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Publisher Tinkers With Twain
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: January 4, 2011
A first edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word “nigger” is replaced by “slave,” a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.
Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.
“I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” he said. “And I don’t think I’m alone.”
Mr. Gribben, who combined “Huckleberry Finn” with “Tom Sawyer” in a single volume and also supplied an introduction, said he worried that “Huckleberry Finn” had fallen off reading lists, and wanted to offer an edition that is not for scholars, but for younger people and general readers.
“I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,” Mr. Gribben said. “The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.” (The book also substitutes “Indian” for “injun.”)
Since the publisher discussed plans for the book this week with Publishers Weekly, it has been “assaulted” with negative e-mails and phone calls, said Suzanne La Rosa, the co-founder and publisher of NewSouth Books.
“We didn’t undertake this lightly,” Ms. La Rosa said. “If our publication fosters good discussion about how language affects learning and certainly the nature of censorship, then difficult as it is likely to be, it’s a good thing.”
The news set off a storm of angry online commentary, scolding the publisher for “censorship” and “political correctness,” or simply for the perceived sin of altering the words of a literary icon. Twain admirers have turned his hefty “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” published last year, into a best seller.
An initial print run of 7,500 copies has been planned for the revised “Huckleberry Finn.” The print edition is scheduled for publication in February, and a digital edition could go on sale as early as next week.
Mr. Gribben said no schools had expressed interest yet in teaching the book — nor did he say what ages he thought the edition appropriate for. In his introduction, however, he writes that “even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.”
Ms. La Rosa said that the publisher had had advance orders from Barnes & Noble, Borders and other bookstores, and that she expected more orders from schools and libraries.
Some English teachers were less than thrilled about the idea of cleaning up a classic.
“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn,’ ” said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. “I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”
Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.
“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Haley Barbour's Amnesia
Wednesday, Dec 22, 2010 08:01 ET
What Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us
Like any good Southern conservative of his generation, he ignores the entire bad faith stew in which he was raised
By Rick Perlstein
AP"January 7, 1970, dawned clear and bitterly cold, a cold that rarely comes to Mississippi. It was 16 degrees on South Main Street, the trees along the older avenues were seared and deathly, and the water in the potholes of the roads in the Negro section was frozen solid. All over Yazoo there was a cold eerie calm."
So recorded the great Southern writer Willie Morris in his classic book "Yazoo: Integration In a Deep Southern Town," with suitable melodrama, of the first day little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls sat together in classrooms in his Mississippi Delta hometown. The moment came fifteen years after the dawn of "Massive Resistance": an organized conspiracy, uniting all strata of white Southern society, high and low, to defy the order of the Supreme Court to integrate its schools "with all deliberate speed."
What happened between Brown v. Board of Education and that January day in 1970 comprises some of the most monstrous inhumanity in the cruel annals of American history. Recently, in a cover feature in the conservative Weekly Standard on his presidential ambitions, Mississippi governor and fellow Yazoo native Haley Barbour had occasion to reflect on that place, in those years. The best that can be said about his recollection is that it is not 100 percent a lie -- just deeply confused, mostly wrong, and indicative above all of a cynical man who has made a lucrative career of exploiting racial trauma when it suited him, or throwing it down a memory hole when it did not; which is to say, an archetypal Dixie conservative.
Start with his account of the White Citizens Councils. They were founded in the Mississippi Delta -- "The Most Southern Place on Earth," as a 1994 history by James C. Cobb enshrined it -- and represented, as one of their leaders proudly put it, "damned near a declaration of war against the United States." In Yazoo, as Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo has documented, the method was economic terror: In 1955, when 53 mostly middle class local blacks signed a petition requesting, you know, that federal law be followed, their livelihoods were crushed.
Barbour's invocation of the Council when asked how the Yazoo schools managed to integrate without violence some fifteen years later was gratuitous and strange. In words now infamous, he replied:
"Because the business community wouldn't stand for it. You heard of the Citizens' Councils? Up North they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there."
That's richly revealing of Barbour's willful and self-exculpating mental fog. While the Citizens Councils were born in 1954 of Brown v. Board of Education, the modern revival of the dreaded "Night Riders" of the Reconstruction Era came about in 1963 in response to President John F. Kennedy's announcement that he was introducing legislation to integrate not just schools but all places of public accommodation. They were the new kids in town -- that it to say, the competition, and low-class competition at that. Local gentry acted swiftly to preserve their monopoly on terror. In Yazoo, records historian John Dittmer in his authoritative "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi," the local Citizens' Council did indeed pass a resolution excoriating the Klan -- because "your Citizen's Council was formed to preserve separation of the races, and believes that it can best serve the county where it is the only organization operating in this field."
In places like Yazoo, the local gentry was exceedingly close-knit and nearly totalitarian in their power over the everyday life of the town -- a fact Barbour's testimony in the Weekly Standard merely confirms: Competing vigilante constabularies were intolerable threats to their droit de seigneur, as deserving of the swift fist of economic terror as any uppity nigger. ("If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there.")
Barbours, who are descended from Mississippi's third governor, were the heart and soul of Yazoo's gentry, as Andrew Ferguson's Weekly Standard profile responsibly establishes. For Haley and his kind, as a childhood friend recollected, it was "an ideal childhood…dances, parties, football, Little League, boys doing all the things boys do in a small town." Barbour concurred: "I grew up in a town that was like a family." One of the abiding tasks of that family's patriarchs was defending it from outsiders contesting their right to run it in the way they saw fit -- advocates and officers, that is to say, of the laws of the United States of America.
It is here that Barbour offers his most bald and sickening claims. Asked what it was like growing up at Ground Zero of the civil rights revolution, he recollected, "I just don't remember it as being that bad," and volunteered his recollection when "Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke at the old fairground….I was there with some of my friends," he said. "We wanted to hear him speak."
King did apparently make a stop in Yazoo during a three-day tour of the Delta region in February 1962, but it was his 1966 visit to the town that is much more famous. Early that June, James Meredith -- the black man whose entry to the University of Mississippi in '62, when Barbour was 15, spurred riots that brought federal troops and the cream of the nation's media to Barbour's future alma mater -- announced he would march "against fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. When he crossed the border into the Magnolia State, a farmer emptied a double-barreled shotgun into his hide. In solidarity, all of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders, and hundreds of their followers, vowed to complete his march. It produced one of the Movement's grandest melodramas. On June 16, at a rally in the courthouse square in Greenwood, militant Stokely Carmichael delivered his infamous "Black Power" address and cleaved the freedom movement forever more into armed versus nonviolent factions. On June 21, King detoured off the line of the march fifty miles to the east, to Neshoba County, symbolically confronting the perpetrators of a notorious murder two years before: "In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered. I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment."
That utterance is significant to the case of Haley Barbour. He says the King speech he saw in '62 was "full of people, black and white" -- part of his longstanding pattern of radically distorting the degree of comity between the races in Mississippi during his youth. In fact, during Mississippi's race revolution, when blacks and whites occupied the same space (except when the former were virtual servants and the former masters), the scene in greater or lesser degrees resembled the chaos that day in Philadelphia. This was as true in 1966 as it was in 1962. As The New York Times described the scene in Philadelphia, white "onlookers" toppled a network camera, "[s]ome 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flared in to the line of march, their eyes wide with anger," and police didn't intervene against the ensuing stones, bottles, clubs, and firecrackers until "[h]alf a dozen Negroes began to fight back."
