"Mitch McConnell made a snap decision one night in 2016," writes veteran New York Times Washington correspondent Carl Hulse in his latest book, Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh. "The consequences will reverberate for decades" (Hulse, 2019, p. 290). The night in question was February 13, 2016. Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at a resort ranch in Texas, news that soon began to make the rounds in Washington and the nation at large. A rarefied hero in conservative legal and political circles, possessed of an originalist bent and considerable intellect, Scalia's death was mourned bipartisanly before grief was subsumed by the political implications.
It was the last year of the Obama presidency, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was determined to have a conservative installed in that now vacant seat. Chances are, Obama wouldn't do it. So McConnell hedged his bets on a Republican winning the 2016 election, and made the unprecedented decision to stonewall President Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill Scalia's seat.
How did we get to that point, the point where one party was willing to set aside bipartisan advice-and-consent in the ever important process of appointing and confirming a qualified individual to life service on the highest court in the land?
The story goes back three decades to the 1980s, with the contentious federal court confirmation hearings of the Reagan years after notable conservative successes at filling influential court seats. Then there was the hearing for Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Robert Bork in 1987, in which Senator Edward Kennedy's opening day speech painted a dystopian future for women and minorities if Bork's conservative legal philosophy was allowed to reign supreme.
A concerted Democratic effort to block Bork on a more partisan basis had inadvertently been started, leading to the defeat of Bork's nomination and the entry into the political dictionary of a new verb, "borked," to describe a form of political obstruction via character assassination and other underhanded tactics more common to election fights rather than the process of appointing impartial legal minds to the federal judiciary (Hulse, 2019, p. 58).
It turns out, the Bork fight was a warm-up for both camps, who recognized the increasing urgency of the judicial fights in leaving long-lasting ideological legacies on the courts. Republicans would build up considerable organizational muscle for the pushing of conservative legal minds into the courts via prominent think-tanks and advocacy groups like the Federalist Society (est. 1982) and the Judicial Crisis Network (est. 2005). However, liberals of a more institutionalist bent would be late to the game, founding in 2018 the Demand Justice organization to counter the Judicial Crisis Network by pushing for more progressive judicial minds.
Meanwhile, partisan court appointment principles would come to be ingrained in the system when in November 2013, frustrated Democrats altered procedural rules to allow for the bypassing of the filibuster (a 60-vote threshold needed to be overcome before an appointee was voted upon) in the case of judicial appointments lower than the Supreme Court level to overcome stalwart Republican opposition to Obama federal court nominees. This cap would be removed for Supreme Court picks in May 2017 to confirm Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, and later, his second, Brett Kavanaugh, on simple majority, largely party-line votes. Armed with both the 2013 and 2017 rule changes, and the considerable expertise and resources of the Judicial Crisis Network and the Federalist Society, Republicans approved slews of conservative candidates at the federal level with ease, a rare success of the Trump administration where other policy fights have not been as successful.
In his concluding remarks, Hulse warns that the rule changes of 2013 and 2017 have set in motion a toxic cycle of partisan legislative agendas getting altered or thrown out when the other party takes power, severely hampering the ability of the federal government to sustain meaningful policy initiatives and other governing projects with the aim of protecting American citizens (and the government is already struggling to do that on limited budgets and personnel resources; see my post reviewing The Fifth Risk for a lengthier discussion of federal organizations under the current administration). Moreover, the courts mediating those fights are increasingly seen as untrustworthy, merely a partisan extension of the other two branches, with the large numbers of Trump appointees tilting the balance to the right for decades.
How will this shift in the ideological balance ultimately impact rulings on key Trump policies increasingly challenged by liberal legal advocacy groups, such as those regarding immigration or regulatory rollback?
Stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Hulse, Carl. (2019). Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, From Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh. New York: HarperCollins.
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Friday, October 11, 2019
Book Review: Michael Lewis's "The Fifth Risk"
How important is a presidential transition? Turns out, it's pretty important. Not only does a successful one demonstrate the importance of the peaceful hand-over of power between political factions, but also enables a new administration to continue mostly uninterrupted the ongoing work of the federal government to protect its citizens from a myriad of threats, whether climate change, food-borne illness, or destitution. That is why the nominees of both major political parties are required to make plans on how to fill the necessary governmental posts before the outcome of a presidential election is made known, so that no matter who wins, the important services continue to be provided. So what happened with the latest presidential transition? Moneyball author Michael Lewis takes an inside look at the impact of the Trump administration's transition on the federal government in his latest book, The Fifth Risk (2018).
To many Americans, the federal government is an opaque, unwieldy many-armed bureaucratic beast whose successes go largely un-lauded, with the majority of the work done in places where "the cameras never roll," while its failures are widely publicized and politicized (Lewis, 2018, p. 95). Composed of "two million federal employees" overseen by "four thousand political appointees," it admittedly is a sometimes dysfunctional enterprise, with cyclical turnover happening at the end of a president's term not necessarily incentivizing efficiency (Lewis, 2018, p. 37).
Yes, it has faults, but Lewis argues that politics is only a tiny part of the big picture of its continued problems, pointing to the process as being the bigger issue, in who and how a new administration chooses to learn (or not) about the missions of each agency in the critical approximately 75 day period between election and inauguration and beyond. Is the administration choosing to tackle the problem of the "fifth risk," by engaging in long-term planning in response to long-term issues rather than trying to solve them with short-term band-aids (Lewis, 2018, p. 75)?
So, it should be no surprise that the current administration's "drain the swamp" transition did not go at all smoothly, with no concrete plans drawn up and then executed by then President-elect Trump's administration to fill the necessary vacancies or even learn about the work each agency has done. Exhaustive briefings by Obama appointees went unattended for the most part, with few Trump appointees showing up; if they did, they were largely unqualified and uninterested in core agency missions.
To help administrations speed up the process, federal laws have been amended to require only 1,200 positions be confirmed by the Senate. Nevertheless, not even after two and a half years under the current administration have all positions been filled. Today, of 731 top executive positions needing Senate confirmation of nominees, including "cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries, chief financial officers, general counsel, heads of agencies, ambassadors and other critical leadership positions," 486 have been filled and 99 have nominees, while 141 posts remain empty with no nominee (Washington Post & Partnership for Public Service, 2019). It almost seems like running the government smoothly isn't a priority and willful ignorance is the rule, not the exception.
What happens when the latter is the case?
By looking at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy through the stories of earnest public servants, Lewis makes clear that most of the administration's picks slated to fill critical positions in these agencies follows a pattern of short-term self interest that is hampering efforts to identify and make plans in the face of continuing or emerging threats. Publicly accessible data has been going missing on government websites, from information about animal abuse, climate change, and violent crime. Many Trump picks seem more interested in weakening their respective institution in favor of private interests, not knowing or caring for the critical work being done to minimize risk for American citizens on many fronts that the private sector just isn't incentivized to take-up (think the development of experimental vaccines to preventing terrorists from stealing nuclear materials).
For instance, within the Department of Commerce, Trump's appointee to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose work includes addressing climate change and national weather forecasting, is Barry Myers, former CEO of private weather company AccuWeather. Myers, whose business relies on government-collected weather data, has been calling for the removal of publicly accessible weather data in favor of charging people for access to that same data. However, Myers has not been officially confirmed.
What then is the way forward? Yes, there are many positions that could be cut in the name of efficiency, a smart approach to make the government more nimble in the face of current threats, many long-term problems of immense scale, like climate change. But to do that, first you need to learn an agency and its functions, promote its programmatic and organizational strengths and minimize its weaknesses, something not high on the Trump administration's list of priorities.
"It's what you fail to imagine that kills you," Lewis warns in the conclusion of The Fifth Risk (Lewis, 2018, p. 219). That's what is troubling about those 141 empty posts, the deliberate ignorance of the existence of tools (personal or technological) to address and solve problems. A problem doesn't just go away if you don't acknowledge its existence. Sooner or later, this attitude tends to come back and bite everyone.
Works Cited:
Lewis, Michael. (2018). The Fifth Risk. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Washington Post, & Partnership for Public Service. (2019). Trump Nominations Tracker: Tracking How Many Key Positions Trump Has Filled So Far. Retrieved August 16, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-administration-appointee-tracker/database/?noredirect=on.
To many Americans, the federal government is an opaque, unwieldy many-armed bureaucratic beast whose successes go largely un-lauded, with the majority of the work done in places where "the cameras never roll," while its failures are widely publicized and politicized (Lewis, 2018, p. 95). Composed of "two million federal employees" overseen by "four thousand political appointees," it admittedly is a sometimes dysfunctional enterprise, with cyclical turnover happening at the end of a president's term not necessarily incentivizing efficiency (Lewis, 2018, p. 37).
Yes, it has faults, but Lewis argues that politics is only a tiny part of the big picture of its continued problems, pointing to the process as being the bigger issue, in who and how a new administration chooses to learn (or not) about the missions of each agency in the critical approximately 75 day period between election and inauguration and beyond. Is the administration choosing to tackle the problem of the "fifth risk," by engaging in long-term planning in response to long-term issues rather than trying to solve them with short-term band-aids (Lewis, 2018, p. 75)?
So, it should be no surprise that the current administration's "drain the swamp" transition did not go at all smoothly, with no concrete plans drawn up and then executed by then President-elect Trump's administration to fill the necessary vacancies or even learn about the work each agency has done. Exhaustive briefings by Obama appointees went unattended for the most part, with few Trump appointees showing up; if they did, they were largely unqualified and uninterested in core agency missions.
To help administrations speed up the process, federal laws have been amended to require only 1,200 positions be confirmed by the Senate. Nevertheless, not even after two and a half years under the current administration have all positions been filled. Today, of 731 top executive positions needing Senate confirmation of nominees, including "cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries, chief financial officers, general counsel, heads of agencies, ambassadors and other critical leadership positions," 486 have been filled and 99 have nominees, while 141 posts remain empty with no nominee (Washington Post & Partnership for Public Service, 2019). It almost seems like running the government smoothly isn't a priority and willful ignorance is the rule, not the exception.
What happens when the latter is the case?
By looking at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy through the stories of earnest public servants, Lewis makes clear that most of the administration's picks slated to fill critical positions in these agencies follows a pattern of short-term self interest that is hampering efforts to identify and make plans in the face of continuing or emerging threats. Publicly accessible data has been going missing on government websites, from information about animal abuse, climate change, and violent crime. Many Trump picks seem more interested in weakening their respective institution in favor of private interests, not knowing or caring for the critical work being done to minimize risk for American citizens on many fronts that the private sector just isn't incentivized to take-up (think the development of experimental vaccines to preventing terrorists from stealing nuclear materials).
For instance, within the Department of Commerce, Trump's appointee to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose work includes addressing climate change and national weather forecasting, is Barry Myers, former CEO of private weather company AccuWeather. Myers, whose business relies on government-collected weather data, has been calling for the removal of publicly accessible weather data in favor of charging people for access to that same data. However, Myers has not been officially confirmed.
What then is the way forward? Yes, there are many positions that could be cut in the name of efficiency, a smart approach to make the government more nimble in the face of current threats, many long-term problems of immense scale, like climate change. But to do that, first you need to learn an agency and its functions, promote its programmatic and organizational strengths and minimize its weaknesses, something not high on the Trump administration's list of priorities.
"It's what you fail to imagine that kills you," Lewis warns in the conclusion of The Fifth Risk (Lewis, 2018, p. 219). That's what is troubling about those 141 empty posts, the deliberate ignorance of the existence of tools (personal or technological) to address and solve problems. A problem doesn't just go away if you don't acknowledge its existence. Sooner or later, this attitude tends to come back and bite everyone.
Works Cited:
Lewis, Michael. (2018). The Fifth Risk. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Washington Post, & Partnership for Public Service. (2019). Trump Nominations Tracker: Tracking How Many Key Positions Trump Has Filled So Far. Retrieved August 16, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-administration-appointee-tracker/database/?noredirect=on.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Book Review: Katharina Pistor's "The Code of Capital"
The rule of law. That should be a familiar phrase for anyone who lives in a democratic society, where law is supposed to be a leveling influence, backed up by the power of the state, protecting citizens from abuses of power from both the public and private sectors alike. It is an idea firmly embedded in our society, from governmental institutions (think Law and Order) to the boardrooms of corporations that drive the global economy. In the latter private sector, rule of law is sacrosanct, giving legitimacy to the transactions they conduct on a daily basis in the form of all-important capital. What exactly is capital, and what role does the law have in a capitalist economy? Columbia Professor of Comparative Law Katharina Pistor's latest work, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019), answers these questions and more in her exploration of the legal mechanisms used to help generate wealth for private sector entities and clients.
It just so turns out that lawyers are very crafty at finding loopholes within the legal regimes that private entities run on in the form of bankruptcy, collateral, contract, corporate, and trust laws and property rights. Their job is to maximize monetary returns for their clients. How do they do this? By incrementally pushing and stretching the limits of said law, just short of the red-line drawn by past case law, where it can be claimed, if challenged in court or in private tribunals, that it is still technically legal, whether based on past court precedent or the absence of an expressed prohibition of a certain practice.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, what is capital, and where does it come from? Capital is the combination of "an asset" and its protecting "legal code," with assets taking the form of anything from an object (such as land or a house) to a skill or idea (for example, the idea of the internal combustion engine or the discovery of a cancer-causing gene) with the potential to be commodified and monetized (Pistor, 2019, p. 2). To get from land to money, or from a cancer gene to a windfall, the key is the legal mechanism used, drawn from the above listed areas of law, that can generate wealth and weather the downturns by conferring on assets the coveted traits of "priority, which ranks competing claims to the same assets; durability, which extends priority claims in time; universality, which extends them in space; and convertibility, which operates as an insurance device that allows holders to convert their private credit claims into state money on demand" (Pistor, 2019, p. 3).
In other words, the key to generating sizable wealth is the ability to protect one's accumulated assets from a hoard of creditors, or conversely, to recover one's assets in the case of another party not being able to hold up their end of the bargain (think defaulting on a loan, for example). And also, to being able to translate said asset's market value into one's currency of choice.
Better yet, the legal shield provided by lawyers, whom Pistor calls the "master of the code," are often backed up by state powers internationally, because recognizing the law an asset was protected by in one country in another provides the impression of legal certainty for asset-holders. Because of this relative legal stability, these investors are more likely to invest in another state's economy and potentially expand their tax revenues, granting upon its population greater prosperity (Pistor, 2019, p. 20). Sound familiar?
However, when states recognize an asset's home legal coding (primarily taking the form of law found in England and the United States), or even go further in adding other sweetening incentives for businesses, growing economic inequality is often the result. Clients and their lawyers are in the game of maximum returns, and as a result, states trying to regulate the excesses of such practices are often playing a game of whack-a-mole, as lawyers rediscover centuries-old feudal economic law or a more innovative legal method to evade taxes and continue to grow their personal fortune.
Moreover, because capital exists largely in law (i.e. is a construct), legal mechanisms often make assets artificially more valuable than they really are. This can be devastating when these assets are found to have been over-valued, with a resulting market adjustment to an asset's actual value often conferring increased clean-up costs on the general public over the asset-holders themselves, who often can cash-in in advance when they see the economic-writing-on-the-wall and escape with minimal losses.
What are we to do when this kind of legal coding has become deeply intertwined within the international financial and political systems? As in my previous posts, looking at books whose authors have increasingly defended the liberal system of incremental reform over calls for the sudden overthrow of the system, even as it becomes ever more unpopular, Pistor advises a similar approach. Despite her largely frustrated undertone to her even-handed look at the current economic landscape, she advocates for a slow-burn course of action that would require a leveling of the playing field for everyone below the rich and powerful, including boosting access to the lawyers and legal mechanisms the privileged use, as well as increasing oversight of current practices to ensure that they are contributing more to greater societal prosperity than to personal fortunes.
