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bl00dline · 4 years

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22 questions

I was tagged by @my-little-kraken. Thanks for the tag, love!

1. The book that transformed your life.

I wouldn’t say this transformed my life, but a book that had quite an impact on me was Night by Elie Wiesel. I really learned a lot about the Holocaust from it.

2. The movie that changed the way you see the world.

I don’t think this changed the way I see the world, but it did sort of change my life— 1917. It wasn’t even the movie itself that changed my life, it was the fandom. The 1917 fandom is full of such wonderful people, and they really changed my life in the best way possible.

3. The music that makes part of the soundtrack of your life.

Any songs by Bix Beiderbecke, Glenn Miller, and Annette Hanshaw.

4. Define longing.

The desire for something you can’t have, whether it be temporary or permanent.

5. If you got back in time, which scene would you visit of your life?

I would probably re-live one of the summers when I was little. Going to baseball games, going to the fair here, and listening to The Beach Boys, The Chantays and Buddy Holly all day.

6. The place where your heart is.

The museum that I volunteer at. It’s a 1920s museum that’s like a little 1920s town. I’ve always wished I lived there.

7. The travel of your life.

I went to Victoria last summer (exactly a year ago actually) and it was so much fun. There are so many historical buildings there and it’s a lovely city!

8. An author that you have met recently, and whose works you want to continue to read.

The author I met most recently was like 5 years ago. Shane Peacock came to my school. I’ve read his Boy Sherlock Holmes series and loved it.

9. Coffee or tea?

TEA ALL THE WAY. I may or may not be a bit addicted to tea...

10. Who’s your Doctor (if you don’t watch Doctor Who, who’s your favorite character from a TV series)?

I don’t watch Dr. Who, but my favourite TV characters are probably Niles Crane from Frasier, Ralph Furley from Three’s Company, and Opie Taylor from The Andy Griffith Show.

11. If you could just throw everything away and live your dream, what would you do?

I would time travel to Edwardian England.

12. If you could choose to be a character from a book, TV series or movie, who you would be?

I would probably be Liz from Keeping Up Appearances. Even though putting up with Hyacinth would be a pain, I think it would be quite amusing to live next door to her and watch her complain to the mailman or the milkman or her relatives or to whoever approaches her house.

13. What makes you not like a story?

Unfinished endings. I don’t mind a bit of a cliffhanger, but when the story really doesn’t seem to have a proper ending, I don’t like it. I like when stories come to some sort of conclusion, not when you have to come up with your own ending.

14. Do you like romance in stories? Why?

I wouldn’t say I’m specifically into romance stories, but I think some sort of romance can really add to the plot of any genre. Even if it’s, like, a horror movie, romance of some sort gives the characters more depth.

15. Which book did you hate having read?

I absolutely hated Cinder. The plotline wasn’t very interesting or believable and the ending was awful. It was supposed to be a twisted version of Cinderella but it was nothing like it. It was really, really bad. Also, one book I had to read in grade 7 that I hated was Le Grenouille et la Baleine. Does a cheesy book from 1988 about a girl being able to breathe underwater and talk to whales sound interesting to you? Not to mention the fact that French is my second language? That book was truly awful. I cried while reading it— not because it was emotional, but because I got so frustrated with having to read it.

16. Which movie did you hate having watched?

Trolls. It was so, so bad. I get that it’s a children’s movie, but it was wayyyy too sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. When I got my wisdom teeth removed, Trolls happened to be playing in the lobby and I just about died

17. Do you like anime/manga? Any favorite?

Nope. I did like Pokemon when I was younger, though.

18. Who is the best villain you saw in a story?

The Lodger in The Lodger (wow what a great sentence). I know it’s revealed that he isn’t the villain, but Ivor Novello plays such a convincing villain! Yet, I can totally see why he was innocent.

19. If you could do an interview with any person, alive or dead, from our world, who would you choose and why?

Buster Keaton, of course! I would love to hear him talk more about his vaudeville days and what it was like.

20. If you could meet and and befriend a writer, who would it be?

I would definitely meet F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I’m not sure if I would want to befriend him. Because he had a lot of personal troubles I feel like he would be a bit difficult to get along with sometimes. But I would definitely love to have a conversation with him!

21. Cats or dogs?

Dogs!!!

22. If you could choose any time period or society to live, which it would be?

As I said before, it would probably be Edwardian England!

This was fun, thank you for tagging me! I’m tagging @schofielded, @made-by-our-history, @silverscene, @lukethewanderer, @heavy-focking-metal, and @miss-amna if you would like to do this!

#tagged #my-little-kraken

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itsworn · 8 years

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This Nasty Classy 1931 Ford Model A Roadster is as at Home at a Show as it is Dragging on the Beach

Full-tilt.

Our story’s title may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Cedric Meeks coined the phrase himself to describe his Model A roadster’s mix of badass and beautiful.

Cedric has actually owned this gennie ’31 Ford twice. He first spotted it about three years ago in the yard of Stan Ochs, another hot rodder in the Portland, Oregon, area where Cedric lives with his wife, Kim.

