I must confess I am somewhat puzzled by the general tenor of many of the comments on this blog. When I or others talk about changes in this country that are worth fighting for, up pop a number of commentators to assure us that we are not likely to succeed, whether because of the weaknesses and failings of professional politicians or because of the inadequacies of the general population. To which the only response I can think of is “duh.” Does anybody reading this blog think that I and the others are starry eyed Pollyannas? I have been on the losing side of political battles for a bit more than 60 years now. Even if I am slow, you would think that by now I would have learned that my chances of success are something less than stellar. But what is the alternative? I am not compelled to go on fighting because my personal situation is safe, comfortable, and affluent. So I could, if I chose, simply sit on the sidelines and do my best to discourage anybody who tries to fight and make a difference. I choose not to do that, but I do not need to delude myself in order to keep my spirits up. As I have written many times and have said to students even more times, the secret to remaining in the fight is to find something you can do to contribute to that fight that you actually enjoy doing. That way, you will keep doing it even when you are losing or when the attention of the world has turned elsewhere. Some people like going to demonstrations. They should do so. Some like knocking on doors or passing out petitions or writing to Congresspersons and senators. They should do that. I like writing and I like raising money out of my computer so that is what I have been doing for most of my life. Is that enough? Of course not. Is it the most important thing to do? No. It is just a contribution that I enjoy and that I can therefore keep doing month after month, year after year, decade after decade.
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23 comments:
Well said.
Professor Wolff,
If this post is directed at me, I believe you are misconstruing my point (perhaps inaptly articulated in part due to the space limitation of the Comment section). My point is that if you and others wish to improve the everyday economic lot of Americans, you should focus on the small, incremental changes that have a realistic likelihood of succeeding, not those which call for large scale overhauling of the Constitution (e.g., amending the Constitution to limit the tenure of Supreme Court justices, a long shot at best, which was proposed by one of your commenters), or a repudiation of our economic system. Not only are such grand efforts likely to fail, in the unlikely event they do succeed, they are likely to have adverse unintended consequences. The small incremental changes, e.g., passing the Lori Ledbetter Equal Pay Act, are more likely to have beneficial consequences for the segment of the population it is aimed at. Regarding the Supreme Court, enlarging it in order to allow the appointment of more progressive justices in the short term, aside from the odds against its being accomplished, will also give the conservatives more seats to fill with conservative leaning justices, and will also encourage them to do the same once they are in power, adding even more conservative seats to the Court. The Court has been fixed at 9 justices since 1869. When President Roosevelt lost his fight to pack the Court, he waited for four vacancies, which he then filled with Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter and William Douglas. Currently, the two oldest conservative justices are Thomas (72 yrs.) and Alito (70 yrs.). While they are significantly younger than J. Ginsburg at her death, the focus should be on electing progressive presidential candidates for two terms in a row, preferably three (Biden, Harris, and Harris again) so that they will be in office when Thomas and/or Alito decide to retire or join J. Ginsberg, and making sure they are in office to replace J. Breyer (82 yrs.) This would restore the liberals to a 5 to 4 majority, with Roberts as the swing vote.
I am not arguing that progressives should throw in the towel and stop fighting – they should just fight smarter.
MS
I could not agree more, as I think my post should make clear. Small incremental improvements are the best we can hope for, which is why I plug on doing my little bits here and there. As for packing the Supreme Court, that is I think a practical question on which my knowledge is quite limited, but I would simply point out that although I can perfectly well live out the rest of my life the way things are now, there are scores of millions of Americans of whom that is not true, and they need change in less than 15 or 20 years.
"Lawrence Lessig: So why do I spend all of my time working on this issue? [audience laughter] So this is a story I’ve told a bunch of times. Let me just tell it one last time, and then… So, I write about this in my book. I was speaking at Dartmouth. A woman said to me, “Professor, you’ve convinced me. You’ve convinced me. This is completely hopeless. There’s nothing we can do.” And as I wrote in my book, when she said that, I had an image in my head of my kid, who then was about 6. And I thought, what if a doctor came to me and said, “Your son has terminal brain cancer and there’s nothing you can do.” Would I do nothing? You know, obviously no. You’d do everything. You’d do everything. You know, and that is what love means. Right? That’s what love means. It means working, acting fiercely against the odds. And then my next thought was, you know, even we liberals love our country. [audience laughter] And so this observation of the impossibility of this challenge is irrelevant, because we love. And we love means we act regardless of how impossible this is. But because of this – and that is, I think, the – that is the emotion that we need to find here. And for me, it really is deeply tied up with love, not just a country of us, kids, you look at these kids, three of them, in my life, handing over a world that is miles below the world that I inherited from my parents. And no hope for fixing this until we fix this problem. So, yeah, it’s hopeless. It’s just the only fight we have. Only fight we have."
