.After reviewing the new and controversial DSM-5 I self-diagnose that I fit 6 diagnoses down from 5 in DSM-4. I'm making progress!
Like · · Promote · Share.
Freddy Hudson, Clare Lynch and Lorna Wood like this..Don Waller I concurFriday at 7:57pm via mobile · Like..Fred Hudson Thanks, Don. I can always count on your encouragement.Friday at 8:08pm · Like · 1..Hank Henley I think you need a second opinion from Facebook. Which six?Yesterday at 7:28am · Like..Fred Hudson Privileged information.20 hours ago · Like..
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Synchronicity
We sometimes watch this pawn shop show on TV on the history channel on Saturday nights. Tonight there is a man selling an autographed book by Dwight Eisenhower. The expert brought in to validate the book said it was Eisenhower's signature but because the book the seller had in hand did not have the dust cover that originally came with the book the product was not complete. A book should come complete with everything that came with it originally for maximum value.
As I watch this I am read an interesting novel called The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn. In the story the protagonist is doing some library research. He is dealing with an archivist when I read this.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Janice almost smiles. "I am an archivist, Dr. Thacker, which means I am a completist. What good is the historical record if it is not complete."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Jung called this synchronicity. Another word for it is coincidence.
As I watch this I am read an interesting novel called The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn. In the story the protagonist is doing some library research. He is dealing with an archivist when I read this.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Janice almost smiles. "I am an archivist, Dr. Thacker, which means I am a completist. What good is the historical record if it is not complete."
____________________________________________________________________________________
Jung called this synchronicity. Another word for it is coincidence.
Friday, July 26, 2013
The Truth About Republican Opposition to the Affordable Health Care Act
Republican Health Care PanicBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 25, 2013 735 Comments
Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation — bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent — that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.
Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work.
And the good news about Obamacare is, I’d argue, what’s driving the Republican Party’s intensified extremism. Successful health reform wouldn’t just be a victory for a president conservatives loathe, it would be an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology. So Republicans are being driven into a last, desperate effort to head this thing off at the pass.
Some background: Although you’d never know it from all the fulminations, with prominent Republicans routinely comparing Obamacare to slavery, the Affordable Care Act is based on three simple ideas. First, all Americans should have access to affordable insurance, even if they have pre-existing medical problems. Second, people should be induced or required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, so that the risk pool remains reasonably favorable. Third, to prevent the insurance “mandate” from being too onerous, there should be subsidies to hold premiums down as a share of income.
Is such a system workable? For a while, Republicans convinced themselves that it was doomed to failure, and that they could profit politically from the inevitable “train wreck.” But a system along exactly these lines has been operating in Massachusetts since 2006, where it was introduced by a Republican governor. What was his name? Mitt Somethingorother? And no trains have been wrecked so far.
The question is whether the Massachusetts success story can be replicated in other states, especially big states like California and New York with large numbers of uninsured residents. The answer to this question depends, in the first place, on whether insurance companies are willing to offer coverage at reasonable rates. And the answer, so far, is a clear “yes.” In California, insurers came in with bids running significantly below expectations; in New York, it appears that premiums will be cut roughly in half.
So is this a case of something for nothing, in which nobody loses? No. In states like California, which have allowed discrimination based on health status, a small number of young, healthy, affluent residents will see their premiums go up. In New York, people who don’t think they need insurance and are too rich to receive subsidies — probably an even smaller group — will feel put upon by being obliged to buy policies. Mainly, though, those insurance subsidies will cost money, and that money will, to an important extent, be raised through higher taxes on the 1 percent: tax increases that have, by the way, already taken effect.
Over all, then, health reform will help millions of Americans who were previously either too sick or too poor to get the coverage they needed, and also offer a great deal of reassurance to millions more who currently have insurance but fear losing it; it will provide these benefits at the expense of a much smaller number of other Americans, mostly the very well off. It is, if you like, a plan to comfort the afflicted while (slightly) afflicting the comfortable.
And the prospect that such a plan might succeed is anathema to a party whose whole philosophy is built around doing just the opposite, of taking from the “takers” and giving to the “job creators,” known to the rest of us as the “rich.” Hence the brinkmanship.
So will Republicans actually take us to the brink? If they do, it will be crucial to understand why they would do such a thing, when their own leaders have admitted that confrontations over the budget inflict substantial harm on the economy. It won’t be because they fear the budget deficit, which is coming down fast. Nor will it be because they sincerely believe that spending cuts produce prosperity.
No, Republicans may be willing to risk economic and financial crisis solely in order to deny essential health care and financial security to millions of their fellow Americans. Let’s hear it for their noble cause!
Published: July 25, 2013 735 Comments
Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation — bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent — that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.
Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work.
And the good news about Obamacare is, I’d argue, what’s driving the Republican Party’s intensified extremism. Successful health reform wouldn’t just be a victory for a president conservatives loathe, it would be an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology. So Republicans are being driven into a last, desperate effort to head this thing off at the pass.
Some background: Although you’d never know it from all the fulminations, with prominent Republicans routinely comparing Obamacare to slavery, the Affordable Care Act is based on three simple ideas. First, all Americans should have access to affordable insurance, even if they have pre-existing medical problems. Second, people should be induced or required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, so that the risk pool remains reasonably favorable. Third, to prevent the insurance “mandate” from being too onerous, there should be subsidies to hold premiums down as a share of income.
Is such a system workable? For a while, Republicans convinced themselves that it was doomed to failure, and that they could profit politically from the inevitable “train wreck.” But a system along exactly these lines has been operating in Massachusetts since 2006, where it was introduced by a Republican governor. What was his name? Mitt Somethingorother? And no trains have been wrecked so far.
The question is whether the Massachusetts success story can be replicated in other states, especially big states like California and New York with large numbers of uninsured residents. The answer to this question depends, in the first place, on whether insurance companies are willing to offer coverage at reasonable rates. And the answer, so far, is a clear “yes.” In California, insurers came in with bids running significantly below expectations; in New York, it appears that premiums will be cut roughly in half.
So is this a case of something for nothing, in which nobody loses? No. In states like California, which have allowed discrimination based on health status, a small number of young, healthy, affluent residents will see their premiums go up. In New York, people who don’t think they need insurance and are too rich to receive subsidies — probably an even smaller group — will feel put upon by being obliged to buy policies. Mainly, though, those insurance subsidies will cost money, and that money will, to an important extent, be raised through higher taxes on the 1 percent: tax increases that have, by the way, already taken effect.
Over all, then, health reform will help millions of Americans who were previously either too sick or too poor to get the coverage they needed, and also offer a great deal of reassurance to millions more who currently have insurance but fear losing it; it will provide these benefits at the expense of a much smaller number of other Americans, mostly the very well off. It is, if you like, a plan to comfort the afflicted while (slightly) afflicting the comfortable.
And the prospect that such a plan might succeed is anathema to a party whose whole philosophy is built around doing just the opposite, of taking from the “takers” and giving to the “job creators,” known to the rest of us as the “rich.” Hence the brinkmanship.
So will Republicans actually take us to the brink? If they do, it will be crucial to understand why they would do such a thing, when their own leaders have admitted that confrontations over the budget inflict substantial harm on the economy. It won’t be because they fear the budget deficit, which is coming down fast. Nor will it be because they sincerely believe that spending cuts produce prosperity.
No, Republicans may be willing to risk economic and financial crisis solely in order to deny essential health care and financial security to millions of their fellow Americans. Let’s hear it for their noble cause!
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Hooray for Little Rock!
Kiplinger names Little Rock top place to live
By David Harten
This article was published today at 11:13 a.m.
Kiplinger's Top 10
1.Little Rock
2.Burlington, Vt.
3.Bryan-College Station, Texas
4.Santa Fe, N.M.
5.Columbia, S.C.
6.Billings, Mont.
7.Morgantown, W. Va.
8.Ithaca, N.Y.
9.Anchorage, Alaska
10.Dubuque, Iowa
The city of Little Rock has impressed Kiplinger personal finance magazine.
The publication recently tallied its 10 Great Places To Live, putting Little Rock at the top of the list of the best midsize-to-small cities.
"Set between the Ouachita Mountains and the Arkansas River and known for its rolling hills and ubiquitous trees, Little Rock offers far more than a lovely setting," the site said. "It is the capital of Arkansas and its largest city, as well as the state center of business, health care and culture. With a population of nearly 200,000, it has the amenities of a larger city but is small enough that you can feel part of the community."
Little Rock beat out the likes of Burlington, Vt.; Bryan-College Station, Texas; and Sante Fe, N.M., among others, for the title.
The website took in account the city's accessibility — the site said most destinations within the city are no more than 20 minutes away — along with job availability, health care, the city's setting and sports culture.
Kiplinger also highlighted a community they said "includes people of all ages," along with the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, the Clinton Presidential Library and Riverfront Park.
The website also gave praise to the city's businesses and economy, stating that Little Rock's unemployment rate is a full percentage point under the U.S. average (6.6 percent compared with 7.6 percent nationally).
By David Harten
This article was published today at 11:13 a.m.
Kiplinger's Top 10
1.Little Rock
2.Burlington, Vt.
3.Bryan-College Station, Texas
4.Santa Fe, N.M.
5.Columbia, S.C.
6.Billings, Mont.
7.Morgantown, W. Va.
8.Ithaca, N.Y.
9.Anchorage, Alaska
10.Dubuque, Iowa
The city of Little Rock has impressed Kiplinger personal finance magazine.
The publication recently tallied its 10 Great Places To Live, putting Little Rock at the top of the list of the best midsize-to-small cities.
"Set between the Ouachita Mountains and the Arkansas River and known for its rolling hills and ubiquitous trees, Little Rock offers far more than a lovely setting," the site said. "It is the capital of Arkansas and its largest city, as well as the state center of business, health care and culture. With a population of nearly 200,000, it has the amenities of a larger city but is small enough that you can feel part of the community."
Little Rock beat out the likes of Burlington, Vt.; Bryan-College Station, Texas; and Sante Fe, N.M., among others, for the title.
The website took in account the city's accessibility — the site said most destinations within the city are no more than 20 minutes away — along with job availability, health care, the city's setting and sports culture.
Kiplinger also highlighted a community they said "includes people of all ages," along with the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, the Clinton Presidential Library and Riverfront Park.
The website also gave praise to the city's businesses and economy, stating that Little Rock's unemployment rate is a full percentage point under the U.S. average (6.6 percent compared with 7.6 percent nationally).
The Difference
Robert Reich.Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Beyond Outrage'
Why Republicans Are Disciplined and Democrats Aren't
Posted: 07/24/2013 3:22 pm
As we head toward renewed battles over the debt ceiling, sequester, and government funding, it's important to understand why Republicans are disciplined and Democrats aren't.
For the past five years of the Obama administration Republicans have marched in lockstep to oppose just about everything Obama and the Democrats have proposed. Yet the Democrats rarely march together. Recently, for example, 22 Democrats in the House joined every Republican in voting to delay the individual mandate in Obamacare.
When Republican leaders tell rank-and-file Republicans to call Obamacare's cost controls "death panels," or to say the rich are "job creators," or the poor are "takers rather than makers," they all repeat the same words. (Frank Luntz, their message consultant, once said: "There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.")
Democrats never stick to the same message. They rarely even say the same thing the same way twice. In fact, their messages often conflict.
To be sure, the Tea Partiers in Congress have challenged the GOP leadership. But that challenge is really about who should have the authority to impose discipline over the party. The firebrands are bucking the old establishment with their own new establishment. Democrats, by contrast, buck their leaders all the time. And they do it as individuals, lone wolves and free agents.
Republican discipline and Democratic lack of discipline isn't a new phenomenon. As Will Rogers once said, "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
The difference has to do with the kind of personalities the two parties attract. People who respect authority, follow orders, want clear answers, obey commands, and prefer precise organization and control, tend to gravitate toward Republicans.
On the other hand, people who don't much like authority, recoil from orders, don't believe in clear answers, often disobey commands, and prefer things a bit undefined, tend to gravitate to the Democrats.
In short, the Republican Party is the party of the authoritarian personality; the Democratic Party is the party of the anti-authoritarian personality.
In "Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics" (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Jonathan Weiler, professor of international studies at UNC Chapel Hill and his co-author, Marc Hetherington, use statistical models to determine whether someone is a Republican or Democrat. It turns out that the best predictor of party affiliation is someone's score on an authoritarian personality scale that measures many of the traits I mentioned above.
This means Republicans will almost always be more disciplined about voting and messaging than the Democrats. Which gives the GOP an advantage in times like this, when the two parties are at war with each other -- and when so many Americans, angry and confused, are looking for simple answers.
Why Republicans Are Disciplined and Democrats Aren't
Posted: 07/24/2013 3:22 pm
As we head toward renewed battles over the debt ceiling, sequester, and government funding, it's important to understand why Republicans are disciplined and Democrats aren't.
For the past five years of the Obama administration Republicans have marched in lockstep to oppose just about everything Obama and the Democrats have proposed. Yet the Democrats rarely march together. Recently, for example, 22 Democrats in the House joined every Republican in voting to delay the individual mandate in Obamacare.
When Republican leaders tell rank-and-file Republicans to call Obamacare's cost controls "death panels," or to say the rich are "job creators," or the poor are "takers rather than makers," they all repeat the same words. (Frank Luntz, their message consultant, once said: "There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.")
Democrats never stick to the same message. They rarely even say the same thing the same way twice. In fact, their messages often conflict.
To be sure, the Tea Partiers in Congress have challenged the GOP leadership. But that challenge is really about who should have the authority to impose discipline over the party. The firebrands are bucking the old establishment with their own new establishment. Democrats, by contrast, buck their leaders all the time. And they do it as individuals, lone wolves and free agents.
Republican discipline and Democratic lack of discipline isn't a new phenomenon. As Will Rogers once said, "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
The difference has to do with the kind of personalities the two parties attract. People who respect authority, follow orders, want clear answers, obey commands, and prefer precise organization and control, tend to gravitate toward Republicans.
On the other hand, people who don't much like authority, recoil from orders, don't believe in clear answers, often disobey commands, and prefer things a bit undefined, tend to gravitate to the Democrats.
In short, the Republican Party is the party of the authoritarian personality; the Democratic Party is the party of the anti-authoritarian personality.
In "Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics" (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Jonathan Weiler, professor of international studies at UNC Chapel Hill and his co-author, Marc Hetherington, use statistical models to determine whether someone is a Republican or Democrat. It turns out that the best predictor of party affiliation is someone's score on an authoritarian personality scale that measures many of the traits I mentioned above.
This means Republicans will almost always be more disciplined about voting and messaging than the Democrats. Which gives the GOP an advantage in times like this, when the two parties are at war with each other -- and when so many Americans, angry and confused, are looking for simple answers.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Henry Wiencek - An Imperfect God
This biography of George Washington is one of the more interesting ones I have read focusing as it does on Washington's record with regard to slavery. Therein lies one of the great what ifs of history.
Alone among his contemporaries GW freed his slaves after his wife's death. None of the other Founding Fathers freed their slaves. Perhaps alone among his contemporaries GW before he died perhaps in the 1790's or perhaps earlier came to morally oppose slavery, seeing slaves as human beings, believing that they could be productive citizens in this country, indeed, perhaps he because truly morally repulsed by slavery.
What if he had freed his slaves during his Presidency before he died? How might this have moved action toward emancipation forward? What effect would it have had on American history? Of course we will never know.
Despite his emancipating action, Washington WAS a huge slaveholder. In his lifetime he bought and sold slaves. He was initially opposed to blacks in his continental army, but had to change his mind due to manpower needs just as Lincoln had to change his mind during the Civil War. There is no such thing as a benevolent slave master. The brutality of chattel slavery eliminates any room for benevolence. Washington had slaves at the constitutional convention. He had slaves in his executive mansion as President. He was a man of his times, a slaveholder in slaveholding Virginia.
