Words, Words, Words

I began to write a typical end of the year post, only because this was hardly a typical year (even discounting our family growing!) I did not much enjoy what I was writing. What I really wanted to do was just a fun post about what I’ve read and written and what we’ve done at Liberal Currents and such. I’ll likely write that other, heavier post, too. Another time.

The project

As of this writing, I have read 57 books in 2020. I’ll likely finish another, Joseph Heath’s The Machinery of Government, before the year is done. That book, like so many I read this year, are part of my constitutionalism project. The output of this project has been a rather openly moving target, but I have had a paper in the works for a couple of months now. The first draft is done, but I did some further research in order to tighten it up, and I have been procrastinating putting in the actual work revising it. I’m hoping to sit down and do it sometime over the holidays.

What I have ended up making this paper about, perhaps unsurprisingly given it was the motivating interest all along, is the nature of law as it is actually practiced. The paper is divided into a section fleshing out the basic framework, and then the rest of it is dedicated to the application: the Voting Rights Act, how it was passed, how it was implemented, what role the courts have played in that implementation. In my original formulation of the institutional question, I broke it down as follows:

  • What actors
  • under what circumstances
  • performing what actions
  • achieve what effects

With the follow-up question:

  • What the likely effect would be if no other actor made an attempt at nullification
  • What actions from what actors could potentially nullify the effect of the action
  • What actions from what actors would strengthen or complement the effect of the action

I later revised this to be:

  • Given a specific actor
  • in a specific institutional context
  • taking a specific action
  • what is the likely effect?

With the new followup:

  • Given a specific actor in a specific institutional context has taken a specific action,
    • what actors
    • in what institutions
    • can nullify the effect of that action,
    • and what action(s) would they have to take in order to do so?

Once I began the work of formulating this to actually use it in an analysis of the VRA, I changed it yet again, to a more sweeping set of questions:

  • Who are the actors?
  • What actions did they take, and what actions could they have taken?
  • What social or institutional tools were used to take these actions? What tools could have been used instead?
  • What intersubjective effects did their actions have, with what scope?
  • How much uncertainty was there about the effects of the actions at the outset?

I think the nature of the conceptual problems I’m wrestling with should be easier to see by looking at how I have changed this over time. Hopefully it will be clear for those reading the paper as well, in both the theoretical background provided and the practical application.

The circle I tend to run in is this: “a government of laws rather than of men” seems, on its face, impossible, since it is in fact men who write, enact, and adjudicate law. The caricature version of legal realism is that the law is whatever a judge in a particular case says it is, but this is precisely where things begin to unravel: why does what that judge say matters? Isn’t it because we endow judges with certain authority by law?

I’ve wrestled with this quite a lot over the past year, and read a fair amount of books—starting around October of last year—and am happy with how far I have traveled in so short a time. There, of course, continues to be a vast amount that I do not know. I have only begun to scratch the surface of the biggest gorilla in law, the executive branch. Judges and legislatures occupy an enormous amount of the discussion about government and law, but its day to day character is determined by the permanent bureaucracy more than anything else. The success of the VRA, for example, had much to do with the character of the Civil Rights Division in the DOJ, where they had been tangling with the Jim Crow states for over a decade and across multiple Civil Rights acts before the VRA came along and gave them new weapons to use at a moment the courts were also sympathetic to their cause. But here we see where the legislature and the courts do matter, and of course ultimately it was the Roberts Court that dismantled the main instruments provided by the VRA in Shelby v Holder.

Projects of this kind are always something of an adventure; when you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s quite hard to predict how exactly the path is going to unfold ahead of you. At the outset I did not think I would bother with the Electoral College, which seemed a relatively small concern given all the other features of our complex system of government, and given how hard it is to amend the Constitution. But I received a review copy of Alexander Keyssar’s Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? and I took it as an opportunity to read his previous work, The Right to Vote. Both are excellent, excellent books, just very high caliber scholarship and historical imagination. And I realized, to my great embarrassment, that I had not even really understood the Electoral College before I read Keyssar’s new book. I thought that the least I could do for our readers was to use my review as an occasion to provide the most boiled down, nuts and bolts explanation of this possible, so that even if they do not read Keyssar’s book (which they should, in fact you should read both) they would come away with a better understanding of how our system works.