At the time it was a bone-stock A. “Stan told me it was the body that Dee Wescott took molds off of to make his fiberglass roadster bodies,” Cedric recalls. “My dad worked for Dee in the 1960s before he worked for Gene Winfield. We’ve known him forever. When Stan told me that, I really wanted the car bad.

“Then Stan goes into his shop and comes out with these chopped windshield stanchions,” Cedric continues. “He told me, ‘These were the stanchions off your dad’s car.’” Cedric’s dad is Russ Meeks, a longtime hot rod builder who, among other cars, built the rear-engine Model A for John Corno that won the America’s Most Beautiful Roadster award in 1972.

“Well, I couldn’t say no,” Cedric admits.

“I bought the car at about 2 in the afternoon, had it home by 4, and then I called my dad and some buddies, and they came over at about 6 and stripped the car down,” Cedric says. They took off the hood, fenders, and running boards, and about a week later Cedric put a set of bent-spoke Kelsey-Hayes wheels on it and a straight pipe. “It looked just like an early gow job. I drove it as a prewar hop-up for six months.”

But then another car “popped up,” he says, a sectioned ’56 Nomad that Russ had built when he worked for Winfield. “Mom and Dad brought me home from [the] hospital when I was born in that car. In 1969, he tore it apart, never finished it, and it went into storage. I used to play in that car when it was just a mothballed show car full of rat turds.” And here it was, back. He sold the roadster and “every piece of speed equipment I could part with” to buy the Nomad, he says. The roadster went to a guy who worked with Russ.

But about a year later, that guy wanted to buy a house and offered Cedric first right of refusal to buy back the roadster. Cedric and Kim had just built a shop, so it wasn’t a great time to buy another car. “But I didn’t know if I would ever get a car this nice again,” he says.

So in November 2015, the roadster returned. And in January 2016, Cedric heard that the Race of Gentlemen was headed west. He had been working on a Model A coupe for Kim, but the coupe went on the back burner to get the roadster ready for TROG at Pismo Beach in October.

“In the meantime, my wife says to me, ‘What are we going to take to Santa Maria [the Cruisin’ Nationals by West Coast Kustoms]? I said, ‘The roadster. I’ll have it ready to go.’ So it was full-tilt, to see how fast I could do it.”

It helped that during the year it had been out of Cedric’s hands, the previous owner installed a dropped front axle, and Russ had built a custom steering arm for it. “So it was already dumped in the front.” The rear was left at the stock height, though Cedric swapped the original rearend for a Halibrand quick-change. He had a stock ’39 transmission to mate to the motor.

The Model B four-banger, which has a Miller-Schofield overhead-valve conversion, came from a fellow Estranged car club member, Mike Thompson. “It was in a roadster that had come out of Idaho,” Cedric explains. “He raced it at the Billetproof drags in Washington a couple years before. I raced him in my wife’s sedan, and this thing was fast. Even with a single 97, it ran hard.” Portland’s Model A Works freshened the motor, Cedric added some speed equipment—Thomas intake, dual Stromberg 81s, and a Charlie Yapp exhaust—and “it’s been running like crazy ever since.”

After stripping the roadster’s body, Cedric painted it in a custom-mixed green hue that’s “based off Kevin Sledge’s ’40 Merc,” he says. “I took a copy of The Rodder’s Journal with that car on the cover to a buddy at a paint shop, and he mixed a base/clear that was pretty close without being candy. I didn’t want to spray candy for my first car.”

Two days before Santa Maria, Cedric had the roadster running, and he and Kim made the trip. It turned out to be the beginning of a very busy year for them. “After Santa Maria, we went to Billetproof Chehalis [in Washington state], got Best of Show from the Slowpokes, from there to Deuce Days in July in Canada, came home, took it to the Billetproof Hot Rod Eruption drags in Toutle [Washington], broke the rear axle racing it there, fixed it, and then went to TROG.” The weekend after TROG, they went to the California Hot Rod Reunion and that same weekend drove up to El Mirage, where the roadster served as a push car for Russ’ XO modified roadster.

Once they got home, Cedric could assess the damage from TROG. “There were 2 inches of sand on the framerails,” he says. “I forgot to put nylons on the intakes, and the rear carb just sucked sand into the engine. It still runs fine; I’ve changed the oil quite a few times, but I’m guessing the cylinders got a fresh hone, just not with the right crosshatch pattern.” He also had to work on the car’s paint, as “every panel was scratched” by the slinging sand.

It was while cleaning TROG off the car that Cedric decided he wanted to take it to the Grand National Roadster Show, “and I wanted it 100 percent finished for GNRS.” That meant fabbing a hood, building top bows for a new top from Guy’s Interior Restorations, swapping out the tires and wheels for the whitewalls and Olds caps seen here, and then having Mitch Kim pinstripe the car, inside and out.

“In just a few months, this car has had three totally different looks,” Cedric points out. “When I raced at Billetproof, I took off the blackwalls on green wheels and made a new set of reversed rims to run really narrow 5-inch slicks. Then for GNRS, I put on the new top, hood, and different tires and wheels. It totally changed the look from a down-and-dirty early ’50s hot rod to a mid- to late ’50s custom show rod. It has just the right attitude. It’s nasty looking, but nasty classy.”

