FRIDAY LIST #5, A DAY LATE

David Palmeter said:  Recurring contribution to DLCC.

Bryant Durrell said:  $25 to Warren, $25 to Castro.

Charles Perkins:  I attended an online training (on canvassing) for Elizabeth Warren's campaign.

I put my EW sign in my window.

I registered for another EW training (phone banking).

I made sure I was registered to vote in California and got my "REAL" ID (ugh) at the DMV ("ugh")— but now I can vote for Warren in the California primary.

I gave $5 to Elizabeth Warren.

Robert Paul Wolff:  I donated $100 to a local candidate for NC Secretary of State

I gave my usual small donation to Bernie

I signed up for some local political work

I curated the Friday List [this is cheaty, I know]

EVERY SO OFTEN IT IS USEFUL TO REMIND OURSELVES

This link takes you to a news report of a wealthy donor fundraiser for Joe Biden last June in which Biden is quoted directly as saying "It’s all within our wheelhouse, and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change."

This was not a gaffe, this was the authentic Joe Biden.

GOOD GRIEF, IT IS THURSDAY

Time to assemble another Friday List.  I am still mulling Jerry Fresia's suggestion of ways to expand its reach and impact.

Send in your accounts of your doings.

AS PROMISED, AN ANSWER TO TOM CATHCART

I promised Tom Cathcart an explanation of my cryptic remark that the NY TIMES’s 1619 Project was “the wrong story.”  I thought I could get away with referencing my book, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, but Tom has read that [one of the few!] and is still puzzled, so here goes.

The standard story of America is that it is exceptional, a nation founded on an idea, The Idea of Freedom, a land, to be sure with defects [brief allusion to slavery], but nonetheless dedicated over its long life to the gradual realization of The Idea of Freedom, first by the freeing of the slaves, then by the slow extension of suffrage to women, to Negroes, then by the modern Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the LGBTQ Movement and throughout by the steady, onward, upward perfection of the vision of the Founding Fathers.  For this reason, America has been and remains a City on a Hill, a model for all mankind, the Leader of the Free World, the Last Best Hope for Mankind.

For eighty-five years, going all the way back to W. E. B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, four generations of great scholars, Black and White, have been challenging and revising that story.  The 1619 Project is a splendid popular compendium of the results of their research.  The Project places the slaves and their descendants at the center of the American story rather than at the periphery.  But it is still a story of free White men and women and their slaves.  The story is so changed as to be almost unrecognizable, but it is still the same story.

The true story is different [and here I rely entirely on those very same scholars, for I have contributed not so much as a single brick to the edifice they have reared by their splendid work.]  From those earliest days in the 17^th century, America was a colonial outpost built on unfree labor White and Black.  In early Colonial America, there were very few Whites whom we today would recognize as free, free to live where they chose, free to work as they chose, free to marry whom they chose.  At the outset, there was no clearly defined status of chattel slavery, for no such status existed in the English Common Law that the settlers brought with them.  Slowly, over almost two centuries, in inseparable interaction with one another, two legal, social, and economic statuses crystallized:  Free White Citizenship and Black Chattel Slavery.  The process was local, complex, messy, and never successfully carried through, for indentured servitude for Whites continued for a long time and there were, contrary to all theory, free Black men and women prior to the Civil War.  But the status of free citizenship for Whites was defined in contrast to and even in terms of, the status of chattel slavery for Blacks.

America has never been a City Upon a Hill, the Only Nation Founded On An Idea, the Last Best Hope on earth.  It was, at the outset, a White Settler colony built on unfree labor, White and Black, and that fact must be made central to any understanding of its nature today.

Something like that is the true story of America.

RESPONSE TO JORDAN

Jordan asks whether I might videotape and post the sessions of my course.  I think that would not be a good idea.  It would transform a course into a performance, and demote the students to an audience.  I have, after all, already posted fourteen YouTube lectures on Marx, Mannheim, and Wilmsen!  The world is not crying out for more.

THE FALL SEMESTER UPON US

And come next Tuesday, I shall be flying up to NY every week to teach with Todd Gitlin.  For those who are interested, here is the syllabus:

Mystifications of Social Reality

SOCI GU4600

Fall 2019

Tuesdays, 2:10-4 pm

Pulitzer Hall 202

Instructors:  Professors Todd Gitlin (Sociology, Journalism, Communications) and Robert Paul Wolff (Philosophy, Afro-American Studies)

I.                    Rationale for the course

            The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were marked by the discovery of a new object of systematic inquiry in addition to Nature and the Individual:  Society.  First Economics, then Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Science developed strikingly new understandings of the actions, beliefs, and institutional arrangements of men and women in society, which were seen as obeying regular laws not derivable from, or reducible to, either the laws of nature or the laws of individual behavior.  But these new disciplines, which came to be called the Social Sciences, were different from their predecessors in one fundamental and centrally important way:  They revealed the study of society, and indeed society itself, to be mystified, ideologically encoded, shaped and distorted by the interests and beliefs of men and women even though those living in society or studying it often were oblivious of this fact.

            In this course we shall read in depth a series of texts by authors who explored the ideological mystifications of social reality in their disciplines.  The goal of the course is not merely to inform students of these authors and their ideas but to strengthen the ability of students to understand their own involvement in, indeed complicity in, ideological mystification.