Then it was on to Yazoo.
Martin Luther King followed a speaker for the pro-violence Deacons of Defense who said, "They ain't a redneck or a cracker in Mississippi that I'm afraid of…They ain't gonna be enough of people to keep black people from hurting white people." King delivered one of the greatest speeches of his soon-to-be-snuffed-out life. You can watch it at the broadcast museums in New York and Los Angeles:
"I am disturbed about a straaaaange theory that is circulating, saying to me that I ought to imitate the worst in the white man and the worse in our oppressors. Who have a specter of killing and lynching people and throwing them in rivers! It's our oppressors! And now people are telling me to stoop down to that level, oh no! The reason that I will not do it is that I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetrate evil throughout our civilization.
"I'm sick and tired of violence.
"I'm tired of the war in Vietnam.
"I"m tired of war and conflict in the world.
"I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hate. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil! I'm not going to use violence, no matter who says it."
I am almost certain it is this scene of menace, foreboding, and transcendence that Haley Barbour is "describing" when he says, "I don't really remember." He elaborates, "We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King."
Which is where things get honestly creepy. I hope Haley Barbour is just making that last detail up. The menacing white mobs that gathered at the periphery of civil rights rallies in places like Yazoo City were almost exclusively male. If he truly remembers the moment through a cloud of testosterone, the imagery invokes to me the most Gothic nastiness imaginable. In "Black Like Me," the 1961 classic in which journalist John Howard Griffith blackened his face to see how race relations worked in the South, Griffith learned through one white interlocutor "how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. 'And I guarantee you, I've had it in every one of them since before they ever got on the payroll…We figure we're doing your people a favor to get some white blood in your kids.'"
No way, not in a million years, am I accusing Haley Barbour of being like this guy. I'm making a different point. At every important turn in the story, Barbour emphasizes how little he remembers of this most intense period imaginable in his beloved home town -- it really was no big deal, he insists. When he does so, this is what he is forgetting: the entire bad-faith stew of race, sex, and corrupt plutocracy -- and its public repression in images of towns like "families" and happy Negroes until outsiders stirred things up -- that defined his formative years. He's a middle-aged Southern conservative. That is what his job is: to opportunistically "forget."
What was the role of the Republican Party in all of this? In 1964, the Mississippi Republican Party changed its platform to reassure potential recruits it bought the whole package: "We feel segregation of the races is absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations and the continued progress of both races in the State of Mississippi." (It worked: Barry Goldwater got 87 percent of the vote.) In 1965, Haley's older brother Jeppie Barbour became one of the first among the Delta's gentry to join the Republican Party. In 1968, with Haley as campaign manager, he became the town's mayor. These were years when the challenge of Massive Resistance became merely bureaucratic, as Lyndon Johnson's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare established legal guidelines to finally force Southern school districts to honor Brown v. Board of Education. The forcing didn't work, in part because Southern Republicans, in concert with President Nixon, kept on devising new ways to stall. Finally, federal courts starting issuing draconian rulings that put the full force of federal police power behind desegregation.
Many school districts still kept fighting. Yazoo City's newly Republican leadership, on the other hand, chose orderly retreat. This is what Haley Barbour is talking about when he claims "the business community wouldn't stand for" anything but legal compliance. The actual field general in the struggle, however, his brother Jeppie Barbour, gave another, less sentimental explanation. The population exodus further skirmishes would have brought would have destroyed the town -- and brought down the plutocrats' fortunes right with it: "We don't have any other choice."
Here was the Delta Republicans' historic task: negotiating terms of surrender to the Constitution, then reframing that Lost Cause as honorable, the better to preserve their insular plutocracy -- perhaps their gravest sin in the first place -- in order to integrate themselves more snugly into national and international circuits of corrupt wealth. Haley Barbour, who received his first Republican patronage job in 1970, is a true son of this confederacy. In 1991 he founded of a lobbying firm that would go on to become the second most powerful in the country in part for its work for the tobacco industry (as governor, he later proposed to dismantle the state's program to discourage youth from using tobacco. In 1993, now RNC chair, he set up a "National Policy Forum," which allegedly shoveled hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign money into the 1994 and 1996 Republican campaigns. Then he provided $50,000 in seed money for the firm of Allen Raymond, which specialized in jamming opponents' phone banks on Election Day. The next year, he became the the South's largest electrical company's liaison to Dick Cheney's secret energy task force.
It goes on. In 2007, now Mississippi governor, Barbour's friends and family were the dominant beneficiaries of $15 billion in federal aid that Governor Barbour brought to the state to take advantage of Hurricane Katrina. One of his nephews, Bloomberg reported, saw his lobbying fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a Katrina reconstruction panel. Barbour received a $25,000 a month payment as a "blind trust" from the firm. That same firm set up a corporation, New Bridge Strategies, to make what it called "big money" on Iraq reconstruction. Meanwhile, in his capacity as governor, Barbour was caught handing out one of the biggest federal contracts in the state for recovery efforts to a Republican activist married to his nephew.
And now they say he's a presidential contender. This great big old bear of a man, you see, according to D.C. gossip Lloyd Grove, "enjoys the friendliest relations with the Washington media elite of any prospective candidate vying for the Republican monition." Margaret Carlson calls him "genuine" and "approachable." After all, as Grove recalls, he kept "a generous supply of Maker's Mark in his handy RNC liquor cabinet." It's one old-fashioned Dixie tradition he's managed to remember just fine.
What Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us
Like any good Southern conservative of his generation, he ignores the entire bad faith stew in which he was raised
By Rick Perlstein
AP"January 7, 1970, dawned clear and bitterly cold, a cold that rarely comes to Mississippi. It was 16 degrees on South Main Street, the trees along the older avenues were seared and deathly, and the water in the potholes of the roads in the Negro section was frozen solid. All over Yazoo there was a cold eerie calm."
So recorded the great Southern writer Willie Morris in his classic book "Yazoo: Integration In a Deep Southern Town," with suitable melodrama, of the first day little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls sat together in classrooms in his Mississippi Delta hometown. The moment came fifteen years after the dawn of "Massive Resistance": an organized conspiracy, uniting all strata of white Southern society, high and low, to defy the order of the Supreme Court to integrate its schools "with all deliberate speed."
What happened between Brown v. Board of Education and that January day in 1970 comprises some of the most monstrous inhumanity in the cruel annals of American history. Recently, in a cover feature in the conservative Weekly Standard on his presidential ambitions, Mississippi governor and fellow Yazoo native Haley Barbour had occasion to reflect on that place, in those years. The best that can be said about his recollection is that it is not 100 percent a lie -- just deeply confused, mostly wrong, and indicative above all of a cynical man who has made a lucrative career of exploiting racial trauma when it suited him, or throwing it down a memory hole when it did not; which is to say, an archetypal Dixie conservative.
