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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Independence Day Edition- Two peas in a pod [1]
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Date: 2023-07-04
We begin today’s Independence Day Edition of the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup with a paragraph I noticed near the end of Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” delivered July 5, 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York.
I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up, from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other.
Esau McCaulley of The New York Times reflects on Douglass’s views about false patriotism. Reflecting on the demand for patriotism, Douglass said “As a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans will be found by Americans.” Our country wants a certain version of the American story told and will laud anyone willing to tell it. But uncritical celebration is a limited and false definition of patriotism. Instead, recounting the full story of America and asking it to be better than it is can be an expression of love. Douglass challenged the idea that certain truths should be overlooked. He composed this speech in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all escaped slaves to be returned to their enslavers. He said this act of Congress turned the nation into a “hunting ground for men” and marred the whole Republic because “your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport.” Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post decries the U.S. Supreme Court’s abandonment for “authentic judicial review” for partisan politics.
Unhinged from judicial standards, the court now roves through the policy landscape, overturning decades of law and reordering Americans’ lives and institutions. It upends women’s health, revamps college admissions, snatches student aid from millions and redefines public accommodations (allowing egregious discrimination). In aggrandizing power, the court illegitimately dominates policymaking, undermining democracy to an extent we have not seen in nearly 100 years. (Ronald Brownstein pointed out that similar constitutional collisions in the 1850s and 1930s took a civil war or threat of court-packing to resolve.) Something must change if we want to preserve rule by the people’s elected leaders responsible to voters.[...] One telltale sign that the justices have become partisan politicians: their refusal to adopt mandatory ethics rules, which destroys the essence of judicial impartiality that is the root of their legitimacy. When judges cease to eliminate conflicts of interest or the appearance thereof, they appear indistinguishable from politicians wined and dined in rarefied settings by lobbyists. The stench of financial corruption, coupled with justices’ intemperate rants in partisan settings and in op-eds, convinces Americans that the justices are partisan players out to score points for their own side.
Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker looks at the fallacy of “color-blindness” in American law and history.
So why does this case elicit such intense passions on both sides, including a great deal of highly personal public feuding among the Justices in their opinions? To begin with, it taps into wildly different theories of American history. The conservative Justices’ opinions discern a golden thread (color blindness) running through the violence and tragedy of the past century and a half of racial law and policy: the Emancipation Proclamation; the post-Civil War Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution; Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lonely dissent in the Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision that upheld Jim Crow; the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (The Harvard and U.N.C. suits argue specifically that affirmative action violates the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.) Now, at last, in the view of the conservative Justices, we can restore the primacy of the golden thread. In fact, each of these historical moments was at the time seen as entirely racial, not color-blind, and none wound up installing a post-racist system that we now can restore. The Emancipation Proclamation, consecrated in our newest national holiday, Juneteenth, specifically permitted the continuation of slavery in areas controlled by the Union. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, initially failed to pass a Confederate-free House of Representatives. After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, as Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in their dissents, vetoed the first national civil-rights law, whose text might be read today as racially neutral, because he felt it discriminated in favor of Black people. The Southern states strongly opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, precisely because they conferred civil and voting rights on Black people, and ratified them only in order to be readmitted to the Union. After less than a decade, the former Confederacy had effectively nullified both amendments through a coördinated campaign of violent terrorism that the federal government grew weary of contesting. Closer to our time, after the civil-rights movement finally got the federal government to pay attention to race again, Presidents John F. Kennedy , in 1961, and Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, signed executive orders mandating affirmative action by government contractors—even though, as the golden-thread theory has it, they were merely trying to create a color-blind society. They did this because the country, particularly in its upper socioeconomic reaches, was almost completely segregated, whatever anti-discrimination provisions were being put into law. And today the vast majority of Black Americans still haven’t experienced a society that feels color-blind to them.
Charlotte Kilpatrick of The New Republic looks at the reasons, practice, and failures of French “universalism.”
Although accounts of discrimination at the hands of the police are widespread, proving it is an entirely different matter. That is because the French government has explicitly outlawed keeping any statistics on race. This means ethnic minorities can claim mistreatment all they want, but without any statistical evidence their claims fall on deaf ears. It is, in effect, the national policy of France to pretend that racism doesn’t exist within its boundaries. The law against statistics on race dates to the 1970s and has origins in the Holocaust. Defenders of the law claim the Nazis were able to round up Jews because the French government kept records on faith and ethnicity. Another reason, and perhaps the most deeply rooted, is the French ideal of universalism—the notion that one’s identity as a French citizen transcends race, gender, and religion. In Macron’s words: “‘Many’ doesn’t mean we’re an agglomerate of communities. It means we’re a national community.” This adherence to a singular national identity is defined abstractly by the French motto of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” All are equal before the law because the law, like society, is color-blind. This insistence on color-blindness manifests in different forms. Because the national curriculum is established centrally in Paris, it means all students, for example those in the French Caribbean islands who are descendants of enslaved Africans, are taught a shared history of France that begins with les Gaulois and climbs through the centuries of kings and queens before arriving at revolution and world wars. Colonialism and slavery are brushed upon, but unless a teacher at Frantz Fanon high school in Martinique takes precious time to step away from the national curriculum, none of the students will read the works of the Creole political philosopher.
You cannot solve a problem if you cannot name or even acknowledge that a problem exists.
Grégoire Poussielgue of the financial newspaper Les Echos notes that in the face of all of the protests in France this year, President Macron might shift to his political right.
Images of violence are circulating worldwide and raising legitimate concerns one year before the Olympic Games are scheduled to be held in Paris, The crisis is undermining the head of state. While he spoke of appeasement, he is now confronted with a security situation that has not been seen since the ‘yellow vest’ protests. “There are no more intermediary bodies, so there is no release valve. When there is a spark, it explodes,” notes an advisor. [...] Macron was attempting to broaden his majority to find pathways in the Assembly after the pension reform, but now he faces fierce criticism from the left, right, and far right. The left reproaches him for not devoting enough attention and resources to marginalized neighborhoods, with the far-left France Insoumise going further by even refusing to call for calm. Instead, the right accuses Macron of weakness in the face of rioters, with far-right leader Marine Le Pen demanding that the President receive the political forces represented in the Assembly to “discuss the serious situation in the country”.
Finally today, David Sadler of the British independent newspaper The Globe Echo points out that a lot of those aforementioned “images of violence” being shared on social networks consists of fake videos and pictures or, in other words, disinformation.
Burning cars, heavily armed police officers, thousands of demonstrators: the protests in France sometimes provide spectacular images that are of course also widely shared on social networks. But as is so often the case in such exceptional situations, much of the content shared is incorrect or misleading information. For example, a widespread video on TikTok, among others, shows several cars apparently falling out of a parking garage and exploding when they hit the street. But these scenes were not recorded in France, nor were they riots: a reverse image search shows that the video was recorded in 2016 – in Cleveland, Ohio. And the context is also completely different: the recordings were made on the set of the action film “Fast and Furious 8”. There are other examples of how films and series are used for disinformation in connection with the protests in France. For example, pictures of a police officer lying on the ground, his face covered in blood, were shared on Twitter. Among other things, users shared the picture with the demand to stop immigration and thus suggested that the alleged perpetrators were migrants. But even this picture was not taken in connection with the current protests. Because these are also recordings of a professional film set: the alleged police officer is the French actor Raphael Sergio, as he confirmed to the French daily “Liberation”.
Related: BBC Verify also has a story fact-checking the various images and videos of the French “riots” posted on social networks.
Have the best possible 4th of July holiday, everyone!
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