Monthly Archives: July 2020

On July 18, we remember and celebrate the life and achievements of a great leader Nelson Mandela.

But rituals of memorialising are hollow unless we ask ourselves the question, why do we recollect this and not that leader?

Nelson Mandela led the struggle against an inhuman political system in South Africa, and he skilfully piloted the transition from apartheid to democracy despite dire predictions that the country would descend into civil war. There is however much more to Mandela; a man of extraordinary courage, tremendous generosity, and remarkable vision.

Mahatma Gandhis doctrine of non-violence influenced Mandelas political strategy to some extent. In an essay on his political guru in The Time magazine of December 31, 1999, Mandela wrote of Gandhi who advocated non-violence when the violence of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had exploded upon us.

Both Gandhi and I, wrote Mandela, suffered colonial oppression, and both of us mobilised our respective people against governments that violated our freedom. I followed, accepted Mandela, Gandhian strategy as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Umkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle.

On December 16, 1961 Umkhonto cadres launched five bomb attacks on power stations, and government buildings in Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg. Mandela and other leaders were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, in what came to be known as the Rivonia Trials.

Umkhonto weSizwe founder Nelson Mandela, receives military training at an Algerian FLN camp in Morocco, 1962. Credit: South African History Online

In the 1980s the apartheid regime had begun to negotiate with the African National Congress. In South Africas dreaded prisons Mandela began to conceptualise peace for his tortured land. The question that now confronted him was: how do social groups that a perverse history has locked into roles of the oppressor and oppressed learn to live together as fellow citizens?

A political community cannot be founded on the empty language of legal entitlements; it has to be based on reciprocal obligations.

Mandela had entered prison as a rebellious young man. By the 1980s reflection transformed him into a wise leader who was to steer his people through the valley of shadow into the sunlight of freedom.

As his release date drew nearer, he recognised that after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre his country had changed. Violence had been unleashed by some groups. Settlers began to demand an assured place at the high table of power. International commentators prophesied civil war. Given the context, Mandelas speech on his release in 1990 is incredible.

During my life time, he said, I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. My ideal is a democratic and free society in which persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve, but, if need be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Also read: When Nelson Mandela Said Viva Fidel!

This was an amazing statement from a man who had suffered imprisonment for 27 years.

A free South Africa for Mandela had to be a compassionate country. People had to understand the frailties and the ambiguities of the human condition. Though his jailers in the three prisons were Afrikaners, he realised that their ideologies were not freely chosen. The sensibilities of human beings are shaped by the society they live in. That society is fashioned by state power. South Africa would see no peace until the whites realised they had to forsake their ambitions of domination, and unless the blacks recognised that Afrikaners could not be banished; they had nowhere to go.

Cuban President Fidel Castro, right, and African leader Nelson Mandela gesture during the celebration of the Day of the Revolution in Matanzas. Credit: YouTube

In a second significant speech, Mandela established the foundations of a democratic political community. On April 10, 1993, one of South Africas most beloved leaders Chris Hani, was murdered by a Polish immigrant Janus Walus. Walus was connected with a white right-wing group opposed to majority rule. Hanis assassination sparked off major protests, arson and violence across the country. He had been a popular leader of the South African Communist Party, and the Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Hani possessed great moral authority and played a crucial role in the multi-party negotiations that cleared the way to democracy. It was generally accepted that Hani would succeed Mandela as President in 1999. Anthony Sampson in his Mandela, The Authorised Biography observed that the assassination deepened perception among whites, and some blacks, that Mandela would not be able to control the tide of violence that threatened to swamp South Africa, let alone establish and head a stable government.

In the days following the assassination, cadres of the African National Congress tried to restore peace and calm passions by holding rallies and demonstrations. Mandela, determined to end the spiral of violence that could dislodge negotiations and the enactment of a Constitution, stepped into the charged atmosphere.

Today, he said in a speech broadcasted by the South African Broadcasting Corporation on April 13, 1993, an unforgivable crime has been committedThe calculated cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani is not just a crime committed against a dearly beloved son of our soil. It is a crime against all the people of our country.

