Daily Archives: 02/10/2013

(Community Matters) Original Sin Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people, I had a chance to read and have extracted several summarizing quotations.

. . . the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

There is a strong sectionalist bias in these efforts. They flourish in just the places Kevin Phillips identified as Republican strongholds—Plains, Mountain, but mainly Southern states, where change invites suspicion, especially when it seems invasive, and government is seen as an intrusive force.

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(Community Matters) Surprised Austin isn’t on the favorable list. Texas has three cities on the least literate list.

HT: Huffington Post

(Community Matters) The Nation: Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS

Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement is a non-violent movement, the largest Palestinian civic movement.

So the first critical and normative claim that follows is that the state of Israel should be representing the diversity of its own population. Indeed, nearly 25 percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and most of those are Palestinian, although some of them are Bedouins and Druze. If Israel is to be considered a democracy, the non-Jewish population deserves equal rights under the law, as do the Mizrachim (Arab Jews) who represent over 30 percent of the population. Presently, there are at least twenty laws that privilege Jews over Arabs within the Israeli legal system.

Judith Butler is a Jewish American post-structuralist philosopher, contributing mostly in the fields of feminist philosophy, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics.

(Community Matters) The New Republic: Original Sin Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.

Playbook: “History, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party’s electoral woes. The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun’s ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

“This is the politics of nullification , the doctrine, nearly as old as the republic itself, which holds that the states, singly or in concert, can defy federal actions by declaring them invalid or simply ignoring them. We hear the echoes of nullification in the venting of anti-government passions and also in campaigns to ‘starve government,’ curtail voter registration, repeal legislation, delegitimize presidents. There is a strong sectionalist bias in these efforts. They flourish in just the places Kevin Phillips identified as Republican strongholds-Plains, Mountain, but mainly Southern states, where change invites suspicion, especially when it seems invasive, and government is seen as an intrusive force.”

Admittedly, I’ve not yet had a chance to read more than Playbook’s summary. But, I will on the drive home – comments to follow.