Start with his account of the White Citizens Councils. They were founded in the Mississippi Delta -- "The Most Southern Place on Earth," as a 1994 history by James C. Cobb enshrined it -- and represented, as one of their leaders proudly put it, "damned near a declaration of war against the United States." In Yazoo, as Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo has documented, the method was economic terror: In 1955, when 53 mostly middle class local blacks signed a petition requesting, you know, that federal law be followed, their livelihoods were crushed.
Barbour's invocation of the Council when asked how the Yazoo schools managed to integrate without violence some fifteen years later was gratuitous and strange. In words now infamous, he replied:
"Because the business community wouldn't stand for it. You heard of the Citizens' Councils? Up North they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there."
That's richly revealing of Barbour's willful and self-exculpating mental fog. While the Citizens Councils were born in 1954 of Brown v. Board of Education, the modern revival of the dreaded "Night Riders" of the Reconstruction Era came about in 1963 in response to President John F. Kennedy's announcement that he was introducing legislation to integrate not just schools but all places of public accommodation. They were the new kids in town -- that it to say, the competition, and low-class competition at that. Local gentry acted swiftly to preserve their monopoly on terror. In Yazoo, records historian John Dittmer in his authoritative "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi," the local Citizens' Council did indeed pass a resolution excoriating the Klan -- because "your Citizen's Council was formed to preserve separation of the races, and believes that it can best serve the county where it is the only organization operating in this field."
In places like Yazoo, the local gentry was exceedingly close-knit and nearly totalitarian in their power over the everyday life of the town -- a fact Barbour's testimony in the Weekly Standard merely confirms: Competing vigilante constabularies were intolerable threats to their droit de seigneur, as deserving of the swift fist of economic terror as any uppity nigger. ("If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there.")
Barbours, who are descended from Mississippi's third governor, were the heart and soul of Yazoo's gentry, as Andrew Ferguson's Weekly Standard profile responsibly establishes. For Haley and his kind, as a childhood friend recollected, it was "an ideal childhood…dances, parties, football, Little League, boys doing all the things boys do in a small town." Barbour concurred: "I grew up in a town that was like a family." One of the abiding tasks of that family's patriarchs was defending it from outsiders contesting their right to run it in the way they saw fit -- advocates and officers, that is to say, of the laws of the United States of America.
It is here that Barbour offers his most bald and sickening claims. Asked what it was like growing up at Ground Zero of the civil rights revolution, he recollected, "I just don't remember it as being that bad," and volunteered his recollection when "Martin Luther King came to town, in '62. He spoke at the old fairground….I was there with some of my friends," he said. "We wanted to hear him speak."
King did apparently make a stop in Yazoo during a three-day tour of the Delta region in February 1962, but it was his 1966 visit to the town that is much more famous. Early that June, James Meredith -- the black man whose entry to the University of Mississippi in '62, when Barbour was 15, spurred riots that brought federal troops and the cream of the nation's media to Barbour's future alma mater -- announced he would march "against fear" from Memphis, Tennessee, to the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. When he crossed the border into the Magnolia State, a farmer emptied a double-barreled shotgun into his hide. In solidarity, all of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders, and hundreds of their followers, vowed to complete his march. It produced one of the Movement's grandest melodramas. On June 16, at a rally in the courthouse square in Greenwood, militant Stokely Carmichael delivered his infamous "Black Power" address and cleaved the freedom movement forever more into armed versus nonviolent factions. On June 21, King detoured off the line of the march fifty miles to the east, to Neshoba County, symbolically confronting the perpetrators of a notorious murder two years before: "In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered. I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment."
That utterance is significant to the case of Haley Barbour. He says the King speech he saw in '62 was "full of people, black and white" -- part of his longstanding pattern of radically distorting the degree of comity between the races in Mississippi during his youth. In fact, during Mississippi's race revolution, when blacks and whites occupied the same space (except when the former were virtual servants and the former masters), the scene in greater or lesser degrees resembled the chaos that day in Philadelphia. This was as true in 1966 as it was in 1962. As The New York Times described the scene in Philadelphia, white "onlookers" toppled a network camera, "[s]ome 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flared in to the line of march, their eyes wide with anger," and police didn't intervene against the ensuing stones, bottles, clubs, and firecrackers until "[h]alf a dozen Negroes began to fight back."
Then it was on to Yazoo.
Martin Luther King followed a speaker for the pro-violence Deacons of Defense who said, "They ain't a redneck or a cracker in Mississippi that I'm afraid of…They ain't gonna be enough of people to keep black people from hurting white people." King delivered one of the greatest speeches of his soon-to-be-snuffed-out life. You can watch it at the broadcast museums in New York and Los Angeles:
"I am disturbed about a straaaaange theory that is circulating, saying to me that I ought to imitate the worst in the white man and the worse in our oppressors. Who have a specter of killing and lynching people and throwing them in rivers! It's our oppressors! And now people are telling me to stoop down to that level, oh no! The reason that I will not do it is that I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetrate evil throughout our civilization.
"I'm sick and tired of violence.
"I'm tired of the war in Vietnam.
"I"m tired of war and conflict in the world.
"I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hate. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil! I'm not going to use violence, no matter who says it."
I am almost certain it is this scene of menace, foreboding, and transcendence that Haley Barbour is "describing" when he says, "I don't really remember." He elaborates, "We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King."
Which is where things get honestly creepy. I hope Haley Barbour is just making that last detail up. The menacing white mobs that gathered at the periphery of civil rights rallies in places like Yazoo City were almost exclusively male. If he truly remembers the moment through a cloud of testosterone, the imagery invokes to me the most Gothic nastiness imaginable. In "Black Like Me," the 1961 classic in which journalist John Howard Griffith blackened his face to see how race relations worked in the South, Griffith learned through one white interlocutor "how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. 'And I guarantee you, I've had it in every one of them since before they ever got on the payroll…We figure we're doing your people a favor to get some white blood in your kids.'"
No way, not in a million years, am I accusing Haley Barbour of being like this guy. I'm making a different point. At every important turn in the story, Barbour emphasizes how little he remembers of this most intense period imaginable in his beloved home town -- it really was no big deal, he insists. When he does so, this is what he is forgetting: the entire bad-faith stew of race, sex, and corrupt plutocracy -- and its public repression in images of towns like "families" and happy Negroes until outsiders stirred things up -- that defined his formative years. He's a middle-aged Southern conservative. That is what his job is: to opportunistically "forget."
What was the role of the Republican Party in all of this? In 1964, the Mississippi Republican Party changed its platform to reassure potential recruits it bought the whole package: "We feel segregation of the races is absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations and the continued progress of both races in the State of Mississippi." (It worked: Barry Goldwater got 87 percent of the vote.) In 1965, Haley's older brother Jeppie Barbour became one of the first among the Delta's gentry to join the Republican Party. In 1968, with Haley as campaign manager, he became the town's mayor. These were years when the challenge of Massive Resistance became merely bureaucratic, as Lyndon Johnson's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare established legal guidelines to finally force Southern school districts to honor Brown v. Board of Education. The forcing didn't work, in part because Southern Republicans, in concert with President Nixon, kept on devising new ways to stall. Finally, federal courts starting issuing draconian rulings that put the full force of federal police power behind desegregation.
