Still Waiting for Reconstruction

Posted on by

I’ve had a copy of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 for at least 20 years,  maybe 30, without starting to read it. Written by Eric Foner, it’s the standard history of the period after the Civil War during which the government theoretically tried to heal the South and integrate former slaves into the southern economy. I’ve never tried reading it because the failure of Reconstruction is too depressing. After fighting a terrible civil war, America had a chance to make significant progress and blew it.

Being a fan of Ulysses S. Grant, however, I’m reading Ron Chernow’s long biography of Grant and have finally reached the post-Civil War years. It looks like rough going ahead:

As the year progressed, Grant was drawn ever more deeply into the debate on Reconstruction. In early March 1865, the federal government had assumed responsibility for aiding freed slaves through the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Since it was set up as a War Department agency, drawing funds and staff from it, Grant was directly involved in its operations. The bureau’s mandate was to feed, clothe, and educate former slaves, providing them with medical supplies and legal protection and relocating them on more than 850,000 acres of land the federal government came to control during the war. . . .

Because southern slaves had inhabited a rural culture, the pivotal issue for their future was whether they could receive land from the federal government. With a plot of land, they had a chance for an independent life; if condemned to remain landless, they would be thrown back into servitude to the same plantation barons who had owned them. On August 16, [President Andrew] Johnson issued an order that allowed southern whites to recapture land confiscated from them during the war—a move that made him heroic to whites while dealing a crushing blow to black hopes. It forced freedmen to abandon the forty-acre plots they had started to work, turning the men into powerless sharecroppers, bound to land owned by whites. Within weeks, a white delegation from the former Confederacy rushed to the White House to express “sincere respect” for Johnson’s desire “to sustain Southern rights in the Union.”

By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy.

During the summer of 1865, President Johnson sent Carl Schurz, the Prussian-born journalist and Union general, to the South to report on the progress of Reconstruction. His forty-six-page report didn’t present the rosy view of a reconciled South that Johnson preferred. Instead he painted the white South as angry and defiant, still insisting that secession had been legitimate. His portrayal of freed blacks described them as languishing in wretched conditions of poverty, reinforced by Black Codes that trapped them in a new subservience.

Unquote.

Now here we are, more than 150 years later. Republicans have switched places with the Democrats and become the guarantors of white supremacy in the South. There are stories like “Georgia Republicans Are Going All-In on Voter Suppression” and “Why the Georgia [Republican Party’s] Voting Rollbacks Would Hit Black People Hard”. Why bother reading about Reconstruction when some of the same crap is happening now?

They Asked If It’s Okay To Buy More Books

Posted on by

“Bibliophile” sounds better than “bookworm”, although it might be better to be one of the latter, not the former.

According to Merriam-Webster, a bibliophile is a lover or collector of books, while a bookworm is someone “unusually devoted to reading and study”. Those definitions suggest that a bookworm spends time in books — using them as tools for a greater purpose — while a bibliophile spends time on books — admiring or acquiring them without necessarily getting inside them.

Being a bibliophile tends to generate two questions. The first is asked by other people: “Have you read all these books?” This question has a simple answer, which should be obvious, even to people who don’t own many books.

The second is asked by oneself: “What am I doing with all these books?” This question comes in may flavors, like “Why do I have all these books?” and “Shouldn’t I get rid of some of these books?”, and no simple answer at all. 

This brings me to something from a site called HMM Weekly. They offer a series called “Ask the Sophist”. Here’s how they describe it:

THE SOPHIST is here to tell you why you’re right. Send your questions to AskTheSophist@hmmweekly.com, and get the answers you want.

The particular question I saw is a good one (that’s my opinion, for personal reasons):

Dear The Sophist,
I own a lot of books, and nearly enough shelves to fit them. I haven’t read most of them—has anyone with a lot of books read most of them?—yet I still get impulses to buy more. Can you please tell me why it’s OK for me to buy more books?