Absent concerted reforms now and into the future, Pistor warns of revolution or "the further erosion of law's legitimacy" to a public growing increasingly frustrated and desperate, seeking scapegoats in foreigners or immigrants when the fault really lies with the excesses of today's economic kingpins (Pistor, 2019, p. 234). And that is a dangerous future for all of us.
Works Cited:
Pistor, Katharina. (2019). The Code of Capital: How The Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. New York: Princeton University Press.
It just so turns out that lawyers are very crafty at finding loopholes within the legal regimes that private entities run on in the form of bankruptcy, collateral, contract, corporate, and trust laws and property rights. Their job is to maximize monetary returns for their clients. How do they do this? By incrementally pushing and stretching the limits of said law, just short of the red-line drawn by past case law, where it can be claimed, if challenged in court or in private tribunals, that it is still technically legal, whether based on past court precedent or the absence of an expressed prohibition of a certain practice.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, what is capital, and where does it come from? Capital is the combination of "an asset" and its protecting "legal code," with assets taking the form of anything from an object (such as land or a house) to a skill or idea (for example, the idea of the internal combustion engine or the discovery of a cancer-causing gene) with the potential to be commodified and monetized (Pistor, 2019, p. 2). To get from land to money, or from a cancer gene to a windfall, the key is the legal mechanism used, drawn from the above listed areas of law, that can generate wealth and weather the downturns by conferring on assets the coveted traits of "priority, which ranks competing claims to the same assets; durability, which extends priority claims in time; universality, which extends them in space; and convertibility, which operates as an insurance device that allows holders to convert their private credit claims into state money on demand" (Pistor, 2019, p. 3).
In other words, the key to generating sizable wealth is the ability to protect one's accumulated assets from a hoard of creditors, or conversely, to recover one's assets in the case of another party not being able to hold up their end of the bargain (think defaulting on a loan, for example). And also, to being able to translate said asset's market value into one's currency of choice.
Better yet, the legal shield provided by lawyers, whom Pistor calls the "master of the code," are often backed up by state powers internationally, because recognizing the law an asset was protected by in one country in another provides the impression of legal certainty for asset-holders. Because of this relative legal stability, these investors are more likely to invest in another state's economy and potentially expand their tax revenues, granting upon its population greater prosperity (Pistor, 2019, p. 20). Sound familiar?
However, when states recognize an asset's home legal coding (primarily taking the form of law found in England and the United States), or even go further in adding other sweetening incentives for businesses, growing economic inequality is often the result. Clients and their lawyers are in the game of maximum returns, and as a result, states trying to regulate the excesses of such practices are often playing a game of whack-a-mole, as lawyers rediscover centuries-old feudal economic law or a more innovative legal method to evade taxes and continue to grow their personal fortune.
Moreover, because capital exists largely in law (i.e. is a construct), legal mechanisms often make assets artificially more valuable than they really are. This can be devastating when these assets are found to have been over-valued, with a resulting market adjustment to an asset's actual value often conferring increased clean-up costs on the general public over the asset-holders themselves, who often can cash-in in advance when they see the economic-writing-on-the-wall and escape with minimal losses.
What are we to do when this kind of legal coding has become deeply intertwined within the international financial and political systems? As in my previous posts, looking at books whose authors have increasingly defended the liberal system of incremental reform over calls for the sudden overthrow of the system, even as it becomes ever more unpopular, Pistor advises a similar approach. Despite her largely frustrated undertone to her even-handed look at the current economic landscape, she advocates for a slow-burn course of action that would require a leveling of the playing field for everyone below the rich and powerful, including boosting access to the lawyers and legal mechanisms the privileged use, as well as increasing oversight of current practices to ensure that they are contributing more to greater societal prosperity than to personal fortunes.
Absent concerted reforms now and into the future, Pistor warns of revolution or "the further erosion of law's legitimacy" to a public growing increasingly frustrated and desperate, seeking scapegoats in foreigners or immigrants when the fault really lies with the excesses of today's economic kingpins (Pistor, 2019, p. 234). And that is a dangerous future for all of us.
Works Cited:
Pistor, Katharina. (2019). The Code of Capital: How The Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. New York: Princeton University Press.
Friday, August 16, 2019
Book Review: Jill Lepore's "This America"
Back in the spring of this year, I had the pleasure of reading Harvard historian Jill Lepore's highly ambitious, yet riveting single-volume of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). In These Truths, Lepore takes a critical look at the American project and asks if it has lived up to its "truths," or the tenets of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" of a country's citizens before the law, and their accession to a governmental authority to protect those rights, respectively (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Of course, the government didn't initially look out for all of its citizens, namely Native Americans, African-Americans, women, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ community. Essentially, American history has been the story of America's gradual rectifying of past injustice (mind you, not exactly a linear process), with much work remaining today to ensure the continuance of such rights and protections for as many as possible.
Coinciding with this ongoing reckoning, starting in the 1960s, intellectuals and scholars soured by the many examples of American hypocrisy in protecting the rights of certain classes of citizens over others, and in regards to the scourge of twisted nationalism that produced Nazism and countless other atrocities, increasingly trended towards discarding the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state altogether. In her follow-up to These Truths, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), Lepore warns against this wholesale ignoring of nationalism, arguing that within this scholarly vacuum, reactionary forces can (and will) fill that void with a dangerous redefinition of nationalism that threatens the very liberal-democratic foundations of the country.
How did we get to this point?
Part civics primer as well as a call to action, This America first takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the idea of a nation-state as we understand it in modern times, a collective of individuals bound together by common laws into a "political community," became cemented through its inseparability with nationalism, one's sense of pride in their country and people (Lepore, 2019, p. 26). Laws and a government aren't enough to bind together diverse groups of people. You need a national origin story, you need national histories. In the case of the USA, that came to be a story about a nation that fought a bloody revolution to secure for itself the universal values of equality, liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical regime, and then went on to continue that fight on behalf of the rest of humanity through its foreign policy of spreading the blessings of democracy (with, to put it mildly, mixed results).
However, there is a duality that remains within American nationalism, a dark side, one that is "less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority" (Lepore, 2019, p. 23). To best fight these ever-present demons, most recently manifested in Trumpism's animosity towards immigrants and globalists, Lepore argues that since nation-states remain a central organizing principle of geopolitics today, the state's liberal democratic institutions remain the best tool for protecting its citizens' rights, and in concert with the nation's intellectuals, can be a powerful advocate of a more positive vision of Americanism.
What is this more positive vision of American nationalism? One that recommits to the liberal project of the expansion of "equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness," within the national consciousness and governmental institutions alike, a nationalism that must reckon with its past while boldly striding forward into a future requiring innovative solutions to the big issues of our day, such as environmental degradation, climate change, mass migration, and income inequality (Lepore, 2019, p. 137). As long as the metaphorical better angel is able to hold greater sway within American social life and politics can the evils of nationalism be kept at bay, and the body politic retain its relative stability.
In her conclusion, Lepore calls for no less than a vigorous re-commitment to the embattled liberal American project. While no doubt a massive undertaking on both the part of citizens and the government in an era where liberalism's center-of-the-road approach has been maligned from all sides as enabling the status quo, Lepore says that it will be worth it. That through the fruits of our labors, our nation can achieve more of what W.E.B. DuBois called "great and beautiful things" and continue to bend the proverbial arc of history closer to justice for all, away from the "hideous mistakes" and the "frightful wrongs" of the past (Lepore, 2019, p. 137).
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lepore, Jill. (2019). This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Coinciding with this ongoing reckoning, starting in the 1960s, intellectuals and scholars soured by the many examples of American hypocrisy in protecting the rights of certain classes of citizens over others, and in regards to the scourge of twisted nationalism that produced Nazism and countless other atrocities, increasingly trended towards discarding the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state altogether. In her follow-up to These Truths, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), Lepore warns against this wholesale ignoring of nationalism, arguing that within this scholarly vacuum, reactionary forces can (and will) fill that void with a dangerous redefinition of nationalism that threatens the very liberal-democratic foundations of the country.
How did we get to this point?
Part civics primer as well as a call to action, This America first takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the idea of a nation-state as we understand it in modern times, a collective of individuals bound together by common laws into a "political community," became cemented through its inseparability with nationalism, one's sense of pride in their country and people (Lepore, 2019, p. 26). Laws and a government aren't enough to bind together diverse groups of people. You need a national origin story, you need national histories. In the case of the USA, that came to be a story about a nation that fought a bloody revolution to secure for itself the universal values of equality, liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical regime, and then went on to continue that fight on behalf of the rest of humanity through its foreign policy of spreading the blessings of democracy (with, to put it mildly, mixed results).
However, there is a duality that remains within American nationalism, a dark side, one that is "less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority" (Lepore, 2019, p. 23). To best fight these ever-present demons, most recently manifested in Trumpism's animosity towards immigrants and globalists, Lepore argues that since nation-states remain a central organizing principle of geopolitics today, the state's liberal democratic institutions remain the best tool for protecting its citizens' rights, and in concert with the nation's intellectuals, can be a powerful advocate of a more positive vision of Americanism.
What is this more positive vision of American nationalism? One that recommits to the liberal project of the expansion of "equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness," within the national consciousness and governmental institutions alike, a nationalism that must reckon with its past while boldly striding forward into a future requiring innovative solutions to the big issues of our day, such as environmental degradation, climate change, mass migration, and income inequality (Lepore, 2019, p. 137). As long as the metaphorical better angel is able to hold greater sway within American social life and politics can the evils of nationalism be kept at bay, and the body politic retain its relative stability.
In her conclusion, Lepore calls for no less than a vigorous re-commitment to the embattled liberal American project. While no doubt a massive undertaking on both the part of citizens and the government in an era where liberalism's center-of-the-road approach has been maligned from all sides as enabling the status quo, Lepore says that it will be worth it. That through the fruits of our labors, our nation can achieve more of what W.E.B. DuBois called "great and beautiful things" and continue to bend the proverbial arc of history closer to justice for all, away from the "hideous mistakes" and the "frightful wrongs" of the past (Lepore, 2019, p. 137).
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lepore, Jill. (2019). This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Friday, August 2, 2019
Book Review: Adam Gopnik's "A Thousand Small Sanities"
Is liberal democracy dead? A considerable amount of literary, journalistic, and scholarly attention has been expended in trying to answer that question in an era of rising partisanship, demagoguery, and the increasing prominence of no-longer-ignorable global issues like climate change and mass-migration. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik adds his two cents to the discussion, saying that the rumors of liberal democracy's death have been greatly exaggerated, but that without a resurgence behind the embattled system of governance from the grassroots and up, we could very well lose it if we're not careful. In this vein of trying to rekindle a popular embrace of a governing concept that is increasingly being attacked for its reliance on compromise and incremental change from both the left and right wings, Gopnik takes readers on a journey through history to rediscover liberalism in A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019).
Everyone knows about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, and more, whose ideas about individualism, reform, scientific reason, self-government, and the inherent natural rights of life, liberty, and property inspired our Founding Fathers to include such ideas in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
However, liberalism as it presents today is not the exclusive domain of the latter 18th century thinkers. Gopnik reaches all the way back to the 16th century to the present to show readers that other, less well-known figures also constitute the complex tapestry of attitudes, ideas, and principles that make up liberalism, from unofficial founder Michel de Montaigne to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Robert Putnam, and anarchist-turned-liberal Emma Goldman. Their contributions included critical ideas about community, compassion, the dual nature of humanity, pluralism, and a belief in an ongoing project of "radical change through practical measures" achieved via an intense commitment to the parliamentary procedures established by governmental institutions with an aim towards minimizing societal cruelty (Gopnik, 2019, p. 80).
At the end of the day, is liberalism perfect? No, not at all.
Critics from both the right and the left have plenty to critique about liberalism. From its closest ally the left-wing comes a profound frustration with incremental change, in liberalism's reluctance to engage in full-scale, system-overturning revolution to address entrenched, systemic injustices like income inequality, classism, racism, sexism, neo-imperialism and colonialism, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the right-wing decries liberalism's attack on traditional communities, values, and modes of authority and order, its hedonism made visible in its promotion of materialism over spiritualism.
Liberalism's response? "What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried so hard to inject a corrective conscience into its institutions," Gopnik writes (Gopnik, 2019, p. 195). Instead of being godless, materialistic and atomizing, liberalism has introduced into society new modes of community and spiritual wellbeing outside the traditional nuclear family, and prefers that a "thousand small sanities" quietly chipping away at injustice in a Sisyphean-perpetuity gradually achieve critical mass within society in order to finally realize large-scale, positive change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 239). In this way, liberalism is advantageous in being derived from real-life experience necessitating cooperation, compromise, empathy, and toleration of diverse groups within larger societies, in a recognition that "good change happens step by step" and not via a harmful "stampede" of society by a utopianism bent on immediate, revolutionary change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 238-239).
All in all, this doesn't make middle-of-the-road liberalism any less frustrating for those like myself exasperated by liberalism's cling to slow reform of a very imperfect system, but Gopnik's treatise makes it more understandable. Liberalism doesn't favor one group over another, but tries to accommodate all, with all the confusing dualities and conflicting local, state, and federal legislative and political impulses this entails. In the conclusion of A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik makes an urgent appeal to embrace again this liberalism, not one that seems to blindly accommodate large scale injustice, but one that continually recognizes and works against injustice while bringing America's diverse populace together as much as possible starting at the local, grassroots level through activism and public education. In this way, Gopnik writes, we can push the American project ever closer towards utopia.
An admirable sentiment, but are we willing to put in the work? That is the question.
Works Cited:
Gopnik, Adam. (2019). A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.
Everyone knows about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, and more, whose ideas about individualism, reform, scientific reason, self-government, and the inherent natural rights of life, liberty, and property inspired our Founding Fathers to include such ideas in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
However, liberalism as it presents today is not the exclusive domain of the latter 18th century thinkers. Gopnik reaches all the way back to the 16th century to the present to show readers that other, less well-known figures also constitute the complex tapestry of attitudes, ideas, and principles that make up liberalism, from unofficial founder Michel de Montaigne to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Robert Putnam, and anarchist-turned-liberal Emma Goldman. Their contributions included critical ideas about community, compassion, the dual nature of humanity, pluralism, and a belief in an ongoing project of "radical change through practical measures" achieved via an intense commitment to the parliamentary procedures established by governmental institutions with an aim towards minimizing societal cruelty (Gopnik, 2019, p. 80).
At the end of the day, is liberalism perfect? No, not at all.
Critics from both the right and the left have plenty to critique about liberalism. From its closest ally the left-wing comes a profound frustration with incremental change, in liberalism's reluctance to engage in full-scale, system-overturning revolution to address entrenched, systemic injustices like income inequality, classism, racism, sexism, neo-imperialism and colonialism, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the right-wing decries liberalism's attack on traditional communities, values, and modes of authority and order, its hedonism made visible in its promotion of materialism over spiritualism.
Liberalism's response? "What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried so hard to inject a corrective conscience into its institutions," Gopnik writes (Gopnik, 2019, p. 195). Instead of being godless, materialistic and atomizing, liberalism has introduced into society new modes of community and spiritual wellbeing outside the traditional nuclear family, and prefers that a "thousand small sanities" quietly chipping away at injustice in a Sisyphean-perpetuity gradually achieve critical mass within society in order to finally realize large-scale, positive change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 239). In this way, liberalism is advantageous in being derived from real-life experience necessitating cooperation, compromise, empathy, and toleration of diverse groups within larger societies, in a recognition that "good change happens step by step" and not via a harmful "stampede" of society by a utopianism bent on immediate, revolutionary change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 238-239).
