Orwell's journalism like the Road to Wigen Pier and Homage to Catalonia is much better liberalism than his novels especially 1984 and Animal Farm. Both of those are great but too connected to their times and have been sort of co-opted by all ideologies because everyone likes to speak in the language of "freedom".
For Russians? I love Dostoyevsky but he supported the Czars during his time. The Devils is an indictment against the anti-Czarist students. While Chekov was not as explicitly political as the Communists made him to be, he at least understood that the gig was up for the Czars and Russian nobles. Herzen and Gorki are better Russian left writers.
All the writers you mention are very good and much better than Ayn Rand (not that this is very hard) but they were writing for the hot button issues of their day. Sinclair Lewis is probably less dated than Dreiser especially in the Zenith novels and his portrait of Midwestern pompousity.
Rand's novels have a vague quality that places them in any age. Lewis was very much writing for his time and Babbit can only take place in the 1920s. It is a great novel and many teenagers and young adults will love it but I can't see a rising liberal political star talking about their love for Sinclair Lewis like many on the right talk about their love for Ayn Rand.
Perhaps. He seems popular enough but he has a more-broad base appeal than Ayn Rand. There are plenty of conservatives who love him. I can't think of anyone on the left who loves Rand novels.
Sanburg? Possibly. I would need to read more.
Upton Sinclair was writing too much for the hot events of his day. I studied Sinclair in my school history classes along with Jacob Riis, not in English class. Ayn Rand's books seem not to be connected to specific issues of when they were published. This is not to go against Sinclair.
Steinbeck might be better but has a bit of the historical problem that Sinclair has, he is writing for his day.
I think you are falling into a bit of the same trap as your cri de coeur.
Your picks are all philosophers and not really storytellers. All the talk about the right and Rand is basically because of her novels. They are absolutely horrible novels and poorly written but they seem to attract a certain kind of teenager and some of these teenagers go on to become rich and powerful. Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, Alan Greenspan, the guy who founded Lululemon all do a lot to promote the cult of Rand.
I suppose the right also likes Hayek but I think more people probably talk about the Road to Serfdom than have actually read the work.
There is no liberal variant of Ayn Rand. A person who sells his or her political philosophy via novels. There are certainly many writers whose writings are imbued with leftist ideas and ideals like Arthur Miller, Harper Lee, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, John Irving but most of these authors are associated with English class in high school especially Miller. Kushner is too political, too current, and too homosexual for all but the most progressive and probably private high schools ironically enough. Arthur Miller probably strikes most people as old-fashioned except for the theatre kids. John Irving's liberalism is often just incidental except in The Cider House Rules. And none of these writers really have any kind developed philosophy that can be ismed.
I find arguable whether FDR overplayed his hand with the courtpacking.
On the one hand, he clearly wanted to do it and much of Congress balked even some ardent New Dealers.
On the other hand, he really did not fail in his goal and arguably won a game of chicken with the Supreme Court. He was able to get Owen Roberts to be the famous Switch in Time in the Parish case. And Chief Justice Hughes eventually convinced one of the four hoursemen to retire so FDR could put someone on the court. Then in a random stroke of luck, FDR got to put a lot of people on the Court in the normal way and probably remade 20th Century Jurisprudence with picks like Douglas and Black.
I think it is fairly mixed among the Greatest generation and Boomers. My mom (born 1946) moved from the Bronx to Long Island when she was five and attended high school in a Jewish suburb. We attended the same high school (34 years apart) and it was still considered a Jewish suburb during my youth. About half my classmates were Jewish and I think the town had more synagogues than churches.
On the other hand, my dad grew up in Washington Heights.
MFarmer seems to also be on of those libertarians who give other libertarians a bad name by his simple belief that making Democratic supporters into the evil ones is a reason for existence.
Not you or many others on this site but there does seem to be a healthy subset of libertarians who seem to get off more on annoying liberals. Stephen Brainbridge once made a comment on his blog about how he preferred some kind of policy or was sticking to one simply because it "annoys liberals". This is a man who teaches at UCLA Law and he is still getting his greatest pleasure out of annoying liberals like a poorly socialized 12 year old adolescent likes annoying a substitute teacher.
There seems to be a lot of this juvenile attitude in certain quarters of the right. I see a lot of "annoy a liberal" type of gear via t-shirts or bumper stickers. I have yet to see sale of "annoy a conservative" stuff to the same degree.
