Samir Chopra's Blog, page 51

The Civil War, The Emancipation Proclamation, And The Slow ‘Disintegration’

In his revisionist history of the Reconstruction A Short History of Reconstruction (Harper and Row, New York, 1990, pp.2) Eric Foner writes:

[T]the [Emancipation] Proclamation  only confirmed what was  happening on farms and plantations throughout the South. War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution, and well before 1863 the disintegration of slavery had begun. As the Union Army occupied territory on the periphery of the Confederacy, first in Virginia, then in Tennessee, Louisiana, and elsewhere, slaves by the thousands headed for the Union lines. Even in the  heart of the Confederacy, the conflict undermined the South’s “peculiar institution.” The drain of white men into military service left plantations under the control of planters’ wives and elderly and infirm men, whose authority slaves increasingly felt able to challenge. Reports of “demoralized” and “insubordinate” behavior multiplied throughout the South.

The transformation among the South’s slaves that Foner makes note of is a fascinating one. It is a process during and through which the formerly enslaved, oppressed, and controlled comes to realize the older shackles do not hold any more–and begin to act, drawing upon and utilizing, the new-found freedom that is now dramatically visible and manifest. For long after the shackles have been removed, after the overseer has left, after the whip has been put down, the enslaved continues to fear the older control, the always exercised restraint. He has come to internalize these controls, to enact them for himself with great efficiency. He has, as it were, become his own slave master. He anticipates the lashing even when the lash can no longer be raised and lowered.

But one day, the slave realizes the physical acts and tools that have restrained his freedom and punished him when he resisted their controls can no longer act.  In their place are only idle threats, puppets who seek to dominate by borrowing the power of others. Power is gone; only its pale shadow remains. The slave cowers under this shadow for a while, but its insubstantiality is all too easily realized; it can be thrown off, shrugged off. The spell is broken. There is disbelief, a reluctance to admit the nightmare is over. Realization and awakening can take their own time to crystallize, to make real former fantasies. But become real they do.

Sometimes the formerly subjugated rise up suddenly and violently. Sometimes their frustrated energies and ambitions, so long repressed, can only seek, and find, explosive release. Those they turn on can find this anger terrifying and pitiless; they, used to cowering and timidity, find the new insubordination and insolence frightening in its lack of regard for older niceties and norms.

As the Union’s Armies approached then, two fronts advanced: one from the ‘outside,’ one from within. The military front promised defeat of one kind, the crumbling domestic one yet another. The verities it uprooted, the older securities it made fantastic, made it a more threatening and ultimately frightening one.  Even if those realizing it took their time about it.

Note: The book excerpted above is an abridgement of Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (Harper Perennial, New York, 2014).

The Republican Party Will Be Just Fine, Thanks Very Much

The supposed collapse of the Republican Party–in the face of an insurgent onslaught led by a motley crew of Tea Partiers, Donald Trump devotees, and Rush Limbaugh fans (which may indeed, be the same demographic)–during this election season is extremely wishful thinking on the part of election pundits and journalistic commentators. What animates these fantasies of an implosion in the Republican Party is, of course, yet another American political fantasy: that one day, there will be more choices on the political landscape besides the ones our current political parties offer. It also makes for entertaining speculation during a never-ending election season and offers more fuel for ‘discussion’ and ‘analysis’ on our twenty-four news channels.

The Republican Party will be just fine. When the smoke clears, after or before its convention, it will have found a way to package this election season’s supposedly ‘new lunacy’ into its platforms and manifestos, which are not too different in content from most of the central positions Donald Trump has adopted in his stump speeches. The Republican Party likes its fascism in the crypto, not the overt, varietal. Very soon–once he has locked up the nomination, if not sooner–Trump will begin to sound like that mythical creature, a ‘moderate Republican,’ and the party will close ranks around him. Just as it did last night, when his opponents at the Republican debate, after spending two hours abusing him as a con man and a fake, said they would still support him in the general elections. Trump’s racism and outright flirtations with white supremacism have not exactly caused a dramatic distancing from him on the part of party operatives and leaders either. Indeed, as many political observers have pointed out, among the Terrible Trio of Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, Trump is the least dangerous, precisely because he is the least ideologically committed, which is why he is anathema to Republican leadership, who would prefer someone crazier in the dimensions of their choice. They’d rather eviscerate this nation’s Constitution and polity in their own distinctive style.