I found this approach suited me, so I did it again for Alex Hertel-Fernandez’s State Capture, which primarily discussed the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) but also talked about the State Policy Network (SPN) and Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Books like Keyssar’s and Hertel-Fernandez’s discuss all the characteristics of their subject matter from various angles, so in my review I try to bring that all together to give a single, comprehensive description. I was once again satisfied with the results, and in both cases the exercise of writing the review helped me grasp the subject matter much more strongly myself.

These nuts and bolts exercises really are the bread and butter of this project. Part of what’s slowed me down with the paper is I’m attempting to describe, in nuts and bolts, something orders of magnitude more complex than what I described in those book reviews. The Electoral College, while a Rube Goldbergian nightmare, is at the end of the day a single decision procedure. ALEC is a novel but niche interest group. The story of the VRA involves the conditions under which a bill may become a statute, the specific actions taken by the DOJ lawyers, the methods by which state officials attempted to defang it, the role of suits brought by activists and state AGs, court decisions, multiple Congressional renewal fights, and so on. A nuts and bolts explanation of why the VRA succeeded in actually crushing Jim Crow where all previous attempts had utterly failed must touch on basically every aspect of the American system of government, federal and local. It’s very hard!

Complaining aside, it’s been tremendously rewarding. And somewhat unexpectedly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, it has helped me to think much more clearly about liberalism. The discipline of thinking through the details as carefully as I can has helped even in more theoretical matters, such as my discussion of the various distinctions that get unhelpfully lumped under the heading of “free speech.” It also paid off in my investigation of how our media ecosystem performed in the first few months of the pandemic.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the role of unelected judges and judicial review in a democracy, and ended up confident enough in my views to write on the matter. I have a draft of a piece about liberal democracy as a whole, which I intend to publish after Biden is inaugurated, that further develops a thread I introduce in the piece on judges; the idea that governance is done by professionals, and that professional politician is therefore not a pejorative and we ought to better support our elected officials with large staffs and other resources to do their jobs properly. ALEC can only exist at all because state legislatures are chronically underfunded, and so it can offer staff and researchers and pre-written bills to its members.

I have read a lot of books in this project, as I mentioned. Here are some that I would recommend to anyone curious about these kinds of questions:

I did some comparative reading, though not as much as I’d like. Patterns of Democracy is a big survey; I also read a bit about the German and the Israeli systems. I intend to read about the French one, one of the few proportional parliamentary systems with an elected president. As far as I am concerned, this project has only just begun. I will hopefully make some progress on the paper over the next few weeks, and finish Heath’s book, and press on.

A new love

When I started reading the Library of America collection of James Baldwin essays in January, I did not expect to fall in love. I had read “The White Man’s Guilt” not even a year before, and it was like a lightning bolt. He unearthed something so clearly, and in such beautiful prose, which I had long felt. Rather than feeling attacked or criticized, I felt understood. It was, perhaps surprisingly, a pleasant feeling. I wanted to return to the well. I also simply wanted to read good writing. My plan was to pick up the massive tome—which includes five other previously published collections in full, such as Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time, along with another few hundred pages of essays beyond that—and put it down, and pick it up again, over the course of the year.

Perhaps it was everything that happened this year. Perhaps it was simply that I fell so completely for Baldwin’s writing. But as the year went on, I simply devoured the book. I finished it, and went on to novels; I read If Beale Street Could Talk, and went right on to Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, and Go Tell it On the Mountain, and Giovanni’s Room, and I recently finished a short story collection. I have a couple more books by him I intend to get to before I start reading about him; there’s no shortage of biographies on the market at the moment.

His writing is very beautiful, but more importantly, it is very bold. He makes me feel like a terrible coward by comparison. But I feel admiration rather than envy. I feel, through the autobiographical nature of his writing (both fiction and nonfiction), that I have come to know him in a way. I ache with the desire to have a conversation with him. Since I cannot, I continue to read.

I have tried to take the craft of writing a little more seriously. When Jason suggested writing something about Mohamed Bouazizi for what would have been his birthday, I decided I would try to think about it as a piece of writing rather than as a simple analysis. While my project helped me think things through even here—Bouazizi’s self-immolation led to a national democratic revolution but changed nothing about the municipal problems that drove him to his death—it was really James Baldwin who was my primary inspiration in writing the piece, even though I won’t pretend it is either in a similar style or within screaming distance of his caliber.

“Discovering” Baldwin has been a real pleasure, a relief from the difficulties of this particular year.