I think that a lot of people are scared by the social conservatism of the Republican Party. There is no more room for people like Jacob Javits or Lincoln Chaffee in the Republican Party. And that is quite a sad commentary on the Party of Lincoln (Abraham, not Chaffee)
Recent Jewish immigrants from Russia tend to be more conservative and Republican because of their anti-conservative views.
The same dynamic plays out in Israel. The recent immigrants and the Sephardim tend to be Likudniks and they see Labor as being the party of the old-guard Ashkenazi "elite".
1. One that uses some forward leaning term like "progressive"
2. One involved in the "cool" industries usually design, fashion, coffee (Starbucks and Peet's). There needs to be some kind of vague sophistication being sold. Think Design within Reach or Room and Board over Big Bill's Furniture Barn.
3. A company with cool employees or ads that feature young and vaguely hipsterish people.
4. A mythical strawmen conjured by libertarians and conservatives so they can jump up and down and say "See! See! Liberals have Big Corporations too"
I think Tom basically represents what was always a strain in American politics because of our Calvinist-Puritan heritage.
The early British colonialists essentially came in two types: Puritans who felt that the high-church Anglicans were too squishy and wanted a theocratic utopia. And early/proto Capitalist adventurers who wanted to get very rich. Somehow these two groups managed to create people like Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and Roger Smith who can almost kind of be the origins of the American left/liberals.
I think you basically see the two original groups still largely animate the American right. They see freedom being about imposing their religious dourness on others and ultra-Capitalism without restraint. They also tend to seem rather drawn to apocalyptic terms and how everything is a grave assault on life as they know it and their freedoms. I see them as basically seeing politics as a zero-sum game and freedom gained by others must mean freedom lost by them. Higher wages for the working class mean less money for the rich, the rights of women to get contraception mean less rights for their theocracy, etc.
You can read almost any book on American history and here the same language and tone being used by right-wingers through out our history that Tom does. This is nothing new. The most seminal work on this is probably:
"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.[1]"
I once was rehearsing a play with my cast in grad school and we were outside because the weather finally turned nice. In the background a nun in roller-blades came flying by.
I think this goes beyond requiring employers (Catholic or otherwise) to provide contraception and other reproductive/family services that they have moral objections to. It goes to the ability of employers to be paternalistic and fire employees for out of work practices that they disagree with.
There are a lot of benefits to at-will employment but I often think we take it too far. In my opinion it should be modified to prohibit lifestyle firing. An employer should not be allowed to fire an employee for any lawful practice engaged in during off-work hours. There do seem to be a lot of pompous "Christian" business people who try to micromanage their employees lives.
This is where I would promote a liberty that restrains the rights of employers. Hypocritically or not, I would have no problem with an employer who orders employees to cover up tattoos and remove non-traditional piercings during work hours. An employer does have a right to convey an image and culture in the office and during work hours but not while employees are off the clock. There was an article in the New Yorker recently about forsenic linguistics. The article opened with a man who was tried and convicted for killing his wife and two sons. The backstory was that he was having an affair with a cocktail waitress but could not divorce his wife because he worked for a "Christian" organization that would terminate employees who divorced. I say tough luck to the employer with that kind of moral rule.
You point to the tensions of value pluralism but I don't think we are very good at the balancing acts as another post in the Democracy symposium said. Most American political fights tend to be between ideologues on one side v. ideoglogues on the other side. The biggest divides between liberals and libertarians seem to be issues of economics (wealth v. fairness) and some "nanny state" health issues.
IIRC there is a fair bit of peer-reviewed psychological research that shows that Bloomberg's soda ban could be a good public health measure. I believe the research shows that if people are served smaller portions, they will eat less and not go back for seconds. I don't think anyone would doubt that obesity is a serious public health issue and an economic one because of rises in diseases like diabetes and heart issues among the severely overweight. Yet any attempt to do something about it results in cries of nanny state and paternalism.
The issue is that humans seem to be deeply tribal in nature. This observation goes back as far as Aristotle to John Donne to modern day psychologists and other scientists like Johnathan Haidt. Haidt basically thinks that it is the inherently tribal nature of people that allowed us to survive and thrive especially during our caveman years when we had much fewer advantages to animals. In Ezra Klein's recent piece on the Individual Mandate in the New Yorker (more really on how groups change policy positions), Haidt said that people might not always come up with the best ideas but we can often be "really good team players."
