Tag: slavery

Clarence Thomas’s Straussian Moment: The Question of Slavery and the Founding, and a question for my political theory and intellectual history friends

A question for the political theorists, intellectual historians, and maybe public law/con law experts. The question comes at the very end of this post. Forgive the build-up. And the potted history: I’m writing fast because I’m hard at work on this Clarence Thomas book and am briefly interrupting that work in order to get a reading list. In the second half of the 1980s, Clarence Thomas is being groomed for a position on the Supreme Court, or senses that he’s being groomed. He’s the head of the EEOC in the Reagan Administration and decides to beef up on his reading in political theory, constitutional law, and American history. He hires two Straussians—Ken Masugi and John Marini—to his staff on the […]

God Is an Accelerationist

At shul today, my eight-year-old daughter Carol asked about the parsha we were reading, from Exodus 10-11, which details the last of the three plagues before Pharaoh lets the Jews go. Up until that final moment, God is “hardening Pharaoh’s heart,” stiffening his tyrannical resolve so that he won’t let the Jews go. Which prompted this exchange: Carol: Why does God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Why doesn’t He soften it? Me: I have no idea. Why do you think? Carol: Maybe if He did, the Jews would get too comfortable and wouldn’t want to go. Me: That’s what people call “heightening the contradictions.”

The American Terrible

Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon. In the course of several argumens and conversations over the last few days—about Trump, what he’s up to, and so on—I’ve sometimes found myself, against my better judgment, drifting into predictions. I start out trying to think about what this current moment means, and I wind up making claims about where we’re going. That’s not a place I want to be. Not simply because my prediction about the election was so completely wrong, not simply because I’m […]

Gag Me With Calhoun

After weeks of embarrassing publicity and political mobilization, Yale University has been forced to rehire Corey Menafee, an African American employee who was fired for smashing a stained glass window at Yale’s Calhoun College that depicted slaves shouldering bales of cotton. For over a year, Calhoun College has been the subject of intense national controversy because it is named after one of America’s foremost defenders of slavery and white supremacy. Menafee’s actions, firing, and now rehiring gave expression, and amplification, to the controversy. But now there’s a new source of controversy: one of the conditions of Menafee’s rehiring is that he keep his mouth shut about the case. But in a move more familiar in corporate labor proceedings than in an academic setting dedicated to free discourse, the […]

John C. Calhoun at Yale

Part of the problem with Yale’s position in the Calhoun College controversy is the assumption that John C. Calhoun’s sins are exhausted by the institution of slavery, that his crimes belong to the first half of the 19th century. Yale President Peter Salovey’s recent email message about this controversy, in which he affirms Yale’s decision to keep the name “Calhoun College,” constantly invokes the terms “slavery”, “history,” “reminder,” and “past.” Calhoun’s real contribution to the canon of American evil, however, is not as a defender of slavery but as a theorist of white supremacy. His was less the voice of a dying institution than a vision of the future that was only just being born. Nearly a century before DuBois coined […]

What Donald Trump Can Learn From Frederick Douglass

As a scholar of conservatism, I’m finding this Trump-wants-to-punish-women-who-get-abortions moment fascinating. At its heart, I’ve argued, “conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.” It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves….Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite. Though certainly hostile to women’s agency, Trump’s position recognizes it. He’s saying women make the choice to get an abortion, abortion is a crime, so do with women who get an abortion what we do with anyone who commits a crime: hold them accountable, punish them. Trump’s detractors in […]

The Internationalism of the American Civil War

One of the topics I’ve long been interested in is the traffic between the European right and the slaveholding South in the US. We know a fair amount, now, about the relationship between the abolitionist movement in the US and the European left, including Marx, but less about the impact that slavery and its defense had on the European right. What first piqued my interest in this issue was reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche talks a lot about slavery in his work, and it’s long been the conventional wisdom that his references here are metaphorical and philosophical rather than contemporary and literal. I’ve had my doubts about that, as I’ve written. One can hear in the opening passages of “The Greek State” […]

Why Arendt might not have read Benito Cereno (if she did indeed not read Benito Cereno)