Liberal Currents

We launched a Patreon for Liberal Currents about a month before everything went to hell. We have had quite the year as a result. I turns out that if you offer to pay people, many will come out of the woodwork to pitch you! And I’m quite pleased with the range of work we have published. Over 66 in total, so I certainly won’t link to them all! Here’s a sampling:

I apologize to those who I did not mention here; there are too many good ones to choose from! I’m very excited by how well things have gone for Liberal Currents. Right now, other than our budget for authors, our chief constraint is editorial capacity. While we’re now a paying publication, our editorial side is still an entirely volunteer effort. This was a particularly difficult year for all of us to find the time for it. I want to give a special shout out to Adrian Rutt who did a tremendous amount of editing this year. Without him, Paul, and Jason, Liberal Currents would simply not be possible. I’m grateful to them all.

If you like anything I’ve linked to above I hope you’ll consider supporting us yourself! Or, if you are a writer, reaching out to pitch us a piece! You can do so at writers at liberalcurrents dot com.

Novels

It wasn’t all political science and James Baldwin and liberalism for me this year, reading wise. Martha Wells kindly saw fit to publish the first full novel (as opposed to novella) in her Murderbot Diaries series this year, and I ate it up. If you have not read this series, please get yourself a copy of All Systems Red yesterday; it is a delight to read. I’ve pre-ordered the next book in the series, but missed Wells’ storytelling so much that I went and read all of an earlier, fantasy series of hers, which consumed me for a while. Wells has such a skill for surprising you with an incredibly imaginative world that is slowly revealed through the lens of very enjoyable characters.

I also read Alex White’s Salvagers series and enjoyed it tremendously. A really rollicking fun ride. I listened to White’s podcast novel, The Gearheart, back when I listened to podcast novels. His writing has improved by leaps and bounds since then, but I can see how he got here from there. I stumbled upon Every Mountain Made Low shortly after, and enjoyed it as well; it appears to be a one-shot but that’s fine, not everything has to be a series.

I read Arkady Markine’s A Memory Called Empire and immediately pre-ordered to next book. One of many things I enjoyed about this book is that the space empire is a decadent poetry and literature obsessed civilization, rather than an ice cold, progressive technocracy. More historically accurate!

At the prompting of friends, I started Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty with the first book, The Grace of Kings. It’s quite a tour de force. A very sophisticated book with a lot of attractive characters, cut more closely from history than I had realized while reading it. I plan to read the next one after Baldwin’s Another Country.

That’s more or less what I wanted to talk about in this post. There’s a lot I decided I did not want to talk about, as I mentioned.

Next time, perhaps.

As I wrote this, my wife informed me that the mother and brother of a close friends of hers, a nurse and a resident doctor respectively, have received the vaccine. The end of the year is upon, and maybe the end of the pandemic is closer than I feel, at this moment, it possibly can be.

But I’ll leave it at that, for now.

Craft, Community, and Healthy Ambition

I wrote for The Umlaut for a little less than two years, January 2013 – October 2014. My perspective on many of the topics I wrote about then has changed so much that I rarely revisit any of the posts there. One that I do find myself going back to again and again is a May 2013 piece called The Option Value of Satisfying Work. The argument of that piece is straightforward: you will almost never be able to do what you love in order to support yourself financially. So do what you love because you love it, and put it online so that there is a chance, however small, that your work will be discovered.

[T]he perfect balance is committing to only those crafts that you can perform with satisfaction even if you have to do so in utter obscurity. Then, put your work out in public as part of the process itself — if you’re making homebrew beer or an Arduino hack, make a video or write about the process as a means to think harder about the details of it. If you’re a writer, think of putting it online as simply having the work backed up in one more place.

In this way, you open yourself up to the spectrum of possibilities, ranging from utter obscurity at one end to global fame at the other. Far more likely is something closer to the obscurity end but much more satisfying — that you will draw the attention of a relative few who share your interests.

The last remark about drawing the attention of other enthusiasts was parenthetical, an aside. But I’ve come to think that it is the point.

Romantic notions of the lone artistic genius aside, it is hard to become good at something and harder still to find satisfaction in it without a community. But if you fix your gaze upon the Prize, the slim chance that this craft will turn into your livelihood (or the much slimmer chance that it will bring you fame or fortune), satisfaction and community are likely to elude you. Odds are, you will also miss your chance to develop skills of the first rate.

