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oaesiir-beloved-of-heaven · 5 years

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How Mowing Your Lawn will Save American Civilization

A little neglect may breed mischief ...

for want of a nail, the shoe was lost;

for want of a shoe the horse was lost;

and for want of a horse the rider was lost.

—Benjamin Franklin

Poor Richard's Almanac, preface (1758)

American habits our forefathers practiced are often the subject of ridicule today. The image of the American father has changed in modern perception; he is now fat, bumbling, politically backward, balding, an alcoholic who's chief indulgence is piss beer. The image of such a man in shorts drinking a Monster Zero riding his lawnmower at the crack of dawn is now a literal meme across the internet.

Make no mistake; such critical viewpoints are another symptom of the self-flagellating masochism which has gripped the American people for nearly a century. Optimism and zeal gave way in the modern discourse to malcontent and apathy after the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan. From our newfound place of unquestionable superiority Americans began to ask new questions from the safety of supremacy so far removed from the struggle that put them there: have we gone too far? Have we traveled across the last frontier and made it from sea to shining sea in the name of an Empire of Liberty only to have lost ourselves along the way? Can a nation such as ours even exist - does it deserve to exist?

Self-criticism is indeed a virtue and it has been practiced in the American people since household names like Paul Revere and Patrick Henry questioned the merit of the Constitution we now know as our founding document. Later it manifested when people like Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes which he knew would go to support the Mexican-American War which he - wrongly - felt was an unjustified act of imperialist aggression.

It’s important to be able to have something to measure yourself against whether it be a moral standard or a friend who is the whetstone that keeps your mind sharp. But what we see now is quite different. We are not seeing critics of American policy and culture coming from a place of love and admiration but rather malice. These critics do not want to see America do better because we can be better but rather they want the Republic to fail and be replaced with something more to their liking, damn the rest of the American people.

Let’s ask ourselves not just what today’s criticisms of American habits are but where they come from. Isn’t there a difference between a friend at the bar telling you that you’ve had a bit too much to drink and an adversary among your peers who considers the mere presence of a bottle of whiskey in your home as a sign of crippling dependency?

Who really is benefiting from the collapse of American self-confidence? It’s not you or me, it’s not our allies, it’s not the free world, nor our communities, municipalities, states, and greater democracy. What Americans need now is to reclaim themselves and their virtues and not abandon them wholesale.

The unique and truly powerful aspect of America’s democracy is that its maintenance falls to all citizens and not a political class. The already quoted Benjamin Franklin was an advocate of the necessity of an educated class of voters who were politically and civically active. The goals of such virtue can be found all over the many institutions of America he helped establish like fire departments and public libraries. It does not fall to the government alone or the elite to maintain society but the active efforts of us all. Civic virtue is the heart and soul of a voluntary society.

Now that I’ve impressed all this upon you the inevitable question must be arising: what does this have to do with lawn care?

Have you ever remarked on the true difference between a cultured and uncultured lawn? Many people consider the mere act of attempting to tame the wilderness on their property a Sisyphean one to be delegated to others if it is to be done at all. But allow me to describe to you the consequences of not tending one’s lawn particularly if you are like me and live in the wilderness where nature is not far away.

In tall grass parasites and other harmful insects come to reside. Ants inevitably make their homes in the soil with the other smaller creatures nearby being a natural source of food with the tall grass providing excellent protection for their mounds. Mice, opossums, armadillos, squirrels, badgers and other small mammals will also find solitude and resources within the fields. Then come snakes looking for meals and like the ants shelter in the soil beneath the tall grass. Soon coyotes and wolves will come looking for food as well with the overgrown ground being perfect hunting ground. Trees and other thick foliage can grow making traversing the ground and assessing it difficult. Nevermind the hazard and untended tree can pose to people or their property. Not all the plants will be benign either; thorns, poison ivy, thistles and other harmful nuisances will emerge. The more wild the acre the more wildlife will come to call it home. Soon enough you’re living in the middle of a small forest that is anything but suited to your comfortable living or the pleasure of your guests and neighbors. A hole or two could appear in the ground as well and you’d never be the wiser or perhaps a bog.

It is clear now to the astute reader what merit my quote has at the beginning of this essay. A simple weekly ritual taking only a few hours of your day might prevent all of these calamities. Though many of us would rather others do it or simply not do it at all I believe it is an edifying exercise of body and mind. A well-groomed property has many possibilities. New spaces for recreation and projects, habitation for animals that might prove beneficial for food, work, or as companions. Trees, plants and crops which while not enough to take to market might prove a healthy snack while out and about or simply a conversation piece and another reason your friends and neighbors love to visit because it means succulent pears or juicy persimmons.

This is not a simple statement of my love for landscaping or a suggestion you take up the hobby; it is an allegory for how our own virtue in daily life can and will improve our democracy. Too often we shove off our duties as citizens on government functionaries and when we do this we exchange a piece of our freedom for security and hope it doesn’t backfire or such powers do not come into the hands of villains and despots.

It is easy to mock older people and past generations for their seemingly provincial passions and lifestyles. But when we do so we lose something valuable as when we discard a culture or people because we view them as savage and uncouth. I’m not suggesting we should wholesale revive the past with all its ill trappings but consider that perhaps there is something to the more grounded practices of our parents and grandparents and beyond. Think about all the things they know/knew how to do but you’re clueless on. How does that negatively impact you? How does it negatively impact your community? Let’s not get bogged down in archaic reaction and get locked into the idea of turning back the lock; that’s not what this is about. It’s about sifting through the living examples of our ancestors and harvesting gold from mud. It goes beyond simple lawncare. America is not a nation of blood and soil but almost a religion maintained by our beliefs and the practice of those beliefs. That the best person to govern a community is its constituents. How can we maintain such a free society without a morally astute, self-reliant people? We cannot. Our goal should be to mold ourselves into such people. A man who can take care of himself is a free man. Together with the product of our own labor in hand we can contribute to the common weal overall. This is the frontier mindset. The free man’s mindset. We do not sit idly by and let our world pass us by; we ride the tiger, we tame the bucking bronco.

Now the full breadth and scope of this practical analogy is revealed to you. We must reclaim the American spirit of independence and self-reliance to maintain a voluntary and democratic society. Put down the comic book and grab a newspaper. Seek out real edifying literature that informs you about the doctrines and theories of our government and practical books that can make you more handy. Go less to the auto shop and pick up a Hayne’s manual and some tools. Learn some simple homespun recipes and stop eating out whenever hunger calls. Pay more attention to your local government and find ways you can make your voice heard and exert your will in the ballot box. This is the truest way to a free society: one where we are less dependent and more independent. One where we have the power and tools to more readily help and advise our neighbors and we have the skills and resources to collaborate. It makes our modern society with all its hard-won excess and bounty a boon and not a dependence to survive.

It’s warming up outside; the sun is out more and a cold breeze is always at your back. So why not roll up your sleeves and do your part to make your community that much greener and yourself that much more free?

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rojasrodmark · 2 years

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l. Venn diagram

II. Discuss your answers to the following questions:

1. What does it mean to be a digital citizen?

The meaning of being a digital citizen is a person who uses information technology to engage in society, politics, and government. And It concerns the ability to interpret, understand and express creativity through digital media, with critical thinking. And Digital Citizenship refers to the digital environment that takes skills in effective communication and creation, to practice forms of social participation that respect human rights and dignity through the responsible use of technology.

2. How can you observe social, ethical, and legal responsibilities in the use of technology tools and resources?

I would have noticed this if I had seen first hand the use of the tools and their sources of technology. And maybe Their social responsibility is an ethical theory in which individuals are responsible for fulfilling their civic duty, and the actions of an individual should benefit society as a whole. In this way, there must be a balance between economic growth and social and environmental welfare.

III. Digital tattoo

This lock will serve everyone's safety, and an example of this is when we use technology it should always be locked. like your passwords in the apps you use like facebook, twitter, instagram and others, you have to keep them always locked and don't tell others because it is also one of your privacy. and the iron that is attached to the lock, we need a strong password so that hackers can't open it right away.

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coeurdastronaute · 7 years

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Giant: Ch. 18

Don't let them take you down Take your heart away And when the world comes crashing down You gotta hold your ground

It was absolute hell. Outside, out in the world, it was an ongoing battle and it was a never ending war. People yelled on television. People yelled on street corners. People yelled at marches and protests and parades and pretty much everywhere, actually. Everyone was very sad and mad and generally so very humanly worried about their place in the world, that it turned into defensive posturing only seen during times of the greats rashes of pandemics and war.

But not in the bed.

Outside, Superman was on trial and the world held its breath. 114 stories below the balcony, everything was swirling and people were uprooted in their firmest beliefs, and yet none of that happened in the bed. In the bed, there weren’t even words, there weren’t even thoughts. It was just quiet and safe.

The rain tapped against the large windows as the grey day hung heavy and woolen around the highest points of the city. Lena stared at the rain dripping and mapping the long trip, pausing and gathering before racing other droplets to the finish line. Not much of her felt like moving at all. She knew what waited once her foot stepped outside her bed, outside the safe walls of her home. Out there, people would hate her still, and she would be asked to comment on the crimes of her girlfriend’s cousin because of her family, and that was just too much to think about.

But not in the bed.

In the bed, she was just Lena, no past, no future, just the present instant and breath. Warm arms slid around her waist as she hunkered beneath the fluffy duvet that still smelled like Kara somehow, all sunshine and warmth despite the day outside that strived to eradicate all memory of the sun at all.

Lips kissed her shoulder through her old shirt. A nose ran along her neck and a warm body pressed against hers, molding to press close. A forehead took the nose’s place, rooting around there softly, earning a smile, until Lena just couldn’t take it any longer. She rolled over in the arms and intertwined their legs and closed her eyes again. Arms wrapped around Kara’s head, around her neck, keeping her close.

“We’re not leaving this bed today,” Kara mumbled, her forehead nuzzling into Lena’s, their noses brushing as she insisted. “Except to get food.”

“What about a bath?”

“Mmm, yeah a bath,” she agreed, almost purring as Lena ran her nails along her back, slipping her hands under the shirt and toying with the muscles that lived there.

The cat curled itself into Kara’s lower back, meowing the faintest complaint as a hand nudged it before it settled back in, also disinterested in moving at all.

“Did you sleep alright?” Lena whispered. “You tossed and turned a bit.”

“I slept like a baby,” Kara lied.

“Darwin got kicked like six times,” she chuckled. “He gave up and went into the living room.”

“I was wondering why I didn’t wake up with a tail or paw in my mouth.”

Lena finally opened her eyes, though Kara refused. There was still a smile on her face though. Moments like that were addicting to the CEO. They were two people, wrapped up in each other and happy. Surely there was someone else in the city in the same position, thinking the same things, being grateful for just a second of that kind of happiness. It was a universal moment that would replay itself and had replayed itself across every century and every continent in some form or another.

“You’re not worried, are you?” Lena asked as her fingertips moved along Kara’s eyebrows, along the bridge of her nose, over her lips and chin and jaw.

“Not right now.”

“Something bad is coming, isn’t it?”

“Nothing Supergirl and the brilliant scientist slash CEO slash genius Lena Luthor can’t handle.”

She couldn’t help it. Lena leaned forward and kissed Kara’s lips, kissed her in the softness that was the rain on the window, in the way that it threw itself against it, uninhibited and eager for the fall, regardless of the smattering upon landing, reckless in itself and its mission to live for a blink.

Once again, Darwin was disbanded, nudged too much for his liking, until he hopped off of the safety of the universe in the sheets, off to his own devices and the scratching post in the living room. Lena pressed her hips against Kara’s and slid atop her in the way that was so natural, even the waves would be jealous.

The kiss deepened until stars appeared around them and they were immortalized as such. Kara’s hands gripped her hips, slightly too tight, slightly enough to leave little bruises that were their own milky way on her thighs, and Lena would press them to herself when she was alone or at a meeting and just needed to feel that kind of love and adoration.

She couldn’t help her hips, and Kara wouldn’t have wanted her to if she could. Instead, she just moved and moaned in that languid, rainy day way that only the weather could understand, with its distant rumblings and gusts of more raindrops living and shouting for joy as they tapped at the window, honored to exist in a moment like that.

Only when she pulled away did Kara open her eyes, her chest moving just as quickly to catch its breath as Lena’s, her lips just as swollen from a kiss like that, her need just as violent and unending and absolutely overwhelming.

Lena pushed away the stray messy golden hair that provided some of the only color in their universe. She was the sun, at the center of it all, and all Lena could do was hold on tight as gravity and physics and such flung her around in an unending orbit.

“Do you know how much I love you?” she whispered.

Kara swallowed because of how earnest and tiny the voice was from the lips that she’d memorized since she was a senior, crushing a lock in her hand just at a glimpse.

“Yeah, I think I do,” Kara nodded.

“Please know.”

“I’ve loved you since I was seventeen, and every year, I think it can’t change, but it does. It just grows and grows and it… it makes me strong. It makes me… me.”

