Clarence Thomas, concurring: "in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."
Calling all
@Yale
liberals--and their enemies.
@DouthatNYT
, Bryan Garsten, and I are teaching a new spring course on the crisis of liberalism, its origins, and possible outcomes. Syllabus:
“If a Native American liberation movement came and fired an R.P.G. at my apartment building because I’m living on stolen land, it wouldn’t be justified. You either accept international humanitarian law or you don’t.” -Rashid Khalidi
@andrewmarantz
Literally five or six of the last ten columns and opeds posted on all topics by
@nytopinion
are about disciplining the left, with zero counterpoint. Sad.
🔥 🔥 This will be read and taught for years.
Nikolas Bowie
@nikobowie
has written an extraordinary essay as a witness at the coming Supreme Court commission hearing.
Everyone should read and share it.
The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
"You throw out Christianity, you throw out the Torah, you throw out God, and w/in two generations people can’t recognize the difference between men and women or between a foreigner and a citizen,” warned
@yhazony
.
It is an ongoing national tragedy that
@DineshDSouza
writes about history, and I hope the national treasure of
@KevinMKruse
‘s rebuttals do something over the long run to claw back some political sanity, and not only to reaffirm historical truth.
1/ Today my piece on the Never Trump movement posts. This thread nerds out on European history in connection. If analogies are to be made with early twentieth century tumult, let’s not forget the descent into facism followed “the containment of the left.”
“But HLS professor Nikolas E. Bowie, who is not on the Council, viewed it with skepticism, writing in an email that the “actual threats to academic freedom” were Harvard’s resistance to students, faculty, and staff labor organizing efforts.”
For some, it will be most significant that Joe Biden won the popular vote but only barely won the presidency. For me, it is even more significant that Donald Trump already got more votes nationally than the 62 million last time.
How can the progressive outlook not require a major overhaul if it succeeds thanks to well-off suburbs, with some evidence of softening minority support?
Princeton's school of international affairs "will continue to be run by 21st-century Wilsonians-who will act as if their worldview sprang from nowhere, that its progenitor didn't exist, repudiating their benefactor while accepting his inheritance."
Someday, somebody needs to write a doctoral dissertation on how the center right enabled the far right, Trump-washed itself, and inoculated the center left against seeking the best solutions from progressives.
Someday, somebody needs to write a doctoral dissertation on how and why so many on the Bernie Sanders campaign team ended up on the far right of American politics, and so many on the Mitt Romney team ended up on the center left.
For the ageing among his followers, like me, Bernie Sanders’s candidacies have provided the earliest glimpse of a future denied our generation after 1989, with its economic “freedom” and endless war—but one which our children deserve and have only begun to win. Thank you Bernie.
Happy pub date to “Liberalism against Itself.” If you come nearest the number between 1-1000 I just wrote on a scrap of paper, I will send you one of my freebies.
@SlaughterAM
Fair enough. I just don’t see your reasons as persuasive enough. An illegal show of force after six years-eroding international norms to contest violations of others-is neither effective nor moral.
One thing I learned studying law is that a lot of what people do every day is illegal and much of our ability to live in society is predicated on the discretionary non-application of laws.
It was an incredible thing, completely formative, to watch liberal elites fail almost unanimously. What is even harder to understand is the failure of accountability that followed.
"We are *not* all in this together. Some pigs are smarter than other pigs and deserve more money."
@DSMarkovits
on Pete Buttigieg, the rise of management consultancy, spiraling inequality--and gargantuan rationalization.
Someone needs to say it: Rahm Emanuel’s “realism” in 2009 destroyed the potential of a transformational mandate and, thus, contributed to getting us where we are.
So true. "Every man must have an attitude to the French Revolution - must make a decision about it somehow - as part of the stand that he generally takes in life." Herbert Butterfield, 1949
This piece and the related book are a huge big deal. We are living through the end state (or perfection) of something with roots centuries ago. “Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life” (Stendhal, The Red and the Black).
1/ There is a difference between due caution or salutary fear, on the one hand, and self-confirming and -fulfilling paranoia, on the other. Whether we stray from one to the other is up to us.
Truth from
@jbouie
: "History ... is a dialogue between the present and the past, between communities of scholars and thinkers working to understand the record of what came before-it is always a process of change and revision and critique."
This is hugely disappointing for a program in which I have guest taught, should concern people of all political views, and remind us that donors are welcome to patronize academic life without dictating content.
@beverlygage
is a hero.
Sometimes it seems as if liberalism consists in the perpetual rediscovery that it cannot realize its own principles because of its antidemocratic alliances.
“...a system in which the great questions of our country are settled by the deaths of octogenarians is too close to late-Soviet Politburo politics for comfort.”
Very excited to teach "Foundations of American Legal Thought" - from the 1890s to (aspects of) the near present -- starting tomorrow. Syllabus not set in stone but...
“This is a shocking and unnecessary sell out by Harvard and FAS leaders who, at the same time, claim to be worried about Harvard College’s acceptance of slavery in the 1700s,” Skocpol added. “Feel free to quote me.”
This worked well last time so... Guess close to the number I have in mind between 1 and 1000 and I will send you one! (Specify if you care to receive the hardcover or the paperback, which has extra stuff.)
In my first ever piece for
@jacobinmag
, I offer a few thoughts on
@martinhaegglund
's extraordinary new book. It challenges those who claim the mantle of Marxism to figure out what, precisely, they mean - with Martin's help.
William Lind discovers my
@nytopinion
piece on “cultural Marxism,” and recommends I educate myself by reading the works of Martin Jay, not realizing Jay was my dissertation adviser.
Barring procrastination, a year from now I will be putting finishing touches on the Carlyle lectures in the history of political thought for 2022 on Cold War liberalism. Mark Goldie’s 2021 series begins in a couple of weeks.
Sad to see Hannah Arendt’s thought reduced in the last few years to a source of Hallmark Greeting Cards-level sayings about political evil, from people not so much ignorant of as uninterested in her work.
“If liberals want to get the next decade right, after the previous one in which we repeatedly failed to save the world while telling ourselves we were doing so, we will need to stop nudging and begin fighting.”