Most importantly, as Corey Robin has deftly pointed out, nothing Trump has said–or promised to do–marks him out as a singularity in the pantheon of Republican leadership and political thought over the past half-century.  Lest we forget, the Republican Party has provided us a stolen election in 2000, a president that declared an illegal war and sanctioned torture, and let Sarah Palin run as their vice-presidential candidate in 2008. Let that sink in for a second. This is a political party that was willing to take the chance of letting a person with the intellectual nous of a daffodil take command of a nuclear arsenal had John McCain shuffled off this mortal coil during his presidential term.

A few more floating turds will not radically change the character of this cesspool. A foul bubble or two,  a few roiling waves, and then the sludge will roll back over to conceal the depths below.

Apple’s ‘Code Is Speech’ Argument, The DeCSS Case, And Free Software

In its ongoing battle with federal law enforcement agencies over its refusal to unlock the iPhone, Apple has mounted a ‘Code is Speech’ defense arguing that “the First Amendment prohibits the government from compelling Apple to make code.” This has provoked some critical commentary, including an article by Neil Richards, which argues that Apple’s argument is “dangerous.”

Richards alludes to some previous legal wrangling over the legal status of computer code, but does not name names. Here is an excerpt from my book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (co-authored with Scott Dexter) that makes note of a relevant court decision and offers arguments for treating code as speech protected under the First Amendment. (To fully flesh out these arguments in their appropriate contexts, do read Chapters 4 and 5 of Decoding Liberation. I’d be happy to mail PDFs to anyone interested.)

Most commonly, software is deemed to be harmful when it facilitates the breaking of law, as in the DeCSS case, which was the first to test the enforceability of the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions. In this case, the First Amendment was invoked in defense of the creation and distribution of the “guilty” software:the defendants sought to portray software as a medium for the expression and communication of ideas, not only between humans and machines but also among computer scientists. Implicit in the defendant’s brief is the concern that restrictions on such “speech” have broad and complex implications in technologized society.

DeCSS

In 1999, Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwegian student, wrote and published source code for software intended to circumvent DVD access control mechanisms. As part of the movie industry’s technical protection of intellectual property, DVDs were encrypted using the proprietary Content Scramble System (CSS), which is intended to allow only licensed players to play DVDs. At the time, the only computers with licensed players were Windows- and Macintosh-based; Linux users could not play DVDs — even if legally purchased — on their machines. Called DeCSS because it reverses the operation of CSS, Johansen’s software, circumventing the protective encryption, allowed DVDs to be played on Linux computers. As far as Linux users were concerned, this software merely enabled the fair use of their legally purchased DVDs, though the movie industry had a different perspective. In 2000 American authorities contacted Norwegian police, who raided Johansen’s home; arrested and tried in Norwegian court, he was fully acquitted in 2003.

In the United States, Universal Studios filed suit under the terms of the DMCA against Eric Corley, Shawn C. Reimerdes, and Roman Kazan, Americans who had posted a copy of the DeCSS code on the Web site 2600.com. In the ensuing legal proceedings, the defense argued that source code is subject to First Amendment protections, citing the landmark decision in Bernstein v. US Dept. of Justice, which had found that “the particular language one chooses [does not] change the nature of language for First Amendment purposes. This court can find no meaningful difference between computer language, particularly highlevel languages as defined above, and German or French.” The Court agreed to an extent, saying

It cannot seriously be argued that any form of computer code may be regulated without reference to First Amendment doctrine. The path from idea to human language to source code to object code is a continuum. As one moves from one to the other, the levels of precision and, arguably, abstraction increase, as does the level of training necessary to discern the idea from the expression. Not everyone can understand each of these forms. . . . Only English speakers will understand English formulations. Principally those familiar with the particular programming language will understand the source code expression. And only a relatively small number of skilled programmers and computer scientists will understand the machine readable object code.

