Seriatim
Journal of American Politics
VOLUME II / ISSUE 2 fall 2015
ON THEORY * and PRACTICE
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Seriatim
Journal of American Politics
VOLUME II / ISSUE 2 fall 2015
ON THEORY * and PRACTICE
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
se•ri•a•tim adv. | discussing a subject logically and freely, one point after another
Seriatim Mission
To serve the University of Virginia community by supporting an engaged citizenry, fostering an open marketplace of ideas, and encouraging the productive exchange of political speech.
Editors-in-Chief Ian T. Robertson Russell C. Bogue
Managing Editor Julia Horowitz
Events
Andrew Boyer
Content
We are dedicated to publishing the highest quality undergraduate work on American politics. Work is selected for its depth of scholarship, originality, and ability to advance our understanding of the American political tradition. We select pieces with the aim to enrich and diversify the political marketplace of ideas.
Statement of Ownership
Seriatim and its print and online publications are independent, privately-funded entities. All content decisions rest at the sole discretion of the Editorial Board.
Marketing-Outreach Austin Owen
Design-Online Sara Neel
Staff
Jack Brake Alex Dunkenberger Jack Hall Conor Kelly Ellen McAlexander Sofie Niziak Zoe Pettler Lucas Pulliza Gaven Wessel Eli Wiener
Publisher
Evan L. Pivonka
Online Readership
Visit seriatimjournal.com for the latest undergraduate work on American politics and to sign-up for the weekly e-newsletter.
Journal of American Politics
DEMOCRACY CANNOT SUCCEED UNLESS THOSE WHO EXPRESS THEIR CHOICE ARE PREPARED TO CHOOSE WISELY. FS D.27,R1938 ranklin eptember
oosevelt
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LETTER FROM THE EDITORS ACADEMIC ESSAYS
17 Habermas & non-foundationalism 33 Privacy in practice 43 The question of freedom of religion 49 Latino voter activation 63 Amending the Constitution 69 Communicative comeptitor 77 Why liberals love the United Nations -Stephen Paul
-Porter Nenon -Attiya Latif
-Elizabeth Hilbert
-Nicholas Kumleben -Stephanie Shifflet
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-Gabrielle Jorgenson
ARTICLES, ET AL.
93 A Return to Kennan 97 America: the elective oligarchy 101 On Nozick’s forced labor theory -Andrew Boyer -Lucas Pulliza
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-Alex Dunkenberger
ENDNOTES
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* * LETTER * * FROM * * THE* EDITORS * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dear Readers,
W
e are excited to present to you our fourth print journal,
compiled from student work submitted to us during the spring semester of 2015. This year we received a number of strong submissions concerning the theoretical foundations of American deliberative democracy—from a paper that explores the role and function of moral discourse, to one that challenges traditional notions of privacy in a free society. Though such pieces are more esoteric than our traditional fare, we believe they serve a valuable purpose in substantive political discussion by forcing us to think critically about the ideals we accept or reject, the viewpoints we implicitly support or deny, and the normative claims we make about the world around us. In addition, we have supplemented these selections with works of a more practical focus, such as an examination of Latino voter turnout, a reflection on the effect of ideology on multilateralism in the U.N., and a discussion of the proper political response to the grow-
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ing threat from the Islamic State. As such, we have decided to call this issue “On Theory and Practice,” for we hope to spark discussion on both the theoretical norms that underlie our republic and the practical consequences these ideals can have on our policies. This year, Seriatim will also be beginning a campaign to raise an endowment to ensure future financial solvency. We have pledged from the beginning to provide all our print journals free of charge, and we are committed to this promise. As our initial seed money winds down, we are looking to raise money that will keep the journal rolling off the presses for many semesters to come—long after we have graduated (at the end of this year). While we are working through many avenues to try to secure this money, we would appreciate any gift, of any amount, in support of this goal. If interested, please visit https://seriatim.betterworldcollective.com/ and click on “Donate” to contribute. As always, we welcome your feedback. You can email us with questions, comments, or submissions at seriatimjournal@ gmail.com.
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Letter from the Editors
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Read on: you’ll discover that valuable, insightful political work is taking place at the University; that political discussions can be informed and refined by a commitment to scholarly investigation; that students are engaging with the most important issues of our generation; and that Seriatim continues to showcase some truly remarkable student work. We hope you enjoy reading these pieces as much as we did, and we encourage you to contribute your voice by submitting work of your own. We wish you a productive and fulfilling rest of the fall semester, and we look forward to hearing from you in the weeks to come. Sincerely,
*
Ian T. Robertson
*
Russell C. Bogue
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academic essays
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T
he following pieces were completed by undergraduates at the University of Virginia. From political theory to public policy, these essays represent a variety of scholarly fields and a diversity of thought on the American political tradition. Works for publication are accepted on a rolling basis and may be submitted via our online forum at seriatimjournal.com.
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Habermas & non-foundationalism Inclusion to decision through ethical discourse
by Stephen Paul
College of Arts and Sciences (2015)
M
oral discourses form the foundational level of normativity in society within the framework of Habermas’s proposal for deliberative democracy. Moral norms are established in universal discourses in which all participate, ideally, by entering into the “ideal speech situation.” Agonists criticize this structure based on an argument that any universal consensus inevitably involves exclusion of, at minimum, other alternative possibilities. Furthermore, the ideal speech situation hampers some of the most important functions of political discourse, identity formation and confrontation of power relations. Taking agonist critiques seriously leads deliberative democracy away from a foundationalist understanding of universal rationality as the basis of discourse. When Habermasian deliberative democracy is shifted into a non-foundationalist perspective, ethical discourse emerges as the fundamental level of discourse in a society. With the “moral” abandoned as illusory, deliberative democracy based on ethical discourse can incorporate a strong degree of agonism while preserving the deliberative aim of establishing norms and decisions by consensus. The failure of agonism to provide for a decision making mechanism becomes starkly apparent when a pluralistic society is faced with decisions that are irrevocable or long term in nature with
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consequences that potentially affect the whole society. I will argue that deliberative democracy centered on ethical discourses is prepared to face moments of decision through the expansion of ethical discourses along a shared dimension of a form of life. I will conclude with a discussion of theologian James Cone’s work, A Black Theology of Liberation, and concretely demonstrate how Cone creates the sort of delimited ethical discourse necessary for the establishment of legitimate norms. Against the universal moral consensus The project of Between Facts and Norms is to develop a method to establish legitimacy for moral and ethical norms in society. Habermas recognizes the ethical origin of deliberation wherein autonomous individuals recognize a shared conception of what is “good for us.”1 Not all individuals, however, agree on this conception; pluralism is defined as a society formed from individuals who hold competing or opposing conceptions of the good life. The prescribed solution to pluralism is moral discourses that “require a perspective freed from all egocentrism or ethnocentrism.”2 When this is accomplished, the participants in the discourse have entered into the “ideal speech situation.”3 These discourses take priority in Habermas’s procedural framework because they serve as the normative foundation for society: “So compromise formation cannot simply replace moral discourses; this is why political will-formation cannot be reduced to compromise. This applies mutatis mutandis to ethical-political discourses as well, for their results must at least be compatible with moral principles… So only the compatibility of all discursively achieved or negotiated programs with what is morally justifiable ensures that the discourse principles has been thoroughly applied.”4 Habermas views it as important that moral norms are established first and then that discursively-achieved ethical norms follow from within the boundaries of established universal moral norms. The agonist critique of deliberative democracy reacts against the conditions that Habermas lays out for the “ideal speech situation.” I will address two agonist related critiques, which are the need to recognize the role of discourses in identity formation and the ineradicable nature of power relations and antagonism. These critiques are aimed at the requirements that participants in deliberation discuss and decide entirely based on the “unforced force of the better argument”5 without being influenced by egocentrism or ethnocentrism.6 The diction casts these in a negative light with connotations of selfishness and racism. Mouffe counters this move in her book The Democratic Paradox and demonstrates that value of understanding politics as a vehicle for identity formation (“egocentrism”) operational-
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ized to address relations of power between groups (“ethnocentrism”).7 The concept of a universal moral norm established by rational consensus sets fundamental features of politics aside for the sake of attempting to reconcile and overcome pluralism. Since this is impossible, the resulting ‘consensus’ is an illusion wherein the most powerful expressions of egocentrism and ethnocentrism subtly manifest themselves implicitly in the hegemonic constellation of values and norms that establishes an unassailable status quo, supposedly rationally justified by inclusive discourse. Denying a space in foundational political discourse for these political actions results in a situation where “the political in its antagonistic dimension manifests itself through other channels”8 such as violence in the form of symbolic oppression, economic exclusion, or physical force. Politics must therefore place a focus on mediating antagonistic conflict, broadly aiming to convert it into “agonism.”9 Setting aside the unattainable ideal of liberal essentialism where people are able to set aside specific identities and power relations to participate fairly in deliberation, politics must instead recognize: this constitutive gap between the people and its various identifications. Hence the importance of leaving this space forever open, instead of trying to fill it through the establishment of a supposedly “rational” consensus.10 This means that people are constantly in the process of forming their identity relative to the identities of the ‘others’ in society. Conceptually homogenizing individuals by compelling a limited ‘universal identity’ as a requirement to entering into ideal discourse therefore defeats that discourse at the moment of its conception because it denies a primary function of deliberation. Similarly, democratic politics must include in discourse conflict over power relations between collective identities. What this means is recognizing Wittgenstein’s observation that “rules… are always an abridgment of forms of life” and that “procedures always involves substantial ethical commitments.”11 The sense of what is rational or justified emerges from within the particular context of a specific form of life, which eliminates the possibility of a universal rational consensus amongst different ethical communities. Habermas presents these differences in forms of life as the empirical difficulties preventing the ideal discourse. They are, on the contrary, ontological problems because controversy over these forms of life present the most fundamental antagonisms of the political that democracy must be prepared to negotiate. Mouffe therefore argues: the free and unconstrained deliberation of all on matters of common concerns is a conceptual impossibility, since the particular forms of life which are presented as its ‘impediments’ are its very condition of possibility.12 If the community has a consistent form of life, then the rules and norms established through consensus fundamentally make rational sense because these
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rules and norms are descriptive of the form of life of the community. Yet pluralism means that the holistic political community is comprised of smaller communities expressing various forms of life that frequently and inevitably come into conflict. The agonist model of democracy strives to convert the destructive antagonism of competition over forms of life into agonistic and constructive conversation. As an alternative to striving for consensus, Mouffe argues, politics should be understood as “a space in which [agonistic] confrontation is kept open, power relations are always being put into question and no victory is final.”13 The agonistic vision is one of a politics that is constantly reflexive and unsure of the results of political processes which function to facilitate identity formation and discussion over power relations. It demonstrates fundamental problems with the possibility and content of the output of discursive deliberation to actualize a legitimate rational moral consensus. Necessity of consensus The politics of agonism denies the potential for a realization of the ideal consensus in deliberative democracy. Yet there are moments in any political history when a decision is demanded and when the agonistic “undecidability” must be suspended and identity and power relations must be crystalized into a decision.14 A purely agonistic model of democracy provides no processes for justifying this process and the result risks being capricious and arbitrary. Political situations calling for a resolution that agonist politics is unprepared to approach can occur as irrevocable events, such as the deployment of nuclear weapons and the associated potentially permanent consequences of that decision to which Habermas gives attention15 or as “critical junctions” that represent the establishment of norms that creates a type of path dependence that substantially alters the course of politics for a significant amount of time.16 When politics approaches events such as these, a consensus with a legitimate outcome, that is one to which all affected may consent, is an ideal way to reach a decision that necessarily has long term implications or finality. Furthermore, it must be desirable to generate communal norms; otherwise anarchy would be preferable to democracy. But realizing ideal norms, as has been previously argued, seems to be impossible. Complicating the matter is the fact there appears to be a necessity for some level of agreement between all, an apparent agreement among all subjects, to certain minimal basic values. Mouffe requires a “common ground because [adversaries] have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality.”17 Despite drawing attention to conflicting
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forms of life as a problem for establishing basic fair procedural rules to govern discourse, Mouffe nevertheless maintains that some foundational level of agreement is necessary. The conflict between agonist and deliberative democrats produces a democratic tension between the necessity of decision and the impossibility of legitimacy. Instead of aiming to implement universal and exclusory moral norms, deliberative discourse must be reflexively aware of its potential to exclude alternate identities and of crystalize power relations. To this end, deliberative democracy should understand ethical discourse as the basis of society and reject the foundationalism of moral discourse as exclusory. The non-foundationalist Habermasian paradigm Any work within an unaltered Habermasian paradigm while taking agonist criticisms seriously will result in an unavoidable conflict between “orthodox Habermasian foundationalism” and the agonist conception of pluralism without a universal foundation.18 I follow White and Farr in suggesting that between traditional foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, which posits the impossibility of any foundations, lies an area of non-foundationalism. Moving the Habermasian paradigm away from the “idea of rational consensus as a foundation” opens up possibilities for recognizing the various communities in pluralistic society that subscribe to different foundations.19 A better way of describing this approach may be multi- or poly- foundationalism. Instead of requiring an elusive and likely non-existent universal foundation, deliberative democracy must respect the various contextual and limited foundations present in a pluralist society. “Nonfoundationalism in this sense means relinquishing the idea of a rational consensus as a foundation; but this does not necessarily mean total abandonment of the idea.”20 Vacating a universal foundation of rationality from the communicative paradigm means that the idea of a universal moral consensus must be surrendered. Instead, deliberative democracy should be focused on ethical discourses, where contextually rational consensus can emerge. Towards ethical discourse Ethical discourse provides an arena for the reconciliation of agonist critiques with the production of a legitimate consensus. Habermas describes the content of ethical discourse as deliberation on the practices and norms that establish the good life or the best way to live.21 Unlike moral norms, not every person must be
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reasonably able to consent to ethical norms.22 Inherited tradition of a particular form of life provides the starting point for ethical basis of an individual or a community. All ethical discourses are therefore inherently re-evaluative, a process of re-assessing received norms and forms of life that were already existing. Unlike moral norms, which are constructed in accordance with the universalization principle, ethical deliberation provide an arena of contestation over forms of life without demanding that a particular abridgment of such be established as a norm acceptable to all.23 Involved in the very concept of ethical discourses is the notion that a particular outcome cannot be universalized because the discourse itself is a re-consideration of previously accepted norms. Any consensus produced by an ethical discourses is therefore inherently recognized to be temporary and open to reconsideration. Moral norms, on the other hand, imply a sense of permanency because the establishment of norms that should be able to be accepted by all. Moral norms abstract from both space and time. That is the source of agonist fears regarding the necessary result of consensus on any constellation of values as hegemonic and exclusive. Ethical discourse provides a political space for various types of foundations and presuppositions to compete without the teleological viewpoint that all ought to be able to consent to a particular norm drawn from on universal foundation.24 The content of ethical discourse provides an arena for competitive contestation that remains about as long as there is a claim that established ethical norms do not comport with a conception of the good life. The breadth of an ethical discourse is limited to those who have a claim that the result affects them.25 As such, participation in an ethical discourse is limited to those who can give justifiable reasons why they should be included in the discussion. Likewise, participants may also demonstrate that the outcome of the ethical norm would not affect a certain group and so justify excluding that group from the discourse. Ethical discourse is not universal; those formally participating in ethical opinion and will-formation are the closed group that is affected by the content of the deliberation. Participation in an ethical discourse therefore means participating in the reflexive establishment of a collective identity because it requires drawing a line of demarcation between the “us” that should be included and the “them” that should be excluded.26 Focusing on ethical discourses means that deliberative democracy will resist the essentialism of assuming that a universal identity can be abstracted from the variety of forms of life in a pluralist society. Ethical discourses instead freely operate between legitimate participants to produce a normative rule to which all affected may agree. In this way, the outcome of an ethical discourse meets the criteria of being rationally justified, since it is the product of contextual rationality. The
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outcome is also legitimate because those who consent to the norm are those who have demonstrated as part of the discursive process that the norm in question will affect them. The consensus produced in an ethical discourse does not result from surrendering certain forms of life to adopt the ontologically impossible “comprehensive perspective of an unlimited communication community.”27 Accepting ethical discourses as the foundational level of deliberation in a non-foundational paradigm therefore allows deliberative democracy to embrace pluralism instead of relegating is as a brute fact to be overcome.28 When thrust to the center of deliberative democracy, ethical discourses proliferate around the multitude of aspects of pluralism. William Connolly discusses the vast arrangement of identifiable characteristics that form the holistic composition of one social subject.29 Around each of these characteristics an ethical discourse may form, calling into question the established foundations and norms describing the form of life in the community formed around that particular aspect of identity. The spread of ethical discourse is therefore extremely broad, with overlapping communities forming around the collective identity of a shared aspect of any holistic conception of the good life. Participation in ethical discourse means acknowledging a shared part of a form of life on which the discourse is focused. Ethical discourse provides the means to form collective identities and the overlapping nature of various intersubjective discourses constructs connections between ethical communities in a pluralistic society. Ethical discourse also provides an arena to approach the ineradicable power relations that are constitutive of society.30 Power relations take on an exploitive nature when the ethical norms of one identity are coercively enforced upon those of another. The concern of agonism is that, in abstracting away specific collective identity characteristics (“ethnocentrism”) as a prerequisite for universal moral discourse, the hegemonic constellation of ethical norms representing the most powerful collective identity of society will exert that power to shape the normative idea of what is in the interest of all.31 Ethical discourse, however, occurs within the specific context of individuals in their collective ethical community. Furthermore, the collective discursive decisions of inclusion and exclusion shape the size and extent of the community. As a result of these conditions, exploited communities may confront power relations by departing from the larger ethical community. They may then reform their own ethical community, rejecting the exploitive norms. This may occur because ethical discourse is not expected to produce a norm to which the universal all may consent. Instead, it produces norms for that community that participates in the ethical discourse to establish those norms that will facilitate their conception of the good life. There is no obligation to remain as-
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sociated with an ethical community if that community establishes norms that oppose an individual’s held ethical values and rejects her conception of the good life. Jettisoning moral discourse and recognizing ethical discourse as the foundational level of discourse in deliberative democracy allows for norms established to remain contextually rationally justified and legitimate for the specific parts of a pluralistic community for which they are discursively decided. The ethical consensus that becomes the locus of normativity is less vulnerable to the type of crystallization feared by agonists because ethical discourse is inherently re-constructive. Therefore ethical discourse resists serving as a vehicle for the imposition of unquestionable rationally legitimized ‘universal norms.’ Instead, the consensus is inherently open to reconsideration because its entire existence is owed to questioning an already established norm that describes a form of life. Rather than suppressing pluralism as an inconvenience, ethically focused deliberative democracy fosters the development of a large number of ethical communities that share various characteristics of identity that lead them to have a certain conception of the good life. Ethical discourse therefore allows for the establishment of norms and for making decisions within a limited community that preserves the ability of communities to operationalize deliberation for identity formation and the confrontation of power relations. Expanding the ethical community Establishing ethical discourses as the foundation of democracy allows for limited communities to establish legitimate norms and to make decisions in manners affecting all in that closed community in a contextually rational way because of a shared conception of the common good. I will now turn to how ethical discourses can function in situation where an irrevocable decision or the establishment of a norm is necessary that has ramifications and consequences so broad that it potentially affects all members a pluralistic society. These situations appear to almost compel a universalistic perspective of the kind Habermas requires of moral discourse. To do so, however, risks imposing the values of the most powerful ethical community in striving to reach the fictional universal identity through essentialism. Instead of striving to strip identity and then enter moral discourse, deliberative democracy, prioritizing ethical discourse, can open the discourse with an initially concerned community and discursively expand that discourse as it becomes evident that the consequences of this decision or of establishing a produced norm affect all. An expansive ethical discourse mediates the tension between agonist worries about exclusion in consensus and necessity to suspend ‘undecidabili-
