US Politics

Citizens’ assemblies are a hot topic these days in democratic theory. Hélène Landemore gave her Tanner Lecture at University of Michigan last semester, describing her experience on the governance committee of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life. Her account of how ordinary citizens could not only deliberate seriously about a contentious issue, but even come to love one another despite their disagreements, was moving and inspirational. I agree with her that citizens’ assemblies offer a promising way to revitalize democracy and reduce the alienation of ordinary people from government–an alienation that factors into the cynicism, nihilism, and “shake things up” populist authoritarianism that is endangering many democracies today.

Here I want to add to her argument a more specific claim, which is the pivotal role citizens can play in directly strengthening the democratic structure of representative government. This can be seen in Michigan’s Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission. Unlike the many experiments in citizens’ assemblies that have only an advisory role, MICRC has genuine legislative power. It is charged with drawing fair (not gerrymandered) districts for the state legislature and Michigan’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, without interference by politicians. [click to continue…]

So is Trump going to be able to pivot to pro-choice in the run-up to the election? I mean: he’s trying. But will it work? And will his pro-life base accept it, because he’s Trump?

I hope no pro-choice voters are fooled. I hope they hold him responsible for overturning Roe. It’s beyond obvious they can’t trust Trump to veto a federal ban, if he’s re-elected, and R’s pass one in Congress. Which they will (almost certainly?) try to do, if they can.

Here’s why I’m even bothering to ask (you knew that stuff I just said.) I think there’s one reason why the pro-life base might go along with it, besides maybe them being boxed in and nowhere else to go. And I haven’t seen anyone really think through the psychology of the shift. Permit me to speculate.

[UPDATE: comments have shown the above paragraph is misleading. Read it so: here’s on reason why the pro-life base, and politicians, might go along if he really goes pro-choice and makes a serious effort to drag others in the party with him. One can’t really trust him, but he might try to make the pivot credible. He doesn’t want to go to prison if he loses, after all. And yes I know there’s nothing he could do to render himself truly trustworthy, still there are things he could do to try to make the R party more pro-choice in an attempt to win voters.]

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If the current Supreme Court had held comparable office in Weimar Germany, that is, its opinion in Trump v. United States would have rendered the judgment in this post’s headline. Never mind that the Weimar Constitution was different from the U.S. Constitution (importantly, in granting emergency powers to the President to rule by decree under Article 48). For, as Justice Sotomayor rightly observes in her blistering dissent, the majority’s decision that the President enjoys absolute immunity for his official acts has “no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent” (quoting Alito’s characterization of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs).

So let us set aside the law, which has nothing to do with how the Court majority arrived at its opinion. I am here to explore the majority’s mindset, which leads it down the path to utter lawlessness, and opens the door to dictatorship. Justice Roberts disparages this worry as overblown, much as Hindenburg imagined that Hitler was a mere blowhard, no real danger to the Republic. Never mind that Trump, like Hitler, habitually announces his malign intentions in advance–that he will not honor any election that does not place him in office, that he will abuse the powers of the President to wreak vengeance on his enemies, that he will rule as a dictator (on “day one,”–but now the Court has granted him a license for at least a 4-year term). Such announcements are the only times when it is prudent to take Trump at his word.

Roberts, like everyone else on the Court, knows that Trump conspired to overthrow the results of the 2020 election and stay in power by inciting a mob to shut down Congress’s counting of electoral votes. What could make him imagine that Trump’s actions were, if not lawful, then beyond the reach of any controlling law?

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After a couple days to think on it, I think this post is right on. I just stumbled on a paper that stumbles, badly, over one of my two obvious thoughts about originalism. So let me point that out. [click to continue…]

Looks like I haven’t posted for a couple years. Probably time to fix that!

This one kicks off from a tweet I fired off, off-handedly, that led somewhere useful. “If you were wanting a paradigm case-in-point to illustrate the plausibility of legal realism, the history of legal originalism would be hard to improve on.” [click to continue…]

There’s been a lot of grumpy commentary about this recent NYT op-ed by Adam S. Hoffman, a Princeton senior claiming that conservatives are being driven off campus. Its basic claims:

In the not-so-distant past, the Typical College Republican idolized Ronald Reagan, fretted about the national debt and read Edmund Burke. Political sophistication, to that person, implied belief in the status quo. … Today’s campus conservatives embrace a less moderate, complacent and institutional approach to politics. … many tend toward scorched-earth politics. But these changes aren’t solely the consequence of a fractured national politics.They’re also the result of puritanically progressive campuses that alienate conservative students from their liberal peers and college as a whole.

