13 posts tagged “politics”

The other day Sarah received a box from her parents containing a bunch of odds and ends from her high school and college years. It was fun to look through the stuff, travel the paths of memories. The re-discoveries included these two flyers from the Carleton College campus, from 23 years ago. I still remember the Cesar Chavez lecture. He was amazing, and already a legend in 1986. The UFW was engaged in a new campaign then, this time linking the working conditions of the fruit pickers to the heavy use of pesticides by commercial growers. It was a precursor to today’s many-sided environmental and climate justice movements.

I try to tell my younger friends about how it was then, at least on the Carleton campus. Every few weeks there were campus visits from noted activists, progressive thinkers, and workers for justice and liberation campaigns. People like Michael Harrington, Dennis Banks, and Angela Davis. And lots of other less famous people. The "tenured radicals" and so-called Closing of the American Mind backlash was right around the corner, but these widespread and frequent appearances by left wing figures were yet to be targeted by the organized right. Looking back on it, it was a very free moment in liberal education. I honestly don’t recall any of those events being documented. Partly, I’m guessing, because they weren’t recognized as so unusual or worthy of archiving. And partly out of simple neglect. So these flyers, randomly saved by Sarah years ago, are an important slice of our political eduction, i.e. a documentary bit of how that education actually was delivered two and a half decades ago.

sandinista visitor, 1986

cesar chavez flyer from '86, carleton college

It was more than three years ago that I picked up a remaindered copy of Hannah Arendt's classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. It sat on the shelf for a long while before I decided to tackle it. Nobody would call me a voracious reader, but I try to read at least one difficult book a year. I mean, that's opposed to the light reading that balances my book diet, or, even lighter, the re-readings of old favorites. Anyway, The Origins of Totalitarianism was to be it. And it is. I'm about 140 pages into it.

Around when I started it, my brother-in-law, who is a historian by training and blogs on urban development issues, told me that it took him some time to understand that starting a book, or reading a book, doesn't necessarily mean reading the whole thing. That selective and partial reading is allowed, and may often be a better use of one's time. I have always been a bit of a purist in that respect, expecting myself to read a book in full, if I was going to say that I had read it. But The Origins of Totalitarianism is a big book, about two inches thick; I thought to myself, maybe this is the book I'll try that out on. Or at least, be open to it.

So I started by aiming to read only Part One of the three parts, Antisemitism. But then I talked to political science professor and Mess Hall keyholder Sophia Mihic. Turns out she teaches this book regularly. I told her my plan. And she says to me, "well, you've got to read Part Two, Imperialism, because it's amazingly relevant and current material." So I am. And she's right. Oh my god, is she right.

I'm only about fifteen pages into Part Two, and it's all there: our current situation. Arendt describes the economics of imperialism, which she defines as existing as a historical period from 1884 to 1914, and forming the transitional period between the 19th and 20th centuries, as the crystallization of expansion for expansion's sake. Part and parcel of this political-economic development was the move from a production economy to a speculation economy. The other essential element in her narrative is the subservience of states to business. When speculation ran aground, armies were called in to do the dirty work of pacifying native peoples, the better that the speculators could realize their returns, through straight plunder, if necessary.

Weirdly (or not?) the currency of Arendt's analysis was just yesterday recognized by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times. The thing Bernstein does not talk about, and what really distresses, is the fact that Arendt wrote all this in 1948. Between '48 and the period of Imperialism, only a catastrophe across Europe and much of the world brought some clarity following the decades of dysfunction. What will a political historian be writing about in 2048? What awful events, what multiple holocausts, will happen between now and then, that said historian will emerge mid-century clear-eyed?

But that all said, I'm still making no promises on finishing the book.

Social interactions in the United States between persons are always already informed by    race relations, precisely because this society is and always has been made up of so many different kinds of races, nationalities, and ethnicities, and because this social mixture, unprecedented in the history of the world, takes place and is driven by a system that effectively builds wealth through conditions that reinforce political and economic inequality.

Importantly, this element in interpersonal sociobility is increasingly evident in all other parts of the world, too, including in those places that not long ago were either peacefully and somewhat obliviously harmonious (as the Chinese government would say), or largely homogenous, in which case the personal encounters with racial difference hardly occurred. So, it is not just an American thing. But the degree of attention given to race relations, the pure, universal obsession of it, seems very much to be an American thing.

