The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Read MoreI’ve watched a lot of presidential campaigns, and I can’t remember one in which the contest for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination has played out quite so publicly. And that’s allowed for some voices and figures to break through who you might not have imagined before. Foremost among them is Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, because of one interview on “Morning Joe,” saying of Donald Trump and JD Vance, “These guys are just weird.”
That was the interview heard around the Democratic Party. I remember it hit me on social media. I saw that and thought, “Oh, that really connects.” And then all of a sudden, it was all you heard from Democrats. “Weird, weird, weird. These guys are weird.”
Why did this connect this way? And is there a risk of this falling into something that can bedevil Democrats, coming off as an insult to Trump’s supporters, like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment in 2016?
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In his July 22, 2024, review of recent books advocating the abolition of prisons, Adam Gopnik argues that the “frequent brutality and ingrained indifference” seen in prisons calls us to “freely imagine alternatives,” but he differs from the abolitionists.
He strongly supports those such as Michelle Alexander who see American incarceration as “a mechanism that preserves racial hierarchy.” Incarceration in her now famous formulation acts as the new Jim Crow.” Black people in New York State, for instance, are fifteen percent of the overall population and almost fifty percent of the prison population.
However, Gopnik rejects the argument that mass incarceration is a product of capitalism,
Read MoreTo recap - Part 1 explored the emergence of a new paradigm, a more holistic worldview aligned with reality, embracing interconnectedness and therefore better able to address humanity’s crises. It also highlighted the burgeoning field of democratic innovation and pointed out aspects that suggest this field is a facet of this new holistic paradigm.
In part 2 I explore - how might we take democratic innovation into deeper levels of this shift so that it becomes ever more able to address our collective predicaments?
Read More
By Wade Lee Hudson
In his review of several books written by Catholic “post-liberals,” Mark Lilla expresses sympathy for their “rejection of the intellectual foundations of modern liberal individualism” and its “idealization of autonomy,” which “has worked as an acid eating away at the deepest cultural foundations inherited from the Christian era” (such as “love your neighbor”).
Read MoreBy David Leonhardt, The New York Times
May 19, 2024
It may be the most discussed fact about American politics today: The country is deeply polarized. The Republican Party has moved to the right by many measures, and the Democratic Party has moved to the left. Each party sees the other as an existential threat. One consequence of this polarization, politicians and pundits often say, is gridlock in Washington.
But in a country that is supposed to have a gridlocked federal government, the past four years are hard to explain. These years have been arguably the most productive period of Washington bipartisanship in decades.
Read MoreDear ChatGPT: Assuming widespread agreement, in 800 words or less, how can the U.S. best fix its immigration problem?
ChatGPT
Addressing the U.S. immigration system requires a multifaceted approach, balancing the need for security, economic growth, humanitarian responsibilities, and the preservation of America's core values as a nation of immigrants. Here's a comprehensive plan, within 800 words, to address the issue:
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In her magnificent magnum opus, Justice by Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen affirms egalitarianism and criticizes domination. She proposes a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to the entire society: politics, the economy, and society. Nevertheless, her analysis falls short.
Allen affirms the development of
citizens’ ability to adopt habits of non-domination in their ordinary interactions with one another.… This would permit us to establish a virtuous cycle linking political, social, and economic domains in support of the kind of human flourishing that rests on autonomy, both private and public.
This attention to interpersonal relationships by a political scientist is rare and vital.
She defines difference without domination as social patterns that don’t involve any group or individual controlling another. She rightly asserts that protecting private autonomy is as important as safeguarding political liberties.
Allen recognizes the necessity to submit to legitimate limits “that come from laws, shared cultural practices, social norms, and organizational protocols.” These hierarchies, however, must “avoid an arbitrary or rights-violating exercise of power.”
Read MoreBy Rashid Khalidi
Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.
Read MorePetition for Peace in Palestine
Dear Mr. President:
Israel deserves to exist in peace and the Palestinian people deserve their own country.
The Palestinian Authority and the Arab nations have recognized the right of Israel to exist.
But Israel has not pledged to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza to allow the formation of a Palestinian state on those lands.
International law forbids Israel from keeping land that it seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, including the West Bank and Gaza.