Many school districts still kept fighting. Yazoo City's newly Republican leadership, on the other hand, chose orderly retreat. This is what Haley Barbour is talking about when he claims "the business community wouldn't stand for" anything but legal compliance. The actual field general in the struggle, however, his brother Jeppie Barbour, gave another, less sentimental explanation. The population exodus further skirmishes would have brought would have destroyed the town -- and brought down the plutocrats' fortunes right with it: "We don't have any other choice."
Here was the Delta Republicans' historic task: negotiating terms of surrender to the Constitution, then reframing that Lost Cause as honorable, the better to preserve their insular plutocracy -- perhaps their gravest sin in the first place -- in order to integrate themselves more snugly into national and international circuits of corrupt wealth. Haley Barbour, who received his first Republican patronage job in 1970, is a true son of this confederacy. In 1991 he founded of a lobbying firm that would go on to become the second most powerful in the country in part for its work for the tobacco industry (as governor, he later proposed to dismantle the state's program to discourage youth from using tobacco. In 1993, now RNC chair, he set up a "National Policy Forum," which allegedly shoveled hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign money into the 1994 and 1996 Republican campaigns. Then he provided $50,000 in seed money for the firm of Allen Raymond, which specialized in jamming opponents' phone banks on Election Day. The next year, he became the the South's largest electrical company's liaison to Dick Cheney's secret energy task force.
It goes on. In 2007, now Mississippi governor, Barbour's friends and family were the dominant beneficiaries of $15 billion in federal aid that Governor Barbour brought to the state to take advantage of Hurricane Katrina. One of his nephews, Bloomberg reported, saw his lobbying fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a Katrina reconstruction panel. Barbour received a $25,000 a month payment as a "blind trust" from the firm. That same firm set up a corporation, New Bridge Strategies, to make what it called "big money" on Iraq reconstruction. Meanwhile, in his capacity as governor, Barbour was caught handing out one of the biggest federal contracts in the state for recovery efforts to a Republican activist married to his nephew.
And now they say he's a presidential contender. This great big old bear of a man, you see, according to D.C. gossip Lloyd Grove, "enjoys the friendliest relations with the Washington media elite of any prospective candidate vying for the Republican monition." Margaret Carlson calls him "genuine" and "approachable." After all, as Grove recalls, he kept "a generous supply of Maker's Mark in his handy RNC liquor cabinet." It's one old-fashioned Dixie tradition he's managed to remember just fine.
Altering Twain
by Alec Harvey
Auburn-Montgomery professor Alan Gribben not shocked his editing of Twain classics drawing fire
Published: Wednesday, January 05, 2011, 5:40 AM Updated: Wednesday, January 05, 2011, 10:40 AM
Alan Gribben edited new version of Mark Twain classics.
A Montgomery publisher and the AUM professor who edited out more than 200 uses of a racially derogatory term in a new edition of Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" say they’re not surprised that they’re coming under fire in some quarters.
"Probably a dozen years or so ago, I would have thought the same way," Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery, said Tuesday night. "The author’s final text is sacrosanct and should never be altered."
But Gribben, who has studied and taught Twain for 40 years, changed his mind as he toured the state a few years ago reading to audiences from "Tom Sawyer" as part of the NEA’s Big Read program. He’d routinely replace the n-word -- used 219 times in "Huck Finn" and nine times in "Tom Sawyer," he said -- with the word "slave," which he has done in NewSouth Books’ new combined edition of the two works. In addition, the word "Injun" is replaced with Indian.
"We were very aware that we were doing something that was potentially very provocative and controversial," NewSouth publisher Suzanne La Rosa said. "We were very persuaded by Dr. Gribben’s point of view of what he called the amount of ‘preemptive censorship’ going on at the school level. It pained him personally to see ... the way that Twain’s novels were being de-listed from curricula across the nation. It became difficult for teachers to engage in discussion about the text when the kids were so uncomfortable, particularly with the n-word."
Gribben said that reaction has been fast and mostly furious since word came out about the new edition, which is at press right now and should be shipped in mid-February.
"I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of e-mails, most of them very critical of me," he said. "One thing that has amused me about it is that in the e-mails that take me to task for substituting the word ‘slave,’ not one of these hotly worded e-mails has mentioned the n-word. ... They won’t say the word, and they won’t write the word."
Taken to task
Gribben has gotten criticized roundly by fellow Twain scholars.
"The Mark Twain guild has brought pretty universal condemnation, but I hope they might soften their views once the book comes out and they read my introduction and my reasons," he said. "I’m not going to apologize for this. I want readers to have this as an option."
In the introduction to the new Twain edition, Gribben said he "gradually reached the conclusion that an epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is needed today."
[Read excerpt from Gribben's introduction.]
"Numerous communities currently ban ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as required reading in public schools," he wrote. "The American Library Association lists this novel as one of the most frequently challenged books across the nation."
An option
La Rosa says she doesn’t expect the NewSouth edition of Twain’s classics to replace others that are out there.
"There’s an abundance of other editions that are faithful to the original text," she said. "This is simply an option for teachers who would prefer to offer something else to students who find it difficult.
"What I’m hoping is that this book will be received well in the quarters where it will help the most," La Rosa added. "I’m not expecting it to be universally adopted by educators or academics."
But, she said, she knows the publication of the new edition will be controversial.
"We try to publish books that we feel have cultural content, and we’re not afraid to take chances with the literature we do publish," she said. "We are a pretty unafraid little house."
The new Twain edition won’t replace the other editions that have become iconic in literature, said Gribben, who has taught at AUM for 20 years, 19 of those as head of the English Department.
"It’s always going to be in print with the original wording, and I applaud that," he said. "I think I may have offered some teachers and some general readers an option for a more palatable reading experience."
Auburn-Montgomery professor Alan Gribben not shocked his editing of Twain classics drawing fire
Published: Wednesday, January 05, 2011, 5:40 AM Updated: Wednesday, January 05, 2011, 10:40 AM
Alan Gribben edited new version of Mark Twain classics.
A Montgomery publisher and the AUM professor who edited out more than 200 uses of a racially derogatory term in a new edition of Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" say they’re not surprised that they’re coming under fire in some quarters.
"Probably a dozen years or so ago, I would have thought the same way," Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery, said Tuesday night. "The author’s final text is sacrosanct and should never be altered."
But Gribben, who has studied and taught Twain for 40 years, changed his mind as he toured the state a few years ago reading to audiences from "Tom Sawyer" as part of the NEA’s Big Read program. He’d routinely replace the n-word -- used 219 times in "Huck Finn" and nine times in "Tom Sawyer," he said -- with the word "slave," which he has done in NewSouth Books’ new combined edition of the two works. In addition, the word "Injun" is replaced with Indian.
"We were very aware that we were doing something that was potentially very provocative and controversial," NewSouth publisher Suzanne La Rosa said. "We were very persuaded by Dr. Gribben’s point of view of what he called the amount of ‘preemptive censorship’ going on at the school level. It pained him personally to see ... the way that Twain’s novels were being de-listed from curricula across the nation. It became difficult for teachers to engage in discussion about the text when the kids were so uncomfortable, particularly with the n-word."
