Lawrence Baum, Ideology in the Supreme Court (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Ideology in the Supreme Court is the first book to analyze the process by which the ideological stances of U.S. Supreme Court justices translate into the positions they take on the issues that the Court addresses . . . Baum argues that the links between ideology and issues are not simply a matter of reasoning logically from general premises. Rather, they reflect the development of shared understandings among political elites, including supreme Court justices. And broad values about matters such as equality are not the only source of these understandings. Another potentially important source is the justices' attitudes about social and political groups, such as the business community and the Republican and Democratic parties. "The book probes these sources by analyzing three issues on which the relative positions of liberal and conservative justices changed between 1910 and 2013: freedom of expression, criminal justice, and government 'takings' of property. Analyzing the Court's decisions and other developments during this period, Baum founds that the values underlying liberalism and conservatism help to explain these changes, but that justices' attitudes toward social and political groups also played a powerful rule." From the text: "Supreme Court justices come from the elite world in which shared understanding develop, and they remain part of that world when they serve on the Court. As justices they are not simply passive adopters of these understandings. Because justices confront issues in the form of legal questions and in the context of disputes between specific litigants, they may perceive linkages between issues and ideology somewhat different from other elites. As a result, they can depart at least marginally from shared understandings about those linkages in their decisions. Moreover, they help to create and solidify these understandings through the ideological polarity of their decisions, which are visible to other segments of the political elite. The Onion Book of Known Knowledge touched on this role in jest when it referred to the Roberts Court as a 'smack but influential Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank' that 'helps shape the national debate.'" Id at 15, citation omitted.).
Zygmunt Bauman, A Chronicle of Crisis, 2011-2016, edited by Carlo Bordoni (London: Social Europe Edition, 2017) (From Neal Lawson, "On Zygmunt Bauman": "Bauman's big idea is that liquid modernity. He described a society somewhere between the solid modern structures and cultures of the early to mid 20th century and the relativism of post-post-modernity." Id. at ix. "Zygmunt's books and essays are not always easy to read. The language can be opaque, but the shafts of light and insights are intense. The analysis is bleak, but uplifting if you believe it to be accurate. For how can we begin to wrestle with the precarious and insecure world we live in unless we understand the scale of the problems we face?" Id. at xi.).
Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("The question arises: are humans naturally hierarchical or, like some species, even some primates, egalitarian? "In our case, uniquely, the answer seems to be: both. We have the strong hierarchical streak evident in most primates, and an eagerness for dominance and a readiness for submission manifested even in such contemporary phenomena as democratic politics, celebrity culture, and reality shows. From an early age, even in the nursery and playground, we sense and can squabble over status differences. But we also appear to have passed through a long egalitarian phase, not through our lack of individual desire to dominate others, but through our even stronger shared desire to provide the best approximation of the conditions of human societies in the Paleolithic egalitarianism rules: the impulse for domination can be kept in check by the concerted effects of all to ensure that no one can dominate others. A moral community, a shared sense of values, allows the weaker collectively to ensure that no strong individuals or coalitions can expect the deference of others." Id. at 124, citations omitted.).
David Brooks:
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Jean-Yves Camus & Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "In Europe today, staunchly nationalist parties such as France's National Front and the Austrian Freedom Party are identified as far-right movements, though supporters seldom embrace that label. More often, 'far right' is pejorative, used by liberals to tar those groups with the taint of Fascism, Nazism, and other discredited ideologies. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg's critical look at the far right throughout Europe--from the United Kingdom to France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere--reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than the stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges these movements pose to the EU's liberal-democratic order.").
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("[T]he researchers conclude that although in the short-term economic expansions increase happiness, over the long term there is no significant relationship. "American consumers know this irony only too well. In what has been termed the 'anxious middle' by Larry Summers, or what Juliet Schor calls the 'cycle of work and spend,' America has cultivated a consumption-driven lifestyle and subsequently stretched itself to achieve it. Many Americans, aligning consumerism with the American Dream, continue penniless along this track. As countless news articles have documented, other than the top echelons of society, everyone is struggling and unable to achieve the American Dream--whatever that is these days--without massive amounts of debt. And yet, your average citizen still believes in the idea of Horatio Alger (not realizing perhaps that Alger was a writer of fictional heroes)." Id. at 183, citations omitted. From the book jacket: In today's world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption--like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use there purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children's growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society 'the aspirational class' and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide.").