The Sophist replied (in part):

Dear Volume Purchaser,
Books are ridiculous objects to buy, aren’t they? For the sake of spending a day or two, maybe a week, with some author’s thoughts and words, you take custody of this physical item that sticks around, and around, as more and more others accumulate along with it. You look at them, almost unseeingly, day after day; the walls of your rooms press in; you pay extra money to the movers to drag the extra weight around from one dwelling to the next, all because you read an interesting review once or a cover caught your eye in a bookstore.  

You know what else is ridiculous? The sheer impermanence of thought. The constant yet ephemeral flickering of partial understanding across the synapses in our wet and mortal brains, and the dry circuits of the junky and even more short-lived electronic ersatz brains we rely on for backup. A book is an investment against forgetting and death—a poor investment, but it beats the alternatives. It is a slippery yet real toehold on eternity. 

Long after your question and my answer here will have been chopped to incompatible bits and decayed to a 404, the physical books will endure. I consult my nearest set of Ikea bookcases—many of their shelves double-stacked, some with books laid sideways, and with copies of Daniel Pinkwater’s Borgel, the first Dragonball trilogy, two Far Side collections, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and sundry other volumes spilled or scattered on the floor at their feet. . . . 

From the shelves proper, searching for something old-looking, I retrieve a copy of Brave Men—”The New Book by ERNIE PYLE,” per the front of the dust jacket; “Now in its 700th thousand, including the Book-of-the-Month Club,” per the rear. It is printed in double columns for economy, under wartime paper rationing. The inside front cover bears a slightly double-struck stamp reading “NAOMI GIESER / 2400 McELDERRY ST.” and on the endpaper opposite is handwritten, in ungraceful cursive, “Ernie Pyle killed in action in Pacific April 1945.” I have read this book, and I would guess so did Naomi Gieser of McElderry St. The internet tells me she was around age 20 at the time, and by the obituaries she was evidently still alive when the book made it to me.

Two shelves down is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask / A Link to the Past: Legendary Edition, displayed in a place of honor. I have not read this book, but its owner has. On the shelf in between is a three-volume set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a richly decorated 1946 edition from The Heritage Press. . . .  There are two strips of torn-off blue-lined memo-pad paper tucked in it, one shortly after the beginning of the text proper, the other up at page 446, “Italy Under Maximian and Severus.” The latter, I think, marks my own deepest run into Gibbon, sometime in the 1990s. But I can get back to it right now and keep going, just as soon as I finish with—what was the question again?

Oh, yes, right. The books. Some of these books will surely outlast their easy-build Swedish bookshelves, which only have so many future moves in them. They have outlasted other readers and non-readers, and they will outlast me. And, sure, I will die without having read many of them, though it would be rude to write down which ones I consider myself the likeliest to miss. As long as they are there, there is the chance. 

My father subscribed to the Library of America for a while, and among the many shelves of books in our home, he left one entire bookcase filled with the results, soundly printed on acid-free paper for posterity. I have no real idea what fraction of them he read; he was a devoted and wide-ranging reader, but not the sort of fanatic or obsessive who would have plowed through them all to prove a point. I carry some off with me now and then, in a tiny contribution to my mother’s decluttering. Before the pandemic I helped myself to his copy of the volume of Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick, and I used it to finally educate myself on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Had he read it, too? If not, then I took care of reading it for both of us.  

If you stop the flow of new books, you stop this flow of possibilities. Still, . . . you sense that your household arrangements are a little out of balance. You have nearly enough shelves, you say, by which you mean that the books are creeping out into your living space. 

Given that, [you could] cull the truly hopeless or pointless part of your inventory . . .  The Sophist has done this, in the course of moving into smaller living spaces with increasing numbers of people. I’ve only regretted not having one of the castoffs once or twice. (More than zero times, though!) 

And then you may buy more books, with a clearer conscience, and carry on as a custodian of knowledge. You might also consider buying some more bookshelves. 

“The revolt of Maxentius immediately restored peace to the churches of Italy and Africa…”, The Sophist 

Well, that helped. 

So the question before the house is: What about The Hidden Springs: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, by Mark Solms, “a revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life” (Norton, 432 pages)?

It’s true, there’s always Kindle. If only Bezos treated his workers better.