All in all, this doesn't make middle-of-the-road liberalism any less frustrating for those like myself exasperated by liberalism's cling to slow reform of a very imperfect system, but Gopnik's treatise makes it more understandable. Liberalism doesn't favor one group over another, but tries to accommodate all, with all the confusing dualities and conflicting local, state, and federal legislative and political impulses this entails. In the conclusion of A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik makes an urgent appeal to embrace again this liberalism, not one that seems to blindly accommodate large scale injustice, but one that continually recognizes and works against injustice while bringing America's diverse populace together as much as possible starting at the local, grassroots level through activism and public education. In this way, Gopnik writes, we can push the American project ever closer towards utopia.
An admirable sentiment, but are we willing to put in the work? That is the question.
Works Cited:
Gopnik, Adam. (2019). A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Book Review: Jared Diamond's "Upheaval"
What can we learn from other countries in regards to how they have solved crises that seemed insurmountable in the moment? Historian and author Jared Diamond, known for works such as Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2004), looks at seven countries and how they have overcome--or somewhat overcame--major national problems in the past in his latest, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019), in order to glean insights into solving the problems of our present moment.
Borrowing from a psychological therapeutic framework used for helping individuals overcome crises, he applies this process analogously to the seven nation-states of Australia, Chile, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Underpinning nations' resiliency in moments of fast or slow-moving crises are twelve factors: recognition of a problem, accepting responsibility, the separation of problematic cultural/national values from useful ones, seeking help from allies, adopting of useful models from abroad, sense of national identity, honest self-appraisal, knowledge of past crises, ability to deal with failure, flexibility, core values, and degree of freedom from geopolitical constraints (Diamond, 2019, p. 50).
Of course, our seven countries have dealt, or are dealing with in the present, differing problems of a national scale with differing degrees of success. Some nations, like Chile and Indonesia dealt with primarily internal problems (coups and counter-coups in 1965 and 1973, respectively), while others were shocked by external forces to begin a process of national reckoning (Australia during WWII with the threat of Japanese invasion; Meiji-era Japan, forced into trade with the world in 1853 at gunpoint by US Commodore Perry; Finland by its partial invasion by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940).
What happened to these nations? Many of the more successful--or partially successful--nations, reached as much as a consensus as possible at a national level (countries are composed of many competing groups and individuals tied together by a national identity) that there was a crisis needing fixing, and figured out what national attributes worked for them and which did not, and adjusted accordingly, achieving what Diamond terms "selective change" (Diamond, 2019, p. 6):
However, the US today faces a more interconnected world and global problems like climate change, potential nuclear war, ecological degradation, inequality, and more. Geography does not insulate some nations as much as it has in the past. National borders do not halt the spread of people, goods, ideas, or problems.
Ultimately, Diamond is neither an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the question of if the U.S. can learn from others, face its problems, and step up to help solve more global issues. Mostly, that is because his individual psychological framework does not translate neatly over to national (i.e. group-involved) crises in all domains (like the assumption of a clear national consensus), and as a result, can't give clear-cut predictions or solutions either way. (In any case, I do applaud his interdisciplinary narrative style, showing intriguing connections between the psychology of leaders and nations and historical outcomes.)
Diamond concludes that it is up to Americans to not squander the considerable blessings we have in our favor, and to work constructively internationally to solve humanity's biggest challenges. He notes that America was able to make the leap of selective change in the past, discarding limiting isolationism post-WWII in favor of engagement with the world and reforming to chip away at various forms of discrimination.
Can we do this again? Nationally, and internationally? Stay tuned...
Works Cited:
Diamond, Jared. (2019). Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. Little, Brown and Company: Little, Brown.
Borrowing from a psychological therapeutic framework used for helping individuals overcome crises, he applies this process analogously to the seven nation-states of Australia, Chile, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Underpinning nations' resiliency in moments of fast or slow-moving crises are twelve factors: recognition of a problem, accepting responsibility, the separation of problematic cultural/national values from useful ones, seeking help from allies, adopting of useful models from abroad, sense of national identity, honest self-appraisal, knowledge of past crises, ability to deal with failure, flexibility, core values, and degree of freedom from geopolitical constraints (Diamond, 2019, p. 50).
Of course, our seven countries have dealt, or are dealing with in the present, differing problems of a national scale with differing degrees of success. Some nations, like Chile and Indonesia dealt with primarily internal problems (coups and counter-coups in 1965 and 1973, respectively), while others were shocked by external forces to begin a process of national reckoning (Australia during WWII with the threat of Japanese invasion; Meiji-era Japan, forced into trade with the world in 1853 at gunpoint by US Commodore Perry; Finland by its partial invasion by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940).
What happened to these nations? Many of the more successful--or partially successful--nations, reached as much as a consensus as possible at a national level (countries are composed of many competing groups and individuals tied together by a national identity) that there was a crisis needing fixing, and figured out what national attributes worked for them and which did not, and adjusted accordingly, achieving what Diamond terms "selective change" (Diamond, 2019, p. 6):
- Australia built up its military defenses, aligned itself closer with Asia and the U.S. rather than their historical partner in the U.K. (itself more or less Europe-oriented now after the loss of the British Empire) in the recognition of both countries needing to act in their mutual interests.
- Chile overcame right-wing coups against what it viewed to be an insurgent left-wing, economic uncertainty, and oppressive military dictatorship to achieve a mostly-balanced democratic government today, seeking to peacefully negotiate between the left and right.
- Finland adopted a new foreign policy that sought to instill trust between it and the Soviet Union (now Russia), and when invaded in 1939-1940 (the Winter War), got the Soviet Union to back down against overwhelming odds in a war of attrition, making any further Soviet gains incredibly costly in terms of personnel and materiel.
- Germany overcame defeats in both WWI and WWII by confronting the painful legacy of Nazism and pragmatically reforming until the achievement of reunification in 1990.
- Indonesia threw off the Dutch colonial yoke, overcame disastrous coups and leadership blunders into unwarranted military invasions of its neighbors to forge a national identity and adapted Western economic tenets and a semi-democratic form of government (but corruption remains and the threat of a military coup still lingers, not to mention the legacy of a consciously unmentioned slaughter of communist and leftist-sympathizers in retaliation for the 1965 coup that targeted generals).
- Meiji-era Japan built up its economic, military, and political strength by borrowing heavily from Western ideas and institutions whose values most closely aligned with Japan's.
However, the US today faces a more interconnected world and global problems like climate change, potential nuclear war, ecological degradation, inequality, and more. Geography does not insulate some nations as much as it has in the past. National borders do not halt the spread of people, goods, ideas, or problems.
Ultimately, Diamond is neither an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the question of if the U.S. can learn from others, face its problems, and step up to help solve more global issues. Mostly, that is because his individual psychological framework does not translate neatly over to national (i.e. group-involved) crises in all domains (like the assumption of a clear national consensus), and as a result, can't give clear-cut predictions or solutions either way. (In any case, I do applaud his interdisciplinary narrative style, showing intriguing connections between the psychology of leaders and nations and historical outcomes.)
Diamond concludes that it is up to Americans to not squander the considerable blessings we have in our favor, and to work constructively internationally to solve humanity's biggest challenges. He notes that America was able to make the leap of selective change in the past, discarding limiting isolationism post-WWII in favor of engagement with the world and reforming to chip away at various forms of discrimination.
Can we do this again? Nationally, and internationally? Stay tuned...
Works Cited:
Diamond, Jared. (2019). Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. Little, Brown and Company: Little, Brown.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Book Review: Peter Frankopan's "The New Silk Roads"
There is no shortage of literature and media coverage out there about China's astonishing rise and the shift of economic and political gravity to the East. It was a staple of my undergraduate international relations curriculum, reviewing such works as Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World (2012)--imagining a scenario in which China has changed the rules of the game by virtue of being the new economic superpower of the world--to Charles Kupchan's No One's World (2012)--heralding a coming multipolar world in which the current powers of the West, especially the unipolar power many would argue the United States has been for most of the post-WWII era, must reconcile and power-share with the rising powers of the East, like China and India.
Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford, joined this debate with works like The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and continues this story in his latest, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018), reframing the conversation by showing the East and not the West has historically been the power-center of the world, perhaps explaining the latest power transition.
Reading more like an epilogue to The Silk Roads--or as a more updated edition to the latter--The New Silk Roads provides an Eastern perspective to events shaping geopolitics since its predecessor's 2015 publication, focusing on headlines showing China's increasing rapprochement with its neighbors in the "One Belt, One Road" initiative in contrast with the West's rising isolationism, inconsistent foreign policy, Trump, diplomatic brain drain, and Brexit problems (Frankopan, 2018, p. 17).
This ambitious economic and infrastructure development plan treads the old land and sea routes of the ancient Silk Roads connecting West-East, but also seeks to make new ones in areas like Africa and Latin America, the latest chapter in a larger discussion of the forces of globalization shaping the 21st century, but also the latest entry in the saga of the Great Games of history, calling to mind American and European imperial strategy in the 17th-20th centuries (Frankopan, 2015). In addition to ports, rail lines, oil pipelines, data sharing, and more, China is also building up military outposts to safeguard its investments and engaging in various bilateral trade talks with its neighbors.
Instead of the silk and spices of old, the eponymous New Silk Roads today are trade routes of people, ideas, natural resources (oil and mineral wealth), arms, data, and modern technology (AI, drones, missile defense systems, etc.). With the West going through the convulsions of Brexit and Trump, developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (even some of the US's erstwhile allies in Europe and Australia) are viewing Beijing with increasing favor and as a potentially more reliable, stable alternative to Washington and London, with the capital to back up its ambitious vision for a prosperous and harmonious new world.
Notwithstanding the rivalries that will need to be dealt with--that of India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, to name a few--pragmatists of all parties have realized that a new strategy is needed to secure their prosperity and national security against the disguised flailing of the West--see the "controlled unpredictability" strategy of the U.S.-- and other threats, such as poverty and climate change (Frankopan, 2018, p. 127). It seems that the pressure applied by US sanctions on Iran and Russia and tariffs against China are doing more to push unlikely parties together to serve as bulwarks against Western influence, and China and friends are taking advantage of the gaps left by the political and economic flux of the West by cementing existing and new channels of engagement that circumvent established Western ones.
All in all, while critics may assail The New Silk Roads as being overly optimistic about the sustainability of China's and other Eastern diplomatic and infrastructure projects, Frankopan balances out the rosy visions of prosperity promised by the One Belt, One Road investments with an aside about the real issues standing in the way of realizing this vision and testing newfound alliances: China's debt load, some instances of predatory lending practices imposed on African nations in exchange for foreign investment, and the larger issues of climate change and environmental degradation, the migration crises, and the looming threat of automation in the public and private sectors. Not to mention many of the countries of the Silk Roads are not democratic by any means, discouraging dissent, controlling media, and limiting other human and political rights.
While the changes underway cannot be easily halted and the array of forces driving geopolitics are many and seemingly magnified, Frankopan concludes that along with the "fragilities and dangers" of our current moment, there are just as many opportunities for "cooperation and collaboration" on the part of the West with the East to aid a peaceful transition to the future (Frankopan, 2018, p. 194). Will we rise to the occasion?
Works Cited:
BBC News. (2019, May 10). A Quick Guide to the US-China Trade War. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45899310.
Frankopan, Peter. (2018). The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
Frankopan, Peter. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Jacques, Martin. (2012). When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Books.
Kupchan, Charles. A. (2012). No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford, joined this debate with works like The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and continues this story in his latest, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018), reframing the conversation by showing the East and not the West has historically been the power-center of the world, perhaps explaining the latest power transition.
Reading more like an epilogue to The Silk Roads--or as a more updated edition to the latter--The New Silk Roads provides an Eastern perspective to events shaping geopolitics since its predecessor's 2015 publication, focusing on headlines showing China's increasing rapprochement with its neighbors in the "One Belt, One Road" initiative in contrast with the West's rising isolationism, inconsistent foreign policy, Trump, diplomatic brain drain, and Brexit problems (Frankopan, 2018, p. 17).
This ambitious economic and infrastructure development plan treads the old land and sea routes of the ancient Silk Roads connecting West-East, but also seeks to make new ones in areas like Africa and Latin America, the latest chapter in a larger discussion of the forces of globalization shaping the 21st century, but also the latest entry in the saga of the Great Games of history, calling to mind American and European imperial strategy in the 17th-20th centuries (Frankopan, 2015). In addition to ports, rail lines, oil pipelines, data sharing, and more, China is also building up military outposts to safeguard its investments and engaging in various bilateral trade talks with its neighbors.
Instead of the silk and spices of old, the eponymous New Silk Roads today are trade routes of people, ideas, natural resources (oil and mineral wealth), arms, data, and modern technology (AI, drones, missile defense systems, etc.). With the West going through the convulsions of Brexit and Trump, developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (even some of the US's erstwhile allies in Europe and Australia) are viewing Beijing with increasing favor and as a potentially more reliable, stable alternative to Washington and London, with the capital to back up its ambitious vision for a prosperous and harmonious new world.
Notwithstanding the rivalries that will need to be dealt with--that of India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, to name a few--pragmatists of all parties have realized that a new strategy is needed to secure their prosperity and national security against the disguised flailing of the West--see the "controlled unpredictability" strategy of the U.S.-- and other threats, such as poverty and climate change (Frankopan, 2018, p. 127). It seems that the pressure applied by US sanctions on Iran and Russia and tariffs against China are doing more to push unlikely parties together to serve as bulwarks against Western influence, and China and friends are taking advantage of the gaps left by the political and economic flux of the West by cementing existing and new channels of engagement that circumvent established Western ones.
All in all, while critics may assail The New Silk Roads as being overly optimistic about the sustainability of China's and other Eastern diplomatic and infrastructure projects, Frankopan balances out the rosy visions of prosperity promised by the One Belt, One Road investments with an aside about the real issues standing in the way of realizing this vision and testing newfound alliances: China's debt load, some instances of predatory lending practices imposed on African nations in exchange for foreign investment, and the larger issues of climate change and environmental degradation, the migration crises, and the looming threat of automation in the public and private sectors. Not to mention many of the countries of the Silk Roads are not democratic by any means, discouraging dissent, controlling media, and limiting other human and political rights.
While the changes underway cannot be easily halted and the array of forces driving geopolitics are many and seemingly magnified, Frankopan concludes that along with the "fragilities and dangers" of our current moment, there are just as many opportunities for "cooperation and collaboration" on the part of the West with the East to aid a peaceful transition to the future (Frankopan, 2018, p. 194). Will we rise to the occasion?
Works Cited:
BBC News. (2019, May 10). A Quick Guide to the US-China Trade War. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45899310.
Frankopan, Peter. (2018). The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
Frankopan, Peter. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Jacques, Martin. (2012). When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Books.
Kupchan, Charles. A. (2012). No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friday, June 14, 2019
Book Review: Daniel Immerwahr's "How to Hide an Empire"
When you think of an empire, what comes to mind? For many, probably Britain first, the country the colonies fought in order to gain their independence. Perhaps the Axis Powers in WWII, Germany and Japan. Or our WWII ally turned Cold War foe, the Soviet Union. What these examples show is that for many Americans, empire has a decidedly negative connotation, associated with autocratic nation-states that eschew democratic values of self-determination and consent of the governed, and impose their rule without regard to the well-being of its subject peoples. So there's no way that the home of the free and land of the brave was (is) an empire in its own right? Right? Turns out we were and are. Historian Daniel Immerwahr takes us on a tour of the American territories whose stories, despite their centrality to American history, have been relegated to the periphery of the national consciousness in his 2019 book How to Hide an Empire.
