Ten days ago, I posted about this new trend of employers demanding that their employees hand over to the boss the passwords to their Facebook accounts. Yesterday, the Daily Dot reported that Kimberly Hester, a teacher’s aide in Michigan, was fired for refusing to give her password to her supervisor at the elementary school where she works. The district’s special education director wrote her: “[I]n the absence of you voluntarily granting Lewis Cass ISD administration access to you[r] Facebook page, we will assume the worst and act accordingly.” And they did. Perhaps not coincidentally, last Tuesday, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted down a proposal that would have made it illegal for an employer to demands his or her employees’ Facebook […]
Paul Hockenos, journalist and author, reviewed The Reactionary Mind for The National, which is published out of Abu Dhabi and features a lot of great cultural reporting. His verdict? “Robin, a New York-based political scientist and regular contributor to publications like The Nation and the London Review of Books, has written an original book with an armful of theses that shed revealing light on the whys and wherefores of right-wing politics in the United States and beyond.” Andrew Tonkovich interviewed me for his show Bibliocracy, which airs on KPFK out in Los Angeles. It was a fun interview, in which he had me read some passages from the book. Listen here (link should be good for another 90 days). David […]
Conservative journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty, who happens to be the politics editor at Business Insider, and I rapped on Bloggingheads about violence, the market, and the right—as well as Michael’s crazy funky love. [vodpod id=Video.16279875&w=425&h=350&fv=diavlogid%3D9348%26amp%3Bfile%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fbloggingheads.tv%2Fplaylist.php%2F9348%2F00%3A00%2F57%3A31%26amp%3Bconfig%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fstatic.bloggingheads.tv%2Framon%2F_live%2Ffiles%2F2012%2Foffsite_config.xml%26amp%3Btopics%3Dfalse] Washington Squares, posted with vodpod
From The Huffington Post “When I used to go to the bathroom, I literally had somebody counting down the minutes,” Dickerson says. It was particularly difficult when she was having her period and felt she couldn’t use the restroom when she needed to. Eventually, she was being reprimanded for too many breaks, she says. Worried about losing her job, she says she tried so hard to avoid using the bathroom that she eventually developed a bladder infection. In case you missed my earlier post on the history of the bathroom break (turns out, it’s not just history)…
“If he can run his household, he can run the country. Amen!” —Haley Harris, Rick Santorum supporter and chanteuse, profiled in today’s New York Times (h/t Elias Isquith) “In order to keep the state out of the hands of the people, it is necessary to keep the family out of the hands of women and children.” —Louis de Bonald, French counterrevolutionary quoted in The Reactionary Mind
Social conservatives are targeting the underlying framework of Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972). One of the less well known birth-control Supreme Court cases, Eisenstadt established that unmarried women and men have a right to use birth control. Jonathan Moreno and Francis Killing have a good analysis over at The Nation: In Liberty and Sexuality, [historian David] Garrow quotes extensively from conservative commentators who claim that Eisenstadt was intended to legitimize sexual liberty and to extend separate the privacy right from marriage and family. Privacy, up to then, was essentially a patriarchal concept with the family as the property of the husband. Limbaugh expresses the same sentiment in cruder ways. Sexually active women who are freed from the fear of pregnancy are “sluts.” […]
From the Seattle Times: When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password. Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn’t see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information. Bassett refused and withdrew his application, saying he didn’t want to work for a company that would seek such personal information. But as the job market steadily improves, other job candidates are confronting the same question from […]
I was a little underwhelmed by Julian Sanchez’s response to my post about his thoughts on the Cato-Koch affair.
At the new Gates Foundations headquarters in Seattle, there is a ban on whispering. This, despite the fact that the warm and fuzzy non-profit frowns on “expressions of hierarchy.” I’m not sure what’s crazier: the fact that Gates Foundation is doing this, or the fact that it’s perfectly legal for them to do this. One more example of workplace tyranny. Reminds me of this bit of wisdom from another political theorist.