There are more shows in the car’s near future, and then Cedric plans to “do nothing but drive the paint off the thing. Or my wife will until the Model A coupe is ready. I have to get it ready for GNRS, so it’s nose to the grindstone again.”

Compare Cedric Meeks’ Model A in its “100 percent finished” state to how he ran the roadster at The Race of Gentlemen West. It’s amazing what a hood, top, and new tires and wheels will do to the look of a car.

More TROG action, here on the soft, downhill chute to the beach. Note the black smoke coming from the engine, the result of the banger ingesting sand. The scrunched look on fellow Estranged club member (and HRD contributor) Kleet Norris’ face is from all the sand the right front tire is throwing at him.

The Model B four-cylinder is pressurized, fitted with insert bearings, and topped with a Miller-Schofield overhead valve conversion. Cedric bought it as a running motor but added the Thomas intake, twin Stromberg 81s, Winfield cam, and Charlie Yapp exhaust manifolds, which are hooked to an exhaust system Cedric fabricated.

Engine is fired by a 12-volt Mallory dual-point ignition. “It’s an honest 100hp motor, maybe 110,” Cedric says. “Reliable as all get-out.”

Mitch Kim pinstriped the firewall, as well as the dashboard inside.

The Vintage Moon fuel pressure gauge is cool, as is a small example of Cedric’s handiwork with copper tubing. Cedric and Kim operate Schmeer Sheet Metal, an architectural sheetmetal shop.

Front suspension consists of a dropped axle hung by a reverse-eye recurved spring. “It’s my dad’s design that we put on everything,” Cedric says of the spring. Boling Brothers early iron brakes stop the roadster. Note that the tires have whitewalls on both sides. “There’s so much black up front [so] I wanted something to contrast with the backing plates,” Cedric says. He sent his Coker wide whites to Diamond Back Classic Tires for the inner whitewalls.

Rearend contains a magnesium Halibrand 101 quick-change. “It’s an in-and-out box,” Cedric says of the q-c. “You can see the shifter hanging down.”

Guy’s Interior Restorations handled the upholstery and also made the roadster’s new top. Pinstriping on the dash is by Mitch Kim, and Cedric fabricated the brass engine-turned panels inset in the beautifully stained floor.

The Ford Crestline wheel was originally intended for Kim’s coupe but wound up in the roadster. “I bought an original Bell wheel for her car, but she doesn’t like it,” Cedric says. “Not enough bling.”

Stock Model A gauges in the dashboard are complemented by a 1950s-era aftermarket Stewart-Warner gauge cluster underneath.

A stock 1939 shift lever is capped by a knob with an inset brass coin, commemorating Ford’s “40 Years of Progress” from 1932-1972. “I bought the knob from Lucky Burton,” Cedric says. “He makes them. I liked the color combination, the Ford script; it just worked.”

Roadster’s nice rake is achieved by dumping the front end and leaving the rear at its stock ride height.

“We have had so much fun in the car,” Cedric says. “The engine is really torque. It goes down the freeway at 65 to 70 with no problem and leaves the line hard. It’s not quite as snappy as something with more cubic inches, but it sings down the road. It just flies.”

The Miller-Schofield/Cragar OHV Conversion

Harry Miller, most famous for his Indy racing machines in the 1920s and 1930s, formed the Miller-Schofield company in 1928 with several other investors, including financier George Schofield. Among the company’s products was an overhead valve cylinder head that was designed by Leo Goossen, one of Miller’s chief engineers. Moving the valves out of the block and into the head improved the engine’s breathing to such a degree that a stock, 40hp Model A motor could make nearly 70 hp with the addition of the head alone.

According to automotive historian Art Bagnall, Miller-Schofield was making up to 50 of these heads a day at its peak. That peak was short-lived, though; Miller-Schofield was bankrupt by 1930, one of the many victims of the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Depression.

Not long after, Harlan Fengler, a former board-track racing driver, teamed with a young plumbing heir named Crane Gartz and bought the remains of the Miller-Schofield cylinder head business. They formed a company and named it Cragar by contracting Gartz’s first and last names. For a couple of years, they manufactured the OHV head as a Cragar component, but they, too, couldn’t escape the crush of the Depression and went bankrupt in 1932. The Cragar name was saved, though, by George Wight, founder of Bell Auto Parts, who bought Cragar’s leftover parts from Gartz.

The cutaway illustration of a Cragar head you see here was drawn by Rex Burnett for an article by Don Francisco called “Ford 4-Barrel Speed Secrets” in the Nov. 1950 issue of HOT ROD. The 4-barrel term referred to the number of cylinders in the block and had nothing to do with carburetion. This was one of a series of tech articles Francisco did in 1950-1951 that examined ways to hop up banger motors for the street and track.