The story of this transformation, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, starts around 2014, when Gen Z arrived on campus. The new progressive students were less tolerant of heterodox ideas and individuals. …For those on the right, the experience is alienating. … And those who challenge liberal pieties can face real repercussions.

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Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently published a book, Can College Level The Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand the structural position of higher education in the US. Spoiler alert here: Their answer is “No”. Most of the book is taken up with explaining why, by showing the multiple ways in which background inequalities and inequalities in the pre-college education system constrain any efforts higher education might make to level the playing field, and showing how unequal the higher education system is anyway, including – and this seems not to be well understood by politicians or a lot of commentators – how unequal the public sector itself is.

Full disclosure: I’m close friends with both of the authors, and read at least 3 versions of the manuscript before it was published and, I just realized by looking at its Princeton University Press page, wrote a blurb for it. The producer of the CEE podcast series is putting the finishing touches on an interview that we’ve done with them, and as soon as it is published, I’ll post about it encouraging you to listen and, again, encouraging you to read the book.

This (extremely long) post, though, is only secondarily about the book. My main interest is in a genuinely awful review of it, and of another book by Gary Orfield (which, I will emphasize several times, I have not read yet), in Boston Review by Christopher Newfield. I’m writing about it partly because it so irritated me that I want to get my irritation out of my system, but also partly because it illustrates some of the failings that are common to many of the books and commentaries I read about higher education.

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I recently listened to the new book by Anand Giridharadas, who is well-known for his previous book Winner Takes All. That book was about how (some of) the superrich are happy trying to contribute to some of the world’s problems, but never ask any questions related to why the world is so unequal as it is, what power and the workings of capitalism have to do with all of this, and whether their capitalist strategies are at all suited to address these problems. I thought that was a great book.

So I was looking forward to his new book. It is called The Persuaders. Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age. It is a book about why we shouldn’t just give up on people who have political or social views that we find wrong, perhaps even horrible. The book presents a series of cases, the activists involved, and the techniques or strategies they use – interspersed with some insights from social psychology and other sciences on what works (and what doesn’t) to make people change their mind in a non-manipulative way.

My take-away from the book is that there is no point in believing you are right (or have the right policy, or the right analysis on what needs to happen on matter X), and believing the only thing that is needed for change is airing those views and that analysis. It’s just not enough. We need to actually spend time and effort to persuade others that this is the right analysis/policy/direction, and this persuasion cannot be merely cognitive; it requires understanding “where people are”, what makes them believe what they believe, and showing respect for them as a person at the outset. All of that requires listening, and being willing to engage in a genuine conversation, and finding out why people believe what they believe. Just believing I am right (and having all the arguments sorted out in my head) and airing my views, is not enough to also make a difference in the world, especially not in deeply divided societies. And, very importantly, trying to persuade others, and being willing to be persuaded, should be an essential part of any democracy. Thus, this book is also, at a deeper level, about what contemporary democracies need. [click to continue…]

The Washington Post has a long piece about a Virginia family whose current (substantial but not huge) wealth derives from their slaveholding forebears and who may now be greatly enriched by the discovery of uranium under their land. There’s an interesting discussion of the arguments for and against reparations

Buried in the middle of the article is something much more interesting, to me at any rate. One member of the family, Edward Coles, opposed slavery. He hid his views until he inherited ownership of 17 enslaved people, then took them to Illinois and freed them. None other than Thomas Jefferson wrote to Coles, seeking to dissuade him.

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It’s probably not an entire coincidence that the Russians plan to withdraw from Kherson after realizing that the mid-term Trumpist wave petered out. It’s safe to say that whatever the final results will be, there will be sufficient, even bipartisan, support to continue the weapons flow to Ukraine for the time being.

In fact, the Ukraine war has exposed two fatal weaknesses of Putin’s regime that reflect the structural weaknesses of all such kleptocratic political orders. First, he encourages corruption down the chain of command in order not just to reward loyalty, but also to maintain leverage over his cronies. But, as any Chinese sage could have taught him, there is no level at which this stops; each level of authority mimics the strong-man at the top. This process gets accentuated in the chain of command of the armed forces, who are shielded from the evidence that things are deeply amiss until it’s too late to do much about it.

