With guest lecturer, Barack Obama. Via 54 40 Or Fight: New for the 2012 spring term at Portland State University is a course called “Revolutionary Marxism: Theory and Practice”, where students will learn the fundamentals of Marxism and enacting revolution. The primary textbook will be “The Meaning of Marxism”, by Paul D’Amato. Mr. D’Amato was
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Portland State Offering How-To Class On “Revolutionary Marxism”…
[Posted by Karl] In assessing why legal “elites” were caught off-guard by the scrutiny Obamacare received in last week’s Supreme Court arguments, Jonathan H. Adler suggests that (in addition to groupthink) “[a]t many schools, academics are more interested in developing a comprehensive theory of justice than in divining the nuances buried in the Court’s cases.” Thus, “[p]remier appellate litigators may have a good sense of how the Court is likely to assess complex constitutional law claims, but elite legal academics, not so much.” Expanding on the former point, Kenneth Anderson suggests legal elites are less interested in predicting Court outcomes than in framing of acceptable and unacceptable opinion and thereby setting the boundaries of outcomes. RTWT, because I intend to focus on the latter point. Surprisingly, the NYT’s Adam Liptak wrote an interesting article looking at how the lawyers on both sides of the Obamacare case went about fashioning arguments to appeal to Justice Kennedy. In particular, both Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and Paul D. Clement tried to appeal to the idiosyncratic way Kennedy tends to view liberty and individual repsonsibility. Although Liptak focused on the much-discussed exchange in which Kennedy left the door open to finding the healthcare market to be unique, he downplayed an almost equally interesting aspect of Kennedy’s jurisprudence: Justice Kennedy has participated in three decisions on the scope of federal power under the Constitution’s commerce clause. He twice voted to strike down the law before him. Most recently, he voted to uphold a law allowing federal regulation of home-grown medicinal marijuana. He wrote an opinion in one of the cases, a concurrence explaining why a law concerning guns near schools had to go. The decision rested, he wrote, on “the theory that two governments accord more liberty than one,” which he said gave rise to a “grave constitutional obligation if democratic liberty and the federalism that secures it are to endure.” On one level, this argument underscores to the difference between a mandate imposed by a state government and the federal government, but it also points to Kennedy’s concern for political accountability. As Ann Althouse quoted Kennedy from United States v. Lopez : The theory that two governments accord more liberty than one requires for its realization two distinct and discernable lines of political accountability: one between the citizens and the Federal Government; the second between the citizens and the States. If, as Madison expected, the federal and state governments are to control each other, see The Federalist No. 51, and hold each other in check by competing for the affections of the people, see The Federalist No. 46, those citizens must have some means of knowing which of the two governments to hold accountable for the failure to perform a given function. ‘Federalism serves to assign political responsibility, not to obscure it.’… Were the Federal Government to take over the regulation of entire areas of traditional state concern, areas having nothing to do with the regulation of commercial activities, the boundaries between the spheres of federal and state authority would blur and political responsibility would become illusory…. The resultant inability to hold either branch of the government answerable to the citizens is more dangerous even than devolving too much authority to the remote central power. Althouse noted how this played out in the context of the argument about the Medicaid expansion: We finally hear from Justice Kennedy ***: “If the inevitable consequence of your position was that the Federal Government could just do this on its own, the Federal Government could have Medicaid, Medicare, and these insurance regulations, assume that’s true, then how are the interests of federalism concerned? How are the interests of federalism concerned if, in Florida or Texas or some of the other objecting States, there are huge Federal bureaucracies doing what this bill allows the State bureaucracies to do?” Clement hits Kennedy with a word Kennedy has used himself in federalism cases. *** The word is “accountability.” Clement says: “If the Federal Government decides to spend money through Federal instrumentalities, and the citizen is hacked off about it, they can bring a Federal complaint to a Federal official working in a Federal agency.” However, the point about political accountability runs throughout Obamacare. Creating a Potemkin insurance