But the Court, as a preamble for its finding in favor of placing restrictions on code, continued, “the long history of First Amendment jurisprudence makes equally clear that the fact that words, symbols and even actions convey ideas and evoke emotions does not inevitably place them beyond the power of government.” While this has never been contested, even by First Amendment proponents, the Court seemed to be failing to confront the question of whose rights would be protected, and whose infringed, by such restrictions.

The Court concluded that the functional nature of code overshadows its expressive, speechlike aspects:

The computer code at issue in this case, however, does more than express the programmers’ concepts. It does more, in other words, than convey a message. DeCSS, like any other computer program, is a series of instructions that causes a computer to perform a particular sequence of tasks which, in the aggregate, decrypt CSS-protected files. Thus, it has a distinctly functional, non-speech aspect in addition to reflecting the thoughts of the programmers. It enables anyone who receives it and who has a modicum of computer skills to circumvent plaintiffs’ access control system.

The Court, after weighing the relative importance of consumers’ fair use rights and content providers’ protection, ruled that DeCSS code was entitled only to a weak form of First Amendment protection, and found for the motion picture industry. Stripped of the veneer of a copyright debate, at its essence, this ruling reflects and reinscribes an old chauvinism that stresses the mechanic/organic, natural/synthetic, and biological/technological dichotomies. We suspect the issue is not ultimately one of functionality outweighing speech; it is simply that the Court cannot conceive of human–machine communication as speech.

The finding was appealed, and in an amicus curiae brief filed by a group of computer scientists, this defense was further elaborated, contesting the Court’s argument about the functionality of code:

[M]ost computer code does not function in a manner legally different from how a cake recipe or a music score “function,” but there can be no doubt that the latter are entitled to full First Amendment protection. . . . but in the absence of human intervention . . . [they] do nothing on their own except to inform the reader. So it is with most computer code: a human must give the command to interpret or compile the source code . . . a human must give the command to execute it . . . [and] a human must operate the device which makes the code functional. . . . The law is clear that the protection afforded to speech is not dependent on whether a device is needed to “execute” the speech. (Tyre 2001)

These arguments seek to establish that software (whether source or object code) is not only an avenue of human expression — “that subset . . . which computers can interpret and execute” (Tyre 2001) — but also one that should be subject to regulation only to the extent it is a form of speech. In their brief, the amici point out that code is used not only to communicate with computers but with computer scientists as well. That is, code is an integral part of “a complex system of understood meanings within specific communities” (Tyre 2001). Further, the expressive quality of source code, containing the “ideas, commands, objectives” (Tyre 2001) of the programmer, is carried into the executable code during a translation process. Thus, code has both communicative and expressive aspects. In the context of the cyborg world, the free speech protections for which the amici advocate generalize in the broadest sense to communication among its hybrid denizens.

Like any other form of speech, code can challenge power and ideology. The act of writing DeCSS was a fundamentally political one, contesting a particular unjust restriction on freedom. The Court’s ruling, implicitly recognizing the political implications of this act, upholds that restriction. While the DeCSS ruling is at one level only about intellectual property protection, the implications for the restrictions on expression extend much further. Without doubt, programmers’ expression has been restricted by this ruling’s chilling effect on the creation and application of cryptographic code; much more alarming is the prospect of restriction of speech and expressiveness in the cyborg world.

Tyre, James. 2001. Brief of Amici Curiae, Universal City Studios, Inc., et al. vs. Eric Corley, a/k/a Emmanuel Goldstein, 2600 Enterprises, Inc., Shawn C. Reimerdes, Roman Kazan. http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-bac.htm.

Max Weber’s ‘Iron Cage’: Who Will Bend Its Bars?

Yesterday morning, as the students in my Social Philosophy class and I discussed an excerpt from Max Weber‘s The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit of Capitalism, we ran out of time. As my students got up and started to head out for their next commitment (work or the next class), I began reading out loud the following passage:

The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

I’m glad to say that at least two or three students halted in their tracks and were visibly moved (by Weber’s writing, not by my sonorous reading.) This remarkable conclusion to Weber’s classic work has not lost any of its power to amaze over the years: it is–as the Wikipedia entry for the book notes, “prescient”–it is poetic, it is wistful, it is also, I think, angry.