“Not leaving this bed today,” Lena decided again.

“Except for food.”

With a devious smile, Lena leaned closer, bit at Kara’s lip, ground her hip into the hero’s. Her nails moved down her neck, the weight of her elbows found shoulders as lips traced toward ear.

“Are you hungry right now?”

“Rao…” Kara moaned, downright moaned a filthy moan with no control at all. “I love you so much.” Teeth found her earlobe. “I’m voracious.”

In an instant, not even an instant. Less than an instant, less than a nanosecond, Lena was pressed into the mattress somehow, a gasp escaping her lips. This was the Kara she got to keep.

It was rare that days were actually good, the entire time, but Lena was living on a hot streak of good to great days. A streak she’d never believed she could ever have. It wasn’t that her life wasn’t good. In fact, over the past three years it got infinitely good. Something about having Kara in her corner just made her outlook on life a little different. She wasn’t the wounded underling sister of crazed psychopaths, she wasn’t fighting for retribution or absolution. Instead, she was just a girl, making a name for herself, and she was oddly happy with who she was becoming as a person.

What did happen, however, was that she had a thunderous kind of brow, where work and life and her past weighed heavy and often disrupted the feelings of goodness and relief from time to time before, as if sensing it in the air, a puppy would appear and close her laptop and sling her over her shoulder or calmly invite her for a break. Sometimes the break meant a daytrip to a museum. Sometimes it meant slow sex in the shower. It was a toss up, depending purely on Kara. But no matter what the activity, it was always super effective.

But Lena was on a hot streak, and life was good despite the impending, despite the trial and the world’s reaction and Superman’s retirement. Kara went out less at night doing her civic duty. Not because she wasn’t needed, but because once, she saved someone from a car robbery, and they spit in her face. It was a new age, rolling into the world, and it was terrifying. But Kara took it in stride, and she seemed happy as well. Life was just coming together, despite all else, and for Lena, the despite part was usually too big to be avoided. Now though, she was happy. She was alive and she was making a way and she had a life that she’d never imagined for herself. She defied the odds and beat her destiny.

That was, perhaps, why it was so downright bothersome when she spent the morning making arrangements for a romantic dinner to be delivered to their home, and those oils that Kara liked to be waiting in the bathroom, and candles purchased by the dozen, for a very, very, very fun night, only to get a call from the other Danvers to come down to the DEO headquarters.

While the inevitable truce remained, and there was less ice than before, it was like asking a lion and a gazelle to be friends. Sure, it was possible in theory, and even manageable for a while, but it was impossible to last. They’d fought, of course. Over LCorp patents and ideas, over investigations and over family, while at the core, it was always about Kara.

But, they were enjoying a time of relative peace between the two, much to the relief of their respective girlfriend and wife. There’d even been a double date that ended in laughs and cheers and more wine being ordered.

Which was also why it was odd to be called down so formally to the headquarters she still disliked, so abruptly. But Lena took it in stride. Told Jess to do the magic she did and decided that surprising her girlfriend at work might be nice. Even as an act of kindness, when she stopped to get herself and Kara coffee, she picked up two extras for whatever part of the the Super Team would be lurking about the office.

Oddly proud of herself, Lena smiled politely as the door was held for her and she followed the agent that met her and accompanied her upstairs.

She gave it a chance to survive as a good day, and for Lena, that was impressive enough. But as soon as she saw Alex’s face, she just knew it was hopeless.

“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it, Agent Danvers,” she sighed. “I’ll have Jess send over my alibis and such--”

“Lena,” Alex shook her head. “When’s the last time you talked to Supergirl?”

“Um, well,” Lena furrowed and really thought about it. She’d been so preoccupied with the day that she couldn’t remember any texts. And Kara wasn’t there when she woke up, which was not out of the realm of normal. “Last night, about eleven when we went to sleep.”

“Did she leave?”

“I was asleep. Or. I mean, she was asleep. We were asleep, and I woke up alone. But when I went to bed she was there.”

“What time?”

“Like I said, about eleven,” she shrugged. “What’s going on?”

“You don’t remember hearing her leave at all?” Alex pressed.

“No, I don’t--” Lena thought hard about it and tried to find some hint. “Maybe? I was asleep. I don’t know what time it was.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since? You haven’t received any calls?”

“Alex, what is going on?”

The agent inhaled deeply and ran her hand through her hair before steeling herself for the news she had to deliver and figure out.

“Kara is missing.”

“No,” Lena disagreed. “No. What do you mean, missing?”

In an instant, she was digging into her purse for her cell phone before dialing and holding it there defiantly, waiting for Kara to answer in that breathless, happy kind of way she always did, as if you could hear the smile through the line.

“Alex, that’s… there’s no way,” she insisted.

When no one answered, she furrowed and shook her head again, typing a text before trying to call once again. As much as she wanted to say she had a hundred thoughts in her head, but all Lena could think was how it was impossible. The word no, a few thousand times with the occasional no way for good measure.

“What happened?” Lena snapped, calling again.

“She went on a call last night with the night crew, and she just stopped responding. Her comm and tracker are offline,” Alex explained.

“Of all the stupid, stupid things that this company has done, it’s those useless trackers and your unfounded belief that she can just do anything--”

“She was doing what she always did!” Alex snapped back.

“Because you all made her into this… this… you did this!”

“And if she wasn’t out there hunting for your brother, she wouldn’t be gone!”

“If you had listened to me sooner about what he was doing, this wouldn’t be a problem!’

Both seethed and clenched their teeth. The entire DEO watched them want to continue to fight and no one wanted to get involved at all. It was their worry all exploding over each other, and neither wanted to do anything else but hurt the other.

“What is going on in here?” J’onn bellowed as she entered the room. Neither girl looked away from the other.

Lene leaned back slightly though, regaining some composure and the practically patented Luthor stare of disdain. Her muscles felt tight with this impending fear.

“Kara is important to all of us, and it is no one’s fault,” he yelled, roaring above them and their pettiness. “But we are going to get her back because we are going to work together and find her.”

The two kept staring at each other, nostrils flaring and bodies rigid. Lena bristled slightly, though tried to keep it hidden. She didn’t have anything else to say, but she knew what she had to do.

With a turn of her heel, she walked out.

By the third morning, Lena was out of her mind and exhausted. She was grateful that when she told Jess she was assisting on time-sensitive government business, her assistant was capable of basically running the company on her own. And she was grateful for the connections she’d made and exploited. But none of it mattered until she found Kara.

“Please, let me work,” Lena mumbled typing furiously as she followed another rabbit hole. The cat didn’t care. He hopped up into her lap and nudged her chest for some attention.

The longer that time went on, the easier it was for terrible thoughts to creep into her head. They haunted her and waited like wolves, just outside of the ring of her campfire-like persistence. In the dark, Lena heard them, circling and chomping and snarling, ready to pounce as she grew weaker and more susceptible to thinking of Kara as gone.

“You have to eat something,” Francine insisted, finally puttering into the office in the penthouse. “I made you your favorite. Now just take a break. I’m sure whatever they are having you work on can wait.”

“It can’t,” Lena insisted, clenching her jaw as she sifted through code and tried to locate security footage.

“You haven’t slept more than a handful of hours. You need to take care of yourself.”

“I will. As soon as I finish this,” she lied.

Her housekeeper eyed her cautiously before deciding there was nothing she could do. That was the Luthor in her. It was hard not to press, but with Lena there was this idea that pushing her made her shut down so easily, and once she did, it was back to square one trying to pry her open.

Darwin curled up in a ball and purred in her lap, but Lena didn’t even notice when Francine sighed and began muttering to herself as she went back to her work. She did, however, hear the words under breath hoping that Kara came back from business soon.

Lex was her first stop, naturally.

But despite all else, he still remained at the blacksite. She knew this because of the feed she hacked. She also knew that an Agent Danvers made a show of interrogating him, only to be toyed with and questioned with a mocking smirk about the entire Super-family being replaced, like a sweet, sweet victory he didn’t even have to do anything to achieve.

Lionel was second up.

Even though he was a ghost, Lena kept constantly tracking his whispers and his trail. It never amounted to much, but after the show with Superman, she knew he was preparing. It didn’t make sense, to take Kara though, as she was around less and less. And from the last security footage Lena found of Supergirl landing at some building across town, she was unable to detect any sign of him in the area.

Lost and out of leads, Lena ran her hand along the cat’s sleeping belly before leaning back and running her hands over her face.

Once again, her phone rang and she tossed it back on the desk after seeing a certain agent’s number appear. After their third or ninth argument a few hours ago, Lena was in no mood for more patronizing or condescension from the DEO.

It buzzed and buzzed until it stopped, paused, and started again, much to the cats disdain. Lena felt the same way.

“What?” she snapped, disinterested in another round with the sister.

“Stop hacking our agencies.”

“Have better firewalls.”

“We followed that lead you had about the warehouse.”

“There weren’t any people near the warehouse.”

“There weren’t, but there were a few days before, and a few days after,” Alex explained. “Maggie has been hearing about this fighting ring, and word at the bar is that--”

“So you’ve been spending time at the bar?” Lena rolled her eyes.

“The word at the bar is that it’s an alien fighting ring, the larger, more exotic species, interesting pairings, things like that.”

“Which would complicate figuring out those missing with this ring or with whatever Lionel is up to,” she nodded to herself.

“I think they took Kara.”

“Which one?”

“That’s the question.”

“Send me everything you have.”

“When I have something, I will.”

“Lena, this is serious.”

“If this has a connection to my father, Kara would want us to figure that out first,” Lena reminded her. “No matter how much it hurts.”

“Just… forget it.”

“I need her back, Alex,” Lena whispered.

“I’ll send over what I have.”

“A courier will be over with my findings shortly.”

“Thank you, Lena.”

“Yeah.”

With a sigh, Lena furrowed and tossed her phone across the desk before furrowing and waiting for her email to explode with the agent's email. Her heart sunk to her stomach as she waited to find the only thing that made life worth living.

The groggy feeling overwhelmed much of her senses, but still, Kara tried to sit up. The ground was hard and she blinked and furrowed a few times as she rubbed the sore muscles of her neck and arm. She tried to swallow but her mouth was dry and her head throbbed too much to focus on anything at all.

“What the heck,” she rasped and shook her head, coughing slightly. Kara rubbed at the spot on the back of her head that would have a bump.

Slowly, the world came into focus, stopped wobbling slightly. It stilled enough for Kara to realize she was in some kind of cage, and the glowing green of the lamp above explained what some of the lingering dizziness was about.

Groggily, she tripped to her feet, barely able to stand. The bars of the cage were cool against her head as she leaned there.

“Hello?” Kara called, peering toward the darkness. She coughed a bit more and rubbed her eyes.

“Keep quiet,” a voice hissed from down the hall.

“Hello? Where am I? What’s going on?”

“I told you, keep your voice down.”

Kara pushed herself toward the wall where the voice was coming from, hoping to get closer, hoping to find some answers.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Gideon. Now keep quiet before they come in here.”

“Where are we?”

“I’m not sure. But if you get selected, you might not come back.”

“How long have I been here?” Kara shook her head and rubbed at some of the pain her body was feeling.

“Three selections, so maybe a week,” he grumbled. “Hard to keep track of things.”

“Selection?”

A door opened down the hall. Kara tried to see what was coming, but shadows merely mingled along the floor from the light cast there. The light was turned up on her ceiling and she fell to the ground, collapsing under the weight of the radiation. Slowly she crawled back toward the bars and found herself staring at a pair of heels, unable to lift her head.

“The Kryptonian is almost ready.”

Exactly four days, to the hour, after the last time Lena saw her girlfriend, she saw her again, and she could finally breathe. Her eyes never moved from the Kryptonian that was paraded around the large ring as the bets or bids were collected.

The files the DEO sent over let her know exactly what was going on, because she had a missing piece of the puzzle, and Lena knew it as soon as she saw the surveillance picture of a ghost from her past. It was just a matter of hours before she was in touch with her old flame.

“See anything you like?” Veronica hummed close to Lena’s ear, earning a shiver.

“A thing or two, yes,” she smirked, falling into the role she knew so well.

The years after high school, when she was struggling to keep up with school and her father and her brother were maddening, and when she disappeared from Kara, she would very well admit that she had gone off of the deep end a bit. Veronica Sinclair was waiting with open arms at the bottom at the diving board, ready for mischief and all manner of escapism.

“I never thought I’d see you in one of these things again,” she quirked and eyebrow and sipped a drink, eyeing Lena carefully. “Especially after the last time.”

“I was young and naïve as to how the world worked,” Lena murmured, toying with the side of her own glass, twisting the stem purposefully. “I’ve learned some things.”

“And here I thought Lena Luthor knew everything already.”

“I’m quick to catch on.”

For a moment, deep brown eyes just stared back at her, and Lena felt her mouth dry slightly, though she kept the gaze. She knew this game. They played it a few times. Now, it was different though.

