I have just finished reading the comments on my brief celebration of William Shatner's journey to the edge of space. I do honestly believe that if I were to reproduce here a picture of the famous element of the Sistine Chapel in which God reaches out a finger and gives life to Adam, the commentary would be completely focused on the question whether God had a little dirt under His fingernail.
Get a life!
Now look, I am a serious person. I made a good living for 50 years pontificating about God, Freedom, Immortality, and anything else you wish to mention. I blog, for God's sake, which means that I consider my opinions worthy of memorialization in the cloud. But when 90-year-old Capt. James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise goes up in a rocket, my heart flutters a little.
Beam me up, Scotty
Rereading Rousseau in preparation for teaching next semester has had on me interesting effect that I did not anticipate. It made clearer to me the present situation in the United States. I realized that by any reasonable 21st century construal of Rousseau’s analysis, it is not accurate to say that it is uncertain whether the United States will remain a representative democracy. It is more accurate to say that the United States is not now a representative democracy, if indeed it ever was. Let me explain.
The United States is formally or legally a representative democracy in which one of the two major parties no longer believes that control of the levers of government should be determined by elections. Instead, right now, the Republican Party with the active support of perhaps 35% or 40% of adult Americans, believes that elections are legitimate only when its candidate wins. I do not mean this puckishly or for dramatic effect. I mean quite literally that Republicans at the local, state, and national level are right now attempting to arrange things so that they will never again “lose” an election. In this effort, they are supported by scores of millions of Americans. Now, any time you find 80 million or more people believing something, it goes without saying that there will be countless reasons why they believe it, countless ways in which they believe it, and countless ways in which they act out of this belief.
Some of the Americans who believe that only elections in which the Republican wins are legitimate believe
that because they are white supremacist racists. Others believe it because they
are fundamentalist Christians. Still others neither believe it nor disbelieve
it but simply find it in their interest to act as though they do. But the total
net effect is that somewhat less, but not much less, than half of adult
Americans no longer have any functional, operational belief in representative
democracy.
Regardless of what happens in the 2022 or 2024 elections –
regardless of whether Republicans are literally able to steal the 2024
presidential election, as they are now deliberately, openly, systematically
preparing to do – it is clear that the United States is not in the usual
understanding of this term, a representative democracy, Wwhich is to say a polity in which it is generally accepted that control of government should be determined by democratic elections of representatives.
Because I so much fear what the Republicans will do with the vast
power of the American government if they succeed in seizing control of it, I
believe that all of us must do everything in our power to stop them, and that
may even involve pretending that we believe American democracy is at risk. But
the simple fact is that American democracy no longer exists.
If you respond that it never has existed, I will not argue
with you. After all, the next book on my reading list is a little tract
entitled In Defense of Anarchism.
I freely confess that it was rereading Of the Social Contract
that cleared my mind and made all of this transparently obvious to me in a way
that it had not quite been before.
There is something to be said for preparing to teach a course.
I have now completed my rereading of Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract. Once again, I am astonished by how much of it I had completely forgotten. For example, in Book 4 there is a succession of chapters totaling 20 pages in my edition about ancient Rome that the students can without loss skip over. On the other hand, there is a great deal that Rousseau has to say about the political states of his day that carry with it the clear implication that he would consider the United States to be absolutely anything other than a legitimate state with a sovereign people. I can see some interesting discussions developing in class about that subject.
Today I will start rereading the third book to be assigned
in the first segment of the course – my little book In Defense of Anarchism. It
has been quite some time since I have actually reread that essay and as with
the Locke and Rousseau, I will be curious to see what is in it that I have
forgotten about.
This is fun.