market with mandates and exchanges was very much about the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress converting the private health insurance market into a social insurance program while trying to pretend otherwise, to escape political accountability both for their long-term goal of a single-payer system and for the inevitable dysfunction of the interim system they have created. It is not clear that Kennedy understands this : Kennedy mused that Congress could have created a Medicare-style program for the uninsured, run exclusively by the government without the involvement of private insurers. “Let’s assume that (Congress) could use the tax power to raise revenue and to just have a national health service, single payer,” said Kennedy. “How does that factor into our analysis? In one sense, it can be argued that this is what the government is doing; it ought to be honest about the power that it’s using and use the correct power. “On the other hand, it means that since … Congress can do it anyway, we give a certain amount of latitude,” Kennedy continued. “I’m not sure which way the argument goes.” If Kennedy is consistent, he ought to know which way the argument goes in his own mind (he may have simply not wished to tip his hand during the oral arguments, although as Liptak noted, the distribution of his questions at oral argument is suggestive). From the outside, the issue is how well the lawyers involved understood the concerns that drive Kennedy’s jurisprudence. The hacktastic Greg Sargent thinks it was “a terrible misjudgment” for anyone to have treated Justice Scalia as a swing vote, but that wasn’t the misjudgment. Rather, the misjudgment was in not having a sufficient understanding of Scalia’s jurisprudence or in thinking a superficial version of it would somehow fool him ( Randy Barnett certainly understands it). Whether Kennedy can be fooled is the $1.76 trillion question. –Karl
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Justice Kennedy and the Obamacare bubble
Another day, another book I need to buy and hopefully read some day. In the March 21st NYT, Nicholas Kristof reviews a new book : ”The Righteous Mind”. In it, author Jonathan Haidt discusses some original research that investigates some key values held by conservatives and liberals – and how these two groups perceive each other on these values. I have long been interested in why Republicans and Democrats believe as they do, and this type of research on values zeroes in on this question. A couple of key observations emerge. First, the author points out how both conservatives and liberals adhere to values that are formed around a moral code, but conservatives follow some additional core values that liberals do not. Kristof phrases it as: Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims. Kristof summarizes the values: …for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity. In his research , Haidt and his colleagues refer to the latter three values as “binding values”, as they bind together people into larger groups. These foundations are Ingroup/loyalty (supporting moral obligations of patriotism and “us vs. them” thinking); Authority/respect (including concerns about social order and the importance of traditions and role-based duties in maintaining that order) and Purity/sanctity (including concerns about treating the body as a temple and living in a higher, more “divine” way, versus a baser, more carnal way). These sound pretty familiar to a conservative. In fact, Haidt’s definition for the second category (authority/respect) sounds like a sound bite description of what conservatism is. The second, more interesting observation from Haidt’s book and research is touched upon briefly by Kristof: Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer . Much of Haidt’s research centered around the accuracy of stereotypes of “out groups” – i.e. how liberals see conservatives and vice versa. The research showed that, by a significant margin, liberals were less accurate in their depiction of conservatives than the converse. The ironic part of this comes when reading the comments on Kristof’s article – this liberal lack of other-awareness is illustrated over and over by the left-leaning commentariat…but what else would we expect from the NYT’s readers? A summary from the original research: Results indicate that people at all points on the political spectrum are at least intuitively aware of the actual differences in moral concerns between liberals and conservatives: they correctly predicted that liberals would care more than conservatives about the two individualizing foundations and that conservatives would care more than liberals about the three binding foundations. The results also confirm previous studies of partisan misperception (e.g. Chambers, et al., 2006) by showing that, in general, people overestimate how dramatically liberals and conservatives differ. Remarkably, people even morally stereotype their own