Alone among his contemporaries GW freed his slaves after his wife's death. None of the other Founding Fathers freed their slaves. Perhaps alone among his contemporaries GW before he died perhaps in the 1790's or perhaps earlier came to morally oppose slavery, seeing slaves as human beings, believing that they could be productive citizens in this country, indeed, perhaps he because truly morally repulsed by slavery.
What if he had freed his slaves during his Presidency before he died? How might this have moved action toward emancipation forward? What effect would it have had on American history? Of course we will never know.
Despite his emancipating action, Washington WAS a huge slaveholder. In his lifetime he bought and sold slaves. He was initially opposed to blacks in his continental army, but had to change his mind due to manpower needs just as Lincoln had to change his mind during the Civil War. There is no such thing as a benevolent slave master. The brutality of chattel slavery eliminates any room for benevolence. Washington had slaves at the constitutional convention. He had slaves in his executive mansion as President. He was a man of his times, a slaveholder in slaveholding Virginia.
Paul Krugman--To the Brink Again
July 24, 2013, 9:18 am 16 Comments
To The Brink, Again
If John Boehner is to be believed — which, admittedly, is a real question — Republicans are once again willing to push America into default and/or shut down the government if they don’t get their way. As Greg Sargent points out, this is amazing — and what’s equally amazing is how this is being treated as normal. Politics ain’t beanbag; but “I’ve got a bomb strapped to my chest, and the whole room gets it if you don’t hand over the money” is not normal tactics, especially if pursued repeatedly.
What adds to the awesomeness of the whole phenomenon is the absence of any halfway plausible rationale. To the extent that there ever was an economic justification for this brinksmanship — the claim that we were on the verge of a debt crisis, the claim that slashing spending would boost the economy — that justification has collapsed in the face of declining debt projections and overwhelming evidence that austerity has large negative impacts in a slump. True, as David Firestone notes, leading Republicans seem to have a hearing problem; they are so deep into their worldview that when, say, Ben Bernanke refutes that view they simply hear him saying the opposite of what he actually said.
Still, how can the GOP be acting this crazy again? This time around, it’s hard to see Obama caving in. So why the brinksmanship?
Well, my guess is that despite being drenched in reality-repellent, Republicans are beginning to suspect an inconvenient truth: Obamacare is not going to be a self-destroying train wreck. Instead, it’s going to work — not perfectly, not as well as it should, but well enough to help far more people than it hurts. And if that’s how it turns out, it will be irreversible. So here comes a last-ditch effort to stop it, at all costs.
But think about that for a moment: the cause for which the GOP is willing to go to the brink, breaking all political norms, threatening the US and world economies with incalculable damage, is the cause of preventing people with preexisting conditions and/or low incomes from getting health insurance. Apparently, the prospect that their fellow citizens might receive this help is so horrifying that nothing else matters.
.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
The President Speaks About Trayvon Martin
Why Obama Spoke About Trayvon MartinBy Jonathan Chait
President Obama delivered an impromptu, instantly historic soliloquy on race today at the White House press conference, occasioned by the acquittal in the George Zimmerman trial. Obama has rarely spoken about race directly since taking office, but here was the unprecedented spectacle of an African-American president essentially explaining structural racism to America. Obama does not disagree with the legal verdict but found the shooting itself troubling.
But he used the occasion to speak more expansively on race from the perspective of an African-American than he ever has before — arguing how, verdict aside, the case triggered legitimate anger. African-Americans, he said, "get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different." While acknowledging that there is no way for the federal government to intervene directly in cases like the Zimmerman trial, he suggested a few ways in which the government might respond: more racial bias training for law enforcement, closer examination of laws like Stand Your Ground, "some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys," and "some soul-searching."
Why is Obama saying this? And why now? There are three things to bear in mind for how Obama approaches the subject of race:
First, he believes that racism remains a significant stain on American life. He knows that African-Americans, especially males, face different treatment from society — today he invoked the experience of being followed in a department store, seeing doors locked around him or women in elevators clutching their purses. And even acknowledging the statistical fact that black males disproportionately commit violence, he considers the treatment of the nonviolent majority a source of legitimate grievance that he personally shares.
Second, Obama believes that talking about race too much is not only useless — he dismissed “national conversations about race” — but, in his case, counterproductive. The entire Barack Obama political image has been built in large part around de-racialization — persuading white voters to put aside any preconceptions about race and to think of him in nonracial terms. Obama, according to one analysis, has “talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.” His famed race speech about Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign was, above all, an effort to put to bed the race issue. Being seen by white America as a spokesman for the black community, rather than America as a whole, has always been Obama’s number-one political nightmare. He spoke out today in spite of this instinct.
Third, Obama believes America’s racial problem has not only gotten dramatically better over the course of his life — it will continue to do so. Younger people are less racially biased than older people, and Obama believes that process will continue to rapidly transform America’s approach to race.
Point No. 3 may help explain the contradictions between No. 1 and No. 2. Obama understands that interjecting himself into a racialized controversy carries risks, but he also believes that the electorate of the future is on his side. His remarks are probably aimed not at the present but at posterity.
President Obama delivered an impromptu, instantly historic soliloquy on race today at the White House press conference, occasioned by the acquittal in the George Zimmerman trial. Obama has rarely spoken about race directly since taking office, but here was the unprecedented spectacle of an African-American president essentially explaining structural racism to America. Obama does not disagree with the legal verdict but found the shooting itself troubling.
But he used the occasion to speak more expansively on race from the perspective of an African-American than he ever has before — arguing how, verdict aside, the case triggered legitimate anger. African-Americans, he said, "get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different." While acknowledging that there is no way for the federal government to intervene directly in cases like the Zimmerman trial, he suggested a few ways in which the government might respond: more racial bias training for law enforcement, closer examination of laws like Stand Your Ground, "some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys," and "some soul-searching."
Why is Obama saying this? And why now? There are three things to bear in mind for how Obama approaches the subject of race:
First, he believes that racism remains a significant stain on American life. He knows that African-Americans, especially males, face different treatment from society — today he invoked the experience of being followed in a department store, seeing doors locked around him or women in elevators clutching their purses. And even acknowledging the statistical fact that black males disproportionately commit violence, he considers the treatment of the nonviolent majority a source of legitimate grievance that he personally shares.
Second, Obama believes that talking about race too much is not only useless — he dismissed “national conversations about race” — but, in his case, counterproductive. The entire Barack Obama political image has been built in large part around de-racialization — persuading white voters to put aside any preconceptions about race and to think of him in nonracial terms. Obama, according to one analysis, has “talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.” His famed race speech about Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign was, above all, an effort to put to bed the race issue. Being seen by white America as a spokesman for the black community, rather than America as a whole, has always been Obama’s number-one political nightmare. He spoke out today in spite of this instinct.
Third, Obama believes America’s racial problem has not only gotten dramatically better over the course of his life — it will continue to do so. Younger people are less racially biased than older people, and Obama believes that process will continue to rapidly transform America’s approach to race.
Point No. 3 may help explain the contradictions between No. 1 and No. 2. Obama understands that interjecting himself into a racialized controversy carries risks, but he also believes that the electorate of the future is on his side. His remarks are probably aimed not at the present but at posterity.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Libertarians and the Civil War
More on Slavery , the Civil War, and Libertarians
Randy Barnett • July 18, 2013 10:29 am
Kudos to Jacob Levy on Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and Ilya (here and here) and Jonathan (here) for their trenchant critiques of the Neo-Confederate sympathies of some who call themselves libertarians. I agree with Jacob that this is an issue more important for libertarian activists and intellectuals to forthrightly address and forcefully reject than are other pathologies (e.g. birtherism) typically arising at the fringes of ideological movements:
Confederatistas aren’t ignoring libertarian principles or classical liberal arguments altogether. They’re (IMHO, of course– sprinkle imputed “IMHOs” as liberally through this post as you like, since I’m talking about my own priorities and not about the world) misusing them, abusing them, drawing the wrong lessons from them, prioritizing them badly. And they’re doing so in a way that runs deep in American political culture and history, not in an irrelevant fringy way.
In my view the Confederatistas perpetuate the white southerners’ two-century-long scam of dressing up the cause of racial dominance in classical liberal clothes, perverting the goal of liberty into the project of slavery. This has been a defining fact of American political life; it has served to discredit some of those classical liberal values and institutions, while also perpetuating a story in which the freedom of African-Americans (postbellum as well as antebellum) lies somehow outside the calculus of American liberty.
I recommend you read the whole thing — especially if you consider yourself to be a libertarian. I know from my own history in the libertarian movement that there are pockets of libertarians who accept this type of Southern revisionism. I have myself been criticized by these folks as a “nationalist” libertarian because I accept the Fourteenth Amendment as good law that ought to be followed (far more than it is) despite it being inimical to states rights.
To their excellent posts, I wish to add a few additional considerations that I have become aware of over the past several years as I have researched and written about “abolitionist constitutionalism” and the career of Salmon P. Chase.
◦The Republican party was formed as the anti-slavery successor to the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. It was the election of the presidential candidate of this party with its anti-slavery platform that precipitated the South’s initiation of force against federal troops and facilities — not a dispute over tariffs. Slavery was deeply involved in both the formation of the Republican party, which supplanted the Whigs due to this issue, its election of a President on its second try, and the Southern reaction to this election, which directly precipitated the Civil War.
◦However, unlike more radical abolitionists like Lysander Spooner, the Republican party platform insisted that the federal government had no legal power to end slavery in any of the original 13 states in which it still existed. In this way, though it opposed the extension of slavery, the Republican platform respected states rights. (From this it is wrong to conclude that anti-slavery “moderates” like Chase or Lincoln were any less opposed to slavery than radicals like Spooner; but only that they recognized constitutional limits on the federal power to abolish it within the original states — a view of the Constitution they shared in common with such radical abolitionists as Garrison and Phillips.) In this sense, because Republicans pledged to respect the “states rights” of the South, the South had no cause to secede on that basis.
◦But the Republican party also believed that it was within the power of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and in other federal enclaves as well as on federal construction projects, a view having nothing to do with “states rights,” and that seems an eminently reasonable, if not patently correct, constitutional stance. The principal response of the Slave Power to this theory was the early invocation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The South rightly feared that these and other undoubtedly constitutional Republican federal programs would erode its ability to maintain slavery over time. (Mill makes this point effectively in the excerpt reproduced by Ilya below.)
◦As others have correctly noted, the Slave Power was enthusiastic about using federal postal power to suppress the distribution of abolitionist literature in the South, and the Necessary & Proper Clause to enact the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Indeed, the defense of the constitutionality of that statute by Justice Story in Prigg v. Pennsylvania offered a reading of the Necessary & Proper Clause that was sweeping in its scope, essentially empowering Congress to enforce any right that might be recognized anywhere in the document. It was “constitutional abolitionists” like Chase who argued the rights of Northern state to protect the rights of their freeman from wrongful kidnapping by slave catchers, a right that was overridden by federal the Fugitive Slave At of 1850 that Southern states demanded. The Slave Power also pushed heavily to extend slavery to new states formed from the territories, by violent extralegal means, as well as to militate to extend their slave system to Cuba by conquest.
◦The political appeal of the Republican party among Northerners, many of whom shared the racism of their day, was based in part and for some on the recognized injustice of slavery, and in part and for many on a quite justified fear of Northerners that slavery would eventually be imposed on them by the South (Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech was about this). When Dred Scott protected the right of Southerners to take their “property” out of their states and into federal territories it seemed a very short step before they could take their “property” into Northern states, as indeed Southerners did and favored a right to do.
◦It is true that Lincoln loudly protested that his aim was to protect the Union not to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed. First, neo-Confederates who stress this seem not to realize that, if believed, like the Republican party platform, this pledge undermines the “states rights” justification for secession. Second, remember most Republicans did not believe that Congress had power under the Constitution to abolish slavery in one of the original states that retained it, which is why the Emancipation Proclamation was justified under the war power as a war measure. Third, Lincoln was gravely concerned with keeping loyal border slave states in the Union so as not to fatally undermine the war effort. Finally, Lincoln was himself a former Whig and moderate late-comer to the antislavery cause, which is why he was distrusted by the radicals in Congress and by abolitionists. Indeed, he kept Chase in his cabinet far longer than he wished because Chase was the administration’s link to the radicals, who would have been up in arms had Chase been dismissed (leverage that Chase enjoyed exercising).
For all these reasons, there is little question that the Civil War was “about slavery” and more relevantly was decidedly not about states rights. This was even more true of the South than it was of the North, which held mixed views on the slavery question. But given that the Republican party supplanted the Whigs on the slavery question, there is little doubt that with Lincoln’s electiion Northern policies were about to turn antislavery, while not directly threatening the existing slave regimes in the South. That this was not good enough for the South shows just how ambitious was their slavery agenda for the country, how rabidly pro-slavery their political establishment had been, and how little their motives stemmed from states rights.
If all this was not bad enough, after losing the Civil War, the Southerners engaged in a campaign of violent terrorism and massacres against the freed blacks and white Republicans and unionists in the South, while reimposing slavery in all but name using every legal device in the book. Thus, even the war did not fully end the Southern commitment to racial subordination, which lasted in virulent form into my lifetime.
With due allowance for the “no true Scotsman fallacy,” any person calling themselves a “libertarian” who puts themselves on the Southern side, whether intellectually, emotionally, rhetorically or symbolically, is either a sadly misguided or misinformed libertarian, or not really a libertarian at all.
UPDATE: If you want a terrific read on how the “political abolitionists” formed the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties, I highly recommend:
My work (linked to above) adds to Sewell’s by examining the constitutional arguments of this group of political activists (and others like Lysander Spooner who eschewed politics), a group that was once called the “constitutional abolitionists” because they maintained that the Constitution was antslavery — or at least consistent with the antislavery political platform of the Republicans — in contrast with the “radical abolitionists” like Garrison and Phillips, who rejected politics and contended that the Constitution was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”
Randy Barnett • July 18, 2013 10:29 am
Kudos to Jacob Levy on Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and Ilya (here and here) and Jonathan (here) for their trenchant critiques of the Neo-Confederate sympathies of some who call themselves libertarians. I agree with Jacob that this is an issue more important for libertarian activists and intellectuals to forthrightly address and forcefully reject than are other pathologies (e.g. birtherism) typically arising at the fringes of ideological movements:
Confederatistas aren’t ignoring libertarian principles or classical liberal arguments altogether. They’re (IMHO, of course– sprinkle imputed “IMHOs” as liberally through this post as you like, since I’m talking about my own priorities and not about the world) misusing them, abusing them, drawing the wrong lessons from them, prioritizing them badly. And they’re doing so in a way that runs deep in American political culture and history, not in an irrelevant fringy way.
In my view the Confederatistas perpetuate the white southerners’ two-century-long scam of dressing up the cause of racial dominance in classical liberal clothes, perverting the goal of liberty into the project of slavery. This has been a defining fact of American political life; it has served to discredit some of those classical liberal values and institutions, while also perpetuating a story in which the freedom of African-Americans (postbellum as well as antebellum) lies somehow outside the calculus of American liberty.
I recommend you read the whole thing — especially if you consider yourself to be a libertarian. I know from my own history in the libertarian movement that there are pockets of libertarians who accept this type of Southern revisionism. I have myself been criticized by these folks as a “nationalist” libertarian because I accept the Fourteenth Amendment as good law that ought to be followed (far more than it is) despite it being inimical to states rights.
To their excellent posts, I wish to add a few additional considerations that I have become aware of over the past several years as I have researched and written about “abolitionist constitutionalism” and the career of Salmon P. Chase.