Lawrence Lessig is good company to be in.
I think you do plenty. Just writing this blog is a significant contribution - especially in having to put up with....and I'm speaking for myself here....rather lame commentary from time to time.
For me at least political participation is no great sacrifice.
It's neoliberal brainwashing that the "natural" state of man/woman is sitting on your coach watching TV or buying a new TV in a mall (on online during the pandemic) and that public participation is a hassle or a sacrifice from "real" life watching half-time at the superbowl.
Hannah Arendt is very good on this topic: she points how participation in the polis was an integral part of a flourishing life for Aristotle and other Greeks and how the so-calling founding fathers of the U.S. shared that belief as did many revolutionary socialists in the libertarian tradition.
Prof. Lessig’s dedication to lost causes is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that he served as one of Justice Scalia’s law clerks during the 1990-01 term, which did little to ameliorate Scailia’s conservative textualist legal philosophy, and presumably had little beneficial effect for Lessing’s liberal ideology. Indeed, during that single year, J. Scalia wrote the majority opinion in Harmelin v. Michigan (1991), sustaining the petitioner’s mandatory life in prison sentence, without the possibility of parole, for the possession of 650 grams of cocaine, rejecting an 8th Amendment challenge that the sentence was cruel and unusual; Barnes v. Glenn Theatre, Inc. (1991), concurring that the 1st Amendment did not preclude criminal prosecution for offering complete nude dancing (a case in which J. Souter, one of Prof. Woolf’s former students, provided a vigorous dissent); and Houston Lawyers; Assn. v. Attorney General (1991), in which he dissented from an opinion which held that the Voting Rights Act applied to judicial elections in states in which judges were elected. One may speculate regarding what influence, if any, the young Lessig had in moderating J. Scalia’s views.
But, to his credit, J. Scalia dissented in County of Riverside v. McLaughlin (1991), which sustained a practice of not providing a probable cause hearing to individuals arrested without a warrant for up to five days. In his dissent, J. Scalia told the following amusing anecdote: “The story is told of the elderly judge who, looking back over a long career, observes with satisfaction that, ‘when I was young, I probably let stand some convictions that should have been overturned, and when I was old I probably set aside some that should have stood; so overall, justice was done.’ I sometimes think that is an appropriate analog to this Court’s constitutional jurisprudence, which alternately creates rights that the Constitution does not contain and denies rights that it does. .... I respectfully dissent.” Perhaps the young Lessig succeeded in having some input on this dissent.
MS
Uh oh, my 72 year old memory has failed me again. J. Souter did not write a dissent in Barnes v Glenn Theatre, vigorous or otherwise. He wrote an opinion concurring in the judgment. However his concurring opinion displays his undergraduate exposure to philosophy (for which Prof. Wolff may perhaps take credit). He wrote:
“Although such performance dancing is inherently expressive, nudity per se is not. It is a condition, not an activity, and the voluntary assumption of that condition, without more, apparently expresses nothing beyond the view that the condition is somehow appropriate to the circumstances. But every voluntary act implies some such idea, and the implication is thus so common and minimal that calling all voluntary activity expressive would reduce the concept of expression to the point of the meaningless. A search for some expression beyond the minimal in the choice to go nude will often yield nothing: a person may choose nudity, for example, for maximum sunbathing. But when nudity is combined with expressive activity, its stimulative and attractive value certainly can enhance the force of expression, and a dancer’s acts in going from clothed to nude, as in a strip-tease, are integrated into the dance and its expressive function. Thus, I agree with the plurality and the dissent that an interest in freely engaging in the nude dancing at issue here is subject to a degree of First Amendment protection.”
J. Souter went on, however, to hold that under 1st Amendment jurisprudence, the State of Indiana had provided a sufficient rationale in its “substantial interest in combating the secondary effects of adult entertainment establishments of the sort typified by respondents’ establishments” to sustain the constitutionality of the statute.
