Sunday, May 08, 2022

and one last time because the tweets by Masters and Cooper make a great pair. And it's become clear since that Cooper doesn't just hate the constitution; he lates law itself. He wants outcomes without process. His justice is ad hoc, like Posner: "the rule of reason". Nothing new but Cooper makes it easy.

I was asked by a journalist from another country—from my twitter days—what I made of this, on Thiel, his followers, pets and servants. Maybe I'll write something later, but the writer's passivity is as much a symptom as the rest. He's  unwilling to ask what Christian fundamentalists and homosexual nihilists have in common. He can't ask himself and us, and more important for his job, he can't ask them. Again: journalism modeled on academia, on courtesy and respect, not interrogation. Sitting in a diner with J.D. Vance and all he's good for is sad stenography, recording a thousand contradictions, passionate hypocrisy, the black heart of fascism.  
--- 
this was pretty good.

---

We've been here before but not on the same day. The idiot Cooper

the court has nothing to do with laws, it is a council of clerics that rules by decree and is discussed as such

Jäger in The Guardian: The Tories’ biggest trick is making their opponents fight post-Brexit policies in the courts

It seems like every few months brings news of another defeat for the UK government in the courts. And there may well be more to come – the latest policy in the sights of lawyers and activists is the plan to process certain asylum seekers who’ve arrived on Britain’s shores in Rwanda in east Africa.

The policy was met with justified outrage from progressives and the left. Specialists also predicted that it would run afoul of international law and human rights legislation. But what if this was part of the plan all along? The Times columnist Clare Foges, writing under the headline “Rwanda won’t work: but it will for Boris Johnson”, wondered if the real purpose of the plan was not to actually reduce perilous journeys across the Channel, as the government claimed, but to draw progressives into extended court battles and lawsuits. This would force them to act as an explicit blockade on post-Brexit migration policies, frustrating the “people’s will” ratified by the 2019 election, and thereby galvanising Tory activists and potential voters.

American liberals haven't complained about judicial review in state courts, which have largely played the same role as in the UK. And I still have never heard opponents cite Derrick Bell's argument against Brown. Why I have a tag for Judicial review.
---
A couple of years ago I searched for articles on Arendt and Bell. I found only one, from 2011. Maribel Morey, in "Reassessing Hannah Arendt's 'Reflections on Little Rock' 1959", refers to Bell in a footnote.
I've removed other footnote markers in the passage.
To late 1950s’ Dissent readers who assumed that the school integration movement required black schoolchildren to become stoic, heroic, and sacrificial civil rights actors for the benefit of future generations, a concern with children’s childhoods seemed immaterial.* However, the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) reveals that even for the nine justices of the Brown Court (who, presumably, represented the antithesis of Arendt’s position in “Reflections”), the entire point of integrating public schools was to improve black children’s lives. Taking the Brown opinion at face value, one of the main reasons for integrating schools was to correct black schoolchildren’s “feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” When in 1959 Arendt prescribed keeping black schoolchildren like Elizabeth Eckford far away from political and public concerns as a means of improving their childhoods, she clearly differed from Brown’s position, but both Arendt and the Brown Court were concerned with the same question. 
Put simply, this article argues that Arendt’s “Reflections,” like the Supreme Court’s Brown opinion, was largely concerned with improving black children’s childhoods and that this point brought to light a broader concern for children’s childhoods that preoccu- pied Arendt deeply in the late 1950s. Rather than being dismissed by Arendtian and civil rights scholars alike, “Reflections” should be read alongside Arendt’s two other contem- porary works and appreciated for bringing up a topic that was central to Brown.

* The constitutional scholar, Derrick Bell, made this observation two decades later. In ‘‘Serving Two Masters,’’ Bell explained that school integration in racially isolated neighborhoods had required the transportation of students, often black students over long distances to white schools. He argued: “The busing issue has served to make concrete what many parents long have sensed and what new research has suggested: court orders mandating racial balance may be (depending on the circumstances) educationally advantageous, irrelevant, or even disadvantageous. Nevertheless, civil rights lawyers continue to argue that black children are entitled to integrated schools without regard to the educational effect of such assignments.” Derrick Bell, ‘‘Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,’’ Yale Law Journal 85 (1976), p. 480. 

I wanted to write something but I was too lazy to do the work of trying to separate Arendt's sympathetic observations from her racism. Now I've found someone who makes the effort, from last year. 

Ainsley LeSure, "The White Mob, (In) Equality Before the Law, and Racial Common Sense: A Critical Race Reading of the Negro Question in "Reflections on Little Rock'"

“Reflections” reveals Arendt’s concern that the second life of equality would become further entrenched, so that the United States would find white mobs challenging the principle of equality altogether, threatening the solvency of the republic in the process. On this reading, Arendt’s analysis of America’s race problem resonates with the racial realist and pessimistic accounts of the tragic continuities of old and new forms of racial domination after moments of supposed racial progress, offered by scholars like Derrick Bell and Saidiya Hartman. Though these scholars conclude that such tragic continuity reflects the inherent racism built into equality as an essential liberal, democratic principle, Arendt’s analysis of the double life of equality offers an alternative explanation—it is not the aspiration toward equality that is the problem but rather the inadequacy of the political institutions tasked with realizing equality. Political institutions cannot just be static entities that simply grant and protect rights. This model is too susceptible to racial common sense.

Yet, Arendt’s work on racism is caught in a political paradox; despite her depiction of liberal political institutions as on the verge of catastrophic failure in the face of racial common sense, she still suggests that the maintenance of these liberal political institutions is the only way to check its rule. In THC, however, Arendt breaks out of this paradox when she implicates the liberal political order in the maintenance of the pernicious modern conditions that bring about the rise of the social and proposes a more expansive model of politics that promises to attune citizens to the complexity of phenomena unfolding in a shared space devoted to witnessing and deliberating about collective matters. Especially important for configuring these political spaces to enact equality anew are the ideas about new forms of government that the new admits to the citizenry bring with them. Practicing politics in this localized, deliberative way opens up the possibility that a collective good, a stable worldly reality, will be produced, disrupting the rule-like fashion in which predetermined racial common sense relates and determines reality in a racist polity.

I haven't read all of LeSure's paper yet—there's a lot more on Bell— but I'm not here to quibble; the relation itself is the point.  And my definition of Liberal is different that anyone above; and it sure as fuck doesn't come from Locke.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment moderation is enabled.