◦The Republican party was formed as the anti-slavery successor to the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. It was the election of the presidential candidate of this party with its anti-slavery platform that precipitated the South’s initiation of force against federal troops and facilities — not a dispute over tariffs. Slavery was deeply involved in both the formation of the Republican party, which supplanted the Whigs due to this issue, its election of a President on its second try, and the Southern reaction to this election, which directly precipitated the Civil War.
◦However, unlike more radical abolitionists like Lysander Spooner, the Republican party platform insisted that the federal government had no legal power to end slavery in any of the original 13 states in which it still existed. In this way, though it opposed the extension of slavery, the Republican platform respected states rights. (From this it is wrong to conclude that anti-slavery “moderates” like Chase or Lincoln were any less opposed to slavery than radicals like Spooner; but only that they recognized constitutional limits on the federal power to abolish it within the original states — a view of the Constitution they shared in common with such radical abolitionists as Garrison and Phillips.) In this sense, because Republicans pledged to respect the “states rights” of the South, the South had no cause to secede on that basis.
◦But the Republican party also believed that it was within the power of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and in other federal enclaves as well as on federal construction projects, a view having nothing to do with “states rights,” and that seems an eminently reasonable, if not patently correct, constitutional stance. The principal response of the Slave Power to this theory was the early invocation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The South rightly feared that these and other undoubtedly constitutional Republican federal programs would erode its ability to maintain slavery over time. (Mill makes this point effectively in the excerpt reproduced by Ilya below.)
◦As others have correctly noted, the Slave Power was enthusiastic about using federal postal power to suppress the distribution of abolitionist literature in the South, and the Necessary & Proper Clause to enact the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Indeed, the defense of the constitutionality of that statute by Justice Story in Prigg v. Pennsylvania offered a reading of the Necessary & Proper Clause that was sweeping in its scope, essentially empowering Congress to enforce any right that might be recognized anywhere in the document. It was “constitutional abolitionists” like Chase who argued the rights of Northern state to protect the rights of their freeman from wrongful kidnapping by slave catchers, a right that was overridden by federal the Fugitive Slave At of 1850 that Southern states demanded. The Slave Power also pushed heavily to extend slavery to new states formed from the territories, by violent extralegal means, as well as to militate to extend their slave system to Cuba by conquest.
◦The political appeal of the Republican party among Northerners, many of whom shared the racism of their day, was based in part and for some on the recognized injustice of slavery, and in part and for many on a quite justified fear of Northerners that slavery would eventually be imposed on them by the South (Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech was about this). When Dred Scott protected the right of Southerners to take their “property” out of their states and into federal territories it seemed a very short step before they could take their “property” into Northern states, as indeed Southerners did and favored a right to do.
◦It is true that Lincoln loudly protested that his aim was to protect the Union not to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed. First, neo-Confederates who stress this seem not to realize that, if believed, like the Republican party platform, this pledge undermines the “states rights” justification for secession. Second, remember most Republicans did not believe that Congress had power under the Constitution to abolish slavery in one of the original states that retained it, which is why the Emancipation Proclamation was justified under the war power as a war measure. Third, Lincoln was gravely concerned with keeping loyal border slave states in the Union so as not to fatally undermine the war effort. Finally, Lincoln was himself a former Whig and moderate late-comer to the antislavery cause, which is why he was distrusted by the radicals in Congress and by abolitionists. Indeed, he kept Chase in his cabinet far longer than he wished because Chase was the administration’s link to the radicals, who would have been up in arms had Chase been dismissed (leverage that Chase enjoyed exercising).
For all these reasons, there is little question that the Civil War was “about slavery” and more relevantly was decidedly not about states rights. This was even more true of the South than it was of the North, which held mixed views on the slavery question. But given that the Republican party supplanted the Whigs on the slavery question, there is little doubt that with Lincoln’s electiion Northern policies were about to turn antislavery, while not directly threatening the existing slave regimes in the South. That this was not good enough for the South shows just how ambitious was their slavery agenda for the country, how rabidly pro-slavery their political establishment had been, and how little their motives stemmed from states rights.
If all this was not bad enough, after losing the Civil War, the Southerners engaged in a campaign of violent terrorism and massacres against the freed blacks and white Republicans and unionists in the South, while reimposing slavery in all but name using every legal device in the book. Thus, even the war did not fully end the Southern commitment to racial subordination, which lasted in virulent form into my lifetime.
With due allowance for the “no true Scotsman fallacy,” any person calling themselves a “libertarian” who puts themselves on the Southern side, whether intellectually, emotionally, rhetorically or symbolically, is either a sadly misguided or misinformed libertarian, or not really a libertarian at all.
UPDATE: If you want a terrific read on how the “political abolitionists” formed the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties, I highly recommend:
My work (linked to above) adds to Sewell’s by examining the constitutional arguments of this group of political activists (and others like Lysander Spooner who eschewed politics), a group that was once called the “constitutional abolitionists” because they maintained that the Constitution was antslavery — or at least consistent with the antislavery political platform of the Republicans — in contrast with the “radical abolitionists” like Garrison and Phillips, who rejected politics and contended that the Constitution was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Evidence that Obamacare will Work
Let us hope that Krugman is right!
July 17, 2013, 5:09 pm 60 Comments
Obamacare Is the Right’s Worst Nightmare
by Paul Krugman
News from New York: it looks as if insurance premiums on the individual market are going to plunge thanks to Obamacare. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; in fact, the New York experience perfectly illustrates why Obamacare had to look the way it does. And it also illustrates why conservatives should be terrified about this legislation, as it takes effect. Americans may have had a lot of misgivings in advance, thanks to vast, deliberately spread misinformation. But I agree with Matt Yglesias — unless the GOP finds even more ways to sabotage the plan, this thing is going to work, it’s going to be extremely popular, and it’s going to wreak havoc with conservative ideology.
To understand what’s happening in New York, you have to start with what almost everyone at least pretends to believe: Americans shouldn’t find it impossible to get health insurance because of pre-existing conditions that aren’t their fault. Two decades ago, New York tried to deal with this by imposing community rating: insurance is available to everyone, and the price doesn’t depend on your medical history.
The problem was that this created a death spiral: young, healthy people didn’t buy insurance, worsening the risk pool, driving up premiums, driving out more relatively healthy people, etc., until you were left with a rump of very ill people paying very high rates.
How do you deal with this? Well, ideally, Medicare for all. But since that wasn’t going to happen, you improve the risk pool by requiring everyone to buy insurance — the individual mandate. And since some people won’t be able to afford that, you also offer subsidies. Voila! ObamaRomneycare!
Where does the money for the subsidies come from? Partly by reducing corporate welfare: reducing overpayments for Medicare Advantage, reducing tax breaks for very generous insurance plans; partly with new taxes on the wealthy.
And while a few people will be hurt — young, healthy individuals too affluent to qualify for subsidies, wealthy taxpayers, etc. — a much larger number of people will be helped, some of them enormously.
Does this amount to “redistribution”? Well, yes — not as an end in itself, but yes, a lot of people will be made better off at the expense of an affluent few.
And Yglesias is right: there will be bobbles along the way, but this is going to become an immensely popular program. By the time Liz Cheney challenges Hillary Clinton’s reelection campaign, there will be signs at the rallies declaring “Don’t let the government get its hands on Obamacare!”
Conservatives are right to be hysterical about this: it’s an attack on everything they believe — and it’s going to make Americans’ lives better. What could be worse?
.
July 17, 2013, 5:09 pm 60 Comments
Obamacare Is the Right’s Worst Nightmare
by Paul Krugman
News from New York: it looks as if insurance premiums on the individual market are going to plunge thanks to Obamacare. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; in fact, the New York experience perfectly illustrates why Obamacare had to look the way it does. And it also illustrates why conservatives should be terrified about this legislation, as it takes effect. Americans may have had a lot of misgivings in advance, thanks to vast, deliberately spread misinformation. But I agree with Matt Yglesias — unless the GOP finds even more ways to sabotage the plan, this thing is going to work, it’s going to be extremely popular, and it’s going to wreak havoc with conservative ideology.
To understand what’s happening in New York, you have to start with what almost everyone at least pretends to believe: Americans shouldn’t find it impossible to get health insurance because of pre-existing conditions that aren’t their fault. Two decades ago, New York tried to deal with this by imposing community rating: insurance is available to everyone, and the price doesn’t depend on your medical history.
The problem was that this created a death spiral: young, healthy people didn’t buy insurance, worsening the risk pool, driving up premiums, driving out more relatively healthy people, etc., until you were left with a rump of very ill people paying very high rates.
How do you deal with this? Well, ideally, Medicare for all. But since that wasn’t going to happen, you improve the risk pool by requiring everyone to buy insurance — the individual mandate. And since some people won’t be able to afford that, you also offer subsidies. Voila! ObamaRomneycare!
Where does the money for the subsidies come from? Partly by reducing corporate welfare: reducing overpayments for Medicare Advantage, reducing tax breaks for very generous insurance plans; partly with new taxes on the wealthy.
And while a few people will be hurt — young, healthy individuals too affluent to qualify for subsidies, wealthy taxpayers, etc. — a much larger number of people will be helped, some of them enormously.
Does this amount to “redistribution”? Well, yes — not as an end in itself, but yes, a lot of people will be made better off at the expense of an affluent few.
And Yglesias is right: there will be bobbles along the way, but this is going to become an immensely popular program. By the time Liz Cheney challenges Hillary Clinton’s reelection campaign, there will be signs at the rallies declaring “Don’t let the government get its hands on Obamacare!”
Conservatives are right to be hysterical about this: it’s an attack on everything they believe — and it’s going to make Americans’ lives better. What could be worse?
.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Joan Didion on Reagan
7, 2013 06:18 PM CDT
When Didion nailed Reagan
"In the Realm of the Fisher King" remains one of the most incisive examinations of America's shift to neoliberalism
BY MEAGAN DAY
Joan Didion’s After Henry, published in 1992, is an overlooked collection. Its obscurity is a shame, if only because its first essay, “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” is so pleasurably perceptive. The essay, an abridged version of which first appeared in 1989 in the New York Review of Books under the title “Life at Court,” gives the Reagan administration the full treatment. More than twenty years hence, the piece remains a trenchant account of the political-economic shift to dedicated neoliberalism in the halls of government. Didion drives home just how complete and intentional that transformation was, and how Reagan’s peculiar combination of disengagement and charm formed the conditions for the flourishing of a new American economic doctrine.
Didion’s characterizations of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s preoccupations and bewilderments are as wry and acerbic as we’ve come to expect. There was the First Lady, who by Didion’s account had the misfortune of being both a committed socialite and terribly socially awkward. She was, in Didion’s vision, an anxious, self-doubting, high-strung, prudish and fragile woman. The behavior of others was frequently “inappropriate” and “uncalled for,” and she was plagued by a “little girl’s fear of being left out, of not having the best friends and not going to the parties in the biggest houses.” She was fancy without being elegant, the latter demanding a sort of intuition that she apparently lacked.
Didion’s opinion of the President himself is best exemplified in an anecdote she recounts in which the Reagans, while traveling during the 1980 campaign, attended a rural church service. Their pew-side experience up to this point had mostly been at places like Bel Air Presbyterian, where during communion congregants treated themselves to individual circular wafers and drank wine out of small cups passed around on a tray. When communion began at the small Virginia church, Nancy Reagan was scandalized that people were all drinking from the same cup. Her aid, registering her panic, assured her that she could just dip the bread in the wine; frazzled, she dropped it in. Ronald Reagan — on autopilot, as if he were reading from a teleprompter — followed suit by confidently plopping his bread into the chalice, never comprehending his mistake, his face radiating piety as his wife and aid looked on mortified. After the final hymn he stood outside the chapel shaking hands and nodding with interest. Here was the President, “insufficiently briefed (or, as they say in the White House, ‘badly served’) on the wafer issue but moving ahead, stepping ‘into the sunlight,’ satisfied with his own and everyone else’s performance, apparently oblivious to (or inured to, or indifferent to) the crises being managed in his presence.”
________________________________________
________________________________________
“In the Realm of the Fisher King” acts as a sort of follow-up to Didion’s 1977 essay “Many Mansions” about the Reagans’ architectural exploits in California. She wrote there of the bland semi-suburban structure the Reagans built to replace the august downtown-Sacramento estate that had previously housed governors: “It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego… mediocre and ‘open’ and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn.” Her persistent observation of Reagan’s vacuousness is what differentiates Didion’s insight from the dominant strain of Reagan-administration critique. To vilify Reagan is to credit him perhaps too generously with engineering the policies of his administration, or engineering much of anything at all besides his own celebrity. By contrast, Didion’s Reagan is a key historical figure only insofar as he is a smokescreen, a diversion, a false protagonist. His primary purpose is to obscure the complex machinations that drive the plot, of which he is apprised but for which he is not intellectually responsible, operating as he does in a perpetual personal blank zone.
Didion has occasionally been accused of wanton cruelty, of insulting her subjects in ways that are, shall we say, “uncalled for.” In this case, as elsewhere, her evisceration of Reagan is not superfluously mean-spirited — instead it lays the groundwork for a nuanced understanding of his administrative tenure. Reagan-as-void is a necessary first step in the project of understanding what precisely occurred in the White House during those years (e.g. the emergence of privatization as a government cure-all, among other game-changers). When people were fixated on what they experienced as either Reagan’s reliable charm or his abject phoniness, White House staffers were concentrated on implementing a new political-economic structure, largely obscured from and uninteresting to the general public.
Didion suggests that the real character and legacy of the Reagan White House “had to do less with the absence at the center” — Reagan’s politically effective but ideologically hollow pageantry — “than with the amount of centrifugal energy this absence left spinning free at the edges.” Reagan was the Trojan horse in which a regiment of eager strategists hid, peering through its eye-holes as they wheeled it surreptitiously into the White House. The people at helm had their sights set on a total overhaul of the relationship between state, government and capital. They were activists, people with a vision, steeped in emergent neoliberal economic theory and intent on revising the agenda. Meanwhile media technologies proliferated and the news cameras multiplied exponentially with each passing year, preoccupying Reagan with public relations, a job for which he was eerily well suited. Consequently “ardor, of a kind that only rarely survives a fully occupied Oval Office, flourished unchecked” in the halls of the Reagan White House.
The new White House “was one of considerable febrility.” Its staffers were self-styled mavericks, distinctly Western in their dress and demeanor, frontierist in their sense of possibility. They talked in loose code, adopting what Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan called the “clipped, laconic style of John Ford characters,” the likes of which Reagan had played onscreen. They were coarse, spirited, and driven. They worked around the clock and called a fight a “dustup” and refused to wear seatbelts on Air Force One. Didion understandably delights in these details.
Furthermore they were ideologues, “the children of an expanded middle class determined to tear down an established order and what they saw as its repressive liberal orthodoxies.” To be a moderate was to be a “squish” or a “weenie.” To gain admission the inner circle of the Reagan White House one had to prove one’s mettle. Specifically one had to demonstrate that one was a true apostle of the free market, not a passive civil servant but a vigorous advocate for the role of government in, above all else, fostering the conditions for the maximum accumulation of capital. (This included an active investment in conservative family values, the Western nuclear family emerging post-war as the most economically productive and effectively governable demographic unit in history.) Didion writes, aggregating Noonan’s observations:
Everyone could quote Richard John Neuhaus on what was called the collapse of the dogmas of the secular enlightenment. Everyone could quote Michael Novak on what was called the collapse of the assumption that education is or should be ‘value-free.’ Everyone could quote George Gilder on what was called the humane nature of the free market. Everyone could quote Jean-Francois Revel on how democracies perish, and everyone could quote Jeane Kirkpatrick on authoritarian versus totalitarian governments, and everyone spoke of ‘the movement’ as in ‘he’s movement from way back’ or ‘she’s good, she’s hardcore.’