“I don’t know anything about your father.”

“I wasn’t going to ask. I had hoped that even you had your limits.”

“You’re still a good liar, did you know that?” Veronica shook her head, almost thoughtful at the entire exchange. “I have ears in many of the same places you do.”

“Sounds like you’ve been asking about me.”

“I keep tabs, when it interests me.”

“We still have things in common,” Lena looked back at the cage once more.

“Keeping the Luthor family business up and running?” Veronica ventured, following Lena’s gaze to the Kryptonian she finally managed to find.

The entire swirling party was eerily familiar, as always seemed to be. People didn’t take much notice of the private conversation. Lena caught the familiar perfume of her former lover, and still, she only missed Kara.

The person who once was with Veronica was a distant memory, almost as much as that name was forgotten. Roulette was born from the ashes, and Lena was reborn as well.

“I want her.”

“You know I never mix business and pleasure,” Roulette tutted.

It was a chess match, and both were experts of the attack and parry, both were experts in thinking a million moves ahead, so that each interaction was a full three moves ahead of where anyone else would think the conversation was going. They were in a battle that both craved, adversaries and possibly evenly matched.

“I seem to remember that being the only thing you did,” Lena smirked.

“You are too much like your father.”

“My father’s name was Phillip. He wrote poetry and was a terrible dancer,” Lena informed the entrepreneur. “And by now I thought you would have known not to second-guess Luthors.”

“Your brother’s well mysteriously dried up. Any idea how that happened?”

Slowly, Roulette slid along the small table, leaning dangerously against it while also pressing against her old friend. Lena watched her own fingers trail up Roulette’s arm.

“Give me Supergirl, and you can have the key to the castle, if you’d like.”

“Now this is getting intriguing,” she smiled again as she finished her drink.

“I still know how to catch your eye, Ronnie.”

“I’ll let you call me that once,” she warned playfully.

A wave of her hand, a nudge of her chin, and Lena followed, surrounded by a gaggle of large men in suits who were most certainly there to prevent any kind of disturbance. Lena wanted to, but she couldn’t do it. If she looked at Kara, she would lose the edge she somehow cultivated in the charade.

The office was little more than a large wooden desk and a light atop it, the rest barren as it would soon be taken apart and moved, gone like a whisper in a storm, leaving nothing else to the police or anyone looking. Lena felt oddly alone in the large room when the guards waited outside.

“That alien is going to make me a lot of money tonight in the fights. She’s the main attraction.”

“I didn’t want to believe it at first,” Lena shook her head and took the seat on one side of the desk. “That you were taking them. But the bodies, the fights, the kidnappings…. It all clicked. Brilliant, in a sadistic kind of way.”

“The only way to make money,” Roulette shrugged as she took her seat. “As you might know, Ms. Luthor.”

“My father is doing the same thing, you know?”

“Running illegal fighting rings?”

“Murdering innocent people.”

“I’ve never raised a hand,” she grinned. “My hands are clean. Your father’s, though, those things are blood-stained.”

“He’s not my father.”

“You have his money.”

“Luck.”

“You might be the luckiest person I know.”

“I think you might be right, actually,” Lena countered, earning piqued eyebrows. “And you might be the unluckiest.”

“You don’t earn the name Roulette for nothing.”

“I want the Kryptonian, and I want you to stop this.”

“You can’t bet against the house, Lena, and many of my fighters enter the arena willingly. Anyone is welcome.”

“Then stop collecting the unwilling at the very least.”

“Why? I have nothing to fear and as far as I’m concerned, whittling down those animals is the greatest public service I’ve ever undertaken,” she rambled as she took a cigarette case out of a drawer and offered it to Lena, who politely shook her head. “Your father does it his way, and I choose to make a living doing the same thing, hidden behind the guise of entertainment. Once you figure out how to make it about money, people don’t really care about the players.”

The lighter snapped shut and slid a few inches across the table. Lena stared at the red end of the cigarette and the smoke that enveloped their conversation.

“My brother’s money laundering program, and you disappear.”

“Just cutting out the foreplay? I know how much you love to take it slow,” she grinned wickedly and inhaled more smoke before tapping a portion of the desk.

“You know about the agents outside.”

“Naturally.”

“What I’m offering you isn’t part of that,” Lena tried.

“What else do you want?”

“My brother.”

“Why do you want Supergirl?”

“Answers aren’t part of the deal, Ronnie,” she grinned, teasing once again.

“That one’s going to cost you,” Roulette taunted, pressing another button on her desk before she stood and jammed out the cigarette. “No one can quite get under my skin like you, Lena. I forgot, until I found us alone again.”

“You just like long odds.”

“You miss me, don’t you?” she hummed, dragging her hand along the desk, ever seductive, ever the most gorgeous thing to ever exist.

Lena didn’t let it phase her at all. She just stared and remained unbothered, all while silently praying the stupid agents outside didn’t get a stupid order from an overeager sister with as many trust issues as the Luthor.

“No.”

“Do you remember what I told you the first night we met? At that club in Silton?”

Long legs rested beside Lena, and she followed them before meeting dark eyes and a devious smile.

“I don’t want to forget anything anymore,” Lena informed her. “I don’t have anything to escape.”

“Not even for a night?” she asked, leaning close to Lena’s lips, those which didn’t move at all, knowing full well the tactic at hand.

The door opened once more behind them, but neither moved. Definitely, Lena stared at Roulette, becoming the only thing she couldn’t have, frustrating her, challenging her in a new way. Before, when she was younger, Lena had been more than willing to take a hit of the drug that was a girl with a dirty mouth, filthy mind, and sweet tongue. Now, she was the chase.

“Tell the agents to disappear and she’s yours,” Roulette smirked, her hand running up Lena’s skirt. “I’ll even toss in the extras, lighten my baggage for my split.

“Lena?” Kara asked, confused at what she just was thrust into.

The Kryptonite shackles made her skin burn and her bones feel like glass, but still, she stood there, seemingly walking into her girlfriend being felt up by some vixen. It was just a bad few days, Kara decided to herself.

“Do you remember that time, in Hong Kong?” the boss sat up, leaning against the desk once more as Lena dug into her purse for her phone, firing off a text.

“That’s a lovely offer, but this is a business transaction.”

“Pleasure and business.”

“What is going on?” Supergirl demanded again, straining against her restraints.

“You’ve been caught and bought, Kryptonian,” she reached for another cigarette. “Now kindly keep quiet while we reminisce. So rarely do I get a worthy bantering partner with a mouth like this.”

“Lena?”

The CEO didn’t turn around.

“Money is yours, agents are called off,” she met Roulette’s eyes again. “Have him at the Pier six by Thursday and the program is yours. You know I’m good for the rest.”

“Ah, so no repeat of Hong Kong then?”

“I was much more limber back then,” Lena shook her head as she stood. “And I don’t share as well as I used to,” she smirked, placing her palm on Roulette’s exposed sternum before leaning forward and kissing the side of her mouth. “Thank you.”

“Thank you, for your contribution.”

“I mean it,” she lowered her voice, held her hand there and earnestly spoke. “You did this for me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Ms. Luthor,” the gambler disagreed. Lena caught her tell though. “A monetary transaction, facilitated in my house by a lovely old friend.”

“If I was ever going to go to Hong Kong again, it’d be with you.”

“Now who’s the tease?”

“Be good.”

“Aren’t I always?” Veronica grinned, lighting another cigarette. “Let’s do this again sometime.”

“As soon as you go legit, I’ll be the first bet on your tables.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

It was obscenely illegal and very lucky. All that Lena could think about was if it hadn’t been so easy, if it hadn’t been Roulette who attacked Kara, if it’d been her father. But she hid it deep down where she held her breath.

She took the key that the bookie offered to her and made her way to Kara, still oddly afraid to meet her eyes, though finding it necessary. Stark confusion and worry were knit there in her brow, but a kind of ease still rested when she recognized her girlfriend.

By the time they left the office, the warehouse was empty, all signs of life were gone, and Lena rolled her eyes at the antics, still slightly in awe of Veronica Sinclair.

“What happened in Hong Kong?” Kara whispered, following Lena out. “Who was that?”

“Just an ex.”

“Oh… an ex?!” she yelped as the office closed behind them.

“Lena’s ex is an illegal casino operator.”

“Yup.”

“Who specializes in gladiator style fights, offered to ultra-rich clientele, supplied by now, strictly willing aliens.”

“Yeah.”

“And she staged a fake tragedy to lure Supergirl into a warehouse where she used illegal technology given to her by Lex Luthor, to capture and attempt to use her in one of these fights.”

��Mmhmm.”

“Lena then bartered a trade consisting of money for Supergirl and the other captured aliens, with no involvement from the DEO.”

“Yes.”

“And also a computer program for the miraculous return of Lex Luthor to American soil for prosecution.”

“That would be it, yes,” Kara nodded, staring intently at the captured, hairless Luthor as he was loaded onto transport.

“And the villain was super hot?” Alex continued, standing beside her sister as she watched Lena boss around DEO agents on the other side of the pier.

“Insanely hot.”

“Did you ever figure out what happened in Hong Kong?”

“Oh yeah,” Supergirl clenched her jaw.

“Are you ever going to tell me?”

“I think her ex proposed a… a… you know… a,” Kara furrowed and finally broke her gaze from the scene unfolding, distracted by her own inability to say a word. “I think she somehow proposed a threesome with us.”

There was dead silence for a moment. A long moment, before Alex couldn’t hold it in any longer and the laugh blew through her lips. It didn’t stop there, once the dam broke. She bent over, gripping her side from laughing until she was nearly crying, much to the annoyance of her sister.

“Sorry. Sorry,” she held up her hands. “I just… wow. That’s. So she had… you asked about. And she once went to… with a bad guy. And someone else? Man.”

“Alright, enjoy.”

“I have to meet her now.”

“I hope our paths never cross again,” Kara grumbled, sullen at the memories. First, of being tricked and captures. Second, of worrying her family. Third, for another woman’s hand on Lena’s thigh.

“This Roulette woman is your girlfriend’s ex. We’ll see her again.”

“Great.”

Despite herself, despite the enjoyment she had at Kara’s slight discomfort with Lena’s past, Alex felt a little bad for how her sister must have felt, thinking about Lena. It was a lucky break for them all, and the many fights that erupted between the agent and the CEO brought a lot of difficult things to light. The truce was more tenuous than ever, but still, it was there.

“Hey, I’m going to take a helicopter up, to make sure the new security measures are in place properly,” Lena approached and typed a few things into her phone before looking up at her girlfriend. “I was thinking of maybe getting a room in Gotham tonight, if you wanted to join me?”

Just like that, Kara was putty in the CEO’s hand.

“Yeah, that sounds amazing,” she grinned, wide and proud. “I’ll let Snapper know I’ll be covering this.”

“Do you think Jess will feed Darwin?”

“I will,” Alex offered, not really understanding where her voice came from in that moment. “I mean. I can stop by after work.”

“Thanks,” Lena nodded polite enough before returning her gaze to her girlfriend. “The suite on the East side. You know which one.”

“I’ll pick up dinner,” Kara promised.

They wouldn’t kiss. Not in public, not as a hero and a CEO. But Alex watched Lena look at Kara like she was the sun before she walked back toward the group.

“She found you, freed you, and managed the captured her brother in under an hour, with no punches thrown,” the older sister marvelled, despite herself. “Forget about Roulette.”

“Isn’t she great?”

“She didn’t sleep while you were gone. We were all worried sick, but she… she was willing to put that aside for the mission. Better than I was.”

“She loves me, Alex,” Kara chuckled to herself.

“If you ever tell her I complimented her in the least, I swear…”

“You love her too. Just admit it,” her sister teased, singing slightly, able to tease her back for the earlier comments.

“Hong Kong.”

With that, Alex zipped up her jacket and meandered toward the Director.

Kara huffed before catching a wink from Lena and shaking her head.

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gravitascivics · 5 years

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BACK TO BASICS, I

Every so often, this blogger is reminded that anyone of his postings might be a reader’s first exposure to this blog. So, it seems prudent to review some of the blog’s main organizing ideas from time to time. Those revisits also give this blogger the opportunity to add some additional ideas or concerns. Here is one of those times, and there is no more basic idea associated with this blog than federalism.

Hopefully, even regular readers might benefit from some rehashing of basic concepts that hold this blog together. Along with the idea of federalism, this blog has relied on the theorizing provided by the late eminent political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar. He refers to this construct as federal theory – this blog favors the term, federation theory.

Elazar supports this theory, generally, because the theory helps political scientists accomplish three goals that he claims political scientists should attempt to satisfy. The goals are:

· the pursuit of political justice in government’s role in establishing and maintaining order;

· discovering the generalizable factors that correlate with the various political actions that characterize a polity; and

· discover, communicate, and promote those policies that create a functional civic environment – through a civil society and a civil community.

Meeting the first two goals helps meet the third.