Community is not simply a nice word for mutual exploitation. A friend who you associate with primarily because they are useful to you is no friend at all; or rather, you are no friend to them, and your friendship is a sham.

And yet, there is no shame in being ambitious. There is no shame in wanting good work to be acknowledged. It is not healthy to obsess over what is not likely to come to pass, but it isn’t bad to wish there was a way to make your living doing what you love.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many young people who yearn to be successful public intellectuals in some capacity. I see it as my role in that situation to disenchant them, to make the odds of achieving such a station clear. But disenchanting does not mean discouraging. A chapter of my long-abandoned book encouraged people to be imaginative when considering their options but clear-eyed about the trade-offs; are you willing to make some serious sacrifices in order to make a real go at the career you want? Or does it make more sense to assume you will never get that career, and try to get jobs which leave you with enough freedom the rest of the time to do what you love?

But on the whole, the healthiest expression of ambition is internal to a community. To work to make friends and find peers who you are not afraid to make mistakes in front of, but whose respect and praise you value. To strive to become skilled enough at the craft you love to earn their respect, and continue earning it with each new creation. To be able to keep on growing, rather than hitting a comfortable plateau and staying there. Such growth is not possible in the first place without finding a community of this kind.

My communities

I love to write. I have always loved to write. For a long time, writing was the point, the main thing in itself. That is part of why engaging in the craft itself is the main focus of that Umlaut post from seven years ago.

After The Umlaut began to wind down, as such communities do, some friends and I launched a little group blog called Sweet Talk. The first post was in May of 2014. It lasted a little longer than The Umlaut, winding down at the end of 2016 (with some dribs and drabs being posted thereafter). Sweet Talk was loads of fun, and many of my dearest friends that I have today I first connected with during that time. I operated it on a fairly promiscuous basis; I invited people to write for us and if they said yes, I gave them carte blanche to post whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. It worked remarkably well for a remarkably long time, until, predictably, it did not.

Liberal Currents, launched in March of 2017 and still ongoing (as it will continue to be for the foreseeable future, thank you very much!) is an actual publication. We greenlight articles on a submission-by-submission basis; no one has an open invitation to publish whatever they want whenever they want. In theory I do, but in practice I never publish anything that our editors have serious reservations about, at least without a frank conversation and revisions.

Somewhere along the way, my writing has become a secondary priority to community-building. I learned some hard lessons from Sweet Talk, but I also wouldn’t change a thing about that experience. I’m also rather older now than when I began. The thing I enjoy most about Liberal Currents is the chance it provides to engage in a bit of mentorship; to be a voice that young writers will listen to and to help promote their work. Getting published by us also means access to our Discord, where several dozen writers and patrons can be found in conversation every day.

There’s a certain irony to all this, too, because I have never taken the quality of my writing more seriously than I do now. At The Umlaut I would run with half-baked ideas and see where they led me, usually applying something from cognitive science or a Nassim Taleb book or some other mediocre foundation. At Sweet Talk I was really engaging in a process of public learning; I don’t regret it, and in fact gained a great deal from it, but most of the 200 or so posts I wrote there are not worth much beyond the exercise of writing them. Towards the end I began to take each individual piece of writing more seriously. While I’m not proud of every one of the 34 articles and essays I have written at Liberal Currents, I have worked quite hard on each of them. To take a recent example, I read hundreds of articles and constructed a timeline of events in order to write my evaluation of the media ecosystem’s performance during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak. Less concretely, I tried very hard to make my article on Mohamed Bouazizi good from a writing perspective. I am proud of the result but I leave it to the reader to determine if that pride is merited.

But I do not think it is coincidental that I have worked harder at the quality of what I write even as community has become a larger priority. When you are out there writing on your own, it is very easy to become solipsistic and, to put it bluntly, blow smoke up your own ass. The first draft of my article on the media ecosystem was a hit piece on the conservative media’s response. But as I wrote it, I anticipated the criticisms of several people I respect who I know were likely to comment on it. And so I dug deeper and tried to provide more evidence. Only it became clear that my whole argument was simply wrong. So I threw out that draft and started performing a more serious survey of coverage across a lot of different outlets.