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ty’ and close a conversation with a decision.32 The expansion of an ethical discourse occurs as a discourse concerning a social development gains the deliberative attention of an increasingly wider section of the pluralistic political society. As awareness that this decision will shape many societies in particular ways spreads, each individual realizes that the result of the discourse will affect him or her in some way. A process then occurs over a period of time as each participant justifies his or her inclusion into the discourse and so ethical community centered on this particular issue expands. The beginning of an ethical discourse is generally a small group and, in many cases, it remains this way. However, if they call into question a norm that reasonably affects many people, then the discourse will become ‘expansive’ as a result. The broad ethical discourse expands along the dimension of a claim to a shared concern for a common particularity in the form of life that the potential decision to be made or norm to be established represents. A model for understanding one potential way that this might happen is found in Dryzek’s discussion of Forester. He describes how a focus on the various needs of a community can allow an ethical discourse to move beyond articulations of general values. His first specific example comes from Forrester and proposes how the needs of infected individuals can allow discussion to form across the divide between the Christian and the homosexual community on the issue of HIV/ AIDS treatment.33 This proposal demonstrates a way for an ethical community to form underneath the divide between these two smaller, identity-based ethical communities. Similarly, reframing the issue of the exclusion of Islamic young from secular Turkish universities because of headscarves in terms of the needs of women and education fostered the development of an ethical community on a shared aspect of the form of the good life beneath the pluralist conflict between Islam and the secular.34 The ethical community participating in the expanding discourse grows not from stepping out of a particular perspective but rather from recognition of commonality. It is therefore not vulnerable to creating a vacuous universal abstraction that a powerful collective identity can subvert in the decision or formation of a norm. Instead it is an expansion of “ethnocentrism” to include the other in a reciprocal recognition of the mutual impact of a particular decision on each other. As the ethical discourse expands toward universal inclusion, it does so through the reciprocal recognition of a shared particularity in a form of life often in the form of a fundamental, deep, and underlying similarity between all parties included. The threat of destruction in a preemptive attack is the sort of deep universal commonality that concerns and affects all the citizens of Germany when the
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community discussed the installation of the missile systems.35 The expansion to universal inclusion is not an abstraction to a higher God’s eye objective viewpoint that agonists rightly criticize as impossible, but rather an undertaking to move beneath pluralism to recognize issues of mutual concern. It is not an attempt to annul pluralism – the ethical communities brought together in expansive ethical discourse may have forms of life that are irreconcilable when viewed holistically and most general ethical discourse affirms that—but a movement of reciprocation of mutual ethical affectedness in monumental political moments. The essence of this proposal of expansive ethical discourse is to demonstrate a possibility for utilizing ethical discourse to process what Dryzek calls “deep differences.”36 He has reached similar conclusions regarding agonism, stating that “Mouffe’s interpretation of the main task of democracy has no obvious place for collective decision making and the resolution of social problems.”37 He analyzes an alternative, consociational democracy, where political conflict is processed between “well-meaning elites.”38 Although this is radically different from the Habermasian deliberative democracy, Dryzek’s critique of consociationalism resonates with agonist understanding of the construction of a false universal identity when the individual is expected to abstract him or herself for participating in moral deliberation. As such, Dryzek’s critiques of consociationalism illuminate the risks of abstracting from context: Consociation precludes any role that public deliberation construed as social learning might play in reconciliation in divided societies…by freezing cleavages, a consociational regime may actually reinforce or, worse, create the kind of conflict it is designed to solve.39 Turning to universal moral discourse similarly acts as a barrier to processing instances of deep differences or producing a necessary norm or decision that is truly in the interests of all. Dryzek offers a solution of coupling the decision making functions and deliberating functions in order to foster agonist debate over deep difference the generates influence over the elites who eventually must make the decision because there can be no reconciliation between the parties. This view is problematic because in decoupling the public sphere, which would house democratic deliberation, from the decision making function of the institutions of the state risks the kind of imposition of a falsely universal identity and the socially privileged hegemony of values of those bureaucrats who actually make the decisions. The agonist public sphere is reduced to little more than a process of providing information to elite decision-makers about the limits of what they may impose as ‘decisions.’ Expansive ethical discourse avoids the pretension of taking a higher-level
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abstracted view of discourse and the presupposition of non-contextual universal reason. As such, when ethical discourse produces a consensus, when it closes debate, this represents not the imposition of boundaries upon the appropriate forms of the good life but an underlying connection that unites the participants because of some basic similarity on a particular shared component of the good life. This is a conception of ethical discourse as going deeper when a universal decision confronts the political body so that the deliberation takes place on a level underneath deep difference. The consensus reached by an ethical discourse of this type represents a broad agreement on a norm that will continue to sustain the shared aspect that adds to each participants’ holistic concept of “the good life.” Habermas’s treatment of civil disobedience during the Pershing missile crisis represents a concrete example of this potential manifestation of ethical discourse. Each citizen was affected by the decision “with which extreme risks are associated and which strike deeply in the lives of each individual as well as at the chances of survival of entire nations.”40 White and Farr describe Habermas’s treatment of civil disobedience as evidence of a “conceptually prior, onto-ethical figuration of no-saying embedded in the core paradigm of communicative action.”41 The participation of individuals exhibiting very different identities in the demonstration of “dissensus” indicates the ability of deep ethical concerns to form a deeply centered discourse: The heterogeneous groups which have coalesced in this movement say not only a plebiscitary “no” to nuclear missiles… The dissensus which gains expression in this “no”…is rooted in the rejection of a life-form… the confrontation of different life-forms is the matter at issue.42 A plurality of groups, each expressing radically different ethical norms and commitments43 themselves, came together in the moment of ethical concern over an issue that deeply underlies their various other values and orientations. These protests present an attempt to open an expansive ethical discourse over a concern for a shared aspect of a form of life. Opening ethical discourse: an example An ethical discourse involves questioning a set of established norms within the context of an affected community. In most cases, this community is limited on the basis of identity characteristics that demarcate inclusion or exclusion. Justifying inclusion or exclusion in the context of an ethical community is therefore a type of identity politics that allows individuals to define who they are within the context of various overlapping ethical communities. As the previous discussion on
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civil disobedience demonstrated, opening ethical discourse requires communicative action.44 While that instance showed the potential for an ethical discourse to expand underneath pluralist forms of life, most ethical discourses will be limited in their content and inclusion. James Cone’s A Black Theology of Liberation is an example of an individual opening an ethical discourse on established ethical norms that describe, in his view wrongly, a certain conception of the form of the good life. This book is fundamentally directed at reshaping the ethical norms of the black Christian community. It takes place within a theological context with clearly demarcated lines of normative inclusion and exclusion. In its attempt to mobilize the Christian community to address issues of injustice in the United States, it participates in the identity politics and the confrontation of power relations that characterized the civil rights movement of the United States in the 1970s. Cone approaches the issue of inclusion and exclusion explicitly. His discussion over the reconsideration of theological and subsequent related ethical norms is very clearly divided into “ontological” categories of being-in-the-eyes-of-God. He describes these two categories in terms of “blackness” and “whiteness.” These categories roughly indicate a divide between the oppressed, for whom God acts, and the oppressors, against whom God acts.45 Those who are “black” include systematically oppressed individuals of all ethnicities, including the indigenous populations of the United States. The theological system he is describing is for those whose identity is black; those who subscribe to “whiteness,” including some ethnically black people, are excluded from the discussion; he argues that they cannot in fact even understand the discussion.46 He very clearly demarcates those included and those excluded in the discourse, and then justifies this divide based on the historical exclusion of “blacks” from establishing the norms to which they have capitulated in the United States. The ethical norms of the United States, even very basic conventions such as neckties, deodorant and hairstyles,47 have been established without a consensus from “blacks.” These aspects of the form of the good life that the “whites” in the United States established have been imposed on the “black” community. The black community must therefore re-evaluate those norms and re-establish it own ethical norms democratically. The ethical discourse is conceived as way of reshaping black understanding of black identity. The understanding that God is black because he is for the oppressed allows black Christians to reject degrading white definitions of blackness as evil and opposed to the work and will of God.48 The ethical discourse Cone creates involves questioning norms of whiteness and recognizing the “power of
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the black community to make decisions regarding its identity.”49 In this way, the black community can become an ethical community with its norms and appropriate, contextually consensual forms of life. Constructing black identity in this case means understanding being black as a “beautiful experience” and unreservedly participating in blackness.50 The theology that Cone constructs is also fundamentally concerned with addressing issues of power relation between “blacks” and “whites.” His theology does not make pretensions to be a universal; in fact the only figure that could potentially be entirely objective, God, very clearly and unreservedly takes sides with those who are oppressed. “The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as God of all peoples.”51 God’s action, for Cone, is the work of liberation, of engaging with the black community to break away from the oppression that they have endured under imposed ethical norms and to establish their own. This dramatically shows the heart of agonist critiques against universal moral consensus. Taking the United States to be the limit of the political body, such a “moral” consensus would merely involve maintaining the status quo – setting “the game of human existence according to white rules” in the words of Cone.52 This echoes Wittgenstein’s conception of rules as an abridgment of a form of life with ethical implications. Black must resist white ethical norms and establish their own: “Law and order” is nothing but stabilization of the status quo, which means telling black they cannot be black and telling whites they have the moral and political right to see to it that blacks “stay in their place.”53 The black community, in participating in this ethical discourse redefines ethical norms about God and society in a way that is their own, setting their own rules the describe the good life for themselves. Conclusion The ethical discourse that James Cone opens in A Black Theology of Liberation therefore captures the essence of what an ethical discourse means within a nonfoundationalist take on Habermas’s communicative paradigm. In accordance with agonist critiques, the universal moral discourse is abandoned because it will always exhibit exclusion in some manner, establishing rules with ethical implications without acknowledging the social power than influences their formation. Ethical discourse instead becomes the basic level of democratic politics. Ethical discourses preserve the agonist critique that the political must serve as an arena for identity politics. The arguments over inclusion and exclusion based on the
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standard of affectedness serve to differentiate an “us” and a “them.” An ethical discourse is initiated primarily through the questioning of an already established and inherited norm in society and so the produced consensus of an ethical discourse is always subject to revision itself. The limited nature of ethical discourses and their revisionary nature make them natural vehicles for confronting power relations. The happens through the movement of ethical communities away from norms that have been imposed on them. Many different normative concerns can serve as the basis of an ethical discourse; Cone for example is opening an ethical discourse for a very limited set of society: black Christians. However, ethical discourses also have the ability to confront issues closer to universally important, by expanding along a particular shared aspect of the ‘good life.’ The civil disobedience of Germany in the 1980s provides an example of this type of expansive ethical discourse that expands along the dimension of a mutual concern for survival itself. The shift to non-foundationalism does not completely abandon the idea of a consensus and so ethical discourses continue to function to produce a limited consensus. This understanding of deliberative democracy draws from the strengths of both agonist and communicative paradigms in order to conceive of a politics that minimizes exclusion while reaching decision.
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Privacy in practice
How defining the right to privacy impacts racial and sexual minorities
by Porter Nenon
College of Arts and Sciences (2016)
T
he English common law dictum, “a man’s home is his castle,” sets out some of the fundamental underpinnings of privacy in the United States. The emphasis on the home highlights the linkage between privacy and property, which creates the spatial dimension of privacy that is the focus of this paper. How do spatial boundaries affect the legal right to privacy? How can the legal definition of the right to privacy best guarantee individual autonomy? Beginning with the paradigmatic legal focus on private property and the home, this paper examines how such spatial concepts of privacy privilege men over women and whites over non-whites. Focusing on the boundaries of the home relegates the woman to the domestic and voids her of privacy; focusing on property embeds the black woman as an object of a man’s privacy rather than the subject of her own. Beyond the home, the maintenance of the boundary between public and private privileges the heterosexual by heavily regulating same-sex intimacy in the public sphere. In either case, a more positivist definition of the right to privacy would better guarantee individual autonomy and liberty. Thus, this paper seeks to demonstrate the weaknesses of the theoretical right to privacy when put into practice, and to introduce questions about data mining and mass surveillance that have begun to reshape the discourse over privacy in the United States.
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Ultimately, linking the right to privacy to property and spatial boundaries subjugates women, objectifies racial minorities, regulates sexual minorities, and makes it difficult to continue to conceptualize individual privacy in the age of mass surveillance. To briefly sketch the theoretical discourse around the public and the private, the right to privacy originates with the idea of the individual. At its core, privacy stems from an individual’s desire to remain distinct from the society in which he or she lives. In his outline of the right to privacy, Jean-Francois Lyotard begins by citing that, “[r]ights and respect for rights are owed to us only because something in us exceeds every recognized right.”1 The right to privacy, then, originates not with humanity inherently, but with the condition of the individual in the larger society. Phillip Harper uses the distinction between secrecy and privacy to elucidate that idea; as Harper sees it, secrecy stems from “a subject’s desire to disavow the degree to which he or she has been absorbed or accounted for in the social totality he or she inhabits.”2 The desire to keep secrets is thus a “defence mechanism” that engenders the need for privacy, and sets up the various binaries between public/private, inside/ outside that drive the spatial analysis of the rest of this paper. Since this paper is concerned with the theory of privacy when put into practice, it is useful to introduce the legal system as both a reflection and arbiter of public standards of privacy. As Harper sees it, “juridical activity not only conforms to but actually helps to establish the terms of legitimacy that condition society as a whole.”3 The definitions used by the Court, then, are critical to understanding which groups have access to the right to privacy and which do not. After all, Patricia Williams discusses rights as “islands of empowerment,” where “the line between rights and no rights is most often the line between dominators and oppressors.”4 Throughout this paper, the decisions and definitions of the U.S. judiciary will be analyzed to elucidate how the theory of the right to privacy (applied equally) works in practice (accrued in the hands of a relative few). The reason that the right to privacy is so heavily theorized is that the understanding of privacy is key to both individual autonomy and individual liberty. James Griffin unpacks both concepts in his review of the legal approaches to privacy. First, the right to privacy is key to individual autonomy because most persons require some degree of protection from public scrutiny. “Without privacy, autonomy is threatened. Most of us fear disapproval, ridicule, ostracism, and attack … If our deliberation and decisions about how to live were open to public scrutiny, our imperative for self-censorship and self-defense would come feverishly to action.”5 Second, individual liberty requires the right to privacy to protect the formulation of unpopular thought or action. “Only with frank, private communication can I discover that you and I have certain of the same unpopular beliefs and so be confident enough to
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act singly or discover the opportunity to act jointly.”6 Thus, if the theory of privacy does not achieve either of these ends when put into practice by the legal system, then a revised definition of the right to privacy is necessary. Privacy and property Operating from the broad concept of privacy as a human right, and as a corollary to individual autonomy and liberty, this paper examines the way general notions of privacy have been linked to property, physical space, and (im)permeable boundaries. Primarily, the physical space of the home sets the parameters of the legal right to privacy. As Margret Grebcowicz explains: “The state and the home are both subject to the same logic, in which the safe, interior space that is mine and in which I rightfully welcome the other is conditioned by the doors and windows through which intruders might enter … – in short by the possibilities of unwelcome incursions from the outside. In both state and home, the ipseity, that is the possibility of hosting a guest, is conditioned by this permeability of boundaries, the possibility of the intruder.”7 Grebcowicz borrows that idea from Jacques Derrida, whose fundamental understanding of privacy is that “in order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world.”8 For Derrida, homes must be functional in order to guarantee ipseity, as “the monad of the home has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at home … in the relation of the self to itself.”9 In other words, the right to physical privacy inherently sets up a permeable boundary, and thus the right to privacy is never absolute. If the notion of privacy is understood through the image of the home, Derrida’s idea is concerned chiefly with the walls, windows, and doors; maintaining privacy means maintaining the borders that protect that privacy. In American law, that idea of privacy as actively maintained private property created the definition of privacy as the freedom from government incursion. Indeed, the United States Bill of Rights never explicitly uses the word privacy, but does ensure “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”10 The legal history of privacy, then, applies Derrida’s concept of boundaries to the person, the home, and the state alike. During Justice Louis Brandeis’s time on the Supreme Court, the idea of privacy as freedom from intrusion became the central understanding of U.S. law. Justice Brandeis says that privacy provides protection against “invasion of the sanctities of a man’s home, and the privacies of life.”11 Brandeis says “The conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the
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right most valued by civilized men.”12 In a number of rulings, the Brandeis Court turned the theoretical right to privacy into the legal practice of guaranteeing the domain of the man over his own home, thus institutionalizing the right to privacy in practice. However, it is not accidental that the legal quotes cited thus far have all referred to “man” or “men;” defining privacy as freedom from government incursion into private property is heavily gendered, and empowers existing patriarchal institutions. As Catharine MacKinnon puts it, privacy law as Brandeis saw it functions to “keep some men out of the bedrooms of other men.”13 A focus on the boundaries of the home and the bedroom gives men un-scrutinized domain over his private property, regardless of what goes on inside that space. However, social constructs of femininity deny women any privacy; “it is because the feminine is exhaustively defined by the domestic/private sphere … that the private sphere is only private for men.”14 In doing so, the legal systems actually protects “the place of battery, marital rape, and women’s exploited labor.”15 As a litigator, MacKinnon’s chief aim was to negate the argument that what happened in the bedroom could not be regulated, since that mindset disproportionately impacts women. In essence, “feminism confronts the fact that women have no privacy to lose or to guarantee.”16 The Brandeis conception of privacy, then, is inherently problematic, as linking privacy to property actually sanctions a number of other crimes. When applied to women of color, the shortcomings of the Brandeis concept of privacy become even more pronounced. Patricia Williams discusses the concept of the “anti-will,” the belief (rooted in slavery) that black women have no free will or individual autonomy. As a result, an interracial relationship between a white man and a black woman “can be characterized as the man’s merely exercising his rights with respect to his own private concern, represented in the person of the woman, whose availability for sexual use—which is effectively identical with her racial affiliation—is a matter of public knowledge.”17 For black women, then, the objectification required for a man’s home to be a castle occurs in any setting, where even a public kiss places the black woman inside the man’s private sphere. For that reason, miscegenation (the mixing of different racial groups through marriage) held the potential to change the character of the distribution of property. As Harper explains, “miscegenation, insofar as it implies the reconceptualization of a nonwhite individual not as a privatized object but as a private subject (who would then, by definition, be entitled to hold private property), must represent a profound threat to the political status quo.”18 Notably, the notion of privacy as a man’s domain independent of government scrutiny has been largely re-scripted, in no small part due to the efforts of feminist thinkers like MacKinnon. MacKinnon herself espouses a “positive” definition of