What’s of particular interest in listing these goals is that since the behavioral revolt within the discipline – since 1930s but becoming prominent after World War II – political science has set aside normative questions. Yet federal theory places normative questions central to the study of politics and that concern serves as an overall, directed rationale for the discipline’s existence.

Elazar writes,

… federal theory, to be good theory, must prove itself empirically, and the practical application of federal arrangements must always rest on some set of theoretical principles. Thus the study of federalism is central to political science because of its linking of theoretical and practical wisdom, which is what all political science should do.[1]

But before one deduces that federal theory can study all forms of political arrangements equally, one needs to take into account that federalism refers to a particular arrangement that a polity can have. And in this, Elazar reminds his readers that polities come about and become structured through various paths.

Citing the The Federalist Papers, No. 2,[2] Elazar reminds his readers that polities come about through one of three ways. The three ways are choice, accident, or force. Beginning with the last of these, force is where a strong figure, usually a military leader, establishes the polity. More often than not, this leads to Aristotle’s rule of the one. Whether the one is a dictator, emperor, or strong king, that leader equates the state with his (usually a man) or her personage.

In the case of accident, a polity evolves from a people in which its leadership revolves around the elites of that people and their family ties. Usually, such an arrangement manifests itself in a noble class, a nobility. Here, what results, is Aristotle’s rule of the few. Traditions in such arrangements become important, especially if the traditions support the legitimacy of those families’ control. In Europe, for example, the role of the Christian Church assisted the nobility by adding a religious rationale for the power arrangements that existed.

But there is a third way and that occurs when a people, directly or through representation, establishes a polity; that is, it forms it through choice. The choice option generally leads to the rule of the many, a la Aristotle. A simplified view of that process can be expressed by pointing out that the people in question creates the polity through an agreement over the provisions of the resulting government.

And Elazar adds, “understanding of federalism [that results from such an agreement] as a system of government based on choice and design rather than accident or force, which gives federal arrangements their special character.”[3] This character leads, and this is the opinion of this blogger, to the necessity for normative questions being asked of the polity not just to understand its origins, but to understand what promotes and secures its continuation.

And the central or near central question becomes what links and strengthens the association between the political behavior of the leadership and citizenry and the demands of justice. If the polity rests on the conscious decisions of the people being governed, then that people need a reason to sustain it because that polity does not ultimately depend on force or traditions.

It instead depends on an ongoing motivation on the part of the governed. Therefore, the polity, on an ongoing basis, needs to satisfy the governmental needs and wants of those people to a higher degree than other polities based on other foundations – the foundations of force or accident.

One minor argument that Elazar offers with which this blogger disagrees is Elazar associates federalism with natural law and natural rights. Perhaps if he were still with us, this blogger or someone could ask him what exactly he meant by linking the two, but his aim was to distinguish federalism from organic or positivist (behavioral) theories.

Behavioral studies, as alluded to above, are based on quantitative analysis of political phenomena. Organic refers to the “accident” view based on traditional, established relationships. Natural rights can be more readily linked to behavioral studies in that by limiting analysis to behaviors, behaviors have the highest range of possible expression in polities that are established and maintained by “choice.”

The history of natural rights, while based on choice rationales, supports, through John Locke’s argument, the idea that individuals submit only to laws and norms that protect the rights of oneself and that of others. Short of that, the individual pretty much has license to do what he/she wants to do. Unfortunately, even though such an arrangement flows from an agreement (and this might be what Elazar is referring to), a partnership – which is what a federal arrangement sets up – demands more.

Yes, perhaps the laws of a federalized government must be well-thought out not to undermine the integrity of each partner, but a federated union demands a more proactive support by its participants. Laws might take on a natural rights patina – one can do what one wants to do short of hurting others or denying others’ their rights – but government policies in a federal union advance the interest of the commonwealth and, by doing so, will and can impose costs on the individual usually through taxation or other obligations and duties.

Having identified this possible disagreement, this blogger wants to highlight an advantage federalism provides especially in a more global political/economic world. And here one can point out a weakness of an “organic” arrangement. Again, organic theories are partial or akin to “accidental” polities. In those polities, the power structure tends to support a notion that the body politics is an organic whole.

In that sort of polity, as pointed out above, there is usually a rationale that claims the power structure is determined by some divine force, everyone has a predetermined place and role. “Downton Abbey,” the British TV show, demonstrates a paternalistic version of that mentality. But in a federalist arrangement, a different mentality takes hold and the opinion here is that it can accommodate a more global world. On this front Elazar writes,

Federalism is resurfacing as a political force because it serves well the principle that there are no simple majorities or minorities but that all majorities are compounded of congeries of groups, and the corollary principle of minority rights, which not only protects the possibility for minorities to preserve themselves but forces majorities to be compound rather than artificially simple. It serves those principles by emphasizing the consensual basis of the polity and the importance of liberty in the constitution and maintenance of the democratic republics.[4]

In other words, federalism encourages and augments the ideals associated with the rule of the many in its diverse makeup.

As such, this construct advances democratic rule through a republican structure. Richard Dagger describes a construct that one can almost consider to be synonymous with federalism, especially the version this blog promotes. Dagger calls his view republican liberalism;[5] this blog calls its view liberated federalism. From that writer’s account, one can readily denote the similarities between the two and they both mirror what is described above as federalist arrangements.

An important derivative of these ideas is, in a world where living together cannot count on common ethnicities, common race, common religion, common national culture, etc., federalism becomes more instrumental in developing and maintaining functional political units, especially at the national level. The relative advantage the US holds is that it began from a federalist foundation where many polities today are trying to arrive at more federalist understandings of governance. With the rise of nationalism, though, this is proving to be very difficult.

As for the American version, yes, originally, this nation’s view of federalism was too parochial – it even led to a civil war. In addition, of late, in the years since World War II, the nation has drifted from its principles, but there is enough there to revive it in a more modern form. In part, this blog is dedicated to the aim of advancing, to whatever degree possible, that endeavor.

[1] Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1987), no page designation, “Preface” in Kindle edition.

[2] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York, NY: Signet, 2003).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 1 (Kindle edition).

[5] Richard Dagger, Civic Virtue: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York, NY: Oxford, 1997).

#federalism #federal theory #federation theory #Aristotle #Daniel J. Elazar #Richard Dagger #The Federalist Papers #behavioral studies #normative issues

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supertrendingnewsarticles · 5 years

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Like the vast majority of Americans, I have been effectively disenfranchised in the last few presidential elections. In 2011, I moved to Washington, D.C., which is so heavily Democratic that any vote for president is totally meaningless — in 2016, Hillary Clinton won with 93 percent of the vote. But last year, I moved to famously swingy Pennsylvania, and suddenly I'm a full citizen again. (I'm already lording it over my friends from California and New York.)As I have written on many occasions, I think Bernie Sanders is the best candidate. But given the abominable Trump presidency, I have also said that I'll vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.However, that was before Mike Bloomberg became a serious presidential contender (currently in third place in national polls and rising fast). I have given it very serious thought, and while I would happily vote for Elizabeth Warren, grudgingly vote for Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar, or secure an entire bottle of Southern Comfort to get sufficiently hammered to vote for Pete Buttigieg, I will not vote for Mike Bloomberg in November if he is nominated.To start with, it is not at all obvious that Bloomberg would even be a better president than Trump. As Alex Pareene writes at The New Republic, he is a right-wing authoritarian with nakedly racist views who constantly violated civil rights laws during his time as mayor of New York City. He locked up thousands of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention (where he gave a speech warmly endorsing George W. Bush, and thanked him for starting the war in Iraq), and a judge held the city in contempt for violating due process law. He created what amounted to a police state for New York Muslims, subjecting the entire community to dragnet surveillance and harassment, and filling mosques with spies and agent provocateurs. The city had to pay millions in settlements for violating Muslims' civil rights. (All this did precisely nothing to prevent terrorism, by the way.)As Nathan Robinson writes at Current Affairs, he drastically escalated the infamous "stop-and-frisk" program in New York, in which innocent black and brown youths were jacked up by cops literally millions of times. Ninety-nine percent of the stops found nothing, and many police used it as a handy pretext to vent their racist prejudice. At its peak in 2011, there were more stops of black men than there were black men in the entire city. And because it was mainly young men being targeted, some were stopped dozens of times. Innocent people were routinely beaten senseless.Bloomberg justified the policy with straightforwardly racist collective guilt. In a 2015 speech, he said "it's controversial, but first thing is, all of your — 95 percent of your murders, murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O. ... They are male minorities, 15 to 25."These statistics are hideously inaccurate. In reality, the relatively few whites stopped under stop-and-frisk were more likely to be carrying weapons, and as The Atlantic's Adam Serwer points out, after the program was halted, crime continued to fall unabated. The whole thing was completely useless — unless the point was to constantly remind black and brown New Yorkers that they were second-class citizens. Bloomberg also espouses the racist theory that the financial crisis was caused by government efforts to reduce prejudice in home lending — thus scapegoating minorities to deflect blame from the real culprit, Wall Street oligarchs like himself.Bloomberg's newfound commitment to progressive policies is so transparently fraudulent that his campaign apparently plagiarized huge chunks of his campaign platform. He is just trying to trick the Democratic electorate with a tidal wave of cash (with evident success).Now, Bloomberg does have a legitimate history of supporting gun control and climate policy. But it is exceedingly unlikely that he will be able to get past a Senate filibuster on gun control, especially given his sneering know-it-all approach. And given his politics and personal wealth, his climate policy would probably look a great deal like Emmanuel Macron's diesel tax in France — a carbon tax whose revenues would go towards cutting taxes on the rich. Macron's move sparked violent protests and was quickly abandoned.Does this sound like a guy who would do anything substantial to reverse Trump's worst policies? If we're lucky, he might reverse the Muslim ban and let a few people out of the CBP camps. If we're not, he'll implement a much quieter and more effective version of the same policies, and partisan Democrats will reverse-engineer justifications for these being somehow necessary (or just ignore them, as they did during the Obama years). Recall that Bloomberg once argued that every Social Security card should have fingerprints so unauthorized immigrants would be unable to get jobs.On the other hand, in some areas Bloomberg would likely be worse than Trump. As Mehdi Hasan writes at The Intercept, Bloomberg is a committed and pitiless warmonger — he supported the war in Iraq and repeated the Bush administration's lie that Saddam Hussein had plotted 9/11. (In January he said he had no regrets about doing so.) He opposed President Obama's Iran deal, and had few complaints about Trump's assassination of Iran's Qassem Soleimani. While Trump has escalated conflicts across the globe, he appears to have at least a mild hesitation about starting new full-scale wars of aggression. The chances of a shooting war with Iran probably increase if Bloomberg wins in 2020.Given his wretched politics, even Bloomberg's superior competence is a mark against him. Right now one tiny silver lining of the Trump administration is that the people trying to commit atrocities through the federal bureaucracy are so inept they keep fumbling the legal procedures and getting stopped in the courts. Bloomberg is sure to appoint competent authoritarian maniacs.And for all the people who complain that Bernie Sanders is not a real Democrat, Bloomberg was literally a Republican up until 2007, and worked to elect Republicans until very recently. In 2014, he or his political action committee donated to the senate campaigns of Susan Collins in Maine and Bob Dold in Illinois. In 2016, he donated $11.7 million to Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — making it the most expensive Senate race in history up to that point, and likely securing victory for Toomey, who won by less than two points. Though he has also donated a lot to Democrats, Bloomberg is a guy who did more than almost anyone to help protect Mitch McConnell's Republican majority in the Senate, and hence to put two more conservatives on the Supreme Court.At bottom, Bloomberg is basically just like George W. Bush, with a dollop of maddening nanny-state condescension. Without question he would be one of the top five worst major-party presidential nominees in the last century of American history.This stance will no doubt infuriate the "vote blue no matter who" crowd who view Donald Trump as some kind of Lovecraftian nightmare. But even aside from how horrible a president Bloomberg would be, perhaps the most compelling reason not to vote for him is what his nomination would reveal about American democracy. It would mean that the oligarch class has so thoroughly corrupted the system that the voice of the people is drowned. His entire candidacy is a cartoonishly blatant instance of how money can corrupt democracy. Right now he is scooping up thousands of campaign operatives and field organizers by offering them as much as $6,000 a month — creating a desperate shortage for other campaigns. He's racking up endorsement after endorsement — of representatives, mayors, and one governor, so far — who have cashed checks from his vast empire of bribery. His nomination would mean the Democratic Party can be "bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese."Partisan Democrats insist that everyone has an obligation to vote tactically — that is, to always pick the lesser of two evils in the voting booth. But as Daniel Davies argues, given that one's individual vote has virtually no chance of actually deciding the outcome, the truly tactical choice is to not bother to vote at all. The only compelling reason to vote is about civic duty and one's patriotic conscience. And as Davies writes, "it seems pretty clear that there is some point at which it becomes obvious that a morally and politically valid response is simply to declare that the fundamental basis of the implied contract has broken down, and that it's a reasonable choice to simply refuse to participate further." If the choice is Cthulhu versus Nyarlathotep, I for one see little point in voting for the candidate that might have one fewer grasping eldritch tentacle.Among Bernie Sanders supporters, I am far from the most die-hard. If I simply cannot countenance putting my name down for Bloomberg in November, there are millions more who would do the same — plus no small number of supporters of the other candidates, in all likelihood. Then there is the general fact that Bloomberg's extreme wealth and extensive record of racism and sexual harassment would negate most of the strongest attacks against Trump. Bloomberg would be highly likely to bleed enough support to third parties (or no one) to lose to Trump, just as Hillary Clinton did.Luckily, it will be easy to avoid this dreadful possibility. Simply vote against Michael Bloomberg in the Democratic primary.More stories from theweek.com The Democratic Party is weak. Mike Bloomberg could break it. What if Trump stopped tweeting? Trump adds former NYPD commissioner, financier convicted in fraud schemes to pardon spree

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/38DRD5r

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batenchantingcollectorsong · 5 years

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ericlwoods · 6 years

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Working subtitle: How I bought a Hemi with a functioning car attached.

