What makes America great?

Back in February, I blogged about writing to Jill Lepore asking her if she had written such an essay somewhere on what makes America great.  Lepore replied: "I think my answer to that question is in my next book, which is called "This America: The Case for the Nation."

I read her op-ed in the NY Times.  I liked what she was arguing for:

My fave #PublicIntellectual, Jill #Lepore:
"Nationalism is an abdication of #liberalism. It is also the opposite of #patriotism. To confuse #nationalism with #patriotism is to mistake contempt for love and #fear for valor."https://t.co/jHGe4q8TEN#tRump

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) May 26, 2019

I suppose I could have made the book a part of my summer reading.  But, this is the first summer when I have taken off from any serious work.  After years of M suggesting that I get out of my head, I implemented it.  It feels like I have put down a huge weight that I had been carrying on all these years.  I have no idea how people like Lepore keep going!

But then even when I don't read books, I do read plenty of book reviews.  This essay reviews Lepore's "This America: The Case for the Nation."  Well, it is a twofer that also reviews "This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto," whose author is an Indian-American--Suketu Mehta.

I haven't read Mehta's book either; but, I have read his op-ed and have heard him articulate his argument.

On #tRump's politics of fear of #immigrantshttps://t.co/UVLSPAW5JR#TheBrownsAreComing

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) June 2, 2019

So, the review essay is not about books that will be unfamiliar terrain.

Nationalism is currently thriving, she believes, because the discourse of American liberalism is deficient. First, that discourse undervalues the radicality and relevance of the country’s founding ideals; second, the preoccupation with the rights of subgroups is essential, certainly, but politically inadequate; third, and here I put the matter much more crudely than Lepore would, liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes. However gauche or complicit it may seem, they must understand and unapologetically frame their values—which currently have a niche, somewhat subversive emphasis—as our core national values:

This America is a community of belonging and commitment, held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements. A nation founded on universal ideas will never stop fighting over the meaning of its past and the direction of the future…. The nation, as ever, is the fight.

I am struck by the reviewer's blunt statement that "liberals must in some sense do battle for possession of the Stars and Stripes."

"The nation, as ever, is the fight."

Right on, Professor Lepore!

"I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.”

That was not me, but it is from Mehta.

This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now…. We’re not letting the bastards take it back.
It’s our America now.

We certainly are not letting the bastards take it back.  No way, Jose!

But, for us liberals and immigrants, the challenge is huge when it comes to fighting for the nation. Fighting for our nation.

If Lepore is right and the nation is indeed the fight, liberals must understand what a fight involves. That is, you can’t fight performatively when the other side is fighting to win: that kind of fight simply won’t go on for very long. You have no option but to fight to win, too. You want to win because you are right and they are wrong; because you have a moral right to power and they don’t; because you are real Americans and they’re not.

Fight on!

More on restructuring higher education .... go multinational!

Professor Sheila Croucher likens academic departments to nation-states, and provides a fantastic argument on why that model will not work.

She wants us to go multinational--well, not by starting branch campuses in the Dubais and Bangalores of the world, but by doing away with this old, parochial, department nation-state model.

Croucher writes:

[Disciplinary] identities and departmental attachments are somehow irrational, or that their promoters and defenders have bad intentions. Traditional disciplines and departments have met, and may continue to meet, important needs and serve valuable purposes—for the individual faculty members within them, the chairs who lead them, the institutions that house them, and the students who are educated by them. Disciplines, like nations, constitute a community of kind—of shared interests, ideas, and intellectual commitments. Members of disciplinary communities share a language (some literally); they share a history, heroes, sacred texts, symbols, vocabulary. Having been powerfully socialized into those communities, most faculty members find a stable, fulfilling source of intellectual and perhaps social belonging in their disciplines, and are likely to see departmental status as the means of preserving their interests.
Yet, as has happened with nation-states in a global era, there are now educational and practical reasons to question the utility of existing models.

As one who has been educated in, and has worked in, many disciplines (electrical engineering, urban planning, economics, environmental resource management, geography) I suppose I could be one of the easiest to be convinced :) 

As Croucher points out, "discipline" does not equal "department" ... Croucher adds:

As universities ponder transcending the conventional model of academic nation-states, those with concerns about their attachments to disciplines need to be assured that these forms of belonging are valued and can be preserved. In fact, scholars of interdisciplinary learning, such as Veronica Boix-Mansilla, have emphasized the need for rigorous engagement with disciplinary knowledge to advance interdisciplinary learning. Integrative or interdisciplinary learning is not antidisciplinary. Similarly, those faculty members who fear that departmental status is the only possible path to safety and security need to be assured with open conversations as well as transparent and democratically conceived policies that that is not the case.
If the international system (comprising a wide diversity of nations, states, ethnic groups, and identities) can recognize and give way to new, multiple, and fluid forms of attachment and governance, surely agreeing on some form of academic reconfiguration is feasible. First, however, people need reminding that "discipline" is not a synonym for "department," that disciplines themselves do, or should, regularly adapt to changing contexts and undergird rather than detract from integrative efforts, and that the freedoms and fairness important to us all can and most certainly should be preserved, whatever the emergent structures.