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privacy, understood not by Derrida’s notion of boundaries but by the autonomous rights that make individual self-definition possible at all.19 That definition of privacy would prevent any woman from being the object of a man’s privacy, as each individual is a subject in his or her own right. In a socio-political context, that change would have profound consequences for the ability of minorities to claim the autonomy and liberty discussed early in this essay; as Harper explains, “social subjectivity depends upon a person’s having control over a body of interests that all concerned parties agree are private to that person.”20 Thus, the link between privacy and property has demonstrable negative effects on women and people of color, which are best mitigated by a positivist understanding of individual autonomy. Privacy and the public sphere Though MacKinnon’s revision of the boundaries of the home did gain traction in the dominant discourse over the right to privacy, other key implications of spatial privacy still remain. When put into practice, the concept of privacy as freedom from government intrusion applies the distinction between public and private in a way that systematically privileges heterosexual relationships over homosexual ones. As Griffin explains: “It is ... the form of the principle of liberty much employed by the Supreme Court itself in the second half of the twentieth century: freedom of action unless certain forms of immorality, which may well include harm to others. In Bowers v. Hardwick, the Court announced that people are generally to be let alone, but that the government is justified in forbidding acts as repellent to American sensibilities as oral and anal sex.”21 Though the Court’s decision in Bowers was later overturned in Lawrence v. Texas, it was overturned on the principle of liberty, not privacy, and this paper examines the ways in which the public/private dichotomy still oppresses acts deemed immoral in the public discourse. The primary symbolic action Harper uses to examine the claim to privacy—the kiss—is useful in understanding the aspects of the same-sex kiss that creates distinctions in the application of the public sphere. In the heterosexual narrative, Harper explains the kiss as something of an open secret: the kiss affirms the underlying erotic tension in a heterosexual relationship that the viewer already presumed, and allows the public to read into the relationship between the man and the woman. The same-sex kiss, though, “functions to reveal a secret not only about the character of the relationship between the persons who kiss but also about those persons themselves.”22 Consequently, “the same-sex kiss speaks to identity in a much more highly
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charged way than does a kiss between a woman and a man.”23 In practice, then, the privacy of the heterosexual relationship actually extends beyond the home, as public kisses confirm an open secret but do not allow the viewer to read into the relationship itself; the homosexual relationship, however, has no informational privacy after a public kiss, as the same-sex couple has no power over the way their performance of intimacy is received in the dominant discourse. Harper uses a personal anecdote with his lover at the YMCA to explore the contexts in which same-sex relationships do (or do not) have access to agency in the public sphere. While showering and changing alone in the locker room, Harper and his lover are confronted by two staff members and accused of engaging in improper sexual behavior. However, “[n]o one actually saw any sexual activity take place between us … rather, the charge seemed to be based on evidence that was not physically visible at all.”24 Harper and his lover were thus alone (private) in a locker room (public) and were subject to scrutiny based not on their actions but on their identities. Harper then frames his discussion around the following questions: “Could it not be that Thom and I were the ones who had suffered the offense? We had, after all, been alone in the room, mutually consenting to whatever improper behavior we engaged in. Moreover, couldn’t the aura of intimacy that apparently implicated us in illicit activity serve, conversely, as a sign of and a boundary around an effectively private realm.”25 Where the issue for MacKinnon was the rigidity and shieldedness of Derrida’s boundary between private and public, the issue Harper elucidates is one of permeability: when the boundary between private and public is unclear, whose privacy is protected in the public realm? In Harper’s case, the public sphere definitely belonged to the heterosexual norm, and his perceived intimacy was an intrusion rather than a boundary. Though Griffin describes that, “the right to the privacy of space and life protects us against intrusions into that space,”26 the determining factor is who claims a space and can exclude intrusions. Without even engaging in a public act like a kiss, Harper and his lover were seen as an “illicit irruption of male-male eroticism into the public space of the YMCA locker room.”27 In other words, because of what same-sex intimacy says about their identities, Harper and his lover’s privacy was subordinate to the right of the heterosexual YMCA patrons not to see homosexual relationships. In the context of the locker room, Harper and his lover were a threat even because of the possibility of an intruder; they were engaging in (or thought to be engaging in) intimacy that Humphreys describes as “so situated as to result in the involuntary accessibility of others as sex objects or witnesses,” making it an act of public sex.”28 As legal confirmation of the ownership of the public by the heterosexual, Harp-
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er discusses a legal trial in which the court protected the heterosexual nuclear family at the expense of a legitimate homosexual relationship: “Until 1983, Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson maintained a closeted lesbian relationship in St. Cloud, Minnesota, having made no legal provisions by which to protect their attachment. In 1983, Kowalski was in a car accident that left her seriously disabled, unable to either speak or to walk. ... [W]hen Thompson applied to be appointed guardian her request was denied by State District Court Judge Robert Campbell, who chastised Thompson for violating Kowalski’s privacy by informing Kowalski’s parents and a concerned gay and lesbian constituency of Kowalski’s lesbian involvement in the first place.”29 The Court’s definitive answer to Harper, then, would be “no;” same-sex intimacy does not have any claim to privacy when in conflict with a heterosexual public. Remarkably, in Judge Campbell’s administration of the boundary between public and private, the homosexual relationship was judged the intruder on the right to privacy of the heterosexual norm. Indeed, the case locates homosexuality entirely in the private sphere, as even the most minimal revelation of the relationship itself was too public for the court. In many ways, then, the court was maintaining the ipseity of the hetero-normative public sphere; as Derrida explains, “since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence.”30 Maintaining the boundaries of the public sphere thus necessitates filtering and excluding acts which do not fit with the dominant heterosexual narrative. The policing that Harper encountered in the locker room is inherent in the construction of a heterosexual public space. Applying the logic of either anecdote to other scenes presents remarkable consequences for same-sex intimacy. As Harper notes, perceived intimacy in the locker room could be similarly perceived in a number of other typical settings—“the street, a restaurant, our own car”—with profound losses of both liberty and autonomy, since the “purportedly public nature [of those settings] subjects us to regulatory sanctions when we are adjudged to violate it.”31 In the same way that women in the domain of a man’s ipseity are the objects of privacy (rather than the subjects), homosexual privacy is bounded by the limits of other people’s public. In many ways, though, the role of same-sex intimacy in the public arena presents the same possibility for rescripting the definition of privacy that miscegenation did for Harper and MacKinnon. At the crux of the Kowalski case is the claim to property; Thompson’s claim thus “portends as profound a disruption in the orderly distribution of material wealth in our era as did the subversion of clearly traceable ‘blood lines’ by miscegenation in the nineteenth century.”32 In the legal attempts to maintain a workable definition of the public sphere,
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then, the U.S. legal system has subjected same-sex intimacy to higher standards of scrutiny, thus limiting the access of those individuals to autonomy or liberty outside the home. As was the case with MacKinnon’s positivism, the problem arises from the policing and gatekeeping of the boundary between public and private; giving sexual minorities their own positive claim to privacy (rather than relegation to the home out of deference to the heterosexual norm) would more fully provide the benefits that the theoretical right to privacy attempts to apply equally. Privacy and mass surveillance In recent years, the rapid dispersion of individual communication technologies has profoundly reshaped the common discourse over privacy as rooted in property. Derrida, for instance, rhetorically asks how his “semantics” would hold up “in a public space structured by the telephone, the fax, e-mail, and the Internet, by all those other prosthetic apparatuses of television and telephonic blindness?”33 In many ways, technology is advancing more quickly than the court system can manage; “the frontier turns out to be caught in a juridico-political turbulence, in the process of destructuration-restructuration, challenging existing law and established norms.”34 Indeed, even the instances considered throughout this paper—those that challenged existing definitions of privacy—do not shed much light on the age of mass surveillance, since new technology offers “the infinite magnification” of the intrusion into the private sphere, all while remaining “faceless and unaccountable.”35 Problematically, the rapid expansion of information technologies simultaneously expand and limit the role of the public in governing (or violating) the private sphere. On the one hand, the state’s access to the private sphere has never been easier. “The government has merely to dip into that endless sea of factoids and sift for what it wants: the hardest part of the job has already been done by the private sector.”36 The boundary of the home that so concerned Derrida is now permeable not only through windows and doors, but through phones, computers, and a myriad of other routes. However, the repository of information in the data banks of the private sector also significantly limits the power of the government, and has inspired many of the most egregious oversteps of recent years. As Derrida explains: “[B]ut today the accelerated deployment of particular technologies increases more rapidly than ever the scope and power of what is called private sociality, far beyond the territory of measurable-surveyable space. Therefore the State, suddenly smaller, weaker than their non-State private powers, … makes excessive efforts to catch and monitor, contain and reappropriate to itself the very thing that is escaping it as fast as possible.”37
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As Derrida notes, defining any sort of public space is now phenomenally difficult, and requires massive databanks like those of the National Security Agency. Though it is not new for private messages to cross public space, the scope and scale of government interception of those messages is truly profound. Public access to exchanges that “those doing the exchanging deem private” disrupts any meaningful definition of ipseity or privacy, as even the basic definition of privacy attempts to exclude the state from such interactions. If anything, the importance of judicial system as the arbiter of the public is waning, as the spatial dimensions of the right to privacy extend further into the realm of private data. To conclude with a particularly vivid image from Justice Brandeis, the fundamental threat from private data is that “what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.”38 Written in 1880, that idea holds remarkable weight in the era of the Wikileaks and NSA scandals. With the rapid deconstruction of boundaries between the public and the private, it seems more important than ever to enact positivist definitions of the right to privacy rather than shoring up the binaries that are being torn down. Otherwise, as two government litigators recently put it, a complete loss of informational privacy could be “the price of living in a modern society.” Abuse, objectification, and regulation have already been the “price” of faulty definitions of the right to privacy, and the information age represents the formation of a new juridico-political frontier—will we go forward or back?
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The question of freedom of religion
by Attiya Latif
College of Arts and Sciences (2018)
D
ebates over religious tolerance have become increasingly prevalent in a time of religious polarization between the West and the East. In order to determine the extent to which religious freedom should be permitted, the topic of religious freedom and its relationship to minorities is becoming relevant. Absolute religious freedom is necessary to maintain democracy in America; religion must also play an individual role and remain independent of governing influences in society by staying within a private realm rather than attempting to associate with the sphere of government in any way. In order to perpetuate religious freedom, religious practices should be permitted so long as they do not encroach upon civil law. Religious freedom is essential to creating a governing institution based in equality. The absence of religious freedom can create a harsh form of law that rejects minorities, as in the case of the Puritans and the Quakers. Jefferson wrote of the Quakers’ predicament, saying that “the poor Quakers were flying from persecution in England; they cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom, but they found them free for only the reigning sect.”1 The Puritans, after experiencing persecution at the hands of the British, desired to maintain religious dominance. This desire translated into a form of government that bound itself
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to religion in order to control every nuance of its citizens’ lives. When faced with rebellion against these oppressive laws, Puritan John Winthrop wrote, “If you want to stand for your own natural corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in your own eyes, you will not endure the least weight of authority…but if you will be satisfied to enjoy…liberties such as Christ allows you, then you will quietly and cheerfully submit.”2 Winthrop’s indignation at challenges from the people displays how dangerous a lack of religious freedom is. When a government raises one set of values above another, any challenges to the religion or dissenting opinions are challenges to government authority. This leads rapidly to a tyrannical form of government that is reminiscent of past monarchs, such as King James himself, who was referred to in the Mayflower compact as “our dread Sovereign Lord.”3 Such rulers used religion to validate inhumane acts of imperialism and colonialism, and to justify trespassing upon the sacred lands and traditions of other places. Additionally, governments cannot establish a single true religion without discrediting and overrunning minority religions. Jefferson wrote, “To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites…The earth is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. These profess probably a thousand different systems of religion…ours is but one of that thousand.”4 The establishment of a single dominant religion necessarily undermines the theory of equality, one of the fundamental principles of democratic government. It complicates the goal of democratic government by raging against the idea that the minority must have rights when the majority rules. Without freedom of religion, American government cannot lay claim to equality, because it values one system of religion over the many thousands that exist. In order to ensure the success of the American democratic institution and maintain equality, and to prevent the tyranny of the majority, freedom of religion must be total. Religion should play an individual role independent of governing influences in society. The separation of church and state ensures that religion plays an individual, personalized role, rather than being reliant on validation through governing influences. The primary objection to containing religious practice within individual, private sectors lies in the desire to shape an American citizen through traditional Christian values. Homogeneity of religion among citizens generates the active propagation of religious mores that then craft a common opinion among the people. However, rather than weakening the influence of Christianity, the absence of Christian influences within the context of laws actually strengthens the religion’s hold on the people. When Patrick Henry proposed a bill in 1784 regarding the establishment of provisions for teachers who educated students on Christianity in their classes, he faced rebuttals from both Madison and Jefferson, who believed that the merging of religion and legislature was at odds with the spirit of the First Amendment. Madison
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wrote that “the establishment proposed by the Bill is not requisite for the support of the Christian religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the Christian religion itself… it is a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them.”5 While initially claiming that religion can succeed without the coercion for or against faith from government, Madison concludes that, “It is moreover to weaken in those who profess this Religion a pious confidence in its innate excellence and the patronage of its Author; and to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”6 Thus, when a government creates law in support of a religion, doubt is instilled in the people. Citizens will question the necessity of religion to hide a flaw in the religion’s design. Yet when government functions outside of a religion and faith is confined to the private sphere, religion becomes stronger, rooting into the hearts and minds of the people with a dedication that comes only from the concept of an active and willful subjection to religious codes of conduct. Alexis De Tocqueville also addressed this point, writing that “a religion cannot share the material strength of the rulers without being burdened with some of the animosity roused against them.”7 Religion is a concept that individual citizens will attach to, so long as the religion in question detaches itself from governing authority in order to make it a seemingly non-political and perpetual influence on the lives of American citizens. Thus, religion leads a privatized role within American society, affecting citizens at an individual rather than governing level in order to prevent doubt from clouding the people’s perception of religion. The significance of separation between the jurisdictions of civil law and religious practice rests in Supreme Court cases regarding religious practices. In the Supreme Court case of Lee v. Weisman, a clergy member was ruled in violation of the First Amendment for reciting a prayer at a graduation ceremony in a public school. This ruling differed from that of Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which members of the Old Order Amish religion were permitted to withdraw their children from school due to religious reasons despite direct violation with state compulsory education laws. Justice Kennedy, writing the majority opinion of the first case, stated, “A school official, the principal, decided that an invocation and a benediction should be given; this is a choice attributable to the State, and from a constitutional perspective it is as if a state statute decreed that the prayer must occur.”8 The dictation of prayer was advocated by an official representative of the state in a public school, an institution regulated by the government. This was a direct violation of the separation of church and state, and a direct intrusion of religious practice upon civil law. The Supreme Court made its ruling in order to protect the religious integrity and beliefs of the minority, whilst
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upholding the integrity of civil law; civil laws thus separated from any form of potential religious compulsion that was found in the school prayers. This indicates that civil law is entirely separate from the advocacy of any form of religious practice. Yet in the ruling of the latter court case, the Amish practice of religious education outside of a public school system was affirmed. Justice Burger wrote, “To agree that religiously grounded conduct must often be subject to the broad police power of the State is not to deny that there are areas of conduct protected by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, and thus beyond the power of the state to control.”9 The rulings of these two cases shape a very clear and positive message concerning the implementation of the First Amendment into society. Public officials cannot advocate religious values nor present a specific religion. They represent the government, and in representing a specific religion may violate the rights of other religious groups in terms of the Separation Clause. Similarly, practices among religious groups that neither affect the surrounding population nor destabilize the nature of a society governed by specific laws can continue their practices under the Free Exercise Clause. These court cases display the protection of the rights of religious minorities in terms of written law. However, in opposition to the idea of the complete separation of civil law and religious practice, Justice Scalia wrote of the simplistic nature of the prayer banned, asserting, “It does not say, for example, that Students are coerced to bow their heads…utter “Amen”, or in fact, pray.”10 He commended the idea of “the effectiveness of public worship…longstanding American tradition of prayer.”11 Indeed, Scalia advocated the idea that banning prayer as advocated by the principal was a government removal of positive traditions that are necessary on some level to imbue in the people. By Scalia’s logic, an American tradition of giving thanks at a momentous occasion in the form of prayer becomes a commonality among the people and thus a way to establish a standard citizenship. Yet the very idea that religious prayer is a specifically American tradition implies that those who oppose prayers that do not relate to their religious creed are, in fact, opposed to American tradition, and therefore not entirely American in thinking and custom. Allowance exists for the free exercise of these people, yet it is only allowance, and not a complete acceptance. In order to establish the complete equality and acceptance of all religions as aspects of American tradition, religious practices must separate entirely from the sphere of civil law. America today is a place where many forms of diversity exist. Yet despite the First Amendment and the demand for total religious freedom, religious privatization, and the separation of religious and civil spheres, prejudice against religious minorities remains rampant. Hateful acts based upon ignorant assumptions of other religions are currently prevalent. Religious freedom, while necessary to establish
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equality in a democratic institution, is challenged by the public’s bias towards what is conceived to be the “other.” The founding fathers were visionary in crafting the Constitution and including the Bill of Rights. Yet their perspective of freedom of religion could not have incorporated the varying beliefs that exist today. At the very least, as the history of America continues, religious freedom will define the push for progress into the future.
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Latino voter activation in historically red states
by Elizabeth Hilbert
College of Arts and Sciences (2016)
I
n this essay, I will make an argument regarding the potential effects on the American political landscape if Latino voters in Texas and Arizona began to turn out to vote in numbers resembling their white counterparts. This paper will primarily focus on presidential elections; however, the conclusions I draw will have equal significance for statewide congressional and gubernatorial campaigns. I will discuss several mechanisms that could cause the Latino electorate to vote in larger numbers, including specific policies put in place or proposed by elected officials or candidates, campaign strategies, changes in voting and voter registration laws of the sort discussed by Leighley and Nagler in Who Votes Now?, increasing partisan polarization, and longer-term demographic shifts in the states in question. I will also discuss what I believe the potential effect on the landscape of electoral politics would be if Latinos became a dependable voting bloc in these key states—namely, that the Republican Party would have to alter its policy platform to stay electorally competitive.
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Seriatim | Journal of American Politics Why focus on Latino voters? Why Texas and Arizona?