How did we get to where we are today, with the United States occupying virtually every corner of the world in its 800 bases and outposts? Well, it all starts with the familiar story of the western frontier and manifest destiny in the 19th century, whereby the United States achieved its familiar lower-48 dimensions by the forced removal of Native Americans from prized lands. Once it had secured Alaska and Hawaii to bring the total to 50 states, America continued to look outward, equal parts eager to gain international prestige on par with the European imperial powers and also to claim critical economic and military footholds in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Before the post WWII era of rapid technological progress allowed for the streamlined movement of people, goods, and ideas around the world (the advent of the radio, telegraph, and Internet, various logistical technologies, standardization and more), there were overwhelming geopolitical incentives to hold sway over as much land as possible. One was control over the sources of (and markets for) critical raw materials not yet amenable to duplication in a laboratory setting, like arable land, rubber, palm oil, and even bird guano. (Yes, bird guano. Turns out that it's a decent fertilizer.) Second, with enough territory comes the ability to secure critical military outposts, used to protect the imperial borders, quell the on-and-off insurrections, cow external threats (i.e. other imperial powers), and better control the movement of both people and trade within one's borders. Lastly, the more land and peoples under your country's sway, the better the opportunity to spread your economic and cultural values into as many hearts and minds as possible.
Thus began the second wave of American imperialism, bringing various archipelagos and islands like the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the less well known Guano Islands into the fold, inextricably tying their economies and political identities closer to the mainland. Over time, the inhabitants of the territories gained at the very least the status of U.S. nationals and statutory citizenship and the fundamental rights that come with it. However, the Insular case (1901) rulings established U.S. colonial doctrine that allowed only the territories that the government deemed on the path to statehood the full protection of the Constitution, while citizens in territories not on the statehood path were left vulnerable to a repeal of their statutorily granted status as a U.S. national or citizen and only had partial protection of the Constitution. Oh, and they don't have official representation in the Congress that had the power to revoke or alter such statutes. This legal limbo led to carte blanche medical experimentation in territories like Puerto Rico and the unfettered architectural redesign of the Philippines' main island.
Surprisingly though, after WWII, the United States suddenly and rapidly decolonized in a moment of postwar ascendancy that many countries would have taken full advantage of to expand their power and territorial holdings. While there probably was some altruistic sentiment underlying it, relating to U.S. values surrounding self-determination, Immerwahr shows that the U.S. did this for overwhelmingly selfish, yet pragmatic reasons.
Nationalist movements capitalized on the postwar devastation of their imperial overlords, asking for self-determination and independence in exchange for helping fight in the war. At the same time, the need for countries to hold large swaths of territory was diminishing with the development of alternative mechanisms of power projection and control, backed up by the improved ability to synthesize necessary raw materials combined with vast improvements in telecommunications, transportation and logistical technologies. Also, it's very expensive to hold large territories. All in all, these factors made it more pragmatic to hold smaller swaths of land in key zones of national interest, backing up economic clout with military power where necessary.
Therefore, the U.S. dropped many of its territories in exchange for investing in a vast worldwide logistical network of smaller swaths of land containing military bases and outposts that we see today. Immerwahr sees this as a new kind of empire, a kind of third wave of imperialism, borne of the realities of globalization, but without many of the overtly negative markers associated with traditional models of empire building. Many other powers seemed to have adopted this model of power, for better or worse, like China.
All in all, what does this mean for the United States going forward? For Immerwahr, it means that the mainland can no longer ignore the crucial role that U.S. territories and military outposts play in continuing to exert U.S. power around the world. As a country, we've largely been expansionist, and continue to be, despite our protestations; we crave territorial influence, but without the baggage associated with having formal political dominion over large swaths of territory and peoples. Our decisions on how to project power had consequences in the past and will continue to do so into the future, especially in our present age of globalization and inter-connectedness. Through this entertaining and riveting jaunt through history, Immerwahr makes it clear that U.S. foreign policy needs to keep these territories and outposts in mind in order to better secure U.S. interests and spread U.S. values without provoking devastating military conflict.
Works Cited:
Immerwahr, Daniel. (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
How did we get to where we are today, with the United States occupying virtually every corner of the world in its 800 bases and outposts? Well, it all starts with the familiar story of the western frontier and manifest destiny in the 19th century, whereby the United States achieved its familiar lower-48 dimensions by the forced removal of Native Americans from prized lands. Once it had secured Alaska and Hawaii to bring the total to 50 states, America continued to look outward, equal parts eager to gain international prestige on par with the European imperial powers and also to claim critical economic and military footholds in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Before the post WWII era of rapid technological progress allowed for the streamlined movement of people, goods, and ideas around the world (the advent of the radio, telegraph, and Internet, various logistical technologies, standardization and more), there were overwhelming geopolitical incentives to hold sway over as much land as possible. One was control over the sources of (and markets for) critical raw materials not yet amenable to duplication in a laboratory setting, like arable land, rubber, palm oil, and even bird guano. (Yes, bird guano. Turns out that it's a decent fertilizer.) Second, with enough territory comes the ability to secure critical military outposts, used to protect the imperial borders, quell the on-and-off insurrections, cow external threats (i.e. other imperial powers), and better control the movement of both people and trade within one's borders. Lastly, the more land and peoples under your country's sway, the better the opportunity to spread your economic and cultural values into as many hearts and minds as possible.
Thus began the second wave of American imperialism, bringing various archipelagos and islands like the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the less well known Guano Islands into the fold, inextricably tying their economies and political identities closer to the mainland. Over time, the inhabitants of the territories gained at the very least the status of U.S. nationals and statutory citizenship and the fundamental rights that come with it. However, the Insular case (1901) rulings established U.S. colonial doctrine that allowed only the territories that the government deemed on the path to statehood the full protection of the Constitution, while citizens in territories not on the statehood path were left vulnerable to a repeal of their statutorily granted status as a U.S. national or citizen and only had partial protection of the Constitution. Oh, and they don't have official representation in the Congress that had the power to revoke or alter such statutes. This legal limbo led to carte blanche medical experimentation in territories like Puerto Rico and the unfettered architectural redesign of the Philippines' main island.
Surprisingly though, after WWII, the United States suddenly and rapidly decolonized in a moment of postwar ascendancy that many countries would have taken full advantage of to expand their power and territorial holdings. While there probably was some altruistic sentiment underlying it, relating to U.S. values surrounding self-determination, Immerwahr shows that the U.S. did this for overwhelmingly selfish, yet pragmatic reasons.
Nationalist movements capitalized on the postwar devastation of their imperial overlords, asking for self-determination and independence in exchange for helping fight in the war. At the same time, the need for countries to hold large swaths of territory was diminishing with the development of alternative mechanisms of power projection and control, backed up by the improved ability to synthesize necessary raw materials combined with vast improvements in telecommunications, transportation and logistical technologies. Also, it's very expensive to hold large territories. All in all, these factors made it more pragmatic to hold smaller swaths of land in key zones of national interest, backing up economic clout with military power where necessary.
Therefore, the U.S. dropped many of its territories in exchange for investing in a vast worldwide logistical network of smaller swaths of land containing military bases and outposts that we see today. Immerwahr sees this as a new kind of empire, a kind of third wave of imperialism, borne of the realities of globalization, but without many of the overtly negative markers associated with traditional models of empire building. Many other powers seemed to have adopted this model of power, for better or worse, like China.
All in all, what does this mean for the United States going forward? For Immerwahr, it means that the mainland can no longer ignore the crucial role that U.S. territories and military outposts play in continuing to exert U.S. power around the world. As a country, we've largely been expansionist, and continue to be, despite our protestations; we crave territorial influence, but without the baggage associated with having formal political dominion over large swaths of territory and peoples. Our decisions on how to project power had consequences in the past and will continue to do so into the future, especially in our present age of globalization and inter-connectedness. Through this entertaining and riveting jaunt through history, Immerwahr makes it clear that U.S. foreign policy needs to keep these territories and outposts in mind in order to better secure U.S. interests and spread U.S. values without provoking devastating military conflict.
Works Cited:
Immerwahr, Daniel. (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Monday, June 3, 2019
Book Review: Jill Lepore's "These Truths"
What is America? Who is America, what do Americans believe in, and how does one define an American way of life? The answer to these questions go beyond America's demarcation on a map as one of 194 recognized nation-states around the world, a republic of 325 million people, composed of some 50 states and five territorial outposts. Author and professor of history Jill Lepore is one of many in a long line of scholars that attempts to answer these difficult questions by way of an ambitious 932-page volume of America's history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Here, the epic saga of American history is explored not just by the time-honored practice of rote chronological recitation of major events, but also by the examination of their ideological and philosophical underpinnings, forces and debates that continue to drive the complicated and ever-evolving American experiment forward.
To understand where we are today, Lepore takes us way back to the 16th century to show that, above all, we are a country of contradictions, and have been from the beginning. A nation that started from the chaos of revolution naturally will have its fits and starts. In an age of postmodernism, where truths seem few and far between or up to interpretation, Lepore begins her examination by asking if American history has lived up to its lofty ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (i.e. America's "truths").
From the time of Columbus landing in the Bahamas to the colonial era, European colonizers and explorers brought their ideas of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" (see the Magna Carta, for example) with them (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Despite believing in these higher-truths, they did not necessarily apply them to the Native Americans they encountered, who appeared backwards to them in their darker skins, practice of pagan religions, and seeming inability to cultivate (read: build/develop/own) their lands in the ways of modern societies. These were not necessarily new ideas, as the conquerors, in their debates over what they were doing in the New World was right, dug up Aristotle, who believed in a natural hierarchy, where some were born into slavery and others into the ruling classes. Stable societies needed hierarchies, that's just how it is.
Those precedents seemed like biological truths rather than the products of sociopolitical realities and would serve, for a time, to sustain certain oppressions in the United States alongside almost utopian conditions of freedom and equality in governance.
Add a new technological revolution with both the potential of unity and division among a growing electorate. Shake. Rinse, repeat. As a result of this turbulent national environment, both conservatives and liberals have taken turns being either the champions of or opposing reactionaries to reforms such as emancipating the slaves (result: the Civil War) to the regulation of labor conditions, legislation of civil rights, and equal rights for women. The echoes of these fights remain with us today, giving us such partisan philosophies as identity politics and creeds of law and order that threaten to undermine the continued fights for the realization of true equality.
In the end, Lepore spares no one in her critiques of the past, showing how peoples of all political persuasions are complicit in either the nation's successes or failures, and that ultimately, the nation is better off for having brought in more of its people underneath the big tent of citizenship (and all of its accompanying obligations). She pushes for continued improvement of the American experiment, taking pride in its successes and asking us to learn from our past grievous errors. Because of the ongoing nature of our national experiment, an epic tale Lepore tells with elegance, no definitive conclusion can be reached on whether or not our nation has, in fact, realized its fundamental truths for all of its citizens. Of course, this means that there is more work to be done, a new generation that needs to wrestle with its history and take the nation into the future.
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
To understand where we are today, Lepore takes us way back to the 16th century to show that, above all, we are a country of contradictions, and have been from the beginning. A nation that started from the chaos of revolution naturally will have its fits and starts. In an age of postmodernism, where truths seem few and far between or up to interpretation, Lepore begins her examination by asking if American history has lived up to its lofty ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (i.e. America's "truths").
From the time of Columbus landing in the Bahamas to the colonial era, European colonizers and explorers brought their ideas of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" (see the Magna Carta, for example) with them (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Despite believing in these higher-truths, they did not necessarily apply them to the Native Americans they encountered, who appeared backwards to them in their darker skins, practice of pagan religions, and seeming inability to cultivate (read: build/develop/own) their lands in the ways of modern societies. These were not necessarily new ideas, as the conquerors, in their debates over what they were doing in the New World was right, dug up Aristotle, who believed in a natural hierarchy, where some were born into slavery and others into the ruling classes. Stable societies needed hierarchies, that's just how it is.
Those precedents seemed like biological truths rather than the products of sociopolitical realities and would serve, for a time, to sustain certain oppressions in the United States alongside almost utopian conditions of freedom and equality in governance.
"A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history." (Lepore, 2018, p. 786)
So when the United States of America was established out of a bloody severance from Great Britain in the name of freedom and liberty, there were many groups of people left out of the promises of a truly democratic society, namely Native Americans, African Americans, women, poor and non-propertied white men (later on, immigrants and the LGBTQ community would be slighted as well in this regard and would agitate to secure their rights). These resulting frictions built up plenty of strain in the sociopolitical tectonics of the nation, with releases coming often as reactionary calamities and a halt or backwards regression of the expansion of equal rights, before another generation would come along and realize the error of its forebears and make corrections.Add a new technological revolution with both the potential of unity and division among a growing electorate. Shake. Rinse, repeat. As a result of this turbulent national environment, both conservatives and liberals have taken turns being either the champions of or opposing reactionaries to reforms such as emancipating the slaves (result: the Civil War) to the regulation of labor conditions, legislation of civil rights, and equal rights for women. The echoes of these fights remain with us today, giving us such partisan philosophies as identity politics and creeds of law and order that threaten to undermine the continued fights for the realization of true equality.
In the end, Lepore spares no one in her critiques of the past, showing how peoples of all political persuasions are complicit in either the nation's successes or failures, and that ultimately, the nation is better off for having brought in more of its people underneath the big tent of citizenship (and all of its accompanying obligations). She pushes for continued improvement of the American experiment, taking pride in its successes and asking us to learn from our past grievous errors. Because of the ongoing nature of our national experiment, an epic tale Lepore tells with elegance, no definitive conclusion can be reached on whether or not our nation has, in fact, realized its fundamental truths for all of its citizens. Of course, this means that there is more work to be done, a new generation that needs to wrestle with its history and take the nation into the future.
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Friday, May 17, 2019
Book Review: Greg Grandin's "The End of the Myth"
If there's anything as American as apple pie and baseball and the Fourth of July, it is the frontier. Today, we don't live in the age of Manifest Destiny, cowboys and outlaws racing ahead of the streams of wagons headed West to the Pacific coast. So politicians have to get more creative nowadays in evoking the cultural memory of the ever-expanding frontier, whether it be international markets or the stars, when trying to pass major policy initiatives. But what happens when politics takes a more insular turn, from the optimism of the seemingly infinite expanse to the pessimistic fortress-mindset represented by the Trumpian Wall? How did we get here? Historian Greg Grandin sheds light on our present moment in his 2019 exploration of the frontier's role in American history, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
The frontier has always held a special place in American hearts and minds, serving as a basis for what we term today "American exceptionalism." Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner first invoked this idea in his "Frontier Thesis," wherein he argued that America's ability to settle such vast swaths of "free land"--not officially claimed by other recognized nation-states--allowed for the genesis of the "uniquely American form of political equality," premised on a fiercely "vibrant, forward-looking individualism" skeptical of centralized power that we've all come to know and love (Grandin, 2019, p. 1). Pioneers at the border needed to be hardy and adaptive when it came to settling in an unfriendly wilderness, encountering justifiably angry and dispossessed Native Americans--the latter pushed ever-westward by the U.S. government--harsh weather, and unfriendly wildlife, forming collective alliances when possible and thus creating outposts of freedom as bulwarks against an uncivilized frontier.
As Americans would come to establish themselves, from "sea to shining sea" and then move out into the world, whether by acquiring territories, opening new international markets, and fighting a long-line of world wars, the thinking went that America could serve as a sort of universal model for democracy done right, where the unceasing onward march would serve as a way to ameliorate social problems like racism or income inequality that plagued other crowded, border-bound nation-states. Why? Because those extremists, racists, and other problem elements and discontents were pushed ever farther away with the expanding frontier line. The best part was that the frontier was self-renewing, as a new frontier beckoned all the time, even after the mainland was thoroughly settled, keeping populational pressures low and divisions minimal, or minimized. Thus, a country could be knit together and political polarization kept at bay by promises of endless growth, an expansion of our universalist ideas, economic and political systems into the world short of imperialistic command and control.