My grandfather on my father’s side was born in Paris in 1879 and was named Barnet. The family name was Zarembowich. In 1880 his parents emigated to the United States, entering at Castle Garden New York. A skeptical immigration official renamed his father Abraham Wolff and so, at least in America, we became the Wolff family. My grandfather was an active member of and a leader in the Socialist party in New York City, and had a comrade named Abe Shiplacof. When my grandmother, Ella Nislow Wolff and Abe Shiplacof’s wife both became pregnant, Barney and Abe made a little agreement that the first one to have a son would name him Karl Marx. Abe’s wife had a boy, so when my father was born shortly thereafter he was named Walter Harold Wolff, a name of no significance. When the two wives became pregnant again, it was agreed that the first one to have a boy would name him Friedrich Engels, but once again the Shiplacofs won the race and so my uncle was given the name “Robert Ingersoll” after a 19th-century orator known as “the great agnostic.”
My parents’ first child was my big sister Barbara, who
almost immediately was nicknamed Bobs. When
I was born, I was named Robert Paul, but it was impossible to have two children
in the family named Bobs and Bob, so I became Rob. At some point during my
growing up I declared my independence by announcing that I would be known to
the world as Bob. To this day, I am known as Bob to my friends but Rob to my
family – except for my cousins, the children of my father’s younger brother,
Benjamin. For some reason, Barney and Ella did not give Ben a middle name and
this lack apparently rankled so deeply that after Ben married Fanny, he gave
his two children two middle names each to compensate. The two of them, inheriting from their father
an appreciation of the importance of middle names, always referred to me and
addressed me as “Robert Paul.”
When my first wife was pregnant with our first child, we
debated about names if it were a boy. We were both rather taken by “Jonathan
Edward” but gave that up when we realized that the little boy’s initials would
be JEW. We settled, for no particular
reason, on Patrick Gideon Wolff. Since I do not like the name Pat I called our
son even when he was a little baby Patrick. Later on, I took to calling him by
his initials PG and this morphed into “Peege” which was my special nickname for
him. Nobody else in the world called Patrick “Peege” until he started as a
teenager competing in high-pressure chess tournaments. The other young hotshot
chess players heard me calling him “Peege” and they thought it was amusing so
for a while that was what he was called in the chess world.
My younger son we named Tobias Barrington Wolff, the middle
name coming from his godfather Barrington Moore, Jr. Since he was a delightfully cherubic little
boy, he quite naturally came to be known in the family as Toby. This ended one
day when he informed me soberly that henceforward he would be known as “Tobias.”
I took this as it was intended, not as a request but as a command, and from
that day to this I have never called him “Toby” again.
So I was “Rob” to my family, save for my cousins Tony and
Cora, to whom I was “Robert Paul” and I was “Bob” to the world. I became “Robert
Paul Wolff” as a result of a series of comic confusions when I was a young man
at Harvard. Starting when I was a 17-year-old sophomore and continuing on as a
young Instructor at Harvard I made a good deal of noise about one thing and
another politically and got confused with a very prominent, rather
conservative, and also rather fat Professor of History named “Robert Lee Wolff.” To
distinguish myself from Prof. Wolff, who by 1961 was chair of the Harvard History
Department and publicly offended by being confused with a young left-wing
whippersnapper, I adopted “Robert Paul Wolff” as my professional name and it
has stuck to me for the past 60 years.
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,Faithful readers of this blog, of which there appear to be a few, will have noticed that I have not been posting much lately. In part this is because I find the world excessively depressing and it is not, as they say, ego syntonic for me constantly to be crying “alack and alas.” But it is also that after a lifetime in the Academy I have not developed the routinized work habits so cherished by capitalist employers.
Sometimes words pour from me as water from the tap, filling
the page and lapping over onto the margins. But then there are times when I
simply am not moved to write. My thoughts never stop, but the need to express
them publicly is quiet.
These days I am obsessed by the efforts to push myself to
walk faster each morning so that my heart rate gets up to the level at which,
so the doctors have told me, I shall postpone the development of my Parkinson’s
disease. For amusement, I do complicated jigsaw puzzles which I find oddly
satisfying. That and rereading the texts that I shall be assigning next
semester keep an 87-year-old man adequately busy.
Never fear. If experience is any indication, I shall soon
enough be troubling you, if not deaf heaven, with my bootless cries.