Gribben said that reaction has been fast and mostly furious since word came out about the new edition, which is at press right now and should be shipped in mid-February.
"I’ve gotten dozens and dozens of e-mails, most of them very critical of me," he said. "One thing that has amused me about it is that in the e-mails that take me to task for substituting the word ‘slave,’ not one of these hotly worded e-mails has mentioned the n-word. ... They won’t say the word, and they won’t write the word."
Taken to task
Gribben has gotten criticized roundly by fellow Twain scholars.
"The Mark Twain guild has brought pretty universal condemnation, but I hope they might soften their views once the book comes out and they read my introduction and my reasons," he said. "I’m not going to apologize for this. I want readers to have this as an option."
In the introduction to the new Twain edition, Gribben said he "gradually reached the conclusion that an epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is needed today."
[Read excerpt from Gribben's introduction.]
"Numerous communities currently ban ‘Huckleberry Finn’ as required reading in public schools," he wrote. "The American Library Association lists this novel as one of the most frequently challenged books across the nation."
An option
La Rosa says she doesn’t expect the NewSouth edition of Twain’s classics to replace others that are out there.
"There’s an abundance of other editions that are faithful to the original text," she said. "This is simply an option for teachers who would prefer to offer something else to students who find it difficult.
"What I’m hoping is that this book will be received well in the quarters where it will help the most," La Rosa added. "I’m not expecting it to be universally adopted by educators or academics."
But, she said, she knows the publication of the new edition will be controversial.
"We try to publish books that we feel have cultural content, and we’re not afraid to take chances with the literature we do publish," she said. "We are a pretty unafraid little house."
The new Twain edition won’t replace the other editions that have become iconic in literature, said Gribben, who has taught at AUM for 20 years, 19 of those as head of the English Department.
"It’s always going to be in print with the original wording, and I applaud that," he said. "I think I may have offered some teachers and some general readers an option for a more palatable reading experience."
Monday, January 3, 2011
The Republican's Big Lie
Robert Reich/Fmr. Secretary of Labor; Professor at Berkeley; Author, Aftershock: 'The Next Economy and America's Future'
Posted: January 3, 2011 05:39 PM
The Big Lie
Republicans are telling Americans a big lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is that our economic problems are due to a government that's too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.
The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can't borrow as before, and must save for retirement.
The short-term solution is for government to counteract this shortfall by spending more, not less. The long-term solution is to spread the benefits of economic growth more widely (for example, through a more progressive income tax, a larger EITC, an exemption on the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and application of payroll taxes to incomes over $250K, stronger unions, and more and better investments in education and infrastructure.)
But instead of telling the truth, Obama has legitimized the Big Lie by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, freezing federal pay, touting his deficit commission co-chairs' recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase, and agreeing to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Will Obama stand up to the Big Lie? Will he use his State of the Union address to rebut it and tell the truth? Maybe, but so far there's no evidence.
In his weekly address yesterday, the president restated his "commitment" for 2011 "to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class." He added that it's important "to look ahead -- not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years" to find ways to stimulate the economy through innovation. And that it is critical that the U.S. discover ways to "out-compete other countries around the world."
Become more innovative? Out-compete? Who or what is he talking about? Big American corporations are innovating like mad all over the world, with research and development centers in China and India. And their profits are soaring. They're sitting on almost $1 trillion of cash. But they won't create jobs in America because there's not enough demand here to justify them.
In the Republican address in response, U.S. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) restated the Big Lie. "The American people sent us to Congress with clear instructions: make government smaller, not bigger," she said. Deficit reduction "isn't a Republican problem or a Democrat problem -- it's an American problem that will require tough decision-making from both parties." And the way to shrink the deficit is to cut government. The extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over the next two years, she said, was an "important first step" to jump-start the economy.
Starting Wednesday, when the 112th Congress convenes with a Republican majority in the House, we'll be hearing far more of the Big Lie.
George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth. Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that "the size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" and that members of the public are "more easily prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones."
Only the president has the bully pulpit. But will he use it to tell the Big Truth?
Posted: January 3, 2011 05:39 PM
The Big Lie
Republicans are telling Americans a big lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is that our economic problems are due to a government that's too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.
The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can't borrow as before, and must save for retirement.
The short-term solution is for government to counteract this shortfall by spending more, not less. The long-term solution is to spread the benefits of economic growth more widely (for example, through a more progressive income tax, a larger EITC, an exemption on the first $20K of income from payroll taxes and application of payroll taxes to incomes over $250K, stronger unions, and more and better investments in education and infrastructure.)
But instead of telling the truth, Obama has legitimized the Big Lie by freezing non-defense discretionary spending, freezing federal pay, touting his deficit commission co-chairs' recommended $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase, and agreeing to extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Will Obama stand up to the Big Lie? Will he use his State of the Union address to rebut it and tell the truth? Maybe, but so far there's no evidence.
In his weekly address yesterday, the president restated his "commitment" for 2011 "to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class." He added that it's important "to look ahead -- not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years" to find ways to stimulate the economy through innovation. And that it is critical that the U.S. discover ways to "out-compete other countries around the world."
Become more innovative? Out-compete? Who or what is he talking about? Big American corporations are innovating like mad all over the world, with research and development centers in China and India. And their profits are soaring. They're sitting on almost $1 trillion of cash. But they won't create jobs in America because there's not enough demand here to justify them.
In the Republican address in response, U.S. Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) restated the Big Lie. "The American people sent us to Congress with clear instructions: make government smaller, not bigger," she said. Deficit reduction "isn't a Republican problem or a Democrat problem -- it's an American problem that will require tough decision-making from both parties." And the way to shrink the deficit is to cut government. The extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over the next two years, she said, was an "important first step" to jump-start the economy.
Starting Wednesday, when the 112th Congress convenes with a Republican majority in the House, we'll be hearing far more of the Big Lie.
George Orwell once explained that when a public is stressed and confused, a Big Lie told repeatedly can become the accepted truth. Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that "the size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" and that members of the public are "more easily prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones."
Only the president has the bully pulpit. But will he use it to tell the Big Truth?
The Conservative Assault on the Constitution
by Eric A. Posner
The Conservative Assault on the Constitution
by Erwin Chemerinsky
Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $18.50
Chemerinsky has a point. The philosophy of original understanding has never received a persuasive theoretical defense—it owes its current prominence to an unhappy mixture of political opportunism and intellectual confusion. But when Chemerinsky tries to explain what the Court should have done—respect Warren Court precedents; invent a new right to education and equalize school financing; strengthen desegregation and promote affirmative action; recognize a new right to protection from the government; restrain executive power; banish religion from the public sphere; strengthen the rights of gays and lesbians; and increase access to the courts—he gets into trouble.
Despite his contempt for originalism, Chemerinsky makes originalist arguments himself. Wherever convenient, he cites the Constitution and the views of the founding generation. He does this because he thinks that Americans bound themselves to the Constitution so that they would not be tempted later on to persecute minorities, just as Ulysses ordered his men to bind him to the mast so that he would not succumb to the Sirens. But Ulysses did not bind future generations to the mast; constitutionalism is different from self-binding, and indeed Chemerinsky implicitly recognizes this point when he criticizes originalists for trying to bind American policy to out-dated constitutional values.