The post This Nasty Classy 1931 Ford Model A Roadster is as at Home at a Show as it is Dragging on the Beach appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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tannertoctoo-blog · 8 years

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February 01, 2017

Hypatia, Vol. 32, #1, 2017 Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 140, #1, 2017 Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 140, #2, 2017 Journal of Moral Philosophy, Vol. 14, #1, 2017 Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 12, #1, 2017 Plato Journal, Vol. 15, 2015 Mind, Vol. 125, #400, 2016 The Monist, Vol. 99, #4, 2016 Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, Vol. 23, #1, 2017 Sophia, Vol. 55, #4, 2016 Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 43, 2016

Hypatia, Vol. 32, #1, 2017 Special Issue: Feminist Love Studies, issue edited by: Ann Ferguson, Margaret E. Toye Editorial Ann Ferguson and Margaret E. Toye. Feminist Love Studies—Editors' Introduction. Articles Allison Weir. Collective Love as Public Freedom: Dancing Resistance. Ehrenreich, Arendt, Kristeva, and Idle No More. Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper's Black Feminist Love-Politics. Megan M. Burke. Love as a Hollow: Merleau-Ponty's Promise of Queer Love. Laura Roberts. A Revolution of Love: Thinking through a Dialectic that is Not “One”. Carolyn Ureña. Loving from Below: Of (De)colonial Love and Other Demons. Lindsey Stewart. Work the Root: Black Feminism, Hoodoo Love Rituals, and Practices of Freedom. Patricia L. Grosse. Love and the Patriarch: Augustine and (Pregnant) Women. Federica Gregoratto. Why Love Kills: Power, Gender Dichotomy, and Romantic Femicide. Tatjana Takševa. Mother Love, Maternal Ambivalence, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. Sara Cantillon and Kathleen Lynch. Affective Equality: Love Matters. Musings Lena Gunnarsson. Hetero-Love in Patriarchy: An Autobiographical Substantiation. Christine M. Koggel. Remembering and Loving in Relationships Involving Dying, Death, and Grief. Asma Abbas. From the Love Studio. Back to Top

Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 140, #1, 2017 Editorial Michelle Greenwood, R. Edward Freeman. Focusing on Ethics and Broadening our Intellectual Base. Original Papers Chris Provis. Intuition, Analysis and Reflection in Business Ethics. Cristina Wildermuth, Carlos A. De Mello e Souza. Circles of Ethics: The Impact of Proximity on Moral Reasoning. Sefa Hayibor Ph.D. Is Fair Treatment Enough? Augmenting the Fairness-Based Perspective on Stakeholder Behaviour. Jay J. Janney, Steve Gove. Firm Linkages to Scandals via Directors and Professional Service Firms: Insights from the Backdating Scandal. Jocelyn D. Evans, Elise Perrault, Timothy A. Jones. Managers’ Moral Obligation of Fairness to (All) Shareholders: Does Information Asymmetry Benefit Privileged Investors at Other Shareholders’ Expense? Martin C. Schleper, Constantin Blome, David A. Wuttke. The Dark Side of Buyer Power: Supplier Exploitation and the Role of Ethical Climates. Jae Hyeung Kang, James G. Matusik, Lizabeth A. Barclay. Affective and Normative Motives to Work Overtime in Asian Organizations: Four Cultural Orientations from Confucian Ethics. Maiju Kangas, Joona Muotka, Mari Huhtala, Anne Mäkikangas. Is the Ethical Culture of the Organization Associated with Sickness Absence? A Multilevel Analysis in a Public Sector Organization. Seraphim Voliotis. Establishing the Normative Standards that Determine Deviance in Organizational Corruption: Is Corruption Within Organizations Antisocial or Unethical? Kristina Haberstroh, Ulrich R. Orth, Stefan Hoffmann. Consumer Response to Unethical Corporate Behavior: A Re-Examination and Extension of the Moral Decoupling Model. Daniel P. Sorensen, Scott E. Miller, Kevin L. Cabe. Developing and Measuring the Impact of an Accounting Ethics Course that is Based on the Moral Philosophy of Adam Smith. Back to Top

Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 140, #2, 2017 Original Papers Pieter Jan Trinks, Bert Scholtens. The Opportunity Cost of Negative Screening in Socially Responsible Investing. Zelong Wei, Hao Shen, Kevin Zheng Zhou, Julie Juan Li. How Does Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility Matter in a Dysfunctional Institutional Environment? Evidence from China. Young Kyun Chang, Won-Yong Oh, Jee Hyun Park. Exploring the Relationship Between Board Characteristics and CSR: Empirical Evidence from Korea. Alejandro Alvarado-Herrera, Enrique Bigne. A Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility Following the Sustainable Development Paradigm. Mohamed Arouri, Guillaume Pijourlet. CSR Performance and the Value of Cash Holdings: International Evidence. Dev R. Mishra. Post-innovation CSR Performance and Firm Value. Yeonsoo Kim. Consumer Responses to the Food Industry’s Proactive and Passive Environmental CSR, Factoring in Price as CSR Tradeoff. Krittinee Nuttavuthisit, John Thøgersen. The Importance of Consumer Trust for the Emergence of a Market for Green Products: The Case of Organic Food. María del Mar Miralles-Quirós, José Luis Miralles-Quirós. Improving Diversification Opportunities for Socially Responsible Investors. Dongyoung Lee. Corporate Social Responsibility and Management Forecast Accuracy. Back to Top