Yes a lot of people in the pundit and armchair pundit classes like to talk about the wisdom of the Founders especially how the Founders warned against political parties. However, forming political parties is just what people do. It is natural for like minded people to get together and form power by numbers. No one has ever found a way against this except absolute monarchy perhaps.
Do you mean Mitch McConnell? That would be a bad choice. I don't know how Republicans feel about him but he is just as much of a cartoon villain for Democrats. Obama can use McConnell as an example of needless obstruction for the sake of putting party above country. It would be a variant of 1948 with Harry Truman and the "do nothing" Congress.
I agree that Portman and Pawlenty would probably have been better choices in some ways from a political prospective because they don't give Obama and the Democratic Party any real fire. Both seem relatively popular within the Republican base and are presentable to undecideds as decent chaps. Ryan gives Obama and the Democrats an Ayn Rand-worshiping cartoon villain. My facebook feed is already lighting up with stuff against Ryan and his budget. I can't have seen my Democratic friends (and I am included obviously) getting this worked up against Portman or Pawlenty.
I agree with you that civil liberties are popular in the abstract but not so popular in actual practice for the most part especially civil liberties dealing with the rights of alleged and actual defendants in criminal cases. The exclusionary rule and confrontation clauses are probably some of the most vexing issues in jurisprudence. I don't think any country has come up with an adequate solution to the problem of illegally seized evidence. Most people can agree that search warrants are good and that police should follow them.
The problem with criminal law is that crime is more inherently emotional than most other aspects of law. Civil litigation is usually only vexing to the parties in the case with a few big blockbuster exceptions that are highly political like Duke v. Wall-Mart, Ledbetter, Brown v. Board of Ed, Lawerence v. Texas, Roe v. Wade, etc. People react strongly and it is very hard to be counterintuitive and defend civil liberties in the face of shocking and notorious crime. It might be one of the hardest things in the world. Certain crimes produce more strong reactions than others and there is a lot of really appalling facts in criminal law.
A lot of civil libertarians are fond of quoting Ben Franklin's line on "People who prefer security over liberty deserve neither." But no one has ever really come up with a practical way of convincing non civil libertarians on how to accept this line. Also no one has come up with a good metric on how much danger is acceptable in the name of liberty. This is a hard question to answer and most people do not want to be martyrs for liberty. Most people would probably rather put up with the indignities of a security state than risk harm by terrorists however remote.
Who was the most ardent civil libertarian on the Supreme Court? Probably William Douglas. Most people also considered him a cantankerous jerk and all-around not very pleasant person. The best spokespeople for civil liberties on the bench were probably a lot more affable and charming like Earl Warren and William Brennan but even they often managed to earn the scorn of conservatives.
What are the mobility rates of people in developed nations over people in less developed nations?
I know a lot of people who are very mobile in the US but they tend to come from the upper-middle class. Basically they were born and grew up in one area, probably went to undergrad in a different city or state, then grad school or first job somewhere else, and then they eventually find a "home" in their late 20s-early 40s. Sometimes later.
How many people in the United States stay local for college/university vs. going to somewhere where commuting is impossible?
I think mobility is an increasing part of being part of the upper-middle class unless you long to a profession (lawyer/doctor) that is local in nature. Lawyers are constrained by bar licenses to a certain extent (it is very common to have two or three but more is excessive) and medicine is a more local profession in general. The business people who really pull ahead are the ones who don't mind uprooting their families to live abroad when the corporation needs it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Growing Market Demand For the Left’s IDEAS”
See below.
"
Orwell's journalism like the Road to Wigen Pier and Homage to Catalonia is much better liberalism than his novels especially 1984 and Animal Farm. Both of those are great but too connected to their times and have been sort of co-opted by all ideologies because everyone likes to speak in the language of "freedom".
For Russians? I love Dostoyevsky but he supported the Czars during his time. The Devils is an indictment against the anti-Czarist students. While Chekov was not as explicitly political as the Communists made him to be, he at least understood that the gig was up for the Czars and Russian nobles. Herzen and Gorki are better Russian left writers.
All the writers you mention are very good and much better than Ayn Rand (not that this is very hard) but they were writing for the hot button issues of their day. Sinclair Lewis is probably less dated than Dreiser especially in the Zenith novels and his portrait of Midwestern pompousity.