Yes, Prof. Croucher!

If only I could convince my esteemed colleagues!

Obama, India, race, and caste

India has a long history with the caste system.  Sometimes I think that the system will somehow, and unfortunately, survive even all the globalization, which otherwise is one hell of an equalizing force.  Lakshmi Chaudhry has more on this:

Many Indians believe Obama's victory makes all things possible for people of color everywhere--including the many American grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins who, thanks to globalization, are part of the Indian extended family. "My granddaughter can now be president of the United States," boasted a university professor who was shopping at the local mall in Bangalore, echoing the sentiments of my mother, an aunt and her neighbor.

And yet for all the rhetoric about America's racist history, Indians have preferred to avoid any mention of our ever-present racism. There's been nary a word on the cognitive dissonance between all this Obama-love in a culture that refers to people of African origin as habshis, an epithet as offensive as the N-word. Like all well-indoctrinated postcolonial subjects, most Indians regard Africans with contempt for being poor, "backward" and, above all, black--a cardinal sin in a nation obsessed with skin color. ("Fairness" creams remain the top-selling cosmetic on the Indian market.) Sure, Obama was one of "us" when he was running for president. But he wouldn't be if he were one of the many African students in, say, Delhi struggling to rent an apartment or hail a cab.

Only Sunday and Monday left for pardons!

I was driving back home when I listened to the president bid his adieu in which he reminded us about the very successful two-terms in which he made all the tough decisions on behalf of us.  It felt like he was telling us that in order to make sure that we would rather take up the president-elect's advice to look forward and not backwards.

Which is why I like the following comments by Christopher Hayes:

1) Yesterday, AG designee Eric Holder said, without hesitation that water-boarding is torture.

2) Dick Cheney has admitted authorizing water-boarding.

3) Dick Cheney has admitted authorizing torture.

4) Torture is a felony under US law punishable by up to 20 years of prison.

5) Dick Cheney authorized a felony.

QED, right? Is there any other way to reason through these premises and deductions?

Roubini says it is "socialism for the rich"

[The] transformation of the US into a country where there is socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street (ie, where profits are privatised and losses are socialised) continues today with the nationalisation of AIG.
This latest action on AIG follows a variety of many other policy actions that imply a massive – and often flawed – government intervention in the financial markets and the economy: the bail-out of the Bear Stearns creditors; the bail-out of Fannie and Freddie; the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk, toxic, illiquid private securities); the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of "liquidity" to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders; the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (through restrictions on short sales).
Then there's the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market, the creation of a whole host of new bail-out facilities to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression, to bail out non-bank financial institutions.
This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. ...
Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or found to be perverts, these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered Wild West laissez-faire jungle capitalism allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, and have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
They are are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalisations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA.
Zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc with their inflexible fanaticism – but they usually don't run the biggest economy in the world. These laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades.

Ouch! As one who often blogged appreciating Roubini's warnings, it will not surprise anybody (is anyone reading this? ha!) that I absolutely love this frank criticism.
(I excerpted it from the Guardian)

And a similar opinion from William Greider at The Nation:

historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics--exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.
Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a brave conservative critic, put it plainly: "The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson's latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist lovefest
between Washington's one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks."

Elections: let the silliness begin

The silly season of the presidential election has started unfolding. Instead of having intense discussions on, say, the economy, bank regulations, the wars, immigration, the crumbling infrastructure, federal deficits and debt, .... and the list goes on, .... we are now down to the Ferragamo shoes that McCain wears, and whether Obama is out of touch with the regular world.

I think, if at all, it is only the left that is beginning to make noise about this (not that I always agree with them). A group of ultra-lefties have signed an open letter to Obama, perhaps worried about his slow drift towards the political center. But, better yet is Katha Pollit's piece, on the bizarre response from McCain on viagra v. contraception pills:
There's the basic unfairness of not covering these essential, even life-saving drugs and devices, so fundamental to women's health and well-being, and the added insult of denying coverage while men are lavished with cut-rate erections. And there's the craven submission to religious extremists that moves the politics of that denial. It's a pocket-book issue, too: A year's worth of contraception can cost a woman $600. That's a lot of money. Is it too much to expect the next president of the United States to understand that? Now that every politican in America prides himself on knowing the price of a gallon of milk and talks like he's just finished doing the week's shopping for a family of ten?