One of those people whose response I anticipated, Adam Elkus, once said that whether or not you are capable of becoming a lifelong learner, on the one hand, or stagnate and even see your horizons shrink, on the other, has everything to do with your friendships and your community. I still cultivate the “option value” of my work, leaving open the possibility of really taking off. But I spend much more time cultivating my community, and the rewards have been immeasurable.

Highlights from the Year So Far

This year has not…quite…gone as expected. Remarkable that on March 10th I was writing about constitutionalism without any tip of the hat to the unfolding events. Then again, fixating on an unrelated topic to avoid the matter at hand is a rather predictable tendency of mine. Especially if that unrelated topic involves a lot of reading and writing and arguing.

I’ve been getting that itch to write again, but I’ve just recently completed a rather large writing project and don’t have something else specific I’m working on. So I thought I’d go through some updates here.

Liberal Currents

At the beginning of February we launched a Patreon for Liberal Currents. The immediate goal was simply to get enough to begin paying authors, which we accomplished in the first week. I’ve been blown away by the support we received, especially with the level of support from each individual patron.

By this point last year I had not written a single piece on Liberal Currents, and would not until July. In 2020 I’ve written four so far, two of which I put a significant amount of work into, and the most recent involved more research than I have done for a single piece in many years.

Sometime in February, Jason Briggeman floated the idea of writing a piece about Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation had sparked a series of mass protests that spread and became The Arab Spring (to summarize simplistically). I was a bit unsure about the idea, as I didn’t know what there was to be said about Bouazizi specifically.

The idea was to put up the piece on what would have been Bouazizi’s birthday. I began digging into what was known about him and decided that I ought to use this as an opportunity to try and grow as a writer. I have a tendency to write highly analytical, argument-driven pieces, but I have a great admiration for writers like my friend Dave. Dave filled Sweet Talk with posts that were both beautiful and invited his readers to approach wisdom, without hitting them over the head with it. I have also been reading essays by James Baldwin, for whom the beauty of his prose was also coterminous with the wisdom contained therein. Notably, both of these men are novelists as much as nonfiction writers.

I would not utter my final result in the same sentence as a work produced by either of these talents, but I was quite pleased with it. Of course, by Bouazizi’s birthday, March 29th, everyone had something quite different on their minds than revising the personal story of the man who inadvertently began mass protests back in 2011. All the same, I hope you’ll consider reading it.

My most recent piece is more in line with how I typically write, but producing it was quite an endeavor. As the pandemic steamrolled everything else, I first sat down, in March, to write a hit piece about the conservative media. It was going to be a straight application of my narrative of the conservative media insurgency to those figures in that ecosystem who at that point were claiming that shutdowns were nothing more than a liberal attempt to tank the economy and hurt Donald Trump’s reelection chances. Only as I began to do the research for the piece, the reality did not appear nearly so one-sided. The mainstream and liberal press made many glaring mistakes as well as bad faith maneuvers in the early days of the outbreak.

As my family and I fled to my parents’ home in order to have access to a better hospital situation when our second son was born (as he was, safely and without complication, on April 27th), I tabled the piece. But the question of how the media had performed, and how one would even go about evaluating it, stuck with me. Some individuals who had been sounding the alarm early, like Matt Parlmer and Balaji S. Srinivasan, had blistering critiques of the media’s coverage as a whole. A locked account that I follow pushed back on this category of critiques, saying “I don’t know what people mean when they say the media failed in its coronavirus coverage. I followed the outbreak from the beginning and was only able to do so through the media.” Then there was the blog and social media aspect; a Medium post in early March had gone so wildly viral that it was a subject of conversation at my place of work, with members of my team specifically recommending it to me.

When I began to rethink the piece, Adam Rust and I talked about a collaboration. We would use the media performance during the Spanish Flu as a historical point of reference. He would write about that, and I would write about how the media performed today. So I went and gathered more and more sources, ultimately amassing something like 200 (the exact number is kinda arbitrary to pin down because some were tweets, some were essays, most were articles but some articles I used for constructing a timeline of events rather than for evaluating coverage).

The more I read, the harder a time I had formulating a one-liner version of my evaluation. So once I finished my research, I sat down and simply tried to write something out. The first draft, completed maybe an hour before we went to the hospital for the baby to be born, clocked in at 6,000 words. Rust was kind enough to provide feedback on this draft, but suggested that expanding it by writing an additional section on the Spanish Flu was probably ill-advised. Between his feedback and my father’s (who I probably would have solicited it from regardless given the topic but it was nice to be able to discuss it in person) I shaved the piece down to 5500 words and, more importantly, significantly restructured it.