The “last ton of fossilized coal” is not yet burnt, the last barrel of oil is not yet extracted, so much damage remains to be done. Many rivers remain to be choked with waste and refuse, many mountainsides are still to be devastated by strip mining, many seas–and their denizens–are not fully clogged with plastic; the temperatures of the worlds oceans and atmosphere are still inching upwards; many communities remain to be immiserated. Meanwhile, our lives become ever more machinic, controlled and administered by Big Data and Big Banks, while fascists and corporate lackeys compete for the highest echelons of power.

Vacations and leisure time shrink, we spend less time with our families; to ask for more, for another bowl, is to ask for a resounding blow about our ears with the boss’ ladle. Nose to the grindstone, shoulders to the wheel: that is where our salvation awaits. We will find deliverance in an office cubicle, the modern zone of spiritual connection with the higher powers that control our lives. When evening rolls around, the iron cage is unlocked and we are let out on furlough, with the reminder that ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’ Do not tarry too long with the family; hurry back soon; they cannot give you what work can.

Who will bend the bars of this cage? Not the jailers.

‘Nausea’ And Psychedelia: Was Antoine Roquentin Tripping?

My re-reading of Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre‘s existentialist classic, for this semester’s independent study on existentialism has now prompted me to blog on it two days in a row.

Today, I find myself returning to a question which I had first considered a couple of decades ago during my first reading of Nausea: Was Antoine Roquentin tripping? Alternatively, did Sartre ever do psychedelics and incorporate some of those visions and experiences into his writing of Nausea?

This question should seem eminently reasonable to anyone who has either experienced psychedelics himself or read about the visions and experiences of those who have ingested psychedelics. For it is all here in Roquentin’s reports: the sheer, stark, apparently unmediated access to reality and being and existence, the sheer particularity and uniqueness of things, and yet at the same time, the dawning realization that reality and appearance are woven together, that–to use Dewey‘s words, “thought is intrinsic to experience,” that consciousness is constructive and constitutive. Like those who set out on psychedelic trips, Roquentin is overpowered and awed by his noticing, as if for the first time, his and the world’s being and existence.

This psychedelic aspect of Roquentin’s visions is most manifest in his famous “vision” in the park, the most philosophically rich section of Nausea. (I do not think it is a coincidence that Sartre uses “vision” here to describe Roquentin’s experiences here.) Here the “individuality” of things melts away, leaving them “naked.” Objects begin to exist so “strongly” that their very existence is almost painful to experience–just as in psychedelic visions, trippers report the almost painfully sharp clarity they now suddenly possess of the world around them. The black roots of the chestnut tree present themselves to Roquentin in all their sensuality, an overwhelming and overpowering one.

Like those who trip, Roquentin comes to realize the world is simultaneously absurd and yet potentially filling to the brim with meaning. Like them, he realizes the interplay of word and world, even as he realizes “the crumbling of the human world, measures, quantities, and directions.” The tripper comes to realize his sight is not innocent, providing unmediated access to reality; instead, it itself is conditioned by a particular state of consciousness so that “sight is an abstract invention, a simplified idea, one of man’s ideas.” He realizes that he cannot stop thinking, that “my thought is me; that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think…and I can’t stop myself from thinking.” Those who have tripped are very often amenable to the idea that through meditative experiences, through flirtations with the no-thought experience that might be possible therein, they will experience the no-self the Buddha spoke about.

Huxley spoke of the psychedelic vision providing access to Heaven and Hell. Roquentin speaks of the “horrible ecstasy” he experiences in the park; it is frightening and exhilarating in equal measure. It leaves him “breathless” and makes him realize that up until that moment, he had not “understood the meaning of ‘existence.'” (Unlike trippers, of course, Roquentin does not feel the urge to have the entire mass of humanity share the experience with him.)

