant email addresses of political figures) or other helpful suggestions could leave them in comments. Time is of the essence; I also get the impression, perhaps mistaken, that graduate student union have only very limited resources to fight this kind of fight (they don’t have the direct political connections to local policy makers that other collective actors have. So please do what you can, and spread the word.

Update – Patrick O’Mahen supplies some useful phone numbers in comments.

Mark Ouimet District 52 (517) 373-0828
Rick Olsen District 55 (888) 345-2849
Pat Somerville District 23 (517) 373-0855
Nancy Jenkins District 55 (855) 292-0002
Kevin Cotter District 99 (517) 373-1789

Jase Bolger is the Speaker of the House and is always useful to bother on these issues (as he’s a veto point and all): (517) 373-1787

Finally, governor Rick Snyder can be reached at (517) 373-3400.