Journal of Moral Philosophy, Vol. 14, #1, 2017 Research Articles Jeff Sebo. Agency and Moral Status. Brian Talbot. Replaceable Lawyers and Guilty Defendants. Toby Svoboda. Why Moral Error Theorists Should Become Revisionary Moral Expressivists. Molly Gardner. On the Strength of the Reason Against Harming. Matti Eklund. Thickness and Evaluation. Book Reviews Heidi Chamberlin Giannini. Constructivism in Ethics, edited by Carla Bagnoli. Ryo Chonabayashi. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, edited by R. Shafer-Landau. Steven Luper. Death and the Afterlife, written by Samuel Scheffler. Hagop Sarkissian. Foundations for Moral Relativism, written by J. David Velleman. David Rocheleau-Houle. Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, written by Derk Pereboom. Back to Top

Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 12, #1, 2017 Articles Amitai Shenhav, David G. Rand and Joshua D. Greene. The Relationship between Intertmporal Choice and Following the Path of Least Resistance across Choices, Preference, and Beliefs. Melisa E. Chávez, Elena Villalobos, José L. Baroja and Arturo Bouzas. Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Intertemporal Choice. Julia P. Prims and Don A. Moore. Overconfidence over the Lifespan. Helena Szrek. How the Number of Options and Perceived Variety Influence Choice Satisfaction: An Experiment with Prescription Drug Plans. Arvid Erlandsson, Fredrik Björklund and Martin Bäckström. Choice-Justifications after Allocating Resources in Helping Dilemmas. Sumitava Mukherjee, Arvind Sahay, V. S. Chandrasekhar Pammi and Narayanan Srinivasan. Is Loss-Aversion Magnitude-Dependent? Measuring Prospective Affective Judgments Regarding Gains and Losses. Back to Top

Mind, Vol. 125, #400, 2016 Editorial Anil Gomes. Editorial. Articles A. J. Cotnoir. How Many Angels Can Be in the Same Place at the Same Time? A Defence of Mereological Universalism. William MacAskill. Normative Uncertainty as a Voting Problem. Ben Saunders. Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle. Luc Lauwers. Why Decision Theory Remains Constructively Incomplete. Juha Saatsi. On the ‘Indispensable Explanatory Role’ of Mathematics. David Mark Kovacs. Self-made People. Christopher Evan Franklin. If Anyone Should Be an Agent-Causalist, then Everyone Should Be an Agent-Causalist. Joe Mintoff. Why Moral Principles? Daniel Stoljar. The Semantics of ‘What it’s like’ and the Nature of Consciousness. Nicholas J. J. Smith. Infinite Decisions and Rationally Negligible Probabilities. Book Reviews Ori J. Herstein. Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good , by Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco. Charles Macmillan Urban. Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate , edited by Joseph K. Schear. Regina Rini. Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality , by Lisa Tessman. Gabriele Contessa. Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality , by Barbara Vetter. Amy Kind. Imagination and the Imaginary , by Kathleen Lennon. David James. Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze , by Frederick Beiser. Joshua Spencer. Could There Have Been Nothing? Against Metaphysical Nihilism , by Geraldine Coggins. Andrew Huddleston. Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity , edited by Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson. Malcolm Schofield. Platonic Conversations , by Mary Margaret McCabe. A. W. Price. Being Realistic about Reasons , by T. M. Scanlon. Back to Top

Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, Vol. 23, #1, 2017 Articles Klaus B. Beckmann, Ralf Dewenter and Tobias Thomas. Can News Draw Blood? The Impact of Media Coverage on the Number and Severity of Terror Attacks. Jeremy Bowling. International Cooperation: Testing Evolution of Cooperation Theories. Lucy Burton, Shane D. Johnson and Alex Braithwaite. Potential uses of Numerical Simulation for the Modelling of Civil Conflict. Chletsos Michael and Roupakias Stelios. Defense Spending and Unemployment. Evidence from Southern European Countries. Back to Top

Plato Journal, Vol. 15, 2015 Editorial Michael Erler, Angela Ulacco. Editorial. Articles Thomas C. Brickhouse, Nicholas D. Smith. Socrates on the Emotions. Yosef Z. Liebersohn. Socrates, Wake Up! An Analysis and Exegesis of the “Preface” in Plato’s Crito (43a1-b9). Nathalie Nercam. L’introduction Problématique du Timée (17a-27a). Christopher Moore. 'Philosophy' in Plato's Phaedrus. Laura Candiotto. Plato’s Cosmological Medicine in the Discourse of Eryximachus in the Symposium. The Responsibility of a Harmonic Techne. Anthony Hooper. Scaling the Ladder. Why the Final Step of the Lover’s Ascent is a Generalizing Step. Reviews William Henry Furness Altman. [Review] Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading. By Christopher P. Long. Franco Ferrari. [Review] Plato’s Parmenides Reconsidered. By Mehmet Tabak. Back to Top

The Monist, Vol. 99, #4, 2016 Issue topic: Conservatism Articles Martin Beckstein; Francis Cheneval. Conservatism: Analytically Reconsidered. Geoffrey Brennan; Alan Hamlin. Practical Conservatism. Geoffrey Brennan; Alan Hamlin. Conservative Value. Vanessa Rampton. The Impossibility of Conservatism? Insights from Russian History. Nir Eyal; Emma Tieffenbach. Incommensurability and Trade. Guy Kahane; Jonathan Pugh; Julian Savulescu. Bioconservatism, Partiality, and the Human-Nature Objection to Enhancement. Kieron O’Hara. Conservatism, Epistemology, and Value. Kristóf Nyíri. Conservatism and Common-Sense Realism. Back to Top