A Possible Way to Address the Filibuster Mess

Posted on by

After four years of political hell, Democrats have a chance to actually move this country forward. In order to do that, Senate Democrats have to either abolish the filibuster or seriously reform it.

Today, ending debate in the Senate requires a “cloture” vote. That means sixty senators have to vote Yes on cloture before the Senate can stop debating and actually vote on legislation. A filibuster is the refusal of forty-one or more senators to vote Yes on cloture. That means the debate proceeds or the Senate gives up and moves on to something else.

But as Senator Warren said last night, senators aren’t sent to Washington to conduct a debate society. If Senate Democrats can’t all agree to totally get rid of the filibuster and allow a simple majority of senators to end debate, they can seriously reform it.

E. J. Dionne shows how it might be done:

Democrats won both Georgia Senate seats in January’s runoffs, giving them control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time in a decade. But their ability to advance legislation — from raising the federal minimum wage to democracy reforms in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — can be thwarted by the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority filibuster rule.

Progressives’ anger at Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his caucus, who use the filibuster to block every initiative they can, is nearly matched by their frustration with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III (W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), whose opposition to getting rid of the filibuster means Democrats are stuck with it, since they’d need all 50 votes in their caucus, plus Vice President Harris as a tiebreaker, to do it. . . .

Manchin hasn’t budged, though. Monday, when asked if he’d reconsider his stance on eliminating the filibuster, he shot back: “Jesus Christ, what don’t you understand about ‘never’?”

Democrats are right to see the urgency: Republican state lawmakers around the country are moving to enact voter suppression measures that will, if passed, put the slender Democratic majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives in jeopardy in 2022 and beyond. Without democracy reform, and with the Supreme Court’s recent assaults on the Voting Rights Act, sticking with the filibuster could make it nearly impossible for the Biden administration to pursue its agenda.

But Democrats should proceed with caution: In 2001, I warned that if Republicans harangued Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) over his apostasy on their party’s policy priorities, they would regret it. He would switch parties and, in a 50-50 Senate, shift the Senate majority. The next month, it happened. The same concern now applies to Democrats with Manchin. Push too far, and the result could be Majority Leader McConnell, foreclosing Democrats’ avenue to pursue infrastructure, tax reform and health reform legislation.

So, what can Democrats do?

. . . Instead of naming and shaming them, Democrats might consider looking at what Manchin and Sinema like about the filibuster. Sinema recently said, “Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.” Last year, Manchin said, “The minority should have input — that’s the whole purpose for the Senate. If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”

If you take their views at face value, the goal is to preserve some rights for the Senate minority, with the aim of fostering compromise. The key, then, is to find ways not to eliminate the filibuster on legislation but to reform it to fit that vision. Here are some options:

MAKE THE MINORITY DO THE WORK

Currently, it takes 60 senators to reach cloture — to end debate and move to a vote on final passage of a bill. The burden is on the majority, a consequence of filibuster reform in 1975, which moved the standard from two-thirds of senators present and voting to three-fifths of the entire Senate. Before that change, if the Senate went around-the-clock, filibustering senators would have to be present in force.

If, for example, only 75 senators showed up for a cloture vote, 50 of them could invoke cloture and move to a final vote. After the reform, only a few senators in the minority needed to be present to a request for unanimous consent and to keep the majority from closing debate by forcing a quorum call. The around-the-clock approach riveted the public, putting a genuine spotlight on the issues. Without it, the minority’s delaying tactics go largely unnoticed, with little or no penalty for obstruction, and no requirement actually to debate the issue.

One way to restore the filibuster’s original intent would be requiring at least two-thirds of the full Senate, or 40 senators, to keep debating instead requiring 60 to end debate. The burden would fall to the minority, who’d have to be prepared for several votes, potentially over several days and nights, including weekends and all-night sessions, and if only once they couldn’t muster 40 — the equivalent of cloture — debate would end, making way for a vote on final passage of the bill in question.

GO BACK TO THE “PRESENT AND VOTING” STANDARD

A shift to three-fifths of the Senate “present and voting” would similarly require the minority to keep most of its members around the Senate when in session. If, for example, the issue in question were voting rights, a Senate deliberating on the floor, 24 hours a day for several days, would put a sharp spotlight on the issue, forcing Republicans to publicly justify opposition to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of minorities. Weekend Senate sessions would cause Republicans up for reelection in 2022 to remain in Washington instead of freeing them to go home to campaign.