Americans live with the question “What does race have to do with (fill in the blank, fill in with any social phenomenon at all)?” in the back of one’s mind all the time. How we collectively attend to that question determines much of the public discourse about race. The collective treatment breaks down into several levels of honesty and insightfulness, which do not necessarily align with political position. For example, I for one happen to believe that right wingers such South Carolina’s Joe Wilson have thought through their positions on race relations at an impressively detailed level. Indeed, the way in which Mr. Wilson walked the line by heckling President Obama through the doubly charged filter of health care reform and illegal immigration just goes to confirm the subtlety of the lout’s thought process.

The hubbub over the Wilson disgrace, now with Jimmy Carter weighing in full force, is in many ways predictable. For one thing, hasn’t Obama by now demonstrated beyond a doubt that he will not be provoked into anger by crude insults, racist caricatures, and old-fashioned epithets? As much as many on the left and especially many from his black constituency would love nothing better than a flash outburst from him, a direct confrontation and put down of the racist right, he has shown that it is simply not going to come from him. He made that clear a long time ago; he’s been called every name in the book, long, long before he ran for national office. It is simply not a game he plays.

Okay, whatever. It is a predictable progression. The Wilson intervention (which is exactly what it was), then the pundits weighing in, then President Carter openly naming the racism, then the Obama people saying those kinds of accusations are not their game.

On the question of race relations, what I am finding really interesting is the other story dominating the online headlines right now, the disappearance and murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le. One might say that this story is also following a familiar script: young woman disappears, corpse is found later, male acquaintence/workmate is identified as a suspect, the suspect is revealed as cocky and having had some problems with women in the past, loads of circumstantial evidence suggest that this is the murderer, cops close in….The only unknown to this story is whether the guy has the balls to kill himself before the heat arrive for the last time. Given picture of a loser that is emerging, I kinda doubt it. If anything, we may have another suicide chump on our hands.

But I find it fascinating, especially given the race flare-up going on in the Joe Wilson story, that there has been basically no mention of there being a racial dimension to the Annie Le story. Or at least, it hasn’t been raised directly. It is being raised indirectly; a great many of the profiles of the suspect, Raymond Clark III, make it a point to mention that his high school activities included membership in the Asian Awareness Club. Some of the shorter items even highlight this tidbit from Clark’s past. Why is this worth mentioning, if not to obliquely suggest that Clark had some (possibly pathological) interest in Asian people, and more specifically, Asian women? If this is indeed the question, then we should ask it directly, and not only of Clark. With regard to this story and the reporting of it, the question then becomes, why the oblique messaging? Is it not believable that this murder was in part or whole racially motivated? And what does ‘racially motivated’ even mean when, as anyone who knows anything about Asian American gender relations knows, white men and Asian and Asian American women meet, unavoidably, at the intersection of a long, transnational history of colonially-informed, sexually-mediated interaction?

Let’s flip it around. I think a lot more insight can be gained by thinking of Joe Wilson’s “You lie [boy]!” as an expression of white male privilege, emphasis on the male, under attack from not only the rise to power of so-called minorities, but of powerful women, in particular. As equal income-earners, as a higher educated segment of the society, as a greater proportion of the urban population, and so forth. What kind of contortions must we perform to see that Wilson’s “You lie [boy]!” was a shot across the bow of feminism, gender equality, and women’s safety? I have no doubt that Wilson would claim to be a defender of women’s honor, but that Old South canard about chivalry stands up about as well as the slaveholder’s professed love for his slave.

That leaves the Annie Le story as today’s racially-charged narrative.

Nice to see some real leadership out of Congress every once in a while. It is especially gratifying when it's your representative. In this case, Madison's Honorable Tammy Baldwin.

What is sad is that there are no co-sponsors. Perhaps you could ask your rep to consider it?

Outside the MuseumsQuartier there is an info kiosk designed to drum up interest in the upcoming European Parliament elections. You would think that this display of packaged chicken should be enough to get people to care.

But one of the two young people manning the booth tells me that the voting rate is down around 20%.

I just had to get this on record:  some people have real nerve. Case in point, one Mister Jake DeSantis, formerly of AIG.

His letter of resignation is a study in arrogance, extreme and unshackled. I respond:

First of all, don't play the martyr for us, trumpeting on about how you were doing this out of duty, working for $1 a year. Buddy, you were overpaid even then. It should have been one freakin Abraham Lincoln cent. For the amounts AIG cost the millions of American tax-paying workers, not to mention the honest (or simply less greedy!) investors out there, you should by all rights be working in a chain gang, digging ditches in the national interest. That is not too strong a sentiment, considering the grandchildren of today's young people will still be saddled with the debts incurred by these bailouts.