The United States has thrown its weight behind Israel in the Middle East conflict, rather than adopting a balanced approach.
Israel is the largest recipient of United States foreign aid, including two billion dollars a year in military aid.
Israel, with the fourth largest military in the world, can protect itself against military conquest.
Israel could trade land for peace by agreeing to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza and recognizing a Palestinian state on those lands.
Therefore, I urge you to:
Read MoreHow Russia Went from Ally to Adversary, Keith Gessen
The dominate-and-surrender paradigm on the global stage
In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush... Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”... Bush did not react... Perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender...
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Barack Obama's presidential campaigns showed we can create a large national movement based on local teams focused on achievable goals. Instead of relying solely on top-down leadership, these campaigns enabled ordinary citizens to collaborate as equals. We can learn from these efforts to build a movement to transform the world with compassion and justice one demand at a time.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
After watching the feature film, “Oppenheimer,” I viewed the PBS documentary, “The Day After Trinity,” and the documentary about its production on the Criterion channel. I then did some research on the issues these films raise.
The backdrop for the decision to bomb Hiroshima was America’s apparently unusual demand for unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan.
Read MoreOrganized people power leading change towards a more just, sustainable, and democratic world.
We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change.
We are a global community of organizers, practitioners, educators and researchers catalyzing change through the power of narratives, rooted in the pedagogy and practice of community organizing.
We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change. We build the leadership, organizing capacity and resources of change makers across the globe to enable them to win campaigns that strengthen justice and human rights.
LCN members are developing leadership and building power in over 75 countries.
Read MoreJune 6
The Politics of Delusion
These excerpts from Edsall’s New York Times essay., The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold, The language is his except where indicated. Following these excerpts, I post a comment. Posted in Political/Partisan Divide
“Matters of status and identity are easy to whip up into existential conflicts with zero-sum solutions. To the extent that political leaders are encouraging people to focus on threats to their social status rather than their economic or material well-being, they are certainly directing attention in an unhelpful and often dangerous direction. It’s much easier to think of others as disproportionately dangerous and extreme when their victory means your loss, rather than focusing on the overall well-being of the nation as a whole.” (Lilliana Mason) [read more]
Read MoreOn May 18, 2023 I posted the following to the Compassionate Action Workshop listserv:
In his “What Americans Don’t Understand About China” New York Times op-ed yesterday, Peter Coy reported:
The latest World Values Survey, conducted from 2017 to 2020, indicates that 95 percent of Chinese participants had significant confidence in their government, compared to 33 percent in the United States. Similarly, 93 percent of Chinese participants valued security over freedom; only 28 percent of Americans did so.
This data prompted me to find these quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” story in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear—for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them…
This elicited the following comments:
Larry Walker: I like this a lot. I believe China is VERY misunderstood in America - to our loss!
Wade Lee Hudson: Should we encourage the development of more democracy in China? If so, how?
By Wade Lee Hudson
In her April 14, 2023 interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Danielle Allen (whose new book is Justice by Means of Democracy) addresses how society might use modern technology to develop and strengthen “deliberative democracy structures that we have not yet set up.” Klein calls voting “a pretty thin level of participation” and envisions methods to enable people to “really be part of steering the ship of state.”
Klein argues, “You could have things like citizens assemblies and meetings, and in other ways, you could have a thicker kind of participation and advisory role for the public than you currently do.” Modern deliberative digital tools can enhance democracy, which Allen defines as “equal empowerment across a body of free and equal citizens.” She believes, “One of the greatest values of democracy is that together we can be much smarter than we can be as individuals.”
Read MoreTo ChatGPT:
What is the criticism of the left-right political spectrum?
From ChatGPT:
There are several criticisms of the left-right political spectrum, including:…
wadehudson0726@gmail.com:
Thank you. Please send me links to resources that elaborate on these arguments.
From ChatGPT:
Sure, here are some resources that you might find helpful:…
What are healthy and unhealthy forms of leadership? Is a co-equal partnership the ideal or merely one option? Must some one person ALWAYS be in charge (in control)? If not, then when must someone be in charge? Are there examples of democratic hierarchies? Are there examples of viable collective/collaborative leadership? Do we need to cultivate more collective/collaborative leadership?