Am. History & Culture
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Quote of the Day: Seth Ackerman
However disastrous or ridiculous the outcome of this crisis ultimately proves to be, the sub-democratic structure of American politics will guarantee that the consequences will be non-existent for those who initiated it: the regime of repressed competition will ensure no consequences for the individual legislators, while its separation of powers will probably ensure no consequences
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Is This an Historic Moment?
As this week’s deadline neared, the investor Warren Buffett, among others, likened threatening default to a kind of economic nuclear warfare. The White House approached the confrontation with the gravity of those October days a half-century ago when President John F. Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles in Cuba. If
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Liberal/Conservative; Revolutionary/Reactionary
There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty,
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Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy
According to the civics text books, a democracy is a government in which the people are sovereign. In its republican forms it elects people who represent them in legislatures, and they work to create the laws that the sovereign people are obligated to obey, whether they like them or not because they were enacted by
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Taking Offense
This is the week when the news is filled with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Paula Deen's cluelessness, and the end of DOMA, and so I've had a few things on my mind about setting and crossing lines in a pluralistic society. Where is it that we come together, where we feel a sense of
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O’Hehir on American Dystopia
Are we there yet? O'Hehir has an interesting piece that complements the discussion in comments about my last post. He quotes Neil Postman echoing a comment made by Jonathan about how Huxley was perhaps a more accurate predictor of our future: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that
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Game Change (Updated)
I just saw the movie–was vaguely aware of it when it first came out, but didn't have HBO. But after watching it, found this remarkable video of Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's key strategists in the 2008 campaign. Woody Harrelson plays him in the movie and Julianne Moore plays Palin. Well worth watching if you
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It’s the Nineties Again
Obama's bad week is hardly worth commenting on except to point out that the only criticism of the administration that gets any traction in the corporate media is the criticism from the Right. The Ben Ghazi thing is all smoke, the IRS thing is about an overwhelmed bureaucracy, and the subpoenaing of the AP phone
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Commonplace Freedoms
What Gramsci calls 'common sense' . . . typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can,
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Commodifying the Un-commodifiable
From Michael Sandel's "What Isn't for Sale" in the April Atlantic: This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market economy is