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You have probably heard some Dems boosted crazy MAGA Trumpists via ad buys in various Rep primaries, obviously angling for victory in November over more extremist, presumptively easier-to-beat opponents. Some of the crazies won!

Here’s a recent WaPo article about it. Quite a bit has been written elsewhere; you can google if curious. Details are colorful. (After the article appeared, Bolduc won!) These R’s who got the boost are all certifiable, whether they are electable or no. And it wasn’t just Dem candidates freelancing this on their own. The DCCC got involved among other leaders. So it wasn’t just some coordination problem where individual candidates acted in selfish, short-sighted ways against the party’s interest, never mind the country’s.

This has outraged people, D’s included. R’s (usually of an anti-anti-Trump bent) have cited it as evidence D’s don’t really believe that MAGA is a threat to democracy. Surely they would not be so cavalier as to play with fire if they thought it would burn the house down!

Maybe I’m getting flaming radical in my old age but, honestly, I just don’t see what the fuss is about. Actually, I thought I did at first. I said that I disapproved. Then I thought again and I just couldn’t see it. You tell me. [click to continue…]

I did a part 1 so I owe a part 2. (I’d like to do a series but I don’t think it will all go with this particular title.)

Right. In part 1, I considered whether D’s really believe that the R party is, as Biden suggested in his speech, a standing threat to democracy, due to Trump and MAGA. Douthat (and others) have suggested that D behavior suggests this is a bit of a put-on. D’s don’t seem to be taking the threat seriously. My counter-argument is that if you think there is, like, a 20% threat to democracy from the R’s, that’s hard to deal with coherently. Partly you want to set your hair on fire and run around screaming ‘danger!’, partly you want to just keep calm and carry on. But those responses are cognitively dissonant, which makes you look insincere – probably about the hair-on-fire part. But that’s actually not right. The dissonance fits the uncertain facts.

So let’s turn to the R’s. Do the R’s really believe that Trump and Trumpism is NOT a threat to democracy AND/OR that D’s are actually the real threat to democracy due to ‘Russia Russia Russia hoax’ perpetrating, election-stealing Dark Brandon and his illegal, student-debt-cancelling ways, plus his nefarious son Hunter? [click to continue…]

Like John H, I was struck by Ross Douthat’s latest piece in the New York Times, but, unlike John, I wasn’t much interested in engaging with the argument, such as it was. Rather, I took at as providing insight into the extent to which being a Republican is central to Douthat’s identity, over-riding any concerns about democracy, justice and so on.

In this respect, Douthat is similar to the great majority of the “good Republicans” implicitly distinguished from the MAGA fascists in Biden’s recent speech (and also in Hillary Clinton’s reference to the “basket of deplorables”). Just as Douthat is the archetypal intellectual in this respect, Susan Collins is the archetypal politician. They want to be seen as decent and caring, but in the end, they are Republicans first and foremost. And it is the Douthats and Collinses who will, in all likelihood, destroy American democracy.

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The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us he wasn’t Twitter. No, I’m kidding, I love Twitter. But I have abandoned blogging and that’s so so sad. So, once again, I’m going to try to do better

I would like to ask: who thinks who is a threat to democracy?

New Quinnipiac poll finds 69% of D’s and 69% of R’s say they think American democracy is in danger of collapse – presumably not for the same reasons.

Biden’s speech called out Trump and Trumpism – MAGA – as threats to democracy and the rule of law. But obviously Trump and his MAGA base don’t see themselves that way. If they’re semi-fascists, they are suffering from severe false-consciousness. They think they are patriots fighting Dem fascists. Or at least they say they think that. Douthat argues today that D’s don’t really believe the hype themselves.

“You may believe that American democracy is threatened as at no point since the Civil War, dear reader, but they do not. They are running a political operation in which the threat to democracy is leverage, used to keep swing voters onside without having to make difficult concessions to the center or the right.”

The evidence: failure to engage in outreach to build the anti-Trump coalition! Some Dems, including the DCCC, gave to MAGA candidates in primaries on the theory they will be weak in the general. Is this the behavior of people who think democracy is on the line?

I dunno. Might be. [click to continue…]