ingroup, with liberals overestimating liberals’ strong individualizing concerns and underestimating liberals’ weak binding concerns, and conservatives exaggerating conservatives’ moral concerns in the opposite directions. Our results go beyond previous studies, however, in finding and explaining an otherwise puzzling result: liberals were the least accurate. We presented three competing hypotheses about accuracy: 1) We found no support for the hypothesis that liberals would be most accurate; liberals were the least accurate about conservatives and about liberals. The largest inaccuracies were in liberals’ underestimations of conservatives’ Harm and Fairness concerns, and liberals further exaggerated the political differences by overestimating their own such concerns. 2) We found some support for the hypothesis that moderates would be most accurate, which they were in the case of the binding foundations. However, and most crucially, partisan inaccuracies were not mirror images of each other. On the contrary, liberals and conservatives both tended to exaggerate their binding foundation differences by underestimating the typical liberal and overestimating the typical conservative. 3) Finally, we found some support for the hypothesis that conservatives would be the most accurate, which they were in the case of the individualizing foundations. In line with Moral Foundations Theory, liberals dramatically underestimated the Harm and Fairness concerns of conservatives. So why do we care? Of course there’s the reassurance that we as conservatives can take from the fact that liberals are provably inaccurate in their stereotyping of conservatives’ moral positions. But more important is the confirmation of the fact that conservatives do care about those issues that liberals claim we do not (not that we didn’t know that already…). As I have mentioned previously on these pages, most, if not all of our policy positions originate largely from our beliefs about these core value issues. In many respects, social conservatism maps into the other “legs” of the conservative stool. Fiscal conservatism, defense conservatism, immigration policy, foreign policy, etc. – all stem from the values we hold in these categories. The fact that liberals seem to be sorely lacking in the “binding values” may (probably, IMO) explain how their positions on many/most policy areas differ from ours. One of the most contentious points made by Haidt is brought out by Kristof: “Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters,” writes Haidt, a former liberal who says he became a centrist while writing the book. Ouch. The liberals commenting on Kristof’s article didn’t like that one a bit. But it does explain a lot. If one accepts the theory that America is a center-right nation, I would say there’s a pretty significant likelihood that the difference lies in this disconnect in these core values that are shared – and not shared – between liberals and conservatives. Yes, we are all values voters.
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Liberals, conservatives, values and how we perceive each other
Last time we checked in on @Soledad_OBrien (D-CNN), she was getting the Wikipedia definition of Critical Race Theory whispered in her ear because Breitbart.com’s Joel Pollak came to her show prepared to do battle. @Soledad_OBrien’s ignorance/deception about Critical Race Theory,… Read more here: Stop Tweeting @Soledad_OBrien. I mean it. #StopTweetingSoledad
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Stop Tweeting @Soledad_OBrien. I mean it. #StopTweetingSoledad
No matter what you think about the Critical Race Theory debate, it has ripped away whatever shreds of credibility Soledad O’Brien might have ever had. Also taking a large hit: the reputation of anyone who touted her pathetic attempt to rehabilitate herself on the definition of Critical Race Theory. I’m looking at you, Tommy Christopher . Airing this morning was one of the more remarkable episodes of media dishonesty you will see this election season. Let’s show you the clip: This video clip is remarkable on several levels, but let’s start with the blatant, jaw-dropping dishonesty on the issue of whether the discussion of white supremacy is a central part of Critical Race Theory. Recall that, the other day, Joel Pollak said that Critical Race Theory holds that the civil rights movement was a sham, and that white supremacy is the order, and it must be overthrown. Here is what Professor Dorothy Brown says in the above clip: Critical Race Theory seeks to explain judicial decisions by asking the question what does race have to do with it … it looks at race in America … It’s nothing about white supremacy. When I hear “white supremacy” I think of the Ku Klux Klan. Critical Race Theory is the opposite of that. So honestly, I have no idea what he was talking about. Actually, we have previously shown that this definition is accurate, according to Obama appointee Elena Kagan . We