The thoughts I offer here, and the parallels I note, are merely suggestive, but I find them intriguing enough to make them explicit. A much closer read of Nausea accompanied by a comparison with classics of psychedelic literature–like Huxley’s The Doors of Perception–should be very rewarding. More on that anon.

Jean-Paul Sartre On ‘An Odd Moment In The Afternoon’

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Antoine Roquentin, offers us a characteristically morose reflection about a very particular hour of the day:

Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable. [New Directions edition, 2007; pp. 14]

Monsieur Roquentin is right. Three o’clock is a pretty terrible time of day.

Growing up in New Delhi, three o’clock very quickly became associated with the hottest part of the summer afternoon. (New Delhi’s summers boast of temperatures regularly rising to 110-115 degrees Fahrenheit (434-46 Celsius).) Four o’clock, because of its proximity to five o’clock, which signaled the start of the evening (that’s when folks rising from their afternoon siesta drank their restorative teas) conveyed a slightly benign air; two o’clock, because of its proximity to one o’clock, inherited some of its life-giving and nourishing aspects. But three o’clock was equidistant from these temporal locations; it seemed remote, inaccessible, forbidding; it was the time by which the roads were sure to have emptied. The sun beat down; the hot winds blew; exposure was foolhardy. Best to hunker down at home and ride out the storm.

When I moved to the East Coast of the United States in 1987, I experienced the sharply diminished daylight of this northern latitude in my first fall, when the clocks were set back from the Daylight Savings Time I had been enjoying on my arrival in August. Now, three o’clock was again a zenith of sorts, but a rather depressing one. I could sense the weak, angular rays of the sun were doing little good against the encroaching cold, and I knew that by four o’clock, the dimness would be sharply pronounced. Night would follow all too soon. The fall and winter evenings where when the winds sharpened; three o’clock now became the last brief station of respite before the misery began. And because I was never much of a night owl, given to working late into the night, three o’clock also signaled to me that time was running out on opportunities to be productive. I do not think it is a coincidence incidentally, that Roquentin offers us these thoughts on Friday, 2nd February–a winter afternoon. All too often, like Roquentin, “I would know in advance the day was lost.” Though, unlike him, I did not ever think that “I shall do nothing good, except, perhaps, after nightfall.”

As may be evident from my notes above, I associate moods–almost personalities, if you will–with times of the day. Three o’clock has always had a bit of a hostile air to it. In my childhood summers, it evoked fear; in my adult winters, it signals a particular kind of despondency and melancholia. There is, however, a silver lining in all of this. Now that I’m a father, three o’clock has come to signal to me that time when, on the days that I work at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Library in Manhattan, I must put away my books, sit down for my afternoon meditation session, and on completing it, head to the subways to take a train back to Brooklyn and pick up my daughter from daycare.

Sometimes, I suppose, there still some things you can get done after that dreaded afternoon hour.

Reviewing Doug Henwood’s ‘My Turn’ In Jacobin Magazine

My review of Doug Henwood‘s book My Turn: Hillary Clinton Takes Aim At The Presidency has just been published by Jacobin Magazine. Here is a pull-quote:

[Henwood’s] insistence on grounding his many rhetorical and analytical fusillades in the material conditions of US life ensures that his detailed, unflinching look at the Clintons’ long public history cannot be written off as a sexist attack. Instead, Henwood’s brief is directed squarely at Hillary Clinton’s political opportunism, her reflexive secrecy, her frequent patronage of friends and cronies, her belligerent approach to foreign policy, her scant legislative record in the Senate, and her unimpressive tenure as secretary of state.

To the extent that Clinton’s identity serves as a basis for Henwood’s critique, it is not her gender, but her identification with, and championing of the interests of, the powerful and wealthy American elite that makes her an unworthy candidate.

Comments welcome; if you like the review essay, please do share it.