Mandela took care to register that grief affected each inhabitant of the country white, black and coloured. What has happened is a national tragedy that has touched millions of people across the political and the colour divide. Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who from any quarter wish to destroy what Chris Hann gave his life for, freedom of all of us.

A woman flies a South African flag during the Nelson Mandela: A Life Celebrated memorial service at Cape Town Stadium December 11, 2013. Credit: Reuters

Mandela adeptly turned the raging debate between white and black into one that pitched peace against violence. This is a watershed moment for all of us. Our decision and actions will determine whether we use our pain, our grief and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country-an elected government of the people, by the people, for the peopleWe, must not let the men who worship war, and who lust after bloodwhen we, as one people, act together decisively, with discipline and determination, nothing can stop us.

Mandela emphasised that all mourned Hanis death, all were overcome with grief irrespective of the colour of their skin, each citizen sympathised with her fellow citizens. Now it is the time for our white compatriots from whom messages of condolences continue to pour in, to reach out with an understanding of the grievous loss to our nation to join in the memorial services and the funeral commemorations.

The speech takes us right back to the eighteenth century, when Adam Smith spoke of sympathy as a bond that united humanity in his famous Theory of Moral Sentiments. People possess the ability to feel pain because they can imagine themselves in the position of others. In the same mode Mandela said:

Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know and bring to justice, this assassin.

He turned the political discourse of racism upside down. Human nature cannot be seen in essentialist terms. We can connect to each other because we have the gift of imagination and sympathy. This is the foundation of society, this is the foundation of common citizenship, and this is the foundation of solidarity.

Students of South African history and politics suggest that this was the day when Nelson Mandela was accepted as the undisputed leader of the country by the blacks, the coloured and the whites. This was the time that South Africans begin to walk on the path that led to healing, and peace through reconciliation.

Also read: Your Ideas Have Spread Like Wildfire: A Letter to Dr Anand Teltumbde on His Birthday

In a third momentous statement Mandela outlined his vision for a democratic South Africa. This was in the aftermath of the first all-race elections on April 27, 1994, and the victory of the African National Congress under his leadership. In his inaugural speech Mandela said.

The time for the healing of wounds has come, the moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come, and the time to build is upon usWe know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people for national reconciliation, for nation-building, for the birth of a new world. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans both black and white will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity-a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Under Mandelas stewardship South Africa initiated the project of reconciling with the past rather than retributive justice. The logic of reconciliation is that the past, howsoever harrowing it might be, cannot be forgotten or set aside. In order to know where we are at the present moment, we must know where we have come from. We cannot understand the present, or plan for the future without knowledge of history and awareness of roads taken and roads not taken.

Forgetting, in sum, is not an option for history has a way of relentlessly intruding into collectively induced amnesia. Someone, somewhere, will recollect past injuries and pain. Someone, somewhere, will deploy these memories to light a conflagration, and punish the descendants of groups who committed these horrific crimes. If conflict in history is not addressed and accepted, memories of violence will continue to fester and deepen the wounds of the body politic.

The Freudian assumption that suppressed trauma will inevitably remerge in destructive ways has to be taken seriously. Societies that cannot come to terms with the past, or those who prefer to forget the past are fragile, ready to burst asunder at the mention of a pain-wracked history.

We never know when violence will break out around some or other grievance of wrongdoing and injustice. Societies can be set on fire if they fondly believe that they have forgotten, a mere spark is enough to do so. They have to acknowledge and accept that there is need to move on. Members may not forget, or forgive, but they should be able to accept the history of their country as irreversible.

A scene from 2009 film Invictus, Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon played President Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, captain of rugby team, respectively. The film speaks of the aftermath of the apartheid and how one sport united the country. Photo: IMDb

Notably the process of reconciliation does not offer a magic mantra. The process is attended by a great deal of trauma and anxiety. Yet a number of theorists have advocated and supported the concept. The very realisation that perpetrators of human rights violations have conceded that they did wrong, has proved, in recent history, a therapeutic process. Victims feel that their pain, their humiliation and their trauma has been recognised or simply that they count.