can further demonstrate its accuracy by looking at the New York Times . But — and here’s the kicker! — guess who else has previously written that Critical Race Theory holds that “white supremacy” is the order of the day? Why, one Dorothy A. Brown — the very expert who appeared in the above clip on Soledad O’Brien’s show: Although CRT does not employ a single methodology, it seeks to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support White supremacy and the subordination of people of color . So why is it that an expert who agrees with Pollak’s position was led to claim that Pollak had it exactly backwards? Because the video was — say it with me! — heavily and selectively edited! You want to know why Brown said she had no idea what Pollak was talking about? Because of the way CNN edited the clip of Pollak’s previous interview. Note how that portion starts with Soledad O’Brien’s denunciation of Pollak’s views as a distortion. What had Pollak just said? That part is not played for the Professor. I’ll give the microphone to Allahpundit to describe what happens instead: She restates his position here for her guest, Professor Dorothy Brown, as “he said Critical Race Theory is all about white supremacy.” Brown seems taken aback by that, understandably — the way O’Brien phrases it, it sounds as if Pollak was claiming that CRT was itself white supremacist in nature, which is insane. So, good job to everyone involved here in debunking something that no one is claiming. Indeed. Here’s the problem: if CNN had played Pollak’s entire quote, it would have been clear that Pollak was arguing that, indeed, Critical Race Theorists are arguing that white supremacy needs to be fought. Here is the original video, with Pollak’s original characterization preserved: Here is the relevant quote: POLLAK: Derrick Bell is the Jeremiah Wright of academia. He passed away last year, but during his lifetime, he developed a theory called Critical Race Theory, which holds that the civil rights movement was a sham, and that white supremacy is the order, and it must be overthrown . SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: That is a complete misreading. I’ll stop you there for a second, and then I’m going to let you continue, but that is a complete misreading of Critical Race Theory. CNN chopped up Pollak’s quote to make it sound like he was claiming the complete opposite of what he was actually saying . . . and then brought on an expert who declared herself baffled. Soledad dusted off her hands and declared victory. Most of you know this by now, but it never hurts to have a reminder: These people in the media will lie to you. They will blatantly lie to you. And it takes people like bloggers to dig up the facts — to “fact check their asses” — and expose the actual truth. By the way, Soledad O’Brien implores people to stop tweeting her about this. You should check her mentions on Twitter for grins. I’d say she is getting tweeted several times a minute about this lie of hers. I contributed a dozen or so retweets at lunchtime, and plan to do a few more before bedtime. I’ll probably do a few more daily until she retracts her lies and apologizes to Joel Pollak. Or, failing that, when the election is over. BUT WAIT! I’M NOT DONE WITH HER YET! We have not yet finished exploring the depravity of the above video clip! Lee Stranahan notesthe extraordinary exchange that seems to support “separate but equal”: O’Brien: Would he have said that the civil rights movement was a sham? Or that Brown v. Board of Ed[ucation] was a sham? Brown: He wouldn’t say it was a sham but he has been very critical of civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education. And his argument, Professor Bell’s argument was the solution did not get the children what the children needed, so perhaps the lawyers in the cases didn’t spend enough time talking to the parents. So Professor Bell’s argument is, “You know, maybe if we had gotten fully funded separate but equal that might’ve been a better alternative to what we have today.” Stranahan says: You read that correctly — on national television, Prof. Dorothy Brown put forward Bell’s idea that America would be better off with “separate but equal”, as long as it was “fully funded.” . . . . Do Soledad O’Brien and CNN favor a society where blacks and whites are “separate but equal?” There was certainly no indication in the broadcast that they oppose this profoundly segregationist idea, the polar opposite of e pluribus unum . It pains me to state the obvious once again about the ideas of Derrick Bell: if a white person had written a book suggesting that perhaps white people would be better off if we still had “separate but equal,” he or she would be universally abhorred as racist. Open your hearts and your minds to the words of Derrick Bell! Now gimme a hug!
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CNN Plays Heavily Edited and Deceptive Video in Pathetic Effort to Discredit Breitbart Editor