Tom Cutterham, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen--the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite--worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries show how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation." "Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone They also sought personal prestige and cultural presence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's 'lower sort' as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else.").
Rosa L. DeLauro, The Last Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable (New York The New Press, 2017) (From the "Introduction: Our Safety Net": "It bears repeating that the reason companies do not feel free to poison us, sell us spoiled meat, lock our daughters up in ninth-floor sweatshops with no fire escapes, employ our underage sons in coal mines, force us to work thirteen-hour shifts without overtime or a break, or call in private armies to fire rifles at those of us who dare strike for higher wages is not because companies experience a moment of Zen and decided to evolve. No. They were forced into greater accountability and social concern by the legitimate actions of a democratic government, In other words, if we depend on goodwill, we are all screwed." Id. at 1.)).
Brooke Gladstone, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (New York:Workman Publishing, 2017) ("To repeat [Hannah] Arendt, eventually the real world watches up with us all. "But we cannot see the real world, whatever that may be. We live in the world that we made from what we see and what we know, and also in the world that we didn't make and do not see do not know. 'We are Yahoo. We struggle in them both." Id. at 86.).
Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion's origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. Chosen Nation is sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the America. [] The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.").
A. James Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1979) ("In the first place, this volume will attempt a summary outline of Fascist ideology and precise as that ideology and practice manifested themselves during the quarter century of Mussolini's rule on the Italian peninsula. [] In the second place, there is an effort to relate Fascism to Bolshevism, both conceived as members of the class of mass-mobilizing, developmental regimes that have become so prominent n the twentieth century. Finally, some suggestions are made that attempt to lodge Fascism in the framework of a general comparative perspective." Id. at ix. "Political theory throughout history has shown itself to be a treacherous guide to political conduct. For centuries great thinkers have written about the origins, the nature, and the essence of life lived in common. They have sought to uncover the conditions governing the political institutions that animate that life. They have sought to uncover the conditions governing the political organization of associated life, have speculated upon the trends and laws inherent in political combination, and have anticipated political futures and issued injunctions and proscriptions. The have advocated reform and revolution and have sought to justify their entire enterprise with appeals to the putative logic of history, divine imperatives, the identification of individual moral instincts, collective material interests and/or universal human dispositions. Out of all this, practical men were expected to tease out directives that might govern the specifics of individual and collective political behavior. Inevitably such directives rely upon one of an immense variety of interpretations of oft-times enormously complex and obscure political theory. Unhappily, more frequently than not there have been as many interpretations of any given theory as there have been interpreters." Id. at 3. NOTE: Yet, to abandon political theory, the search for (unifying) political principles, etc., abandons one to being merely politically transactional and politically unprincipled. Thus, there is much to be said for trying to develop one's political theory and political principles, even if the results are not completely satisfactory.).
Brian Klaas, The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2016) ("Global democracy is in decline. As a result, the world is becoming less stable, less prosperous, and vastly more dangerous." Id. at 213. "For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the world is losing faith in democracy. Between Donald Trump's rise in American politics and the predictable but self-inflicted 'Brexit' economic shockwave, may are now openly asking what was previously an unthinkable question in the West: can people really be trusted with self-government? Is it time to ditch democracy and try something else? [] These declines are not an accident; they are the battle scars of a struggle between the rule of the people and the rule of the despots and dictators. Right now, the people are losing." Id. at 1. "The West helps despots in two main ways. The first involves a deliberate cozy relationship with an appalling undemocratic regime because of geostrategic expediency. I call this the 'Saudi Arabia Effect'.":The second way the West aids and abets despots arises form the laughably low standards set for counterfeit democracies, creating counterproductive incentives for cynical leaders to do only the bare minimum--to simply appear democratic. This allows Western governments to accept deeply flawed counterfeit democracies so that they can work with them in seemingly good conscience. I call this the 'Madagascar Effect,' or the 'curse of low expectations'." Id. at 5-6. Klaas's ten-principled suggested way forward: "Principle 1: Think long-term." "Principle 2: Stop trying to impose democracy with war." "Principle 3: Insist on real democracy and coordinate low-level and high-level diplomacy." "Principle 4: Do not directly intervene in foreign elections." "Principle 5: Give despots a way out." "Principle 6: Encourage new democracies to include the old regime during transition." "Principle 7: Don't waste money. Target reformers instead." "Principle 8: Use economic incentives to encourage democratization and discourage despotism." "Principle 9: Harness the power of information technology to outfox and undermine despots, but recognize its limits." "Principle 10: Lead by example." "The ten principles . . . all show a way for the West to reinvent its flawed approach to advancing democracy across the globe." Id. at 51-191.).