The Latino electorate is a key minority group for several reasons. First, the potential impact of its group vote has been, as of yet, largely unrealized. The 2008 presidential election provided compelling evidence for the potential electoral decisiveness of a well-mobilized minority—President Barack Obama’s victory is often attributed to the unprecedented mobilization and turnout of African American voters.1 2008 was the first time in history that voter turnout was higher among black Americans than white Americans.2 However, according to the latest census estimates, African Americans and black Americans comprise only 13 percent of the national population while Hispanic or Latino Americans comprise 17 percent. Hispanic and Latino Americans are the United States’ youngest, fastest growing ethnic group and its largest ethnic minority, which will naturally lend the demographic increased significance in the years to come.3 In addition to the significant size of the electorate, Latinos are a significant electoral variable because they have demonstrated that they dependably prefer candidates on the left side of the ideological spectrum. In 2012, Latinos cast fully 71 percent of their votes for Democratic incumbent Barack Obama and only 27 percent for Republican challenger Mitt Romney. By contrast, whites voted cast only 39 percent of their votes for Barack Obama and 59 percent for Romney.4 This striking partisan gap has the potential to be decisive, especially in Texas and Arizona, where the Hispanic or Latino population comprises 38 and 30 percent of the states’ total populations, respectively. However, despite the immense size and dependable Democratic slant of the Latino population, extremely low Latino voter turnout has allowed Texas and Arizona to historically remain two of the reddest states in the country. For example, despite comprising 38 percent of Texas’s population, Latinos only accounted for 20 percent of total votes cast in the Lone Star State in 2012.5 Overall, 57 percent of total votes cast in Texas in 2012 went to Romney with only 31 percent going to Obama; the state has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in the Electoral College since 1968.6 Texas, with 38 votes at stake in the Electoral College, is by far the largest of the GOP strongholds and second only to California overall, lending it a particular electoral significance. In 2012, Arizona gave its 11 Electoral College votes to Mitt Romney with a popular vote breakdown of 54 to 44 percent; historically, Arizona has been a red state in every presidential election year since 1948, with the sole exception of 1996. Among the states that Romney won in 2012, only North Carolina and
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Georgia (and Texas, of course) had more Electoral College votes at stake than did Arizona.7 In addition, the issue of immigration, a particularly salient one for Latinos, has a large hand in shaping the politics of Texas and Arizona, both of which share large swathes of their borders with Mexico. In recent years, Arizona has taken a notoriously conservative stance on immigration, the most famous example being the controversial SB 1070, otherwise known as the “papers please” law. Passed in 2011, SB 1070 requires state and local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of those persons they suspect to be illegal aliens and makes it a crime for non-citizens to fail to carry documentation.8 In Texas, meanwhile, an $86 million appropriation was recently passed to fund a security “surge” at the Mexican border.9 Said Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, “If people are walking through your front door, which is wide open, and they’re committing crimes, what do you do? You close the door.”10 I believe that if state legislators expected to be held accountable at the polls to an active Latino electorate which cares deeply about the legal status of immigration, they would not pass such conservative immigration policy, nor engage in such thoughtlessly xenophobic rhetoric. I believe that significant Latino mobilization in Texas and Arizona could potentially end this era of uncontested Republican dominance. In the following sections of this essay, I will explore several possible avenues that could lead to the fuller political incorporation of Latinos in these key states. The significance of demographic shifts over time In 2012, only 48 percent of eligible Hispanic voters cast a ballot, compared to 64 percent of eligible whites.11 To a certain extent, Latino voter turnout is influenced by the same mechanisms as white voter turnout; older and more educated Latinos are more likely to vote than those who are younger and less educated.12 As a group, however, Latinos tend to be lower-resourced and less connected to mainstream networks of political elites overall.13 For this reason, Latinos are usually not targeted by the mobilizing efforts of campaigns since they are unlikely to appear on lists of potential voters.14 However, one of the most significant barriers to full incorporation of the Latino electorate is that many Latinos are currently not citizens, and are thus not eligible to vote. For example, while in 2012 Latinos comprised 17.2 percent of the nation’s population, they accounted for only 10.8 percent of eligible voters, and just 8.4 percent of those who actually turned out to cast a ballot.15
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Importantly, however, the Latino population is a young one; many Latinos are born in the United States to immigrant parents, and thus are natural-born citizens, eligible to vote once they turn 18. In Texas and Arizona, 34 percent of the Latino population is under the age of 18, and Latino population growth has accounted for half of Arizona’s overall growth in recent years.16 While only 64 percent of Latino adults are citizens, 93 percent of those under 18 are.17 This means that every year, about 800,000 Latinos turn 18 and become eligible to vote; some researchers estimate that this number could grow to 1 million per year by 2030, thus doubling the size of the Latino voting-eligible population.18 This particular factor, then—Latinos being ineligible to vote for lack of citizenship—will become less and less significant with every passing year. In addition, Latinos who have resided in the United States for longer periods of time become more likely to become voters, which means that these effects will be compounded.19 However, if these potential voters are to make a significant impact on the landscape of electoral politics, they will have to be interested and invested in the political system. A significant barrier to formidable Latino political power is that many Latinos simply feel no ideological or partisan attachment to either the Republican or Democratic Party. In Why Americans Don’t Join the Party, authors Hajnal and Lee explore the failure of immigrants to be meaningfully incorporated into either political party. The authors suggest that before an immigrant can meaningfully place themselves at some point on the Left-Right continuum, they must be able to perceive meaningful difference between the political options available to them.20 This requires time and the development of a strong sense of internal political efficacy. Of course, Latinos born within the United States are at an advantage here, as they have been socialized within the United States’ political system since birth; Hajnal and Lee note that such domestically-born Latinos are 8 percent less likely than their foreign-born counterparts to identify as nonpartisans, and thus are more likely to be voters.21 Considering this in light of the demographic data discussed above—more and more Latinos are being born in the United States every year—we can safely assume that over time, more and more Latinos will successfully sort themselves within the political parties, with the majority choosing to identify with the Democratic Party. The significance of choices by candidates and campaigns Many Latinos may choose to sort themselves within the Democratic Party if the policy choices they offer continue to be more appealing than those
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offered by the Republican Party, or if the Democratic Party is simply a more appealing choice for non-issue reasons. The authors of Beyond the Barrio, an analysis of the Latino vote in the 2004 election, note that political “wedge” issues have the potential to increase the political impact of Latinos by furthering the ideological divide between Latinos and white voters.22 The most important of these wedge issues seems to be immigration, an issue on which Republicans have recently been taking a unified oppositional stance. In their study of mobilization of ethnic minorities, authors Barreto, Collingwood, and Garcia-Rios argued that Romney’s uncompromisingly conservative stance on immigration “probably sealed his fate” in 2012, particularly noting his opposition to the DREAM Act and his suggestion that illegal immigrants “self-deport.”23 In addition, Romney’s appointment of Kansas politician Kris Kobach, primary architect of Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB-1070, as his advisor on immigration policy seriously hurt him among Latinos.24 Obama, in contrast, publically supported the DREAM Act, making him immensely more popular among Latino voters.25 The immigration issue provides an excellent illustration of a Latino mobilizing force, one that sharply divides white and Latino voters. Some argue that the pervasiveness of the conservative brand of anti-immigrant rhetoric has solidified a sense of Pan-Latino linked fate.26 If Latinos, as a group, thus feel threatened by harsh and oppressive anti-immigration laws, it could have significant consequences for mobilization. This “galvanizing” effect of perceived threats to the Latino community is discussed by Ramirez in his book, Mobilizing Opportunities. Ramirez argues that Latinos will mobilize in response to real or perceived political threats, whether that means engaging in protest activity or turning out to the polls in greater numbers.27 We’ve seen that this “reactive mobilization,” as Ramirez calls it, is indeed in effect in the world. Ballot measures targeting immigrants, such as California’s Proposition 187, which would have blocked undocumented immigrants from using public services, including public education and health care, have caused Latinos to turn out to the polls in record numbers to record their opposition on their ballots.28 In 2006, legislation adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives that would have made it a felony to be in the United States illegally prompted mass marches and demonstrations by Latinos, illustrating both concepts of Latino political linked-fate and reactive mobilization.29 Another Latino mobilizing opportunity recently presented itself in Arizona’s “papers please” law. The measure was supported by many whites in the state, but, according to one Democratic strategist, “many in the Latino community take it [SB 1070] as a betrayal of what the Republican establishment thinks about them.”30 This “betrayal” is thought to have the potential to fuel
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electoral backlash against the Republican Party in the state. In addition to proposing concrete and appealing policy measures on immigration and other salient issues, candidates can and must demonstrate that they stand in solidarity with the Latino community by attempting to be culturally responsive. As discussed above, Obama was popular and successful among Latinos in no small part due to his cultural outreach, including making all of his campaign materials available in Spanish, running Spanish-language advertisements in key areas, and hiring Latino strategists to help him tap into this key constituency.31 As a result, 66 percent of Latinos thought that Obama cared about Latinos, but only 14 percent said the same about Romney.32 To achieve Obama-level support within the Latino community, candidates must demonstrate familiarity with the Latino experience, writes Ramos in The Latino Wave. “Hiring a mariachi band . . . isn’t enough to win over the Latino voting community” Ramos argues, decrying what he calls “taco and sombrero politics” and instead calling on candidates to engage in genuine and insightful dialogue.33 This is the best way to curry favor with the Latino community, Ramos argues. Speaking Spanish—or hiring a campaign consultant who does—also doesn’t hurt. “Spanish,” says scholar Robert Suro, “is more than a means of communication; it’s a kind of a cultural icon. Even for Latinos who never use Spanish to speak to anybody, when someone [a candidate] recognizes Spanish, he is recognizing them and their distinct identity.”34 This sort of cultural responsiveness deeply matters to Latino voters. Candidates can also demonstrate their commitment to Latinos through that most conventional of means, political advertising. Indeed, exposure to political advertising containing Latino appeals, whether that is Spanish language or some other form of cultural appeal, not only increased political knowledge (in the case of issue-focused ads) but also increased the probability of casting a ballot by 9 percent.35 These ads are important, as they can counteract the electoral barriers erected by the low levels of political knowledge that tend to be endemic in the Latino community. In the 2004 presidential election, large advertising pushes in Nevada, broadcast in both English and Spanish, helped the Democratic Party turn out high percentages of Latinos, leading to a narrow Democratic victory.36 Though Latinos are a unique demographic, they are certainly not immune to the activation and mobilization effects of political advertising. Of course, campaigns must not ignore traditional voter registration and outreach efforts in Latino communities just because these voters tend to be of
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a lower socio-economic status. In Counting on the Latino Vote, DeSipio profiles two categories of Latino citizens who choose not to vote. This includes the “Reluctant”, the non-registered citizen, and the “Reticent,” the registered nonvoter.37 DeSipio notes that these citizens, who tend to have lower levels of wealth, knowledge, and education, need an incentive to vote that overcomes the political limitations of their socio-economic status.38 An extra push of voter registration efforts, DeSipio finds, can be effective as registering the Reluctant voters, with one study showing that 84 percent of those contacted by campaigns registered to vote.39 Though between 17 and 27 percent of these nonregistered Reluctant voters report being political Independents, they generally are not apolitical or nonpartisan—they often take on positions aligned with partisan ideologies.40 Indeed, DeSipio found that Reticents, the registered nonvoters, were even more likely to be Democratic identifiers than those who did vote, and thus simply needed some push from an outside force to become involved in the political system.41 If all Reticents and Reluctants voted (which is obviously unrealistic, although it’s a useful illustrative point) the size of the Latino electorate would double.42 This study simply illustrates that Latino nonvoters can easily be converted to reliable voters with some extra mobilizing attention from campaigns, and that this conversion would have considerable electoral impact. Importantly, these sorts of non-issue variables—candidate likeability, advertising, strategic campaign choices—have been shown to be significant predictors of voter turnout and choice among Latinos, especially those who are lower in political information and thus tend to not be issue-based voters.43 Overall, symbolic considerations are thought to be more important than issue considerations for Latinos deciding for whom to vote.44 However, this is not to say that there are not some issues Latinos feel very strongly about. Obviously, there is the issue of immigration, extensively discussed above. In addition, education and the economy are cited as the most salient issues among Latinos, with medical care and social security not far behind.45 Critically, Latinos appear to be to the ideological left of whites on just about every significant public policy issue.46 Supermajorities of Latinos readily embrace that main tenant of liberalism, a greater role for government. Fully 82 percent of Latinos surveyed said that they would like the government to be bigger and do more, a rate 30 percentage points higher than whites.47 Additionally, less than 17 percent of Latinos think of the free market as the preferred instrument for social change; among whites, this response rate was doubled.48 Overall, Latinos seem to be a solidly progressive bunch, significantly more supportive of redistributive governmental policies than whites.
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However, some may argue that Latinos are uncommonly conservative on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, meaning that they should actually vote for conservative Republican candidates, but this assertion is not held up in survey data. Latinos are very slightly more conservative than whites regarding abortion, but no more so on LGBT issues.49 Note, however, that social issues like these were not the most important issues cited by Latino voters; it may be that Latinos vote based on employment, education, and health care, not paying much mind to a candidate’s position on social issues. In this case, there is little to no evidence to support the assertion that Latinos “should” be Republican partisans. Overall, then, to the extent that issues are important to Latinos, the significant ones are the economy, immigration, health care, and education. The liberal attitudes Latinos tend to hold on these issues align most closely with the policies of the Democratic Party. To the extent that issues are not the primary driver of Latino vote choice, Latinos want to vote for candidates who demonstrate cultural solidarity with and responsiveness to the Latino community. In recent history, Democrats have succeeded at winning the support of Latinos through culturally responsive strategies and campaigns, and Republicans have not. A note on partisan polarization I expect that the effects I outlined above will become more significant over time due to partisan polarization. As the parties continue to move closer to their respective ideological extremes, we would expect the policies proffered by Democratic candidates to be more redistributive and those from Republican candidates more anti-immigrant (for example). As I have discussed above, anti-immigration policies have the effect of activating a significant Pan-Latino identity and galvanizing large numbers of Latino voters into opposition. I predict that we may see this happening specifically with regard to the issue of immigration: as polarization increases, it will become increasingly politically untenable for a Republican candidate to stake out a pro-immigrant position, and this will continue to alienate Latino voters. Speculates Jose Ramos in The Latino Wave: “Politicians have two options: either accept the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants and that—given the unequal economic condition of Latin America—the immigrants will continue to come; or adopt a repressive posture toward immigrants and step up border patrol forces. This latter op-
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tion—promoted by ultraconservative leaders . . . would have severe negative repercussions for any party that adopted it. To be anti-immigrant is to be anti-Hispanic.”50 These prescient words were written in 2004, and over the last ten years, Republicans have cracked down on immigration, encountering Democratic opposition, and the GOP has been punished for their actions by Latinos at the polls—see the negative effects of Mitt Romney’s stance on self-deportation in 2012. These trends are not likely to be broken anytime in the near future—ultra-conservative politicians have made it clear that they want nothing to do with “illegal aliens,” causing the near-total erosion of any Latino base of support that Republicans once had.51 Over time, it should become even clearer that voting Democratic is the “right” thing for Latinos to do. This would assist with the sort of partisan sorting of immigrants that Hajnal and Lee discuss: as the options become further apart ideologically, it becomes easier to perceive which one you prefer. Overall, then, the effects of partisan polarization could aid the full political incorporation of Latinos. The significance of electoral reform at the state level In Who Votes Now?, Leighley and Nagler explore the means by which non-voters can be converted to voters, and conclude that reforms of state-level electoral laws can have significant consequences for voter incorporation. Who Votes Now? addresses the effectiveness of various types of electoral law reform (for example, Election Day registration, absentee voting), when it comes to transforming non-voters into voters, finding that the option to register to vote on Election Day is the most effective conversion method. It’s worth noting that neither Texas nor Arizona have such a law. Indeed, in Arizona, registration closes 29 days prior to Election Day; in Texas, 30. Leighley an Nagler, through a study of states that adopted a policy of Election Day registration, conclude that adopting the reform converts between one-sixth and one-seventh of non-voters to voters.52 Based on their research and recent census data regarding the respective Latino population and Latino voter turnout rates in each state, the adoption of Election Day registration alone could add almost 950,000 Latino votes between the two states in 2016. While this would not be electorally decisive, the implementation of this reform alone could have substantial political impacts in these states. Leighley and Nagler make a few caveats about the effectiveness of Election Day registration, which are important for understanding how the Latino com-
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munity might react to such a policy change. For example, the authors concede that the implementation of Election Day registration is more likely to convert non-voters with a high-school diploma than those without.53 Only 61 percent of Hispanics hold a high-school diploma or higher level of education, and that number is lower among foreign-born Hispanics.54 This means that Election Day registration might not be optimally effective at converting Hispanic non-voters, since non-voting Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be among that 39 percent who have not completed high school. However, Leighley and Nagler’s second caveat—that the net benefit of Election Day registration is larger for younger age groups—would benefit the conversion of Latino non-voters, both because Latino non-voters tend to be younger and because the Latino population is a young one generally.55 For these reasons, it’s probable that implementing a policy of Election Day registration in Texas and Arizona would assist in mobilizing some Latino voters. Summary of factors Thus far, I have identified several mechanisms by which Latinos may become active members of the electorate. Among these factors are natural demographic shifts over time and reforms of state-level voting laws, such as the implementation of Election Day registration. In addition, I have discussed reactive mobilization in response to anti-immigration policies and rhetoric and proactive mobilization in response to culturally responsive campaigning, as well as identified how these effects may be exacerbated by increasing partisan polarization. As to the relative power of each of these factors, I believe that demographic shifts will eventually have the most effect on Latino political incorporation, but these effects will not be immediate by any means. Researchers have predicted that due to high birth rates and rates of naturalization, the Latino electorate could double in size by 2030—but is there any hope for Texas and Arizona to turn blue sooner than that?56 Some Democratic strategists believe that even in the near future, victory in Texas and Arizona is not out of reach. Said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in 2012, “People said last time, ‘Oh, you can’t win Virginia,’ until we did. ‘You can’t win Florida,’ until we did. ‘You can never win North Carolina,’ until we did. And so a whole bunch of people are saying, ‘Can he win Arizona?’”57 Of course, Obama did not win Arizona in 2012, instead losing by quite a large margin, despite the prominence of anti-immigrant rhetoric and his culturally responsive campaign. This suggests that full political incorporation of Latinos will come in time, as the demographic ages,
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becomes citizens at higher rates, attains higher levels of education and wealth, and further acculturates into the American political system. While it is unlikely that the political power of Latinos will have become decisive by the 2016 election, we can expect it to become costlier and costlier for the Republican Party to ignore Latino voters with every passing year. The voting-relevant demographic gaps between Latinos and white Americans are quickly narrowing—Latinos are graduating from high school and enrolling in universities at higher rates than ever before, and the Latino birth rate is the highest of any ethnic group, which means more and better educated Latino citizens will be joining the ranks of the voting-eligible in Texas and Arizona year after year.58 This has led some observers to conclude that Arizona, coming off the heels of Democrat Janet Napolitano’s overwhelming victory in the most recent governor’s election, is turning “if not blue, then at least purple.”59 Texas seems to be no safer for the Republican Party, as voter turnout rates, even among whites, are among the lowest in the nation.60 A Latino surge, assuming that turnout among whites continued to be depressed, could catch Texan politics completely off guard, ushering in a newly competitive era in the Lone Star State. When Latino power is established, what changes can we expect? Suppose the year is 2030. Increased rates of birth and naturalization have led to the doubling in size of the voting-eligible Latino population. So, too, has voter turnout increased, with Latinos making it to the polls to cast a ballot at rates in the mid-sixties—commensurate with whites. These changes have led to Arizona and Texas becoming, if not reliably Democratic in the vein of New York or California, purple swing states. This change is more than possible through demographic shifts alone; we’ve seen it happen recently in Northern Virginia’s exurbs of Washington, D.C., which Obama won in 2008 largely by riding the rising tide of Hispanic and Asian voters.61 The state of Virginia is now considered a toss-up, perhaps even trending blue in statewide and national elections, in part because of the growing power of the large Hispanic and other minority populations. If this can happen in Virginia, home of the former capital of the Confederacy, why are we so skeptical about the prospect of a purple Texas? I contend that within twenty years, this will be the case. What changes, then, will we expect to see for politics within Texas and Arizona, as well as on the national level? First, it is likely that there would be some sort of electoral backlash on the
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part of conservative Republicans if Latinos began to demonstrate their electoral power. Reactive mobilization in response to perceived political threats is not just confined to one community, after all. It has been well documented that white voters respond with anxiety—a politically significant emotion—to immigration, particularly when the immigrants in question are nonwhite and unskilled, as Latinos tend to be.62 In experimental studies, Brader and Suhay found that this anxiety is exacerbated when the issue of immigration is coupled with anti-immigrant elite discourse, as is the case in the real world today.63 This anxiety, if activated, could potentially lead to perceived “high-stimulus” elections and increased voter turnout among more races than just Latinos. In addition, I believe we would be less likely to see the passage of state-level legislation such as Arizona’s SB 1070 if Latinos became a dependable voting bloc. This does not necessarily mean that anti-immigrant sentiment or rhetoric would disappear; however, if politicians understood that anti-immigration stances were politically untenable, we likely would not see them so voraciously pursued. After his party’s demographics-driven defeat in 2012, Al Cardenas, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, remarked “Now, we know it [improving demographically] is an essential issue. You have to ignore reality not to deal with this issue.”64 Indeed, Latino voter incorporation is the new reality, and the Republican Party will have to make serious issue-based adjustments if they wish to stay electable in the changing demographic climate. Can we realistically expect that this will happen? After all, the black vote has been electorally significant for years now, and Republican outreach to Black voters has been minimal and, where it does exist, largely unsuccessful; indeed, 93 percent of African Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2012.65 Interestingly, the reasons cited as to why Latinos “should” be conservatives are largely applicable to Black Americans as well—family values, religiosity, and the value of a strong work ethic are likewise pillars of the Black community.66 However, none of these factors seem to have constituted compelling reasons for Black Americans to sort themselves within the Republican Party. I predict that much of the same may happen with Latino voters—cursory attempts by the Republican Party may be made to appeal to Latinos, but short of adoption of comprehensive immigration reform and a more redistributive, progressive economic policy, Latinos will continue to sort themselves on the liberal Democratic end of the ideological spectrum. In conclusion, short of Republican policy change on an unprecedented scale, we will continue to see Latinos vote for Democratic candidates. This demographic group likely will not be an electorally decisive one in 2016, perhaps
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not even 2022—among voting-eligible citizens, Latino numbers are still too low to make a difference in such conservative states as Arizona and Texas. However, if Republicans take any comfort from this fact, they shouldn’t. As Latinos continue to be born and naturalized into the full rights of citizenship at a higher rate than any other ethnic group, their electoral power will increase until ignoring their demographic will be politically fatal. If Democrats continue to offer policies regarding immigration and the economy that appeal to Latinos, as well as run the types of thoughtful campaigns exemplified by Barack Obama, they will build an unstoppable coalition. Guillermo Meneses, a spokesman for the Democratic Party, is confident that “when minorities vote, Democrats win.”67 In this essay, I have outlined the necessary conditions for Latinos to start voting. Now, it seems, is the time for Democrats to start winning.