The confusion does not stop here. Chemerinsky’s claim that judges should tie Americans to the mast of the Constitution contradicts his assertion that originalism fails because the text of the Constitution is vague.
Chemerinsky also argues that the purpose of the Constitution was to protect minorities from majorities. The Warren Court honored this spirit by discovering (that is, inventing) a bevy of new constitutional rights for the civil rights era. However, another purpose of the Constitution was to establish democratic rule. These two purposes are in tension. To explain why the Court should recognize some particular right, it is not adequate to say the Constitution is anti-majoritarian, as Chemerinsky does in the course of defending his constitutional agenda. He must explain why in this instance majoritarian concerns should be set aside.
Chemerinsky criticizes conservative justices for violating precedent, but it does not bother him that the Warren Court violated precedent. He criticizes fellow liberals for relying on the general principles underlying constitutional provisions, correctly noting that they can be used to justify anything—but he does the same thing himself (“the Court should be guided by the underlying goal of creating a more perfect union, of upholding the decency of every individual, and of advancing liberty and equality in society,” among other hokum). Sometimes he argues for particular outcomes by relying on existing doctrine; at other times he argues that existing doctrine is wrong and should be revised. He criticizes conservatives for believing that judges can decide cases in a value-free way, but his own arguments appeal to transcendent legal norms like precedent and legal text.
Or he just makes unsupported assertions. Consider Chemerinsky’s defense of Roe v. Wade. Women have a compelling interest in their reproductive freedom, he says, so there must be a right to an abortion. He acknowledges that other people might care about fetal life, but he believes the state’s interest in fetal life kicks in only after viability. He argues that the reason that viability is the dividing line is that any view that fetal life matters before viability must be religious, and religious views do not count in politics. But in fact some secular people do care about fetal life before viability, and the vast majority of Americans are religious and allow their religious values to influence their views on the law—how could they not? Chemerinsky shares the well-loved conceit among secular intellectuals that only non-religious values may inform public debate. It is a philosopher’s fantasy that has never been true, in this country or in any other.
Finally, Chemerinsky argues that all the conservative case outcomes harm people without providing any benefits. The exclusionary rule and other protections for criminal defendants do not increase crime. Desegregation always improves educational outcomes. Enhanced executive power does not increase safety. But Chemerinsky cites the social science selectively. In fact, for all the issues he discusses, the social science is ambiguous (as he notes when he shoots down the incautious arguments of conservatives). The inconsistencies in Chemerinsky’s argument can be traced to a larger problem. He lacks a coherent theoretical stance on constitutional interpretation, one that could discipline his various claims based on constitutional text, precedent, principle, and policy. He takes a sort of lawyer’s approach that involves throwing everything at a target in the hope that something will stick.
Meanwhile Chemerinsky ignores the major challenges to Warren Court-style jurisprudence. One is whether the Court can lead, as the Warren Court assumed, or is ultimately constrained by popular opinion operating through democratic institutions. Many scholars have argued that the Court usually hews to public opinion because it fears that it will lose public support if it does not; when it does depart from public opinion, it whips up political maelstroms. Chemerinsky ignores this large literature even while inadvertently reproducing its own pessimistic conclusions about the potential of Court-led social change. For Chemerinsky claims that the conservative assault on the Constitution resulted from a political backlash to the Warren Court. He says nothing about what this backlash implies about the political viability of Warren Court-style jurisprudence in the first place.
The other big debate concerns the tension between judicial review and democracy. Chemerinsky largely ignores recent writing by liberals and conservatives who fret that when courts too freely overturn legislation, they stifle public deliberation, infantilize the people, and play a legislative role to which they are not suited. These writings have not won a judicial constituency, but they do express a general uneasiness with “living constitution”-style arguments that courts should constrain democratic decisionmaking on the basis of public values that change with the times. Good arguments are not lacking on behalf of this variety of judicial decision-making. Indeed, it is all that is left standing if originalism is wrong. But Chemerinsky offers no new arguments to advance his cause. He simply equates constitutional evolution with (more or less) the platform of the Democratic Party.
Like a good brief, Chemerinsky’s book is brisk and impassioned, and he enlivens the argument with stories of his own clients’ entanglement in constitutional litigation. He has good fun with fatuous conservative rhetoric and the political blather of Republican presidents, and he makes telling points about the psychological burdens of “neutral” judicial interpretation. But he skimps on real scholarship. Instead he caricatures those he disagrees with, presenting cartoon versions of their arguments that can be easily dismissed.
Chemerinsky never addresses the obvious possibility that the liberal justices whom he champions are as ideologically motivated as the conservative justices whom he deplores, despite a massive political science literature that provides considerable evidence of outcome-oriented voting by all justices on the Supreme Court. Disagreements among conservatives, including the conservative justices, are rarely mentioned, as are their agreements with the liberal justices in a range of business cases; attention to these fissures and convergences would undermine his depiction of the conservatives as undifferentiated figures in a wicked political monolith. His clients are noble; the conservatives are evil; his fellow lawyers heroic. Chemerinsky dips into the advocate’s bag of tricks too many times: he seems like the stereotypical lawyer who will say anything to win his case and does not care about the truth. The artifice of his presentation robs his argument of its force.
Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
The Conservative Assault on the Constitution
by Erwin Chemerinsky
Simon & Schuster, 336 pp., $18.50
Chemerinsky has a point. The philosophy of original understanding has never received a persuasive theoretical defense—it owes its current prominence to an unhappy mixture of political opportunism and intellectual confusion. But when Chemerinsky tries to explain what the Court should have done—respect Warren Court precedents; invent a new right to education and equalize school financing; strengthen desegregation and promote affirmative action; recognize a new right to protection from the government; restrain executive power; banish religion from the public sphere; strengthen the rights of gays and lesbians; and increase access to the courts—he gets into trouble.
Despite his contempt for originalism, Chemerinsky makes originalist arguments himself. Wherever convenient, he cites the Constitution and the views of the founding generation. He does this because he thinks that Americans bound themselves to the Constitution so that they would not be tempted later on to persecute minorities, just as Ulysses ordered his men to bind him to the mast so that he would not succumb to the Sirens. But Ulysses did not bind future generations to the mast; constitutionalism is different from self-binding, and indeed Chemerinsky implicitly recognizes this point when he criticizes originalists for trying to bind American policy to out-dated constitutional values.
The confusion does not stop here. Chemerinsky’s claim that judges should tie Americans to the mast of the Constitution contradicts his assertion that originalism fails because the text of the Constitution is vague.
Chemerinsky also argues that the purpose of the Constitution was to protect minorities from majorities. The Warren Court honored this spirit by discovering (that is, inventing) a bevy of new constitutional rights for the civil rights era. However, another purpose of the Constitution was to establish democratic rule. These two purposes are in tension. To explain why the Court should recognize some particular right, it is not adequate to say the Constitution is anti-majoritarian, as Chemerinsky does in the course of defending his constitutional agenda. He must explain why in this instance majoritarian concerns should be set aside.