Alexander Klimburg, The Darkening Web (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) (From the book jacket:"No single invention of the last half century has changed the way we live now as much as the Internet. Alexander Klimburg was a member of the generation for whom it was a utopian ideal turned reality: a place where ideas, information, and knowledge could be shared and new freedoms found and enjoyed. Two decades later, the future isn't as bight--increasingly, the Internet is used as a weapon and means of domination by states eager to exploit or curtail global connectivity in order to further their national interests." From the text: "To keep the Internet free, we need to keep Internet governance free, and doing this is not an easy task. As the ability of states to attack each other in and through cyberspace using both kinetic information operation and, even more worrying, concepts of information warfare increases, so will their implicit or explicit claim to be the final arbiter of the information domain in all its forms. The is a trap liberal democracies must not fall into, and it will require some effort and resources. But the costs in terms of compromise and expense are worth. For the multistakeholder system may indeed be the worst system by which to govern the Internet--except for all the rest." Id. at 356. Note: One small item, to have in the back of your mind while reading this book, is Trump's tweet floating the possibility of a US-Russia "impenetrable cyber security unit." What was Trump thinking?).
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Butterfly Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) ("'The butterfly effect' was coined in 1972 by Konrad Lorenz in a talk title 'Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' It charmingly models . . . how some extremely small simple actions, properly targeted, can come to have highly complex and large effects in certain contexts. Yes: a butterfly opening and closing its wings in Brazil can ultimately produce a tornado in Texas, according to chaos theory's understanding of complex causality in dynamic unstable systems. "Butterfly politics means the right small human intervention is an unstable political system can sooner or later have large complex reverberations. As an organizing metaphor and central conceit for this volume, it coheres forty years of flights of activism that, through recursion in a collective context, have eventuated or are eventuating in storms, sometimes tornadoes, engineered relation though law. "Encompassing legal and political interventions form 1976 to 2016, this volume collects moments of attempts to change the inequality of omen to men and reflections on those attempts." Id. at 1.).
Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017) (From the book jacket: "What is really happening to American politics? Behind the headlines of billionaires taking over our government is the surprising story of a secretive cause with deep and troubling roots. Democracy in Chains uncovers the history of the well-heeled radical right's vast network and explains why this movement doesn't want simply to change who rules, but to fundamental alter the rules of democratic governance as we have know it in the United States. But while billionaires now drive the effort, they did not start it; a white intellectual in embattled Jim Crow South did. Nancy MacLean names the true author of this cause's playbook--the Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan--and documents for the first time the strategy he and his collaborators developed over the six decades to disempower the majority. "In an engrossing narrative, MacLean shows how Buchanan first forged his ideas in Virginia, in a last-gasp attempt to preserve the power of the white elite in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. Right-wing corporate donors and their foundations were only too eager to support his work in teaching others how to divide the citizenry into 'makers' and 'takers.' When, on his messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, multi-billionaire Charles Koch discovered the utility of Buchanan's thought, he deployed a vast, many-armed apparatus to carry out a strategy steered by it. "By showing when and how Buchanan figured out a way to prevent those without great property or power from using their majority votes to better their lives, MacLean fills in the missing piece of the increasingly sinister story of dark money and radical right politics. She decodes the language an strategic moves Buchanan taught the movement to to employ in order to hide its true intentions even from its own base of support. Using the insiders' own words, she exposes what is in store for the country if this movement, already gaining strength, actually succeeds. There can be no denying now the logic and the endgame of the capitalist right's relentless push to remodel our public life. "Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian cause would not have succeeded in the sleuth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Mike Pence's rise put a longtime loyalist in the White House, backed by a phalanx of fighters in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and many courts across the country. Their agenda includes measures calculated to kill off unions, keep millions of citizens from voting, privatize everything from schools to highways to Medicare and Social Security, stop any action on climate change--and transform the legal system and amend the