From Austerlitz To Auschwitz

I’ve only recently read Elie Wiesel‘s Night (last week, in fact), and as is my habit, I skipped the preface (by Robert McAfee Brown) and the foreword (by François Mauriac) and went straight to the text. Once I was done, I returned to these preliminary sections. In the foreword, I read Mauriac describe his encounter with a young Wiesel, and how it led him to memories of the Occupation (of France):

I confided to my young visitor that nothing I had seen during those somber years had left so deep a mark upon me as those trainloads of Jewish children standing at Austerlitz station. Yet I did not even see them myself! My wife described them to me, her voice still filled with horror.

I read these lines with some puzzlement. Austerlitz?  I knew of only two Austerlitzes: the first, the scene of Napoleon’s greatest military triumph; the second, W.G. Sebald‘s novel (which I have not read yet.) Didn’t Mauriac mean ‘Auschwitz’ instead? Had his wife–whom I knew nothing about–been to Auschwitz, survived, and brought back these visions of deported Jewish children? If Mauriac did mean ‘Auschwitz’ then surely this was the most bizarre typo I had seen in a very long time. For it would have run together a place which has now passed into our collective memory as a zone of unimaginable atrocity, and a venue of military conflict, whose name has come to represent the zenith of one of the most remarkable lives of all time. Had Mauriac, somehow, unthinkingly, as he sat down at his typewriter, run together the typographic similarity of these two words in his mind, and pressed the wrong keys? But even if that was the case, how had such a howler made it through the editing gauntlet?

As might be expected, I went online to assuage my confusion. There I found that Mauriac had not made a mistake. He was indeed speaking of ‘Austerlitz station.’ To be precise, he was referring to Gare d’Austerlitz “one of the six large terminus railway stations in Paris…situated on the left bank of the Seine in the southeastern part of the city, in the 13th arrondissement.” It was built in 1840, the year Napoleon’s remains were returned from Helena to be buried at Hôtel des Invalides. During the Second World War,  the Vichy Regime set up internment camps to hold Jews being deported to concentration and death camps. Among them was Drancy internment camp, which included five subcamps; three of these were the Austerlitz, Lévitan and Bassano camps. When these Jews were finally sent to their final destinations, they departed from one of Paris’ stations. One of them, of course, was Austerlitz station, where Mauriac’s wife would have seen the sights she reported to her husband. Perhaps some of the children she saw went to Auschwitz too. (This photograph shows deportees at Austerlitz station in 1941.)

So no typo, but even then, what terrible irony. A symbol of French military ingenuity and brilliance and valor, where Napoleon took on the Old Empires and beat them to establish a new European order, sullied by these associations with the greatest European atrocity of all.

Donald Trump And Organized Labor’s Death Wish

Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi makes note of a distinctive and troubling feature of modern American political life, the seeming death wish of American organized labor:

Every four years, some Democrat who’s been a lifelong friend of labor runs for president. And every four years, that Democrat gets thrown over by national labor bosses in favor of some party lifer with his signature on a half-dozen job-exporting free-trade agreements.

It’s called “transactional politics,” and the operating idea is that workers should back the winner, rather than the most union-friendly candidate.

This year, national leaders of several prominent unions went with Hillary Clinton – who, among other things, supported her husband’s efforts to pass NAFTA – over Bernie Sanders….Trump is already positioning himself to take advantage of the political opportunity afforded him by “transactional politics.” He regularly hammers the NAFTA deal in his speeches….

Unions have been abused so much by both parties in the past decades that even mentioning themes union members care about instantly grabs the attention of workers. That’s true even when it comes from Donald Trump….You will find union members scattered at almost all of Trump’s speeches. And there have been rumors of unions nationally considering endorsing Trump….

Indeed. Never mind that the candidates unions would consider endorsing would then want to distance themselves as much as possible from organized labor. (As Taibbi also notes, Trump thinks Michigan autoworkers are paid too much and that in general, “wages are too high.”)

I have written before on this blog about the self-destructive, seemingly self-hating antipathy that American workers have to organized labor. The phenomenon Taibbi points to is another matter altogether. Here, unions themselves are engaged in behavior which is willfully, inexplicably self-destructive.  Perhaps this behavior reveals a particularly virulent strain of Stockholm Syndrome (it is very hard, after all, to leave abusive relationships and seek help); perhaps it’s a manifestation of the thing Freud called a ‘todestrieb.’