For such a monster of a piece, it has been among the more successful at Liberal Currents this year. The Neoliberal Project folks liked it so much that they invited me onto their podcast.

I’ve been babbling on about my pieces, but we’ve published ten others so far this year. In addition, our pipeline is as robust as it has ever been—it turns out more people will write for you when you pay them for their work! Liberal Currents has grown in general, in its audience, its social media following, its contributor base, and as mentioned, its revenue. It’s all happening as an unprecedented disaster rocks the world, so it’s easy to lose sight of. But I’m extremely proud of everything we’ve accomplished since we launched three years ago.

The research project

As I mentioned at the outset, my research project is broken up into four reading lists. I made the conscious choice not to share those lists because I planned to be updating them as I went, while keeping them roughly the same length (with the exception of the fourth list, which is more of a place to dump things that would be nice to get to some day).

As an outsider to the fields I am reading up on, my initial lists were self-consciously tentative based on extremely limited knowledge of what I even needed to know. As I read more, and connected directly with more scholars for recommendations, I substituted the books I originally put on the list for better, more relevant, more authoritative texts.

However, at this point I have almost completed the first list, which I had set a (quite conservative) goal of completing by October. It is the only one of the lists I put a deadline on; essentially I wanted this list to give me the bare-bones basics of what I’d need to write the piece I hope to write in November.

It will be a stretch to finish the second list in time, but I think I can realistically get through half of it; hopefully more! Getting to the third list is extremely unlikely, and starting the fourth list by the end of the year is, I think it is safe to say, impossible.

At this point I can share the first list, though:

I can’t even begin to say how much I have learned, compared to how little I knew at the start, and I still know so much less than I need to. As you may have noticed, I began by writing reviews of each to help me absorb them a bit better, as well as some more gut-responses here. I intended to write a joint review of Congress’s Constitution and The Politics of War Powers and still may, but the pandemic intervened; my family left our home temporarily and the books stayed behind. I will undoubtedly write a great deal more and revisit many of these numerous times, but doing it one by one (or even two by two) was simply going to take too long.

I’d love to have the forthcoming Congress Overwhelmed on this list but it looks like the review copy won’t be coming soon enough. Hopefully it’ll make it in time for the second list.

Murderbot

The last few years I’d tried to balance nonfiction reading with novels, but my constitutionalism project has left little room for that this year. After reading The Last Policeman trilogy in December and January—a good series, though it probably could have been a single book rather than a trilogy—I didn’t read any other novels. But then Network Effects, the first full-length novel novel in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, came out, and it seemed an opportune moment to take a break from the research project.

I cannot recommend that series enough. As I mentioned, the latest one is the only novel-length part of the series; the first four are novellas. All Systems Red, the first in the series, can be obtained for two bucks and is a very quick read. If you like science fiction at all, or fun, campy series, (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for example), you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. I’d love if it took off and we got a Netflix series out of it.

I can’t imagine I’ll be getting to too many more novels this year unfortunately, with the tight timeline I have for my research project. But it was definitely worth the detour for this particular one.

That’s all I’ve got. Thanks for those of you interested enough in what I’m working on to read through infodumps like this.

Disrupting My Book Reviews

This year at Liberal Currents we started going in for book reviews fairly seriously. I picked up two books with the intention of reviewing them together, but am having trouble producing anything worth publishing. So, as is my way, I’m going to spitball a bit here.

I was happy with how pairing two books turned out for my review of Daniel Okrent’s Guarded Gates on the immigration restriction battles and eugenics at the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries. I reviewed it together with Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers, which, published in 2016, was the source of my interest (some would say obsession) with Okrent’s topic. The two books take very different approaches and the subject matter does not line up one to one; Leonard is an academic historian whose topic is primarily the history of economics as a discipline. Okrent is a popular writer who, while diligent in his research, is focusing on telling a compelling story about interesting characters. More importantly, Okrent’s net is much wider. The more I read Okrent’s book, the more I worried that the approach of pairing the books would prove unfeasible for a review. But I found the right angle and I’m happy with how the piece has turned out.