II.                  Major Readings [there may be other assigned and suggested readings and videos]

1. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One; Communist Manifesto; “Alienated Labor” [Economics]
2. Max Weber, Economy and Society [Sociology, https://archive.org/stream/MaxWeberEconomyAndSociety/MaxWeberEconomyAndSociety_djvu.txt]
3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [Sociology, History; https://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/1/Weber_Max_1930-2005_The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism.pdf]
4. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia [Political Sociology]
5. Edwin Wilmsen, Land Filled With Flies [Ethnography]
6. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract [African-American Studies]
7. Robert Paul Wolff, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man [African-American Studies]
8. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams:  Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars [Sociology]

III.       Weekly assigned reading

Sept. 3:            Intro to seminar.  No assigned reading

Sept. 10:          Marx, Communist Manifesto (1848); “Alienated Labor” (1844)

Sept. 17:          Marx. Capital, Chapters 1-6

Sept. 24:          Marx, Capital, Chapters 7-10

Oct. 1:             Weber, Economy and Society, Part One, Chapters I and III, i-v

The Types of Legitimate Authority: The Basis of Legitimacy, The Three Pure Types of Authority: Traditional Authority, Legal Authority, Charismatic Authority; pp. 212-231,  241-254

Oct. 8:             Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

                        Short paper due

Oct. 15:           Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Parts I and II

Oct. 22:           Mannheim, Part IV

Oct. 29:           Wilmsen, Land Filled With Flies. Watch Professor Wolff’s four YouTube lectures on

                        Wilmsen. The first is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbU3yW2xIGE.

                          Students should bring comments and questions.

Nov. 5:             Mills, The Racial Contract

Nov. 12:          Wolff, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man

Nov. 19:          Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (excerpts)

Dec. 3:             General discussion and afterthoughts

Dec. 14:           Final paper due

III.               Writing Assignments

Each student is required to submit a 7-10 page mid-term essay on a topic of the student’s choosing, and a 15-20 page final essay due December 13.  The topic of the final paper must be approved by the Instructors no later than November 12.  Students are asked to submit two hard copies of assigned work, one for each Instructor, along with an electronic copy.

IV.                Grading

 Roughly one-third of the grade will be based on the mid-term essay and two-thirds on the final essay, with adjustments made on the basis of class participation.

V.                Supplements

Students who wish to explore the subject matter of the seminar in greater depth are invited to read Professor Wolff’s two books on the thought of Karl Marx, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky and Understanding Marx, the remainder of his book on race in America, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, and to watch on YouTube his series of lectures on The Thought of Karl Marx and the other six lectures not assigned in his series of lectures on Ideological Critique.

It will also be beneficial to read Max Weber’s essays, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” both online.

INTERESTING STUFF

I have been reading my new numbers guru, Rachel Bitecofer, and here are some takeaways.  Much of this is not surprising, but some is, at least to me.  You can check out her analysis here.  All of this rests on the well-known but often under-appreciated fact that voter turnout in American elections is astonishingly low – maybe 60% of eligible voters in presidential years and [usually] 35-40% in off years.  One might ask whether, with turnout like that, American voters deserve a democracy, but that is a discussion for another day.

Remember, even in solidly Republican House districts, with an off-year turnout of 35-40% there are large numbers of non-voting Democrats [often clumped together in big cities, college towns, and the like.]   Suppose in a Republican district with 400,000 eligible voters, the entire electorate breaks 55-45 for the Republicans, a seemingly unbeatable +10 advantage for the Rs.  This means there are 220,000 Republicans and 180,000 Democrats in the district.  If only 40% turn out, and there is equal enthusiasm on both sides, a ten point Republican victory means that 88,000 voted R and 72,000 voted D, a 16,000 margin.  But there are still 108,000 non-voting Ds!  If 15% of them can be motivated to get off their asses and vote, the Democrats win narrowly.  Common sense suggests that it may be easier to motivate 16,200 non-voting Ds than it is to turn 8,100 Rs to the D side.

OK, with that as background, let me summarize what Bitecofer says she has found.

First:  Contrary to Conventional Wisdom, the big Democratic House victories in 2018 were not driven by voter concern about health care, nor were they driven by Republican defections to the Democrats.  The victories were the result of an enormous surge in the turnout of reliably Democratic segments of the electorate driven by hatred of Trump.  This may sound unsurprising, but it has enormous implications for the choice of candidates up and down the ticket, including at the very top.

There is a hunger out there in the hearts and minds and stomachs of scores of millions of Americans for a chance to vote against Trump.  I saw this the day after Inauguration Day in 2017 when I attended the Women’s March in Washington.

Second:  the single most significant determinant of the relative popularity of candidates for the Democratic nomination is the astonishing, unfathomable, too easily overlooked sheer ignorance of the American electorate.  Bitecofer has some fascinating and rather complex analysis of the role of name recognition in the poll results we have all been seeing.

I recall many years ago, when I was living in Massachusetts, reading a news story about name ID among voters.  Various Democratic and Republican politicians had name IDs in the 60s, 70s, or 80s, but topping the list, unsurprisingly, was Teddy Kennedy, the senior Senator, who had the astronomical name ID score of 95%.  The author of the story oohed and aahed about this astonishing figure, but all I could think was, “Dear God!  One in twenty people I pass on the street have never heard of Teddy Kennedy.  What alternate universe do they live in?”

As Bitecofer shows, “Statistically, low levels of name recognition have massive impacts on polling data. It is not possible to compare favorability of low and high name ID candidates.”  Now, political preferences are relatively difficult to change, but name recognition changes considerably as more low information voters turn their attention to what we junkies think about obsessively every day.

A thought for the day