Month: June 2012

Nino! Now Playing at the Schubert Theater

In case you missed the whole Justice Scalia series, here’s a recap. Prologue: I’ve Got a Crush on You Scalia’s mission, by contrast, is to make everything come out wrong. A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules—leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative—but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being […]

Affirmative Action Baby

This is last of my 3-part series on Justice Scalia, Diva of Disdain.  Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.  The introduction is here. • • • • • In the United States, Tocqueville observed, a federal judge “must know how to understand the spirit of the age.” While the persona of a Supreme Court Justice may be “purely judicial,” his “prerogatives”—the power to strike down laws in the name of the Constitution—“are entirely political.” If he is to exercise those prerogatives effectively, he must be as culturally nimble and socially attuned as the shrewdest pol. How then to explain the influence of Scalia? Here is a man who proudly, defiantly, proclaims his disdain for “the spirit of the […]

Adolph Reed Speaks Truth on Wisconsin

Over at The Nation, Adolph Reed weighs in on the great debate about Wisconsin. (His piece, as of this writing, is second from the top, just after Bill Fletcher’s and Jane McAlevey’s.) Adolph, whose credentials as a thinker and activist I assume no one (at least no one in her right mind) would question, has got some choice words of wisdom that I hope we’ll all heed. Many observers have noted that the Madison occupation depended on intense, aggressive, even extraordinary mobilization by unions, and not only unions in Wisconsin. That point has underscored the labor movement’s centrality to any mass action of that sort because it alone has the capacity – people and organizational and economic resources — to […]

Justice Scalia: American Nietzsche

This is Part 2 of my series on Justice Scalia, Diva of Disdain.  Part 1 is here; an introduction to the whole is here. • • • • • Like many originalists, Scalia claims that his jurisprudence has nothing to do with his conservatism. “I try mightily to prevent my religious views or my political views or my philosophical views from affecting my interpretation of the laws.” Yet he has also said that he learned from his teachers at Georgetown never to “separate your religious life from your intellectual life. They’re not separate.” Only months before Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1986, he admitted that his legal views were “inevitably affected by moral and theological perceptions.” […]

Diva of Disdain: Justice Scalia in Three Parts

Thanks to his rant from the bench yesterday—about the Arizona immigration law, which the Supreme Court mostly struck down—Justice Scalia is back in the news. But where many on the left see Scalia as a partisan hack, who twists the Constitution into a pretzel to get the result he wants, I’m more impressed by the  underlying consistency of his jurisprudence. That’s not to say he’s never inconsistent, but hackery is not his main problem. But to see the problem, you have to have a better sense of the man and his vision. In The Reactionary Mind, I devoted a chapter to that question. Last fall, I excerpted the introduction to that chapter. Given all the attention now being paid to […]

Labor was once central to the liberal imagination; today, not so much.

While we’re all arguing about what went down in Wisconsin and about the state of the labor movement, I hope we can agree that the rights of labor are central to any notion of a decent and just society.  Sadly, that proposition remains controversial, and even liberals have retreated from it in recent decades.  (Which is why this post from liberal political theorist Elizabeth Anderson was so refreshing!) In this must-read piece, Mark Ames details the sorry retreat of prominent human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU from any real commitment to labor rights.  Ames doesn’t mention two excellent reports that the ACLU and Human Rights Watch did prepare on the rights of labor—The Rights […]

What Might Have Been: One Report from Madison, Wisconsin

In all the post-mortems about what went down in Wisconsin, this comment on my blog from a union activist in Madison got lost in the shuffle.  I have no idea who this person is or if s/he is correct in his/her assessment. But it seemed worth posting here in full. . . . . . . . I’m a member of the Teaching Assistants’ Association. I was heavily involved during the actual occupation of the Capitol, and then gradually less so after we were kicked out. I was at the meeting of the Wisconsin South-Central Federation of Labor when it voted to endorse a general strike if the bill went through. It should be noted that the final version of […]

Whither Wisconsin: A Guide to the Perplexed (Left)

Gordon Lafer on how to think—and not think—about the Wisconsin recall: After all, if the real problem was overpaid union bureaucrats, then radical unions like the Wobblies or United Electrical workers—unburdened by highly paid staff or Democratic politics—should be meeting greater success in organizing. But, of course, they are not. The problem is not what unions are doing; it’s the coercive power of employers. Read the rest here.