At the core of the concept of reconciliation is the centrality of human rights, what should not be done to people, and what should be done for them. Reconciliation does not provide comprehensive solutions to the problems of the past; it seeks to change attitudes to historical injustice. Forgiveness may not be a key issue in reconciliation, it is more important to accept that wrong has been done, that the wrongdoer has accepted his crime, and that societies should now carry on. This was the lesson Mandela taught humanity. For this he should be remembered.

The process of reconciliation was set in place in South Africa under the leadership of Mandela, and guided by the same principles that he had expressed publicly, his earnest desire and his determination that South Africa belonged to all irrespective of race and class. The transition from apartheid to democracy was largely peaceful in as much as there was no open civil war or large-scale bloodshed as international commentators had forecast.

This is the genius of Mandela; this is why we remember him.

Neera Chandhoke is former professor of political science, Delhi University.

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Remembering Nelson Mandela, Who Honoured the Power of Reconciliation - The Wire

(Courtesy of Verso)

What is the way forward for progressives in a time when it seems both centrism and authoritarianism are resurgent? What should be the character and scope of a national program that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can and should embrace? There are many places to look for answers to these questions, and no doubt the answers will have many inspirations.Ad Policy

One of the most incisive articulations of an American progressive alternative is that of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Harvard Law professor, philosopher, and former Brazilian politician. He has written over two dozen books addressing an unusual diversity of topics, including critical legal theorywhich he helped developeconomics, philosophy, and religion. Given this range, it would be unfair to reduce Ungers work to one core idea. But perhaps the major theme of his work is summed up in his argument that society is made and imagined, that it is a human artifact rather than the expression of an underlying natural order.

What this means is that nothing in our societythe economy, liberal democracy, the legal order, etc.is predetermined toward some definitive end. They are human creations, artifacts whose forms can therefore be challenged, transcended, and ultimately reoriented for the purpose of greater human liberation, individually and collectively.

What makes Ungers progressive vision of society unique are its religious and prophetic elements. He sees human beings as having a divinelike capacity to transcend their societal circumstances to achieve greatness. What prevents them from doing so is the false assumption that there can be no substantial alternative to inherited political institutions. His work exposes this false necessity while providing progressive social, political, and economic alternatives to it. In this regard, his work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.

The Nation recently spoke with Unger about his proposal for an alternative progressive track for American politics. Along the way, we discussed racial injustice in the United States, Donald Trumps election, democratizing new technologies, the future of education, and progressive taxation. Of pressing importance is the topic of structural economic and political change, and in turn, whether Ungers vision is impractical. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Right now the streets are filled with protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of George Floyds brutal killing by Minneapolis police. Progressives have long struggled to confront and overcome racial injustice in the United States. You have criticized their approach, the dominant approach, to racial oppression. What is your understanding? And what is your proposal?

Roberto Mangabeira Unger: To grasp the meaning of this moment for the future of the country, it is useful to begin by distinguishing the immediate backgroundthe failure of the established approach to racial injustice in the United Statesfrom the larger context of which this failure forms a part: the disorientation of American progressives and the long-standing absence in American politics of any program responsive to the needs, interests, and aspirations of the working-class majority of the country, white or black.

The prevailing response to racial injustice in the United States has been the integrationist orthodoxy. It treats racial injustice as a threshold issue, to be addressed before all problems of economic equality and opportunity. Its signature expression is affirmative action. It has done little for those who most require protection, the vast number of black people who languish in prisons and dead-end jobs. This approach has offended the white working-class majority, who believe themselves to be victims of a conspiracy between sanctimonious white elites and the representatives of black workers. And it has provided a model for the identity politics that has addressed legitimate demands for respect and recognition only by diverting the country from engagement with its structural problems.

There is an alternative. The alternative is to distinguish individualized racial discrimination from the advancement of the unequipped, the excluded, and the impoverished. Individualized racial discrimination should be criminalized, as it is in many countries. Social advancement should be predicated on real disadvantage or exclusion, wherever it is found. Racial stigma should serve as only one of the standards that, together with other forms of disadvantage, trigger such advancement. Race should be combined with class rather than separated from it.