For a change of pace… In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt makes the argument that one of the reasons the French Revolution took such a violent and authoritarian turn was that it allowed the social question—simplistically put, issues of poverty and the poor—to enter and then dominate public discussion. Unlike the American Revolution, which was more properly concerned with truly political questions like the organization of public power, constitutions, and civic action. Once issues of economic need are put on the table, Arendt suggests, tyranny cannot be far off. So pressing and overwhelming are the physical needs of the body, so much do they cry out for our response, that they almost introduce, by their very nature, an element of compulsion […]

Capitalism and Slavery

I’ve mentioned Greg Grandin’s book Empire of Necessity on this blog before. It’s basically the true story—and more!—behind Melville’s Benito Cereno, which if you haven’t read, you should read right away. And then read Greg’s book. In any event, Alex Gourevitch has a wonderful interview with Greg up today at Jacobin. It’s got all sorts of gems in it, but I thought readers here would be especially interested in this: Scholars have long examined the ways in which slavery underwrites capitalism. I thought this story, though, allowed attention to slavery’s role in shaping not so much the social or financial dimensions of capitalism but its psychic and imaginative ones. Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, […]

The US Senate: Where Democracy Goes to Die

Every once in a while I teach constitutional law, and when I do, I pose to my students the following question: What if the Senate apportioned votes not on the basis of states but on the basis of race? That is, rather than each state getting two votes in the Senate, what if each racial or ethnic group listed in the US Census got two votes instead? Regardless of race, almost all of the students freak out at the suggestion. It’s undemocratic, they cry! When I point out that the Senate is already undemocratic—the vote of any Wyomian is worth vastly more than the vote of each New Yorker—they say, yeah, but that’s different: small states need protection from large […]

A Most Delightful Fuck You

Pardon my French, but there really are no other words to describe this letter, written by Jourdan Anderson, an ex-slave, to his former master in 1865. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. […]

Still Batshit Crazy After All These Years: A Reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jumping off from Mark Lilla’s negative review of my book in the New York Review of Books—about which more later, though if you’re looking for a hard-hitting response, check out Alex Gourevitch’s demolition at Jacobin—Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a helpful corrective to Lilla’s claim that “political apocalypticism” is a recent development on the right. It’s interesting that Lilla raises Buckley here. People often bring him up as foil to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as an example of a time when conservatism was sane. But that Buckley joke has always struck me (a college dropout) as batshit crazy. I constantly hear about the sober-minded Buckley, but it’s tough for me to square that with the man who posited that the bombing […]

From the American Slaveholders to the Nazis…

From my dialogue with Daniel Larison over at The New Inquiry: In the American context, there is a precedent for the conservative rush to empire, which you suggest is mostly a creation of the Cold War. And that is the slaveholders. But the slaveholders developed a fascinating vision of an imperial political economy, which would be centered around the Mississippi and spread out from there to the Caribbean Basin and beyond. It would be centered on slave labor, and it was thought to be a different kind of imperialism. And though I’ve never seen anyone discuss this, it strikes me that there are fascinating parallels to be drawn between their vision of a slave empire, based on land, and the […]

To Play the Part of a Lord: A Reply to Andrew Sullivan about Conservatism

Andrew Sullivan—whose views on conservatism I take very seriously (one of the main arguments of my book is inspired by and aimed at his writing)—has linked to Sheri Berman’s response to my critique and identified one paragraph in particular as the “money quote.” If these are Sullivan’s apprehensions, they merit a response. If this paragraph is the crux of concern, it can be dispatched fairly easily. The paragraph in question makes two claims; I’ve divided my response accordingly.   Claim 1: “If conservatism is always about the submission and subjugation of the lower orders, then any popular support for such movements must—by definition—be misguided, misinformed, or the result of trickery.” This claim rests upon two mistaken assumptions: The lower orders […]

The Republican Debate: 5 Theses

Thesis 1: When the libertarian rubber hits the political road… Going after Mitt Romney in the first ten minutes of the debate, Rick Perry claimed that Romney had a good record of creating jobs when he was in the private sector but a terrible record as governor of Massachusetts.  Conversely, said Perry, he had a terrific record as governor of Texas.  “We created more jobs in the last three months in Texas” than Romney did during his entire term in Massachusetts.  Even Michael Dukakis, Perry added, had a better record than Romney, to which Romney replied: “George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did.” In all the back and forth, no one noted the […]