| Kommentar | LEO does have its trollish waves and internecine spats (bikes! cars!), but on the whole I thought we had been trying pretty hard to keep things relatively sachlich and not just rant and rave, even though we all have often felt like it occasionally. /-: Probably none of us want to see the thread prolonged just to keep rehashing the same frustrations. But on the other hand, it still seems to me that there is some value in keeping an eye on the facts of what's happening, especially now that new developments are happening farther offstage from the mainstream media. It also still seems important to keep looing back at how Trump got so much power and came so close to an authoritarian takeover, because it's not at all clear that we're out of danger yet. The likelihood that Republicans will come surging back in the elections of 2022, perhaps even retaking both houses of Congress, seems worryingly strong to me, because the margin is already so thin, and it seems so unlikely that Biden will be able to accomplish anything significant before then, and there's always such a backlash against the party in power at the midterm. I wasn't sure where or whether to mention these articles, but maybe they halfway fit here and could at least give us something different but related to think about. Ross Douthat is one of a couple of token conservatives at the New York Times. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions he draws, particularly his sense that Trumpian conservatism must be a waning force just because it's so nutty and not as widely supported by military and industrial leaders as the Nazis were in the Weimar era. Surely that's dangerously wishful thinking. In that sense, it's also sobering to read Harvard history professor Jill Lepore's review of the weaknesses of the US constitution when it comes to preventing dictatorship. _____________________ ‘Babylon Berlin,’ Babylon America?
How watching a TV show about Weimar Germany can help us interpret our own era. ...
... if you are inclined to see contemporary America, under Donald Trump or after him, as a nation entering its own Weimar period, there will be scenes from the Berlin tapestry that prompt a shock of recognition.
This includes the aspects of Weimar that inspire nostalgia on the left, the Babylon Brooklyn mix of socialist radicalism and sexual liberation. It includes the bully-boy factions in the streets, whose menace antifa and the Proud Boys imitate in our own era. It includes the way that extremes can radicalize one another as the center weakens, the agony of moderate figures trying to decide whether their official political opponents or their more extreme ideological allies are the bigger threat, and the mix of cynicism and naïveté with which the wrong choice is often made.
Above all it includes the depiction of Berlin itself, the show’s real main character, a self-contained world of deracination and atomization, sexual experimentation and depravity, utopian fantasy and reactionary zeal, old and new bigotries, media frenzies and political radicalization. What is the city, if not the late-1920s version of the internet?
But then alongside these familiarities there is the stronger shock of difference. The scale of poverty and degradation on display, even before the Great Depression hits, is a reminder that the world in which the Nazis rose was extraordinarily poorer than our own, with a fundamental fragility even for the middle class that neither the Great Recession nor the coronavirus have yet delivered to Americans. The violent legacy of World War I, its brutalization of an entire generation, is palpable in both the violence in Berlin’s streets and the literal shell shock afflicting multiple male characters: No recent American trauma can compare.
Equally unfamiliar is the scope of viable-seeming political possibilities for the characters to embrace. In the course of the show we meet Stalinists and Trotskyists and White Russians, nationalists and fascists and would-be restorers of the Kaiser, as well as the fractious defenders of the republic. Almost all of them, crucially, have real-world correlatives for their ambitions — still-extant monarchies, the Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy. If the tragedy of Weimar is that it went through a doorway that opened into hell, the drama of Weimar is that so many doors were open, so many different political futures seemed entirely possible — in a way that makes our own era’s radicalisms feel more fantastic, ungrounded or made for cable TV.
Then the final thing that’s striking about Weimar’s world compared to ours is the sweeping institutional and cultural strength of the nationalist right. Indeed if anything the show underplays this power: It portrays a right-wing German military eager for a coup and conservative industrialists eager to support it, but the potency of right-wing ideas in the intelligentsia and the German university hasn’t really been depicted; the lone student character so far is an idealistic Communist.
The overall vibe on the show, though, makes some kind of rightward shift in 1930s Germany seem all but inevitable. (Which only makes the role the non-Nazi right played in elevating Hitler seem more shameful.) But that is not at all the vibe of 2020s America, where conservatism feels much more decayed and self-marginalizing, with little of the right-wing infrastructure and ambition that the Nazis channeled, co-opted and corrupted.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/opinion/ba...When Constitutions Took Over the World
Starting in the eighteenth century, citizens were promised their rights in print. Was this new age spurred by the ideals of the Enlightenment or by the imperatives of global warfare? ...
To prepare for his citizenship test, knowing that he’d be asked questions about the U.S. Constitution, Gödel had dedicated himself to the study of American history and constitutional law. Time and again, he’d phoned Morgenstern with rising panic about the exam. (Gödel, a paranoid recluse who later died of starvation, used the telephone to speak with people even when they were in the same room.) Morgenstern reassured him that “at most they might ask what sort of government we have.” But Gödel only grew more upset. Eventually, as Morgenstern later recalled, “he rather excitedly told me that in looking at the Constitution, to his distress, he had found some inner contradictions and that he could show how in a perfectly legal manner it would be possible for somebody to become a dictator and set up a Fascist regime, never intended by those who drew up the Constitution.” He’d found a logical flaw.
Morgenstern told Einstein about Gödel’s theory; both of them told Gödel not to bring it up during the exam. When they got to the courtroom, the three men sat before a judge, who asked Gödel about the Austrian government.
“It was a republic, but the constitution was such that it finally was changed into a dictatorship,” Gödel said.