Rand's novels have a vague quality that places them in any age. Lewis was very much writing for his time and Babbit can only take place in the 1920s. It is a great novel and many teenagers and young adults will love it but I can't see a rising liberal political star talking about their love for Sinclair Lewis like many on the right talk about their love for Ayn Rand.
"
Vonnegut:
Perhaps. He seems popular enough but he has a more-broad base appeal than Ayn Rand. There are plenty of conservatives who love him. I can't think of anyone on the left who loves Rand novels.
Sanburg? Possibly. I would need to read more.
Upton Sinclair was writing too much for the hot events of his day. I studied Sinclair in my school history classes along with Jacob Riis, not in English class. Ayn Rand's books seem not to be connected to specific issues of when they were published. This is not to go against Sinclair.
Steinbeck might be better but has a bit of the historical problem that Sinclair has, he is writing for his day.
"
I think you are falling into a bit of the same trap as your cri de coeur.
Your picks are all philosophers and not really storytellers. All the talk about the right and Rand is basically because of her novels. They are absolutely horrible novels and poorly written but they seem to attract a certain kind of teenager and some of these teenagers go on to become rich and powerful. Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, Alan Greenspan, the guy who founded Lululemon all do a lot to promote the cult of Rand.
I suppose the right also likes Hayek but I think more people probably talk about the Road to Serfdom than have actually read the work.
There is no liberal variant of Ayn Rand. A person who sells his or her political philosophy via novels. There are certainly many writers whose writings are imbued with leftist ideas and ideals like Arthur Miller, Harper Lee, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, John Irving but most of these authors are associated with English class in high school especially Miller. Kushner is too political, too current, and too homosexual for all but the most progressive and probably private high schools ironically enough. Arthur Miller probably strikes most people as old-fashioned except for the theatre kids. John Irving's liberalism is often just incidental except in The Cider House Rules. And none of these writers really have any kind developed philosophy that can be ismed.
"
I find arguable whether FDR overplayed his hand with the courtpacking.
On the one hand, he clearly wanted to do it and much of Congress balked even some ardent New Dealers.
On the other hand, he really did not fail in his goal and arguably won a game of chicken with the Supreme Court. He was able to get Owen Roberts to be the famous Switch in Time in the Parish case. And Chief Justice Hughes eventually convinced one of the four hoursemen to retire so FDR could put someone on the court. Then in a random stroke of luck, FDR got to put a lot of people on the Court in the normal way and probably remade 20th Century Jurisprudence with picks like Douglas and Black.
On “Campaign 2012: The Return to Nixonland”
Do you have any citations?
I think it is fairly mixed among the Greatest generation and Boomers. My mom (born 1946) moved from the Bronx to Long Island when she was five and attended high school in a Jewish suburb. We attended the same high school (34 years apart) and it was still considered a Jewish suburb during my youth. About half my classmates were Jewish and I think the town had more synagogues than churches.
On the other hand, my dad grew up in Washington Heights.
"
The League will soon discover that my typos often lead to unintentional hilarity.
"
This is what happens when I write before coffee.
Anti-communist views.
On “Growing Market Demand For the Left’s IDEAS”
Jesse,
I agree. It is very hard to find a good compromise when the most conservative Democrats are still to the left of the most liberal Republicans.
On “Campaign 2012: The Return to Nixonland”
MFarmer seems to also be on of those libertarians who give other libertarians a bad name by his simple belief that making Democratic supporters into the evil ones is a reason for existence.
Not you or many others on this site but there does seem to be a healthy subset of libertarians who seem to get off more on annoying liberals. Stephen Brainbridge once made a comment on his blog about how he preferred some kind of policy or was sticking to one simply because it "annoys liberals". This is a man who teaches at UCLA Law and he is still getting his greatest pleasure out of annoying liberals like a poorly socialized 12 year old adolescent likes annoying a substitute teacher.
There seems to be a lot of this juvenile attitude in certain quarters of the right. I see a lot of "annoy a liberal" type of gear via t-shirts or bumper stickers. I have yet to see sale of "annoy a conservative" stuff to the same degree.
"
I think that a lot of people are scared by the social conservatism of the Republican Party. There is no more room for people like Jacob Javits or Lincoln Chaffee in the Republican Party. And that is quite a sad commentary on the Party of Lincoln (Abraham, not Chaffee)
"
Recent Jewish immigrants from Russia tend to be more conservative and Republican because of their anti-conservative views.