My experience with my current pair was, if anything, the opposite. I had a specific goal in mind when I obtained a copy of Super Pumped, Mike Isaac’s book about Uber: I wanted to see if there was anything to my father’s framing of the primary intraelite conflict being between tech entrepreneurs on the one hand and east coast establishment types on the other, and Uber seemed like a good lens for that. The best lens; no one has thrown down harder against established elites who have gotten in their way than Uber.

I then learned (through conversation with my father, as it happens) of the book Conspiracy, by Ryan Holiday, about the destruction of Gawker by Peter Thiel. I thought, vaguely, that I could deepen my investigation by adding another tech elite’s activities. My first surprise here was to find that Thiel/Uber did not make a very meaningful parallel at all, whereas Gawker, as described by Holiday anyway, basically operated like a media version of Uber without the deep VC pockets to bail it out of any problem.

But there the parallels largely run dry. I wanted to make some general point about the exercise of power and how hard it can be to tell, in the moment, who really has it—Holiday has a great line, after describing an incident in which Gawker ignored an injunction from a Florida judge:

We asked earlier who the underdog was in the dynamic. It is probably not the party that can defy an order from a judge and get away with it.

ignoring legal orders is the benchmark for power, then Uber is in a league of its own. In October of 2010, just four months after the first Uber user hailed a ride, officials from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency showed up at their headquarters to serve them a cease and desist order. The company, then known as UberCab, was in violation of local regulations, and could face fines up to $5,000 per trip, while the company’s management faced up to ninety days of jail time per day they remained in operation.

Isaac sets the scene:

Graves was scared. “What are we supposed to do here? He said aloud, reading his name on a piece of paper that said he could be going to jail. Hayes, the venture capitalist, wasn’t sure what to say. He was used to investing in consumer tech companies, but rarely (if ever) did they run afoul of the law. Geidt, just a few months out of college, stood quiet and nervous, too. This was her first foray into the professional world. Now she was looking a jail time.

Kalanick didn’t miss a beat. “We ignore it,” he said to the room.”

And that was that. They dropped “Cab” from their name and moved on.

This was their first year. Over the next seven years, Uber would not only break numerous local laws with impunity, they would develop a whole playbook for doing so effectively. In Philadephia, where the battle with local authorities was especially fierce, they would rack up 120,000 violations adding up to a $12 million fine. Uber is available in Philadelphia to this day—and in a settlement they managed to get that fine cut down by more than two thirds, to $3.5 million.

The proximate source of Uber’s power in this regard is quite simple: investors had given them an unbelievable amount of cash with basically no strings attached other than the mandate to grow, grow, grow. This allowed them to hire top talent, of course; talent which allowed them to develop sophisticated strategies for staying ahead of local enforcers, among other things. But far more important and not sophisticated by any stretch was their ability to simply throw money at problems. This included paying for expensive lawyers, of course, but also being able to promise drivers that “all costs associated” with run-ins with local regulators would be covered by Uber. During their doomed play for the Chinese market, Uber spent $40-50 million a week in subsidies alone, to entice drivers away from competitors.

Gawker did not have that kind of war chest, though it had very good liability insurance. Thiel, of course, did have the money to burn trying to take Gawker down, and that’s precisely what he did.

But here I find myself dissatisfied with where a potential review would go. Will it really boil down to “money = power”? The halo around tech “disruptors” and being part of the “rude” (but specifically rude and lefty) press plays an important role too, but this amounts to little more than pointing out that money and status are power. Hardly Earth-shattering stuff; not much meat to sink your teeth into.

Ultimately the books are incompatible in the lessons I would want to draw about them. Conspiracy raises some important questions about a court system too expensive for even, as Thiel put it, “single digit millionaires” to afford, as well as the tension between privacy and freedom of expression, and other press-and-judiciary related questions. Super Pumped, on the other hand, is simply a book I would want to give to all my old libertarian buddies, as well as anyone in finance, and anyone too enthusiastic about disruption per se as an approach to creating progress. I think the end of replacing taxi cartels with services like Uber is a good one in principle; I also think one would be hard pressed to square the means Uber employed to that end with even the rule of law as an ideal, even in the most minimal conceivable formulation.

Rather than deepening the material for approaching the same set of questions, pairing these two books seems simply to multiply the set of questions to be addressed. So I think I’m going to have to bite the bullet and drop one of them, probably Conspiracy, which offers a more unique and therefore less generalizable scenario.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been failing to write this Thanksgiving break. Hope you all had an enjoyable one.