Not surprisingly, there are problems with this Turnerian ethos. One, the world's resources are not infinite. National policy and our current model of troubled capitalism have not historically recognized this and are just starting to recognize our ecological and economic limits (at least on some fronts). (More liberal humanist perspectives, upon recognizing this, thus posit a more equitable societal arrangement to better share our finite resources, a model of social democracy. Others see limitations as an invitation to double down on an isolationist and racist mindset of domination and exclusion of non-whites from sharing in these benefits. The more dog-eat-dog model, if you will.) Secondly, this brand of American exceptionalism was founded in an era of contradictions, where unprecedented individual freedom (absolute freedom from restrictions in a world that does demand some restrictions on this freedom) only extended to whites and not African-American slaves, dispossessed Native Americans, or later immigrant peoples of color. Additionally, the government and not the rugged individual working collectively were able to open the doors wide for an unprecedented settlement and prosperity, pushing Native Americans and people of color out of the way of white settlers. Thus, these contradictions have remained, and have festered.
With the Great Recession of 2008 and draining Middle East campaigns under our national belt and income inequality rising (corporations have exploited the frontier mindset to the detriment of the commons raised on the unfettered idealism of the American Dream), pessimism has set in, with Donald Trump's election and Wall declaring the frontier closed and for America to start digging in the trenches. The safety valve of expansion seems to have failed, leaving no place for the fringe extremists and nativist elements to vent aside from internally directed violence against immigrants and people of color and a ramping up of polarization, starkly revealing the unavoidable social problems of modern life. More importantly, the realization is slowly setting in that the United States is like other nations, obligated to reckon with the latter problems just like everyone else.
We seem to have come down from the clouds, faced with the destructive impulses of a Trumpism that refuses limits, even when recognizing that the world is limited, an uneasy, destabilizing contradiction detrimental to the stability of our polity. While Grandin pulls no punches in his troubling assessment of our present and possible future of ever-greater polarization, he concludes with the cautiously optimistic hope that America still has time to recognize its limits in the Global Age and learn to thrive in a more balanced social democracy. This moment of reckoning will come, and we need to be ready for it.
Works Cited:
Grandin, Greg. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.
The frontier has always held a special place in American hearts and minds, serving as a basis for what we term today "American exceptionalism." Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner first invoked this idea in his "Frontier Thesis," wherein he argued that America's ability to settle such vast swaths of "free land"--not officially claimed by other recognized nation-states--allowed for the genesis of the "uniquely American form of political equality," premised on a fiercely "vibrant, forward-looking individualism" skeptical of centralized power that we've all come to know and love (Grandin, 2019, p. 1). Pioneers at the border needed to be hardy and adaptive when it came to settling in an unfriendly wilderness, encountering justifiably angry and dispossessed Native Americans--the latter pushed ever-westward by the U.S. government--harsh weather, and unfriendly wildlife, forming collective alliances when possible and thus creating outposts of freedom as bulwarks against an uncivilized frontier.
As Americans would come to establish themselves, from "sea to shining sea" and then move out into the world, whether by acquiring territories, opening new international markets, and fighting a long-line of world wars, the thinking went that America could serve as a sort of universal model for democracy done right, where the unceasing onward march would serve as a way to ameliorate social problems like racism or income inequality that plagued other crowded, border-bound nation-states. Why? Because those extremists, racists, and other problem elements and discontents were pushed ever farther away with the expanding frontier line. The best part was that the frontier was self-renewing, as a new frontier beckoned all the time, even after the mainland was thoroughly settled, keeping populational pressures low and divisions minimal, or minimized. Thus, a country could be knit together and political polarization kept at bay by promises of endless growth, an expansion of our universalist ideas, economic and political systems into the world short of imperialistic command and control.
Not surprisingly, there are problems with this Turnerian ethos. One, the world's resources are not infinite. National policy and our current model of troubled capitalism have not historically recognized this and are just starting to recognize our ecological and economic limits (at least on some fronts). (More liberal humanist perspectives, upon recognizing this, thus posit a more equitable societal arrangement to better share our finite resources, a model of social democracy. Others see limitations as an invitation to double down on an isolationist and racist mindset of domination and exclusion of non-whites from sharing in these benefits. The more dog-eat-dog model, if you will.) Secondly, this brand of American exceptionalism was founded in an era of contradictions, where unprecedented individual freedom (absolute freedom from restrictions in a world that does demand some restrictions on this freedom) only extended to whites and not African-American slaves, dispossessed Native Americans, or later immigrant peoples of color. Additionally, the government and not the rugged individual working collectively were able to open the doors wide for an unprecedented settlement and prosperity, pushing Native Americans and people of color out of the way of white settlers. Thus, these contradictions have remained, and have festered.
With the Great Recession of 2008 and draining Middle East campaigns under our national belt and income inequality rising (corporations have exploited the frontier mindset to the detriment of the commons raised on the unfettered idealism of the American Dream), pessimism has set in, with Donald Trump's election and Wall declaring the frontier closed and for America to start digging in the trenches. The safety valve of expansion seems to have failed, leaving no place for the fringe extremists and nativist elements to vent aside from internally directed violence against immigrants and people of color and a ramping up of polarization, starkly revealing the unavoidable social problems of modern life. More importantly, the realization is slowly setting in that the United States is like other nations, obligated to reckon with the latter problems just like everyone else.
We seem to have come down from the clouds, faced with the destructive impulses of a Trumpism that refuses limits, even when recognizing that the world is limited, an uneasy, destabilizing contradiction detrimental to the stability of our polity. While Grandin pulls no punches in his troubling assessment of our present and possible future of ever-greater polarization, he concludes with the cautiously optimistic hope that America still has time to recognize its limits in the Global Age and learn to thrive in a more balanced social democracy. This moment of reckoning will come, and we need to be ready for it.
Works Cited:
Grandin, Greg. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.
Friday, May 3, 2019
Taking a Look at the Redacted Mueller Report
The wait is over! The Mueller Report has finally been released to the public, albeit heavily redacted, and boy is it a whopper. Coming in at 448 pages, the report consists of two volumes, covering Mueller's findings concerning potential obstruction of justice and conspiracy by the Trump administration and Russia during the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump administration's reactions to Mueller's probe. So was there collusion and obstruction of justice? No, but there wasn't not collusion and obstruction of justice. "A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts," writes Mueller in the introduction (Mueller, 2019, Vol. I, p. 2). Confused? I'll explain.
So, Mueller's team was unable to definitively prove-underneath the high evidentiary and intent bars set by federal obstruction of justice and conspiracy statutes-that individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russia consciously conspired together to sway the 2016 presidential election in Trump's favor. Why?
For one, there are differing points of view over what investigatory actions can and cannot be taken in the course of an investigation while the President holds office and, as a result, is protected from certain legal liabilities. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the White House asserts that investigations like Mueller's can only investigate and prosecute a narrow set of obstructive acts such as evidence and witness tampering and perjury. To prosecute any broader than those acts infringes on the President's powers to "supervise prosecutorial conduct or to remove inferior law-enforcement officers" like the FBI director or Special Counsel in the course of the President's job to see that laws are "faithfully executed" (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 170, 180). Basically, Congress can only look at the crimes that don't fall under the powers and actions allowed the President in the Constitution. On the other side arguing for a broader interpretation of federal laws is Mueller's team, saying, look, Congress has the power to protect its oversight operations (like the Special Counsel's inquiry) "against corrupt acts from any source" (hence the legislating and enactment of federal criminal law statutes and grand jury protections) and that there are more ways aside from evidence tampering for obstruction to take place (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 176). Ways that may entangle messily with executive powers and that aren't easily prosecuted while a President holds office.
Secondly, Mueller admits in the report that he is unable to say with certainty whether or not the President and his inner circle committed any crimes because some sensitive communications are protected by executive privilege. There is also the issue that the President refused to submit to a personal interview, instead submitting written responses to Mueller's questions that read like the written equivalent of Jeff Sessions's "I don't recall" Senate testimony in June 2017. Therefore, Mueller could not satisfactorily clear up any doubts whether the evidence showed without a doubt the actions taken meet all the criteria set by obstruction of justice statutes, namely, those of the "obstructive act, nexus to a proceeding, and intent" (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 15). In other words, you have to prove that a specific action, like bribery, was taken with the knowledge of an upcoming judicial proceeding or investigation, and was not taken in the public interest (i.e. taken in a personal interest).
Therefore, Mueller's strongest case for the potential bringing of charges seem to be Trump's actions to discourage Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen from testifying against him, his attempts to have the investigation restricted to future election meddling, repeated attempts to get former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to "unrecuse" himself and take control of the Special Counsel investigation, and the President's two attempts to fire the Special Counsel himself (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 5).
While Mueller could've subpoenaed the President to try and get the evidence he needed to make a definitive charging call, he didn't bother, finding the President's written submissions to be "inadequate," but not wanting to delay the investigation further by going to court over the subpoena (Blake, 2019; Mueller, 2019, App. C, p. 2). Besides, Mueller reasoned that the investigation had enough viable evidence from other sources to be confident about the established facts without wading into the legal morass.
So where do we go from here? It seems that Mueller is telling Congress that his investigative scope was limited, along with resources and time, and further tied up by the thorny legal questions surrounding executive criminal liability, and that it is up to Congress to continue investigating. (In fact, ongoing cases involving Russians and former Trump team members have been handed off to law enforcement agencies like the FBI, who in turn have partnered with state Attorneys General and other prosecutors.) If Congress finds amidst the evidence conduct that amounts to conspiracy or obstruction, it can then check executive abuse of powers by initiating impeachment proceedings to remove the President from office. Moreover, Mueller points out that the President's protections against certain legal liabilities go away when not holding office and responsible for enforcing the nation's laws.
Whatever happens next, whether or not Mueller chooses to testify in front of Congress about his findings or House Democrats start impeachment proceedings, what is clear is that the ball is in Congress's court now.
Works Cited:
Blake, Aaron. (2019, April 23). The 5 Crimes Mueller Suggests Trump Could Be Charged With. Retrieved May 2, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/23/crimes-mueller-suggests-trump-could-be-charged-with/?utm_term=.aff9aa072005.
Mueller, Robert. S. III. (2019). Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election: Submitted Pursuant to 28 C.F.R. §600.8(c) (pp. 1-448) (United States of America, United States Department of Justice, Office of the Special Counsel). Washington D.C.: United States Department of Justice.
So, Mueller's team was unable to definitively prove-underneath the high evidentiary and intent bars set by federal obstruction of justice and conspiracy statutes-that individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russia consciously conspired together to sway the 2016 presidential election in Trump's favor. Why?
For one, there are differing points of view over what investigatory actions can and cannot be taken in the course of an investigation while the President holds office and, as a result, is protected from certain legal liabilities. The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the White House asserts that investigations like Mueller's can only investigate and prosecute a narrow set of obstructive acts such as evidence and witness tampering and perjury. To prosecute any broader than those acts infringes on the President's powers to "supervise prosecutorial conduct or to remove inferior law-enforcement officers" like the FBI director or Special Counsel in the course of the President's job to see that laws are "faithfully executed" (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 170, 180). Basically, Congress can only look at the crimes that don't fall under the powers and actions allowed the President in the Constitution. On the other side arguing for a broader interpretation of federal laws is Mueller's team, saying, look, Congress has the power to protect its oversight operations (like the Special Counsel's inquiry) "against corrupt acts from any source" (hence the legislating and enactment of federal criminal law statutes and grand jury protections) and that there are more ways aside from evidence tampering for obstruction to take place (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 176). Ways that may entangle messily with executive powers and that aren't easily prosecuted while a President holds office.
Secondly, Mueller admits in the report that he is unable to say with certainty whether or not the President and his inner circle committed any crimes because some sensitive communications are protected by executive privilege. There is also the issue that the President refused to submit to a personal interview, instead submitting written responses to Mueller's questions that read like the written equivalent of Jeff Sessions's "I don't recall" Senate testimony in June 2017. Therefore, Mueller could not satisfactorily clear up any doubts whether the evidence showed without a doubt the actions taken meet all the criteria set by obstruction of justice statutes, namely, those of the "obstructive act, nexus to a proceeding, and intent" (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 15). In other words, you have to prove that a specific action, like bribery, was taken with the knowledge of an upcoming judicial proceeding or investigation, and was not taken in the public interest (i.e. taken in a personal interest).
Therefore, Mueller's strongest case for the potential bringing of charges seem to be Trump's actions to discourage Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen from testifying against him, his attempts to have the investigation restricted to future election meddling, repeated attempts to get former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to "unrecuse" himself and take control of the Special Counsel investigation, and the President's two attempts to fire the Special Counsel himself (Mueller, 2019, Vol. II, p. 5).
While Mueller could've subpoenaed the President to try and get the evidence he needed to make a definitive charging call, he didn't bother, finding the President's written submissions to be "inadequate," but not wanting to delay the investigation further by going to court over the subpoena (Blake, 2019; Mueller, 2019, App. C, p. 2). Besides, Mueller reasoned that the investigation had enough viable evidence from other sources to be confident about the established facts without wading into the legal morass.
So where do we go from here? It seems that Mueller is telling Congress that his investigative scope was limited, along with resources and time, and further tied up by the thorny legal questions surrounding executive criminal liability, and that it is up to Congress to continue investigating. (In fact, ongoing cases involving Russians and former Trump team members have been handed off to law enforcement agencies like the FBI, who in turn have partnered with state Attorneys General and other prosecutors.) If Congress finds amidst the evidence conduct that amounts to conspiracy or obstruction, it can then check executive abuse of powers by initiating impeachment proceedings to remove the President from office. Moreover, Mueller points out that the President's protections against certain legal liabilities go away when not holding office and responsible for enforcing the nation's laws.
Whatever happens next, whether or not Mueller chooses to testify in front of Congress about his findings or House Democrats start impeachment proceedings, what is clear is that the ball is in Congress's court now.
Works Cited:
Blake, Aaron. (2019, April 23). The 5 Crimes Mueller Suggests Trump Could Be Charged With. Retrieved May 2, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/23/crimes-mueller-suggests-trump-could-be-charged-with/?utm_term=.aff9aa072005.
Mueller, Robert. S. III. (2019). Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election: Submitted Pursuant to 28 C.F.R. §600.8(c) (pp. 1-448) (United States of America, United States Department of Justice, Office of the Special Counsel). Washington D.C.: United States Department of Justice.
Friday, April 19, 2019
Book Review: Peter Frankopan's "The Silk Roads"
What was your history class like? Was there any world history? If there was, chances are that it was relegated to the periphery of the largely Euro-centric story told of the rise of the West, or left out to be taught in another non-mandatory elective. Professor of global history at Oxford University, Peter Frankopan, seeks to rectify these historical gaps in his 2016 bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, and in the process maybe change Western perceptions of a region today commonly seen to be backwards and reactionary.
Frankopan tells the interconnected story of the world by examining the civilizations along the ancient trading routes of the Silk Roads that spanned from Africa to the Mediterranean to East Asia that connect the West to the East, from the distant past to the present, giving readers a new perspective on major historical events, like the fall of the Roman Empire to the later fall of the European colonial powers. It is the epic story of conquests, wars, and the constant trade of goods, people, ideas, and religions, a globalization that started and has never completely stopped, but seemingly has increased in intensity in the present moment.
So rather than follow the traditional route of historical analyses in expounding heavily on our inheritance of the Greco-Roman legacy, a path Frankopan sees as neglecting a nuanced tale of vibrant East-West exchange, Frankopan starts with the rise of the Persian Empire in the 6th century BCE in competition to the Romans as one of the first defining moments of antiquity. Within this hotbed of exchange, major religions and economic conventions became fairly mainstream, from common trade currencies to religions whose success depended on emphasizing common elements of these doctrines with local traditions. Christianity moved this way east and Buddhism west, attracting large sects of competing followers and helping to ensure their statuses among major world religions.