The same dynamic plays out in Israel. The recent immigrants and the Sephardim tend to be Likudniks and they see Labor as being the party of the old-guard Ashkenazi "elite".
On “Growing Market Demand For the Left’s IDEAS”
1. I have a very unruly JewFro
2. Define boring. Most of what I read is hardly the stuff of the NYTimes bestseller list or any best seller list.
On “Campaign 2012: The Return to Nixonland”
Sadly, it is just a very stupid typo. Around 20 percent vote Republican.
On “But remember, it’s the evil government that we have to protect these companies from…”
This was funny.
"
Semi-Serious but not really answer:
1. One that uses some forward leaning term like "progressive"
2. One involved in the "cool" industries usually design, fashion, coffee (Starbucks and Peet's). There needs to be some kind of vague sophistication being sold. Think Design within Reach or Room and Board over Big Bill's Furniture Barn.
3. A company with cool employees or ads that feature young and vaguely hipsterish people.
4. A mythical strawmen conjured by libertarians and conservatives so they can jump up and down and say "See! See! Liberals have Big Corporations too"
On “Whose Religious Liberty? What Value Pluralism? What Attention Span?”
I think Tom basically represents what was always a strain in American politics because of our Calvinist-Puritan heritage.
The early British colonialists essentially came in two types: Puritans who felt that the high-church Anglicans were too squishy and wanted a theocratic utopia. And early/proto Capitalist adventurers who wanted to get very rich. Somehow these two groups managed to create people like Anne Hutchinson, William Penn, and Roger Smith who can almost kind of be the origins of the American left/liberals.
I think you basically see the two original groups still largely animate the American right. They see freedom being about imposing their religious dourness on others and ultra-Capitalism without restraint. They also tend to seem rather drawn to apocalyptic terms and how everything is a grave assault on life as they know it and their freedoms. I see them as basically seeing politics as a zero-sum game and freedom gained by others must mean freedom lost by them. Higher wages for the working class mean less money for the rich, the rights of women to get contraception mean less rights for their theocracy, etc.
You can read almost any book on American history and here the same language and tone being used by right-wingers through out our history that Tom does. This is nothing new. The most seminal work on this is probably:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics
Sample quote:
"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.[1]"
"
I once was rehearsing a play with my cast in grad school and we were outside because the weather finally turned nice. In the background a nun in roller-blades came flying by.
"
I think this goes beyond requiring employers (Catholic or otherwise) to provide contraception and other reproductive/family services that they have moral objections to. It goes to the ability of employers to be paternalistic and fire employees for out of work practices that they disagree with.
There are a lot of benefits to at-will employment but I often think we take it too far. In my opinion it should be modified to prohibit lifestyle firing. An employer should not be allowed to fire an employee for any lawful practice engaged in during off-work hours. There do seem to be a lot of pompous "Christian" business people who try to micromanage their employees lives.
This is where I would promote a liberty that restrains the rights of employers. Hypocritically or not, I would have no problem with an employer who orders employees to cover up tattoos and remove non-traditional piercings during work hours. An employer does have a right to convey an image and culture in the office and during work hours but not while employees are off the clock. There was an article in the New Yorker recently about forsenic linguistics. The article opened with a man who was tried and convicted for killing his wife and two sons. The backstory was that he was having an affair with a cocktail waitress but could not divorce his wife because he worked for a "Christian" organization that would terminate employees who divorced. I say tough luck to the employer with that kind of moral rule.
You point to the tensions of value pluralism but I don't think we are very good at the balancing acts as another post in the Democracy symposium said. Most American political fights tend to be between ideologues on one side v. ideoglogues on the other side. The biggest divides between liberals and libertarians seem to be issues of economics (wealth v. fairness) and some "nanny state" health issues.
IIRC there is a fair bit of peer-reviewed psychological research that shows that Bloomberg's soda ban could be a good public health measure. I believe the research shows that if people are served smaller portions, they will eat less and not go back for seconds. I don't think anyone would doubt that obesity is a serious public health issue and an economic one because of rises in diseases like diabetes and heart issues among the severely overweight. Yet any attempt to do something about it results in cries of nanny state and paternalism.