The Project of a Nation

One of the best works of political philosophy I’ve read in the last few years is Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. Rorty’s politics were very much not my own; he was as hard left as they came, though just as adamantly anti-communist. The book came out in 1998 and served as something of a survey of the 20th century left, its accomplishments, its pitfalls, and what we might call its fall into decadence. At 67 years old, Rorty had seen much of this himself, and been born into a politically active family from the start. He had a uniquely rich perspective on the subject, in short.

Rorty was a pragmatist; he cared little for doctrinal disputes or purity and more for results. And so while today we might find it surprising that so committed a leftist was a staunch defender of nationalism, his reasons had nothing to do with blood ties or cultural essentialism or anything smelling even vaguely of metaphysics, as nationalism tends to.

The book opens as follows:

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely.

And like that we’re off to the races. Further down he adds:

Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past—episodes and figures to which the country should remain true.

Rorty emphasized this need for national pride and inspiring national stories because he believed that we had veered too much towards national shame. Or perhaps that the two tasks, of reminding the country “what it can take pride in” and “what it should be ashamed of” had polarized in an unhealthy way. On one side we are told story after story that is meant to make us feel the shame of past and present sins, on the other we are given inspirational stories that have been bled of their human complexity, bleached out to be made into acceptable children’s fables and little more. On this latter score, Rorty cites, with approval, James Baldwin’s description of the:

collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.

Taking Whitman and Dewey as his guiding stars, Rorty offers:

The sort of pride Whitman and Dewey urge Americans to feel is compatible with remembering that we expanded our boundaries by massacring the tribes which blocked our way, that we broke the word we had pledged at the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and that we caused the death of a million Vietnamese out of sheer macho arrogance.

But, one might protest, is there nothing incompatible with American national pride? I think the Dewey-Whitman answer is that there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible for a constitutional democracy to regain self-respect. To say that certain acts do make this impossible is to abandon the secular, antiauthoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope in favor of the vocabulary which Whitman and Dewey abhorred: a vocabulary built around the notion of sin.

Here I must part ways with Rorty slightly and admit that I’m quite fine with a vocabulary of sin, but not one that requires abandoning anti-authoritarian shared social hope.

So much for Rorty. I recommend the book very highly; I have thought of it often lately. Though told from the perspective of an old American leftist, I think it provides a clear formulation of the positive path out of the discourse of negation that my dad has spoken about at some length, in his book and many other places. In one interview, he specifically pointed to the difference between how Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed in The Social Network compared to how Edison was portrayed in the 1940 Young Tom Edison. Rorty emphasizes the need to remind a country “what we ought to be ashamed of” far more than my dad would, but their positive discursive vision is almost identical: we need to revive, support, and sustain a healthy national pride.

It is from this perspective that, as an American, I felt jealous as I read Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Ghandi. The subtitle of the book is The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, and this framing is already surprising, though very obviously true. India is the largest democracy in the world and therefore in history. Guha from the beginning emphasizes that, recent economic growth aside (which, shortly after finishing the book, I sadly learned has been less than originally thought), India pulled off a political accomplishment that is nothing short of astonishing. As the second largest country in the world, and by far the most diverse ethnically, religiously, culturally, linguistically, you name it—almost everyone among right-thinking observers assumed the whole project would blow up. And yet here they are, still a united, secular democracy, some 72 years later.

I did not read the book to learn how amazing India was. In truth, I read it because I am abhorrently ignorant about the largest democracy in the world. But as Guha described monumental accomplishments such as the integration of the independent principalities and the rolling out of the infrastructure to allow a universal suffrage election so soon after independence—I thought to myself, boy, how I’d love to read someone with Guha’s careful hand writing about the postwar period of American history, to the present. Guha wrote a book for India that fit the exact specifications of what Rorty wanted for Americans: he did not shrink from India’s internal strife, its mistakes, its abuses, but I find it hard to believe any Indian could read the book and not walk away with their national pride tremendously—and deservedly!—augmented.

My goal this year was to read more books on countries like India that I know far too little about. And I still hope to do so. But the approach Guha took makes me want to read more American history. The section on the first Indian elections in particular makes me want to get to Pauline Maier’s Ratification, which I have heard is phenomenal. I’m slowly working through the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers before doing so, for context.

Context is important. But so is hope. And so is pride.