“In the Realm of the Fisher King” is worth reading today for the way in which its characterization of the Reagan White House imagines the shift to neoliberalism (Didion never uses this word, but it’s clear this is the clandestine doctrine at hand) as something incontestably engineered. It was the intentional implementation of a plan that was conceived a few decades prior, its origins roughly traceable to the Chicago School in the U.S. and the Mont Pelerin Society in Europe, both of which emerged directly after World War II. The thinkers who formed these groups, chief among them Friedrich Hayek, rejected the “invisible hand” principle that defined classical liberalism from the Enlightenment through Fordism. The new intellectuals were advocates not of uniformly restrained government, but of selective government intervention — neoliberalism prefers a state that gets out of the way of the market when business is booming and pitches in to assist it (usually at the expense of the public sector) whenever an obstacle presents itself. Suddenly free market economists wanted to see an animated and energetic government, so long as that energy was ultimately harnessed in the interest of unconstrained economic growth. And so the capitalist economists, the young readers of Hayek who graduated college in the fifties and sixties and read Milton Friedman’s Newsweek columns throughout the seventies, set their sights on the White House.
Reagan’s “weird absence of ego” is precisely that which, according to Didion, allowed such robust activism to occur in the halls of government. Didion’s title refers to an Arthurian legend that tells of a king who is injured and cannot move, and so with his knights effectively running the kingdom, he idly sits near the lake by his castle and fishes. What makes him king, in the absence of his effective rule, is that he is the keeper of the Holy Grail — in this case, perhaps, a nameplate in the Oval Office. Reagan was an effective executive because he was generic, mechanical, his eyes eternally trained on the teleprompter. The general public emerged from the spectacular trance of the Reagan years to find that its government had undergone a total theoretical and practical renovation. It rationalized the change as a natural evolution in political-economic dynamics when really it had been a movement, a coup, an ingenious Trojan horse trick.
When Didion nailed Reagan
"In the Realm of the Fisher King" remains one of the most incisive examinations of America's shift to neoliberalism
BY MEAGAN DAY
Joan Didion’s After Henry, published in 1992, is an overlooked collection. Its obscurity is a shame, if only because its first essay, “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” is so pleasurably perceptive. The essay, an abridged version of which first appeared in 1989 in the New York Review of Books under the title “Life at Court,” gives the Reagan administration the full treatment. More than twenty years hence, the piece remains a trenchant account of the political-economic shift to dedicated neoliberalism in the halls of government. Didion drives home just how complete and intentional that transformation was, and how Reagan’s peculiar combination of disengagement and charm formed the conditions for the flourishing of a new American economic doctrine.
Didion’s characterizations of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s preoccupations and bewilderments are as wry and acerbic as we’ve come to expect. There was the First Lady, who by Didion’s account had the misfortune of being both a committed socialite and terribly socially awkward. She was, in Didion’s vision, an anxious, self-doubting, high-strung, prudish and fragile woman. The behavior of others was frequently “inappropriate” and “uncalled for,” and she was plagued by a “little girl’s fear of being left out, of not having the best friends and not going to the parties in the biggest houses.” She was fancy without being elegant, the latter demanding a sort of intuition that she apparently lacked.
Didion’s opinion of the President himself is best exemplified in an anecdote she recounts in which the Reagans, while traveling during the 1980 campaign, attended a rural church service. Their pew-side experience up to this point had mostly been at places like Bel Air Presbyterian, where during communion congregants treated themselves to individual circular wafers and drank wine out of small cups passed around on a tray. When communion began at the small Virginia church, Nancy Reagan was scandalized that people were all drinking from the same cup. Her aid, registering her panic, assured her that she could just dip the bread in the wine; frazzled, she dropped it in. Ronald Reagan — on autopilot, as if he were reading from a teleprompter — followed suit by confidently plopping his bread into the chalice, never comprehending his mistake, his face radiating piety as his wife and aid looked on mortified. After the final hymn he stood outside the chapel shaking hands and nodding with interest. Here was the President, “insufficiently briefed (or, as they say in the White House, ‘badly served’) on the wafer issue but moving ahead, stepping ‘into the sunlight,’ satisfied with his own and everyone else’s performance, apparently oblivious to (or inured to, or indifferent to) the crises being managed in his presence.”
________________________________________
________________________________________
“In the Realm of the Fisher King” acts as a sort of follow-up to Didion’s 1977 essay “Many Mansions” about the Reagans’ architectural exploits in California. She wrote there of the bland semi-suburban structure the Reagans built to replace the august downtown-Sacramento estate that had previously housed governors: “It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego… mediocre and ‘open’ and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn.” Her persistent observation of Reagan’s vacuousness is what differentiates Didion’s insight from the dominant strain of Reagan-administration critique. To vilify Reagan is to credit him perhaps too generously with engineering the policies of his administration, or engineering much of anything at all besides his own celebrity. By contrast, Didion’s Reagan is a key historical figure only insofar as he is a smokescreen, a diversion, a false protagonist. His primary purpose is to obscure the complex machinations that drive the plot, of which he is apprised but for which he is not intellectually responsible, operating as he does in a perpetual personal blank zone.
Didion has occasionally been accused of wanton cruelty, of insulting her subjects in ways that are, shall we say, “uncalled for.” In this case, as elsewhere, her evisceration of Reagan is not superfluously mean-spirited — instead it lays the groundwork for a nuanced understanding of his administrative tenure. Reagan-as-void is a necessary first step in the project of understanding what precisely occurred in the White House during those years (e.g. the emergence of privatization as a government cure-all, among other game-changers). When people were fixated on what they experienced as either Reagan’s reliable charm or his abject phoniness, White House staffers were concentrated on implementing a new political-economic structure, largely obscured from and uninteresting to the general public.
Didion suggests that the real character and legacy of the Reagan White House “had to do less with the absence at the center” — Reagan’s politically effective but ideologically hollow pageantry — “than with the amount of centrifugal energy this absence left spinning free at the edges.” Reagan was the Trojan horse in which a regiment of eager strategists hid, peering through its eye-holes as they wheeled it surreptitiously into the White House. The people at helm had their sights set on a total overhaul of the relationship between state, government and capital. They were activists, people with a vision, steeped in emergent neoliberal economic theory and intent on revising the agenda. Meanwhile media technologies proliferated and the news cameras multiplied exponentially with each passing year, preoccupying Reagan with public relations, a job for which he was eerily well suited. Consequently “ardor, of a kind that only rarely survives a fully occupied Oval Office, flourished unchecked” in the halls of the Reagan White House.
The new White House “was one of considerable febrility.” Its staffers were self-styled mavericks, distinctly Western in their dress and demeanor, frontierist in their sense of possibility. They talked in loose code, adopting what Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan called the “clipped, laconic style of John Ford characters,” the likes of which Reagan had played onscreen. They were coarse, spirited, and driven. They worked around the clock and called a fight a “dustup” and refused to wear seatbelts on Air Force One. Didion understandably delights in these details.
Furthermore they were ideologues, “the children of an expanded middle class determined to tear down an established order and what they saw as its repressive liberal orthodoxies.” To be a moderate was to be a “squish” or a “weenie.” To gain admission the inner circle of the Reagan White House one had to prove one’s mettle. Specifically one had to demonstrate that one was a true apostle of the free market, not a passive civil servant but a vigorous advocate for the role of government in, above all else, fostering the conditions for the maximum accumulation of capital. (This included an active investment in conservative family values, the Western nuclear family emerging post-war as the most economically productive and effectively governable demographic unit in history.) Didion writes, aggregating Noonan’s observations:
Everyone could quote Richard John Neuhaus on what was called the collapse of the dogmas of the secular enlightenment. Everyone could quote Michael Novak on what was called the collapse of the assumption that education is or should be ‘value-free.’ Everyone could quote George Gilder on what was called the humane nature of the free market. Everyone could quote Jean-Francois Revel on how democracies perish, and everyone could quote Jeane Kirkpatrick on authoritarian versus totalitarian governments, and everyone spoke of ‘the movement’ as in ‘he’s movement from way back’ or ‘she’s good, she’s hardcore.’
“In the Realm of the Fisher King” is worth reading today for the way in which its characterization of the Reagan White House imagines the shift to neoliberalism (Didion never uses this word, but it’s clear this is the clandestine doctrine at hand) as something incontestably engineered. It was the intentional implementation of a plan that was conceived a few decades prior, its origins roughly traceable to the Chicago School in the U.S. and the Mont Pelerin Society in Europe, both of which emerged directly after World War II. The thinkers who formed these groups, chief among them Friedrich Hayek, rejected the “invisible hand” principle that defined classical liberalism from the Enlightenment through Fordism. The new intellectuals were advocates not of uniformly restrained government, but of selective government intervention — neoliberalism prefers a state that gets out of the way of the market when business is booming and pitches in to assist it (usually at the expense of the public sector) whenever an obstacle presents itself. Suddenly free market economists wanted to see an animated and energetic government, so long as that energy was ultimately harnessed in the interest of unconstrained economic growth. And so the capitalist economists, the young readers of Hayek who graduated college in the fifties and sixties and read Milton Friedman’s Newsweek columns throughout the seventies, set their sights on the White House.
Reagan’s “weird absence of ego” is precisely that which, according to Didion, allowed such robust activism to occur in the halls of government. Didion’s title refers to an Arthurian legend that tells of a king who is injured and cannot move, and so with his knights effectively running the kingdom, he idly sits near the lake by his castle and fishes. What makes him king, in the absence of his effective rule, is that he is the keeper of the Holy Grail — in this case, perhaps, a nameplate in the Oval Office. Reagan was an effective executive because he was generic, mechanical, his eyes eternally trained on the teleprompter. The general public emerged from the spectacular trance of the Reagan years to find that its government had undergone a total theoretical and practical renovation. It rationalized the change as a natural evolution in political-economic dynamics when really it had been a movement, a coup, an ingenious Trojan horse trick.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Republican Pathology
Op-Ed Columnist
Hunger Games, U.S.A.By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 14, 2013 331 Comments
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Save
E-mail
Share
Print
Reprints
Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.
Enlarge This Image
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Go to Columnist Page »
.Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
.Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
.Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (330) »
The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the House passed last week.
For decades, farm bills have had two major pieces. One piece offers subsidies to farmers; the other offers nutritional aid to Americans in distress, mainly in the form of food stamps (these days officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP).
Long ago, when subsidies helped many poor farmers, you could defend the whole package as a form of support for those in need. Over the years, however, the two pieces diverged. Farm subsidies became a fraud-ridden program that mainly benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Meanwhile food stamps became a crucial part of the social safety net.
So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.
To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.”
It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.
Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies.
Given this awesome double standard — I don’t think the word “hypocrisy” does it justice — it seems almost anti-climactic to talk about facts and figures. But I guess we must.
So: Food stamp usage has indeed soared in recent years, with the percentage of the population receiving stamps rising from 8.7 in 2007 to 15.2 in the most recent data. There is, however, no mystery here. SNAP is supposed to help families in distress, and lately a lot of families have been in distress.
In fact, SNAP usage tends to track broad measures of unemployment, like U6, which includes the underemployed and workers who have temporarily given up active job search. And U6 more than doubled in the crisis, from about 8 percent before the Great Recession to 17 percent in early 2010. It’s true that broad unemployment has since declined slightly, while food stamp numbers have continued to rise — but there’s normally some lag in the relationship, and it’s probably also true that some families have been forced to take food stamps by sharp cuts in unemployment benefits.
What about the theory, common on the right, that it’s the other way around — that we have so much unemployment thanks to government programs that, in effect, pay people not to work? (Soup kitchens caused the Great Depression!) The basic answer is, you have to be kidding. Do you really believe that Americans are living lives of leisure on $134 a month, the average SNAP benefit?
Still, let’s pretend to take this seriously. If employment is down because government aid is inducing people to stay home, reducing the labor force, then the law of supply and demand should apply: withdrawing all those workers should be causing labor shortages and rising wages, especially among the low-paid workers most likely to receive aid. In reality, of course, wages are stagnant or declining — and that’s especially true for the groups that benefit most from food stamps.
So what’s going on here? Is it just racism? No doubt the old racist canards — like Ronald Reagan’s image of the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy a T-bone steak — still have some traction. But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites; in Tennessee, home of the Bible-quoting Mr. Fincher, the number is 63 percent. So it’s not all about race.
What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.” If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.
Hunger Games, U.S.A.By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 14, 2013 331 Comments
Google+
Save
Share
Reprints
Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.
Enlarge This Image
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
Go to Columnist Page »
.Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
.Connect With Us on Twitter
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
.Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (330) »
The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the House passed last week.
For decades, farm bills have had two major pieces. One piece offers subsidies to farmers; the other offers nutritional aid to Americans in distress, mainly in the form of food stamps (these days officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP).
Long ago, when subsidies helped many poor farmers, you could defend the whole package as a form of support for those in need. Over the years, however, the two pieces diverged. Farm subsidies became a fraud-ridden program that mainly benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Meanwhile food stamps became a crucial part of the social safety net.
So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill.
To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.”
It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.
Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies.
Given this awesome double standard — I don’t think the word “hypocrisy” does it justice — it seems almost anti-climactic to talk about facts and figures. But I guess we must.
So: Food stamp usage has indeed soared in recent years, with the percentage of the population receiving stamps rising from 8.7 in 2007 to 15.2 in the most recent data. There is, however, no mystery here. SNAP is supposed to help families in distress, and lately a lot of families have been in distress.
In fact, SNAP usage tends to track broad measures of unemployment, like U6, which includes the underemployed and workers who have temporarily given up active job search. And U6 more than doubled in the crisis, from about 8 percent before the Great Recession to 17 percent in early 2010. It’s true that broad unemployment has since declined slightly, while food stamp numbers have continued to rise — but there’s normally some lag in the relationship, and it’s probably also true that some families have been forced to take food stamps by sharp cuts in unemployment benefits.
What about the theory, common on the right, that it’s the other way around — that we have so much unemployment thanks to government programs that, in effect, pay people not to work? (Soup kitchens caused the Great Depression!) The basic answer is, you have to be kidding. Do you really believe that Americans are living lives of leisure on $134 a month, the average SNAP benefit?
Still, let’s pretend to take this seriously. If employment is down because government aid is inducing people to stay home, reducing the labor force, then the law of supply and demand should apply: withdrawing all those workers should be causing labor shortages and rising wages, especially among the low-paid workers most likely to receive aid. In reality, of course, wages are stagnant or declining — and that’s especially true for the groups that benefit most from food stamps.
So what’s going on here? Is it just racism? No doubt the old racist canards — like Ronald Reagan’s image of the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy a T-bone steak — still have some traction. But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites; in Tennessee, home of the Bible-quoting Mr. Fincher, the number is 63 percent. So it’s not all about race.
What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.” If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Knewtonian Adaptive Learning
What If You Could Learn Everything?
How a new technology that figures out just how your mind works is about to make us all a whole lot smarter.
By Anya Kamenetz
1.2K
OPINIONS
9
COMMENT
1.2K
SHARE
Prev Story
Next Story
Imagine every student has a tireless personal tutor, an artificially intelligent and inexhaustible companion that magically knows everything, knows the student, and helps her learn what she needs to know. “‘You guys sound like you’re from the future,’” Jose Ferreira, the CEO of the education technology startup Knewton, says. “That’s the most common reaction we get from others in the industry.”
When I first met Ferreira four years ago, this kind of talk sounded like typical Silicon Valley bluster from another scruffy, boyish founder of a technology startup. Today, he can back up the kinds of breakthroughs he says his company can deliver: several million data points generated daily by each of 1 million students from elementary school through college, using Knewton’s “adaptive learning” technology to study math, reading, and other fundamentals. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor, and an early investor in Knewton, told Knewton’s staff recently that the company has two key characteristics he looks for in a deal. “Before they happen, everybody thought it was impossible. Afterwards it’s too late for anyone else, because they’ve already done it.”