“That is very bad,” the judge replied. “This could not happen in this country.”
Morgenstern and Einstein must have exchanged anxious glances. Gödel could not be stopped.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I can prove it.” ...
In 1949, the year after Kurt Gödel became a U.S. citizen, Linda Colley was born in the United Kingdom, a country without a written constitution. Colley, one of the world’s most acclaimed historians, is a British citizen and a C.B.E., a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. (If there were a Nobel Prize in History, Colley would be my nominee.) She lives in the United States. For the past twenty years or so, she’s been teaching at Princeton, walking the same grounds and haunting the same library stacks that Gödel once did, by turns puzzled and fascinated, as he was, by the nature of constitutions. “I came to this subject very much as an outsider,” she writes in an incandescent, paradigm-shifting new book, “The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World” (Liveright). “Moving in the late twentieth century to live and work in the United States, a country which makes a cult out of its own written constitution, was therefore for me an arresting experience.” Colley has upended much of what historians believe about the origins of written constitutions. Gödel’s Loophole is all over the Internet ... The graver the American constitutional crisis, the greater the interest in the idea that there’s a bug in the constitutional code. But, for genuine illumination about the promise and the limits of constitutionalism, consider, instead, Colley’s Rule: Follow the violence. ...
... as the usual story has it, American constitutionalism served as a model for what can be called the age of constitution-making, an era also characterized by the spread of democracy[. B]y 1914, governments on every continent had adopted written constitutions, driven by the force of the idea that the nature of rule, the structure of government, and the guarantee of rights are the sorts of things that have got to be written down, printed, and made public.
Colley doesn’t see it this way. First, she finds the origins of constitution-writing elsewhere—all over the place, really, and often very far from Philadelphia. Second, she thinks it’s important to separate the spread of constitutionalism from the rise of democracy, not least because many nations that adopted written constitutions rejected democracy, and still do. Third, she isn’t convinced that the writing of constitutions was simply driven by the force of an idea; instead, she thinks that the writing of constitutions was driven, in large part, by the exigencies of war. States make war and wars make states, the sociologist Charles Tilly once argued. Colley offers this corollary: Wars make states make constitutions. ...
During the brutal world wars of the eighteenth century, millions of men carried millions of weapons, sailed hundreds of thousands of ships, and marched with thousands of armies. If most of those men demanded political rights, and political equality, in exchange for their sacrifices, they didn’t always get them. Some constitutions written in the great age of constitution-writing were, like many constitutions written more recently, instruments of tyranny. But, when constitutions did grant rights, it was because people, in wartime, had their governments by the throat. ...
Placed in this global context, the constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 looks both less and more original. Colley points out that nine of the first ten Federalist Papers concern the dangers of war and two more concern insurrection. Thirty of the fifty-five delegates had fought in the war for independence. The Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman said that there were four reasons to adopt a new constitution: defense against foreign powers, defense against domestic insurrections, treaties with foreign nations, and the regulation of foreign commerce. One overlooked factor that distinguished the constitution debated in Philadelphia from the Nakaz, Colley suggests, is how quickly, easily, and successfully the American document was circulated. There were no newspapers in Russia, and no provincial presses. By contrast, anyone who wanted a copy of the U.S. Constitution could have one, within a matter of days after the convention had adjourned.
Wars make states make constitutions; states print constitutions; constitutions guarantee freedom of the press. In the nearly six hundred constitutions written between 1776 and about 1850, the right most frequently asserted—more often than freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly—was freedom of the press. ...
As more states adopted constitutions, the number of published constitutions and collections of constitutions grew. Edmund Burke wrote, in 1796, that a chief architect of the 1791 French constitution had “whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions readymade, ticketed, sorted, and numbered; suited to every season and every fancy.” A newspaper in Strasbourg even printed a template for anyone wishing to write a new constitution; all you had to do was fill in the blanks. Norway’s 1814 constitution, hastily written in Oslo under threat of an invasion by Sweden, borrowed passages, verbatim, from the printed constitutions of the United States (1787), France (1791, 1793, and 1795), Poland (1791), Batavia (1798), Sweden (1809), and Spain (1812). The new constitution was then printed and made available in post offices, and, as Colley reports, the government encouraged people to paste copies on the walls of their houses. ...
Constitutions grant rights; they can also take rights away. In 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft celebrated the promise of constitutionalism: “A constitution is a standard for the people to rally around. It is the pillar of a government, the bond of all social unity and order. ...” But constitutions, Colley says, have nearly always made things worse for women. Before constitutions were written, women had informal rights in all sorts of places; constitutions explicitly excluded them, not least because a constitution, in Colley’s formulation, is a bargain struck between a state and its men, who made sacrifices to the state as taxpayers and soldiers ...
The U.S. was the first nation whose constitution provided for its own revision. Article V, the amendment clause, ... left ajar a constitutional door for making it, and the Union, “more perfect.” Federalists cited the amendment provision when arguing for ratification. ... Without an amendment provision, the only way to change the rules is to overthrow the government, by way of insurrection. ...
The problem, in the United States, is that it is extremely difficult to amend the Constitution. It’s often thought to be structurally impossible these days, but much scholarship suggests that it is, instead, merely culturally impossible ...
The U.S. Constitution has been rewritten three times: in 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments; after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments; and during the Progressive Era, with the ratification of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments. It is time for another reinvention.Published in the print edition of the March 29, 2021, issue, with the headline “The Age of Consent.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29... |
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