DSJ: How did the country arrive at its present situation, with the presidency in the hands of Donald Trump, after decades in which millions of working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party? MORE FROM Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

RMU: The principal vehicle of American progressives, the Democratic Party, failed to come up with a sequel to Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. The sequel would have had to be very different from the original, which focused on economic security rather than economic empowerment and offers no model for how to bring more American workers into the good jobs of the most productive parts of todays economy.

Let us look coldly at what has happened since then. Having begun under Lyndon Johnson by treating the poor as an insular minority in need of support and blacks as another insular minority in need of rights, progressives offered nothing to the working-class majority of the country other than later to dissolve them into a series of group identities and special interests. Conservatives responded with the formula by which, under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, they won and wielded power for half a century: combining material concessions to the moneyed class with moral concessions to the moneyless classes. For this whole period, the United States has had no economic growth strategy other than cheap money, delegated by the federal government to the central bank, and productivity growth has stagnated. The majority of American workers have feltand beenabandoned.

Into the expanding vacuum that resulted from these successive abdications came the plutocratic populism of Donald Trump: a big fat hoax, given that it has done nothing for the abandoned majority other than to wage war against low-skill immigrants while continuingit must be acknowledgedto get high employment, with relatively few good jobs, on the basis of the cheap-money policy. What an opportunity for the progressives, if they had a program. They dont.

DSJ: What, then, should be the character of a national alternative that progressives in and outside the Democratic Party can embrace?

RMU: The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression. Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation. In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid. The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged.

The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality. The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together. And the method should be structural changethe criterion of depthchange in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions. Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined systemsocialism for capitalismby another. It is fragmentary but cumulative. The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.

These generalities mark a direction. They do not excuse us from proposing the initial steps by which to begin to move in that direction in a particular society and time. A combination of innovations in the economy, education, and democratic politics would start to give shape to the alternative that the country lacks.

DSJ: You have argued in your most recent book, The Knowledge Economy, that progressives need an approach to the supply side of the economy. What does such an approach entail for the future of the American economy and the situation of American workers?

RMU: At the heart of the economic part of a progressive program must be the attempt to develop a socially inclusive form of todays most advanced practice of production, the knowledge economy, informed by science and devoted to perpetual innovation. It exists in every sector of the American economyin intellectually dense services and even in precision agriculture, as well as in the high-tech industry with which we tend, too narrowly, to identify it. In every sector, however, it appears only as a fringe, a series of insular vanguards of production excluding the overwhelming majority of businesses and workers. Practices, more than technologies, are what set the knowledge economy apart. These practices bring production closer to discovery. The insularity of the knowledge economy results in both economic stagnation and economic inequality. It causes economic stagnation by denying the most advanced practice to most economic agents. And it roots economic inequality in a lengthening chasm between the advanced and backward parts of production.

To move toward an inclusive knowledge economy, the country needs to develop a 21st century equivalent to the 19th century system of agricultural extension by which it created, on its agrarian frontier, family-scale agriculture with entrepreneurial attributes. That would require establishing between the government and the producers an intermediate cadre of support centers, with wide autonomy and professional management and financed by a combination of subsidies and fees, to give a wider range of small- and medium-size enterprises broader access to advanced practice and technology, as well as to capital, and to identify and disseminate best practice.

But it is not enough to lift up businesses. It is also necessary to reach out, by analogous means, to people who have little or no relation to business organizations. The best place to begin is the middle part of the job structurethe part most hollowed out by the economic changes of recent decadesimproving the equipment and skills of people such as machine repair technicians and nurse practitioners. The goal would be to turn them into technologically equipped artisans. From there, it is possible to move, with similar methods and intentions, both up and down the job hierarchy.

This second wing of the productive uplift effort in turn merges into initiatives designed to strengthen labor in its relation to capital. No dynamic of inclusive rise in productivity can flourish against the background of low-wage and insecure labor. In the United States, as around the world, stable employment is ceasing to be the norm. More and more jobs are temporary, part-time, or otherwise insecure. The reality of labor performed under decentralized contractual arrangements, rather than as part of a stable labor force assembled in large productive units, cannot be reversed. It results from changes in the forms of production. But it can be mastered by the law to prevent flexibility from meaning insecurity. The free-for-all gig economy must not become the rule. The counterpart to productive uplift is new labor lawto organize, represent, and protect unstable labor.