Adaptive learning is an increasingly popular catchphrase denoting educational software that customizes its presentation of material from moment to moment based on the user’s input. It’s being hailed as a “revolution” by both venture capitalists and big, established education companies.
Starting this fall, Knewton’s technology will be available to the vast majority of the nation’s colleges and universities and K-12 school districts through new partnerships with three major textbook publishers: Pearson, MacMillan, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Ferreira’s done all this even though he says neither his investors nor his competition, to say nothing of the public or the press, really understand what Knewton can do.
But here’s the vision. Within five or 10 years, the paper textbook and mimeographed worksheet will be dead. Classroom exercises and homework—text, audio, video, games—will have shifted entirely to the iPad or equivalent. And adaptive learning will help each user find the exact right piece of content needed, in the exact right format, at the exact right time, based on previous patterns of use.
In an age of swelling class sizes, teacher layoffs, and students with a vast array of special needs and learning styles, some reformers hail these software systems as a savior that could make learning more customized and effective and teaching more efficient. While battle lines are sharp in K-12 school reform over issues from charters to the Common Core national curriculum standards, digital innovations have fans across the political spectrum for their power to engage students and bring the classroom into the 21st century.
Here’s what Ferreira thinks this software-powered learning can do. “Right now about 22 percent of the people in the world graduate high school or the equivalent. That’s pathetic. In one generation we could get close to 100 percent, almost for free.”
Mark Abramson
The staff at Knewton has perfected getting the right content to the right kid, at the right time, in the right format.
LIKE A lot of technology entrepreneurs, Ferreira has a personal beef with the existing education system. “I found school very boring and frustrating,” he says, his low, quick voice barely audible over the roar of air conditioners on the roof deck of Knewton’s new Union Square digs in Manhattan. The company is hiring as fast as it can. Clad in flip-flops, a T-shirt, and shorts, Ferreira presides over an office stocked with an espresso machine and several brands of beer. On the day I visit, employees have brought in bags of kale for a communal lunch.
“The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits—I wasn’t. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you’re stupid. You don’t think, if this kid’s not a good fit it could be the system’s fault.”
All the content behind education is going to move online in the next 10 years. It’s one giant Oklahoma land grab.
He inherited his rebellious streak, but his family also put tremendous pressure on him to succeed. Ferreira’s parents were native-born white Africans who came to America when he was 2, after his father’s anti-apartheid political activism, in Ferreira’s words, “got us kicked out” of South Africa. They settled in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he attended public schools that were high quality but, to him, dull. He was the type to torment the teachers with smart-aleck questions, skip homework assignments, and cram all the material the night before the test.
After graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota, where he studied philosophy and mathematics, Ferreira faced anemic job prospects in the early-’90s recession. Living in San Francisco, he made ends meet as an SAT tutor for Kaplan, the largest test-prep company, by day, and as a poker player in casinos at night. In both roles, he delighted in playing the numbers, getting an edge over the house. “Casinos are statistics in game form. And I had started teaching because I love brainteasers. At some point I had taken every standardized test out there—the SATs, the GREs, the GMATs, the MCATs. I just took them for fun. ”
Joshua Lott/New York Times/Redux
Using adaptive technology, students move at their own speed, so teachers can spend class time targeting individual needs.
To his parents, however, he was the black sheep. They hadn’t told the rest of the family what he was doing for a living. “One day my parents came into town to take me to dinner. My dad was worried I was a failure. My mom asked, ‘Why do you think you haven’t dated anyone in two years?’—because all my nights and weekends were spent at the poker table. Kaplan had offered me a full-time job, so I took it. I figured it was time to get serious.” Ferreira extended his love of brainteasers to the art and science of taking—and beating, and helping others beat—standardized tests. He never saw this as cheating, rather as righting an injustice for kids like himself, smart but restless, whose fates were being decided on the basis of an arbitrary three-hour test.
His confidence and love of risk, meanwhile, served him well. At one point while working for Kaplan, Ferreira discovered a flaw on the GREs that turned what was supposed to be a very technical math question into something a child could do. The vulnerability forced the Educational Testing Service, makers of the GREs, to delete an entire section of questions. They referred to the test-prep hacker privately as “the Antichrist.” “They had to pull this section of the test. They gave me credit publicly. It’s the only time they’ve ever admitted publicly that someone beat them,” he says, grinning with pride. Kaplan turned the admission from ETS into the basis of an international marketing campaign for their test-prep services. “We put that on everything we sent out after that. I mean nurses in the Philippines were getting postcards about it.”
As a student reads, Knewton’s system is ‘reading’ the student as well. Hesitant or confident? Guessing blindly or taking her time?
Ferreira could have stayed at Kaplan, rising through the ranks, but the dot-com era was dawning, and he became increasingly captivated by the power of technology to transform teaching and learning. He enrolled in Harvard Business School, but continued to play poker for fun and money, sometimes sleeping in his car at 4 a.m. in the parking lot of an Atlantic City casino, unwilling to spring for a hotel room despite the several thousand dollars in his pocket. MBA in hand, he went to work at Goldman Sachs, then left to found a mapping-software startup that imploded in the 2000 bust. He worked as a strategist for the John Kerry campaign for a while (he’s a nephew of Teresa Heinz Kerry). He was a venture capitalist.
“I was like, I’ve had these ideas about education germinating for a long time and I just got to the point where I said, I have to do this.” He started Knewton in 2008 with more or less the same vision he espouses today: to enable digital technology to transform learning for everyone and to build the company that dominates that transformation.
“Look at what other industries the Internet has transformed,” he told me at one of our first meetings, at a technology conference in 2009. “It laid waste to media and is rebuilding it—print, digital, video, music. Travel, hotels, restaurants, retail—anything with a big information component. But for whatever reason, people don’t see it with education. It is blindingly obvious to me that it will happen with education.
“All the content behind education is going to move online in the next 10 years. It’s one giant Oklahoma land grab—one tectonic shift. And that is what Knewton is going to power.”
Mark Abramson
“The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits—I wasn’t.”
THE RECOMMENDATION engine is a core technology of the Internet, and probably one you encounter every day. Google uses recommendations: other people who entered these search terms clicked on this page, so we’ll show it to you first. Amazon uses them: other people who bought this book also bought that book. Netflix uses them: you liked Bringing Up Baby, you’ll probably like The Seven-Year Itch.
The more you use one of these websites, the more it knows about you—not just about your current behavior, but about all the other searches and clicks you’ve done. In theory, as you spend more time with a site its recommendations will become more personalized even as they also draw on everyone else’s interactions within the platform.
Knewton, at base, is a recommendation engine but for learning. Rather than the set of all Web pages or all movies, the learning data set is, more or less, the universe of all facts. For example, a single piece of data in the engine might be the math fact that a Pythagorean triangle has sides in the ratio 3-4-5, and you can multiply those numbers by any whole number to get a new set of side lengths for this type of triangle. Another might be the function of “adversatives” such as “but,” “however,” or “on the other hand” in changing the meaning of an English sentence. Ferreira calls these facts “atomic concepts,” meaning that they’re indivisible into smaller concepts—he clearly also relishes the physics reference.
When a textbook publisher like Pearson loads its curriculum into Knewton’s platform, each piece of content—it could be a video, a test question, or a paragraph of text—is tagged with the appropriate concept or concepts.
Brian Finke/Gallery Stock
The majority of students placed into remedial math at community colleges never get their degrees.
Let’s say your school bought the Knewton-powered MyMathLab online system, using the specific curriculum based on, say, Lial’s Basic College Mathematics 8e. When a student logs on to the system, she first takes a simple placement test or pretest from the book, which has been tagged with the relevant “atomic concepts.” As a student reads the text or watches the video and answers the questions, Knewton’s system is “reading” the student as well—timing every second on task, tabulating every keystroke, and constructing a profile of learning style: hesitant or confident? Guessing blindly or taking her time? Based on the student’s answers, and what she did before getting the answer, “we can tell you to the percentile, for each concept: how fast they learned it, how well they know it, how long they’ll retain it, and how likely they are to learn other similar concepts that well,” says Ferreira. “I can tell you that to a degree that most people don’t think is possible. It sounds like space talk.” By watching as a student interacts with it, the platform extrapolates, for example, “If you learn concept No. 513 best in the morning between 8:20 and 9:35 with 80 percent text and 20 percent rich media and no more than 32 minutes at a time, well, then the odds are you’re going to learn every one of 12 highly correlated concepts best that same way.”
The platform forms a personalized study plan based on that information and decides what the student should work on next, feeding the student the appropriate new pieces of content and continuously checking the progress. A dashboard shows the student how many “mastery points” have been achieved and what to do next. Teachers, likewise, can see exactly which concepts the student is struggling with, and not only whether the homework problems have been done but also how many times each problem was attempted, how many hints were needed, and whether the student looked at the page or opened up the video with the relevant explanation.
The more people use the system, the better it gets; and the more you use it, the better it gets for you.
Global spending on education is in the trillions of dollars, and demand still far outstrips supply.
In a traditional class, a teacher moves a group of students through a predetermined sequence of material at a single pace. Reactions are delayed—you don’t get homework or pop quizzes back for a day or two. Some students are bored; some are confused. You can miss a key idea, fall behind, and never catch up.
Software-enabled adaptive learning flips all of this on its head. Students can move at their own speed. They can get hints and instant feedback. Teachers, meanwhile, can spend class time targeting their help to individuals or small groups based on need.
Ferreira is able to work with competitors like Pearson and Wiley because his software can power anybody’s educational content, the same way Amazon Web Services provides the servers for any website to be hosted in the cloud. But before it had any content partners, as a proof of concept, Knewton built its own remedial college math course using its software platform. Math Readiness was adopted starting in the summer of 2011 at Arizona State University; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the University of Alabama.
At ASU, students worked through the computer material in Knewton’s Math Readiness program on their own or in small groups, with instructors spending face-to-face time working on problem solving, critical thinking, and troubleshooting specific concepts. After two semesters of use, course withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates went from 64 percent to 75 percent. At Alabama, pass rates rose from 70 percent to 87 percent, and at UNLV, where entering students were given the chance to take the course online in the summer before they started college, the percentage who then qualified for college algebra went from 30 percent to 41 percent.
“Before this, I worked on the assumption that all students were at the same place. Now, because they progress at different rates, I meet them where they are,” Irene Bloom, a math lecturer at ASU, told an education blog about the pilot program. “I have so much more information about what my students do (or don’t do) outside of class. I can see where they are stuck, how fast they are progressing, and how much time and effort they are putting into learning mathematics.”
The Knewton system uses its analytics to keep students motivated. If it notices that you seem to have a confidence problem, because you too often blow questions that should be easy based on previous results, it will start you off with a few questions you’re likely to get right. If you’re stuck, choosing the wrong answer again and again, it will throw out broader and broader hints before just showing you the right answer. It knows when to drill you on multiplication and when to give you a fun animated video to watch.
There is a hunger for proof that students are achieving mastery, not just covering material.
It turns out that personalizing in this way can speed up learning. In the first year, 45 percent of ASU students in a 14-week course learned the material four weeks ahead of schedule. “We’ve had students finish a semester course in 14 days,” says Ferreira, clearly psyched about setting free the kind of bored student he used to be. “For the whole history of the human race until now, she had to stay in that class the whole time.”
Better data is giving more options to the student who didn’t succeed as well. Students may not yet know enough to pass the final exam, but a close read of their answers shows that they are making slow and steady progress. “In the past, those students would have dropped out of school,” he says. In fact, the vast majority of students placed into remedial math at the nation’s community colleges never get their degrees. “Instead, we were able to say, give them another semester and they’ll get it. Their whole life has now changed.”
Amy E. Price/PRNewsFoto/AP
Microsoft founder Bill Gates (right) has done perhaps more than any single person to seed the growth of innovation in education.
GLOBAL SPENDING on education is in the trillions of dollars, and demand still far outstrips supply.
Ed-tech venture funding reached $1.1 billion in 2012. Rupert Murdoch has launched a $200 million tablet and digital curriculum brand; Apple and Google are building significant education businesses in devices and apps, respectively. Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller, and Andrew Ng, all Stanford professors, raised almost $100 million in venture capital to create online course platforms Udacity and Coursera, which deliver free video versions of courses created at the world’s most famous universities. The Khan Academy, a nonprofit library of free instructional videos and online exercises, has more than 6 million users per month and is used in 30,000 classrooms. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has perhaps done more than any single person to seed the growth of innovation in education, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to both nonprofits and for-profits through the Gates Foundation’s education programs. At his keynote at SXSWedu, an entire subconference of the South by Southwest technology gathering in Austin, Texas, dedicated to ed-tech, he compared the digital revolution in education to the discovery of the polio vaccine.
These are early days, but the questions are mounting: Can all this innovation narrow the stubborn achievement gap between rich and poor or black and white? Can it lower the cost of college or make a dent in student-loan debt? And, as must be asked of all things tech, can it complement the human elements of education? Research indicates that emotional qualities like grit, persistence, and motivation may be even more important to students’ success than the knowledge or skills they acquire, and they all depend heavily on human relationships. Knowledge acquisition is the only aspect of education that today’s digital technology seems especially well adapted to. So far, most software applications, platforms, apps, and games, including Knewton’s, have been optimized for transferring quantitative, bounded bodies of facts in domains like math, science, or engineering, as well as basic literacy and grammar. An adaptive-learning platform like Knewton’s is helpless to tabulate or analyze a student’s insight in class discussions, the special brilliance of an essay, or creativity in a group presentation; anything that complex requires human discretion.
Still, within that subdomain of knowledge transfer, or what we’re used to thinking of as “learning,” interventions like Knewton’s are having intriguing results. As the Common Core attempts to raise standards, there is a hunger for proof that students are achieving mastery, not just covering material.
Knewton’s launch of a retail platform planned for early next year will allow anyone to upload any piece of educational content from the Web—whether a teacher’s own lesson, a TED talk, or a set of Khan Academy exercises. (Until now only textbook publishers could engage with the software.) The laborious process of tagging the content by “atomic concept” will be crowd sourced. If the community gets engaged, Knewton’s recommendation engine will be helping to sort the universe of free and open educational resources to provide much richer learning experiences to anyone, again, for free.
The idea of learning as an unmediated, infinitely scalable experience, as customized and seamless, given sufficient bandwidth, as downloading a song or watching a YouTube video, may turn out to be a fantasy of the early digital age—the era we’re in now. But the promise of putting all the intelligence of big data, rich content, and analytics in the hands of talented teachers and learners and setting them free, together, to explore at their own pace, in their own way—that is far more compelling, and achievable given what we’ve already seen.
In a rare moment of humility, Ferreira agrees. “In the end,” he says, “Knewton is just a tool.”
The Best Trayvon Martin Summary
Charles Clymer
America Is in Dire Need of 'White, Liberal Guilt'
Posted: 07/14/2013 On Saturday night, George Zimmerman was found "not guilty" in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
Regardless of what has been said about the case, here are three irrefutable facts: 1) Zimmerman had a history of making unnecessary 911 calls about "suspicious" black persons in his neighborhood, 2) he followed Trayvon Martin, got out of his truck, and further pursued him despite being told not to by dispatch, and 3) he did so with a gun.
We can argue over the reasons for a "not guilty" verdict, all day: the prosecution team was weak, the judicial system technically did its job but is very flawed, etc.
But one thing is clear: a light-skinned, prejudiced man followed an unarmed black teenager for no reason more than that he "looked suspicious", and this led to that teen's death.
And here's a sad truth: I'll still continue my late night walks in D.C. because white men don't get pursued and shot in this country without consequences. We may be the victims of crime, but if the suspect is non-white and is caught (guilty or not), more than likely, a price will be paid.
My friend put it succinctly, last month: "White men are allowed to get angry." I thought I understood it when she said it, but I'm realizing now that I did not.
