What I Wrote
My column this week was on constitutional crises and this notion of “constitutional rot,” and how to think of the current situation in this country.
One thing the language of crisis captures, however, is the degree to which the American political system is under a tremendous amount of stress. And to the extent that this stress threatens the integrity of the constitutional order, it is because the American system is, and has been, in a profound state of disrepair. If we are in or approaching a constitutional crisis, it has been a long time coming.
And on this week’s episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we watched the 1997 political thriller “Conspiracy Thriller,” directed by Richard Donner.
Now Reading
Danielle M. Wenner on why Democrats must lead public opinion rather than follow it, for Liberal Currents.
Republicans and their centrist enablers have sold voters a bag of lies about what is in their interests across a range of issues from “free speech” to DEI programs to basic rights for trans people. Rather than taking voters’ preferences as an immutable fact to which they must always and only respond, Democrats must embrace the power that they have to help voters identify and understand what their interests are, and thus how they should perceive the impacts of this administration’s actions on their ability to pursue and achieve them. Just as importantly, they must also do the work to construct a positive alternative vision of what our nation can be and use their significant ideational power to show voters how and why a nation built around the values of freedom and democracy is better for them than one built on cruelty and fear.
Rebecca Solnit on how the language of victim blaming shapes our politics for her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency.
There’s a term, coercive control, which describes such violence and sexual assault as part of a larger campaign of domination, which is why it was always about control, never about losing control. Blaming the victim is another tactic in a campaign of control and power, and it has often worked. It still does. Male violence was a given, and it was women who were supposed to alter their lives to avoid it and who were blamed not only by attackers but by society if we didn’t succeed.
Olufemi Taiwo on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s war on D.E.I., for Slate.
If meritocracy is to be won in this country, we have to create the possibility for lasting change first. Accomplishing this task is directly at odds with “restoring” a mythic past. No matter how many times the president or his party use the word “meritocracy,” it is clear that the game rigged for the Kennedys and against the Bridgeses of this country is the America they want to return to “greatness.” And no matter how they phrase it, the case for that is meritless.
Vikram David Amar and Jason Mazzone on the birthright citizenship clause, for Verdict.
Just as Occam’s razor suggests that answers that are the simplest and that require the fewest assumptions are often the best in resolving disputes in the realm of philosophy, so too in the absence of compelling public legislative or other history, a constitutional interpretation that straightforwardly honors a provision’s textual emphasis on place of birth and actual amenability to regulation — and nothing more — is vastly superior to interpretations that require the imputation of the status, allegiance or ephemerality of a child’s parents, when the words of the document never mention anything at all about the parents or any of these concepts.
Lawrence B. Glickman on Social Security, for Boston Review.
As the opposition to MAGA struggles to find its footing — especially, it seems, within the leadership of the Democratic Party — recalling FDR’s description of the danger posed by these “new mercenaries” might help guide the way. To him, the best way to combat that danger was simple: a popular politics of public goods, social insurance, and life-saving regulation, one in accordance with the overwhelming support for Social Security. Then as now, such a politics not only challenges the view, articulated most recently by Trump and Musk, that government expenditures — except those that enrich elites — are a racket. It also underlines how the kind of public goods that only government can provide are not only morally just and enriching, but, as FDR argued, essential in the “war for the survival of democracy.”
