A couple of long reads for people who don’t care about football
by digby
If you aren’t watching the Super Bowl or otherwise caught up in mass cultural events this afternoon, you might want to take a minute to read a couple of really interesting think pieces.
The first by Ta-Nehisi Coates about President Obama’s relationship to the black community is amazing. I won’t characterize it, I couldn’t do it justice anyway. I honestly don’t think anyone but Coates could to be honest:
What your country tells you it thinks of you has real meaning. If you see people around you acquiring college degrees and rising only to work as Pullman porters or in the Post Office, while in other communities men become rich, you take a certain message from this. If you see your father being ripped off in the sharecropping fields of Mississippi, you take a certain message about your own prospects. If the preponderance of men in your life are under the supervision of the state, you take some sense of how your country regards you. And if you see someone who is black like you, and was fatherless like you, and endures the barbs of American racism like you, and triumphs like no one you’ve ever known, that too sends a message.
And this messenger—who is Barack Obama—becomes something more to black people. He becomes a champion of black imagination, of black dreams and black possibilities. For liberals and Democrats, the prospect of an Obama defeat in 2012 meant the reversal of an agenda they favored. For black people, the fight was existential. “Please proceed, governor,” will always mean something more to us, something akin to Ali’s rope-a-dope, Louis over Schmeling, or Doug Williams over John Elway…
Read on to see where this goes. It goes deep and in unpredictable ways.
And this by Rich Yeselson on James Madison’s worst nightmare is just plain old interesting. He takes the supercilious Madison worshiper George Will to task for his hypocrisy (or intellectual inconsistency perhaps) and, among other things, brilliantly makes a point that I’ve often discussed on this blog over the years:
Modern conservatism continues to rely on certain antebellum-era arguments on behalf of states’ rights and, also, the intrastate rights of state majorities versus state minorities.
In the decades before the Civil War, the increasingly dominant Southern wing of the Democratic Party agreed about the broad questions of political and economic power. During the 1850s, the issue of slavery destroyed the Whig Party and brought forth the anti-slavery Republican Party (or, at the least, the party opposed to the expansion of slavery). These developments clarified the overwhelmingly pro-slavery position of the Southern Democrats, who argued only over the smartest tactics—whether to stay within or leave the federal union—that would preserve the pervasive privileges and hierarchies of slavery.
Antebellum Southern intellectuals sought to promote and defend their vision of American society by lodging the maximum power possible within the states. Calhoun, as sitting vice president during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, had worked, during the 1820s and early 1830s, on refining the doctrine of “nullification” in connection with South Carolina’s opposition to congressionally passed tariff laws. Calhoun disagreed that the federal government—whose power to trump the states is enshrined in the supremacy clause of the Constitution (strongly defended by Hamilton in Federalist No. 33)—subsumed, as the clause stated, “under the authority of the United States,” a state’s right to decide which federal laws (and treaties) are constitutional and which aren’t. Calhoun believed that the “mutual negative” of warring interests “forms the constitution.” Its essential purpose was to nullify, not ratify.
Read on, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Enjoy!
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