And then - of course - you say it was not your fault, nor the fault of anyone in particular. Well, I must say, if you're looking for sympathy and new friends, that is not how to find them. If you are gonna claim innocence and be so close to the damage, then you better name some names. And if your point is that we are all at fault, that the lawmakers didn't do their job, and the public didn't pay attention, well, I must say, ordinary people didn't make millions upon millions, either, but sure as heck are stuck with the bill. 

And can we say entitled? So you worked your way into MIT. Big whoop. That means you don't have to fix the mistakes your company - yeah, the one that issued the paychecks - made? That means you get all the extra-special rewards for your good work, but bear no special responsibility? I can appreciate the man's sense of charity, and I know there are lots of groups who can use that bonus money he's giving away. But to somehow think that you still have any say in the matter, given what's owed the public, is simply astonishing.

To those who say to Mister DeSantis stop whining and get a clue, I am with you.

Lauren Berlant also commented on the buzz kill response to the Obama victory from parts of the Left, Judith Butler's text among them. Cross posted with permission.

She says:

Dear Friends, Please do not allow your political optimism about Obama’s election to make you stupid! Here’s how to stay sharp and smart…

If mainstream politics significantly shapes your mood, this week has been a blow to normalcy.  For the moment, Obama is the President of our emotional Infrastructure as well as the economic and physical ones. As a result, if you’re like me, you have been inundated by condescending and vitalizing exhortations not to become naive or stupid where political happiness also is.

This bolus of anxiety expresses the fear that political happiness will lead to a flatlined complacent brain, diminished political judgment, and the revelation of your bad taste. The claim that anxiety makes you smart makes me laugh. But solidaristically, not condescendingly.

We’ve all been in bad love affairs before, where our attachments made us stupid. Once you attach to an object, after all, you become aware that the object isn’t in your control. Suddenly the prospect of having the object and losing the object, of getting more and less than you want from it, rule you. You become aware that the intensity of your attachment is not unconditional, even as you demand unconditional fidelity from the other person. When the pulses that brought you to the person subside you ask, “What did I want when I wanted that?” Then your affect and intelligence shift around, trying to make new sense of things. If the object is a political figure, perhaps you start circulating screeds to your friends, reminding them not to be stupid where there is desire.

But these efforts to manage the anxiety of political attachment and of optimism about it are actually oversimple about how (political) emotion can work. I don’t have the space here to make the long argument. Here’s a bit of it. Attachments are intrinsically optimistic. The event of attachment does not make us stupid but releases a slew of smart but often overwhelming thoughts about how complicated attachment is.

We are ambivalent about what we want, for lots of reasons. Attachment reveals our dependency on something, our need for reciprocity and recognition, and the place of fantasy in managing life. One strategy of managing this is sometimes to pretend that our feelings aren’t mixed. Then when the world disappoints us we can say that we were true while the other was false. Another way to manage this is to claim that we are complex while the other people are disappointing, limited, and deserving of critique and complaint. But presuming a self-interested distinction between complexity and simplicity where attachment is concerned itself performs a fantasy that there are unmixed feelings and that people are ever simple. Even your grandmother wasn’t that simple, trust me. But you knew that. You just wanted someone to be simple so that you could reliably rest in proximity to the scene of the love.

So can we think about political emotion differently, and be less afraid of optimism? The process of managing the ambivalent feelings that come from active political commitment is fundamentally optimistic, and no one needs to be protected against that. Optimism is what keeps you in the scene as it veers between being joyful, stressful, and tedious. Indeed, David Graeber argues that solidarity amounts to a comic commitment to practicing expressing political desire and finding pleasure and sustenance in disagreement, along with all the other political emotions (such as, boredom, aversion, outrage, betrayal). Not that there’s anything wrong with a rigorous fear of one’s own stupidity–after all, fear can be a teacher of sorts. But let’s not equate a sense of happiness with shallowness and emotional darkness with truth and profundity.

Oh yes, about Obama, the neoliberal, gay-marriage compromised, “market guy…” Here’s what makes me politically happy about the event of Obama. He is the first mainstream politician in decades who loves the political process. He does not confuse “Washington” with politics. His organization’s practice of training other organizers demonstrates his commitment to producing skills for political world-building beyond his campaign.