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Amending the Constitution
“No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. Every constitution then, and even every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.” —Thomas Jefferson
by Nicholas Kumleben
College of Arts and Sciences (2018)
A
s discordant as it may seem to argue in a paper at Mr. Jefferson’s University, the above quotation, and line of thinking, is incorrect. While it does have its merits, the idea that the American Constitution should be rewritten once a generation, or every nineteen years, is both highly disputable in theory and almost unworkable in practice. The Constitution’s status as the highest law of the land and the difficult nature of the process to amend or change it is crucial in the American system of government, both in its operation and its legitimacy. First, it is necessary to discuss the importance of a permanent, unchanging constitution as part of a constitutional liberal democracy. The Constitution describes and limits the role of government in a political system, the significance of which cannot be overstated. It involves a complicated system of checks and balances on the executive and the legislative branches, so that they do not overreach themselves and so that America did not come to resemble the less representative British model that the writers of the Constitution so disliked. The Constitution also guaranteed some fundamental liberties: blocking the suspension of habeas corpus, excluding times of invasion or rebellion; outlawing the passing of bills of attainder; guaranteeing the right to a trial by jury; ensuring equality between the states; outlawing religious
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qualification for public office as well as the passing of ex post facto laws at state or federal level. The Constitution also provides transparency and legitimacy in the eyes of the people; the Constitution is easily accessible online and at public libraries. Thus, the people can themselves compare an act of Congress or executive order to the parameters set out in the Constitution and decide for themselves if it is constitutional. If they do not think it is constitutional, but the judicial review process does not strike it down, they can vote for a party that promises its repeal. In this way, the permanent Constitution is reflective of popular sentiment and legitimately represents the people’s will, which is a key argument in disproving Mr. Jefferson’s theory that a Constitution from 1788 cannot be legitimate in 2015. While essential liberties such as those described above should be sacred, it does become necessary to change the Constitution as times, contexts and public opinions change. To amend the Constitution, a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or a national convention requested by two-thirds of the state must vote in favor of the proposed amendment—although the latter method has only been used once, to ratify the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition. Then, three-fourths of state legislatures must approve the amendment for it to be added to the Constitution. This, albeit cumbersome, system reinforces the most important aspect of the Constitution—it is a higher law that no executive or legislature can change without the approval of the vast majority of publicly elected representatives. This avoids partisan or tyrannical governments being able to change the highest law of the land, and ensures that any change to the Constitution has the support of the vast majority of the country. While this process may be slow, it is counteracted by the latitude which the judiciary provides in interpreting the Constitution—when there is debate as to whether an act of Congress or an executive action is unconstitutional, that debate generally results in a case being brought in front of the Supreme Court, who then can rule on its constitutionality. The Constitution not only provides a mandate for a limited, democratic, representative form of government, it also provides stability in a constantly changing world. Were we to rewrite the constitution every 19 years, as Mr. Jefferson proposed, a single mistake or an episode of poor timing would be hugely detrimental to the country’s functioning, the legitimacy of government, and millions of people’s lives; imagine the infringements on personal freedom and civil liberties that a Constitution rewritten at the height of McCarthyism may have imposed, or what a Constitution written during the Civil War may have done to the country. Having a Constitution set in stone, which describes the inalienable, basic rights and equalities all citizens are entitled to, is a bulwark of stability that a country can always fall back upon, even in desperate times.
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Furthermore, the Constitution’s immutability will, over time, confer reverence upon it in the minds of the people, which will detract from the likelihood of popular support for tyrannical, repressive or otherwise illiberal governments. The fact that the Constitution has been in force since 1788, for an impressive 227 years, is in itself indicative of its merit as a governing document. Another important aspect of the Constitution’s venerable age is that it now serves as a cohesive, binding agent for the American people, much as hatred for the British regime did in the 1770s and 1780s, and the veneration of the monarchy now does for the vast majority of the British populace. Another crucial point to make against the idea of rewriting the Constitution every 19 years—or at whatever interval may be appropriate for a generation, assuming it changes with increased life expectancy—is the huge cost, of money and of man-hours, that a Constitutional convention would necessitate. Firstly, the delegates would be chosen, through what would no doubt be a long, hard-fought and expensive campaign and voting process, not dissimilar to an entire election cycle. Then, the delegates would undoubtedly take months, if not years, to iron out points of difference, reach compromises and eventually produce something resembling a Constitution. It is inarguable that the current Constitution, at least to some extent, works. So, how can such a lengthy and expensive process be justified, considering that it would undoubtedly be at the taxpayer’s expense? Furthermore, assuming, as is reasonable, that the delegates to the Convention would be the best and brightest from the worlds of politics, academia and business, the incredible loss of productivity in those fields arising from their leaders’ absences must also be considered. Mr. Jefferson’s very conception of progress, upon which he bases his argument, is also flawed. Jefferson assumes a smooth, linear progress in various fields of society—indeed, he argued that “each generation is as independent as the one preceding”—which is indubitably incorrect.2 Is it really appropriate to say that the age of the Industrial Revolution, or the years in which humans created the modern computer and the Internet, are equivalent in progress and invention to the stagnant 1930s or war-torn 1940s? Such an argument cannot possibly be justified. Furthermore, the portrayal of politics as a science, or at least as a relatively smooth, predictable process is incorrect. Moreover, 1787 was also a good time for a constitution to be written. The United States was blessed with a rich variety of great thinkers: George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton amongst others led the Convention. The U.S. was also atypically unified and cohesive at the time; united by hatred of the British colonialists and cohesive on the high from gaining independence through armed struggle—such a fortunate confluence of factors is unlikely to
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come around every 19 years. In conclusion, it is entirely implausible that rewriting the Constitution every 19 years, or every generation, is a good idea. A constitution needs to be permanent to serve its purpose; that is to say, to provide parameters within which the government can act and to provide a finely tuned system of checks and balances that maintain its integrity and legitimacy. Furthermore, having a venerable higher law that has served the test of time is both important in bringing people together and in reminding politicians of the value of humility. Moreover, there are huge inherent dangers in repeatedly rewriting the Constitution without the complicated system that currently exists; no popular mandate is assured and no essential freedoms are protected, not to mention the huge expenditure of time and money that such a system would require. The American Constitution is a perfectly appropriate governing document, and the current system of amendments and judicial review has served this country admirably.
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Communicative competitor
by Stephanie Shifflet
College of Arts and Sciences (2015)
A
legitimate deliberative democracy functions through a process in which collective decision-making results from free and reasoned deliberation among individuals who are considered as moral and political equals. Therefore, according to Seyla Benhabib in Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy, what is considered the common good of all results from rational and collective deliberation.1 Ideally, participants come to discuss political issues with an open mind about the solution and, through reasoned argument, not bound by authority or prior norms, come to a conclusion based on the more legitimate and well-articulated argument. However, as Iris Young illustrates in Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy, there are two problematic tendencies that deliberative democrats seem to have. They assume that unity or equality is either a starting point or a goal, and they assume that restricting the type of discussion while deliberating to mere argument is more rational and legitimate.2 These tendencies do not allow for deliberative democracy to function ideally. Cultural biases and the inability of some to obtain the skill in the art of argumentation will lead to exclusion from democratic discussion. Alternatively, communicative democracy refrains from the tendency to assume unity, therefore acknowledges differences, and allows, through means other
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than argument, varying forms of communication to contribute to political discussion. Therefore, “communicative democracy,” as proposed by Young, is a preferable alternative to Benhabib’s notion of deliberative democracy. Communicative democracy allows silenced voices to be heard by broadening the scope of legitimate political dialogue. Communicative democracy is a broader concept of democratic discussion and interaction that includes varying “modes” of desirable communication, and offers an exposure to other perspectives, allowing for an appreciation of “plurality.” Young advocates communicative democracy and starts by bringing light to the two problematic tendencies of deliberative democracy as mentioned earlier. She feels that most theories of deliberative democracy offer too narrow a conception of the democratic process, and therefore, she proposes two revisions to broaden the form of democracy. She suggests that the differences of culture, social perspective, and particularist commitment, are resources to draw on, rather than divisions that must be overcome, when it comes to reaching a better understanding of those in democratic discussion. Young proposes to expand the concept of democratic communication through means of greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling, in addition to argument, as they both contribute to political discussion.3 For purposes of Young’s argument, “greeting” can be defined as “a logical and motivational condition for dialogue that aims to reach understanding” or what those deliberating use to flatter. She mentions that this discussion is also wrapped in nonlinguistic gestures that bring people together warmly, such as smiles, handshakes, and hugs. Greeting is the “polite acknowledgement of the otherness of others.”4 In order to have a free exchange of ideas, people need to acknowledge the difference in individuals, as well as their particular histories and current circumstances. “Rhetoric” is meant to draw people in and engage the mind, to “get and keep attention.” Rhetoric is meant to engage the minds of the masses, rather than ignite passions, such as Hitler who “moved the masses with hot passion.” Rhetoric includes emotional tone, the way in which one formulates a speech, the hand gestures and the metaphors, the symbolism and the satire. Rhetoric uses humor, wordplay, images, and figures of speech to color the arguments, “making discussion pull on thought through desire.”5 Finally, “storytelling” is a communicative form meant to provide narratives that help individuals understand a problem with which they have no experience, by revealing values, cultures, and meanings, to allow for total social knowledge. Young discusses in Activist Challenges to Democracy the discourses about poverty and the ways of addressing poverty through policy. She mentions that although there are many debates about the causes and cures of poverty, there seems to be a wide agreement that poverty is the result of the individual’s failure to develop various
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skills and capacities necessary to be included in the work force.6 In conceptualizing such an agreement, the discourses place responsibility on the individuals and their families rather than social institutions, or economic development. Therefore, the resulting policies ultimately aim to transform the individual. However, if these two consensuses are wrong, and certainly they are controversial, then the policies implemented were ineffective, thus only perpetuating the problem rather than solving it. One must wonder how these conceptions or assumptions of situations and people became naturalized or the norm of society—consequently affecting policies. Furthermore, one of the main concerns with the narrow model of deliberative democracy is that the norms of society, and the structural inequalities included in such, cannot allow for fair procedures and outcomes. Because of the ways in which society “understands,” the deliberations set forth to debate will consequently result in a policy developed under what is certainly a narrow understanding as well as an understanding that may very well be false. To alleviate this issue, the communicative democrat aims to broaden the communication that takes place, by acknowledging societal differences and using greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling, to better understand those differences. In doing so, communicative democracy allows for a better understanding of the affected parties of a potential policy, or lack thereof. Communicative democracy will function in a way not under false consensus, but in a way that is legitimate and does not silence individuals who are socially unequal. Conversely, Seyla Benhabib denies Young’s communicative democracy. Benhabib argues that the modes, greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling, “may have their place in the informally structured process of everyday communication among individuals who share a cultural and historical life world.” However, she argues, “it is neither necessary for the democratic theorist to try to formalize and institutionalize these aspects of communicative everyday competence, nor is it plausible.”7 Deliberative democracy theorists also argue that bracketing political and economic power is sufficient to make speakers equal, and serves as a way to combat the structural inequalities and norms. Young, however, argues that this assumption fails to notice that the social power that may prevent people from acting as equal speakers derives not just from economic and political domination, but also from an internalized sense of the right the individual feels they have to speak, or participate in deliberating. This problem also arises from the devaluation of some people’s style of speech, which is also a result of structural inequalities, and the elevation of the speaking style of others.8 Young states, “the deliberative ideal tends to assume that when we eliminate the influence of economic and political power, people’s way of speaking and understanding will be the same; but this will be true only if we also eliminate their cultural differences and different social positions.”9
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Then, Benhabib goes on to assert that just as the deliberative model that Young criticizes, communicative democracy depends upon the same standards of impartiality and fairness. Benhabib states that, without those standards, “Young could not differentiate the genuine transformation of partial and situated perspectives from mere arguments of convenience or apparent unanimity reached under conditions of duress” or coercion.10 Furthermore, Benhabib explains that the political claims the deciding body makes are “rational until shown otherwise.” In doing so, she asserts, majoritarian decisions are “temporarily agreed-upon conclusions, the claim to rationality and validity of which can be publicly reexamined.”11 However, in order for a minority to “reexamine” or to show otherwise, one must have the power to first create, then articulate, an argument that breaks the barricade of social norms to even be heard. Finally, Benhabib asserts, “Young must be able to distinguish the kind of transformation and transcendence of partial perspectives that occurs in communicative democracy from the mutual agreement to be reached in processes of deliberative democracy.”12 So, in doing just that, I will exemplify the transcendence of partial perspectives that previously disadvantaged both women and homosexuals. Young, in revising deliberative democracy is such ways that she terms communicative democracy, simultaneously makes room for activism to achieve the rights that a deliberative democracy would not allow. At the very least, the activist’s goal is to “make us wonder about what we are doing, to rupture a stream of thought,” to be heard.13 The deliberative model of communication derives from specific institutional contexts of the modern West such as scientific debate, modern parliaments, and courts—all styles defining the meaning of reason itself in the modern world. These institutional forms of communication were in their time elitist and exclusive, and since their enlightenment beginnings, they have also been very male-dominated institutions, as well as white- and upper class-dominated. So, just as these institutional forms have come to be known as the meaning of reason, they have also come to silence or devalue the speech of some people, who do not fall into the very specific category of an upper class, white male.14 The norms of deliberation are in their very nature culturally specific and often operate as forms of power, that privilege speech that is dispassionate, general and formal. However, these forms of “articulateness” must “be learned; and in actual speaking situations in our society exhibiting such speaking styles is a sign of social privilege.”15 Therefore, deliberative democracy inadvertently becomes an agent in further marginalizing those who are already disadvantaged. For example, the resulting valued forms of speech are those that are assertive and confrontational, rather
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than speech that is tentative, or exploratory—in most cases this inevitably privileges male speaking styles over female.16 This silences the female voice almost entirely, and this is a voice that has in a major way been silenced up until Election Day 1920, when millions of American women exercised their right to vote for the very first time. Because the issue of women’s suffrage was not coming to a conclusion in the deliberative model of democracy in that time, activists took to the streets and the campaign for women’s suffrage began.17 The norms of womanhood in the past, and arguably to this day to some extent, are those that deemed the woman a submissive wife and mother, concerned exclusively with the upkeep of the home and maintenance of the family life. But, through greeting, rhetoric, and endless storytelling, the suffragists gained an immense following, while also contributing to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a “true woman.” In doing so, and at the very least, the activists successfully ruptured a stream of thought through their alternative means of communicating. However, beyond the success of just igniting new ideas in the minds of silenced women, the suffragists set fire to a movement that in time resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment, gaining women in the United States the natural rights they fought so passionately for.18 Furthermore, homosexuals were also silenced in the political arena due to norms and structural inequalities. This made intertwining in the workforce for homosexuals difficult, marriage impossible, and sometimes even led to sexual-orientation-based hate crimes. However, beginning predominantly in the 1960s and to be continued today, people of both homo- and hetero-sexual orientations have come together through the gay rights movement, to give a voice to the homosexual people, that has been in many instances and for many years denied in the political arena. Once again, just as in the women’s rights movement, the leaders of the gay rights movement have used alternative forms of communication, beyond deliberative democracy as Young states, to obtain the rights that are being denied, to create a voice for the structurally unequal, and to allow means for people to better understand their position. Better understanding the position is key, because for many years prior to the movements, a number of people were having a difficult time understanding the concept of homosexuality and as what was normally done, they dismissed the concept and the rights of the people entirely. However, there continues to be growing support for gay rights, and this includes people who have changed their minds. Polling conducted in 2003 found that most Americans (58 percent) opposed gay rights, including the right to marry legally, and just a third (33 percent) in favor. However, a recent survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center, from March 1317, 2013, found that the figures have crossed, with 49 percent supporting same-sex
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marriage, and 44 percent opposed. And while this is nonetheless a survey, which may allow for error and bias, the more important finding of the survey is why people they changed their mind. Pew Research Center reports, “roughly a third (32%) say they changed their mind because they know someone—a friend, family member or other acquaintance—who is homosexual. A quarter (25%) say that their personal views have changed as they have thought about the issue or simply because they have grown older. About one-in-five (18%) say they changed their minds to support gay marriage because the world has changed and that this kind of shift is inevitable. The same percentage (18%) say they changed their minds because they think people should be free to choose what makes them happy and that they no longer think the government should be involved in people’s personal lives in this way.”19 The reasons for the changed minds in these cases can be seen as a result of the communication styles of activism and the movement for gay rights. The 32 percent who now say they have changed their mind because they know someone who may be directly linked to the movements aim to broaden the understanding of homosexuality, by aiming to give the homosexual men and women, boys and girls, the courage to make their sexual-orientation known. The 25 percent who say that their views have changed as they have thought about the issue or because they have grown older, is also a success that can be attributed to an activist’s goal to, at the very least, make an individual wonder about what they are doing or thinking and why. Similarly, the remaining reasons for the changed minds can result from the rhetoric the activists in the movement use. Therefore, the communicative nature of activism has allowed for the gay rights movement to propel into mass popularity, as well as successfully extend the rights of homosexual individuals in a number of places. As Harvey Milk said in The Harvey Milk Interviews: In His Own Words, “rights are won only by those who make their voices heard.” Although the movement is not complete, the substantial progress that has been made would not have come in a narrow model of deliberative democracy, as the norms of yesterday would have silenced the individuals advocating rights for tomorrow, rights for the broader spectrum of society, rights for the silenced.20 Deliberative democrats and communicative democrats both find dialogue to be of grave importance, and commit to requiring some form of dialogue to achieve a well-functioning and legitimate democracy. However, according to Iris Young, deliberative democracy remains too restrictive and too narrow, and consequently is unable to deal with difference. The communicative democratic model that Young offers rests on a form of practical reasoning, which requires predominantly inclusion and equality, as well as the opportunity to be heard publicly. Communicative democracy is a strong soldier able to combat power hierar-
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chies due to social inequality in deliberative democracies. By allowing certain styles of communication to have equal moral worth as formal argumentation, the communicative model seeks to end oppression by making speech more inclusive. Communicative democracy allows for deliberations to occur however wild, however passionate, and however informal. Since this can be done with communicative democracy, groups that have previously been silenced in the political arena can now speak—and not only speak, but also be heard.