There was a healthy inter-mixing and borrowing (and relative tolerance) of ideas that, by-and-large, enabled the East to flourish in a varying succession of great empires, a condition that has endured for a majority of humanity's existence. The West caught up and eventually surpassed the East in large part through the exploitation of the bountiful natural and human resources of conquered lands, from the gold and slaves brought back from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, to the spices, precious stones, and eventually oil, of the Middle and Far East. Conquest and suffering went hand-in-hand with prosperity at home, allowing Western Europe and later America to beef up their militaries while simultaneously raising their political, cultural, and economic stars worldwide in the form of various colonial empires. When those empires fell, the powers-that-be turned to short-term deals with strongmen to safeguard their interests in the region (think oil). (Of course, we know today how that's gone.)
As a result of the latter policies, the exploitation of the East by the West left mixed-bag legacies that continue to resonate today, from the powder keg of the largely autocratic Middle East to the economic dynamism of East and South-East Asia. This is where it becomes especially helpful to know the other side of the story, how imperial legacies set the countries of the Silk Roads back in the modern era, with arbitrarily designed national boundaries and centuries of economic exploitation (think oil) resulting in autocracy, income inequality, and a bevy of other declines on various social indices for many living in the region.
But, there seem to be major changes underway today that are serving to revitalize the ancient corridors of commerce, people, and ideas, and with it lift up the peoples of the area. While uneven progress has been made in the center of the world towards climbing back upwards, the exhaustion of the West in the wake of huge military expenditures in the region in combination with increased political infighting over the globalization opening up new avenues in the East seems to show that the Silk Roads may be reclaiming their historical top-dog status once again. For one, China is investing heavily in Africa and in its ambitious New Silk Roads initiative to build up the transportation and economic infrastructure of the region. New centers for the arts and learning are popping up again in the Middle East and Asia. Many Western foreign policies are beginning to shift their focus Eastward.
In any case, in an era of transition, much uncertainty remains. While The Silk Roads prescribes no solutions that will avert potential conflict between a seemingly peaking West and rising East, it provides helpful context, a roadmap of the past leading to the present. Whatever we choose to do next, it seems clear that Western foreign policy should be geared towards peacefully guiding the rising powers upwards and securing a prosperous multipolar world for the many. Peace would seem to depend on that.
Works Cited:
Frankopan, Peter. (2016). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Frankopan tells the interconnected story of the world by examining the civilizations along the ancient trading routes of the Silk Roads that spanned from Africa to the Mediterranean to East Asia that connect the West to the East, from the distant past to the present, giving readers a new perspective on major historical events, like the fall of the Roman Empire to the later fall of the European colonial powers. It is the epic story of conquests, wars, and the constant trade of goods, people, ideas, and religions, a globalization that started and has never completely stopped, but seemingly has increased in intensity in the present moment.
So rather than follow the traditional route of historical analyses in expounding heavily on our inheritance of the Greco-Roman legacy, a path Frankopan sees as neglecting a nuanced tale of vibrant East-West exchange, Frankopan starts with the rise of the Persian Empire in the 6th century BCE in competition to the Romans as one of the first defining moments of antiquity. Within this hotbed of exchange, major religions and economic conventions became fairly mainstream, from common trade currencies to religions whose success depended on emphasizing common elements of these doctrines with local traditions. Christianity moved this way east and Buddhism west, attracting large sects of competing followers and helping to ensure their statuses among major world religions.
There was a healthy inter-mixing and borrowing (and relative tolerance) of ideas that, by-and-large, enabled the East to flourish in a varying succession of great empires, a condition that has endured for a majority of humanity's existence. The West caught up and eventually surpassed the East in large part through the exploitation of the bountiful natural and human resources of conquered lands, from the gold and slaves brought back from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, to the spices, precious stones, and eventually oil, of the Middle and Far East. Conquest and suffering went hand-in-hand with prosperity at home, allowing Western Europe and later America to beef up their militaries while simultaneously raising their political, cultural, and economic stars worldwide in the form of various colonial empires. When those empires fell, the powers-that-be turned to short-term deals with strongmen to safeguard their interests in the region (think oil). (Of course, we know today how that's gone.)
As a result of the latter policies, the exploitation of the East by the West left mixed-bag legacies that continue to resonate today, from the powder keg of the largely autocratic Middle East to the economic dynamism of East and South-East Asia. This is where it becomes especially helpful to know the other side of the story, how imperial legacies set the countries of the Silk Roads back in the modern era, with arbitrarily designed national boundaries and centuries of economic exploitation (think oil) resulting in autocracy, income inequality, and a bevy of other declines on various social indices for many living in the region.
But, there seem to be major changes underway today that are serving to revitalize the ancient corridors of commerce, people, and ideas, and with it lift up the peoples of the area. While uneven progress has been made in the center of the world towards climbing back upwards, the exhaustion of the West in the wake of huge military expenditures in the region in combination with increased political infighting over the globalization opening up new avenues in the East seems to show that the Silk Roads may be reclaiming their historical top-dog status once again. For one, China is investing heavily in Africa and in its ambitious New Silk Roads initiative to build up the transportation and economic infrastructure of the region. New centers for the arts and learning are popping up again in the Middle East and Asia. Many Western foreign policies are beginning to shift their focus Eastward.
In any case, in an era of transition, much uncertainty remains. While The Silk Roads prescribes no solutions that will avert potential conflict between a seemingly peaking West and rising East, it provides helpful context, a roadmap of the past leading to the present. Whatever we choose to do next, it seems clear that Western foreign policy should be geared towards peacefully guiding the rising powers upwards and securing a prosperous multipolar world for the many. Peace would seem to depend on that.
Works Cited:
Frankopan, Peter. (2016). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Book Review: Laurie Halse Anderson's "Shout"
In the era of #MeToo, many women in the United States and around the world have found their voices to speak out against a persistently misogynistic cultural, economic, political and social system. A shot heard round the world, from the United States to Bollywood. Sure, it was much worse in the past, the usual narrative goes. But now women have achieved voting rights and a degree of social mobility. Now, with #MeToo, it seems the power imbalances have been thrust into the light, and no abuser is safe. Yay, progress!? Well...not so much.
Like much else, recent history is a mixed bag, with many benefits of movements that shake the powerful and go viral on mainstream news outlets around the world not necessarily trickling down to the masses or affecting change on the underlying structural issues and social attitudes that cause the problems in the first place. This is frustrating and demoralizing for women across the world, who, silenced by the stigmas surrounding sexual violence and assault, may judge it not worth the social costs to come forward, to agitate for change. If they do, they may face scorn and even death threats (see the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who received death threats after her testimony at the hearing for now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh). One of many giving voice to this despair and rage felt by many women is author Laurie Halse Anderson, first through her 1999 novel Speak, and in her latest, Shout: A Poetry Memoir (2019).
From the get-go, Shout issues a siren call for a new wave of activism in a searing work of poetic prose that is half unflinchingly personal autobiography and half advocacy treatise. Like protagonist Melinda from Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson was sexually assaulted as a teenager, when she was thirteen years old. Of course, this assault having occurred in the 70s meant that Anderson, like other girls and women (and yes, boys and men), were counseled that to stay safe from predatory men (and women), they must dress conservatively, make themselves blend in to the wallpaper, to be seen, not heard. If they were assaulted, it was their fault for dressing provocatively, for drinking, being out at night alone. As for having candid conversations about sex, healthy relationships, consent and menstruation? Out of the question. Talking about sex was taboo, and when non-consensual intercourse happened, it was also taboo to speak up about it.
What makes it even worse is that in addition to the latter smothering cultural mores, Anderson's home life also had another toxic layer of drug and emotional abuse, as a result of her father's PTSD and her mother's powerlessness to change the family situation. After her rape, Anderson fell into a similar spiral, driven by her shame and anger at having to deal with her continuing trauma.
It wasn't until she spent 13 months in Denmark as a foreign exchange student that Anderson was able to gain the clarity she needed to begin healing, something she was unable to do living under her parents' toxic roof. Upon her return home, this clarity began to crystallize into an awareness of the pervasiveness of her situation, as she attended college at Georgetown and dealt with handsy professors, and as a reporter witnessed a defense attorney engaging in the brutal character assassination of a rape survivor. She channeled this awareness and dawning rage at the trauma she faced into fiction writing, first in Speak. When Speak broke into the mainstream, she used her newfound platform to tour schools and speak against sexual violence, empowering students to address these issues openly in their schools to everyone's benefit, while not flinching away from the hard path of recovery those who've dealt with sexual violence must take in order to heal. It is in this unflinching address to readers where Anderson's prose is at its most powerful, a dagger to pierce through layers of ignorance and trauma alike to let the light in.
While we've come a long way from the 70s, there still is much work to be done, as seen by the push back of school administrators against teaching sex-ed sans abstinence, school librarians worried about losing their jobs for ordering Speak, and even one revealing episode in which the fire alarm was pulled by a principal to stop Anderson's talk. But not talking about it will not make the problems go away. Instead, they fester, and the cycle of sexual violence and misogyny continues.
The laws may have changed so that women are able to vote and speak their minds publicly, but social and cultural norms must evolve alongside the laws for a truly lasting change to take hold, to break the cycle. Shout's brutal honesty makes this abundantly clear, and clears the way for other similar much-needed stories to be told, to remind us that the fight is not over. There's still much more work to do.
Works Cited:
Anderson, Laurie Halse. (2019). Shout: A Poetry Memoir. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
Taub, Amanda. (2019, February 11). #MeToo Paradox: Movement Topples the Powerful, Not the Ordinary. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/world/americas/metoo-ocar-arias.html.
Like much else, recent history is a mixed bag, with many benefits of movements that shake the powerful and go viral on mainstream news outlets around the world not necessarily trickling down to the masses or affecting change on the underlying structural issues and social attitudes that cause the problems in the first place. This is frustrating and demoralizing for women across the world, who, silenced by the stigmas surrounding sexual violence and assault, may judge it not worth the social costs to come forward, to agitate for change. If they do, they may face scorn and even death threats (see the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who received death threats after her testimony at the hearing for now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh). One of many giving voice to this despair and rage felt by many women is author Laurie Halse Anderson, first through her 1999 novel Speak, and in her latest, Shout: A Poetry Memoir (2019).
From the get-go, Shout issues a siren call for a new wave of activism in a searing work of poetic prose that is half unflinchingly personal autobiography and half advocacy treatise. Like protagonist Melinda from Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson was sexually assaulted as a teenager, when she was thirteen years old. Of course, this assault having occurred in the 70s meant that Anderson, like other girls and women (and yes, boys and men), were counseled that to stay safe from predatory men (and women), they must dress conservatively, make themselves blend in to the wallpaper, to be seen, not heard. If they were assaulted, it was their fault for dressing provocatively, for drinking, being out at night alone. As for having candid conversations about sex, healthy relationships, consent and menstruation? Out of the question. Talking about sex was taboo, and when non-consensual intercourse happened, it was also taboo to speak up about it.
What makes it even worse is that in addition to the latter smothering cultural mores, Anderson's home life also had another toxic layer of drug and emotional abuse, as a result of her father's PTSD and her mother's powerlessness to change the family situation. After her rape, Anderson fell into a similar spiral, driven by her shame and anger at having to deal with her continuing trauma.
It wasn't until she spent 13 months in Denmark as a foreign exchange student that Anderson was able to gain the clarity she needed to begin healing, something she was unable to do living under her parents' toxic roof. Upon her return home, this clarity began to crystallize into an awareness of the pervasiveness of her situation, as she attended college at Georgetown and dealt with handsy professors, and as a reporter witnessed a defense attorney engaging in the brutal character assassination of a rape survivor. She channeled this awareness and dawning rage at the trauma she faced into fiction writing, first in Speak. When Speak broke into the mainstream, she used her newfound platform to tour schools and speak against sexual violence, empowering students to address these issues openly in their schools to everyone's benefit, while not flinching away from the hard path of recovery those who've dealt with sexual violence must take in order to heal. It is in this unflinching address to readers where Anderson's prose is at its most powerful, a dagger to pierce through layers of ignorance and trauma alike to let the light in.
While we've come a long way from the 70s, there still is much work to be done, as seen by the push back of school administrators against teaching sex-ed sans abstinence, school librarians worried about losing their jobs for ordering Speak, and even one revealing episode in which the fire alarm was pulled by a principal to stop Anderson's talk. But not talking about it will not make the problems go away. Instead, they fester, and the cycle of sexual violence and misogyny continues.
The laws may have changed so that women are able to vote and speak their minds publicly, but social and cultural norms must evolve alongside the laws for a truly lasting change to take hold, to break the cycle. Shout's brutal honesty makes this abundantly clear, and clears the way for other similar much-needed stories to be told, to remind us that the fight is not over. There's still much more work to do.
Works Cited:
Anderson, Laurie Halse. (2019). Shout: A Poetry Memoir. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
Taub, Amanda. (2019, February 11). #MeToo Paradox: Movement Topples the Powerful, Not the Ordinary. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/world/americas/metoo-ocar-arias.html.
Friday, March 15, 2019
Book Review: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's "My Own Words"
{The following is the second of two pieces dedicated to telling the stories of women past and present during Women's National History Month.}
In this week's piece, I will take a look at an American icon, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (known by many as the "Notorious R.B.G.") through the lens of a 2016 collection of her professional and personal writings titled My Own Words. Put together by her biographers, Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, both accomplished legal professors themselves, My Own Words is not a typical biography in any sense. Bracketed by contextualizing introductory pieces by Hartnett and Williams and one piece by her now deceased husband Marty Ginsburg, My Own Words showcases to readers the varied writings of a sharp legal mind whose long career as a women's rights advocate, law professor, and then judge and justice, colors the pages and legal arguments contained within.
A native of Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933 and grew up in a Jewish household, learning from her mother early on to be independent and studious. After her mother's death due to cancer upon Ruth's 1950 graduation from high school, she would go on study law at Harvard and Columbia University, rededicating herself to the scholarly pursuits her stay-at-home mother was determined Ruth have.
Ginsburg's first foray into the national spotlight would come when, as one of the first women professors at Columbia University in the 1970s and an early beneficiary of the burgeoning women's rights movement at the time, would partner with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to found the Women's Rights Project. As her role with the ACLU required arguing cases before the courts as part of a litigious, piecemeal achievement strategy on behalf of American women inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, her national profile would rise with each of the six cases she would argue before the Supreme Court. All in all, her inspiring work with the ACLU would attract the attention of two presidential administrations: President Carter would appoint her to the D.C. Circuit's U.S. Court of Appeals in 1980 and President Clinton would elevate her into her current position of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993.
My Own Words is dedicated primarily to Ginsburg's legal lectures, opinions, and speeches given throughout her long career. Taken as a whole, these works compose a detailed picture of her liberal-leaning constitutional philosophy, reveal the inner-workings of a busy Supreme Court, and serve to contextualize American jurisprudence in a larger international context centered largely around expanding the reach of human rights and the rule of law in democratic (and on a more hopeful note, non-democratic) societies. This includes encouraging the development of legal regimes dedicated to eliminating discrimination based on race, gender, and socioeconomic circumstance.
Even as the book's biographical narrative turns on the highlights of her legal career, her story is fleshed out further in the tributes she gives recognizing the women trailblazers that came before her as well as close contemporaries she sees in a similar light, like justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and former justice Sandra Day O'Connor. She gives stirring remarks about her friendships within the court, especially the unlikely one that developed between her and the late conservative-leaning justice Antonin Scalia around their mutual love of the opera. (In fact, they both performed as special guests in operatic showings on two separate occasions.) Overall, it was very rewarding to get a glimpse at both the formal and informal ceremonies of the Supreme Court and the dynamic bonds of collegiality the court depends on to function effectively as last-resort arbiters in cases of constitutional import, interpersonal bonds that serve an equal importance in the other co-equal branches of government.
