Month: October 2013

Dayenu at Yale

A conference at Yale inspires this little variant on the classic Passover songs Chad Gadya (“One Little Goat”) and Dayenu (“It would have been enough!”) The “he” in the verse is God. Had He only convened a conference on the Age of Revolution at Yale—Yale!—it would have been enough. Dayenu! Had He only convened a conference on the Age of Revolution at Yale—Yale!—at which there were no women panelists, it would have been enough. Dayenu! Had he only convened a conference on the Age of Revolution at Yale—Yale!—at which there were no women panelists, and called the center that organized the conference “The Center for the Study of Representative Institutions,” it would have been enough. Dayenu!

The Right to an Education: This Won’t Hurt a Bit

Gawker recently obtained the audiotape of a captive audience meeting at a firm in Georgia where truckers are trying to organize a union. Anti-union employers often hold these mandatory meetings, where they subject employees to extended lectures on the evils and ills of unionization. As captive audience meetings go, this one is relatively benign. The workers speak up, some voice tentative pro-union sympathy, there’s a back and forth, there’s little intimidation, not even of the more informal or implicit variety. That’s often not the case. Even so, the tape has some creepy moments that reveal the paternalism of management’s opposition to unions and its treatment of workers more generally. Early in the tape, a manager tells the workers: We have […]

When Richard Nixon Met Karl Polanyi

In 1969, while he was working on Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an income of $1600 plus $800 in food stamps to every family of four, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was deputized by Nixon to investigate the historical accuracy of one of Karl Polanyi’s claims in The Great Transformation. Polanyi had argued that Britain’s Speenhamland system—like Nixon’s plan, it would have guaranteed an annual income to poor families, regardless of whether they worked or not—had the perverse effect of making the poor poorer. Reiterating claims made by Marx and Engels, Polanyi wrote that Speenhamland allowed, even encouraged, employers to hire workers at below-subsistence wages (the poor were guaranteed an income regardless of whether they worked). Because workers […]

For the New Intellectual…

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it….Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too….All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the […]

Burke in Debt

Some day someone should write an essay on the struggles of Edmund Burke in his final years to overcome his considerable debts—some £30,000—by securing a peerage and a pension from the Crown. Throughout his career, Burke’s financial state had been precarious. Much to his embarrassment, he was periodically forced to rely upon well timed gifts and loans from his wealthier friends and patrons. So terrified was he of dying in a debtor’s prison that he struggled in his retirement to learn Italian. His hope, claimed one of the many visitors at his estate, was to flee England and “end his days with tollerable Ease in Italy.” (He also floated, apparently, the possibility of fleeing to Portugal or America.) “I cannot […]

The Moderate and the McCarthyite: The Case of Robert Taft

In the New York Times today, John G. Taft, who is the grandson of Robert Taft, makes his contribution to the growing “Oh, conservatives used to be so moderate, now they’re just radicals and crazies” literature that The Reactionary Mind was supposed to consign to the dustbin of history. (You can see how successful I’ve been.) Having written about and against this thesis of conservatism’s Golden Age so many times, I don’t think it’s useful for me to rehearse my critique here. Instead, I’ll focus on one important tidbit of Taft’s argument, in the hope that a little micro-history about his grandfather might serve to correct our macro-history of conservatism. Here’s what Taft says: This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by […]

How I Met Your Mother, or, When Unions Disrupt the Disruptors

On December 23, 2005, I went out on a date. It was one day after the transit strike that crippled New York had ended. I was in a foul mood. The night before, you see, I had been on another date. Throughout dinner, the woman I was out with complained about the transit strike. About how much she was inconvenienced (she worked in the publishing industry and her commute into Manhattan had been screwed up), how good the workers had it, how bad public sector unions were. So on the night of the 23rd, as I walked into the bar, I was ready for the worst. When I met the woman I was due to have a drink with, I […]

Eric Alterman v. Max Blumenthal

Over the years, Eric Alterman has written many articles I’ve disagreed with. I’ve never commented on them publicly because he’s a colleague at Brooklyn College. But in the current issue of the Nation Alterman devotes a column—and then a blog post—to a critique of Max Blumenthal’s new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Even if you haven’t read Blumenthal’s book, it’s not hard to see that Alterman is writing out of an animus he can’t get a hold of. His prose gives him away. Alterman writes, for example, “And its [Goliath’s] larding of virtually every sentence with pointless adjectives designed to demonstrate the author’s distaste for his subject is as amateurish as it is ineffective.” A writer more […]

The History of Fear, Part 5

I’m back today with part 5 of my intellectual history of fear. After my posts on Hobbes (rational fear), Montesquieu (despotic terror), Tocqueville (democratic anxiety), and Arendt (total terror), we’re ready to turn to more recent theories of fear, which arose in the 1980s and 1990s, in the wake of the conservative backlash against the 1960s and the collapse of communism. In my book on fear, I divide these recent theories into two broad camps: the liberalism of anxiety and the liberalism of terror. The first camp tracks communitarian liberalism (or liberal communitarianism) as well as some influential arguments about identity and civil society; the second camp tracks what is often called political liberalism or negative liberalism, and it includes […]

Nozick: Libertarians are “filled…with resentment at other freer ways of being”

I don’t know how I missed this the previous times I read Nozick, but John Holbo—in a terrific paper on liberalism, conservatism, and ideal theory, which is due to appear in a forthcoming volume of Nomos—points me to this revealing line from Nozick’s preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia. This is how Nozick characterizes his libertarian comrades: Many of the people who take a similar position [as Nozick’s] are…filled, paradoxically, with resentment at other freer ways of being. From his lips to your ears. Or, as I wrote in The Reactionary Mind: Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force—the opposition to the liberation of men and […]

Same As It Ever Was

“The Administration…can gain the leeway on the domestic front…only by combatting the radical Right rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground — an illusory operation since the Right can always go still further right and will.” —David Riesman, “The Cold War and the West: Answers Given in a Partisan Review Symposium” (1962) (h/t Marilyn Young)

WTF Does Obama Think They Were Doing at Stonewall?