Constitution to lock all this in place permanently. "Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok, This tour de force of historical research and synthesis traces the lineage of current events and makes their ultimate import unmistakable, Strikingly" Note: One, it wouldn't be a bad idea to read James Buchanan's collected works (readily available). I say this notwithstanding (and, perhaps because) I disagree with most of his social and political thinking. Two, his book should make you aware that Donald Trump is not the real problem, he is just the current delivery-system for a problematic political agenda. And, three, I actually think it is too late to stop this silence coup of the radical right. The majority of Americans have been, and remain, politically asleep, only waking long enough to complain their being cheated because someone might be getting something that they are not getting, e.g., meals-on-wheels for the elderly, meals at school for poor children, or access to health care for poor women. The United States is becoming, if it has not already become, an oligarchy. From the text: "'Democracy,' the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, is essentially an act of faith.' When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, is not simply 'descriptively inaccurate'--indeed, 'a terrible caricature' of how the political process works. It also constitutes an insidious attack on the very 'norm of public spiritedness' so crucial to shaping good government policy and ethical conduct in civic life. That is to say, public choice theory was wrong in its explanation, and would be toxic if believed by the public or its representatives. We have seen the truth of that prediction." Id. at 232-233, citations omitted.).
Haroon Moghul, How to Be a Muslim: An American Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).
Peter Moskowitz, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood (New York: Nation Books, 2017) (" As geographer Neil Smith wrote in his landmark book on the topic, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, 'If cultural choice and consumer preference really explain gentrification, this amounts either to the hypothesis that individual preferences change in unison not only nationally but internationally--a bleak view of human nature and cultural individuality--or that the overriding constraints are strong enough to obliterate the individuality implied in consumer preference. If the latter is the case, the concept of consumer preference is at best contradictory.' In other words, gentrification's not a fluke or an accident. Gentrification is a system that places the needs of capital (both in terms of city budget and in terms of real estate profits) above the needs of people." Id. at 9. "But [Jane] Jacobs's philosophy lacked a significant racial and class analysis. There are plenty of people who already know what we want and need--better housing, better schools, better transportation, more money--but they are disenfranchised and therefore unable to achieve it. So the problem of solving gentrification is not only about economics or urban planning, but about democracy. What would cities look like if the people who lived in them, who made them function, controlled their fate?" Id. at 206.).
Carlos Santiago Nino, The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy (New haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1996) (From the book jacket: "What justifies democracy? Carlos Santiago Nino critically examines answers others have given and then develops his own distinctive theory of democracy, emphasizing its deliberative character. In Nino's view, democracy resembles a moral conversation and is valued because of its capacity to generate an impartial perspective, one that takes into account the interests of all citizens.").
Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1996) (From the book jacket: "Does an emergent democracy have an obligation to prosecute its former dictators for crimes against humanity--for what Arendt and Kant called 'radical evil'? What impact will such prosecutions have on the future of democracy?" "In this book, Carlos Santiago Nino offers a provocative first-hand analysis of developments in Argentina during the 1980s, when a brutal military dictatorship gave way to a democratic government. Nino played a key role in guiding the transition to democracy and in shaping the human rights policies of President Raul Alfonsin after the fall of the military junta in 1983. The centerpiece of Alfonsin's human rights program was the trial held in a federal court in Buenos Aires in 1985, which resulted in the conviction five of the leading members of the junta that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983." "Placing the Argentine experience in the context of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, Tokyo, and elsewhere, Nino examines the broader questions raised by human rights trials. He considered their political repercussions and their potential for strengthening the new democratic government. He explains why prosecutions for human rights violations should be grounded on a theory of criminal law that emphasizes the preventive rather than retributive functions of punishment, Nino rejects the obligation to punish perpetrators of radical evil and argues instead for a more forward-looking duty--to safeguard democracy. This, he believes, is what ultimately justified the Argentine trials and should be the focus of any international action.").
Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (New York: Viking, 2017) (From the book jacket: "In The Broken Ladder psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically; it also has profound consequences for how we think, how we respond to stress, how our immune system functions, and even how we view moral concepts such as justice and fairness. "Research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has not only revealed important new insights into how inequality changes people in predictable ways but also provided a corrective to the flawed view of poverty as being the result n individual character failings. Among modern developed societies, inequality is not primarily a matter of the actual among of money people have, It is, rather, people's sense of where they stand in relation tooters. Feeling poor matters--not just being poor. Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have such higher rates of all the social maladies we associate with poverty, including lower than average life expectancy, serious health problems, mental illness, and crime. "The Broken Ladder, explores such issues as why women in poor societies often have more children, and why they have them at a younger age; why there is little trust among the working class in the prudence of investing for the future; why people's perception of their social status affects their political beliefs and leads to greater political divisions; how poverty raises stress levels as effectively as actual physical threats; how inequality in the workplace affects performance; and why unequal societies tend to become more religious. Understanding how inequality shapes our world can help us better understand what drives ideological divide, why high inequality makes the middle class feel left behind, and how to disconnect for the endless treadmill of social comparison.").
Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2017) ("Not all upper middle-class advantages results from a open contest. We also engage in some opportunity hoarding, accessing valuable, finite opportunities by unfair means. This amounts to rigging the market in or favor. "When we hoard opportunities, we help our own children but hurt others by reducing their chances of securing those opportunities. Every college place or internship that goes to one of our kids because of a legacy bias or personal connection is one less available to others. We may prefer not to dwell on the unfairness here, but that's simply a moral failing on our part. Too many upper middle-class Americans still insist that their success, or the success of their children, stems entirely from brilliance and tenacity; 'born on third base, thinking they hit a triple.' in football coach Barry Switzer's vivid phrase. "Three opportunity hoarding mechanisms stand out in particular: exclusionary zoning in residential areas; unfair mechanism inflating college admissions, including legal preference, and the informal location of internships. Each of these tilts the playing field in favor of upper middle-class children. Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles see these as evidence of a 'captured economy.' Reihan Salam dubs it 'incumbent protection.' I call it a glass floor, which protects the upper middle class against the risk of downward mobility. "There is one point that I probably can't stress enough: being an opportunity hoarder is not the same thing as being a good parent. Many of the things we do for our kids--reading stories, helping with homework, providing good food, supporting their sports and extracurricular activities--will equip them to be more successful in the world and increase their chances of remaining in the upper middle class. All of this is great, indeed, laudable. Much of what the upper middle class does ought to be emulated. The problem comes when we use our power to distort competition. "Opportunity hoarding is bad for society in the same way that commercial market rigging is bad for the economy. It is good that parents want the best for their kids, just as it is good that company directors want to make profit. But companies should make their profits by competing fairly in the marketplace, That's why we stop them from forming cartels. In just the same way, we need to stop parents from rigging the market to benefit their own kids. Right now, the markets that shape opportunities, especially in housing and education, are rigged in our [that, is, the upper middle class's] favor." Id. at 12-13, citations omitted.).