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DSJ: Progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and progressive academics like Thomas Piketty have emphasized the role of redistributive taxesincluding taxes on wealthin diminishing inequality. Why do you resist? And what do you see as the proper place of taxation in a progressive program?

RMU: No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer. Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation. A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services.

That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption. Evidently, many progressive politicians prefer pietistic gestures to transformative effects. Bereft of a structural program, they simply want to show on whose side they are. And some of them are now distracted by the pleasant thought that, regardless of special circumstances, they can evade the whole problem by printing money instead of raising it.

DSJ: The economic changes that you propose, including a socially inclusive knowledge economy, seem to have far-reaching implications for education. What are they, and how can they be reconciled with a class divide that is also an educational divide in America?

RMU: The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.

The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information. That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.

The school under democracy should not be the instrument of either government or the family. It should be the voice of the future and recognize in each young person a tongue-tied prophet.

DSJ: Can these alternatives in the economy and in education advance unless we remake our political institutions? Our democracy was not organized to facilitate structural change unless crisis forces transformation.

RMU: A deepening of democracy must accompany, in a progressive project, the economic and educational changes for which I have argued: Political institutions set the terms under which change in all other areas can happen. The mark of such a deepening is to strengthen our collective ability as citizens to master the shape of society rather than to have it imposed on us by history or necessity. As a result, it diminishes the need for crisis to serve as the enabling condition of change and weakens the power of the past to determine the future.

Here there are three major focal points for institutional innovation. The setup of the government, as defined in the Constitution, which powerfully shapes our ability to change society through politics: the pace of politics. The arrangements that influence the level of popular engagement in political life: the temperature of politics. And the relation of the national government to the states and towns: the federal system.

A defining feature of the constitutional architecture of the United States is its combination of a liberal principle of fragmentation of power with a conservative principle of the slowing down of politics, expressed in Madisons plan. Americans believe mistakenly that these two principles are naturally and necessarily bound together. They are not. They are connected by design to inhibit the transformation of society by politics. We can reaffirm the liberal principle but repudiate the conservative one, for example, by allowing either of the political branches to call early elections for both branches in the presence of an impasse. But it is futile to raise this issue in the United States now. The constitutional setup is revered as part of the national political identity. Those who have dissented from this view, beginning with Thomas Jefferson, have gone unheard.

Of the other two areas of possible innovation in the arrangements of democracythe level of participation and the reshaping of federalism, progressives have given priority to the first and dismissed the second as marginal to their aims. The initiatives that would raise the level of organized popular engagement in political life would reform the relation between money and politics, the terms of free access to the means of mass communication by political parties and organized social movements, and the electoral regime. They are indispensable to a progressive program. Placing them first, however, is a misjudgment. All are highly contentious, legally as well as politically. By contrast, the reenergizing of federalism has immense potential appeal, cutting across divisions between left and right and offering a wonderful device for developing the economic and educational alternatives the country needs.

Cooperative federalism, vertically among the three levels of the federal system and horizontally among the states and municipalities, can serve as the initial stage of determined and broad-based experimentation in American public life. Contrary to common prejudice, strong initiative by the national government and the empowerment of state and local government are not opposites. It is possible to have more of both at the same time, so long as we define clearly which responsibilities of each part of the federal system are exclusive and which are concurrent. Later on and within limits designed to prevent oppression and abuse, parts of the United States should be able to diverge from the predominant policies and arrangements in the country and create countermodels of the national future. Without such a dialectic of dominant and dissident solutions, no vital democratic experimentalism can take hold.

DSJ: Arent you demanding and expecting more than political reality allows? Cant your views be dismissed as utopian? For a leftist or any sort of progressive, isnt there a choice in the end between inadequate reform and impossible revolution?

RMU: I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past. The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking.

DSJ: For the alternative you defend to advance, step by step, it needs a social base, a coalition, that doesnt yet exist. What base does your program imply? And how can it become a majority coalition without winning support from groups, such as the small-business class, that have been mainstays of American conservatism?