Here we are with my Part 2 return to vehicular ramblings.

As mentioned in my Part 1 post my Dad hooked me on cars early starting with my love for his Plymouth Road Runner. Dad is mostly a GM man, but this one time early Mopar foray of his may have planted the Mopar seed.

Cousin Johnsie and I in front of my Dad’s Road Runner.

OK, there was my Mom’s decidedly non-V8 slant 6 Dodge Dart later on, but we are not counting that secondhand burnt orange “everyone slide up on 3” manual bench front seat, stall on hard left take offs wonder of utilitarian vehicularity. One of my first car designs as a kid was an all-wheel-drive matte black modified 70s Hemi Charger.

As mentioned previously I no longer have the Crown Vic from Part 1. My Dad took a great liking to it and as a token of appreciation for all he has done for us my wife and I gave it to him.

Did miss the Crown Vic, but I made peace with it. When purchasing the Crown Vic I was actually more smitten with the more common offerings they had.

Was good car wise so we had no need. Then after a vehicular altercation where no one was harmed, we had an opening. Back to the surplus I went.

Surplus Car Rules of Engagement

As we learned with the first purchase vehicles in rougher shape are auctioned online, but the better examples are not listed online at all, but put out front and have to be reviewed and purchased in person. Like some sort of not so secret, secret club. Here is the Dodge rundown.

Bluesmobile Dodge upgrades.

Again these are retired, well maintained state trooper vehicles.

Performance

It has Hemi. Pretty much does it.

HP: 380 HP

Torque: 395 ft. lbs.

Over a hundred up on HP and torque above anything I have owned.

I’m good.

Heavy duty running gear.

Sidebar: There are plenty of aftermarket 5.7L upgrades that can get this engine further into license losing power levels if that is your thing.

Handling

This was one of the most pleasant surprises of this car.

Not sure of what was done, but this is a nimble beast. Handles very well staying flat in corners.

With that it also has a very comfortable ride.

Brakes

Upgraded brakes. Front rotors are upgraded to 14.5″ rotors.

My first car, a VW Fox, had smaller wheels that this has brakes at 14″.

Interestingly the transmission plays a great part during braking. The first time I had to reduce speed on a highway the transmission kicked down gears like I would have done when I drove stick. The result is that the reduction in speed was so jarring and I had to let off of the brake to keep the Civic behind me from rear-ending me.

Oddities

To make space for the center console gear the shifter moves to the steering column. This is also where the manual shift switch has moved. But the transmission handles duties so deftly I rarely use it.

Pleasant Surprises

This car is nice. Not that I was expecting it to be awful. Was expecting a rough and tumble car. A more powerful version of the rough around the edges Crown Vic. But this car feels like a more powerful version of our V6 VW Passat. And dare I say better handling. Makes sense since the base Charger architecture was lifted from E Class MBs of years ago as a result of the Daimler marriage long since annulled. The current VW Passat is a softer American built and American market vehicle which may explain it being more softly sprung than the Charger.

Media. The base touchscreen system has been flawless. No Bluetooth, but it proved to be no issue. There is a USB slot where I loaded my music and there is a conveniently located AUX cable between two power ports in the lower dash. Great sounding stereo. More ways to customize locking, locks, lights, wipers, etc. through the touch screen than I have ever seen. In-dash display with great information available.

Wheels. All black hubcaps that are so fetching that I have no plans to replace them.

Comfort. While first researching Dodge Charger my son and I test drove a civilian Charger and found it to be very tight. But surplus vehicles have seats with less padding to accommodate utility belts. Same for the backseat. Combined this also provides more backseat leg room. No center console also makes for better hip room up front. No sunroof so it gave my son proper Afro clearance.

Keyless entry and remote start. Never had it before.

Has cylinder deactivation so fuel economy was rated at 25 MPG highway. That matches the VW Passat that has 100 less HP. Takes medium grade fuel instead of the premium required for the VW so the fuel bill ends up being less under normal use.

Cosmetic condition.

These cars are the cream of the surplus crop.

Exterior:

Very few cosmetic blemishes and most are forgivable. Most are very clean. The very cheapest carry a few dings, but the car I chose was very clean. A bit of touch up paint here and there and that about did it.

Interior:

A bit of shampoo for the front seats.

What about reliability concerns?

Legitimate concern. These surplus cars are packing over 100,000 miles. But they come with a folder stocked with all of the service documents. And there are a few things that helped me get past my concerns:

A Hemi engine alone runs about $6,000 depending on where you look. These cars started around $6,000.

The only repair for this car after a thorough review by the local Dodge dealership was less than $200 of exhaust work to rid the car of a rattle. For a little more I had a missing cargo hook in the trunk replaced.

My folks have been driving it trouble free since. They both took a liking to it so there previously favorite vehicles are often parked.

Purchasing strategy.

Same as you would use anywhere. They do not let you drive the cars, but they will let you start them and open them up. Ran through the usual checklist:

Do all power windows, door locks, mirrors, and other auxiliary equipment work?

Run the engine with no radio to see if there are any errant clicks, squeaks, whines, or ticks.

Get low. Look in wheel wells, at the exhaust, and under the car for any signs of corrosion or leaks.

Test A/C to see if the cold blows cold and the hot blows hot.

Cigarette lighter check for cell phone power.

Open the hood and trunk to gauge the state of things. Any fluid leaks or rotted plastics or rubber up front. Feel around the trunk for any signs of water leaks.

Check the tires for how much life is left.

Look through the provided service records to see if big service items have been addressed.

Gun it. Purely for the sake of science of course.

There is no haggling by the way. Price is as posted. Reasonable price for a well-maintained vehicle in great condition with well-sorted factory upgrades.

Choosing our Hemi.

As mentioned earlier the least expensive of the offerings was available for $6,450. The most expensive of the RWD 2014 and earlier Chargers was just shy of $10,000.

Sidebar:

Year 2015 and beyond are AWD. Read that Dodge offered AWD as an option for 2014 and so many cars were ordered that they made AWD standard from 2015 on. As a result 2015 models and on bring a $3,000 premium. May sound unreasonable until you consider that a high powered AWD full-size vehicle for $12,000 is actually a pretty good deal. May come back for one in a few years.

Went for the middle ground at $8,700.

My calculation was simple. The least expensive car with no major blemishes, no ticks, functioning switchgear, good tires, and black hubcaps. I also liked the missed chrome exhaust trim on the one I chose. Fit the gray and black theme of the car perfectly.

My upgrades.

Did not need anything. Changed one thing.

As with the Crown Vic removing the police gear in the center console left a big gap, but unlike the Crown Vic a large metal plate was left that did not allow for a $29 mail order center console.

This took a little more research for a solution. My theory was that someone out there created a solution and wanted my money. And I was right. For $95 I found this cupholder/armrest that was made to be bolted to just this type of metal plate.

Conclusion.

If you are an old land yacht car head that enjoys the rumble of a V8 of the HEMI variety, a smooth ride, ample interior space, but does not want to spend a ton of money I highly recommend that you look for one of these old decommissioned cruisers. If you are fortunate to have one of these surplus facilities near you even better. For less than $9,000 all in I can ride in style in a whimsical vehicle that does not embarrass itself when the odd evasive maneuver is required.

As an added bonus on-ramp merging is a breeze, especially at night.

I present to you the Dadmobile 5000.2:

ELW

Frugal Dad Files: Dadmobile Edition Part 2, Hemi Charger Working subtitle: How I bought a Hemi with a functioning car attached. Here we are with my Part 2 return to vehicular ramblings.

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radioleary-blog · 6 years

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Golden-gate

You know what this week’s topic is. A scandal, not on the level of Watergate, perhaps, but it’s a political scandal and that means we have to attach the suffix “-gate” to it. Let’s call it...Golden-gate. An unsubstantiated report was released just ten days before Trump’s inauguration after circulating for months, among the claims that journalists have not been able to verify is that Trump hired prostitutes to perform “golden showers” in front of him. Now, surprisingly, there were a whole lot of people who had never heard that term before, and it was quickly trending as a top google search. Many innocent, non-perverted people had conjured up some naively wholesome ideas as to what a “golden shower” might be. “Is it a party for your fiftieth anniversary, I wonder?” Well, yeah, sure, it could be, if the kids are all moved out of the house and you cover the furniture with plastic. Hey, could that be why some weird old people used to cover their furniture with plastic? Man, my Aunt Tootsie may have been cooler than we thought. Other naive, un-jaded people wondered, “I bet a golden shower is his really fancy bathroom in his Trump Tower penthouse apartment.” Well, kind of, in that I think you could see golden showers in Penthouse magazine. But no, all these precious illusions were shattered pretty quickly, very quickly, in fact, when their google search resulted in: “About 4,750,000 results in (0.52 seconds).” The truth hit them like a splash in the face.

Not since the great Clinton blowjob scandal of the 90’s has simply following the news cause the corruption of so many poor, innocent minds. And that happened way before the internet, so back then you had to ask your Social Studies teacher why Monica Lewinsky didn’t just swallow for the sake of our country. And yet today that sounds like a much more innocent time; just a friendly adulterous blowjob scandal. Not like this soggy affair. Being aware of what our political leaders are doing is our responsibility as citizens, it’s our civic duty, but this rate, don’t be surprised if the next scandal actually involves some politician’s ‘civic doody’. But I guess it’s all part of making America great again. No word on where these ‘leaks’ came from, I thought they came from the Russian prostitutes? I wonder if they charged extra for leaking the report, too.

Trump is furious, he’s red in the face over this report, but if I remember color theory correctly, when you mix red with yellow, you get orange. Hmm, this could explain a lot. And now we finally understand what he meant when he said he wanted to bring back waterboarding! Let’s see, if you do it to somebody with water, it’s considered torture and it’s against the Geneva Convention, but if you do it with pee, it’s 500 dollars an hour and you have to pay for the hotel room. Uh, I hear! I mean, um, how would I know? So, ah...can we just get back to Trump?

You know, I used to think Donald Trump was like Nero without the violin lessons. Now I think he’s more like Caligula, but without the class.

I’m not going to run down a litany of cheap jokes and puns about these salacious accusations. Not me, I have too much journalistic integrity for that. And I doubt any of it is true anyway, I mean, not Donald Trump, right? He’s worked hard ever since he was a wee lad. He’s the kind of guy who never settles for second place because he strives for number one. Donald Trump is a man who has climbed the bladder of success. He’s worth his weight in gold and showers in the adoration of his supporters. He’s a financial whizz. In a recent live stream press conference he said, “You have to trust ‘your innate’ instincts when you do your business. There are times the market is flush, and times you just have to go with the flow, but always be ready for a golden opportunity.” No, no cheap puns here. I don’t engage in yellow journalism.

Whew! I couldn’t hold those jokes in any longer! Ah...what a relief! I realize every comedian in America came up with these exact same jokes, and everybody who isn’t a comedian, too. Going to the bathroom is something we start telling jokes about it as soon as we learn how to talk, we’ve all been ready with these jokes since about the first grade. As a kid you always got huge laughs just by using the word “poopy”. Man, it slayed. That was your closing bit. Now as adults we make witty remarks about “Close Encounters of the Turd Kind,” but it’s still the same joke. And we will always think bodily functions are funny. A thousand years from now, if mankind has returned to space and colonized the Solar System, people will still be joking about asteroids on Uranus. It’s human nature. So everybody was ready with jokes for this scandal, reaching back to our earliest comedic sources. And we let loose, even if the story doesn’t hold water.

But don’t think that Donald Trump was the first alleged sexual deviant to be President, I did a little research and you might be surprised at some of the fun and interesting presidential facts I discovered:

President Calvin Coolidge kept Vice-President Charles G. Dawes in a full-body leather gimp costume, locking him in a trunk in the basement of a pawn shop when the Senate was not in session. It is speculated that the middle initial G. stood for Gimp. Same for Warren G. Harding.

Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) was heavy into body modification, living up to his name with over 50 body piercings. 30 of them were deliberate, the rest were just shrapnel from a cannonball injury in the war of 1812.

Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) only got off on Bukkake and Japanese tentacle porn. Alright, so that’s not true, but he’d a lot more interesting if it was. Nobody cares that he was a reconstructionist.

You know, before this story hit, I thought I’d be talking about his previous scandal for the week, his feud with actress Meryl Streep, but only Trump can actually trump himself. Meryl Streep had attack Trump for bullying and mocking a disabled reporter during her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes awards. There’s that word “golden” again. Anyway, Trump didn’t like it, and the Twitter war was on. He tweeted, "Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes." Wait a minute. Over-rated? Is he unaware of the existence of irony? Meryl Streep has won 157 awards, and over 400 nominations. Donald Trump? The Apprentice lost at the Emmys to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And it lost twice to The Amazing Race. Donald Trump calling Meryl Streep over-rated is like Vin Diesel giving a bad review of a Monet retrospective at MoMA:

“Monet? Nah, bro. This guy ain’t no Impressionist, Impressionists do a bunch of voices like John Wayne and shit, this guy just paints pictures of water lilies. I ain’t Impressed. I asked if I could meet this guy Monet or Merlot or whatever, and they told me he died. Whoa. Car crash I bet. Should have slowed your roll, my brother. Ride or die, esse. Gas, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free. But how come none of these paintings have muscle cars in them? For example, his painting ‘Morning on the Seine near Giverny’ is aight, but what it really needs is a cherry red 1970 GTO with a 455 cubic inch V-8, 370 hp. and a Ram Air IV engine. Pimp your ride, pimp your painting, bro.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published in 1922, is the most persuasive critique of democracy I’ve ever read. Shortly after it was published, John Dewey, the great defender of democracy and the most important American philosopher of the era, called Lippmann’s book “the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived.”

Lippmann poses a straightforward question: can citizens achieve a basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices about what to do? His answer is no, and the whole point of the book is to expose the gap between what we say democracy is and what we know about how human beings actually behave.

Most democratic theorists in the 20th century believed that more information would produce a more informed citizenry, and a more informed citizenry would make good on the core promise of democracy. They were wrong. More information doesn’t necessarily lead to more enlightened civic participation — it is just as likely to lead to more noise, more partisanship, and more ignorance (click here and here and here for research backing this up). Indeed, more informed voters practice more partisan self-deception.

The second half of the book attempts to solve all the problems the first part unearths. Here Lippmann fails spectacularly, and he fails because his solution to the problems of democracy is to abandon everything that makes democracy worthwhile. He couldn’t figure out how to intelligently guide public opinion, so he sought to transcend it altogether by creating a “bureau of experts” that would decide public policy on behalf of the public. But that isn’t a democracy at all; it’s a technocracy at best, an oligarchy at worst.

Today, Lippmann’s pessimism is fashionable. After Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, a whole genre of nonfiction literature has emerged, seeking to explain how democracies die, or why Western liberalism is in retreat. Pundits and analysts have argued that democracy is “decaying” worldwide, and that America is morphing into an authoritarian state.

Which is why it’s important to note that as powerful as Lippmann’s diagnosis of democracy’s flaws is, it seems to have missed something essential about the elasticity of democratic systems. After all, here we are, almost a century later, and America has become more powerful, more tolerant, more wealthy, and even more democratic. Perhaps that divergence contains lessons for our present moment of panic, too.

Lippmann begins his critique by exploding the romanticized vision of democracy espoused by the American Founders.

They imagined that citizens, no matter how sprawling the state became, would still function much as they did in the small, self-contained communities that existed in the 18th century. Which is to say, they would be asked to make decisions about issues with which they had direct experience. They were thinking of white, male, property-owning farmers who understood their local environment, knew their neighbors, and didn’t live in a highly industrialized society.

As Lippmann put it, “The democratic ideal, as Jefferson moulded it, consisted of an ideal environment and a selected class.” The racism and sexism notwithstanding, that environment looks nothing like ours, and the range of issues voters are expected to know something about today vastly exceeds the demands at the time of the founding.

The question for Lippmann, then, wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently. And he made the point using himself as an example:

My sympathies are with [the citizen], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.

You might read this and think, “Citizens don’t have to have an intelligent opinion on every issue confronting the community. Instead, they choose the party they trust to serve their interests.” On this view, citizens don’t need to be “omnicompetent,” to borrow Lippmann’s term, they just have to know enough to pick the team that represents their interests. But to do that, voters have to know what their interests are, and which party actually represents them.

There’s no vision of democracy worth defending that doesn’t assume a minimum level of competence from a majority of voters. Lippmann doubted this level of mastery was possible because citizens are too removed from the world to form concrete judgments. Consequently, they’re forced to live in “pseudo-environments,” in which they reduce the world to stereotypes in order to render it intelligible.

Lippmann was an integral part of the Committee on Public Information, the agency tasked with creating propaganda to gin up support for World War I. That experience taught him how manipulable the public was, how easily people surrender to compelling narratives. We’re told about the world before we see it, we imagine things before we experience them, and we become hostages to these preconceptions.

These narratives are a defense against uncertainty. They present us with an ordered picture of the world, to which our tastes and stereotypes and values are anchored. Which is why it’s so hard to separate people from their dogmas. “Any disturbance of the stereotypes,” Lippmann says, “seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe … It is an attack upon the foundations of our universe.”

Lippmann’s point is that voter preferences are based “not on direct and certain knowledge but on pictures” given to us. The question is then, where do we get our pictures? The most obvious answer is the media. If the media can provide accurate pictures of the world, citizens ought to have the information they need to perform their democratic duties. Lippmann says this works in theory but not in practice. The world, he argues, is big and it moves fast and the speed of communication in the age of mass media forces journalists to speak through slogans and simplified interpretations. (And this doesn’t even touch the problem of partisanship in a commercialized media landscape.)

Somewhere early in the book, Lippmann cites a famous passage from Plato’s Republic that describes human beings as cave-dwellers who spend their lives watching shadows on a wall and take that to be their true reality. Our present condition is scarcely different, Lippmann implies. We’re locked in a cave of media misrepresentations and we take our caricatured pictures of the world to be an accurate reflection of what’s actually happening.

If Lippmann is right, more and better information won’t save us, because the problem isn’t access to facts; it’s flaws in human cognition. But even if he’s wrong about this, and I think he might be, we’re still screwed because of certain constraints imposed on the press.

Lippmann says the press is like a roaming spotlight, bouncing from topic to topic, story to story, illuminating things but never fully explaining them. “The function of news,” he writes, “is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”

This is a strange way of making a simple point: in the world of news, there is often no objective test for what’s true. If we’re reporting sports statistics or poll numbers or stock futures, then objectivity is easy. But when it comes to analyzing economic conditions or the value of labor unions or the merits of universal health care or the limits of state power, there is no such test. What we’re doing isn’t uncovering truth so much as constructing narratives, and those narratives reflect our biases, our experience, our ignorance, our hopes, our confusion. We see reality through a glass darkly.

But even if we set aside this question of whether the press can reliably tell the truth, there remains an intractable demand-side problem: readers, for the most part, aren’t paying for news, so publications need advertisers; to get advertisers, you must attract readers; and to attract readers, you must pander to the audience’s biases. Here’s how Lippmann sums it up:

This is the plight of the reader of the general news. If he is to read it at all he must be interested, that is to say, he must enter into the situation and care about the outcome … The more passionately involved he becomes, the more he will tend to resent not only a different view, but a disturbing bit of news. That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it can not easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position.

Lippmann’s point was true enough in 1922 — today it is indisputable. The media is more fragmented, more competitive, more profit-driven. Consequently, news consumption is like shopping: you find the source of information that most reflects your point of view, and you signal your preference with your loyalty.

Here again Lippmann is undermining an assumption baked into most democratic theories: we expect the press to “carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty” by supplying citizens with the truth even though it’s not at all clear most people are interested in truth. Is it not obvious, Lippmann asks, that people prefer the entertaining and the trivial over the dull and the important, or the flattering and the convenient over the honest and the difficult?

It’s hard to look at our current moment and conclude that Lippmann’s pessimism was misplaced. Truth is as variable as it’s ever been, and public trust in the press is at an all-time low. That stereotypical thinking Lippmann worried about is amplified by a media environment far more commercialized and partisan than he ever imagined. Indeed, public opinion is now so hopelessly cocooned that the president is under investigation for colluding with our primary geopolitical foe and more than half the country doesn’t give a damn.

Lippmann anticipated many of these problems, and yet you can’t engage his critique without asking what comes next. Sadly, the alternative vision of democracy isn’t actually a vision of democracy at all.

The best he can do is call for a “specialized class” of social scientific experts who operate beyond the voters and the politicians. In theory, there would be a crop of experts for each area of government, and these experts would competently examine the facts and then advise government officials. Lippmann believed such a system would divorce the “assembling of knowledge” from “the control of policy.” And, even more crucially, it would ensure that the experts remained independently funded and thus free from corrupt motives.

Dewey probably said it best: “No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.” If Lippmann had his way, the public would be liberated from its oppressive fictions, but at the price of everything just about democracy.

After Public Opinion was released, Lippmann and Dewey entered into a long, informal debate about how to fix democracy. Dewey was forced to concede Lippmann’s basic point about the folly of public opinion. “As matters now stand,” he wrote, “every issue is hopelessly entangled in a snarl of emotions, stereotypes and irrelevant memories and associations.” Still, he rejected Lippmann’s call for a technocratic elite.

For Dewey, everything reduced to a simple question: who is most in need of enlightenment, citizens or administrators? What Lippmann wanted, whether he realized it or not, was to permanently turn citizens into spectators. He assumed that public opinion was about the mass of individuals possessing a correct representation of the world, and since they could never do this, they had to be locked out of the decision-making process.

But Dewey insisted that political knowledge, in a democracy, could only come about through conversation among and between citizens. The only reality that matters is the reality that citizens collectively construct. If you accept, as Lippmann does, that the public is atomized and permanently cut off from the conversation about public affairs, then you’ve undercut the very possibility of democracy. Again, Dewey put it well:

There is no limit to the intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community. That and that only gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson, said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.

I think Dewey is right here, but Lippmann’s point about people effectively living in separate worlds still holds. Since Robert Putnam’s famous 2000 book Bowling Alone, scholars have lamented the loss of civic bonds in America. At the same time, local newspapers are dying out and political discourse is becoming increasingly nationalized, which means most issues are abstract and dominated by tribal allegiance and caricatured right-left narratives.

Lippmann feared that the citizenry would abandon the public square and give themselves over to propaganda. That’s exactly what happened, and yet American democracy has done remarkably well over the last century.

How do we make sense of that?

It’s tempting, from our perch in 2018, to conclude that democracy is broken beyond repair. The world seems to be careening into more and more disorder, and American politics in particular is hopelessly ensnarled in partisan dysfunction.

But perhaps the Lippmann-Dewey debate offers another perspective: democracy has always been clumsy, has never really lived up to its ideals, and yet we’re all still alive. Given how prophetic Lippmann’s critique was, you’d expect American democracy to have collapsed under the weight of its own incoherence by now. But here we are, in 2018, still humming along, still the most influential country in the world, still the richest and the most dynamic economy on the planet.

For all its problems (and there are many), democracy has managed to thrive. And the democratic world, over time, has gotten more stable, more wealthy, and more tolerant. Maybe the point is that democracy doesn’t have to work the way it was conceived in order to be successful. Maybe the myth of democracy is just that — a myth.

If there’s a lesson in all this for today, it’s that we should be careful not to define democracy by its worst attribute. Lippmann was so obsessed with the problem of public opinion that he failed to notice that the problem wasn’t new, that democracy wasn’t malfunctioning. The practice of democracy has always been messy and chaotic, and mass ignorance wasn’t the exception but the rule.

Voters will often make egregious choices, and sometimes those choices produce horrifying outcomes. Still, the system, as a whole, has proven incredibly resilient, and a far better alternative to non-democratic systems, which lead invariably to corruption and oppression. If democracy works, it’s not because the people are reliably wise; it’s because the system offers a layer of accountability that, more often than not, supports a stable and just society. Democracies are also prone to disorder and corruption, but these are ineluctable features of any political system comprised of selfish and flawed human beings.

The current wave of pessimism is a reminder that there’s a recurring tendency on the part of intellectuals to abandon democracy when it veers off course. It’s a reactionary move that typically overstates the nature of the threat. Lippmann was shaken by the insanity of World War I, and so he thought something — anything — had to be done to keep the democratic world from descending into another war. The shock of Brexit and a Trump presidency has sent many observers (myself included) into a panic. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I interviewed Jason Brennan, a Georgetown political theorist, who argued for a Lippmann-esque epistocracy to replace traditional democracy.