On “The Death of Democracy”
The issue is that humans seem to be deeply tribal in nature. This observation goes back as far as Aristotle to John Donne to modern day psychologists and other scientists like Johnathan Haidt. Haidt basically thinks that it is the inherently tribal nature of people that allowed us to survive and thrive especially during our caveman years when we had much fewer advantages to animals. In Ezra Klein's recent piece on the Individual Mandate in the New Yorker (more really on how groups change policy positions), Haidt said that people might not always come up with the best ideas but we can often be "really good team players."
Yes a lot of people in the pundit and armchair pundit classes like to talk about the wisdom of the Founders especially how the Founders warned against political parties. However, forming political parties is just what people do. It is natural for like minded people to get together and form power by numbers. No one has ever found a way against this except absolute monarchy perhaps.
On “Paul Ryan?”
Do you mean Mitch McConnell? That would be a bad choice. I don't know how Republicans feel about him but he is just as much of a cartoon villain for Democrats. Obama can use McConnell as an example of needless obstruction for the sake of putting party above country. It would be a variant of 1948 with Harry Truman and the "do nothing" Congress.
I agree that Portman and Pawlenty would probably have been better choices in some ways from a political prospective because they don't give Obama and the Democratic Party any real fire. Both seem relatively popular within the Republican base and are presentable to undecideds as decent chaps. Ryan gives Obama and the Democrats an Ayn Rand-worshiping cartoon villain. My facebook feed is already lighting up with stuff against Ryan and his budget. I can't have seen my Democratic friends (and I am included obviously) getting this worked up against Portman or Pawlenty.
"
Is it worth trying to gain Wisconsin while alienating and possibly (or probably) losing Florida and Ohio?
"
Is picking Ryan the equivalent of going all the way home with the base? Or does it only get him to second?
On “Popular Erosion Of Liberty: Do You Feel Lucky?”
This is a very good post.
I agree with you that civil liberties are popular in the abstract but not so popular in actual practice for the most part especially civil liberties dealing with the rights of alleged and actual defendants in criminal cases. The exclusionary rule and confrontation clauses are probably some of the most vexing issues in jurisprudence. I don't think any country has come up with an adequate solution to the problem of illegally seized evidence. Most people can agree that search warrants are good and that police should follow them.
The problem with criminal law is that crime is more inherently emotional than most other aspects of law. Civil litigation is usually only vexing to the parties in the case with a few big blockbuster exceptions that are highly political like Duke v. Wall-Mart, Ledbetter, Brown v. Board of Ed, Lawerence v. Texas, Roe v. Wade, etc. People react strongly and it is very hard to be counterintuitive and defend civil liberties in the face of shocking and notorious crime. It might be one of the hardest things in the world. Certain crimes produce more strong reactions than others and there is a lot of really appalling facts in criminal law.
A lot of civil libertarians are fond of quoting Ben Franklin's line on "People who prefer security over liberty deserve neither." But no one has ever really come up with a practical way of convincing non civil libertarians on how to accept this line. Also no one has come up with a good metric on how much danger is acceptable in the name of liberty. This is a hard question to answer and most people do not want to be martyrs for liberty. Most people would probably rather put up with the indignities of a security state than risk harm by terrorists however remote.
Who was the most ardent civil libertarian on the Supreme Court? Probably William Douglas. Most people also considered him a cantankerous jerk and all-around not very pleasant person. The best spokespeople for civil liberties on the bench were probably a lot more affable and charming like Earl Warren and William Brennan but even they often managed to earn the scorn of conservatives.
On “Democracy Symposium: Geographic Chains of Democratic Nationalism”
What are the mobility rates of people in developed nations over people in less developed nations?
I know a lot of people who are very mobile in the US but they tend to come from the upper-middle class. Basically they were born and grew up in one area, probably went to undergrad in a different city or state, then grad school or first job somewhere else, and then they eventually find a "home" in their late 20s-early 40s. Sometimes later.
How many people in the United States stay local for college/university vs. going to somewhere where commuting is impossible?
I think mobility is an increasing part of being part of the upper-middle class unless you long to a profession (lawyer/doctor) that is local in nature. Lawyers are constrained by bar licenses to a certain extent (it is very common to have two or three but more is excessive) and medicine is a more local profession in general. The business people who really pull ahead are the ones who don't mind uprooting their families to live abroad when the corporation needs it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.