After discussing the forgotten lunacies of the conservative movement during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s—including one Fred Schwarz, right-wing crackpot and author of You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists—Rick Perlstein, who knows more about the American right than just about anyone, writes this: The notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it. In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin’s ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that “most of the turmoil […]
Climbing aboard the anti-birth control bandwagon, the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 on Monday to endorse legislation that would: a) give employers the right to deny health insurance coverage to their employees for religious reasons; b) give employers the right to ask their employees whether their birth control prescriptions are for contraception or other purposes (hormone control, for example, or acne treatment). There are three things to say about this legislation. The Private Life of Power First, as I argue in The Reactionary Mind, conservatism is dedicated to defending hierarchies of power against democratic movements from below, particularly in the so-called private spheres of the family and the workplace. Conservatism is a defense of what I call “the private […]
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Categories
The Right
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Tags Abe Fortas, Alexis de Tocqueville, Arizona, birth control, Debbie Lesko, Ellen Schrecker, Gordon Lafer, Griswold v. Connecticut, Howard Fast, Langston Hughes, Liza Love, Matthew Crespino, McCarthyism, Mike Konczal, Paul Robeson, Robert Jackson, segregation academies
When Kathy Saumier learned that a new factory was coming to town, it seemed as if there really was—as that absurdist bit of suburban wisdom from The Graduate has it—a great future in plastics. Landis Plastics, to be exact. Landis, a family-owned company based in Illinois, makes containers for yogurt and cottage cheese. The company was opening a plant in Solvay, New York, not far from Syracuse where Saumier lived. She applied for a job. “It’s a new place,” she thought. “It’s more money. It sounded good.” New York Governor Mario Cuomo thought so too. With the help of Solvay officials, Cuomo’s administration had put together an $8.5 million package of tax breaks, cheap electricity, and direct aid to lure […]
In the midst of the controversy over the Phillips Curve, Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson wrote to economist Alvin Hansen: Milton F[riedman] is a bloody nuisance. In the end he is not right in his provocative stands, but it takes valuable time rebutting his arguments….Having just returned from UCLA where (as in Virginia and Washington) the place is jumping with energetic libertarian nuts, I realize that so much of one’s scientific life has to be occupied in sterile debate. h/t Yann Giraud (and Doug Henwood for forwarding this post to me)
Inspired by all this libertarian talk, I dug out an old piece of mine from 2002, in the Boston Globe, that talks about a little known fact: many workers in the United States aren’t able to exercise their right to pee on the job—due to lack of government enforcement—and it wasn’t until 1998 (!) that they even got that right, thanks to the federal government. The piece pivots from there to a more general discussion about coercion in the workplace and its history. I wish academics, journalists, intellectuals, and bloggers had a more concrete sense of what it’s like to work in an actual workplace in America (not to mention elsewhere). Sometimes, it seems that scholars and writers, if they […]
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Categories
Labor/Workplace
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Tags Barbara Ehrenreich, Frederick Douglass, Grey Poupon, Henry Ford, Ingrid Nygaard, Jim Beam, Karen Orren, Lance Compa, Louis Harz, Marc Linder, Nabisco
Yesterday, libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez announced that if the right-wing Koch brothers successfully take over the libertarian Cato Institute, where he works, he’ll resign. (According to most reports, the Kochs want Cato to be a more reliable instrument of the Republican cause.) Today, Sanchez criticizes progressives who can’t help noting the irony of libertarians complaining about wealthy people using their money to buy the kind of speech they like. If Cato is Koch property, progressives say, doesn’t libertarian theory require that the Kochs be allowed to do with it what they will? Silly progressives, says Sanchez. Libertarians aren’t recommending that the Kochs, assuming they have legal title, not be allowed to do whatever they want with Cato. They’re simply saying it’s not a good idea for the Kochs to […]
En route with my daughter to the Purim Carnival, I stopped at my friends Greg and Manu‘s house. Manu’s mother Toshi is visiting from India, and we got to talking about corruption scandals there. Specifically, what people do with money they’ve gotten illegally. Toshi called it “black money”—a phrase I hadn’t heard before. Turns out, it’s a fairly common term. Here’s one definition: Proceeds, usually received in cash, from underground economic activity. Black money is earned through illegal activity and, as such, is not taxed. Recipients of black money must hide it, spend it only in the underground economy, or attempt to give it the appearance of legitimacy through illegal money laundering. Talking about the kind of hoarding people engage […]
Over at The American Conservative, political theorist Sam Goldman offers a thoughtful response to The Reactionary Mind. Among its many virtues, Goldman’s post manages to get my argument right. As we’ve seen, that can be something of a challenge for some reviewers. Goldman also agrees with me on some fundamentals. Conservatism, he says, is a reactionary ideology. It is a defense of hierarchy against emancipatory movements from below. It’s not a disposition or an attitude; it’s not a philosophy of liberty or even of limited government. (It supports the idea of limited government, Goldman says, but that’s a consequence, not a premise, of the theory.) It is first and foremost a coherent set of ideas about inequality that gets […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Right
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Tags Alex Gourevitch, Antonin Scalia, Ayn Rand, Bentham, Carl Schmitt, Diderot, Edmund Burke, Foucault, Joan of Arc, Joseph de Maistre, Kant, Mark Lilla, Nietzsche, punishment, Robert Nozick, Samuel Goldman, Sankar Muthu, Sarah Palin
From Bloomberg.com: The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters. “People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?” Nope, I can’t imagine it. Maybe these guys could: Or maybe this guy.