But I could just as easily argue that Brennan, like Lippmann, has it precisely backwards. Instead of abandoning democracy, maybe what we need is more and better democracy. Maybe, as Dewey taught, we need to educate and empower more citizens. Maybe the crisis we’re facing now, in the age of Trump, is just the latest manifestation of a problem that has always plagued democratic societies, and always will. Maybe we should pause, take a deep breath, and step back from the precipice.

Democracy has survived far worse than Trump and Brexit.

Original Source -> Intellectuals have said democracy is failing for a century. They were wrong.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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bestnewsmag-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Bestnewsmag

New Post has been published on https://bestnewsmag.com/canada-nails-down-best-ever-result-with-silver-in-world-mixed-doubles-curling/

Canada nails down best-ever result with silver in world mixed doubles curling

It was an agonizing way to lose but, in the big picture, it was a huge step forward for Canada at the 2017 World Mixed Doubles Curling Championship.

Canada’s Joanne Courtney and Reid Carruthers gave up an early lead to fall to Switzerland’s Martin Rios and Jenny Perret 6-5 on Saturday afternoon to settle for silver at the world mixed doubles curling championship.

The Canadians held a 5-2 lead through seven ends but a miss from Courtney on her final shot of the game opened the door for the Swiss to claim their leading sixth gold medal in the 10-year history of the event as Perret drew for four.

“We can’t be prouder of this team, but that’s mixed doubles — you make one little mistake and all of a sudden there’s a four on the board and you lose the world championship,” said national mixed doubles coach Jeff Stoughton. “I know they’ll be thinking about this for quite a long time, but they can hold their heads high and be super proud of their accomplishments.”

It was a best-ever finish for Canada in mixed doubles. In the previous nine world championships, Canada had won just one medal, a bronze in 2009 by Alli Flaxey and Sean Grassie.

The Canadians also locked up a berth in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where mixed doubles curling will make its debut as a medal sport. Canada will be joined by host South Korea, Switzerland, the United States, Finland, Norway, China, and Russia.

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The Look at of the Gothic Element of Double in Poe’s Decided on Works The Observe of Doubles in Poe’s Works

Fashionable History

Poe

A vital and innovative reinterpreter of the Gothic inside the literary world turned into Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) who asserted ‘that terror isn’t always of Germany, but of the soul’. His stature as a first-rate discern in world literature is based on his incredibly acclaimed brief memories, poems, and crucial theories, which installed an influential intent for the fast shape in each poetry and fiction. Poe is also well-known for his Gothic style of writing. Fisher affirms that: “Few would treat a challenge to a lengthy-status opinion that Poe became a master of the Gothic horror tale, although many won’t as without difficulty be aware that he did not invent Gothic fiction” (p.seventy two). Certainly, Poe became the Gothic fiction of the eighteenth-century to the inner cries and desires of the individual. Apart from a not unusual theoretical basis, there’s a mental intensity this is characteristic of Poe’s writings, particularly the tales of horror that comprise his exceptional and exceptional-recognized works.

Double

A massive Detail of Gothic genre is the subject matter of double. In Gothic (1996), Fred Botting writes that “on the end of the nineteenth century acquainted Gothic figures-the double and the vampire-reemerged in new shapes with an exceptional intensity and disturbing investments as objects of terror”(p.one hundred thirty-five). It seems so terrible whilst one seems at everywhere and sees his very own image and likeness. The presence of the double, for this reason, will be interpreted as a cause of the alienation of person inside the modern international. Botting expresses that “the lack of human identification and the alienation of self from each itself and the social bearings in which a sense of fact is secured are provided inside the threatening shapes of more and more dehumanized environments, mechanic doubles and violent, psychotic fragmentation” (p.157).

Doubles are seen in distinct bureaucracy and shapes in Gothic texts. The in the main used paperwork are doppelgangers, replicate photographs, shadows, and even mandrakes. In the maximum of Gothic fictions, the theme of doubles and mirrors exist. Dealing with their doubles, characters come to recognize the one’s components and aspects in their persona which have been alien and unknown to them. Doubles appear in numerous paperwork; doppelganger, regulate ego, shadow, twins, replicate images and even mandrakes. As Botting asserts, in Poe’s fiction: “Doubles and mirrors are used to high-quality outcomes…” (p.120). But what seems important to notice is that the meaning which the doubles convey is the same; they’re used to reveal the concept of self-estrangement and self-destruction of the principle characters to the readers. This lack of self-knowledge which in lots of cases results in self-destruction is emphasized by using each author in their works like “William Wilson”, “The Tell-tale Coronary heart”, “The fall of House of Ushers” by Poe. The author’s use of the idea of ‘The Double’ implies that absolutely everyone may be misled by using appearances thru their emotional tendencies, just as all of us can be reassured by way of knowledge thru the operation of his/her rational functions. The term doppelganger which has been remarkably utilized by Poe might be defined first.

Doppelgänger

According to the Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (2004) doppelganger means “a ghostly counterpart of a dwelling character.” In German it derives from Doppel (double) and Gänger (goer), meaning “double goer”, in German folklore, a wraith or apparition of a dwelling person, as distinguished from a ghost. The concept of the lifestyles of a spirit double, a genuine but normally invisible replica of every man, bird, or beast, is a historic and giant perception. To fulfill one’s double is an indication that one’s dying is approaching. The doppelganger is a famous symbol of horror literature, and the theme took on great complexity.

Some memories offer supernatural motives for doubles. Those doppelgängers are normally, but not continually, evil in Some way. The double will often impersonate the sufferer and go approximately ruining them, as an example via committing crimes or insulting the victim’s pals. Seeing is the primary category here; the doppelganger, because it seems and reappears in literary and other cultures, is notably a thing of visual fascination and terror. hence notions of doubling contain not only replications of identification, however also variations in identification, in which the self-seems to be within the incorrect frame. A case which combines the two opportunities would be Oscar Wilde’s “Photograph of Dorian Gray.” The idea of a phantom ‘double’ has existed at some point of recorded records and nevertheless prospers in superstitions, fairy testimonies, and folklore in the course of the sector. It’s far taken critically via A few psychologists for instance of an out-of-frame experience. It figures in many primitive religions, where the ‘double’ is thought to be the individual’s soul. However, the doppelgänger idea has additionally schemed state-of-the-art humans and triggered in them a dread of the unknown and a morbid assumption of doom corresponding to the responses of primitive businesses.

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gravitascivics · 3 years

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UNLOCKING LOCKE’S VIEW

This blog has often described the national disagreement between those who lean toward republican values and those who lean toward liberalist values. And here begins a problem with language. One might think, from these “titles” that republicanism refers to the beliefs of the Republican Party, and liberalism favors the Democratic Party.

But as the terms are being used in this posting, and in the related literature, the opposite is true. Here, liberalism does not refer to left-of-center political thought, but actually reflects the natural rights view. And republicanism, of which federalism is one form, refers to communal biases as expressed by a representative governmental arrangement. With that, this posting can report on a debate among scholars who study the history of American political thought.

And this debate centers on how at the time of the colonial years and through the beginning of the nation the Enlightenment affected American leaders and the constitutional model they hit upon to establish the nation’s governance. Those who favor liberalism argue that the Enlightenment led the founders toward a polity that put in place the arguments of John Locke.

Often cited is Thomas Jefferson’s phraseology of the rights of the individual: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

This mirrored, so the claim states, Locke’s natural rights of life, liberty, and property. And for the bulk of the years this debate has been carried forth, those who favor liberalism cite this bias,[1] but roughly since 1960s, led by such historians as J. G. A. Pocock, that republican ideas were at least just as important as liberal ideas.[2]

There are other scholars who support the republican bias, and this blogger leans toward the political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar, who this blog often cites for his contributions to explaining this history.[3] Another historian this blog has cited is Gordon Wood along with his work on the founding generation.[4]

This is how this blog described Wood’s account of the founders,

Gordon Wood argues that in the years surrounding the writing of the Declaration of Independence there was an especially strong popular commitment to federalist ideals. Particularly, the political group of that time, known as the Commonwealthmen or Whigs (not to be confused with the nineteenth century Whig Party), demonstrated an inordinate level of support for republicanism which can be described as a type of political beliefs that include federalist thought.

The Whigs are credited with leading popular support for independence from Britain. They emphasized citizen participation, – especially at the local level – representative government, liberty, equality, and public virtue. In other words, citizens bound to this cultural view lived their social lives [in the 1830s] as Tocqueville described them [in an earlier posting].[5]

So disposed, a lot of the colonists’ thought took on a reactive mode to changes in British rule as the 1700s progressed. That is, they began to see the British as corrupt since they were instituting policies that flew in the face of colonials’ biases. That particularly targeted British taxing policies, their interference with American politics, and their on again-off again promotion of Anglican religion seemed contrary to what Americans were judging to be good governance.

What the colonists began to emphasize – both as result of the Enlightenment but also due to their Puritanical background – was that a person’s value, in intrinsic terms as well as in his/her financial standing, was based on property[6] (and its entailed rights), but that value also included his/her communal sense of citizenship.

Beyond these sensitivities, they saw governmental corruption by means of faction, patronage, standing armies, an established church, and excessive support of monied interests as growing under their colonial existence and attributed to British influence or policies. Summarily, one can classify these growing concerns as those of republicanism.

These feelings were not limited to the elites but made their way across the American colonial population. And this grew as Britain attempted to exert its presence within the colonies and as the 1700s wore on. Most Americans can readily remember their school lessons of British taxation and Americans’ call for “no taxation without representation.”

As for Jefferson’s phrase, such writers as Gary Will credits not John Locke (Will argues that Jefferson did not even own Locke’s work from which the famous phrase was credited), but was much more influenced by common sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid. Others attribute the actual Declaration quote to William Wollaston.

In Wollaston’s 1722 book, The Religion of Nature Delineated, he provides “the pursuit of happiness” phrase and attributes its prudence to reason and truth.[7] Yet others look to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.[8] So the Locke source – which in his Two Treatises of Government is “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” – does not turn out to be a “slam dunk” source of Jefferson’s phrase.

As a matter of fact, when one reviews Locke’s position on natural rights, he is reigned in by something called natural law. Steven Forde makes an important related distinction between Locke and Thomas Hobbes – who should be the philosopher cited by natural rights advocates. Forde writes,

Locke’s claim is that individual have a duty to respect the rights of others, even in the state of nature [that state that exists before a people organize a polity]. The source of this duty, he says, is natural law.

The difference with Hobbes is clearest in Locke’s argument about property. Hobbes and Locke agree that individuals have a right to property in the state of nature, but Hobbes denies that individuals have any duty to respect the property of others. This makes property more or less useless in Hobbes’s state of nature. Locke says individuals have a duty to respect the property (and lives and liberties) of others even in the state of nature, a duty he traces to natural law. Natural law and natural rights coexist, but natural law is primary, commanding respect for the rights of others.[9]

Forde goes on to clarify this a bit further. He claims that an individual’s rights are in the context of this duty, in that that duty is always present with the exception when one’s life is in jeopardy.

This posting will, of course, not end this debate, but this blogger wishes to take this opportunity to explicitly state an underlying message this blog has tried to communicate. Most of American history, not only the years surrounding the birth the nation, was guided more so by the republican train of thought. More specifically, that being the form of republicanism Americans followed, federalism.

Everyone knows that that bias determined the structural makeup of the national and state governments. But beyond that, Americans had held as almost sacred to federalism’s processes. That included a reliance that the nation saw, at least as a basic espoused value, the worth of its population being federated within themselves. At least to the degree that a sense of communality, collaboration, and cooperation by those who were accepted as part of the national partnership served to establish what was right in terms of governance and politics.

Its only shortcoming – and it was and has been an immoral and unjust shortcoming – was the exclusion of nonwhites. That is why federation theory, what this blogger promotes, is not this earlier version, parochial/traditional federalism, but a newer version. That is liberated federalism, which is inclusive of all Americans.

As for what today holds in regard to the allegiance of most Americans, that would be the natural rights view. Some hold onto the ideals of Locke, but too many are holding onto Hobbes’s dystopian vision – a social existence without any sense of duty or obligation. With that insight, one can begin to understand the sorry state of the polity today.

[1] See Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I: The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, edited by Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114. Ironically, a value this blogger cites making up what one can call republicanism – or more specifically federalism – is civic humanism. In making his argument, Kramnick admits that up until the development of the founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – American elites tended to rely on republican values such as civic humanism. Civic humanism, as Kramnick describes it, is a political being realizing his/her fulfilment through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends. This is a republican value.

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966) and Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1987).

[4] Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969/1968).

[5] Robert Gutierrez, “What Was the Original Intent?”, Gravitas: A Voice for Social Studies – a blog (May 30, 2017).

[6] Life was considered an element of one’s property.

[7] James W. Ely, Main Themes in the Debate over Property Rights (Milton Park, England: Routledge, 1997).

[8] Paul Sayre (ed.), Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies: Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pond (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1947).