Sophia, Vol. 55, #4, 2016 Bimal K Matilal Memorial Issue: 25th death anniversary; Issue Editors: Jay L. Garfield, Purushottama Bilimoria Editorial Purushottama Bilimoria, Jay L. Garfield. Editorial: Bimal Krishna Matilal, 1935–1991. Original Papers Arindam Chakrabarti. Remembering Matilal on Remembering. Prabal Kumar Sen. Śruti as a Means of Establishing Ajñāna. Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, Purushottama Bilimoria, Jaysankar L. Shaw. Absence: An Indo-Analytic Inquiry. Richard P. Hayes. When a Philosopher’s Stone Turns Gold into Base Metal. Priyambada Sarkar. The Paradox of Ineffability: Matilal and Early Wittgenstein. Amita Chatterjee. Computational Traits in Navya-Nyāya? Richard Sorabji. Tagore in Debate with Gandhi: Freedom as Creativity. Bindu Puri. Gandhi and Tagore on the Idea of the Surplus, Creativity and Freedom: In Conversation with Richard Sorabji. Erratum Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, Purushottama Bilimoria, Jaysankar L. Shaw. Absence: An Indo-Analytic Inquiry. Brief Communication Niranjan Saha. A Survey of Modern Scholars’ Views on Śaṃkara’s Authorship of the Bhagavadgītābhāsya. Book Reviews Amitabha Dasgupta. Review of Sharad Deshpande (ed.), Philosophy in Colonial India. Constant J. Mews. Review of Wayne Hudson, Australian Religious Thought. Review Paper Debashish Banerji. World Between Chaos and Homogeneity: a Review Discussion of The Clasp of Civilizations by Richard Hartz. Back to Top

Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 43, 2016 Topic: Descartes’ Treatise on Man and its Reception; Editors: Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Stephen Gaukroger Chapters Delphine Antoine-Mahut. The Story of L’Homme. Annie Bitbol-Hespériès. The Primacy of L’Homme in the 1664 Parisian Edition by Clerselier. Franco A. Meschini. New Indications for Critical Edition of L’Homme. Stephen Gaukroger. L’Homme in English. Tad M. Schmaltz. The Early Dutch Reception of L’Homme. Raffaele Carbone. The Critical Reception of Cartesian Physiology in Tommaso Cornelio’s Progymnasmata Physica. Domenico Collacciani. The Reception of L’Homme Among the Leuven Physicians: The Condemnation of 1662 and the Origins of Occasionalism. Philippe Drieux. Machine and Communication of Corporeal Dispositions in Descartes and La Forge: The Mysterious ‘Article 83’ of L’Homme and La Forge’s Comments. Emanuela Scribano. La Forge on Memory: From the Treatise on Man to the Treatise on the Human Mind. Gabriel Alban-Zapata. Light and Man: An Anomaly in the Treatise on Light? Raphaële Andrault. Anatomy, Mechanism and Anthropology: Nicolas Steno’s Reading of L’Homme. Steven Nadler. The Art of Cartesianism: The Illustrations of Clerselier’s Edition of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664). Claude Gautier. A Treatise of Human Nature, a Treatise of the World? Julie Henry. What the Body Can Do: A Comparative Reading of Descartes’ Treatise on Man and Spinoza’s Physical Interlude. Arnaud Milanese. Hobbes and Descartes on Anthropology: Is There a Debt of Hobbesian Anthropology to L’Homme? Stephen Gaukroger. Enlightenment Criticisms of Descartes’ Anthropology. Gary Hatfield. L’Homme in Psychology and Neuroscience. Barnaby R. Hutchins, Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Charles T. Wolfe. The Embodied Descartes: Contemporary Readings of L’Homme. Back to Top

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How to build a new majority in American politics

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, partisans on both sides are anxious about the future of their party. And they should be. Both the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries revealed deep fault lines in the parties’ respective coalitions, fault lines that are not going away.

As both parties struggle to orient their future, here are two pieces of advice:

The winning side in American politics is always the side that offers the biggest tent;

Building a winning majority requires thinking past “left” and “right.”

The big-tent principle of coalition building in American politics follows from two basic premises.

First, we are a very big and diverse country, and most public opinion across issues does not cohere along any meaningful left-right spectrum. By a political junkie’s standard, most voters are consistently inconsistent across a wide range of issues on a conventional liberal-conservative scale. Self-proclaimed “moderates,” especially, are all over the place. There are also many single-issue activists groups in politics, all seeking to find a party home.

Second, all our national elections are plurality single-winner elections, which makes it very difficult for third parties to gain traction. As a result, America has always been a two-party nation.

Given the diversity of underlying opinion, shoehorning a plurality of voters into one party is an exercise in trade-offs and conflict management. As the political scientists Gary Miller and Norman Schofield have noted: “Successful American parties must be coalitions of enemies. A party gets to be a majority party by forming fragile ties across wide and deep differences in one dimension or the other. Maintaining such diverse majority coalitions is necessarily an enormous struggle against strong centrifugal forces.”