While being extremely gracious about her colleagues on and off the bench, she pulls no punches in describing the ideological differences that exist even in as politically-insulated a branch as the judicial one, even as the Supreme Court tends to be unanimous or close to unanimous in a good majority of its decisions. In the end, the key to keeping it together, Ginsburg notes, is to attack the ideas in an argument rather than resort to ad-hominum attacks on another justice's character or personal beliefs. The behind-the-scenes legal battles fought in majority and dissenting opinions is just another ongoing dialogue, one of many spirited discussions necessary in a democratic system. After all, democracy turns on reaching a consensus among groups of people with vastly different beliefs, finding the places of common ground and moving together from there.
While not necessarily a biographical work, My Own Words is a strong showing nevertheless in terms of granting readers a better perspective on the professional and personal life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite some repetitiveness and overlap between certain passages, as Ginsburg often cites her legal opinions frequently in her many off-the-court appearances at legal conferences, schools, memorials, and other public venues. Some readers will feel dissatisfied at the heavier focus on Ginsburg's legal philosophies and insights at the expense of getting a more personal sense of the motivations driving her long career, such as the struggles and self-doubt she no doubt experienced at some point in her life, perhaps during her early days as an ACLU advocate fighting the good fight against gender-based discrimination. However, in my opinion, My Own Words gives just enough glimpses into both Ginsburg's personal and professional lives to sate readers for now, while building anticipation for the full-fledged official Hartnett and Williams biography of Ginsburg expected to be published after Ginsburg completes her term on the Supreme Court. Stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, Hartnett, Mary, & Williams, Wendy W. (2016). My Own Words. New York: Simon & Schuster.
In this week's piece, I will take a look at an American icon, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (known by many as the "Notorious R.B.G.") through the lens of a 2016 collection of her professional and personal writings titled My Own Words. Put together by her biographers, Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, both accomplished legal professors themselves, My Own Words is not a typical biography in any sense. Bracketed by contextualizing introductory pieces by Hartnett and Williams and one piece by her now deceased husband Marty Ginsburg, My Own Words showcases to readers the varied writings of a sharp legal mind whose long career as a women's rights advocate, law professor, and then judge and justice, colors the pages and legal arguments contained within.
A native of Brooklyn, New York, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933 and grew up in a Jewish household, learning from her mother early on to be independent and studious. After her mother's death due to cancer upon Ruth's 1950 graduation from high school, she would go on study law at Harvard and Columbia University, rededicating herself to the scholarly pursuits her stay-at-home mother was determined Ruth have.
Ginsburg's first foray into the national spotlight would come when, as one of the first women professors at Columbia University in the 1970s and an early beneficiary of the burgeoning women's rights movement at the time, would partner with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to found the Women's Rights Project. As her role with the ACLU required arguing cases before the courts as part of a litigious, piecemeal achievement strategy on behalf of American women inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, her national profile would rise with each of the six cases she would argue before the Supreme Court. All in all, her inspiring work with the ACLU would attract the attention of two presidential administrations: President Carter would appoint her to the D.C. Circuit's U.S. Court of Appeals in 1980 and President Clinton would elevate her into her current position of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993.
My Own Words is dedicated primarily to Ginsburg's legal lectures, opinions, and speeches given throughout her long career. Taken as a whole, these works compose a detailed picture of her liberal-leaning constitutional philosophy, reveal the inner-workings of a busy Supreme Court, and serve to contextualize American jurisprudence in a larger international context centered largely around expanding the reach of human rights and the rule of law in democratic (and on a more hopeful note, non-democratic) societies. This includes encouraging the development of legal regimes dedicated to eliminating discrimination based on race, gender, and socioeconomic circumstance.
Even as the book's biographical narrative turns on the highlights of her legal career, her story is fleshed out further in the tributes she gives recognizing the women trailblazers that came before her as well as close contemporaries she sees in a similar light, like justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and former justice Sandra Day O'Connor. She gives stirring remarks about her friendships within the court, especially the unlikely one that developed between her and the late conservative-leaning justice Antonin Scalia around their mutual love of the opera. (In fact, they both performed as special guests in operatic showings on two separate occasions.) Overall, it was very rewarding to get a glimpse at both the formal and informal ceremonies of the Supreme Court and the dynamic bonds of collegiality the court depends on to function effectively as last-resort arbiters in cases of constitutional import, interpersonal bonds that serve an equal importance in the other co-equal branches of government.
While being extremely gracious about her colleagues on and off the bench, she pulls no punches in describing the ideological differences that exist even in as politically-insulated a branch as the judicial one, even as the Supreme Court tends to be unanimous or close to unanimous in a good majority of its decisions. In the end, the key to keeping it together, Ginsburg notes, is to attack the ideas in an argument rather than resort to ad-hominum attacks on another justice's character or personal beliefs. The behind-the-scenes legal battles fought in majority and dissenting opinions is just another ongoing dialogue, one of many spirited discussions necessary in a democratic system. After all, democracy turns on reaching a consensus among groups of people with vastly different beliefs, finding the places of common ground and moving together from there.
While not necessarily a biographical work, My Own Words is a strong showing nevertheless in terms of granting readers a better perspective on the professional and personal life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, despite some repetitiveness and overlap between certain passages, as Ginsburg often cites her legal opinions frequently in her many off-the-court appearances at legal conferences, schools, memorials, and other public venues. Some readers will feel dissatisfied at the heavier focus on Ginsburg's legal philosophies and insights at the expense of getting a more personal sense of the motivations driving her long career, such as the struggles and self-doubt she no doubt experienced at some point in her life, perhaps during her early days as an ACLU advocate fighting the good fight against gender-based discrimination. However, in my opinion, My Own Words gives just enough glimpses into both Ginsburg's personal and professional lives to sate readers for now, while building anticipation for the full-fledged official Hartnett and Williams biography of Ginsburg expected to be published after Ginsburg completes her term on the Supreme Court. Stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, Hartnett, Mary, & Williams, Wendy W. (2016). My Own Words. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Friday, March 1, 2019
Book Review: Kara Cooney's "When Women Ruled the World"
{March is the official start to Women's History Month! Here is one of two pieces about women's lives both past and present to celebrate.}
I happened recently upon an intriguing book chronicling the (often short) reigns of six ancient Egyptian queens. Partly out of curiosity to learn about an ancient culture I hardly knew anything about outside of the dramatized stories surrounding Cleopatra taught in schools and outside of them, and drawn to the the title's promise to shed more light on historical figures almost completely left out of the record, I gave Egyptologist Kara Cooney's 2018 publication, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, a chance. And I was not disappointed.
There were only six women leaders or pharaohs on record in the tombs, temples, statuary, stone tablets and other artifacts left behind in ancient Egypt's roughly 4,000 years of existence: Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra. Upon the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC by the first pharaoh and warlord King Narmer, the ancient Egyptian lands of Northern Africa were uniquely positioned to flourish as they were protected from the constant instability of other societies of the time--namely, invasion and drastic population shifts--by the Nile delta, perilous seas, and surrounding deserts. Moreover, the Nile's annual floods and fertile silt left behind, made Egypt into the Mediterranean breadbasket. All of these blessings bestowed by its natural geography and unique agricultural situation allowed its societal institutions and culture to remain largely unchanged over its long history, passing down a patriarchal and authoritarian system of centralized rule underneath an Egyptian god-king. How then did these six women find the space to rule in such a society, however briefly their reigns may have been?
Not unique among hereditary dynasties, Egypt sought to stave off crippling internal power struggles partly by utilizing a system of incestuous marriage, and partly with the unique Egyptian tradition of ritualized killings of the competition (mostly male members of the elite and royal family) in the event of the previous monarch's death and burial, to consolidate power in one line of continuous descent. This included the children of the monarch begotten by the many women in the royal harem and his wife, respectively. While brutal, realpolitik ritualized killings of the competition eventually tapered off after the stabilization of dynastic rule, there were situations in which there was no fit male ruler to continue the dynasty: he was too young, crippled, sterile, or died young as a consequence of incest. To stave off a succession crisis and make the smooth transition between dynasty, Egypt relied on its women, usually the widowed Royal Wife, to serve as a stop-gap or regent where the male heir was too young or wasn't there, counting on the assumption that women wouldn't act against their children's or larger familial interests by ruling pragmatically (why buck the system that gave you your power and station?). This usually meant violence of any kind was out and consensus in, and that the women inherited their station at the end of a dynasty and in times of crisis, whether they were the frequent incest-driven succession kind or the more rare cases of infighting, religious feuds, or climatological shifts. (Funny isn't it how women tend to come to power in more unequal societies and during times of crisis to clean up the mess left behind?)
Merneith was the first queen to witness the brutalities of court life--notwithstanding the ritualized killings claiming up to hundreds of victims at a time or the fact of her gender being largely regarded as mercurial, passive, and easy to control by the men in her life. Merneith would not be the first or last woman to largely be used in leadership positions in order to shore up their support of a patriarchal system that had elevated them to those same positions of power. She was the pioneer of the six, ruling as (unofficial) regent while her young son, King Den, matured, with those same ritualized killings helping to shore up her unofficial reign along with an emphasis on her status as descendant of a god-king or kings. Using the template Merneith set down of achieving power as the feminine protector of the god-king's realm, Neferusobek followed up by managing to rule for four years alone after the untimely death of her sterile husband. She would become the first female king, with Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra VII following using the time-honored strategy of propaganda and other positive PR emphasizing her god-king lineage and willingness to do anything in service of the realm (this PR included grafting on traditional masculine-aspects of power onto their female figures in stone reliefs carved in their image in a sort of ancient-world pant-suit).
However, these women couldn't rely solely on their religious and political status and had to also use their educated minds to get Egypt out of a tight spots. For example, Cleopatra made powerful Roman alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and other Mediterranean powers to shore up Egypt against imperial rule and Nefertiti made peace with ostracized and powerful priests in a diplomatic tight-rope act after her husband Akhenaten tried disastrously to forcibly convert Egyptians to a monotheistic sun cult religion away from their traditional polytheistic one in a bid for even more power. In other words, instead of the proverbial two-sided coin of power being both male and female (stereotypical brash and bold versus cautious leadership styles), this pharaoh was of the view that a man need not share influence at all and sought to redefine power as only legitimate when exercised by a male.
Often, the thanks these women got for coming to the rescue was backlash from the society that temporarily granted them power, evidenced by the removal or attempted obliteration of their names from the kingly lineages recorded on tablets, statuary, or tombs. If they remained in the historical record at all, they would be remembered as leadership failures or as overreaching by showing naked ambition for power, rather than cloaking it as merely assuming the mantle of leadership in protection of her dynasty (sounds familiar). Akhenaten's cult-episode and Nefertiti's perceived blatant power-grab foreshadowed a trend in following dynasties that mostly barred royal women from positions of power, opening up marriage to non-royal females (the power disparities much greater here) and allowing Game of Thrones-style infighting among elite families to worsen.
While I disagreed with Cooney's broad generalizations about female leadership biologically trending towards the cautious, consensual, and prudent rather than the bold or aggressive unilateral style of a man's (society's social constraints rather than biology seems to explain better why a woman takes a more cautious approach to power in a patriarchal society that would crucify her for expressing herself any other way than the "proper" protector-of-the-family or supportive-nurturer role), I agreed with her concluding appeal that society needs to utilize all styles of leadership (whether perceived to be more feminine or masculine) in order to prosper. This makes the equality of the sexes culturally, economically, politically, religiously and otherwise even more imperative if we can redefine and re-balance the idea of power itself. However, as When Women Ruled the World shows, as a species, humans, whether in monarchical or democratic systems of governance, are both so close and yet so far from that elusive goal of parity.
Works Cited:
Cooney, Kara. (2018). When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt. Washington, D. C.: National Geographic.
I happened recently upon an intriguing book chronicling the (often short) reigns of six ancient Egyptian queens. Partly out of curiosity to learn about an ancient culture I hardly knew anything about outside of the dramatized stories surrounding Cleopatra taught in schools and outside of them, and drawn to the the title's promise to shed more light on historical figures almost completely left out of the record, I gave Egyptologist Kara Cooney's 2018 publication, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, a chance. And I was not disappointed.
There were only six women leaders or pharaohs on record in the tombs, temples, statuary, stone tablets and other artifacts left behind in ancient Egypt's roughly 4,000 years of existence: Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra. Upon the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in 3100 BC by the first pharaoh and warlord King Narmer, the ancient Egyptian lands of Northern Africa were uniquely positioned to flourish as they were protected from the constant instability of other societies of the time--namely, invasion and drastic population shifts--by the Nile delta, perilous seas, and surrounding deserts. Moreover, the Nile's annual floods and fertile silt left behind, made Egypt into the Mediterranean breadbasket. All of these blessings bestowed by its natural geography and unique agricultural situation allowed its societal institutions and culture to remain largely unchanged over its long history, passing down a patriarchal and authoritarian system of centralized rule underneath an Egyptian god-king. How then did these six women find the space to rule in such a society, however briefly their reigns may have been?
Not unique among hereditary dynasties, Egypt sought to stave off crippling internal power struggles partly by utilizing a system of incestuous marriage, and partly with the unique Egyptian tradition of ritualized killings of the competition (mostly male members of the elite and royal family) in the event of the previous monarch's death and burial, to consolidate power in one line of continuous descent. This included the children of the monarch begotten by the many women in the royal harem and his wife, respectively. While brutal, realpolitik ritualized killings of the competition eventually tapered off after the stabilization of dynastic rule, there were situations in which there was no fit male ruler to continue the dynasty: he was too young, crippled, sterile, or died young as a consequence of incest. To stave off a succession crisis and make the smooth transition between dynasty, Egypt relied on its women, usually the widowed Royal Wife, to serve as a stop-gap or regent where the male heir was too young or wasn't there, counting on the assumption that women wouldn't act against their children's or larger familial interests by ruling pragmatically (why buck the system that gave you your power and station?). This usually meant violence of any kind was out and consensus in, and that the women inherited their station at the end of a dynasty and in times of crisis, whether they were the frequent incest-driven succession kind or the more rare cases of infighting, religious feuds, or climatological shifts. (Funny isn't it how women tend to come to power in more unequal societies and during times of crisis to clean up the mess left behind?)
Merneith was the first queen to witness the brutalities of court life--notwithstanding the ritualized killings claiming up to hundreds of victims at a time or the fact of her gender being largely regarded as mercurial, passive, and easy to control by the men in her life. Merneith would not be the first or last woman to largely be used in leadership positions in order to shore up their support of a patriarchal system that had elevated them to those same positions of power. She was the pioneer of the six, ruling as (unofficial) regent while her young son, King Den, matured, with those same ritualized killings helping to shore up her unofficial reign along with an emphasis on her status as descendant of a god-king or kings. Using the template Merneith set down of achieving power as the feminine protector of the god-king's realm, Neferusobek followed up by managing to rule for four years alone after the untimely death of her sterile husband. She would become the first female king, with Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra VII following using the time-honored strategy of propaganda and other positive PR emphasizing her god-king lineage and willingness to do anything in service of the realm (this PR included grafting on traditional masculine-aspects of power onto their female figures in stone reliefs carved in their image in a sort of ancient-world pant-suit).
However, these women couldn't rely solely on their religious and political status and had to also use their educated minds to get Egypt out of a tight spots. For example, Cleopatra made powerful Roman alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and other Mediterranean powers to shore up Egypt against imperial rule and Nefertiti made peace with ostracized and powerful priests in a diplomatic tight-rope act after her husband Akhenaten tried disastrously to forcibly convert Egyptians to a monotheistic sun cult religion away from their traditional polytheistic one in a bid for even more power. In other words, instead of the proverbial two-sided coin of power being both male and female (stereotypical brash and bold versus cautious leadership styles), this pharaoh was of the view that a man need not share influence at all and sought to redefine power as only legitimate when exercised by a male.