White men are allowed to express anger. We are allowed to express hurt. We are allowed to act on suspicion and concern. We are allowed to speak freely. This isn't to say these feelings aren't acceptable, but it does mean they are validated by a society in which power is monopolized by those of light skin, whereas concerns expressed by people of color are scrutinized by a ridiculous "playing the race card" theory.
If a stranger approached you with a gun, late at night, how would you react? As a white person, I am permitted to attack and defend myself. People of color, within seconds, must consider how this will look to a jury. Think that's off-base?
Last month, Dr. Marissa Alexander, a black woman, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot in front of her abusive ex-husband. In her home. In Florida. The "Stand Your Ground" law of that state that was used to defend George Zimmerman was dismissed in Dr. Alexander's case.
Amazing.
I love those conservatives who keep making accusations of "white, liberal guilt."
You are absolutely right: I am white, I am liberal, and I feel guilty -- as in complicit -- that I live in a society that affords me greater privilege because of my skin color; an unarmed black teenager was profiled, pursued, and gunned down when he fought back against an unfamiliar man who approached him with a gun.
We failed Trayvon, and we failed ourselves. Simple as that.
How many more innocent lives will be lost until we finally have an honest conversation about race in this country?
The United States could use more white Americans with "guilt" who are ready to come forward and have that conversation.
LIke Billie Says
Songwriters: WIGGINS, DWAYNE P. / PEARL, MAURICE / ALLAN, LEWISSouthern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop. Billie Holiday (1949)
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop. Billie Holiday (1949)
Saturday, July 13, 2013
America for Dummies
America for Dummies
In ‘Across the Pond,’ Terry Eagleton Explains the U.S.
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: July 11, 2013
For several years I worked under a literary editor who, whenever he encountered a new volume he thought had little reason to exist, would hold it aloft and announce, his voice bright with sarcasm, “Well, here’s a necessary book.”
Enlarge This Image
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
ACROSS THE POND
An Englishman’s View of America
By Terry Eagleton
178 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
HOW TO READ LITERATURE
By Terry Eagleton
216 pages. Yale University Press. $26.
Enlarge This Image
Oliver Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
That editor’s voice rang in my ears as I picked up the two new books from the prolific British literary critic Terry Eagleton, “Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America” and “How to Read Literature.”
These are much-trampled topics. No writer should approach either unless he’s certain of being very charming indeed. Approaching both in one season is like fiddling with two of the colored wires while trying to defuse a homemade bomb.
Mr. Eagleton is best known for the heavy lifting he performed in his classic volume “Literary Theory: An Introduction” (1983), and for the carnage strewn more recently in “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” (2009). In that book he put neoatheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in his sights, as well as a good deal of organized religion.
It’s plausible that he might inject new life into the subjects at hand here.
“Across the Pond” and “How to Read Literature,” each nearly as slim as a pretzel rod, find him in raconteur mode — jolly and coasting. This is not the most graceful pace for Mr. Eagleton. Turning the pages of each, you frequently get that most queasy of literary sensations: that of encountering a writer who isn’t as charming as he thinks he is.
“Across the Pond” contrasts the British and the Americans in all the ways they’ve been contrasted before. He likes us both, the big lug, even if we Americans tend to be fatter, to smile too much, to have little sense of history, to be gullibly religious and flummoxed by irony.
Mr. Eagleton has a lively mind, and his best sentences have a curmudgeonly salt crust. But he too often pushes his observations into sub-Dave Barry, over-the-falls-in-a-barrel comic overkill. Here he is on American’s fondness for the word “like”:
“It is rumored that you can now find tombstones in the States reading: ‘To Our Beloved Son, Brother and Like Husband.’ There are also proposals to modernize certain timeworn slogans to ‘In Like God We Trust’ and ‘My Country Like ’Tis of Thee.’ There will no doubt soon be headlines in The Washington Post reading: ‘I Was Like “Oh My God!” Says President of Harvard.’ ”
Like, let’s get out of here, as Shaggy of “Scooby-Doo” liked to say. I bet they can insert a laugh track — or, more authentically, the sound of crickets — into the audio version.
It’s easy to pick nits from a book like “Across the Pond.” Some of these nits are swollen; they more resemble ticks. About the illusion of social mobility, he argues that Americans think as follows:
“As long as you have enough willpower and ambition, the fact that you are a destitute Latino with a gargantuan drink problem puts you at no disadvantage to graduates of the Harvard Business School when it comes to scaling the social ladder. All you need to do is try.”
Few in America think this. We do think that if you try, however, your children may have a shot at moving up that ladder.
Mr. Eagleton shook the pan a few years ago when he accused Martin Amis, on meager evidence, of being an Islamophobe. In “Across the Pond” he manages to sound far less than progressive himself. About the backlash that imperial power can stir he writes, “This did not stop the British from torturing and massacring their colonial subjects from time to time, but they did so in a modest, unassuming kind of way, as though they were offering them a much sought-after service.” Even in subjugation, I suppose, style is everything.
The least happy thing about “Across the Pond” is how hoary its range of reference mostly is. We are only on Page 2 before Mr. Eagleton hauls out that great taxidermied owl, Alexis de Tocqueville. He leans heavily on Charles Dickens’s and Henry James’s analyses of the American character.
There’s nothing wrong with this. But so many excellent and incisive things have been written about America vs. England by other writers, many of them still alive, that “Across the Pond” seems dated. It mostly could have been written in 1971, if not 1921.
Mr. Eagleton refers to “How to Read Literature” as “a guide for beginners.” He hopes to “demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment,” and he just about gets that done.
But here too the fireworks often explode before he has had time to run away. (“The Creation was the first item on the divine agenda, before God went on to organize dreadful weather for the English and in a calamitous lapse of attention allowed Michael Jackson to slip into existence.”)
Here too the range of reference is not, as the feminine hygiene ads liked to put it, so fresh. He meditates on Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens and Melville and Milton, among others. This is lovely. But he considers the work of few writers born after 1940. A sense that you might be reading Mortimer Adler sneaks in.
I have been, I fear, hard on Mr. Eagleton. There are many things to like in both of these volumes, which belong on that long bookstore shelf one wants to label “Blah Books With Bright Bits.”
Allow me to end with one of these bits. Here is his final take on us plucky and headstrong Americans:
“The good news about the citizens of this kindly, violent, bigoted, generous-spirited nation is that if ever the planet is plunged into nuclear war, they will be the first to crawl over the edge of the crater, dust themselves down, and proceed to build a new world. The bad news is that they will probably have started the war.”
Friday, July 12, 2013
Hillary Clinton Honored With Children's Library Dedication In Little Rock
Huffington Post
9 July 2013
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton read The Very Hungry Caterpillar at a ceremony Monday, celebrating the dedication of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children's Library and Learning Center.
The new facility was named for the former first lady after a vote by the Central Arkansas Library System in late June. Bobby Roberts, director of the library system, said the Board of Trustees chose to honor Clinton for her commitment to children's health and education advocacy.
"I think she’s done so much over the decades really working with children, particularly starting in Arkansas, even before she was first lady," Roberts told public radio station UALR.
The library houses more than 21,000 books, CDs and DVDs.
The potential 2016 presidential candidate isn't the only Clinton whose name adorns a library in Arkansas. The William J. Clinton Presidential Library opened in the state's capital in 2004.
9 July 2013
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton read The Very Hungry Caterpillar at a ceremony Monday, celebrating the dedication of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children's Library and Learning Center.
The new facility was named for the former first lady after a vote by the Central Arkansas Library System in late June. Bobby Roberts, director of the library system, said the Board of Trustees chose to honor Clinton for her commitment to children's health and education advocacy.
"I think she’s done so much over the decades really working with children, particularly starting in Arkansas, even before she was first lady," Roberts told public radio station UALR.
The library houses more than 21,000 books, CDs and DVDs.
The potential 2016 presidential candidate isn't the only Clinton whose name adorns a library in Arkansas. The William J. Clinton Presidential Library opened in the state's capital in 2004.
Praising Professor Morgan
Tell Me What You See: Jill Lepore Salutes Historian Edmund S. Morgan
Jul 10, 2013 12:18 PM EDT
One of America’s greatest and most influential historians died this week. Jill Lepore salutes Yale professor Edmund S. Morgan and recalls his advice to a generation of students.
Michael Marsland/Yale University
Edmund Sears Morgan, who died in New Haven, Connecticut, on Monday at age 97, was one of the most influential American historians of the 20th century. He was also a singularly elegant writer, as well as a famously gentle, humble, and generous man, the E.B. White of the historical profession. He’d studied history and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard and went on to graduate study in Harvard’s program in the history of American civilization. He had a decidedly literary mind. In the middle decades of the 20th century, when a great many American historians were drawn to the social sciences, as both a method and especially as a style of writing, with all its brutalism, Morgan’s own thinking and writing turned, instead, toward humanity, clarity, and compassion. The Puritan Dilemma (1956), his short biography of John Winthrop, is a piece of biographical haiku: the character of a man as the character of a people in 224 pages. There are sentences in American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) that generations of historians have committed to memory. Of the failure of the first English colonies in Virginia: “Doubtless the expectations had been too high, but it is always a little sad to watch men lower their sights.” Of the rise, in early America, of both liberty and slavery, “The paradox is American, and it behooves Americans to understand it if they would understand themselves.” Morgan admired no American historical figure more than Benjamin Franklin. Writing against the prevailing fashion for triumphant, nationalist Founding Father biographies, Morgan, in Benjamin Franklin (2002), wrote about him as an intellectual. He adored Franklin’s wit. He liked, especially, an epitaph Franklin wrote for a little girl whose pet squirrel had died: “Few Squirrels were better accomplish’d; for he had had a good Education, had travell’d far, and seen much of the World.”
Don’t tell me what other historians say. Tell me what you see. Never dismiss the unexpected.
Morgan was a spectacularly brilliant teacher. He taught at Yale beginning in the 1950s. (I missed the chance to take a class with him; he retired in the 1980s, a few years before I got there, but I saw him in the park nearly every day. I’d be walking my dog, and he’d be walking his.) He held his American-history graduate seminar in his office. He turned off his phone and leaned over his desk. He told his students to find out how to find facts. He gave them assignments. Find out: How long did it take to sail from Liverpool to Philadelphia in 1694? In an 18th-century New England town, who owned the meetinghouse? For writing, he gave his students rules. Don’t tell me what other historians say. Tell me what you see. Never dismiss the unexpected. Edmund Morgan liked, especially, to teach his students how to make and sharpen a quill. None were ever so sharp as his.
The Examined Life
Listening for Clues to Mind’s Mysteries
‘The Examined Life’ Describes Psychoanalysis’s Power
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 8, 2013
Freud’s famous case studies, like Dora, the Wolf Man, Little Hans and the Rat Man, are psychoanalytic readings, suspenseful detective stories and elliptical narratives that have all the drama and contradictions of modernist fiction. Not only is Freud a powerful writer, but his methodology and insights also have a lot in common with literary criticism and novelistic architecture. His patient portraits showcase his skills both as a critic, intent on deconstructing his subjects’ lives, and as a masterly storyteller, adept at using unreliable narrators to explore the mysteries of love and sex and death. It’s no coincidence that he liked to write about characters from Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen and Sophocles (yes, Oedipus), or that he paid so much attention to the language and imagery employed by his patients.
Enlarge This Image
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
THE EXAMINED LIFE
How We Lose and Find Ourselves
By Stephen Grosz
225 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Enlarge This Image
Bettina von Zwehl
Stephen Grosz
“The Examined Life,” by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz — who teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalytic Unit at University College London — shares the best literary qualities of Freud’s most persuasive work.
The book’s unfortunate title and chapter headings (“On not being in a couple,” “Why parents envy their children,” “How lovesickness keeps us from love”) give the false impression that this is some sort of cheesy self-help book. It’s not. It is, rather, an insightful and beautifully written book about the process of psychoanalysis, and the ways people’s efforts to connect the past, present and future reflect their capacity to change. The book distills the author’s 25 years of work as a psychoanalyst and more than 50,000 hours of conversation into a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks. They invite us to identify with Mr. Grosz’s patients and their losses and regrets, even as we are made to marvel at the complexities and convolutions of the human mind.
Mr. Grosz quotes Isak Dinesen, who observed that “all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,” and he goes on to argue that stories can help us to make sense of our lives, but that if “we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us — we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
To protect his patients’ confidentiality, Mr. Grosz says he has “changed names and altered all identifying particulars.” Some have predicaments that will sound immediately familiar to many of us: a woman reluctant to give up hope that her commitment-phobic boyfriend will marry her; a man, uncomfortable with intimacy and emotional dependence, finds that he is genuinely happier on his own (he asks Mr. Grosz if he can see him occasionally, when he needs to, but not on a regular basis); a girl whose skill in living up to her parents’ expectations of good behavior and academic achievement “did not prevent the development of her substantial intellectual abilities” but slowed her emotional development.
Other case studies have a more surreal, fablelike quality. There’s a man who obsessively fantasizes about an imaginary house he owns in France, sketching floor plans in his head, visualizing different colors of paint in one room, a larger doorway in another. And there’s a man who seems willfully intent on boring everyone around him, including dates, colleagues — and yes, Mr. Grosz; apparently, it’s an aggressive way of “controlling, and excluding, others,” and his avoidance of dealing with his feelings reminds Mr. Grosz of the character Hamm in Beckett’s “Endgame,” who says: “Absent, always. It all happened without me.”
Like Freud, Mr. Grosz is fond of literary allusions, and he’s nimble at excavating the psychological subtext of literary classics. He reads Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as “a story about an extraordinary psychological transformation.” One of the lessons it teaches, he argues, is that “Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present — change can only take place in the here and now. This is important because trying to change the past can leave us feeling helpless, depressed.”
Like many of Mr. Grosz’s observations, this echoes Kierkegaard’s definition of “the unhappiest man” as someone incapable of living in the present, dwelling instead in past memory or future hope. Mr. Grosz writes about a woman who’s so caught up in imagining the future — her father being at her wedding, getting a home near her boyfriend’s parents — that she’s in denial about the depressing reality of her relationship with the boyfriend. And he writes about a compulsive liar who seems to be, unconsciously, recreating the relationship he had with his mother when he was a boy. (He lied about wetting his bed, and she silently conspired with him to cover it up.)
In recounting his patients’ stories, Mr. Grosz is candid about his role in the process of analysis: he worries about projecting his difficulties with a girlfriend onto his interpretation of a patient’s problem coming to terms with her husband’s apparent infidelity; and he monitors his feelings of detachment when dealing with a patient who’s out of touch with his emotions.
Mr. Grosz notices the language his patients employ — he detects a tone of condescension in a woman who refers to her husband as “sweetie.” He is prone to seeing loss everywhere: success, he suggests, can make a person feel cut off from colleagues and the past; marriage can make someone feel as if other avenues of possibility had been closed. But he is never tendentious, and he does not try, like Freud, to view everything — even the most existential of dilemmas — through an insistently sexual prism. He writes with enormous empathy for his patients, gently encouraging them to recognize patterns in their lives, while hearing out their own theories and concerns. He reassures one patient that he will face all her problems with her, and he promises a seriously ill patient that he will visit him in the hospital for his regular sessions, five times a week.
Being a psychoanalyst, Mr. Grosz writes, means spending his workdays “alone with another person, thinking — trying to be present.” He is a “tour guide — part detective, part translator” — an editor who helps his patients connect the dots of their stories, helping them to make sense of their lives, or, at the very least, assuring them that they are “alive in the mind of another.” With this deeply affecting book, he has done just that — and shared their tales with a wider world.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
The Rand Confederacy Beat Goes On
•
• The World's Largest Building, Of Course, Is Now in China MATT SCHIAVENZA
Rand Paul's Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy
The most myopic libertarians and the damage they do to the movement
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF JUL 11 2013, 9:30 AM ET
1
inShare
More
Email
Print
This week, Alana Goodman, a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon, broke a story about Senator Rand Paul's 39-year-old social-media director, Jack Hunter, who "spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist" under the name "Southern Avenger." "He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln," Goodman reported. "During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag."