The vigorous dissent was in fact written by J. White (who played football for Harvard), with the concurrence of Justices Marshall, Blackmun and Stevens. My apologies for my imperfect memory.
MS
Byron White played football for the Univ. of Colorado, not Harvard (and then played professionally). But as the kids say, whatever...
Two errors in the same posting. I am devastated. Not only did Byron White not play football for Harvard, as LFC correctly notes, he never attended Harvard. Wikipedia tells me that he attended Yale Law School, played professional football for the Detroit Lions, and went on to heroic service in the Navy during WWII, winning two Bronze Stars. They don’t make Supreme Court Justices like that anymore.
MS
@Anonymous 3:05pm
Or, as Sartre put it:
You don't fight fascism because you're going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist. You must always fight the fascists, whatever the consequences.
Eric’s comment has illuminated something for me, and now I think I see the problem, why I am at odds with a lot of the political sentiments expressed on this blog. It depends on what you see and define as “fascism.” :”Fascism” is defined on my online dictionary as, “a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.” Il Duce clearly qualifies as a promoter of fascism under this definition. It appears to me, however, that a lot of the commenters on this blog equate “capitalism” to “fascism.” If a person is motivated out of pure self-interest in maximizing their wealth, they are fascist. This is nonsense. They are selfish and, perhaps, despicable people, but they are far from fascists. Fascism is far worse than capitalism. And if you confuse the two, and believe like Sartre, “You must always fight the fascists, whatever the consequences” and you equate capitalism to fascism, then, in fact, the consequences can be quite dire, then you are going to refuse to support political candidates, viewing them as fascists, who simply do not agree with your view of how much better the world would be if socialism, rather than capitalism, were the dominant economic philosophy in this country. And in doing so, you are (1) doomed to being repeatedly disappointed by the election results in this country, and (2) by refusing to vote for capitalist moderates, equating them with fascists, making things much worse in this country, because you are giving the advantage to the political conservatives, whose opinions you and I may vehemently disagree with, but who are not fascists. And, in turn, you are increasing the likelihood that a true fascist, like Il Duce, will succeed in gaining power.
An example. I support a woman’s right to choose, and therefore I support Roe v. Wade. I believe that those who reject a woman’s right to choose, and advocate for overturning Roe v. Wade, are narrow minded and misguided. They are often driven by their narrow religious beliefs, which I don’t share. But does the fact that they wish to impose their religious beliefs on women who do not share those religious beliefs make them fascists? I do not believe it does – because we all have ideological views which we would like to make the dominant viewpoint in the country. By this definition, those who would prefer that socialism was the dominant economic philosophy in this country, and would have no compunctions imposing that economic philosophy on those who prefer capitalism, are also fascists. And then we are all fascists. And confusing the two attitudes has, I believe, helped to lead those of us who consider ourselves as liberals into the precarious position we find ourselves today. It is clear, given Cory Gardner’s announcement that he is not going to flip and will support Il Duce’s Supreme Court nominee to replace J. Ginsberg, that we will soon have six very conservative justices on the Supreme Court. In all likelihood, Roe v. Wade is doomed. Those six conservative justices are not fascists, however much I disagree with their political and constitutional views. But confusing fascism with capitalism and conservatism has helped put them where they are.
@Unknown, since you mentioned me, I'll state here that I do not consider all capitalists to be fascists, although I oppose both.
Eric,
You just made my point. I can see opposing all fascists, maintaining that fascism is per se despicable, and should be denounced uniformly. When you say “I oppose both,” do you mean that you oppose all capitalists, that they are as evil as fascists, that capitalism, like fascism, is to be uniformly denounced, that it’s 6 of one, half dozen of another? That Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, Gates and Job were/are as evil as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolin, Franco and Pinochet? Then, yes, by opposing both equally, you are confusing the two, and falling into the pitfall I am criticizing. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet did little, if any, good for the people they tyrannically ruled. You cannot say the same of Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, Gates and Job – that they had only an adverse effect on the world, with no redeeming qualities.
MS
MS,
Are you the MS from New Jersey whom I always used to argue with?
If so, welcome back.
To S. Wallerstein.
Affirmative.
MS
@Unknown/MS, I don't see the value, in the context of this discussion, of calling any of them "evil." Using that kind of language is just a rhetorical distraction.
