Doing democracy

"Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing." Archibald MacLeish

Litmus test

In my book, Twilight of Democracy, I described how autocratic one-party states use conspiracy theories to test party members' loyalty to the regime. Looks like the Republican party is now on that track.

https://wapo.st/3vwMEEj

https://www.threads.net/@anneapplebaum2000/post/C5A8iz5oFlC/?xmt=AQGzKy7FBKwBBuMnovNs2TFvvgfIFq6ipjduPfCF5OWCZw

Hannah Arendt and the art of beginning afresh: “we are free to change the world”

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a "post-truth era," she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/15/we-are-free-to-change-the-world-hannah-arendt/

Freedom of the spirit

Yesterday in CoPhi, some denied that greater freedom for all to pursue happiness (in the spirit of J.S. Mill) would improve society.

Mr. Shirer, and anyone who's ever lived under the thumb of dictatorship, would disagree. I hope this generation of students never has to learn that the hard way.

It's time to vote.

"Living in a totalitarian land taught me to value highly—and fiercely—the very things the dictators denied: tolerance, respect for others and, above all, the freedom of the human spirit."
—William L. Shirer, born on this day in 1904

https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C3r-8IzuvfP/

We Can Still Resist a Pipeline to Hell

As the planet hurtles toward an irreversible climate tipping point, natural gas projects will further devastate the environment.

"...Let's take the Tennessee General Assembly as a case in point. As in other red states, our legislature has taken misinformation rebranding to new levels, legally defining methane as "clean energy." It has passed pre-emptive legislation that prevents local governments from rejecting a pipeline or even regulating its safety. In Tennessee, anyone who disrupts the construction of a pipeline has committed a Class C felony. 

"The gas-fired fever dream gripping the South is completely at odds with the need to decarbonize how we get our energy," said the Southern Environmental Law Center's Greg Buppert. "Natural gas — methane — isn't some climate elixir. It's just another dirty fossil fuel that pollutes communities and heats up the planet."

The so-called Southeast Supply Enhancement pipeline won't reach Tennessee, but that doesn't mean we're safe from the dangers and destructions of pipeline and methane-plant construction. As WPLN's environment reporter Caroline Eggers reported in December, the Tennessee Valley Authority — which provides electricity to most of Tennessee and parts of six other Southern states — has built or approved eight new gas plants just in the last three years. The T.V.A. is building out more new methane-power infrastructure than any other utility in the United States and has locked most of the local utility companies it serves into 20-year contracts.

We don't have time for political obfuscation. We don't have time for our utilities' stubborn reliance on fossil fuels, despite their dangers. We certainly don't have time for state officials to ignore their constituents' choices regarding energy sources in their own communities..." 

--Margaret Renkl

Reconstruction Amendments

"…It seems clear that the men who wrote the Reconstruction Amendments expected men like former president Trump to be disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment, as 25 distinguished historians of Reconstruction outlined in their recent brief supporting Trump's removal from the Colorado ballot.

But the Fourteenth Amendment did far more than ban insurrectionists from office. Together with the other Reconstruction Amendments, it established the power of the federal government to defend civil rights, voting, and government finances from a minority that had entrenched itself in power in the states and from that power base tried to impose its ideology on the nation." HCR

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-4-2024?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Another Gun Fight Is Looming in Tennessee

"…this growing coalition of new gun-safety advocates continues to give me hope. They were back at the Capitol last week — parents, teenagers, children and just about every other group, from both sides of the political aisle. They are not giving up, and so far they have not fallen prey to the political divisions that so often splinter bipartisan advocacy efforts…" —Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/opinion/gun-safety-tennessee.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

"Freedom in Education: A Philosophical Critique of Current Ed. Policies"

Fall '23 MTSUApplied Philosophy Lyceum with Dr. Eric T. Weber, now on YouTube

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mDhuxrOJpwU&si=70Yam8XLBc90qMKs

“American Academy”

And "a different type of lawyer"…

"… Trump was frustrated in his first term by lawyers who refused to go along with his wishes, trying to stay within the law, so Trump's allies are making lists of lawyers they believe would be "more aggressive" on issues of immigration, taking over the Department of Justice, and overturning elections.

They are looking, they say, for "a different type of lawyer" than those supported by the right-wing Federalist Society, one "willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump" and "to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause."

John Mitnick, who served in Trump's first term, told the reporters that "no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees" in a second Trump term. Instead, the lawyers in a second term would be "opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do."

Trump has also made it clear he and his allies want to gut the nonpartisan civil service and fill tens of thousands of government positions with his own loyalists. Led by Russell Vought, who served as Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump's allies believe that agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission should not be independent but should push the president's agenda.

This week, Trump vowed to take over higher education too. In a campaign video, he promised to tax private universities with large endowments to fund a new institution called "American Academy."

The school, which would be online only, would award free degrees and funnel students into jobs with the U.S. government and federal contractors.

"We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they're turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions," Trump said. "We can't let this happen." In his university, "wokeness or jihadism" would not be allowed, he said.

In admirable understatement, Politico's Meridith McGraw and Michael Stratford noted: "Using the federal government to create an entirely new educational institution aimed at competing with the thousands of existing schools would drastically reshape American higher education..." HCR

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-3-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Heather Cox Richardson with Rebecca Solnit / Democracy Awakening

Two smart meliorists, on the instructive past and hopeful (but insecure) future of democracy

https://youtu.be/SYtE8_f3-oE?si=eaJQb_CijJIEPwRS

Ken Burns: Being an American means...

Proud, but also aspirational...

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cw-UHcQtkpM/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=ZGUzMzM3NWJiOQ==

Feel the Bern

Happy 82d, Senator! 🎂

"Sanders says his interest in politics began at a young age. He says: "A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So, what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.

On his way to becoming a U.S. senator, Sanders was active in the Civil Rights movement while at the University of Chicago, served as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for three terms, and has also been a Head Start teacher, a carpenter, and a filmmaker.

Sanders is fond of calling himself"democratic socialist," saying: "All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small 'd.' I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who's making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So, if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/twa-from-friday-september-8-2017?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post