RMU: Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class. Such a majority is within reach. Nothing in the alternative direction that I have described is incompatible within any part of this majority. The single most dangerous bias of the left is its prejudice against the small-business class, which has always had an outsize influence on the countrys self-understanding. That class now shades into the growing legions of the self-employed. To give up on it and on them is to prepare defeat.

DSJ: Even when you deal with economic and political practicalities, your ideas have a prophetic undertone. Another recent book of yours is called The Religion of the Future. The country has had its prophets. Does it really need new ones?

RMU: When politics is most serious, it is also about who we are and what we can and should become. It turns into a struggle over consciousness as well as over institutions. The message of the American prophetsincluding Emerson, Whitman, and Lincolnwas that the individual shares in the divine attribute of transcendence over context and becomes more human by becoming more godlike. Under democracy, which puts its faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women, this idea comes down to earth and informs the organization of society.

It is not good enough to say that the message has failed to be enacted and that the country should return to its founding ideals. The message itself should be rethought. From the outset, it bore a double taint, which compromised and corrupted it. It misrepresented the relation between self-construction and solidarity, failing to do justice to the presence of the latter within the former. As a result, it tempted Americans to think of themselves as little self-crowned Napoleons. The second stain on the prophetic teaching was to exempt American institutions from the reach of challenge and change and hold them up as the definitive form of a free society. The exemption amounted to a species of idolatry, for which the American republic has paid and continues to pay a terrible price. The prophetic voice must speak again in the United States. In breaking its silence, it must also correct its message.

See the article here:

Roberto Mangabeira Ungers Alternative Progressive Vision - The Nation

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In Portland, Oregon, unidentified armed assailants dressed in military fatigues have been snatching people off the streets, piling them into unmarked vans, and taking them away.

Just as the founders intended.

No, seriously, the founders must have intended for that to happen. Otherwise the people who are always proclaiming their worship of rights, and freedom, and liberty people who are quite certain they know a lot more than you about what the founders intended would be condemning this assault on, well, rights, and freedom, and liberty.

And theyre not.

Any discomfort, any momentary tinge of cognitive dissonance, appears to be assuaged by whos in charge. The thugs dispatched to seize American citizens off the streets of a U.S. city, you see, are federal officers carrying out orders of the Trump administration.

The Oregon attorney general has filed a suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Protective Service. Oh, and the AG in Nevadas neighbor to the northwest has also sued John Does 1-10, who are so named, the suit explains, because the government has made it impossible for them to be individually identified by carrying out law enforcement actions without wearing any identifying information, even so much as the agency that employs them.

Aint that America?

The John Does and their cohorts have been conducting the aforementioned abductions of your fellow Americans without either arresting them or stating the basis for an arrest, since at least Tuesday, July 14, according to allegations in the suit.

Ordinarily, a person exercising his right to walk through the streets of Portland who is confronted by anonymous men in military-type fatigues and ordered into an unmarked van can reasonably assume that he is being kidnapped and is the victim of a crime, the suit notes. Which is true.

Defendants are injuring the occupants of Portland, the suit continues, by taking away citizens ability to determine whether they are being kidnapped by militia or other malfeasants dressed in paramilitary gear (such that they may engage in self-defense to the fullest extent permitted by law) or are being arrested (such that resisting might amount to a crime).

The abductions, in addition to creeping everyone out, are violations of the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments, says the suit, which seeks an injunction ordering the Trump administration to, well, stop being a bunch of lawless thugs.

Remember that one day when people who think fighting the covid is unconstitutional or something went to the Nevada governors office, with guns, to call him a dictator and shake their fists at the sky and yell about freedom?

Or remember that time a huge Blue Lives Matter march was supposed to be held in Las Vegas?

Imagine if, at such an event, federal officers started just cold grabbing protesters and hauling them away with no explanation whatsoever.

Imagine the outcry from the likes of, oh, Fox News, or Adam Laxalt, or Brobdingnagian Dan Rodimer, or Michele Fiore, or that one whosit carnival barker who used to have a column in the RJ. They would have had a cow (donated by Cliven Bundy no doubt).