Consider for instance, the news that Jeff Johnson, the head of the Washington State Labor Council–affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which has not yet endorsed anyone for president–was allegedly pressured by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to not speak at a Bernie Sanders’ campaign event. The AFSCME, one of the largest public-sector unions in the U.S. and a member of the AFL-CIO, endorsed Clinton for president in October. As the article linked to above notes, the AFSCME is perfectly within its rights to slap down on a state labor federation pending approval from national AFL-CIO. Still, it might be asked, why endorse candidates who send union jobs overseas to non-unionized workplaces?

Desperate political times call for desperate actions. Unions are under assault everywhere; membership is shrinking nation-wide. One might ask though, of all the actions available to organized labor, why would it endorse candidates so damaging to its members’ short-term and long-term interests, both economic and political? Especially when the decline of unionization in the American workplace has so extensively been identified as a primary cause of falling wages and rising economic inequality?

My Daughter And The Hillary Clinton Candidacy

In the first draft of my review–forthcoming in Jacobin–of Doug Henwood‘s My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets The Presidency, I had included some lines that did not survive the first editorial take on my submission (I await, with some trepidation, the next editorial lowering of the boom.) Here is how it read:

Hilary is no…Eleanor Roosevelt…she is no feminist hero and should not be….I will not ask my three-year old daughter to look up to Hillary; she will find better feminist heroes elsewhere. Like her mother, who fights for the rights of unionized workers, something which Hillary, in her attacks on teachers unions in Arkansas, has shown herself incapable of in the past.

In my assessment, on this blog (here and here), of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, I had often wondered whether the symbolic value of her presidency would be great enough to outweigh her political faults. In these ruminations, I could not but help think of my daughter (and others like her.) A mere toddler, sure, but by the time a Clinton presidency’s first term will terminate, she will be seven years old. (If Clinton serves two terms, my daughter will almost be a pre-teen by the time of the second term’s conclusion.) What would it mean to her to see a woman as president? Just for her, and for her sense of what is possible in this world, would it not be better that a woman become president–in preference to yet another old white man, even if he is a kindly Jewish socialist from Vermont?

I don’t think so. My daughter encounters many women who can serve as positive role models. I introduce her, on a regular basis, to my woman friends in my various social groups: professors, journalists, doctors, writers, lawyers, teachers, students, labor organizers, mathematicians, and so on. She sees women–at my gym–perform amazing feats of strength. (She sees her own mother perform some of these.) She is not lacking for inspiration, for the right kinds of images; she hears, as often as I can manage, stories of women’s power and achievement. She will still encounter sexism and patriarchy; that much, I cannot protect her from. But I try, on an ongoing basis, to prepare her for those inevitable encounters.  I try to expand her sense of what this world holds for her, and of the kind of room she can make for herself.

Women politicians and  leaders are an important component of her world-image but they, like any of the other women I introduce my daughter to, must show, by their commitment to ethical and political ideals that I think my daughter should live by, that they can serve as worthy exemplars for my daughter.  This same constraint applies to any of the other women my daughter meets. I doubt a woman who busts unions for a living, or a journalist who serves corporate interests, would evoke approving commentary from me. “Keep your distance from this kind of achievement” is what I think I would say.

I desperately want my daughter want to grow up in a kinder and more just world. I want her to grow up in a world without war, racism, and soul-and-life-crushing economic inequality. I do not think a candidate who has supported mass incarceration, helped throw helpless families off welfare, voted for an illegal war, and payed obeisance to–and aspires to membership in–the most powerful economic class in this nation, will make that kind of world.

A political post is but one station among many that a woman can occupy to serve as a role model for my daughter. And even that one must be occupied by a woman animated by the right kinds of principles. My daughter has many other heroes to look up to; she will be just fine without a Hillary Clinton presidency. And if Hillary Clinton does become president, I will make sure to point out to my daughter that were she to aspire to be president herself, she would hopefully seek out an alternate set of animating political and moral principles.