In this way the event of Obama has already massively advanced the skills for democracy in the United States. In other ways he seems committed to constraining and even undermining what that might entail concretely. Protesting and appreciating, though, are some of what we do to maintain the optimism of any attachment. They keep you bound to the (political) scene, to the cognitive and affective difficulties of remaining critically present to desire.

It was about three days after the election that Mary Patten forwarded a text by Judith Butler to the gochgo list. It was Uncritical Exuberance?, and I guess the story is that Butler composed it on or soon after Election Day, sent it around through her circles and from there it was passed along widely. You can read it here.

I wrote a response which was posted to  eipcp, and also below. Gerald Raunig put in the work of translating it for readers of German.

A Response to Judith Butler:  Working the Optimism

Judith Butler’s commentary Uncritical Exuberance? continues what the left has been doing for so long it is now almost second nature: distance itself from the power structure.  Critical voices on the left are always the first to see the likelihoods of cooptation, neutralization of radical elements, assimilation of grassroots formal innovation into the institutional sphere, misreadings of a political figure as a messianic force, looming conflicts and frustrations with erstwhile allies, and all the various pitfalls of politics at the mass, national, mediated scale.  But when Butler asks, to where is our wholehearted and emotionally-rewarding identification with (first) the Obama campaign and (now, maybe?) this president leading us, I cannot help but think, there is a slightly different set of questions the critical left needs to be asking right now.

Not that Butler’s questions are without merit.  It is fair to ask, are leftist positions in danger of traveling in an emotional bubble, the skin stretching as some mass illusion of Obama-as-redemption takes hold, putting itself at risk of blowing up with the first great disappointment?  But I think this question is rather easily answered:  No.  If the unity/new politics/change/hope bubble was not popped long ago by Obama’s two year-old team of brass-heavy foreign policy advisers, it has been in the mere days since the election.  From within, the appointment of so many former Clinton-associated figures to the transition teams dispels illusions, and from conditions outside, the daily onslaught of announced mass layoffs and other bad economic developments does the same thing.  We all know this is a president going into the job with his hands tied and choices limited, no matter his intentions.  If any of his domestic initiatives—serious health care reform, big time green tech investments, national service programs, etc.—gain early traction, he will have proved himself a political Houdini.  And if the unfolding conditions in Washington do not splash cold water onto the face of a hopeful electorate, then perhaps the news of fresh suicide attacks in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last week, resulting in scores of dead, served to remind just how awful and messy these next few years will be, everywhere, always. 

It is true, America felt like a new country for about a day, maybe two.  Those denying reality stretched it into the weekend.  But by the time Obama took the televised walk to the Oval Office with George W. Bush at his side six days after the election, any residual exhilarations had been flattened into the self-congratulatory feelings which accompany the achievement of a first:  yes, there goes the First Black President-Elect.  As in, there is a first time for everything.  No more messiah, no more euphoria, no more fantasies of redemption.  Is the mood much improved?  How could it not be with the first concrete signal of the impending departure of the evil, disasterous, and violent Bush regime?  Given the literally torturous tenure of George W. Bush, identifying Obama—and identifying with Obama—as the cleansing agent ready to flush the White House of its eight-year build-up of scum seems perfectly reasonable.  While Butler’s theoretical analysis of this identification remains impressive for its sheer, uncompromising criticality, ie that such personal identifications which are at least partially the result of strategically produced affects perform functions essential to the machinery of fascism, it is undone by the example she herself cites.  Liddy Dole, bursting with love for ‘each and every one of us,’ and a heavily favored incumbent and national Republican figure, lost the US Senate seat held only six years ago by paleo-conservative Jesse Helms to a little known Democratic state senator.  This time around, the voters of North Carolina rejected all that ‘love’—by nearly ten points.

But more to the point, in this crucial moment is the primary job of critical theoreticians to poke holes in our optimism, our satisfaction, our good feelings?  Even if the exuberance has run its short course and rendered the question moot, I still answer, no, not as an end in itself, or as a precondition for further political work.  Butler cites voter contradictions to remind us of our reasons to remain sober.  Disunity on gay marriage and the rights of Palestinians are only the two most pronounced of the disagreements internal to the grand coalition that elected Obama.  There are other divides and gaps, as well.  But is this news?  When Butler says we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him, I say, has there been anybody, anywhere, who fully agrees with Obama on all the issues?  For the hard activist left, the ‘new configuration’ may be simply this:  we have finally, for one election cycle, gotten over our insistence on being right at the expense of being effective.  I do not have a problem with being rewarded, for once in my lifetime at least, with the feeling that comes riding an insurgent campaign to a win on a grand scale.