So youd think those self-professed lovers of freedom and rights and liberty and the rule of law, those self-identified Real Americans, and their ilk would be pitching a fit over tyrannical and dictatorial federal actions designed to, as Trump likes to say, dominate the citizenry.

After all, as the Oregon AGs suit asserts, Citizens peacefully gathering on the streets of Portland to protest racial inequality have the right

Oh. Wait. It looks weve found the extenuating circumstances.

Its not as if people in Portland were making noise on behalf of some truly cherished American value, like the freedom to spread covid to others, or the right of a welfare cowboy to make taxpayers foot the bill to feed his cows.

Its not as if people in Portland were standing up to support the perpetuation of the traditional status quo, wherein police kill Black people and no one is held accountable.

No, the people in Portland have been protesting racial inequality.

Your freedom-loving, mask-despising patriots may, as a rule, view Big Guvment para-trooping a light military force into a state without giving notice to, let alone being requested by, that states duly elected officials or law enforcement as a violation of every star-spangled red white & blue value they hold so dear.

Unless the stormtroopers are violating the rights and liberty of people who are challenging North Americas 400-year legacy of cruelty, violence, theft, rape, and systemic oppression of people who arent white. When people are protesting that, kidnapping Americans is evidently OK. Even if the people being secreted away are white (seriously have you been to Portland?).

No one expects intellectual consistency, or intellectual much of anything, from Laxalt, Rodimer, Fiore & Friends.

And everyone, even and especially his supporters, know that law and order just means continued oppression and domination of everyone who isnt a Trump supporter when Trump says it.

Ah, but maybe these harsh and authoritarian tactics undertaken by the weak wannabe strongman will at least quell unrest or vandalism in Portland, and Dear Leader Trump will save the day after all.

Eh, not so much.

Their presence, the Oregonian reported Monday of Trumps invasion of Portland, has stoked the nightly strife in downtown, not tamped down tensions as professed by Trump or Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad F. Wolf, local and state leaders say.

Portlands mayor has said, well, a lot of things, as you can imagine. But this is the most important:

This could happen in your city.

As if on cue, Trump Monday blustered that hes going to send his American Gestapo to Chicago and several other cities all run by liberal Democrats.

No one would ever accuse Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman of being one of those. But she doesnt really run the metro area, the county commission does, and however to the left you may think they are, rest assured its more than enough to qualify as liberal Democrats in Trumps noggin. Laughable though it may seem, the same goes for Nevadas governor and Democrats who have majorities in the Legislature.

Trump hasnt targeted Las Vegas for unconstitutional and malicious military thuggery. Yet. But if and when he does, its a safe bet Nevada Trump supporters, states rights devotees all, will demonstrate their commitment to the nations founding principles of liberty and freedom by cheering him on.

Editor | Hugh Jackson has been writing about Nevada policy and politics for more than 20 years. He was editor of the Las Vegas Business Press, senior editor at the Las Vegas CityLife weekly newspaper, daily political commentator on the Las Vegas NBC affiliate, and wrote the then-groundbreaking Las Vegas Gleaner, which among other things was the only independent political blog from Nevada that was credentialed at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He spent a few years as a senior energy and environmental policy analyst for Public Citizen, and has occasionally worked as a consultant on mining, taxation, education and other issues for Nevada labor and public interest organizations. His freelance work has been published in outlets ranging from the Guardian to Desert Companion to In These Times to the Oil & Gas Journal. For several years he also taught U.S. History courses at UNLV. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, he was a reporter and then assistant managing editor at the Casper Star-Tribune, Wyomings largest newspaper.

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There's never a states' rights hero around when you need one - Nevada Current

The British just system has taken over 1,000 years to evolve into the one we recognise today. Its foundations and principles have been retained by so many countries that 30% of the worlds population live under its rule[1], and for those who are not fortunate enough to be governed by such, I suspect, envy those who are.

Yes we have miscarriages of justice and as a Barrister I dont dismiss these lightly but we have to accept, that no system, built by humans for humans, can ever be perfect. However, as a person of colour, I think I would rather hedge my innocence being proven through the balance and checks of our legal system than one from, say, in Guangzhou, China or perhapsMinneapolis, USA, but am I right to feel this way?