The dream of a consistent “centrist coalition” is and will always be a fantasy

The winning side is the side that does the best job of forcing the most truces among otherwise competing groups. The political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once concisely defined a political party as “an organized effort to gain political power.” The definition may sound mercenary, but it speaks to the basic reality of political competition. And to gain power, both Democrats and Republicans have enforced illusory binary coherence on the otherwise incoherent miasma of voters and groups in society.

By my guess, if we had a proportional representation system in American politics, we’d have six parties, which I’ve laid out below, along with my guesstimate on the percentage of seats they’d fill in a national legislature. I also assess where each party would stand on six key issues that could potentially organize politics.

Most people would attempt to place these six parties on a left-right spectrum, because that’s how we think about politics. But this is not quite right. Depending on the issue, the six parties would line up differently. There’s no universal left-right dimension. Depending on which is the organizing principle of politics, the coalitions would come down differently. Politics is multidimensional.

So the next time somebody tells you Democrats or Republicans should move to the left or to the right, you should look at that person quizzically and ask: On which issues?

Similarly, the next time somebody tells you about a new centrist movement, you should ask them: On which issues? The center varies by issue. Platitudes about civility and process are not the same as moderation and actual issue compromise. Likewise, while bipartisanship is possible, it varies by issue. The dream of a consistent “centrist coalition” is and will always be a fantasy.

The reason polarization relatively was low from the 1940s through the 1980s was because Democrats were a disorganized big-tent party. Democrats and Republicans sometimes voted together because they and their constituents agreed with each other on the substance (or sometimes, in the case of log rolls, the irrelevance) of the issues, not because they subscribed to some underlying Platonic ideal of bipartisan compromise as the summum bonum of public service. The centrists were those who were genuinely cross-pressured between the programs of two major parties.

The Democratic Party was a majority for a simple reason. It maintained a big-tent coalition capacious enough to allow room for what often felt like two separate parties: Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats.

In a proportional representation system, one could envision a minority governing “centrist” coalition of Progressives and Whigs, and more. This is a good reason why self-proclaimed “centrists” and other supporters of bipartisanship should support electoral reforms that allow for more of a multi-party system.

But in our winner-take-all system, this coalition is not enough for a majority party. Progressives need to band with Labor/Left to have a chance of winning, which creates a Democratic Party that is limited in the ability to achieve possible consensus with what I here call the Whigs (a.k.a. establishment Republicans). In theory, Labor/Left, Progressives, and Whigs could have a majority party. But both Liberals and Whigs would have to agree to disagree on some of their principles for the sake of a majoritarian coalition. For now, they haven’t. Old loyalties are sticky.

The big-tent principle in action

From the 1930s through the early 1990s, the Democratic Party was the majority party in Congress. Democrats controlled the House for 58 out of the 62 years between 1933 and 1995, and controlled the Senate for 52 out of 62 years. They also controlled most state legislatures.

The two factions within the party often disagreed. Sometimes Northern Democrats voted with Republicans against Southern Democrats (often on civil rights). Sometimes Southern Democrats voted with Republicans against Northern Democrats (often on economic issues). Scholars and journalists frequently bemoaned the incoherence and disorganization of the Democratic Party, a lament encapsulated in Will Rogers’s oft-repeated phrase: “I’m not a member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.”

But this disorganization was also the Democrats’ strength. By allowing a wide range of candidates to claim the Democratic name while standing for different things, Democrats maintained a consistent majority.

As the Democratic Party became more unified in the 1980s and early 1990s, the tent became smaller. The centrifugal forces won out, leaving more and more longtime Democratic groups and voters feeling tossed from their party.

In 1994, Republicans took back the House and the Senate. Southern conservative Democrats got replaced by Southern conservative Republicans. The Democratic coalition narrowed.

The Republicans’ big-tent vision was encapsulated in the Reagan coalition: traditional economic conservatives who wanted lower taxes and less business regulation, working-class “Reagan Democrats” who felt the Democrats’ civil rights agenda had gone too far, Christian conservatives who wanted a return to traditional values, and anti-communists who saw America as a force for good in the world.

The unifying vision of “limited government” and “conservatism” meant different things to different groups within the party coalition. They were, however, united in their sense that the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy was not for them.

The big tent worked. When the 2018 election rolls around, Republicans will have held the House for 20 out of 24 years and the Senate for 14 out of 24 years.

Are other coalitions possible?

In our current politics, Republicans are still held together by being pro-market and pro–traditional values. Democrats are held together by being more socially liberal, more skeptical of markets, and more supportive of social welfare.

By contrast, issues of both foreign policy and civil liberties now more directly cut across the existing party coalitions, mostly because these issues have played a less central role in our public conversation. But if they become more prominent, party coalitions could change.

For example, if Trump’s authoritarian tendencies translate into aggressive domestic spying and crackdowns on First Amendment rights of free assembly, free speech, and a free press, the pushback could be significant. If so, Democrats could expand their coalition to incorporate Libertarians and some Whigs. However, this is complicated by the fact that Democrats and Libertarians would have to resolve some fundamental conflicts over the role of markets and the social safety net, or agree to deemphasize these issues.