In a three-fifths present and voting scenario, if only 80 senators showed up, only 48 votes would be needed to get to cloture. Add to that a requirement that at all times, a member of the minority party would have to be on the floor, actually debating, and the burden would be even greater, while delivering what Manchin and Sinema say they want — more debate. . . .

In a 50-50 Senate, and with the Republican strategy clearly being united opposition to almost all Democratic priorities, Biden and Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) need the support of Manchin and Sinema on a daily basis. They won’t be persuaded by pressure campaigns from progressive groups or from members of Congress. But they might consider reforms that weaken the power of filibusters and give Democrats more leverage to enact their policies, without pursuing the dead end of abolishing the rule altogether.

That Time the Chinese Communists Used a Few Words to Make Themselves Look Good

Posted on by

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) doesn’t get as much publicity as it should. The people who run China’s government do horrible things. Prof. Perry Link is an expert on China and explains one way the party easily manipulated the rest of the world using the power of propaganda: 

Does the CCP’s Department of Propaganda (later renamed the Department of Publicity) lie? [Author and dissident] Su Xiaokang gently told me that the question is naïve. The CCP system, he explained, has an entirely different way of measuring the value of statements. Truth and falsity are incidental. A statement is valuable if its “social effects” are “good,” and the effects count as good if they support the power interests of the CCP. (For politically innocuous matters like weather reports or basketball scores, support of the party does not apply, but avoidance of harm to the party still does.) Hence a “good” statement might be true, half-true, or untrue—that is beside the point.

A tendency toward including truth does become relevant when someone judges that a statement will influence people more effectively if a bit of verisimilitude is supplied. But truth is never the first criterion, and in that sense neither is lying. American democracy’s headache with a president who lies is a fundamentally different problem from China’s living under the CCP’s propaganda apparatus, whose roots date from the 1940s and whose experts by now are very good at what they do.

Readers of the Western press, whether aware of it or not, have seen examples of that expertise. In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the international wing of the Xinhua News Agency instituted frequent use of the phrase “lifted from poverty.” This was what “China” (meaning the CCP) had done for hundreds of millions of Chinese people. The world’s media—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Al Jazeera, Kyodo News, the BBC, and many others—picked up the phrase, as did Western politicians on both the left and the right. The World Bank used it in official reports. Those words were, in short, highly successful in achieving the intended effect: the world came to believe that the CCP was doing great good.

A more transparent account of what it had done, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, is that it released its controls on the Chinese people so that, for the first time in decades, they could make money for themselves; hundreds of millions responded by working long hours at low wages without the protection of labor unions, workers’ compensation insurance, a free press, or independent courts; and, yes, they made great amounts of money, escaping poverty for themselves and simultaneously catapulting the CCP elite, who still rode high above them, to truly spectacular wealth.

In short, the word “lifted” [requires] analysis of who lifted whom. That question did not normally occur to people around the world who read the words “China lifted.” The grammar of such sentences, combined with the formula China = CCP, left no need for a question. Was this word-engineering deliberate? Anyone who doubts that it was should note that CCP media used the “China lifted” phrase in publications in English, French, German, and other foreign languages but not in Chinese-language media at home. That made good sense. What would happen if the CCP started telling the Chinese people that “we lifted you”? The people would know better. Both sides know better. To make such an assertion might generate unfortunate “social effects,” such as a greater number of demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, roadblocks, and other examples of what the Ministry of Public Security labels “masses incidents” and counts in the tens of thousands per year.

Senator Warren Briefly Reminds Us the Constitution Doesn’t Include a Veto for Mitch McConnell

Posted on by

President Biden and congressional Democrats are necessarily focused on getting the Covid relief bill (the American Rescue Plan) passed in the next two weeks. They also need to get the rest of Biden’s team in place. But after that, how long will they allow a soulless senator from Kentucky the ability to veto so much other vital legislation?