Chemerinsky criticizes conservative justices for violating precedent, but it does not bother him that the Warren Court violated precedent. He criticizes fellow liberals for relying on the general principles underlying constitutional provisions, correctly noting that they can be used to justify anything—but he does the same thing himself (“the Court should be guided by the underlying goal of creating a more perfect union, of upholding the decency of every individual, and of advancing liberty and equality in society,” among other hokum). Sometimes he argues for particular outcomes by relying on existing doctrine; at other times he argues that existing doctrine is wrong and should be revised. He criticizes conservatives for believing that judges can decide cases in a value-free way, but his own arguments appeal to transcendent legal norms like precedent and legal text.
Or he just makes unsupported assertions. Consider Chemerinsky’s defense of Roe v. Wade. Women have a compelling interest in their reproductive freedom, he says, so there must be a right to an abortion. He acknowledges that other people might care about fetal life, but he believes the state’s interest in fetal life kicks in only after viability. He argues that the reason that viability is the dividing line is that any view that fetal life matters before viability must be religious, and religious views do not count in politics. But in fact some secular people do care about fetal life before viability, and the vast majority of Americans are religious and allow their religious values to influence their views on the law—how could they not? Chemerinsky shares the well-loved conceit among secular intellectuals that only non-religious values may inform public debate. It is a philosopher’s fantasy that has never been true, in this country or in any other.
Finally, Chemerinsky argues that all the conservative case outcomes harm people without providing any benefits. The exclusionary rule and other protections for criminal defendants do not increase crime. Desegregation always improves educational outcomes. Enhanced executive power does not increase safety. But Chemerinsky cites the social science selectively. In fact, for all the issues he discusses, the social science is ambiguous (as he notes when he shoots down the incautious arguments of conservatives). The inconsistencies in Chemerinsky’s argument can be traced to a larger problem. He lacks a coherent theoretical stance on constitutional interpretation, one that could discipline his various claims based on constitutional text, precedent, principle, and policy. He takes a sort of lawyer’s approach that involves throwing everything at a target in the hope that something will stick.
Meanwhile Chemerinsky ignores the major challenges to Warren Court-style jurisprudence. One is whether the Court can lead, as the Warren Court assumed, or is ultimately constrained by popular opinion operating through democratic institutions. Many scholars have argued that the Court usually hews to public opinion because it fears that it will lose public support if it does not; when it does depart from public opinion, it whips up political maelstroms. Chemerinsky ignores this large literature even while inadvertently reproducing its own pessimistic conclusions about the potential of Court-led social change. For Chemerinsky claims that the conservative assault on the Constitution resulted from a political backlash to the Warren Court. He says nothing about what this backlash implies about the political viability of Warren Court-style jurisprudence in the first place.
The other big debate concerns the tension between judicial review and democracy. Chemerinsky largely ignores recent writing by liberals and conservatives who fret that when courts too freely overturn legislation, they stifle public deliberation, infantilize the people, and play a legislative role to which they are not suited. These writings have not won a judicial constituency, but they do express a general uneasiness with “living constitution”-style arguments that courts should constrain democratic decisionmaking on the basis of public values that change with the times. Good arguments are not lacking on behalf of this variety of judicial decision-making. Indeed, it is all that is left standing if originalism is wrong. But Chemerinsky offers no new arguments to advance his cause. He simply equates constitutional evolution with (more or less) the platform of the Democratic Party.
Like a good brief, Chemerinsky’s book is brisk and impassioned, and he enlivens the argument with stories of his own clients’ entanglement in constitutional litigation. He has good fun with fatuous conservative rhetoric and the political blather of Republican presidents, and he makes telling points about the psychological burdens of “neutral” judicial interpretation. But he skimps on real scholarship. Instead he caricatures those he disagrees with, presenting cartoon versions of their arguments that can be easily dismissed.
Chemerinsky never addresses the obvious possibility that the liberal justices whom he champions are as ideologically motivated as the conservative justices whom he deplores, despite a massive political science literature that provides considerable evidence of outcome-oriented voting by all justices on the Supreme Court. Disagreements among conservatives, including the conservative justices, are rarely mentioned, as are their agreements with the liberal justices in a range of business cases; attention to these fissures and convergences would undermine his depiction of the conservatives as undifferentiated figures in a wicked political monolith. His clients are noble; the conservatives are evil; his fellow lawyers heroic. Chemerinsky dips into the advocate’s bag of tricks too many times: he seems like the stereotypical lawyer who will say anything to win his case and does not care about the truth. The artifice of his presentation robs his argument of its force.
Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Conservative Economic Nonsense
Jonathan Chait
Why Do Good Conservative Economists Endorse Pseudoeconomic Nonsense?
Former Bush economic advisor Greg Mankiw urges President Obama to stop "spreading the wealth:
Ever since your famous exchange with Joe the Plumber, it has been clear that you believe that the redistribution of income is a crucial function of government. A long philosophical tradition supports your view. It includes John Rawls’s treatise “A Theory of Justice,” which concludes that the main goal of public policy should be to transfer resources to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Many Republicans, however, reject this view of the state. From their perspective, it is not the proper role of government to fix the income distribution in an attempt to achieve some utopian vision of fairness. They believe, instead, that in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.
Like AEI President Arthur Brooks, Mankiw makes a fundamental arror here is assuming that there are two approaches toward income distribution: believing either that the market is perfectly fair and all attempts to mitigate market inequality therefore fundamentally unjust, or believing in total equality. Obama and the Democrats are not pursuing anything even vaguely resembling a "utopian vision of fairness." The tax code is very slightly redistributive:
Democrats propose to make it ever more slightly so. But restoring Clinton-era rates on the rich is not a utopian left-wing plan.
Mankiw's argument serves the useful, if inadvertent, purpose of showing how it is that at least some legitimate economists support the GOP. Republican economic policy is dominated by a debt-financed tax cuts, a policy that has no economic support. (To the extent that conservative economists can back up support for tax cutting, it is for tax cuts matched by spending cuts, which has no relation to actual Republican policy.) Mankiw is an acclaimed economist, and actually wrote a textbook describing those who claim tax cuts can increase revenue as "charlatans and cranks," despite the fact that the president he worked for repeatedly made that very argument.
So why is it that conservative economists like himself can lend their name to Lafferism and other nonsense? They're driven by their political philosophy, not their economic beliefs. Mankiw is willing to overlook the crankery of Republican economics because it furthers his philosophical beliefs. When he advocates Repiublican policies, it is generally Mankiw the amateur political philosopher speaking, not Mankiw the economist.
Why Do Good Conservative Economists Endorse Pseudoeconomic Nonsense?
Former Bush economic advisor Greg Mankiw urges President Obama to stop "spreading the wealth:
Ever since your famous exchange with Joe the Plumber, it has been clear that you believe that the redistribution of income is a crucial function of government. A long philosophical tradition supports your view. It includes John Rawls’s treatise “A Theory of Justice,” which concludes that the main goal of public policy should be to transfer resources to those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Many Republicans, however, reject this view of the state. From their perspective, it is not the proper role of government to fix the income distribution in an attempt to achieve some utopian vision of fairness. They believe, instead, that in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.