Fascists like Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and many of their supporters, acted with malice, deliberately inflicting pain and suffering on their enemies.
I oppose capitalists because the effects of their guiding philosophy are harmful. But I don't see individual capitalists as necessarily malicious. Elizabeth Warren and Marianne Williamson, to take two prominent examples, are capitalists. I don't see either of them willingly employing violence—embracing torture like Pinochet or Mussolini, or ordering the execution of millions, including children, even babies, as Hitler did. Many capitalists, like Williamson, seem to me to simply be misguided about the effects of capitalism. Others, such as Warren, mistakenly believe that those negative effects are consequences of faulty implementations of capitalism that could be avoided with reforms, when in fact the negative effects are inherent to capitalism. I know many capitalists, including some of my close family members, who would never dream of intentionally hurting anyone in pursuit of personal economic or political interests, unlike the fascists.
(Incidentally, your mention of Henry Ford is problematic, given his Fascist sympathies, relationship with Hitler, longstanding antisemitism, and attempt to profit from his company's subsidiary operations in Nazi Germany.)
For the record:
Stalin was not a fascist. He was a Stalinist. His industrialization of the Soviet Union and his beating Hitler should be considered to his credit.
There was a huge debate on the Chilean left during the dictatorship on whether Pinochet was a fascist or not. The Communist Party, who tend to be more dogmatic than the rest of the left, insisted that he was, while the others claimed that he wasn't. Reasons: his dictatorship wasn't racist or economically nationalist (he lowered tariffs and let domestic industry go bankrupt), there was no mass movement (black or brown shirts, SS, etc.), his foreign policy was not aggressive or bellicose.
Carnegie and Rockefeller may have done some positive things (Marx himself points out that capitalism is progressive), but the working conditions in their factories were inhumane and if you tried to organize a union, you might end up dead.
My great uncle Julian started working at age 12 in one of Edison's factories (in New Jersey) and the working conditions there were cruel and brutal.
s. wallerstein,
Here we go again. You welcome me back and then immediately confront me with your typical semantic games. Stalin was not a fascist, he was a Stalinist. Right, tell that to the millions of innocent people he sent to the Gulag to freeze and starve. And Hitler was not a fascist, he was a Hitlerist; and Franco was not a fascist, he was a Francoist; and Pinochet was not a fascist, he was a Pinochetist; etc. etc.
And yes, working conditions in the factories owned by a lot of capitalists are horrible and degrading, but they beat being sent to the Gulag, or being arrested in the middle of the night and never being seen again; or being tortured and, if you are a woman, being raped. I am pretty sure if you asked the employees of these capitalists if they would prefer being sent to the Gulag, or imprisoned without a trial, or being tortured for their political beliefs, they would prefer working for the capitalist. Now, of course, they might prefer owning the means of production themselves, sharing the profits on an equal basis with their co-workers and improving their working conditions, and would prefer that over the two alternative options, but that is not the issue when the choice is between working for the capitalist or being sent to the Gulag. And I italicize might, because it is not a forgone conclusion that all, or even a majority, of the capitalists’ employees would prefer owning the means of production themselves. As another commenter on a previous post noted, attributing a quote to John Steinbeck which is more properly attributed to Ronald Wright. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” And as George Orwell wrote in more sophisticated terms:
“The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters.”
So, are we going to resume our tit-for-tat tete-a’-tetes? I hope not. The last time it happened, it irritated the heck out of Prof. Wolff.
MS
I don't play "semantic games". Words have a certain meaning and why not try to use them with a certain precision?
I know that in general parlance, "fascist" has come to mean any extreme rightwinger, but Orwell, whom you seem to admire (as I do too), in his essay "Politics and the English language", calls for more precision in our use of political language.
I don't know what your Orwell quote has to do with me, frankly. I tend to follow Chomsky who is a libertarian socialist and believes that any radical changes have to come from below, from the people themselves, not from an vanguard who has read certain sacred texts.
As for the tit for tat, there was absolutely no reason to accuse me of playing "semantic games", I didn't use any ad hominem remarks in my reply to you above. So you threw the first stone and you got one back.
@Wallerstein, useful info there re the debate as to whether Pinochet is properly considered having been a fascist. Not something I had previously thought about. Good for future reference.
Btw, are you a native chileno?
I've lived here for 41 years, but I was born in the U.S.
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