[9] Steven Forde, “John Locke and the Natural Law and Natural Rights Tradition,” Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism (n.d.), accessed June 3, 2021, http://www.nlnrac.org/earlymodern/locke .

#John Locke #Thomas Hobbes #Thomas Jefferson #republicanism #liberalism #civics education #social studies

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gravitascivics · 6 years

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PROUD TO BE US

This blog promotes two social/political attributes: social capital and civic humanism. Isaac Kramnick writes of civic humanism:

… civic humanism conceives of man as a political being whose realization of self occurs only through participation in public life, through active citizenship in a republic. The virtuous man is concerned primarily with the public good, res publica, or commonweal, not with private or selfish ends.[1]

While such a notion is probably pleasant for any good citizen to hear, there are two concerns.

One, why would anyone be so motivated? Two, in a time when the dominant political view, the natural rights construct, ignores any such sense of virtuousness, what promotes civic humanism in modern American life? Yes, the natural rights’ view does not preclude an individual from harboring such a belief, but it does not encourage it.

This blog has commented on motivation, especially as it leads to good citizenship. After all, if a main concern of civics education is to encourage students to lead good, civic lives, the question of motivation is obvious. This is particularly important in modern life where so much of social reality is dealing with faceless entities – government, large corporations, populous urban environments. The personal touch to public affairs is quite prominent in its absence.

When no one in an extended environment seems to know how one behaves or, for the most part, cares, it is hard enough to promote law abiding behavior. Here, the notion of civic humanism calls not only for obeying the law but dedicating a significant part of one’s life to res publica, the commonwealth. Wow!

Now, this blog supports, as opposed to natural rights, federation theory. This latter theory, as described in this blog, calls on citizens to abide by the standard of civic humanism, at least, as an ideal. In turn, that leads to actively “teaching,” in civics classes, values and arranging content that extolls this virtue.

The blog has explained that this need not be through propaganda techniques, but through open-ended questioning in which students strive to solve relevant issues. The support manifests itself through the topics and questions such a curriculum utilizes. And, yes, through such a curriculum a student can reject civic humanism but is called upon to justify such a position.

But the challenge remains: what motivates one to be receptive to such a value. Richard Dagger[2] reports on this question. He shares with his readers the concerns of Michael Sandel who identifies three sources for such a motivation.

The first is for people to feel a sense that one needs a healthy social order – a society that, if not a commonwealth, is one where citizens readily obey the law and abide by its norms. If citizens meet their needs, such as securing a reasonable job, then they are disposed to have positive judgements of their society.

This includes every individual, in a spirit of reciprocity, to go along; to do his/her part. This might call for occasional sacrifices as one fulfills duties associated with citizenship. Yes, there is the problem of the free-rider, but in a healthy society this is kept to a minimum. And that minimum does not solely depend on policing. If social harmony overly depends on coercive, police powers, that society will find the financial expense for cooperation to be prohibitive.

The second has to do with the residue of living in a functional republic. That is, going about doing the things one does and be able to do them with reasonable success, one generally will develop sentimental ties with those he/she interacts. From that, a person will generalize that good feeling and extend the sentiment to the population. He/she will develop an emotional disposition to promote that society or nation. It feels good to positively support such a commonwealth.

This might reach a level in which obligations or duties are accepted more readily. One might be ready to sacrifice for the homeland or the state or the community in which one resides. The sentiment might take the following form: “These are my folks!”

The third source of motivation reminds one of Maslow’s highest order of needs. That is self-actualization. Those familiar with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model know that the sixth level, a level few attain, is self-actualization. To be so motivated one needs to know oneself so well that he/she realizes what one really wants out of life.

Not what one wants for other reasons, like impressing one’s neighbor, but what stems from one’s nature. As Psychology Today puts it: self-actualization “represents growth of an individual toward fulfillment of the highest needs; those for meaning in life, in particular.”[3] Sandel believes a civic humanistic disposition is part of being human; i.e., to desire promoting one’s society, one’s culture, one’s community.

In the last posting, this blog reported on the natural human tendency to being tribal. It turns out that the hypothalamus produces a hormone, oxytocin, which is instrumental in biasing one in favor of those people one is taught to believe belong to “Us.” It further encourages one to be biased against “Them.” That posting described this natural fact as promoting prejudicial beliefs and that civics education should actively counter this Us/Theming when it comes to prejudicial judgements and behaviors.

But is there a positive side to this phenomenon? Is the hormone the basis by which a person is motivated toward finding fulfillment in holding one’s people, nation, community as an extension of oneself? By so doing, does that sense lead one to define who he/she is by the positive roles he/she plays to further the legitimate interests of that greater social entity? If so, one can see substance to Sandel’s third source of motivation.

This topic will be picked up in the next posting. Turns out, Sandel’s idea, as appealing as it is, does have its critic. The next posting will review that criticism and determine, in terms of federation theory, how motivation should be treated in an ideal civics education curriculum.

[1] Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I: The Colonial Era through Reconstruction, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 98.

[2] Richard Dagger, Civic Virtue: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York, NY: Oxford, 1997).

[3] “The Theory of Self-Actualization,” Psychology Today, August 13, 2013, accessed April 5, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-and-psychopathology/201308/the-theory-self-actualization.

#civic humanism #good citizenship

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gravitascivics · 7 years

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EARLY AMERICAN VERSION OF FEDERALISM

To understand what this blog is promoting, it is necessary to review relevant historical information. This blog is arguing that civics teachers and curricular developers should use a mental construct, federation theory, in their choice of content. This theory has a rich history in America.

To this point, past postings have pointed out that this construct is related to civic humanism and that it was central to the thinking of the founding generation, and finally, how through the years, it has been challenged mostly by a shift toward natural rights thinking. But what exactly is it and how is it related to civic humanism? With this posting, these questions will begin to be answered.

To be clear, this blog is not geared to promote an earlier form of federalism, which will be called traditional federalism, but by reviewing it and its tenets, one can appreciate what basic moral posture federalist thought is. That construct was essential in forming our republic. Therefore, a person cannot understand this nation’s constitution without having a working knowledge of this set of beliefs.

According to Elazar, there are federalist ideas and structures that have had essential influences on not only current political realities, in terms of government, but also in terms of economic institutions.[1] And traditional federalism is the source of civic ideas and ideals that are functional in promoting social capital.

But it has its shortcomings which are due mostly to its age. Traditional federalism, in its totality, is of another time, but it is not irrelevant. In its time, it was an antithesis to aristocratic and monarchical privilege and some of its attributes might sound like what the advocates of Locke were seeking, but the distinguishing characteristic is its reliance and promotion of communal citizenry.[2]

Essentially, federalism is a construct emphasizing the collective and organic nature of society. It does this while not sacrificing the integrity of the individual. It defines society and its government as a social entity that comes about because of a process in which individuals and/or groups consciously form a union based on agreement over fundamental principles and beliefs.

For those who are familiar with political theory, this view of societal and governmental establishment is one of reflection and choice as opposed to force or accident. The members of the group formulate this agreement as a mutual promise among the individuals or groups making up the union.

The agreement has the following qualities: it is made in perpetuity; it states the purpose(s) of the union; it determines any structural arrangements; it identifies any rights the individuals or groups have under the arrangement; it establishes sanctions that its governing apparatus can administer for infractions against its provisions; and if a covenant, calls on God to witness the promise.

Our most well-known example of a federated arrangement, not covenant but a compact, is that of the United States. In that case, the central government was formed by an agreement among both the people of the United States' nation and among the states of the United States. As such, the US is a complex example. A much simpler example is a marriage. In both examples, a member, whether an individual or a group, is equal to all other members, be it a spouse or a nation full of people and/or states.

By definition, federated arrangements strive to secure equality. Along with equal treatment, each member has a set of responsibilities and duties so that the union can progress toward accomplishing its purposes. One way to see this union is to consider it as a partnership among its members whose interests are mutually advanced, at least, in the long run.

Federalism has a long history in the US. It arrived with the Puritans who landed on the shore along Massachusetts Bay. They adopted the old Judaic tradition of covenants which had been used to bind people together. But even before the Puritans, the Mayflower Compact, drawn up by Pilgrims, was a covenant.[3]

The idea is that, unlike a contract, people from time to time need to rely on others in such a way that that reliance will not waiver through challenging times. It is not an agreement in which one party provides something in exchange for something else from another party, as in a dollar for a bag of peanuts. It does, instead, define a relationship in which all members' interests are bound together.

That would be the case under a government (or a marriage). A government is formed so that a people can be afforded mutual protection and for other purposes. A people needs to rely on this institution no matter what might happen. By using a covenant, the Puritans established a government based on federalist principles – the term federalism has its origins in the meaning of covenant as will be further explained in a subsequent posting (along with what a compact is).

This historical occurrence began a theoretical tradition that would have enormous influence on the nation's foundational philosophy.[4] Its most immediate influence was in formulating our foundational documents such as subsequent constitutions and charters which were written during the colonial days and in all the original thirteen colonies and then states. All the subsequent state constitutions follow the federalist format outlined above.

While the construct served as the dominant view of government and politics, its reign suffered from a continuous diminution. According to Kramnick, as pointed out in Chapter 2, the beginning of its diminution followed the Revolutionary War.[5] Others place the start of this diminution at other times. Gordon S. Wood writes that federalist ideas held an unchallenged position through the writing of the Constitution by those who led the fight for independence.[6]

This more traditional, purer rendition of federalism, with an accompanying assumption of homogeneity, had to be surrendered as our politics had to accommodate a pluralistic reality. The homogeneity of the nation or even of localities within the nation was slipping away within a very short period of time after the establishment of communities became standard practice and the urban areas attracted more people.

As was pointed out in earlier postings as they described the various political subcultures that emerged, America was not of one mind concerning basic biases and beliefs over governance. Whatever the beginning of its demise, as a study of the American political culture points out, the more moralistic, federalist view of government and politics was seriously challenged by transcendental thought. This will only be the first of serious challenges to the more moralistic view.

Each of these challenges, in turn, undermined the more communal beliefs of federalism and bolstered the individualism of the natural rights construct. This diminution was not a simple, one-way trend. The nation’s history indicates that some of the challenges were very complex in their effects (for example, the New Deal while providing extensive bureaucratic programs, did reignite a “we’re in this together” spirit to combat the drastic effects of the Great Depression).

But before the natural rights construct took hold as the dominant construct, a federalist view held sway, at least more so than any other view. It hung on as a pervading atmosphere which was mostly instrumental in relaying a sense of duty and, when appropriate, shame when its moral precepts were offended. And this dominance can be detected in place till mid twentieth century. During its years of dominance, its influence held beyond the concerns of government and included the family, the church, and education.[7]

Stephen L. Schechter[8] provides a good sense of how intimately federalist ideas affected the development of our political tradition starting in the 1600. These recurring processes started with small settlements, evolved into colonies, and then into a large nation.

America engaged in a development characterized with “reflection and choice” as opposed to “accidental” development – a natural growth usually characterized by monarchial rule. The US can point to a definite period, of short duration, in which its basic constitutional ideas were proactively thought of and implemented.

The created political entities were the product of well thought-out considerations, including these five essential attributes:

· the almost missionary application of covenants,

· the reliance on rational-choice (an Enlightenment ideal),

· the establishment of republican government characterized by popular consent and limited government,

· the reliance on the rule of law principle which picks up on the Anglo-American common law tradition,

· and the incorporation of “the principle of organizing polities by distributing and sharing power between general (central government) and constituent governments (the state governments).”[9]

Adding to one’s understanding is the writing of Jack N. Rakove:

The American decision for independence added a further dimension to the concept of informed citizen … Americans began writing new constitutions of government to replace the old colonial regime, and these constitutions took an avowedly republican cast [known for] the virtue of their citizens: their public-spiritedness, their willingness to subordinate private interest to public good, their capacity to monitor their rulers for signs of tyrannical ambition, their knowledge of the essential rights government existed to protect. A republican government required a republican society.[10] (emphasis added)

These are federalist values in operation.

[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” Readings for classes taught by Professor Elazar (Steamboat Springs, CO: National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, 1994), 1-30. A booklet of readings prepared for an institute for teachers. In a booklet of readings.

[2] Communal citizenry will be identified by the term civic humanism, mentioned earlier, which will be more formally defined in subsequent posting.

[3] The Mayflower Compact was not written and agreed to by Puritans, but by Pilgrims who landed on the Massachusetts Bay at Plymouth Rock.

[4] Donald S. Lutz, “The Mayflower Compact, 1620,” in Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 17-23.

[5] Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism I,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I: The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114.

[6] Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998). Wood uses other terminology.

[7] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly” AND Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

[8] Stephen L. Schechter, introduction to Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted, Stephen L. Schechter (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 1-16.

[9] Stephen L. Schechter, introduction to Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted., 4.

[10] Jack N. Rokove, “Once More into the Breach: Reflections on Jefferson, Madison, and the Religion Problem,” in Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society, ed. Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 233-262, 240.

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