Like AEI President Arthur Brooks, Mankiw makes a fundamental arror here is assuming that there are two approaches toward income distribution: believing either that the market is perfectly fair and all attempts to mitigate market inequality therefore fundamentally unjust, or believing in total equality. Obama and the Democrats are not pursuing anything even vaguely resembling a "utopian vision of fairness." The tax code is very slightly redistributive:
Democrats propose to make it ever more slightly so. But restoring Clinton-era rates on the rich is not a utopian left-wing plan.
Mankiw's argument serves the useful, if inadvertent, purpose of showing how it is that at least some legitimate economists support the GOP. Republican economic policy is dominated by a debt-financed tax cuts, a policy that has no economic support. (To the extent that conservative economists can back up support for tax cutting, it is for tax cuts matched by spending cuts, which has no relation to actual Republican policy.) Mankiw is an acclaimed economist, and actually wrote a textbook describing those who claim tax cuts can increase revenue as "charlatans and cranks," despite the fact that the president he worked for repeatedly made that very argument.
So why is it that conservative economists like himself can lend their name to Lafferism and other nonsense? They're driven by their political philosophy, not their economic beliefs. Mankiw is willing to overlook the crankery of Republican economics because it furthers his philosophical beliefs. When he advocates Repiublican policies, it is generally Mankiw the amateur political philosopher speaking, not Mankiw the economist.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Less Reading = Less Empathy
Home » Scientific American Mind » January 2011
See Inside What, Me Care?
A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S.
By Jamil Zaki | January 19, 2011 | 1
Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom’s prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people’s emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years.
The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social Psychology Review, found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.
An individual’s empathy can be assessed in many ways, but one of the most popular is simply asking people what they think of themselves. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a well-known questionnaire, taps empathy by asking whether responders agree to statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.” People vary a great deal in how empathic they consider themselves. Moreover, research confirms that the people who say they are empathic actually demonstrate empathy in discernible ways, ranging from mimicking others’ postures to helping people in need (for example, offering to take notes for a sick fellow student).
Since the creation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index in 1979, tens of thousands of students have filled out this questionnaire while participating in studies examining everything from neural responses to others’ pain to levels of social conservatism. Konrath and her colleagues took advantage of this wealth of data by collating self-reported empathy scores of nearly 14,000 students. She then used a technique known as cross-temporal meta-analysis to measure whether scores have changed over the years. The results were startling: almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.
What’s to Blame?
This information seems to conflict with studies suggesting that empathy is a trait people are born with. For example, in a 2007 study Yale University developmental psychologists found that six-month-old infants demonstrate an affinity for empathic behavior, preferring simple dolls they have seen helping others over visually similar bullies. And investigators at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have shown that even when given no incentive, toddlers help experimenters and share rewards with others. Empathic behavior is not confined to humans or even to primates. In a recent study mice reacted more strongly to painful stimuli when they saw another mouse suffering, suggesting that they “share” the pain of their cage mates.
But the new finding that empathy is on the decline indicates that even when a trait is hardwired, social context can exert a profound effect, changing even our most basic emotional responses. Precisely what is sapping young people of their natural impulse to feel for others remains mysterious, however, because scientists cannot design a study to evaluate changes that occurred in the past. As Twenge puts it, “you can’t randomly assign people to a generation.”
There are theories, however. Konrath cites the increase in social isolation, which has coincided with the drop in empathy. In the past 30 years Americans have become more likely to live alone and less likely to join groups—ranging from PTAs to political parties to casual sports teams. Several studies hint that this type of isolation can take a toll on people’s attitudes toward others. Steve Duck of the University of Iowa has found that socially isolated, as compared with integrated, individuals evaluate others less generously after interacting with them, and Kenneth J. Rotenberg of Keele University in England has shown that lonely people are more likely to take advantage of others’ trust to cheat them in laboratory games.
The types of information we consume have also shifted in recent decades; specifically, Americans have abandoned reading in droves. The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50 percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
Whereas the sources of empathic decline are impossible to pinpoint, the work of Konrath and Twenge demonstrates that the American personality is shifting in an ominous direction. Still, we are not doomed to become a society of self-obsessed loners. Konrath points out that if life choices can drive empathy down, then making different choices could nurture it. “The fact that empathy is declining means that there’s more fluidity to it than previously thought,” she says. “It means that empathy can change. It can go up.”
See Inside What, Me Care?
A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S.
By Jamil Zaki | January 19, 2011 | 1
Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom’s prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people’s emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years.
The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social Psychology Review, found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.
An individual’s empathy can be assessed in many ways, but one of the most popular is simply asking people what they think of themselves. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a well-known questionnaire, taps empathy by asking whether responders agree to statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I try to look at everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision.” People vary a great deal in how empathic they consider themselves. Moreover, research confirms that the people who say they are empathic actually demonstrate empathy in discernible ways, ranging from mimicking others’ postures to helping people in need (for example, offering to take notes for a sick fellow student).
Since the creation of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index in 1979, tens of thousands of students have filled out this questionnaire while participating in studies examining everything from neural responses to others’ pain to levels of social conservatism. Konrath and her colleagues took advantage of this wealth of data by collating self-reported empathy scores of nearly 14,000 students. She then used a technique known as cross-temporal meta-analysis to measure whether scores have changed over the years. The results were startling: almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.
What’s to Blame?
This information seems to conflict with studies suggesting that empathy is a trait people are born with. For example, in a 2007 study Yale University developmental psychologists found that six-month-old infants demonstrate an affinity for empathic behavior, preferring simple dolls they have seen helping others over visually similar bullies. And investigators at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have shown that even when given no incentive, toddlers help experimenters and share rewards with others. Empathic behavior is not confined to humans or even to primates. In a recent study mice reacted more strongly to painful stimuli when they saw another mouse suffering, suggesting that they “share” the pain of their cage mates.
But the new finding that empathy is on the decline indicates that even when a trait is hardwired, social context can exert a profound effect, changing even our most basic emotional responses. Precisely what is sapping young people of their natural impulse to feel for others remains mysterious, however, because scientists cannot design a study to evaluate changes that occurred in the past. As Twenge puts it, “you can’t randomly assign people to a generation.”
There are theories, however. Konrath cites the increase in social isolation, which has coincided with the drop in empathy. In the past 30 years Americans have become more likely to live alone and less likely to join groups—ranging from PTAs to political parties to casual sports teams. Several studies hint that this type of isolation can take a toll on people’s attitudes toward others. Steve Duck of the University of Iowa has found that socially isolated, as compared with integrated, individuals evaluate others less generously after interacting with them, and Kenneth J. Rotenberg of Keele University in England has shown that lonely people are more likely to take advantage of others’ trust to cheat them in laboratory games.
The types of information we consume have also shifted in recent decades; specifically, Americans have abandoned reading in droves. The number of adults who read literature for pleasure sank below 50 percent for the first time ever in the past 10 years, with the decrease occurring most sharply among college-age adults. And reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
Whereas the sources of empathic decline are impossible to pinpoint, the work of Konrath and Twenge demonstrates that the American personality is shifting in an ominous direction. Still, we are not doomed to become a society of self-obsessed loners. Konrath points out that if life choices can drive empathy down, then making different choices could nurture it. “The fact that empathy is declining means that there’s more fluidity to it than previously thought,” she says. “It means that empathy can change. It can go up.”
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