A Solidarity of Strangers

My “Challenge to the Left” has provoked a fair amount of discussion and pushback (the latter mostly on Facebook and Twitter, as well as on email listserves, or so I’m told). Part of the problem with this discussion, to my mind, is that very few people have a real sense of what organizing entails. One of the ones who does have a sense is Jay Driskell, a talented young historian at Hood College. Jay offered some thoughts on my Facebook page, and I asked him to turn them into a blog post.  So here it is. • • • • • Since the defeat of Tuesday’s recall effort in Wisconsin, there has been a lot of debate over whether it […]

The Militant Minority: Untimely Meditations from David Montgomery

From David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: Nevertheless, to organize concerted action and to fashion a sense of social goals shared by all workers required deliberate human agency. Class consciousness was more than the unmediated product of daily experience. It was also a project. Working-class activists, and some individuals from other social strata who had linked their aspirations to the workers’ movement, persistently sought to foster a sense of unity and purposiveness among their fellow workers….Both “history from the bottom up” and the common fixation on great leaders have obscured the decisive role of those whom twentieth-century syndicalists have called the “militant minority”: the men and women who endeavored to weld their workmates and neighbors into a […]

A Challenge to the Left

This is a challenge to the left. Not the left that’s out there already doing the hard work—the labor movement, the Occupiers, the immigrants rights’ organizers—but the left that’s like, well, me: the academics, the writers, the bloggers, the journalists, the think tankers, the kibbitzers. The people who talk too much. My challenge is this: If you’re calling for the labor movement to be more radical—more adventurous, more willing to get out into the streets, to break laws, to challenge the social order (and let me be clear, that is an aim I share)—I want you to stop and ask yourself a question. Have you ever organized a majority, even a plurality, of your co-workers—in an academic department, at a […]

Wisconsin: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable on Labor, the Democrats, and Why Everything Sucks

The defeat of the recall effort in Wisconsin has, understandably, troubled the waters on the left. Everyone from Ezra Klein to Doug Henwood to Josh Eidelson is trying to figure out what it means. I’ve been doing the same, though I’m still not sure. So I put the question to my Facebook friends.  Lots of folks participated in the discussion: bloggers like Aaron Bady and Seth Ackerman, political scientists like Scott Lemieux and Alan Ryan, journalists like Doug, and labor experts like Gordon Lafer, Stephanie Luce, and Nathan Newman. The discussion was kicked off by my posting Klein’s observations on FB, and everyone took it from there. • • • • • • Corey Robin Here are some sobering thoughts […]

I See London, I See France…

“The law,” Anatole France famously declared, “in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Now there’s this: A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Was Mohamed Atta Gay?

My friend Connor Kilpatrick just told me the incredible news that the Cold War classic My Son John is being released this summer on video. I first learned about this film—which features Helen Hayes, an incredibly campy Robert Walker, and Van Heflin—in Nora Sayre’s fantastic book Running Time, which I also recommend. I had pretty much forgotten about the movie. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly rumors began to surface that Mohamed Atta was guy. The whole thing was so reminiscent of the plot and premise of My Son John that I had to revisit the film and write about it for a piece I did in the New York Times Magazine. It’s funny re-reading that piece now; you get a […]

Careerism: Prolegomena to a Political Theory

Someone recently tweeted this article on Hannah Arendt that I wrote in the London Review of Books many moons ago.  Re-reading it, I was reminded of this closing passage on careerism. I’ve long wanted to write two books of political theory: one on careerism and the other on collaboration. Both are topics that don’t get much, if any, treatment in contemporary theory. Yet both have been central pillars of modern political life. Alas, it doesn’t look like I’ll get to these books any time soon.  So in the meantime, there’s this: The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In […]