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Why liberals love the United Nations The effect of ideology on support for multilateralism
by Gabrielle Jorgenson
College of Arts and Sciences (2015)
T
he question of political ideology’s effect on various aspects of foreign policy has been met with curiosity but has generated few conclusive answers. Perhaps this is because ideology is so often conflated with the effects of similar philosophical and social thought—for instance, the role played by one’s religious or ethnic background. Rather than examine ideological pull on the entirety of foreign policy decision-making, it is prudent to narrow the scope of the assessment. Historical case studies have shown us that ideologically liberal administrations more favorably view the use of multilateral institutions in foreign affairs, which could include the brokerage of international agreements, state-building efforts, or protecting foreign civilians from violence. “Liberalism” by this definition is the left-wing American political ideology that tends to favor social justice and a mixed economy. For this purpose, it refers to the post-World War II distinction in which liberals and conservatives are roughly aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. In an examination of 20th-century case studies, there emerges a correlation between the ideology of the political actor in play and support for multilateralism. However, real policy examples also demonstrate that administrations sometimes deviate from their ideological positions in the face of
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either domestic or international political pressure, which can lead to little variation between the foreign policy outcomes of different ideological camps. As demonstrated by cases such as the Roosevelt, Clinton, and Bush administrations, multilateral institutions are not only favored by liberal-minded presidents; they are frequently rejected or bypassed by conservatives. The work of Jonathan Haidt and other proponents of moral foundations theory may explain at least part of this disparity. Liberals often denounce conservative thinkers as “amoral” with respect to foreign policy, citing failures to intervene in foreign genocides or sanctioning torture at CIA “black sites.” However, the research of Haidt and others overwhelmingly demonstrates just the opposite; conservatives actually rely on moral judgments with equal preponderance. Different approaches to foreign affairs are thus rooted in real moral disparities that are often irreconcilable due to their diametrically opposed worldviews, experiences, and interests. Because liberal ideology tends to foster strong moral convictions about protection from harm and safeguarding equity and fairness, its subscribers are more attracted to the potential benefits of multilateralism. Multilateral institutions provide liberal policymakers with an opportunity to cooperate on global issues by transcending national boundaries. In contrast, conservatives are more likely to embrace nationalism and subscribe to a hierarchical social order, which can be difficult to reconcile with the blurred jurisdiction and lack of enforcement that often comes with international bodies. These moral foundations, barring any overpowering unit- and system-level political constraints (à la Putnam’s “two-level game” model),1 ultimately have a greater effect on American foreign policy positions in the 21st century than do the older international relations paradigms of liberalism and realism. The U.S. political climate affects policymaking in the United Nations in a number of ways, but the same cannot always be said for the reverse situation. This is because the United States has often opted out of cooperating with U.N. treaties or has failed to seek international support for disruptive actions abroad. Historically, politically liberal or left-wing politicians have approached the United Nations more warmly than their conservative counterparts, a fissure that extends all the way down to the level of public opinion.2 In fact, while there is little evidence to support the assumption that public opinion usually and directly influences foreign policy, the population’s feelings about multilateralism can be used as a useful example of the extent to which the two camps are divided on the United Nations. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 87 percent of self-identified liberals believed the United Nations plays a “necessary role” in the world, while only 56 percent of conservatives agreed with that sentiment.3 In a 2010 survey that asked whether certain international institutions should be strengthened, liberals scored
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significantly higher than conservatives in their support for institutions such as the U.N., World Health Organization, World Bank, International Atomic Energy Agency, and more.4 As politicians are often much more politically polarized than the American public, these differences are exaggerated at the executive and legislative level. In his book on the politics of American foreign policy, political scientist Peter Gries demonstrates the way in which conservatives’ mistrust of multilateralism supersedes even an opportunity to protect disabled veterans. In explaining his refusal to support U.S. ratification of a U.N. treaty that mirrored the Americans with Disabilities Act, one Republican senator proclaimed that he would not support the “cumbersome regulations” and “potentially overzealous international institutions with anti-American biases” that were somehow reflected in the treaty.5 To Senate Democrats, the treaty was nothing more than an extension of American protections to the rest of the world. Recent research suggests that these striking differences in attitudes run much deeper than surface-level partisan bickering and may in fact reflect a genuine divergence of moral orientations. The work of Jonathan Haidt illustrates five basic moral foundations that govern human social interactions, and the degree to which each is valued and acted upon depends on a number of ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural factors.6 The prevalence of the “care/harm” moral foundation in liberals’ minds leads them to value international cooperation when it has the apparent potential to minimize harm to individuals in any part of the globe.7 Most liberal thinkers do not differentiate much between the harm done to Americans and harm done to other innocent civilians abroad, although this is not always reflected in policy decisions. In adopting the mindset of the “global citizen,” liberals are freed from the “loyalty” constraints faced by conservatives and can support the protection of individuals even through methods that might threaten the sovereign control of the United States. While conservatives certainly emphasize the care/ harm foundation as well, their in-group/out-group mentality governs the way in which it is applied. Unlike liberals, most conservatives have a deep-seated “loyalty/ betrayal” foundation that competes with their desire to protect from harm.8 As the primary driver of nationalism, reliance on this foundation leads conservatives to prioritize the harm protection of their fellow citizens lest they risk betraying their own kind. Clearly, this mentality does not lend itself well to collective international decision-making, as the outcomes of some deliberations could—and often do—favor the interests of foreign populations more than those of Americans. Haidt argues that liberals are also heavily moved by the “fairness/cheating” foundation, and while conservatives are greatly concerned about fairness in par-
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ticular contexts—especially with respect to economic freedom—they again face conflict with other strongly weighted moral foundations.9 Liberals tend to perceive “fairness” in the foreign policy context as equity. Similar to the idea of a “zipcode lottery,” liberals typically argue that no one in the world chooses his or her birthplace and that allowing the perpetuation of malnourishment, illiteracy, and unsettled war refugees is inequitable and unjust. Thus, it makes sense for multilateral institutions to oversee the gradual redistribution of resources from the global North to the global South.10 Further, reliance on the fairness foundation makes liberals more likely to concern themselves with the civil and political rights of foreign citizens purely for the sake of human rights. Again, multilateral institutions are seen as a vehicle for this type of progress because they are perceived to be in the unique position of playing an objective role in world affairs. Conservatives are often concerned with the development of democratic systems overseas as well, but conservative-led democratization efforts are frequently intertwined with national interest and conditional on the ability to act unilaterally. Part of conservatives’ support for unilateralism can be traced to their reliance on the authority/subversion foundation.11 Belief in respect for authority necessitates confidence in a strictly hierarchical social order. International institutions threaten this hierarchy because they suggest that the typical boundaries and sovereign power of the nation-state can be superseded under certain circumstances. Conservatives view the signing of many international agreements as deference to an illegitimate authority that seeks to subvert the traditional structure and is akin to the U.S. government relinquishing its power to an imposing force. In failing to view the global political scape in such a hierarchical fashion, liberals are freed from this constraint. They usually view the multilateral institutions in which the U.S. is involved as cooperative bodies and as part of a contract that nations have voluntarily entered in which hierarchy is mostly dissolved and nations can reach agreements above the walls of national boundaries. These beliefs do not unconditionally translate to conservative policy decisions, but they are useful for examining the purely ideological components of conservative strategy. Finally, Haidt describes a sanctity/degradation foundation that is almost entirely unique to conservatives; only particularly religious liberals tend to rely on it when making moral judgments.12 It relates to a desire for purity, that there is an inherent “wrongness” in certain social practices that are difficult to justify beyond a reflexive sense of disgust. Gries uses the sanctity foundation to demonstrate the negative reaction that some conservatives exhibit toward the multiethnic, multilingual makeup of most international institutions.13 Of course, just as none of these moral doctrines should be generalized to all subscribers of an ideology, this
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is not to say that all conservatives oppose the U.N. for prejudiced reasons. But this regard for sanctity coupled with loyalty-driven nationalism contributes to an overall desire to protect and cooperate with one’s “own,” sometimes at the expense of others. Because liberals do not score highly on a tendency to value sanctity, they rarely face this dilemma when evaluating the merits of multilateralism. Over the past 15 years, scholars have asserted that there are two distinct orientations toward international affairs, one “cooperative internationalist” and the other “militant internationalist.”14 This model marks the division between a universalist approach to global problem solving and a concern for the protection of one’s own national interests. This theory is consistent with moral foundations theory; subscribers to cooperative internationalism are usually the liberals who prioritize care/harm and fairness/cheating. Kertzer et al. found a strongly positive correlation between care/harm and fairness/cheating prioritization and cooperative internationalism, while there was a negative correlation between these moral foundations and militant internationalism.15 Further, they found that cooperative internationalism is negatively correlated with the other three moral foundations of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.16 Kertzer’s study also validates the assumption that the primary counterweight to the harm and fairness foundations for conservatives when deciding whether to support a unilateral institution or action is the loyalty foundation; loyalty predicted militant internationalism with a coefficient of .35.17 This finding indicates that 35 percent of the variance in the recorded degrees of militant internationalism can be explained by the extent to which respondents value loyalty. There is overwhelming evidence for the theoretical explanation of why liberals feel more warmly toward multilateral institutions, but these findings are easier to interpret when viewed through the lens of real foreign policy actions taken by ideologically polarized politicians. The following case studies will demonstrate this effect more thoroughly. The George W. Bush administration’s approach to the United Nations is representative of the conservative/liberal divide on multilateralism. Though President Bush sought to use the United Nations to gain international support for initial anti-terrorist action in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush doctrine ultimately “proclaims emancipation from the colossus of international constraints.”18 What was originally perceived as a genuine call for international cooperation in fighting global terrorism was soon revealed as a request for other nations to pledge support for an American-directed plan of attack; the “coalition of the willing” would be those who agreed to Bush’s National Security Strategy. By the end of 2002, the administration’s relationship to the U.N. had become largely a formality, and many
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nations had begun to turn against the Bush administration’s strategy. Leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration did use the Security Council in an attempt to legitimize its plans for war. The United States solicited a Security Council sanction for carrying out the vision outlined in the National Security Strategy. The Security Council passed Resolution 1441, which threatened Iraq with “serious consequences” if it did not comply with U.N. weapons inspectors.19 Disagreement over the interpretation of this resolution became evident when the Bush administration expressed that the resolution was intended to legally authorize the use of force if Iraq failed to deliver; other nations, such as France, warned of the dangers associated with that kind of precedent. Eventually, the U.S. and U.K. launched air strikes on Iraq using the disputed resolution as justification. To much of the world, the action was a blatant disregard for multilateral efforts, and the Security Council never accepted its legality under the resolution. In an interview with NBC, Vice President Cheney quipped, “The United Nations has proven incapable of dealing with the threat that Saddam Hussein represents, incapable of enforcing its own resolutions.”20 But had the Bush administration ever truly expected to use international cooperation as a resource in the fight against terrorism? The administration’s focus on reorienting American foreign policy toward a strategy of preemption suggests that it may not have. True to the conservative doctrine of militant internationalism, President Bush and his administration saw the post-9/11 world as a dangerous arena in which nations must take any measures necessary to protect themselves from security threats. Similarly, the administration’s boldly unilateral approach reflects the nationalist tendencies that arise from the moral foundations associated most strongly with conservatives. The decision to invade Iraq was largely fueled by a thirst to attack an enemy that many felt should have been deposed a decade earlier during the elder Bush’s presidency. Despite the numerous political and economic factors often cited as the main reasons for the war, the force driving such intense thirst can be boiled down to moral objectives. The authority/subversion principle undoubtedly influenced the neoconservatives’ desire to enforce a global hierarchy regardless of whether the U.N. would condone its actions. Not only did the United States need to reassert the superiority of its military and its status as a superpower in the wake of such a devastating attack, it had to democratize Iraq if it was to restore a balance of power in the Middle East that was favorable to American interests. As in any state-building initiative, Operation Iraqi Freedom did have clear political and economic motivations. But this administration justified its pursuits on the premise that the U.S. was somehow in a position to enforce the global order it wished to
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see. This presumption necessitates that the United States had some sort of political and moral authority over what it portrayed as victims of a despotic leader. Similarly, the loyalty/betrayal foundation heavily influenced the administration’s decision to largely ignore the U.N. Security Council. When trusted allies expressed a lack of support for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the administration played up their betrayal to the American public. Rather than a prudent respect for international law and desire to wait for more evidence, France’s withdrawal from the coalition was portrayed as a selfish and disloyal action; France was no longer part of the pro-American “in-group.” In spearheading their coalition with a “join or die” mentality, officials in the Bush administration made it clear that the U.S. was seeking loyal comrades and would take any refusal to participate personally. The administration’s rhetoric was embraced by the American mainstream news media. Fox News, for example, unapologetically supported the invasion at the expense of promoting a diplomatic relationship with European allies and consistently maintained the highest ratings on Iraq coverage. In 2003, the station aired an interview with Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, who boldly proclaimed that “the French, together with the Germans, [are trying to build] a common European policy in opposition to the United States.”21 MSNBC, Fox News’s left-leaning counterpart, did not hyperbolize French “betrayal,” but it rarely criticized the American position for fear of appearing unpatriotic, demonstrating the stronghold of conservative ideology at the time.22 In defying the Security Council, the neoconservative Bush administration intentionally undermined the legal authority of the U.N. By denying the necessity of the Security Council’s blessing in legitimizing the invasion, the U.S. made a conscious statement to the rest of the world that multilateralism should only be sought in ways that are convenient for the leader of the coalition. This is a strategy that does not place international institutions in high regard and sends an uncooperative message to other nations. It also renders the legal weight of U.N. treaties meaningless, which sets a dangerous precedent for the future enforcement of international law. The Bush administration was not oblivious to these consequences; its members were ideologically devoted to priorities other than international collaboration. The refusal of the United States to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) is also the result of conservative unilateralism. Attitudes toward the relationship between the U.S. and ICC have fluctuated across different administrations. Though he publicly denounced what he saw as significant flaws in the ICC treaty, President Clinton signed the document, expressing a desire for the United States to participate in securing international justice.23 President Clinton
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cited the U.S.’s devotion to “moral leadership” on the world stage as a reason for its commitment to the general principles of an international criminal court and believed that the ICC could “make a profound contribution in deterring egregious human rights abuses worldwide.”24 In doing so, he was quite plainly speaking to the care/harm principle. As an active and powerful international participant, the United States had a responsibility to prevent harm to innocent civilians whenever reasonably possible. Since the central purpose of the International Criminal Court is to deliver justice in the face of human rights violations, reliance on the fairness/ cheating foundation is even more apparent. Support for the ICC requires a dedication to international law that many conservatives do not have, simply because they would prefer to enforce justice within the confines of national boundaries and hold criminals accountable to their own governments. Predictably, the George W. Bush administration reacted quite differently to the International Criminal Court treaty, and in May of 2002 the U.S. officially withdrew its signature.25 This became one of several of the administration’s post9/11 shifts away from multilateralism and harkened back to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s earlier remark that the United States would not act in a way that favored the interests of a “an illusory international community.”26 One of the Bush administration’s primary justifications for its ICC exit was the fact that sending a nation’s war criminals to an international court infringed on the sovereignty of national criminal justice systems, part of a broader scheme to “question the utility of international institutions in general.”27 President Bush and his advisers even took their opposition a step further in seeking to undermine the workings of the court, primarily by finding ways to exempt American citizens from indictment. For example, the administration vetoed the extension of peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina so as not to subject its troops to ICC jurisdiction.28 It proceeded to present the Security Council with an ultimatum: either the U.S. would withdraw from future peacekeeping operations, or U.N. peacekeepers would be immune to prosecution by the ICC. This resolution passed and was renewed until the news of abhorrent prisoner treatment at Abu Ghraib broke in 2004. The administration faced significant pushback from liberal members of Congress and human rights advocacy groups who worried about the moral degradation of the American government. As moral foundations theory demonstrates, however, this rejection of a multilateral initiative was merely the product of different moral frameworks rather than the absence of one altogether. Many top officials in the Bush administration did not want the ICC to scrutinize the behavior of the American military abroad because they did not want roadblocks to what they viewed as protecting American interests. As was the case with respect to Opera-
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tion Iraqi Freedom more generally, both a desire to restore global hierarchy and a fierce attachment to the American identity caused neoconservative politicians to protect American national interests at high costs. To them, the price of losing multilateral partnerships was low enough to justify the perceived reward of democratizing a “threatening” nation and eliminating all possible links to al Qaeda before they could execute another attack on Americans anywhere in the world. In fact, liberals supported many of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist pursuits in the wake of 9/11—only one Democrat in the entire United States Congress voted against the Authorization to Use Military Force. However, they were subsequently unwilling to accept a strategy in which, according to liberal criteria, the safety and due process of innocent civilians were violated in the name of American preemption. This is what most Democrats believe ideologically, but it must be acknowledged that presidential administrations often do not act exclusively on their ideological whims. In fact, a number of counterexamples provide a significant limitation to the influence of ideology on multilateralism. Domestic and international political pressures, whether in the form of organized interest groups, legislative opposition, or foreign leaders, can cause administrations to act against the basic inclinations predicted by their moral priorities. An example of misaligned ideology and action is the Clinton administration’s selective use of multilateralism. President Clinton decided not to intervene in Rwanda despite his belief in humanitarian intervention. Richard Betts suggests that a variety of factors can serve as a counterweight to ideological motivation and can lead to similar foreign policy actions across ideological boundaries.29 With the exception of wartime, presidents experience few electoral incentives for multilateral action because the American public expresses little interest in foreign policy relative to other, more politically charged issues. If an administration such as Clinton’s does not want to intervene due to regrets about past drawn-out involvements—Somalia, in this case—it rarely needs to worry about electoral consequences as long as it successfully stifles any vocal proponents. Further, the effect of intragovernmental politics can at times be just as influential as ideological motivation; in a situation where nonintervention is a more politically feasible move considering the positions of others in the government and in Congress, it is easier for an administration to simply drop the issue. This latter point is also a reason that President Clinton, after signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, failed to press the Senate when it refused to ratify the treaty. In this case, the path of least political resistance was more appealing than adhering to ideological convictions given the political climate surrounding the administration at the time. The President expressed support for multilateral action
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against climate change, but he was not willing to expend resources to keep it alive. Finally, while liberals are consistently aware of the positions and interests of U.S. allies, allied support is often contingent on procedural correctness rather than the content of the policy.30 Often, allies are most concerned with whether the U.S. solicits their input and permission to intervene abroad, which explains why Democrats occasionally settle for loopholes in observing international law. Consider President Clinton’s decision to intervene in Kosovo against the Serbian Miloševic regime. President Clinton was not prepared to rescind his decision to intervene if the U.N. Security Council did not approve the mission, which it was not likely to do at the time. Because European allies were simply looking for a U.S.-led coalition and did not require a Security Council resolution as a condition of their support, President Clinton was able to use NATO as a “symbolic substitute” for institutional multilateral channels and thus maintain the appearance of liberal “respect for the principles of international law.”31 The actions of the Obama administration illustrate other examples of misalignment. The administration’s policy on drones defies liberal moral values because it neither receives widespread allied support nor ensures the protection of foreign civilians. The President’s drone policy is indicative of a desire to appease the defense community in a way that allows him to maintain liberal credibility in his refusal to put “boots on the ground.” As there is no precedent for drone strikes in international law, and due to the broadness of the Authorization to Use Military Force, it is difficult for critics to cite explicit legal reasons that would compel the administration to curb the program. While the media has pressured the administration to increase transparency in its drone policy, ideological motivation has not proven to bear much weight in persuading the administration to appeal to the Security Council. Instead, it claims it is attempting to reform the program itself rather than involve multilateral institutions or coalitions. President Obama’s policy toward the admission of Palestine into the United Nations and its failure to use the U.N. to put pressure on Israel also exemplify this inconsistency. The administration responded to UNESCO’s admission of Palestine by slashing funds to the international agency, which amounted to 22 percent of UNESCO’s entire budget.32 In 2011, Congress threatened the same fate for any U.N. agency that admitted Palestine in the future, and the administration made no move to stop the legislation in which it was outlined.33 The administration has been consistently reluctant to entertain the idea of Palestinian statehood and equally hesitant to punish Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. If the Obama administration were acting on purely ideological grounds, its policies toward multilateralism would likely have taken a different direction. Its