Often, the thanks these women got for coming to the rescue was backlash from the society that temporarily granted them power, evidenced by the removal or attempted obliteration of their names from the kingly lineages recorded on tablets, statuary, or tombs. If they remained in the historical record at all, they would be remembered as leadership failures or as overreaching by showing naked ambition for power, rather than cloaking it as merely assuming the mantle of leadership in protection of her dynasty (sounds familiar). Akhenaten's cult-episode and Nefertiti's perceived blatant power-grab foreshadowed a trend in following dynasties that mostly barred royal women from positions of power, opening up marriage to non-royal females (the power disparities much greater here) and allowing Game of Thrones-style infighting among elite families to worsen.
While I disagreed with Cooney's broad generalizations about female leadership biologically trending towards the cautious, consensual, and prudent rather than the bold or aggressive unilateral style of a man's (society's social constraints rather than biology seems to explain better why a woman takes a more cautious approach to power in a patriarchal society that would crucify her for expressing herself any other way than the "proper" protector-of-the-family or supportive-nurturer role), I agreed with her concluding appeal that society needs to utilize all styles of leadership (whether perceived to be more feminine or masculine) in order to prosper. This makes the equality of the sexes culturally, economically, politically, religiously and otherwise even more imperative if we can redefine and re-balance the idea of power itself. However, as When Women Ruled the World shows, as a species, humans, whether in monarchical or democratic systems of governance, are both so close and yet so far from that elusive goal of parity.
Works Cited:
Cooney, Kara. (2018). When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt. Washington, D. C.: National Geographic.
Friday, February 15, 2019
Book Review: Susan Orlean's "The Library Book"
What do you picture when you think of a the library? A mere repository of books? A place you can go to get your documents notarized? The place you can go to consult with a reference librarian, or a clerk on their latest book recommendations? A place to study and research? Perhaps, a place where you can access the Internet for free? A community meeting space with adult and children's programming, such as story times or book clubs? A sanctuary when you want to get away from it all? Libraries are all of these things and more nowadays where the Internet and Internet-based technologies constantly call into question their continued relevancy. New Yorker writer and author Susan Orlean offers a look at the evolution of libraries over time through the story of the Los Angeles Central Public Library, which was wracked by one of the worst library fires in American history in April of 1986.
Orlean's story is part true-crime thriller, historical treatise, and journalistic endeavor, whose prose overall reads like an ode to the beloved institution of the library and the people that make it feel alive, patrons and workers alike. While not perfect by any means, dealing with the social problems of the society that hosts it, such as homelessness, unemployment, and mental illness, libraries have become regarded nonetheless as valuable community spaces. The community of Los Angeles was no exception in regards to the Central Library. Central Library burned for nearly seven hours in April 1986, causing the loss of 400,000 books and damage to a good portion of the surviving inventory, either charred by flames, buffeted by smoke, or soaked through despite the best attempts by the firefighters to cover the stacks with protective tarps. Not long after, Los Angeles heard the suspicions of arson investigators hired in the wake of the tragedy that the blaze was intentionally set.
Orlean writes of the visceral damage to community morale when libraries and their contents were targeted by arson, whether by a spited lone arsonist, a government feeling challenged by the ideas contained in their stacks, or collateral damage in an armed conflict. These kinds of disasters shake people to their cores precisely because one's life is fleeting and impermanent, but stories put into books live on; to burn those books is therefore psychologically damaging as much as they are physically to the patrons and library materials involved. Despite this, communities are also very resilient. After much of the shock passed, the community rallied in support of their imperfect library, whose crowding, flawed wiring, and lack of air conditioning had been issues before the fire. In October of 1993, the library would reopen renovated and twice the size of the original building with the addition of a new wing. Not bad, considering that the Los Angeles Library, like many other libraries, started off as small charity projects (the most famous being the Carnegie libraries project), stuffed into cramped quarters, with their collections at first only open to wealthy men.
Works Cited:
Orlean, Susan. (2018). The Library Book. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Orlean's story is part true-crime thriller, historical treatise, and journalistic endeavor, whose prose overall reads like an ode to the beloved institution of the library and the people that make it feel alive, patrons and workers alike. While not perfect by any means, dealing with the social problems of the society that hosts it, such as homelessness, unemployment, and mental illness, libraries have become regarded nonetheless as valuable community spaces. The community of Los Angeles was no exception in regards to the Central Library. Central Library burned for nearly seven hours in April 1986, causing the loss of 400,000 books and damage to a good portion of the surviving inventory, either charred by flames, buffeted by smoke, or soaked through despite the best attempts by the firefighters to cover the stacks with protective tarps. Not long after, Los Angeles heard the suspicions of arson investigators hired in the wake of the tragedy that the blaze was intentionally set.
Orlean writes of the visceral damage to community morale when libraries and their contents were targeted by arson, whether by a spited lone arsonist, a government feeling challenged by the ideas contained in their stacks, or collateral damage in an armed conflict. These kinds of disasters shake people to their cores precisely because one's life is fleeting and impermanent, but stories put into books live on; to burn those books is therefore psychologically damaging as much as they are physically to the patrons and library materials involved. Despite this, communities are also very resilient. After much of the shock passed, the community rallied in support of their imperfect library, whose crowding, flawed wiring, and lack of air conditioning had been issues before the fire. In October of 1993, the library would reopen renovated and twice the size of the original building with the addition of a new wing. Not bad, considering that the Los Angeles Library, like many other libraries, started off as small charity projects (the most famous being the Carnegie libraries project), stuffed into cramped quarters, with their collections at first only open to wealthy men.
"All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen." (Orlean, 2018, p. 310)
However, before the library re-opened in 1993, the city was occupied with the arson investigation, which. after fits and starts and dead-ends, zeroed in on aspiring actor Harry Peak, whose narrative shifted like the wind, being a person who liked pleasing people to the point of obsession and craved attention. He'd been at the library when the fire started, then he wasn't. It was pretty much a case with circumstantial evidence, frustrating arson investigators, who'd already been dealing with the challenge of trying to pinpoint the origin of the fire and how it started, considering pretty much all the materials in the vicinity combusted almost instantly. Like many matters, emotions ran high despite investigators and the public craving accountability and impartiality, meaning that the need to arrest and charge someone put immense pressure on the city. When the dragged out legal process finally concluded, with the city settling with Harry Peak over allegations of mistreatment by investigators, the case was considered closed. Yet, the mystery of the fire still lingers, with outside arson investigators questioning if it even was an arson in the first place and instead pointing their fingers towards the electric and environmental problems the library had at the time.
In the end, Orlean accepts the enduring mystery around the 1986 fire and instead chooses to focus her concluding chapters on the future of the Los Angeles Public Library. This is an appropriate, with the fire and the rebuilding aftermath serving as a symbol of libraries' continued evolution and survival in the face of the considerable pressures of modernization. Like other libraries, the Los Angeles Public Library is no longer merely a research center and repository of books and other print media, but a full fledged community space and information hub. It also functions as a contact center for social service agencies and community events, a meeting place for all sorts of classes and community clubs, and an access point to both electronic and print media at no charge. Yet, for all of the changes, the modern library at its core for many remains an irreplaceable and magical place of exploration and refuge in the Google Age, a feeling perfectly captured in Orlean's Library Book.
Orlean, Susan. (2018). The Library Book. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Friday, February 1, 2019
Book Review: Jeffrey A. Engel & et al.'s "Impeachment"
Impeachment. The dreaded "I"-word. It is a term bandied about frequently enough in today's 24/7 news climate to drive one insane, yet whose seriousness has been somewhat diluted in today's partisan political climate, with negative connotations of hyper-partisanship when contemplated by the party not in power. Yet, it has only been brought forward formally three times in our nation's 242 years of existence, making it a rare occurrence. How did this rarely-used mechanism come about? In what contexts were the first three impeachments invoked, and what can these cases tell us about our current moment? Four scholars and journalists (Jeffrey A. Engel, Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali and Peter Baker) present three case studies in an attempt to answer this question in their 2018 treatise Impeachment: An American History.
We may think that we have a monopoly on moments of national crisis nowadays, but that is hardly true. Often, the contexts in which the three motions of impeachment were passed were similar moments of national vulnerability. The same goes with the circumstances under which impeachment was first devised in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. An overwhelming and understandable distrust of any centralization of power after the Revolutionary War had left the nation no more than a thirteen-part confederacy, with the federal government unable to keep order, collect tax revenues, oversee commerce and the national defense, let alone govern effectively (most everything required three-fourths of the states to agree in order to pass in the legislature). The colonial powers circled around the young United States, sensing weakness in the new republic, adding to the Founders' fears that any potential future leader could be unduly swayed by a foreign power to the detriment of the country.
After much debate, a new constitution was devised, establishing a system of three separate and co-equal legislative, judicial, and executive branches, which had various checks on the others to keep them in line. Embedded into this document was the impeachment mechanism we know today, only to be used in cases when the president was found guilty of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors," enough to warrant an expedited remedy rather than waiting for an electoral one in dealing with a potential tyrant (Engel et al., 2018, p. 44). Therefore, to the Founders, a strong executive was needed to govern by enforcing the will of the legislative (and indirectly the judicial) branch, but needn't be tempted to consolidate even more powers from other branches. Together with the checks and balances between the three branches and the safety valve of impeachment, the Founders believed they had found the needed governance model for their new republic to flourish long-term. They hoped that no one would have to use impeachment, but it nevertheless remained an option when electoral and other methods had failed.
To begin with the first case of Andrew Johnson, the nation was just barely emerging from the destruction of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which put the latter's Reconstruction policies in jeopardy. Serving initially as vice-president on Lincoln's Republican ticket in order to shore up support with Southern whites (largely supportive of the then Democratic Party), Johnson's actions and policies (many of them done with racist overtones) as president soon alienated congressional Republicans so much that they brought a case of impeachment formally against him in 1868. This case largely involved technicalities, with Johnson accused of violating a (dubiously) constitutional piece of legislation known as the Tenure of Office Act over a questionable attorney general appointment. The case did not make it past the Senate, however, failing to meet the somewhat subjective bar of "high crimes and misdemeanors" or a pattern of serious criminal activity (Engel et al., 2018, p. 44).
A vague case, void of specifics, largely motivated by political animus rather than specific legal violations, Johnson's case would inform the careful, bipartisan case of abuse of executive powers assembled by the House Judicial Committee chairman, Peter Rodino, between 1972-1974. The largely airtight, detailed case succeeded in pushing Nixon to resign in 1974 when it was revealed that Nixon threw the Constitution underneath the bus in covering up the break-in to the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters. This spectacle of corruption only served to feed the national unease over Vietnam at the time, where both cases seemed to demonstrate an administration mostly concerned with political survival over national well-being.
While the impeachment cases brought against Johnson and Nixon made it only so far as the House and Senate respectively, President Bill Clinton would survive a House vote on impeachment after winning the battle over his sexual misconduct (and his lying about it) in the court of public opinion. Again, like Johnson's case, Clinton's acquittal came about, arguably, over the overtly partisan nature of the proceedings rather than any specific, detailed enumeration of serious corruption. It was reasoned that yes, Clinton's conduct was terrible and lying about it didn't help, but his actions weren't an overt danger to the republic.
What then does this mean for the elephant in the room in President Trump? The erudite and heavily researched Impeachment leaves readers with an uncertain picture, hinting that the success of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may ultimately hinge on a Rodino-like method of meticulous and bipartisan case-building, clearly connecting the president to serious crimes against the country like corruption, bribery, or even collusion with a foreign power in order to boost his electoral prospects. Can the nation and our representatives assemble the bipartisan trust needed in these kinds of investigations and subsequent (potential) impeachment hearings in today's divided times? Stay tuned.
Works Cited:
Engel, Jeffrey A., Meacham, Jon, Naftali, Timothy, & Baker, Peter. (2018). Impeachment: An American History. New York: Random House.
We may think that we have a monopoly on moments of national crisis nowadays, but that is hardly true. Often, the contexts in which the three motions of impeachment were passed were similar moments of national vulnerability. The same goes with the circumstances under which impeachment was first devised in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. An overwhelming and understandable distrust of any centralization of power after the Revolutionary War had left the nation no more than a thirteen-part confederacy, with the federal government unable to keep order, collect tax revenues, oversee commerce and the national defense, let alone govern effectively (most everything required three-fourths of the states to agree in order to pass in the legislature). The colonial powers circled around the young United States, sensing weakness in the new republic, adding to the Founders' fears that any potential future leader could be unduly swayed by a foreign power to the detriment of the country.
After much debate, a new constitution was devised, establishing a system of three separate and co-equal legislative, judicial, and executive branches, which had various checks on the others to keep them in line. Embedded into this document was the impeachment mechanism we know today, only to be used in cases when the president was found guilty of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors," enough to warrant an expedited remedy rather than waiting for an electoral one in dealing with a potential tyrant (Engel et al., 2018, p. 44). Therefore, to the Founders, a strong executive was needed to govern by enforcing the will of the legislative (and indirectly the judicial) branch, but needn't be tempted to consolidate even more powers from other branches. Together with the checks and balances between the three branches and the safety valve of impeachment, the Founders believed they had found the needed governance model for their new republic to flourish long-term. They hoped that no one would have to use impeachment, but it nevertheless remained an option when electoral and other methods had failed.
To begin with the first case of Andrew Johnson, the nation was just barely emerging from the destruction of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which put the latter's Reconstruction policies in jeopardy. Serving initially as vice-president on Lincoln's Republican ticket in order to shore up support with Southern whites (largely supportive of the then Democratic Party), Johnson's actions and policies (many of them done with racist overtones) as president soon alienated congressional Republicans so much that they brought a case of impeachment formally against him in 1868. This case largely involved technicalities, with Johnson accused of violating a (dubiously) constitutional piece of legislation known as the Tenure of Office Act over a questionable attorney general appointment. The case did not make it past the Senate, however, failing to meet the somewhat subjective bar of "high crimes and misdemeanors" or a pattern of serious criminal activity (Engel et al., 2018, p. 44).
A vague case, void of specifics, largely motivated by political animus rather than specific legal violations, Johnson's case would inform the careful, bipartisan case of abuse of executive powers assembled by the House Judicial Committee chairman, Peter Rodino, between 1972-1974. The largely airtight, detailed case succeeded in pushing Nixon to resign in 1974 when it was revealed that Nixon threw the Constitution underneath the bus in covering up the break-in to the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters. This spectacle of corruption only served to feed the national unease over Vietnam at the time, where both cases seemed to demonstrate an administration mostly concerned with political survival over national well-being.
While the impeachment cases brought against Johnson and Nixon made it only so far as the House and Senate respectively, President Bill Clinton would survive a House vote on impeachment after winning the battle over his sexual misconduct (and his lying about it) in the court of public opinion. Again, like Johnson's case, Clinton's acquittal came about, arguably, over the overtly partisan nature of the proceedings rather than any specific, detailed enumeration of serious corruption. It was reasoned that yes, Clinton's conduct was terrible and lying about it didn't help, but his actions weren't an overt danger to the republic.
What then does this mean for the elephant in the room in President Trump? The erudite and heavily researched Impeachment leaves readers with an uncertain picture, hinting that the success of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may ultimately hinge on a Rodino-like method of meticulous and bipartisan case-building, clearly connecting the president to serious crimes against the country like corruption, bribery, or even collusion with a foreign power in order to boost his electoral prospects. Can the nation and our representatives assemble the bipartisan trust needed in these kinds of investigations and subsequent (potential) impeachment hearings in today's divided times? Stay tuned.
Works Cited:
Engel, Jeffrey A., Meacham, Jon, Naftali, Timothy, & Baker, Peter. (2018). Impeachment: An American History. New York: Random House.
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