Similarly, if Trump makes good on his “America first” foreign policy promises and increases global instability as a result, foreign policy issues could return to the center of American politics. Democrats could expand to incorporate Whigs who placed similar value in preserving and defending America’s post–World War II alliances. However, Democrats could also potentially lose some liberals who favor a smaller international role for the United States.

A populist coalition between the Nationalist-Populists, Labor/Left, and some Progressives is also possible, if economic issues come to dominate everything else in politics, including now-prominent social and identity politics issues. This could happen if the economy went into a major tailspin. It would also be more likely if the Democratic Party coalition incorporates Libertarians, Whigs, or both, or becomes more pro-corporate and more interventionist in foreign policy. I suspect this realignment will happen eventually, but it will take some time to get there.

For the past eight years, Republicans have benefited in holding together their coalition together by focusing all of their energy on a common, unifying enemy: Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton

It’s also possible that new issues could arise, and give rise to new factions or even new parties. Indeed, many coalitions are conceivably possible. It all depends on which issue becomes the central dividing line of politics. “What happens in politics,” Schattschneider writes, “depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes, etc. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of possible conflicts gains the dominant position.”

For Democrats, then, the strongest winning strategy would be to find a new dividing line. As the political scientist William Riker writes, the winning strategy for a minority is “to divide the majority party with a new alternative … if successful this maneuver produces a new majority coalition composed of the old minority and the portion of the old majority that likes the new alternative better.” But this is easier said than done.

The Republicans’ national success — the presidency, majorities in the House and Senate, unified control of 25 state governments — is a tribute to their ability to hold their coalition together. Many different people vote Republican for many different reasons. Republicans also benefit from geography, since their voters are more efficiently allocated throughout the country. Democrats are more narrowly clustered in major metropolitan areas and coastal states, where they have supermajorities.

For the past eight years, Republicans have benefited in holding together their coalition together by focusing all of their energy on a common, unifying enemy: Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton. They benefited by being the opposition party, which meant they weren’t responsible for setting the agenda. And they could vote all they wanted to repeal Obamacare for symbolic reasons, never once having to worry that they would run afoul of Colin Powell’s rule: You break it, you own it. Now that Republicans have unified control, the disagreements within the party actually need to be worked out.

When they take over unified control of government in 2017, Republicans will be an awkward “coalition of enemies.” Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump all have different visions for the Republican Party, and none are big-tent, inclusive visions. They campaigned separately, and it’s hard to see how they can govern together.

As Julia Azari has convincingly argued, Trump’s presidency may well signal the “end of the Reagan era.” After all, the current party coalition has held together now for about four decades, which is as long as any party coalition has ever held together in the history of American politics. The conditions that brought the current coalition together feel less and relevant as the decades go by. Today, the median-aged American (age 37) would have been a year old in 1980. Party coalitions have a life span. And a “coalition of enemies” can only stay friends for so long.

Can Democrats build a new majority?

One narrative Democrats might take away from the 2016 election is that they are actually the majority party, and they don’t need to expand their coalition or change the dividing line in politics. After all, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote. And demography is on the Democrats’ side. But demographic change is slow, and its directionality is not guaranteed: It is not destiny. Just because Latinos and African Americans vote Democratic now doesn’t mean their loyalty is guaranteed in perpetuity.

If Democrats are going to make 2018 gains, they’re going to have to venture deep into Republican territory

Democrats also have a problem in that their core demographic groups — highly educated white liberals and minorities — are highly geographically concentrated. If anything, the Democrats’ geographic reach became even more limited in 2016. Democrats can complain all they want about the unfairness of the weird ways in which rural America gets overrepresented, but they need to win big majorities before they can change the system.

Democrats might also comfort themselves that there is always an electoral backlash against the party that controls the White House, an almost “thermostatic” ebb and flow to partisan fortunes in America. The out-of-power party almost always picks up congressional seats in a midterm. But if Democrats are going to make 2018 gains, they’re going to have to venture deep into Republican territory. They’ve only held the House for four out of the past 24 years, and they’ll be defending 25 Senate seats, including 10 in states that voted for Trump.

Certainly, Democrats can wait for a collapse of the Republican coalition. But they need to have a winning strategy for building a new majoritarian politics, too. Both civil liberties and foreign policy could be powerful wedge issues. Here, Democrats might be encouraged to note that Mitch McConnell did not take kindly to Trump’s suggestion that flag burners be jailed and stripped of their citizenship, and that McConnell has also been a strong supporter of the NATO alliance, which Trump has threatened to undermine.

If a Trump administration enjoins these fights, he could create a lot of disaffected Republicans. Whether Democrats can take advantage electorally depends on whether they are willing to build a coalition that’s welcoming to disaffected Republicans. Again, the party that has the most capacious big tent is the winning party. Alternatively, Democrats and Republicans might learn to work together in bipartisan ways on these issues, building some new working relationships.

If Democrats want to start winning, they’ll have to find a way to shift the dividing line in American politics to build a big-tent coalition where they’re the majority. And to do so, they’ll have to think bigger than left versus right. If Republicans want to keep winning, they’re going to need to keep political debate where it currently is, and continue to suppress the divisions within their party. Both are daunting challenges. But in the zero-sum nature of two-party competition, one of these two things has to happen.

This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.

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