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hostility to Palestinian statehood is inconsistent with the cooperative internationalism it has demonstrated in other cases. Using the care/harm foundation as a reference point, one can reasonably predict that a liberal administration such as President Obama’s would actively seek to minimize harm to oppressed individuals and victims of conflict, especially if their oppressors were actively defying U.N. Security Council resolutions. The U.S. has considerable leverage in this situation because it is a prime supplier of Israeli munitions and one of its strongest allies; if the administration would risk the political fallout associated with defying AIPAC, it could persuade the Israeli government to comply with international law. Just as President Bush used America’s leverage in the global arena to defy the Security Council’s legal authority, the Obama administration could use it to enforce U.N. resolutions in the name of liberation and Wilsonian-style self-determination. Author Stephen Zune notes that the Obama administration ignores the fact that the U.N. “reiterates the illegality of any nation expanding its territory by force” and instead “insists that the two sides must ‘reach agreement’ on [the question of territorial claims].”34 Within the moral foundations framework, one would also assume that the administration would encourage the self-determination of all ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities, as well as equal representation in the global discourse. Instead, the administration surrenders to political pressure from American lobbying groups and foreign officials and struggles to maintain a philosophically and morally consistent foreign policy agenda. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, the U.S. has “pledged to veto any sanctions…by the U.N. to force Israel to live up to its international legal obligations.”35 The message this sends does not bode well for maintaining a cooperative structure that respects international law and enforces it when necessary. The decision of the United States, under the leadership of either party, to demand special exemption for itself and its allies fundamentally undermines the legal authority of international bodies. Thus, liberalism may be correlated with support for multilateralism, but it is not always correlated with acting on that support. In some areas, however, the Obama administration has prevented political interests from inhibiting multilateral engagement. Perhaps the most notable example of this is the recent nuclear negotiations with Iran. While the President maintained his position that the United States is determined to prevent Iran from nuclear armament, he also demonstrated a willingness to work with Iran and five other nations to reach a deal that satisfied the interests of all involved. This strategy took the place of a sanctions-only option in which the U.S. would steadily increase economic pressure on Iran to shut down its nuclear program. The Iran is-
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sue has long been the subject of concern for the Security Council, and the Obama administration has generally followed the same strategy as the U.N., an alternation of economic sanctions and diplomatic talks.36 In a move illustrative of cooperative internationalism, President Obama became the first U.S. president since 1979 to have direct contact with a leader of Iran. Together with the cooperation of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, and leaders from the E.U., Russia, and China, the Obama administration participated in multilateral diplomacy, which, since achieved could have outcomes especially favorable to liberals. The underlying ideology of the talks was justified by the desire to promote a just world; since Iran agreed to the same non-proliferation stipulations as other nuclear nations, it should not be singled out as a global menace. Even had the talks ended unconstructively, the negotiations would have sent a powerful message that multilateralism can be taken seriously by the world’s dominant powers. Ideology cannot always predict action, as demonstrated by inconsistencies in the Clinton and Obama administrations. When conflicting political interests are strong enough, they can often overpower ideological inclinations in foreign policymaking. For this reason, it would be incorrect to assume that differing attitudes toward multilateralism will always yield different policy decisions, as they often take very similar actions if they are politically popular and do not heavily contradict ideological reasoning. However, the role of ideological factors in the ways presidents make use of multilateral institutions is not insignificant. There are real differences in the way liberal and conservative politicians perceive the world and America’s place in it. The evidence for this difference spans different dimensions. Liberals tend to focus more heavily on the foundations of protecting others from harm and ensuring fairness when making moral decisions, and the use of these foundations has been correlated with a cooperative view of the world. Foreign policy conservatives, on the other hand, uphold protection from harm and fairness only within the constraints of competing moral foundations. Because conservatives also value in-group loyalty, purity, and respect for authority, the scope of their concern for fairness and protection from harm is usually more concentrated. These dimensions of moral consideration are correlated with a more militant and realist view of international relations. These moral differences speak to a presidential administration’s warmth toward multilateral institutions both in the U.S. and abroad. The pattern of liberals and multilateral participation can be traced as far back as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his conception for a United Nations. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson expanded American multilateralism in the Western hemisphere in their involvements with the Alliance for Progress and Organization of American States,
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while Presidents Clinton and Obama have used multilateral efforts to significant degrees in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Libya. Conversely, the George W. Bush administration was largely skeptical of the authority of the U.N., ICC, and international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and Convention Against Torture. While any administration is guided by politics, this difference in approach reflects an ideological divide that should be considered when evaluating American foreign policy and deciding the position of the U.S. in current world affairs. Ideology can thus be used to explain the degree of support for multilateralism, which translates to increased multilateral action if domestic- and international-level political constraints allow for it. Whether the U.S. is a multilateral actor is not left to random chance but is instead largely influenced by the moral beliefs of the men and women in the White House.
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articles, et al.
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C
omprised of editorials and other short original works, the following pieces were written by undergraduates at the University of Virginia.To view the full collection of this semester’s submissions and to submit your own work,visit seriatimjournal.com. Student work is published on a rolling basis and featured in our weekly e-newsletter.
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A return to Kennan
by Andrew Boyer
College of Arts and Sciences (2017)
I
SIS controls a swath of territory spanning both Iraq and Syria; al Qaeda has meanwhile been growing faster than ISIS in Iraq over the past six months; Vladimir Putin’s Russia overran Crimea and is currently supporting Eastern Ukrainians in a fight against their sovereign government; Latin American governments in places like Venezuela and Argentina frequently criticize and castigate the United States while relying on institutions that the U.S. manages. All of this is merely to underscore an oft mentioned Einstein quote, “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” It is the role of the president to make sure that the most important people are doing something. The Obama administration has come under criticism for its foreign policy and its failure to articulate the animating principles of that policy. It is unclear why the President has taken action when he has chosen to involve U.S. military resources, and there is a general feeling among pols that he might similarly struggle to provide an undergirding structure for making such decisions. While he has been successful in some cases, the absence of strategy has led the President into a number of foreign policy shortcomings. It is time for him to decide how the United States will conduct itself abroad instead of bouncing from crisis to crisis without
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clear direction. As George Kennan once famously advocated, President Obama ought to pursue a strategy of containment, but updated for the 21st century. Kennan’s strategy relied on the concept of asymmetry predicated on a broader understanding of the modern world. It had a firm grasp of how to distinguish between real and superfluous threats in order to effectively constrain policy. Now more than ever, such a rational outlook is needed. What makes asymmetry possible is both the strategic might to assert the United States’ will anywhere it needs to do so as well as the limiting mentality that it will only use this power where absolutely necessary. An asymmetric strategy does not call for a response to every single action taken by world actors. Instead, it calls for an active pursuit of the United States’ interests all over the world while countering those threats which pose legitimate national security risks. A modern day containment would still call for many of the operations we currently undertake. For instance, implementing anti-terror surveillance and operations would enable the United States to ensure protection from attacks while simultaneously allowing the United States to determine the true capability of state and nonstate actors. This intelligence would grant the United States the ability to understand threats based on real capabilities. An asymmetric policy would then promote a wise disbursement of resources to match those threats. In an obvious example, ISIS may pose an international threat, while Boko Haram may be much more limited to strike the region they inhabit. These sorts of calculations would give the United States the necessary guidance to effectively and economically use its assets. But the policy would necessarily limit some actions which the public and the Department of Defense might otherwise be inclined to undertake. In all reality, Eastern Ukraine does not presently command serious interests of the United States. Despite the conqueror’s mentality that Putin has taken toward his effete neighbor, there is no strategic reason for the United States to commit ground forces to Ukraine, even if they are an ally. This does not prevent the United States and other international groups like the U.N. and IMF from putting diplomatic and financial strain onto Russia for its undemocratic actions, but it does prevent the United States from getting mired in a conflict that does not seriously involve its interests. While asymmetry can be challenging to implement, it is the only way to successfully allocate the United States’ resources to maintain containment. It must permit temporary evil in some places and hold it constant in others in order to strike out at it in its most dangerous and volatile forms. The United States has seen how hard it is to embark on wars to rebuild regions of the world, but that should not discourage its policy makers from attempting to send the world in the path of open,
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free democratic capitalism for all. It will just require a significant gut check to those at the National Security Council who wish to go everywhere and stop everything. Containment will ensure that terror and fear make no significant advances while the rest of the world battles for its inalienable rights.
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America: the elective oligarchy
by Lucas Pulliza
College of Arts and Sciences (2018)
I
n 1863, Abraham Lincoln stated the United States was a “Government of the people, by the people, for the people,” in praise of the assumed democratic nature of the government. However, democracy has and probably always will be a blatantly inaccurate characterization of America. A genuine democracy is a form of government in which the majority of people directly participate in the political process regardless of socio-economic status. However, the ever-growing disaffiliation between people and the political process in contemporary society has given birth to an elective oligarchy, a form of government incompatible with democracy, where a miniscule minority of affluent aristocrats have the actual power. The real difference between democracy and elective oligarchy rests in both the relative impact of wealth on the political process and the capacity to which the marginalized of society can genuinely influence the political process. Democracies enable both the extremely poor and the extremely rich to have equal participation and influence on the political process; elective oligarchies function as top-down rule from elites where the preferences of the marginalized aren’t genuinely taken into account. The disproportionately immense influence of wealth on the political process and inability of the majority of society—not just the marginalized—to have a genuine role in the political process
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has led to the U.S. undoubtedly embodying an elective oligarchy. However, many people still contest that the ability for all citizens above the age of 18 to vote renders the U.S. a democracy, because it allows citizens to participate in and influence the political process—unfortunately, that just simply isn’t the case. Simply voting cannot sustain a democracy due its role as not only a method of disaffiliating people with the political process, but also as a fountain for unequal involvement with the political process. A democracy entails direct participation in the legislative process—voting is the least direct form of participation in the legislative process, as it requires the lowest amount of effort, time, and genuine political participation. An authentic democracy involves all citizens having some level of influence on policy decisions at the local and national level. The most direct version of expressing influence involves caucuses, town hall meetings, and other forums where poor and rich citizens gather to discuss their policy preferences on an equal footing. The direct version alone can easily sustain a democracy due to its ability to equally involve rich and poor voters in the political process. Simply voting for a politician to represent the interests of his/her constituents enables people to indirectly express their preferences through their representative, but leads to a disaffiliation between people and the political process due to the lack of genuine involvement with the political process. This disaffiliation can be seen in the lack of people even exercising their vote in contemporary America: only 54 percent of people cast a ballot in the last presidential election, 36.4 percent cast a ballot in the last mid-term election, and barely 21 percent of people participate on average in state elections. Voting has also been proven to inadequately represent the interests of the poor and rich—the one-person, one-vote principle simply doesn’t result in political equality. Gerrymandering of district lines enables the majority party of a state to ensure the continued re-election of a member of its party by drawing district lines to disperse members of the opposing party. This leads to the members of the opposing party having no influence on the political process, because its vote is essentially arbitrary due to its inability to ever genuinely impact the outcome of the election. Direct participation in the political process through town halls and caucuses allow for people holding the policy preferences of the minority party to argue for its policy preferences and potentially persuade other people to change their policy preferences. However, voting simply results in the level of genuine involvement with the political process being determined by geographic location—i.e., a republican will never be genuinely involved with the political process in a state like Rhode Island due to the marginalization of his/her vote, which disrupts the presumed political equality associated with democracies. The inability of voting to adequately allow for people to equally expresses their desired policy preferences renders the process unable to preserve a
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democracy on its own, which is only worsened by the disaffiliation between people and the political process caused by the practice. However, there is merit to the argument that an elective oligarchy is the inevitable result of a democracy in 21st century given the expectations and responsibilities of a modern government in a highly developed country. The question is if average American citizens understand the actual lack of influence they have—if they understand the extent to which their opinion, their values, and their preferred policy preferences are arbitrary.
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On Nozick’s forced labor theory
by Alex Dunkenberger
College of Arts and Sciences (2018)
I
n Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick claims “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.” He argues that taxation essentially requires individuals to work for other’s benefit with no choice in the matter. Nozick declares this to be unjust because it violates the Principle of Self-Ownership, which states that individuals possess sole ownership over themselves physically, their possessions, and their talents. He argues that because the individual exclusively owns these things, anyone else that attempts to lay claim to them without the owner’s permission is in violation of that individual’s basic rights. Thus, Nozick views taxation as an unjust claim by the state to the possessions of the individual that coerces them into working for the state’s benefit. Though Nozick initially presents a very interesting argument, there are many reasons to reject his view. First, Nozick has a liberal definition of what constitutes forced labor. Most people would agree that forced labor is defined as the obligatory use of an individual’s time and abilities for the sole benefit of someone else. They have no other option than dedicating all of their time and efforts towards an objective decided by someone else. However, taxing an individual’s possessions or income does not force them into a position where they are working solely for the benefit of
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the taxing agent, as they will still receive a portion of their income (typically a larger portion than what is taxed). Further, individuals are not being forced into labor. As stated before, those engaged in forced labor are required to work or face the threat of punishment. For example, in early American society, individuals were taken from their homes and forced to work on plantations or else face severe punishment or even death. In situations of actual forced labor, the individual works to avoid the repercussions of not working. However, in the situation that Nozick addresses, the individual might face repercussions if they do not pay taxes, but avoiding those repercussions is not what motivates the individual to work. The individual chooses to work in order to earn an income. Taxes on that income are thus a result of the individual’s choice to work. Another reason to reject Nozick’s idea that taxation is comparable to forced labor is that some possessions being taxed require no labor at all. Nozick argues that taking away an individual’s possession is practically the same as forcing him or her to work for the benefit of another individual. However, in instances such as gifts, inheritances, and possessions collected by chance (e.g., lottery winnings), possessions are acquired by means other than labor. Thus, an individual whose possessions were acquired rather than earned cannot claim that such taxation is forced labor because he or she did no labor at all. To argue that taxing those possessions is the same as forcing the individual to work for the benefit of others is not completely true. For example, in the circumstance that an individual’s grandmother passes away and they inherit a hefty sum of money, the individual cannot say that they earned that money through labor. At no point is the individual doing any form of labor to earn their possession and nor is the individual losing any time or use of talent in the portion of their possession that is taxed. Furthermore, Nozick misunderstands the purpose of taxes. In the context of taxation as on par with forced labor, he believes that the individual works for an income and then loses part of that income to the state without reaping any sort of benefit in return. Similar to this suggestion, someone engaged in forced labor ultimately forfeits the product of their labor to someone else and without ever receiving any sort of benefit from their labor. However, as Nozick fails to recognize, this is not the case with taxation. The individual does yield part of their earnings to the state, but the state gives something back to the individual in return by using the tax revenue to provide public services for the individual’s use (e.g., roadways or schools). Therefore, taxation is not on par with forced labor because the individual is not working solely for the benefit of someone else, but also receives benefits as a member of a larger community to which they contribute. For example, Chris, a Charlottesville citizen, pays an income tax to the Commonwealth of Virginia, which uses that money in
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combination with other individuals’ money to build and maintain roadways that can be enjoyed by all. Though Chris does not necessarily choose what benefit he receives from his labor, he still receives a benefit, which is not the case in forced labor. Of course, Nozick would fiercely refute these objections. In regards to the first objection, Nozick would argue that even if fear of repercussions are not the motivating force behind labor in the modern society, the individual still must work to survive and thus is prone to taxation. In order to survive in modern society, the individual must work and earn an income to be able to afford life’s necessities. The state offers no alternative means of acquiring those necessities other than working to earn an income, which is in turn taxed. Thus, Nozick would argue that individuals are forced into labor and a portion of their earnings from that labor are taken from them and put into the hands of the state. Nozick would argue against the claim that taxation on acquired possessions is not coercive using the self-ownership principle. He would argue that even if the individual does not have to work to acquire the goods, the self-ownership principle means that they are still the sole owner of those goods. Thus, any attempt to tax those goods is to collect an individual’s possession without their consent, which is a violation of their basic rights. Nozick sees this as akin to forced labor because it forces the individual to give part of their possessions, even if it is acquired rather than earned, to another benefactor. In the situation stated above, where an individual collects a large sum of money by inheriting it from their deceased grandmother, the individual lays sole claim to that sum of money and it is their right to use the inheritance in any way they deem suitable. If the state taxes those acquired possessions, they are essentially claiming partial ownership of the funds and forcing the individual to use their acquired possessions in ways they might not desire. Nozick would refute the objection that the individual still sees benefits from their taxes paid to the state by arguing that the individual has no voice in how those taxes are used; thus, taxation still violates their basic rights. In the context of Chris, the Charlottesville citizen discussed above, the citizen pays their taxes to the Commonwealth and receives a benefit from those taxes in the form of a roadway. However, Chris did not get to decide how his money is spent. Instead, the state allocates Chris’ taxes, along with many other citizens’, to a government agency that then makes the decision to use the funds to build and maintain roadways. In Nozick’s view, this is unjust because the individual must work to earn a living, part of those earnings are taken by the state—essentially on coercive terms—and uses the individual’s earnings in a way the state deems suitable, even if it is not in line with what the individual would have wanted to do with their money. Despite the fact that Nozick offers some compelling arguments for the idea
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that taxation is on par with forced labor, I maintain that in a modern democratic society, his claim is both radical and incorrect. Even if the individual cannot survive without working and is therefore liable for taxation, they are not forced into labor out of fear of repercussions if they do not work. This is clearly different from situations of forced labor, where individuals are forced to work and oblige out of fear of facing severe backlash. I also remain unconvinced that the taxation of unearned goods is on par with forced labor, because the state is not robbing the individual of any effort they put forth. Even if Nozick sees the taxation as an unjust claim to the individual’s possessions, it cannot be equated to forced labor because there is no labor involved. Finally, Nozick’s claim that an individual has no voice in how their taxed possessions are used is not true in modern society. In a modern democratic society, the individual has the ability to push their representative to use their tax dollars, along with the tax dollars of others, in a way that directly benefits the taxed individual. Not only do the taxes on the individual’s possessions come back to benefit the individual, which Nozick fails to recognize, but the individual does have a voice in exactly how they will benefit. In circumstances of forced labor, not only does the individual not see the benefits of their labor, but they also do not have a voice in how the product of their labor is used. Overall, Nozick presents a very curious claim and a clear argument that taxation may violate the principle of self-ownership, but in a modern society, taxation is not as extreme as forced labor.