China is well versed in the criticisms levied against it by the world for inhumane treatment of particular ethnic groups in its society. In United Nations findings, 2018, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Amnesty Internationals Deputy East Asia Director Lisa Tassi said:

The Committees findings highlight the systematic oppression of ethnic minorities in China, including the mass arbitrary detention of Chinese Uighurs and others in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR)

The Committee found that the Chinese government were mass detaining certain groups under the pretext of countering terrorism, with the estimated number of those being detained ranging from tens of thousands to the unimaginable number of a million. Because of the broad way in which terrorism has been defined in legislation, this has meant that an act of peaceful or religious expression could be defined as a threat to the state, having the effect of targeting particular ethnic and religious groups.

In the USAs report of the same year (2018) to the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, this report also made some troubling findings.

In 2016 (the last figures), Black Americans made up 27% of the prison population, double their share of the total population. The USA criminal justice system caters for the largest prison population in the world (2015, over 6.7 million people were incarcerated). The figures collated in this report provide a clear picture of the disparity between the races.

African Americans were more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, were more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. African-American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than whites and Hispanics are 3.1 times as likely.As of 2001, one of every three black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as could one of every six Latinos compared to one of every seventeen white males.

This report concluded that the impact of systemic racism was a broad reason for the above findings, however, that deprivation also played a part where the USs legal system ran a two tier system one for the rich and one for the poor, essentially, if youre rich, you can buy your way to freedom. There is an over representation of individuals from poor areas in the criminal justice system who tend to come from ethnic groups.

In attempting to evidence its findings, the report compared and contrasted those arrested for drugs. Use rates of drugs in the States are largely comparable, and yet if you are African American, you are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested than a white person. The same disparities arise when you consider the USs equivalent to stop and search.

Closer to home, in France, the justice system based on the principles of freedom and fairness is also under scrutiny. French state policy rejects any references to a person being identified by his nationality, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic difference. Anyone in contact with the State is faceless and cannot be judged on who they are or what they look like, purely for the deed they are being accused of committing.

This starts off well doesnt it? However, the experience of ethnic groups is very different. They describe themselves as being ignored, suffering racism (both direct and indirect) at community and state level, but with little clear path to seeking redress, because as is often the case, it is very hard to prove the causative reason for an act, merely that the act has occurred.

The French government refuse to conduct research on the experience of those that may be linked to their race. For example, it doesnt know how many of its people follow the muslim religion or identify as a member of an ethnic group.

Legally, the constitutional principle of equality has been interpreted as prohibiting the government from collecting data or statistics on the racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds of its citizens, in any context. This means for example that the socioeconomic status of groups across any indicators based on racial, ethnic, religious or other grounds is unknown, and that the national census does not include any questions about race or ethnicity.

So the French government, and its citizens, have no idea whether one group is suffering from discrimination, or to consider a more positive slant if the state is getting it right for all its citizens. There are few anti discrimination laws, but of the ones that exist there are even problems identified within those. In particular they refer to immigrants, even when the person who is attempting to rely on the protective law is a second or third generation French national and member of society.

In 2017, David Lammy MP undertook an 18 month review of ethnic groups and their contact with the English criminal justice system. Im sure you wont be surprised at what he discovered: Just 3% of people in England & Wales are Black, and yet 12% of our prison population is Black. Going further, 25% of our prison population, and over 40% of our youth prison population, come from ethnic minority backgrounds. That compares to 14% of the overall population, and for those facing imprisonment and identified as Asian or Black, were associated with a 50-55% increase in the odds of imprisonment, compared to those self-reporting as White.

You may also be familiar with the figure that a black male is twice as likely to die during an arrest than a white male and that he is 47 times more likely to be stopped and searched.

Clearly, my feeling that I would fair a better chance navigating my way through the criminal justice system in this country than any other is not based on the empirical evidence.

However, I take hope: in 2019 the EU undertook research into the experiences of racism suffered by black and other ethnic groups in the member states. It found that the level of racism experienced in Britain was relatively low in comparison to the other member states and even in the US.so maybe my feeling, although not completely justified, should at least be hopeful?

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A view from the Bar: Race and the British justice system - Open Access Government