In a follow-up article, Goodman reported that "controversial radio-pundit-turned-Senate-aide Jack Hunter's work caught the eye of the Paul family years before he was hired as Sen. Rand Paul's (R., Ky.) social media director," and that "it remains unclear whether Rand Paul was familiar with Hunter's inflammatory radio punditry when he hired him." Interviewed by the Free Beacon, "Hunter renounced most of his comments," and his article archive at The American Conservative, which dates back to July 2008, suggests that his thinking changed prior to this controversy. I wish every neo-Confederate would read these lines in his April 1, 2013 column:
The 20-something me would consider the 30-something me a bleeding-heart liberal. Though I still hate political correctness, I no longer find it valuable to attack PC by charging off in the opposite direction, making insensitive remarks that even if right in fact were so wrong in form. I'm not the first political pundit to use excessive hyperbole. I might be one of the few to admit being embarrassed about it. This embarrassment is particularly true concerning my own region, the South, where slavery, segregation, and institutional racism left a heavy mark.
I still detest those on the left and right who exploit racial tension for their own purposes. But I detest even more the inhumanity suffered by African-Americans in our early and later history. T.S. Eliot said, "humankind cannot bear too much reality," and it is impossible for those of us living in the new millennium to comprehend that absolute horror of being treated like chattel by your fellow man, or being terrorized by your neighbors, because of the color of your skin. Books, memorials, and museums will never be able to adequately convey such tragedy, at least not in any manner remotely comparable to the pain of those who lived it.
A bit farther back in his archive at The American Conservative, however, he displays all the cluelessness of nostalgists for the Confederacy, writing, "My entire adult life I have defended the Old South and the Southern cause in America's bloodiest war. Not because I support slavery or racism, but despite it. The positive parallels between what the Confederacy was fighting for in 1861 and what the American colonists fought for in 1776 are many and obvious -- republican democracy, political and economic freedom, national independence, defense of one's homeland."
He has yet to renounce his secessionism.
In an effort to understand his views as fully as possible, I read all his columns from The American Conservative, bearing in mind Daniel McCarthy's claim that "anyone who reads them, while finding plenty to disagree with -- he's an independent thinker -- will not find hate. Naïveté, yes, and a certain obtuseness about minorities that's long been characteristic of the right."
That characterization is accurate. An April 14, 2011, column best captures the maddening way he thinks about secession:
If a liberal like Maddow's primary reason for denouncing nullification or secession is these concepts' popular association with the Old South and slavery, would Maddow have respected the Fugitive Slave Act -- or nullified it? Would the liberal host have agreed with Lincoln that runaway slaves should be returned to their masters? Would Maddow have opposed abolitionists' Northern secession? If she is opposed to nullification and secession in each and every instance -- as her rhetoric heavily implies -- would liberals like Maddow have occasionally found themselves in the strange position of supporting slavery?
What about today, where a de facto nullification remains in effect in California which continues to openly flout federal drug laws? Does Maddow believe residents in that state who are stricken with cancer or glaucoma deserve to be arrested for alleviating their pain with medicinal marijuana? Or does Maddow support nullification? Liberals do not want to be confronted with these uncomfortable philosophical contradictions concerning centralization vs. decentralization -- the debate that raged in 1776, 1861 and still rages today -- because any such intellectual exploration toward this end threatens the very heart of the Left's collectivist historical narrative. For progressives, the ever-increasing power of the federal government represents human liberation and political liberalization--period.
This has been the Left's clarion call from FDR to Barack Obama, and any talk of devolving centralized power -- even in the name of what would typically be considered liberal causes -- is heresy.
Hunter gets one thing right: Secession and nullification aren't inherently wrong. The judges who tried to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act were doing God's work. If the federal government started rounding up all Muslim Americans, and liberal California tried to secede and offer them safe harbor, I'd proudly fly the banner of the Bear Flag Republic. And I believe that state governments are the rightful deciders when it comes to issues like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and assisted suicide. Want to nullify the War on Drugs by refusing to cooperate with federal efforts to prosecute marijuana? Go for it, Colorado! Cite the Tenth Amendment. I'll back you.
What the author fails to realize is that secession and nullification have bad names because, historically, in practice rather than theory, their use has overwhelmingly led to the subjugation of minorities and diminished liberty; and because, a few Vermonters aside, the maneuvers are almost always paired -- as Hunter pairs them! -- with a myopic Confederate nostalgia that poisons intellectual consideration of the concepts more than any central government-loving liberal.
Centralization is often bad for liberty. Prohibition and the federal government's War on Drugs are examples. But the Union's victory in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Amendment, and the incorporation doctrine were huge advances for liberty that every American ought to celebrate.
And the form of government favored by Jefferson Davis' Confederacy? I'd like to associate myself with almost every characterization of it made by the Cato Institute's Jason Kuznicki:
Whatever others may say on the subject, I can't understand how anyone might admire the Confederacy and also call themselves a libertarian. Any affinity for the Confederacy marks one very clearly as an enemy of liberty.*
The Confederate Constitution says all that needs to be said on the subject, and it answers all possible arguments to the contrary. Yes, the antebellum U.S. Constitution was clearly quite soft on slavery, and this is not at all to its credit. The best that can be said for it was that it was embarrassed about being quite soft on slavery -- amid all the other liberties it granted and all the other progress it made. Products of committees, do note, can be as schizophrenic as the committees that draft them. Our first attempt at a constitutional order was one such schizophrenic product, and in this respect, the antebellum U.S. Constitution was terrible.
But the Confederate Constitution was vastly worse. What it lacked in schizophrenia, it more than made up for in pure, unadulterated, wholly consistent evil. Consider the following passages:
No law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.
The Confederate States may acquire new territory... In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
It would be a sick joke to stop merely at calling these provisions unlibertarian -- as if all but the exceptionally punctilious members of my little tribe might maybe tolerate them after all.
These provisions are unlibertarian, but they are far worse than that. There is only one legal term that seems quite to do them justice. That term is hostis humani generis: The founders of Confederacy were the enemies of all mankind, as admiralty law holds slave-takers to be. War against slave-takers is always permitted, by anyone, without pretext or need for justification. The practice of slavery is to be crushed, so that mere humanity might live. Anyone who cares about human liberty -- to whatever degree -- ought to despise the Confederacy, ought to mock and desecrate its symbols, and ought never to let Confederate apologists pass unchallenged.
Want to go even deeper in the weeds? See Jonathan Blanks. "Because Confederate-secession defenders will not typically make arguments in favor of chattel slavery, they rely instead on the assumption that secession is an unbounded right and thus a state may leave a country for whatever reason it chooses," he writes. "To accept this premise, one has to bypass moral judgment on the cause of secession, yet affirmatively assign a morality to secession as a matter of preferred political procedure -- in common parlance as 'states' rights.' This turns the assumption of individual rights on its head, if the federalist procedure is to supersede the right of exit of any group or individual within that state, as the Confederacy's slave economy unquestionably did."
Perhaps this critique has already persuaded, or will one day persuade, Hunter to renounce more of his past positions. "In radio, sometimes you're encouraged to be provocative and inflammatory," he told the Free Beacon. "I've been guilty of both, and am embarrassed by some of the comments I made precisely because they do not represent me today. I was embarrassed by some of them even then." It is a discredit to his character that he said things he didn't believe on the radio; just as I do not excuse Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh for spewing false, provocative nonsense for the sake of ego and/or lucre, I don't regard I misrepresented my opinions because I was in a dishonest medium to be any kind of excuse.
I do respect Hunter's renunciations and rethinking, and the increased empathy that preceded this controversy. Within the world of commentary, I am disinclined to shun anyone earnestly seeking redemption from a past of talk-radio hackery -- talk about getting the incentives all wrong.
That doesn't change the fact that Hunter should resign his post immediately, because his continued presence can only undermine the effectiveness of his employer. Paul shouldn't have ever hired him, because even if -- to be overly charitable -- Paul wasn't aware of his objectionable views, or disagreed with all of them but didn't regard them as pertinent to the job, a Senate staffer's role is to help his boss govern, and any fool should've been able to see that having an avowed secessionist and Confederate nostalgist on staff would end in distraction, controversy, and many assuming (whether rightly or wrongly) an antagonism to blacks -- just as many Americans assumed, during the Jeremiah Wright scandal, that Obama harbored antagonism toward America. The political best practice "don't hire extremist former talk-radio hosts who spewed years of nonsense even they won't defend" didn't guide Paul's hiring when Hunter joined.
Why? Dave Weigel has thoughts. Lots of them. Other hypotheses:
1. Paul sympathizes with Confederate nostalgia and secessionism.
2. Just as it made sense for Obama to associate himself with Jeremiah Wright to win over a certain sort of liberal Chicago voter, and made sense for him to disassociate himself with Wright to win over Americans generally, Rand Paul is constantly trying, on one hand, to retain the base of his father, and on the other, to increase his appeal to Americans generally. Insofar as he associates with secessionists and Confederate nostalgists, it is calculated, a bone he throws to the fringe of America that is disproportionately likely to bankroll money bombs; but the fringe stuff doesn't reflect his actual beliefs or governing agenda.
3. He just liked the good things about Jack Hunter, has a higher tolerance than most for fringe beliefs, and a distaste for shunning people just because they have views that are offensive to many.
4. Paul, like many pols, is strangely blind to the dumbest excesses or mistakes within his own ideology.
My bet would be on No. 2, which is neither the most nor least charitable explanation. But since I'm betting and not asserting, be assured that this is a question Paul will need to address directly. Perhaps not now, or ever, if he just wants to remain in the Senate; but sometime, if he runs for president in 2016.
This whole episode is vexing to me. This week as much as last, I believe that Paul, like Ron Wyden, is one of several indispensable members of his chamber, where one voice can make a significant difference in policy.
Paul is constantly speaking out against needless American involvement in foreign wars, most recently in Syria; so long as a vote on Iran could conceivably be the difference between a catastrophic war that could "haunt us for generations," as Robert Gates put it, every non-interventionist is indispensable. He favors reforming mandatory minimum sentencing and forcing transparency on the surveillance state, and he's critical of a secretive drone campaign that has killed so many innocents. If Paul left the Senate tomorrow, it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone in Kentucky or anywhere else would start taking these and other stands, many of which speak directly to some of the most illiberal, unjust actions America carries out. In all these fights, Paul faces long odds.
Every association with neo-Confederates, or bit of evidence that he hasn't learned the lessons of his father's poisonous newsletters, doesn't just corrode his standing as a champion of liberty; nor is it just destructive of any presidential ambitions he harbors. It undermines his ability to achieve vital reforms, to avert foreign wars, to protect civil liberties or critique the War on Terror in any way. It strengthens the hands of his opponents on those issues, however illogically.
And for what? What is gained by these associations?
Paul is perhaps thinking, as he's expressed before, that he wants to be judged on his actions in the Senate -- on the votes that he takes and the questions that he raises. He may say that his aide's opinions are irrelevant, given that neither he nor even the aide himself share most of them. He may argue, as I have done, that there is a double-standard in the way that Republicans, especially libertarian-leaning ones, are treated on the issue: that Paul is called a racist based on newsletters written by his father and talk-radio monologues delivered by his aide, while Michael Bloomberg remains unscathed, even as he himself presides over and defends racially profiling and secretly spying on innocent New York-area Muslim Americans, as well as the deeply-racist-in-practice Stop and Frisk. But even granting all of that, every word I've written above stands.
So what should we think about Paul now?
Chris Hayes says that he very much likes some of the positions that Paul has taken, but that "in the final analysis, there are certain things, certain views, that just put you outside of the boundaries that get you listened to on anything. I'd say white supremacy is one of those. And association with people who hold those views, they render you unfit." ** I predict that if Paul makes a cogent point on drone policy, or surveillance policy, or a particularly compelling anti-war argument, Hayes will, in fact, listen to him, and even broadcast his words to others.
I sure will.
And while there are many differences between the Obama-Wright controversy (which did not at all dissuade me from supporting Obama in 2008) and the current controversy over Hunter's remarks, there is this similarity: Both deal with how we ought to react to indefensible remarks made by someone a prominent politician chose to associate with, even after the remarks.
In that instance, Hayes had this reaction:
Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to "particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media" who were members of the list. The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, "It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country." Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. "All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going."
"Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians -- men, women, children, the infirmed -- on its hands. You'll forgive me if I just can't quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama's pastor," Hayes wrote. "I'm not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don't think he's worthy of defense, don't defend him! What I'm saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable."
He later clarified, "My argument was that Wright's views and Obama's relationship to him simply weren't at all predictive of how Obama would govern or fundamentally revealing about the kind of president he would make."
He was certainly right about that.
As a whole, his take has many parallels to today's unapologetic Paul defenders: They say this is a distraction dredged up by neo-cons to maintain control of the Republican Party, that the hand-wringing just keeps the hustle going, and that considering the horrific policies that the U.S. implements and Paul opposes, being outraged about an associate's offensive comments is bizarre.
What do I say?
• Paul deserves much of the criticism he's getting, including what I've heaped on him above. If he can't see how this undermines his goals he should ask Will Wilkinson to explain it to him.
• Judging from Paul's time in the Senate, nothing about Hunter's controversial views have been at all predictive of how Paul has governed, and there is no credible case that they ever will be predictive.
• If you'd never vote for Paul because he employs an aide who said lots of offensive stuff on talk radio but you did vote to reelect George W. Bush or Obama, who've both retained aides at the highest levels who were complicit in torturing other human beings, perhaps you should rethink what it is that you make into a litmus test -- more on that point here.
Consider all that a tentative take, pending new facts and further reflection.
__
* Here's the one line I want to parse: "Any affinity for the Confederacy marks one very clearly as an enemy of liberty." That feels true to me. It would be true, if people were rational creatures. But I've encountered a lot of people whose affinity for the Confederacy is characterized by staggering historical ignorance, stubborn, irrational, myopic tribalism, pathological, selective over-intellectualization, and cognitive dissonance. Their commitments don't make any kind of sense when juxtaposed, which doesn't mean they don't believe them. It's a lot like the college students who have hammer-and-sickle flags on their wall, Che tees on their bodies, and ready defenses of Fidel Castro, but who also champion civil liberties and like capitalism.
Weirdly, they exist.
** Hayes goes on:
Even if you take the most charitable view possible, that, say, you get three white supremacist strikes, Rand Paul is in trouble. Strike one was in 2009 when Rand Paul's Senate campaign spokesperson was forced to resign over a horribly racist comment and historical image of a lynching -- I am not making that up -- posted by a friend on his MySpace wall on Martin Luther King Weekend. It had been allowed to remain for almost two years. Rand Paul then went on the Rachel Maddow show, saying he didn't much like the Civil Rights Act, that was strike two. And now this, the Southern Avenger on the Senator's staff. That's three racist strikes. You're out.
Seriously? Assigning Rand Paul a "white supremacist strike" because he employed a spokesman whose friend posted something offensive on the spokesman's MySpace page? And really, a "white supremacist strike" for taking the position that the Civil Rights Act did a lot of good things, but that he had some principled objections to the private business provision? I've criticized Paul's answer as wrongheaded, but it certainly isn't a white supremacist position.