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end notes
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Seriatim | Journal of American Politics Habermas & non-foundationalism | Stephen Paul
1. Jürgen Habermas. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 161. 2. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 97. 3. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 361. 4. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 167. 5. Habermas, Inclusion of the Other, 37. 6. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 97. 7. Chantal Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). 8. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 114. 9. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 117. 10. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 56. 11. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 68-69. 12. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 98 13. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 15. 14. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 34. 15. Jürgen Habermas, “Civil Disobedience: Litmus Test for the Democratic Constitutional State,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology (1985), 30: 95-116. 16. Ruth Berins Collier, and David Collier. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 17. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 102. 18. Stephen White and Evan Farr, “‘No-Saying’ in Habermas,” Political Theory 40, no. 1 (2012): 32-57. 19. White and Farr, “‘No-saying’ in Habermas,” 50. 20. White and Farr, “‘No-saying’ in Habermas,” 50. 21. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 161. 22. The words “moral” and “ethical” are often used in philosophy as synonyms. In Habermas, whom I follow in this paper, they have different meanings. Moral norms are universal, while ethical norms are local. 23. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 109. 24. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 161. 25. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 160. 26. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 56. 27. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 162. 28. At the foundational level there are many competing conceptions of what the
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foundation is. As previously stated, poly-foundational may be a better way of understanding this paradigm. 29. William E. Connolly. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 174. 30. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 98. 31. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 69. 32. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 32. 33. John Dryzek, “Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies,” Political Theory, 33, no. 2: 218-242 (2005), 221 34. Dryzek, “Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies,” 225. 35. White and Farr, “‘No-saying’ in Habermas,” 50. 36. Dryzek, “Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies,” 225. 37. Dryzek, “Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies,” 225. 38. Dryzek, “Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies,” 225. 39. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy in Divide Societies, 223; citing Andrew Reynolds, “Majoritarian or Power-Sharing Governments,” in Democracy and Institutions: The Life Work of Arend Lijphart, ed. Markus M. L. Crepaz, Thomas A Koelble, and David Wilsford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 155-96, at 166-70. 40. Habermas, “Civil Disobedience,” 109. 41. White and Farr, “‘No-saying’ in Habermas,” 33. 42. Habermas, “Civil Disobedience,” 110. 43. White and Farr, “‘No-saying’ in Habermas,” 44. 44. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 98. 45. James H. Cone. A Black Theology of Liberation, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970), 9. 46. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 10. 47. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 13. 38. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 63. 49. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 24. 50. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 25. 51. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 63, emphasis added. 52. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 14. 53. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 15.
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Seriatim | Journal of American Politics Privacy in practice | Porter Nenon
1. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The general line.” in Postmodern fables, trans. Georges van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993/1997. 121. 2. Harper, Phillip Brian. Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations. New York: New York University Press, 1999, 11. 3. Harper, Private Affairs, 45. 4. Williams, Patricia J. “On Being the Object of Property.” The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. 22. 5. Griffin, James. “The Human Right To Privacy.” San Diego Law Review 44.4 (2007): 697-721. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Apr. 2014, 699. 6. Griffin, “The Human Right to Privacy,” 701. 7. Grebcowicz, Margret. “Democracy And Pornography: On Speech, Rights, Privacies, And Pleasures In Conflict.” Hypatia 26.1 (2011): 150-165. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Apr. 2014, 152. 8. Derrida, Jacques. “Of Hospitality.” Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000, 61. 9. Derrida, “Of Hospitality,” 61. 10. Bill of Rights, The United States Constitution. 11. Brandeis, Louis and Samuel Warren. “The Right to Privacy,” 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890), 49. 12. Griffin, “The Human Right to Privacy,” 706. 13. MacKinnon, Catharine. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987, 102. 14. Grebowicz, “Democracy and Pornography,” 152. 15. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 101-102. 16. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 100. 17. Harper, Private Affairs, 19. 18. Harper, Private Affairs, 20. 19. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 99-102. 20. Harper, Private Affairs, 20. 21. Griffin, “The Human Right to Privacy,” 706. 22. Harper, Private Affairs, 22. 23. Harper, Private Affairs, 22. 24. Harper, Private Affairs, 62. 25. Harper, Private Affairs, 63-64. 26. Griffin, “The Human Right to Privacy,” 705.
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27. Harper, Private Affairs, 63. 28. Humphreys, Laud. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. (1970; New York: Aldine, enlarged ed. 1975), 159. 29. Harper, Private Affairs, 28. 30. Derrida, “Of Hospitality,” 55. 31. Harper, Private Affairs, 82. 32. Harper, Private Affairs, 28. 33. Derrida, “Of Hospitality,” 47. 34. Derrida, “Of Hospitality,” 51. 35. Williams, “A Well Alibi’d Life,” 9. 36. Williams, “A Well Alibi’d Life,” 9. 37. Derrida, “Of Hospitality,” 57. 38. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” 51. The question of freedom of religion | Attiya Latif 1. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes On the State of Virginia: Written In the Year 1781. Paris, 178. 2. Winthrop, John. “Little Speech On Liberty.” [Boston: Directors of the South work, 1896. Mayflower Compact.] 3. Mayflower Compact. 4. Holowchak, Mark. Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy: Essays On the Philosophical Cast of Jefferson’s Writings. 5. Madison, James. Religious Freedom: a Memorial and Remonstrance, Drawn by His Excellency James Madison, Late President of the United States, Against the General Assessment, In “a Bill Establishing Provision for the Teachers of the Christian Religion” : Presented to the General Assembly of Virginia, At the Session of 1785. Boston: Printed and sold by Lincoln and Edmands, 1819. 5. Madison, Religious Freedom. 7. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Henry Reeve, and John Canfield Spencer. Democracy In America: . New York: E. Walker, 1850, 297. 8. Text of U.S. Supreme Court Decision: Robert E. Lee, et al., v. Daniel Weisman..” Journal of Church & State 34.3 (Summer92): 666-700. 9. Irons, Peter H., and Stephanie Guitton. May it Please the Court : the Most Significant Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955. New York: New Press , 2007. 10. Irons, May it Please the Court.
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11. Irons, May it Please the Court. Latino Voter Activation | Elizabeth Hilbert 1. Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, and Lopez, Mark Hugo. “Inside the 2012 Latino Electorate.” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project. June 3, 2013. 2. Gonzalez-Barrera and Lopez, “Inside the 2012 Latino Electorate.” 3. Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, Lopez, Mark Hugo, Passel, Jeffery S, and Taylor, Paul. “An Awakened Giant: The Hispanic Electorate is Likely to Double by 2030.” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project. November 14, 2012. 4. “U.S. Elections: How Groups Voted in 2012”. Roper Center for Public Opinion, University of Connecticut. 2014. Web. 5. “New Americans in Texas: The Political and Economic Power of Immigrants, Latinos, and Asians in the Lone Star State”. Immigration Policy Center. American Immigration Council. July 2013. Web. 6. Lopez, Mark Hugo and Taylor, Paul. “Latino Voters in the 2012 Election.” Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project. November 7, 2012. Web. 7. “2012 Presidential Election Results”. The Washington Post. 19 November 2012. Web. 8. “Arizona SB 1070: Legal Challenges and Economic Realities”. Immigration Policy Center. American Immigration Council. August 2011. Web. 9. Betheja. 10. Betheja. 11. Lopez and Taylor, “Latino Voters in the 2012 Election.” 12. Gonzalez-Barrera and Lopez, “Inside the 2012 Latino Electorate.” 13. Barreto, Matt A., Collingwood, Loren, and Garcia-Rios, Sergio A. “Revisiting Latino Voting: Cross-Racial Mobilization in the 2012 Election”. Political Research Quarterly. Vol. 74 No. 3 (2014), 633. 14. Geron, Kim. Latino Political Power. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 2005, 99. 15. Gonzalez-Barrera and Lopez, “Inside the 2012 Latino Electorate.” 16. Segura, Gary M. “Latino Public Opinion and Realigning the American Electorate.” Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Vol. 141 No. 4 (Fall 2012), 107. 17. Segura, “Latino Public Opinion,” 107. 18. Gonzalez-Barrera, et al, “An Awakened Giant.”
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19. Hajnal, Zoltan L., and Lee, Taeku. Why Americans Don’t Enjoy the Party: Race, Immigration, and the Failure (of Political Parties) to Engage the Electorate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 193. 20. Hajnal and Lee, Why Americans Don’t Enjoy the Party, 181. 21. Hajnal and Lee, Why Americans Don’t Enjoy the Party, 193. 22. DeSipio, Louis, de la Garza, Rodolfo O., and Leal, David L. Beyond the Barrio: Latinos in the 2004 Elections. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2010, 91. 23. Barreto, et al, “Revisiting Latino Voting,” 643. 24. Barreto, et al, “Revisiting Latino Voting,” 637. 25. Barreto, et al, “Revisiting Latino Voting,” 636. 26. Wallace, 1362. 27. Ramirez, Ricardo. Mobilizing Opportunities: The Evolving Latino Electorate and the Future of American Politics, 9. 28. Geron, Latino Political Power, 102. 29. Suro, Roberto. “Latino Numbers and Social Trends: Implications for the Future.” In Latinos and the Nation’s Future. Ed. Henry Cisneros. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 159. Print. 30. Roarty, Alex. “Obama Taking Arizona Just A Desert Mirage.” The National Journal. February 25, 2012, 9. Web. 31. Barreto, et al, “Revisiting Latino Voting,” 636. 32. Barreto, et al, “Revisiting Latino Voting,” 643. 33. Ramos, Jorge. The Latino Wave. New York: HarperCollins, 2004, 230. 34. Ramos, The Latino Wave, 237. 35. Abrajano, Marisa A. Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Advertising to Latino Voters. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 95. 36. Subervi-Velez, Federico A. The Mass Media and Latino Politics: Studies of U.S. Media Content, Campaign Strategies and Survey Research: 1984 2004. New York: Routledge, 2008, 303. 37. DeSipio, Louis. Counting on the Latino Vote: Latinos as a New Electorate. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 1996, 87. 38. DeSipio, Counting on the Latino Vote, 96. 39. DeSipio, Counting on the Latino Vote, 97. 40. DeSipio, Counting on the Latino Vote, 102. 41. DeSipio, Counting on the Latino Vote, 102. 42. DeSipio, Counting on the Latino Vote, 117. 43. Nicholson, Stephen P., Pantoja, Adrian, and Segura, Gary. “Political
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Knowledge and Issue Voting in the Latino Electorate.” Political Re search Quarterly. Vol. 59 No. 259 (June 2006), 266. 44. Nicholson, et al, “Political Knowledge and Issue Voting,” 268. 45. Ramos, The Latino Wave, 119. 46. Segura, “Latino Public Opinion,” 99. 47. Segura, “Latino Public Opinion,” 102. 48. Segura, “Latino Public Opinion,” 104. 49. Segura, “Latino Public Opinion,” 105. 50. Ramos, The Latino Wave, 125. 51. Sosa, Lionel. “Politics and the Latino Future: A Republican Dream.” In Latinos and the Nation’s Future. Ed. Henry Cisneros. Houston: Arte Publico Press. Print, 121. 52. Leighley, J. E., & Nagler, J. Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States. Princeton: Prince University Press, 2013, 104. 53. Leighley and Nagler, Who Votes Now?, 105. 54. Ryan, Camille L., & Siebens, Julie. “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2009”. U.S. Census Bureau. February 2012. Web, 5. 55. Leighley and Nagler, Who Votes Now?, 105. 56. Gonzalez-Barrera, et al, “An Awakened Giant.” 57. Roarty, “Obama Taking Arizona.” 58. Ryan, “Educational Attainment in the United States,” 5. 59. Roarty, “Obama Taking Arizona.” 60. Ramsey, Ross. “Voter Turnout as Big as Texas? Not Really” The New York Times. June 7, 2014. Web. 61. Shear, Michael D. “Demographic Shifts Bring New Worries for Republicans”. The New York Times. November 7, 2012. Web. 62. Brader, T., Valentino, N. A., & Suhay, E. 2008. “What triggers public opposition to immigration? Anxiety, group cues, and immigration threat”. American Journal of Political Science, 52(4), 968. 63. Brader and Suhay, “What triggers public opposition,” 961. 64. Shear, “Voter Turnout.” 65. “2012 Presidential Election Results” 66. Sosa, Lionel. “Politics and the Latino Future: A Republican Dream.” In Latinos and the Nation’s Future. Ed. Henry Cisneros. Houston: Arte Publico Press. Print, 119. 67. Ramos, The Latino Wave, 233.
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Amending the Constitution | Nicholas Kumleben 1. Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Samuel Kercheval. 1816. 2. Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Samuel Kercheval. 1816. Communicative competitor | Stephanie Shifflet 1. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy.” In Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2. Young, Iris Marion. 1996. “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy.” In Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 120-135. 3. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 120. 4. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 129. 5. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 130. 6. Young, Iris Marion. “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy.” New York: Oxford University Press. 686. 7. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” 83. 8. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 122. 9. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 123. 10. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” 82. 11. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” 72. 12. Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” 82. 13. Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” 687. 14. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 123. 15. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 124. 16. Young, “Communication and the Other,” 123. 17. “The Fight for Women’s Suffrage.” History. A & E Television Networks, 2013. Web. 24 October 2013. 18. “The Fight for Women’s Suffrage.” 19. “Growing Support for Gay Marriage: Changed Minds and Changing Demographics.” Pew Research: Center for the People & the Press. Pew Research Center, 20 March 2013. Web. 24 October 2013. 20. “States.” Freedom to Marry. Freedom to Marry Action, 2013. Web. 16 October 2013.
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Why Liberals Love the United Nations | Gabrielle Jorgenson 1. Reference to Robert Putnam’s “two-level game” theory, in which heads of state must juggle the interests of international actors and domestic-level constraints. (Putnam, Robert. “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games.” International Organization, Vol. 42 Issue 3. 1988.) 2. Gries, Peter Hays. The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs. Stanford: 2014, Stanford University Press. Print. 3. Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy. 4. Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy. 5. Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy, 235. 6. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: 2012, Vintage Books. Print. 7. Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 8. Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 9. Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 10. Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy. 11. Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 12. Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 13. Gries, The Politics of American Foreign Policy. 14. Kertzer, Joshua D., Powers, Kathleen E., Rathbun, Brian C., and Iyer, Ravi. “Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes.” Journal of Politics. Vol. 76 Issue 3, July 2014. 15. Kertzer, et al, “Moral Support.” 16. Kertzer, et al, “Moral Support.” 17. K ertzer, et al, “Moral Support.” 18. Glen, Carol M. “The United Nations Charter System and the Iraq Wars.” Public Integrity, Vol. 11 Issue 4, Fall 2009. 19. Glen, “The United Nations Charter System.” 20. Cheney, Richard. Interview with NBC, online transcript. 16 March 2003. Web. 21. Perle, Richard. Interview on Fox News Channel, 2003. Accessed through YouTube, 11 December 2014. Web. 22. “Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline.” FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. 19 March 2007. Web. Accessed 11 December 2014. Web.
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23. Birdsall, Andrea. “The ‘Monster That We Need to Slay’? Global Governance, the United States, and the International Criminal Court.” Global Governance, Vol. 16, Issue 4. October-December 2010. 24. Birdsall, “The ‘Monster That We Need to Slay’?.” 25. Birdsall, “The ‘Monster That We Need to Slay’?.” 26. Birdsall, “The ‘Monster That We Need to Slay’?.” 27. Birdsall, “The ‘Monster That We Need to Slay’?.” 28. Birdsall, “The ‘Monster That We Need to Slay’?.” 29. Betts, Richard K. “The Political Support System for American Primacy.” International Affairs, Vol. 81 Issue 1. 21 January 2005. 30. Betts, “The Political Support System.” 31. Betts, “The Political Support System.” 32. Zunes, Stephen. “Obama, Palestine, and the United Nations.” Tikkun, Vol. 27, Issue 2. Spring 2012. 33. Zunes, “Obama, Palestine, and the United Nations.” 34. Zunes, “Obama, Palestine, and the United Nations.” 35. Zunes, “Obama, Palestine, and the United Nations.” 36. “Timeline on Iran’s Nuclear Program.” The New York Times. Last Updated 20 November 2014. Web.
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