Barack Obama, Second Inaugural Address: We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall…. Barack Obama on the Republicans and the shutdown at yesterday’s press conference: I was at a small business the other day and talking to a bunch of workers, and I said, you know, when you’re at the plant and you’re in the middle of your job, do you ever say to your boss, you know what, unless I get a raise right now and more vacation pay, I’m going to just shut down the plant; […]

Upstairs, Downstairs at the University of Chicago

Back in May at the University of Chicago, this happened (h/t Micah Uetricht): Two locksmiths with medical conditions were told to repair locks on the fourth floor of the Administration Building during the day. Stephen Clarke, the locksmith who originally responded to the emergency repair, has had two hip replacement surgeries during his 23 years as an employee of the University. According to Clarke, when he asked Kevin Ahn, his immediate supervisor, if he could use the elevator due to his medical condition, Ahn said no. Clarke was unable to perform the work, and Elliot Lounsbury, a second locksmith who has asthma, was called to perform the repairs. Lounsbury also asked Ahn if he could use the elevator to access […]

Study Finds Grad Student Unions Actually Improve Things

From Inside Higher Ed: The authors of a paper released this year surveyed similar graduate students at universities with and without unions about pay and also the student-faculty relationship. The study found unionized graduate students earn more, on average. And on various measures of student-faculty relations, the survey found either no difference or (in some cases) better relations at unionized campuses. The paper (abstract available here) appears in ILR Review, published by Cornell University. “These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty-student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees,” says the paper, by Sean E. Rogers, assistant professor of management at New Mexico State University; […]

The only people who cared about literature were the KGB

Cornell historian Holly Case has a fascinating piece in The Chronicle Review on Stalin as editor. Reminds me of that George Steiner line that the only people in the 20th century who cared about literature were the KGB. Here are some excerpts. But read the whole thing. Joseph Djugashvili was a student in a theological seminary when he came across the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a Bolshevik revolutionary. Thereafter, in addition to blowing things up, robbing banks, and organizing strikes, he became an editor, working at two papers in Baku and then as editor of the first Bolshevik daily, Pravda. Lenin admired Djugashvili’s editing; Djugashvili admired Lenin, and rejected 47 articles he submitted to Pravda. Djugashvili (later […]

David Grossman v. Max Blumenthal

Anyone familiar with Max Blumenthal’s journalism—in print or video (his interviews with Chicken Hawk Republicans are legendary)—knows him to be absolutely fearless. Whether he’s exploring the id of American conservatism or the contradictions of Israeli nationalism, Max heads deep into the dark places and doesn’t stop till he’s turned on all the lights. Courage in journalism requires not only physical fortitude but also an especially shrewd and sophisticated mode of intelligence. It’s not enough to go into a war zone; you have to know how to size up your marks, not get taken in by the locals with their lore, and know when and how to squeeze your informants. Max possesses those qualities in spades. With laser precision, he zeroes […]

The Washington Post: America’s Imperial Scribes

Vo Nguyen Giap, the military leader of the Vietnamese resistance to French and American domination, has died. The Washington Post has a decent obituary, but this bit of language really caught my eye.  Listen carefully to the different verbs that are used to describe the actions of the US versus those of the Vietnamese, post-Geneva Accords. At the Geneva Conference that followed the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam was divided into two countries: north and south. In the north, the Communist Party ruled under the leadership of Ho. With the French colonialists out of the picture, an ambitious land-reform program was undertaken, for which Gen. Giap would later apologize. “[W]e . . . executed too many honest people . . . and, seeing enemies […]

Mark Zuckerberg, Meet George Pullman

The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Inc.’s sprawling campus in Menlo Park, Calif., is so full of cushy perks that some employees may never want to go home. Soon, they’ll have that option. The social network said this week it is working with a local developer to build a $120 million, 394-unit housing community within walking distance of its offices. Called Anton Menlo, the 630,000 square-foot rental property will include everything from a sports bar to a doggy day care. … One of Facebook’s corporate goals is to take care of as many aspects of its employees lives as possible. They don’t have to worry about transportation—there’s a bus for that. Laundry and dry cleaning? Check. Hairstylists, woodworking classes, bike maintenance. […]

Adam Smith on the Mobility of Labor v. Capital

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 10, Part II: Corporation laws, however, give less obstruction to the free circulation of stock from one place to another than to that of labour. It is everywhere much easier for a wealthy merchant to obtain the privilege of trading in a town corporate, than for a poor artificer to obtain that of working in it. Same as it ever was.

Adam Smith Was Never an Adjunct

Every single one of the explanations that Adam Smith offers—in Book 1, Chapter 10, Part 1, of The Wealth of Nations—for the difference in wage rates between various kinds of labor is discomfirmed by the example of adjuncts in the academy.* Turns out: work that is harder, more disagreeable, more precarious, riskier as a long-term career opportunity, of lower social standing, and that requires more time and training to enter into and more trust from society to perform, does not in fact pay better. *These explanations have to do with what Smith calls “inequalities arising from the nature of the employments themselves.” These explanations are to be distinguished from those having to do with government policies or the forces of […]