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017) ("The Color of Law is concerned with consistent government policy that was employed in the mid-twentieth century to enforce residential racial segregation. There were many specific government actions that prevented African Americans and whites from living among one another, and I categorize them as 'unconstitutional.' In doing so, I reject the widespread view that an action is not unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so. Few Americans think that racial segregation in schools was constitutional before 1954, when the Supreme Court prohibited it. Rather, segregation was always unconstitutional, although a misguided Supreme Court majority mistakenly failed to recognize it. "Yet even if we came to a nationally shared recognition that government policy has created an unconstitutional, de jure, system of residential segregation, it does not follow that litigation can remedy this situation. Although most African Americans have suffered under this de sure system, they cannot identify, with the specificity a court case requires, the particular point at which they were victimized. For example, many African American World War II veterans did not apply for government-guaranteed mortgages for suburban purchases because they knew that the Veterans Administration would reject them on account of their race, so applications were pointless. Those veterans then did not gain wealth from home equity appreciation as did white veterans' descendants. With less inherited wealth, African Americans today are generally less able than their white peers to afford to attend good colleges. If one of those African American descendants now learned that the reason his or her grandparents were forced to rent apartments in overcrowded urban areas was that the federal government unconstitutionally and unlawfully prohibited banks from leading to African Americans, the grandchild would not have the standing to file a lawsuit; nor would he or she be able to name a particular party from whom damages could be recovered. There is generally no judicial remedy for a policy that the Supreme Court wrongheadedly approved. But this does not mean that there is no constitutionally required remedy for such violations. It is up to the people, through our elected representatives, to enforce our Constitution by implementing the remedy." Id. at x-xi. "When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that if residential segregation 'is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications,' he set forth a principle. But the principle supported his conclusion--that government remedies for segregation were impermissible--only because he assumed an inaccurate factual background: that residential serration was mostly created by private choices." Id. at 215. "In the 1930s and 1940s, University of Chicago trustees . . . instructed chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins . . . to ensure that neighborhoods near the campus were segregated. His father, William James Hutchins . . . president of the interracial Berea College in Kentucky, unsuccessfully advised his son to reject the demand." Id. at 218. Note: (1) One might note, the Supreme Court (not to mention, Americans generally) have been living in a post-fact world for quite some time. (2) Women who came of age after, say, 1970, may not be fully cognizant of state and federal laws making it difficult for single women to get credit, including home mortgages. Again, another instance of de jure, and not merely de facto, discrimination. Instead of being based on race, based on gender. (3) Ask yourself these questions: How racially integrated/segregated is your neighborhood? Are you part of the solution, or are you part of the problem?).
Arundhati Roy & John Cusack, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conservations (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) ("AR: Truly there's no alternative to stupidity. Cretinism is the other of fascism. I have no defense again it, really . . . " Id. at 20. "AR: Of course. So I don't have the Big Idea. I don't have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That's what keeps the balance in the universe . . . the refusal to obey. I mean what's a country? It's just an administrative unit, a glorified municipality. Why do we imbue it with esoteric meaning and protect it with nuclear bombs? I can't bow down to a municipality . . . it's just not intelligent. The bastards will do what they have to do, and we'll do what we have to do. Even if they annihilate us, we'll go down on the other side." Id. at 77.).
Michael Signer, Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) ("Populists play by the rules, but demagogues most often bully the rule of law. The point was emphasized by Aristotle, who wrote that the most dangerous form of democracy is the one in which 'not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power, and supersede the law by their decrees. . . . This is the state of affairs,' he concluded, 'brought on by demagogues.' The rule of law is the sine qua non of a successful democracy; conversely, demagogues break rules of order and, often, order itself." Id. at 36. ).
Noah Benezra Strote, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (New Haven & London; Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Not long after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Germans rebuilt their shattered country and emerged as one of the leading nations of the Western liberal world. [] Noah Strote analyzes this remarkable turnaround and challenges the widely held perception that the Western Allies--particularly the United States--were responsible for Germany's transformation. Instead, Strote draws from never-before-seen materials to show how common opposition to Adolf Hitler united the fractious groups that had once vied for supremacy undertake Weimar Republic, Germany's first democracy, from 1918 to 1938. His character-driven narrative follows ten Germans of rival worldview who experienced the breakdown of the Weimar society, lived under the Nazi dictatorship, and together assumed founding roles in the democratic reconstruction.").
Peter Temin, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2017) ("The American middle class is vanishing . . . The middle class's share of total income fell 30 percent in forty-four years. This is a big change for the United States; one that we need to comprehend in order to adapt to or change. [] Real wages stopped growing at that [1970] time. Wages had grown with the rest of the economy since the end of the Second Word War. National production continued to grow after 1970, but wages did not. Somehow wages were disconnected from what we all regarded as economic growth. "This disconnect has been noticed widely. John Edwards observed in 2004, 'We shouldn't have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kips are going to be just fine; and them one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck. 'Where did the rest of the national product go? Not to the lower group . . . It went instead to the upper group . . . The higher one goes in the income distribution the more rapid the growth of income in recent decades, and the pattern of differential growth extends to the upper 20 percent of the income distribution." Id. at 3-4. "Race and class are distinct, but they have interacted in complex ways from the U.S. slavery era that ended in 1865; to Ronald Reagan announcing his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia in Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964; to Donald Trump's equally indirect claim to 'Make America Great Again' in his 2016 presidential campaign--where 'great' is a euphemism for 'white.' The Civil Rights Movement changed the language of racism without reducing its scope. As incomes become more and more unequal, racism becomes a tool for the rich to arouse poor whites to feel superior to blacks and distract them from their economic plight." Id. at xii. "As Bob Dylan said in a song a Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington, 'The poor white remains / On the caboose of the tain / But it ain't him to blame / He's only a pawn in their game'" Id. at xii. "Democracy appears to be unstable in the United States because of the legacy of slavery. Voting was conceptualized in the new country as a privilege, not a right. Until we shake that conception, we will have trouble sustaining a durable democracy. Change will come slowly because of the federalized nature of our government. The federal government delegated voting regulation to the states to implement the constitutional compromise. This practice was sustained by whites who wanted to maintain blacks in subservient positions, a view supported by racecraft. States delegate the administration of voting to localities, where the privilege concept is still expressed. In order to change the fundamental nature of American voting, we need to restructure many levels of government." Id. at 88-89.).
Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: Harper, 2016) (From the book jacket: "In Empire of Things, Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary story of our modern material world, from Renaissance Italy and later Ming China to today's global economy. While consumption is often portrayed as a recent American export, this monumental and richly detailed account shows that it is, in fact, a truly international phenomenon with a much longer and more diverse history. Trentmann traces the influence of trade and empire on tastes, as formerly exotic goods like coffee, tobacco, Indian cotton, and Chinese porcelain conquered the world, and explores the growing demand for home furnishings, fashionable clothes, and convenience that transferred private and public life. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought department stores, credit cards, and advertising, but also the rise of the ethical shopper, new generational identities, and, eventually, the resurgence of the Asian consumer. With an eye to the present and future, Trentmann provides a long view on the global challenges of our relentless pursuit of more--from waste and debt to stress and inequality. A masterpiece of research and storytelling many years in the making, Empire of Things recounts the epic history of the goods that have seduced, enriched, and unsettled our lives over the past six hundred years." From the text: "We live surrounded by things. A typical German owns 10,000 objects. In Los Angeles, a middle-class garage often no longer houses a car but several hundred boxes of stuff. The United Kingdom in 2013 was home to 6 billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per adult; a quarter of these never leave the wardrobe. Of course, people always had things, and used them not only to survive but for ritual, display and fun. But the possessions in a pre-modern village or an indigenous tribe pale when placed next to the growing mountain of things in advanced societies like ours. This change in accumulation involved a historic shift in humans' relations with things. In contrast to the pre-modern village, where most goods were passed on and arrived as gifts or with the wedding trousseau, things in modern societies are mainly bought in the marketplace. And they pass through our lives more quickly." Id. at 1. Note: I remember of bumper sticker popular with the yuppie-set in the 1980s: "The one who dies with the most toys wins!").
Sherry Turtle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
Sheldon S. Wolin, Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays, edited by Nicholas Xenos (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (From "Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy": "A hint of the antagonism between democracy and institutionalized politics is the paradoxical status democracy occupies in contemporary political discourse. Democracy is, on the one hand, widely acclaimed to be the universal criterion of legitimacy for political systems and, on the other, almost universally dismissed as an impractical scheme of government and condemned as a bad one. The contemporary euphemism for 'bad' or 'perverted' democracy is 'populism.' "Perhaps the most compelling testimony to the paradox is that although very few publicly deny the claims of democratic legitimacy periodically made by official spokesmen for each of the so-called advanced, industrialized democracies, few still dare to argue that 'the people' actually rule in any of them. What is being measured by their claim to democratic legitimacy is, therefore, not the vitality of democracy in those nations but the degree to which democracy is attenuated so that it may serve other ends. The most fundamental of these ends--which more than any other could be safely called 'the original intent of the framers of the American Constitution'--is the establishment of political conditions favorable to the development of the modernizing state. This suggests that the contemporary 'problem of democracy' is not . . . that the ancient conception of democracy is incompatible with the size and scale of modern political societies. Rather, it is that any conception of democracy centered on the citizen-as-actor and politics-as-episodic-activity is incompatible with the modern choice of the state as the fixed center of political life and the corollary conception of politics as organizational activity aimed at a single, dominating objective, control of the state apparatus." Id. at 76, 84.).