I wonder how many strikes would result if Hayes applied these same standards to, say, Bill Clinton. Who was it that he cited as his mentor? Ah, yes, a former segregationist. Strike one? We'd do well to reserve white supremacist strikes for people who actually believe in or advocate white supremacy
• The World's Largest Building, Of Course, Is Now in China MATT SCHIAVENZA
Rand Paul's Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy
The most myopic libertarians and the damage they do to the movement
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF JUL 11 2013, 9:30 AM ET
1
inShare
More
This week, Alana Goodman, a reporter at the Washington Free Beacon, broke a story about Senator Rand Paul's 39-year-old social-media director, Jack Hunter, who "spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist" under the name "Southern Avenger." "He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln," Goodman reported. "During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag."
In a follow-up article, Goodman reported that "controversial radio-pundit-turned-Senate-aide Jack Hunter's work caught the eye of the Paul family years before he was hired as Sen. Rand Paul's (R., Ky.) social media director," and that "it remains unclear whether Rand Paul was familiar with Hunter's inflammatory radio punditry when he hired him." Interviewed by the Free Beacon, "Hunter renounced most of his comments," and his article archive at The American Conservative, which dates back to July 2008, suggests that his thinking changed prior to this controversy. I wish every neo-Confederate would read these lines in his April 1, 2013 column:
The 20-something me would consider the 30-something me a bleeding-heart liberal. Though I still hate political correctness, I no longer find it valuable to attack PC by charging off in the opposite direction, making insensitive remarks that even if right in fact were so wrong in form. I'm not the first political pundit to use excessive hyperbole. I might be one of the few to admit being embarrassed about it. This embarrassment is particularly true concerning my own region, the South, where slavery, segregation, and institutional racism left a heavy mark.
I still detest those on the left and right who exploit racial tension for their own purposes. But I detest even more the inhumanity suffered by African-Americans in our early and later history. T.S. Eliot said, "humankind cannot bear too much reality," and it is impossible for those of us living in the new millennium to comprehend that absolute horror of being treated like chattel by your fellow man, or being terrorized by your neighbors, because of the color of your skin. Books, memorials, and museums will never be able to adequately convey such tragedy, at least not in any manner remotely comparable to the pain of those who lived it.
A bit farther back in his archive at The American Conservative, however, he displays all the cluelessness of nostalgists for the Confederacy, writing, "My entire adult life I have defended the Old South and the Southern cause in America's bloodiest war. Not because I support slavery or racism, but despite it. The positive parallels between what the Confederacy was fighting for in 1861 and what the American colonists fought for in 1776 are many and obvious -- republican democracy, political and economic freedom, national independence, defense of one's homeland."
He has yet to renounce his secessionism.
In an effort to understand his views as fully as possible, I read all his columns from The American Conservative, bearing in mind Daniel McCarthy's claim that "anyone who reads them, while finding plenty to disagree with -- he's an independent thinker -- will not find hate. Naïveté, yes, and a certain obtuseness about minorities that's long been characteristic of the right."
That characterization is accurate. An April 14, 2011, column best captures the maddening way he thinks about secession:
If a liberal like Maddow's primary reason for denouncing nullification or secession is these concepts' popular association with the Old South and slavery, would Maddow have respected the Fugitive Slave Act -- or nullified it? Would the liberal host have agreed with Lincoln that runaway slaves should be returned to their masters? Would Maddow have opposed abolitionists' Northern secession? If she is opposed to nullification and secession in each and every instance -- as her rhetoric heavily implies -- would liberals like Maddow have occasionally found themselves in the strange position of supporting slavery?
What about today, where a de facto nullification remains in effect in California which continues to openly flout federal drug laws? Does Maddow believe residents in that state who are stricken with cancer or glaucoma deserve to be arrested for alleviating their pain with medicinal marijuana? Or does Maddow support nullification? Liberals do not want to be confronted with these uncomfortable philosophical contradictions concerning centralization vs. decentralization -- the debate that raged in 1776, 1861 and still rages today -- because any such intellectual exploration toward this end threatens the very heart of the Left's collectivist historical narrative. For progressives, the ever-increasing power of the federal government represents human liberation and political liberalization--period.
This has been the Left's clarion call from FDR to Barack Obama, and any talk of devolving centralized power -- even in the name of what would typically be considered liberal causes -- is heresy.
Hunter gets one thing right: Secession and nullification aren't inherently wrong. The judges who tried to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act were doing God's work. If the federal government started rounding up all Muslim Americans, and liberal California tried to secede and offer them safe harbor, I'd proudly fly the banner of the Bear Flag Republic. And I believe that state governments are the rightful deciders when it comes to issues like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and assisted suicide. Want to nullify the War on Drugs by refusing to cooperate with federal efforts to prosecute marijuana? Go for it, Colorado! Cite the Tenth Amendment. I'll back you.
What the author fails to realize is that secession and nullification have bad names because, historically, in practice rather than theory, their use has overwhelmingly led to the subjugation of minorities and diminished liberty; and because, a few Vermonters aside, the maneuvers are almost always paired -- as Hunter pairs them! -- with a myopic Confederate nostalgia that poisons intellectual consideration of the concepts more than any central government-loving liberal.
Centralization is often bad for liberty. Prohibition and the federal government's War on Drugs are examples. But the Union's victory in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Amendment, and the incorporation doctrine were huge advances for liberty that every American ought to celebrate.
And the form of government favored by Jefferson Davis' Confederacy? I'd like to associate myself with almost every characterization of it made by the Cato Institute's Jason Kuznicki:
Whatever others may say on the subject, I can't understand how anyone might admire the Confederacy and also call themselves a libertarian. Any affinity for the Confederacy marks one very clearly as an enemy of liberty.*
The Confederate Constitution says all that needs to be said on the subject, and it answers all possible arguments to the contrary. Yes, the antebellum U.S. Constitution was clearly quite soft on slavery, and this is not at all to its credit. The best that can be said for it was that it was embarrassed about being quite soft on slavery -- amid all the other liberties it granted and all the other progress it made. Products of committees, do note, can be as schizophrenic as the committees that draft them. Our first attempt at a constitutional order was one such schizophrenic product, and in this respect, the antebellum U.S. Constitution was terrible.
But the Confederate Constitution was vastly worse. What it lacked in schizophrenia, it more than made up for in pure, unadulterated, wholly consistent evil. Consider the following passages:
No law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.
No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.
The Confederate States may acquire new territory... In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
It would be a sick joke to stop merely at calling these provisions unlibertarian -- as if all but the exceptionally punctilious members of my little tribe might maybe tolerate them after all.
These provisions are unlibertarian, but they are far worse than that. There is only one legal term that seems quite to do them justice. That term is hostis humani generis: The founders of Confederacy were the enemies of all mankind, as admiralty law holds slave-takers to be. War against slave-takers is always permitted, by anyone, without pretext or need for justification. The practice of slavery is to be crushed, so that mere humanity might live. Anyone who cares about human liberty -- to whatever degree -- ought to despise the Confederacy, ought to mock and desecrate its symbols, and ought never to let Confederate apologists pass unchallenged.
Want to go even deeper in the weeds? See Jonathan Blanks. "Because Confederate-secession defenders will not typically make arguments in favor of chattel slavery, they rely instead on the assumption that secession is an unbounded right and thus a state may leave a country for whatever reason it chooses," he writes. "To accept this premise, one has to bypass moral judgment on the cause of secession, yet affirmatively assign a morality to secession as a matter of preferred political procedure -- in common parlance as 'states' rights.' This turns the assumption of individual rights on its head, if the federalist procedure is to supersede the right of exit of any group or individual within that state, as the Confederacy's slave economy unquestionably did."
Perhaps this critique has already persuaded, or will one day persuade, Hunter to renounce more of his past positions. "In radio, sometimes you're encouraged to be provocative and inflammatory," he told the Free Beacon. "I've been guilty of both, and am embarrassed by some of the comments I made precisely because they do not represent me today. I was embarrassed by some of them even then." It is a discredit to his character that he said things he didn't believe on the radio; just as I do not excuse Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh for spewing false, provocative nonsense for the sake of ego and/or lucre, I don't regard I misrepresented my opinions because I was in a dishonest medium to be any kind of excuse.
I do respect Hunter's renunciations and rethinking, and the increased empathy that preceded this controversy. Within the world of commentary, I am disinclined to shun anyone earnestly seeking redemption from a past of talk-radio hackery -- talk about getting the incentives all wrong.
That doesn't change the fact that Hunter should resign his post immediately, because his continued presence can only undermine the effectiveness of his employer. Paul shouldn't have ever hired him, because even if -- to be overly charitable -- Paul wasn't aware of his objectionable views, or disagreed with all of them but didn't regard them as pertinent to the job, a Senate staffer's role is to help his boss govern, and any fool should've been able to see that having an avowed secessionist and Confederate nostalgist on staff would end in distraction, controversy, and many assuming (whether rightly or wrongly) an antagonism to blacks -- just as many Americans assumed, during the Jeremiah Wright scandal, that Obama harbored antagonism toward America. The political best practice "don't hire extremist former talk-radio hosts who spewed years of nonsense even they won't defend" didn't guide Paul's hiring when Hunter joined.
Why? Dave Weigel has thoughts. Lots of them. Other hypotheses:
1. Paul sympathizes with Confederate nostalgia and secessionism.
2. Just as it made sense for Obama to associate himself with Jeremiah Wright to win over a certain sort of liberal Chicago voter, and made sense for him to disassociate himself with Wright to win over Americans generally, Rand Paul is constantly trying, on one hand, to retain the base of his father, and on the other, to increase his appeal to Americans generally. Insofar as he associates with secessionists and Confederate nostalgists, it is calculated, a bone he throws to the fringe of America that is disproportionately likely to bankroll money bombs; but the fringe stuff doesn't reflect his actual beliefs or governing agenda.
3. He just liked the good things about Jack Hunter, has a higher tolerance than most for fringe beliefs, and a distaste for shunning people just because they have views that are offensive to many.
4. Paul, like many pols, is strangely blind to the dumbest excesses or mistakes within his own ideology.
My bet would be on No. 2, which is neither the most nor least charitable explanation. But since I'm betting and not asserting, be assured that this is a question Paul will need to address directly. Perhaps not now, or ever, if he just wants to remain in the Senate; but sometime, if he runs for president in 2016.
This whole episode is vexing to me. This week as much as last, I believe that Paul, like Ron Wyden, is one of several indispensable members of his chamber, where one voice can make a significant difference in policy.
Paul is constantly speaking out against needless American involvement in foreign wars, most recently in Syria; so long as a vote on Iran could conceivably be the difference between a catastrophic war that could "haunt us for generations," as Robert Gates put it, every non-interventionist is indispensable. He favors reforming mandatory minimum sentencing and forcing transparency on the surveillance state, and he's critical of a secretive drone campaign that has killed so many innocents. If Paul left the Senate tomorrow, it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone in Kentucky or anywhere else would start taking these and other stands, many of which speak directly to some of the most illiberal, unjust actions America carries out. In all these fights, Paul faces long odds.
Every association with neo-Confederates, or bit of evidence that he hasn't learned the lessons of his father's poisonous newsletters, doesn't just corrode his standing as a champion of liberty; nor is it just destructive of any presidential ambitions he harbors. It undermines his ability to achieve vital reforms, to avert foreign wars, to protect civil liberties or critique the War on Terror in any way. It strengthens the hands of his opponents on those issues, however illogically.
And for what? What is gained by these associations?
Paul is perhaps thinking, as he's expressed before, that he wants to be judged on his actions in the Senate -- on the votes that he takes and the questions that he raises. He may say that his aide's opinions are irrelevant, given that neither he nor even the aide himself share most of them. He may argue, as I have done, that there is a double-standard in the way that Republicans, especially libertarian-leaning ones, are treated on the issue: that Paul is called a racist based on newsletters written by his father and talk-radio monologues delivered by his aide, while Michael Bloomberg remains unscathed, even as he himself presides over and defends racially profiling and secretly spying on innocent New York-area Muslim Americans, as well as the deeply-racist-in-practice Stop and Frisk. But even granting all of that, every word I've written above stands.
So what should we think about Paul now?
Chris Hayes says that he very much likes some of the positions that Paul has taken, but that "in the final analysis, there are certain things, certain views, that just put you outside of the boundaries that get you listened to on anything. I'd say white supremacy is one of those. And association with people who hold those views, they render you unfit." ** I predict that if Paul makes a cogent point on drone policy, or surveillance policy, or a particularly compelling anti-war argument, Hayes will, in fact, listen to him, and even broadcast his words to others.
I sure will.
And while there are many differences between the Obama-Wright controversy (which did not at all dissuade me from supporting Obama in 2008) and the current controversy over Hunter's remarks, there is this similarity: Both deal with how we ought to react to indefensible remarks made by someone a prominent politician chose to associate with, even after the remarks.
In that instance, Hayes had this reaction:
Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to "particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media" who were members of the list. The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, "It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country." Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. "All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going."
"Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians -- men, women, children, the infirmed -- on its hands. You'll forgive me if I just can't quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama's pastor," Hayes wrote. "I'm not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don't think he's worthy of defense, don't defend him! What I'm saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable."
He later clarified, "My argument was that Wright's views and Obama's relationship to him simply weren't at all predictive of how Obama would govern or fundamentally revealing about the kind of president he would make."
He was certainly right about that.
As a whole, his take has many parallels to today's unapologetic Paul defenders: They say this is a distraction dredged up by neo-cons to maintain control of the Republican Party, that the hand-wringing just keeps the hustle going, and that considering the horrific policies that the U.S. implements and Paul opposes, being outraged about an associate's offensive comments is bizarre.
What do I say?
• Paul deserves much of the criticism he's getting, including what I've heaped on him above. If he can't see how this undermines his goals he should ask Will Wilkinson to explain it to him.
• Judging from Paul's time in the Senate, nothing about Hunter's controversial views have been at all predictive of how Paul has governed, and there is no credible case that they ever will be predictive.
• If you'd never vote for Paul because he employs an aide who said lots of offensive stuff on talk radio but you did vote to reelect George W. Bush or Obama, who've both retained aides at the highest levels who were complicit in torturing other human beings, perhaps you should rethink what it is that you make into a litmus test -- more on that point here.
Consider all that a tentative take, pending new facts and further reflection.
__
* Here's the one line I want to parse: "Any affinity for the Confederacy marks one very clearly as an enemy of liberty." That feels true to me. It would be true, if people were rational creatures. But I've encountered a lot of people whose affinity for the Confederacy is characterized by staggering historical ignorance, stubborn, irrational, myopic tribalism, pathological, selective over-intellectualization, and cognitive dissonance. Their commitments don't make any kind of sense when juxtaposed, which doesn't mean they don't believe them. It's a lot like the college students who have hammer-and-sickle flags on their wall, Che tees on their bodies, and ready defenses of Fidel Castro, but who also champion civil liberties and like capitalism.
Weirdly, they exist.
** Hayes goes on:
Even if you take the most charitable view possible, that, say, you get three white supremacist strikes, Rand Paul is in trouble. Strike one was in 2009 when Rand Paul's Senate campaign spokesperson was forced to resign over a horribly racist comment and historical image of a lynching -- I am not making that up -- posted by a friend on his MySpace wall on Martin Luther King Weekend. It had been allowed to remain for almost two years. Rand Paul then went on the Rachel Maddow show, saying he didn't much like the Civil Rights Act, that was strike two. And now this, the Southern Avenger on the Senator's staff. That's three racist strikes. You're out.
Seriously? Assigning Rand Paul a "white supremacist strike" because he employed a spokesman whose friend posted something offensive on the spokesman's MySpace page? And really, a "white supremacist strike" for taking the position that the Civil Rights Act did a lot of good things, but that he had some principled objections to the private business provision? I've criticized Paul's answer as wrongheaded, but it certainly isn't a white supremacist position.
I wonder how many strikes would result if Hayes applied these same standards to, say, Bill Clinton. Who was it that he cited as his mentor? Ah, yes, a former segregationist. Strike one? We'd do well to reserve white supremacist strikes for people who actually believe in or advocate white supremacy
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)