Critical voices on the left do need to be heard right now, but the most pressing task is to conduct self-analyses apropos the conditions now defined by a successful national campaign that featured and relied on the essentials of a grassroots organizing model.  Rather than merely reminding us of Obama’s shortcomings, or, as Butler does, of listing the left’s minimal demands that must be met to prevent a ‘dramatic and consequential disillusionment,’ the urgent responsibility right now for the critical left is to dissect this victory and map workable strategies for pushing a progressive agenda, including in intra-coalition campaigns.  This involves recalling what kind of thick-skinned work brought us that moment of Election Night joy, and, just as importantly, to study how the reactionary forces are likely to respond to this administration.

If we who supported Obama all gulped a bit of the Kool-Aid, for its part the campaign squeezed the tube.  The grassroots are now out, volunteers by the thousands, trained and invested—one might even say habituated—and the more the theoreticians among us attend to the strategic tasks of continued organizing, based on the actualities of activist work plus the lessons of the campaign recently won, the more the grassroots element will evolve and mature.  Ideally, Obama-identified grassroots constituencies and work forces will grow to become not fully directable by Obama, and will have the potential to outlast him.  Progressive dreams have always included building movements with leverage over national politicians, and here we have the chance.  So even though I agree when Butler says many of us "set aside" our concerns in order to enjoy the extreme un-ambivalence of this moment, I think her worries about uncritical exuberance are, while not necessarily overstated, somewhat misplaced.  When those of us who are committed to full gay rights, or Palestinian rights, or another progressive cause that goes against Democratic Party liberal orthodoxy and/or the moderation of Obama himself, begin the difficult and tedious work of lobbying our opponents/one-time coalition allies (and their constituents, on their doorsteps, in their neighborhoods, instead of on our blogs), looking for those individuals (the ‘each and every’ of grassroots organizing) who just may be convinceable but for whatever reason have fallen into the opposing camp, any lingering good feeling over the election victory will seem very distant.  But if we show up and do the work, future victories for progressives in those areas will at least be in the cards.  Whether, why, and how we should show up to do this work are the questions we need to be thinking through.  Butler is right in identifying that space of a ‘critical politics’ as moving between illusion and cynicism.  Widening that space depends on our continued political work, that is, on our continual generation of concrete contestations, the analyses of which will automatically recalibrate the emotions to a more restrained register, but would do so without turning to the crutch of measuring Obama’s imminent actions and non-actions according to the default moralism of the left.  And we do the work to win—precisely so we can feel that feeling again.

Already there’s been quite a bit of writing, remarking, and blogging on the Obama victory as a sort of national catharsis. But like the fluid identity of Obama himself, the emotional healing enters the picture from any number of angles. Here’s mine.

Forty years after the Chicago Police, under orders from Mayor Richard J. Daley—remembered by more than a few from that time as an out and out racist—beat down the anti-war demonstrators in Grant Park during the DNC and in the process established definitively a split between the New Left and the Democratic Party, the younger Mayor Daley welcomed supporters of Barack Obama downtown for the election night celebration party, whether they had tickets or not. He did this knowing full well he was putting his fate into the hands of a young leader who, if he’d had the curse to stand before the throngs in defeat, or worse, perceived criminal theft of an election, would have had the responsibility to quell an unfolding riot, if not a new civil war.

This act of faith on the part of Richard Daley the Son, seemed to offer another dimension to the feeling of this election’s seeming resolution of long-standing divides:  after ’68, Nixon, the ineffective Carter, the victorious Reagan, the centrist Clinton, and the nightmare that is Bush the Younger, is the Left back in the fold of the Democratic Party? It is a fair question, because the activist Left put in some serious work for the Obama campaign, in the meantime shelving work on many other struggles. Also, there is the plain reality of the incessent right wing chatter/incantation of the names Bill Ayers, ACORN, and Jeremiah Wright—names, groups, and lineages (SDS, Weather Underground, Alinsky-style organizing around poverty issues, black liberation theology) to which, really, only the activist Left are positively attached. When such associations were used to attack Obama many leftists felt a righteous responsibility to contribute to the campaign, no matter the falseness or prespostureousness of the charges. In other words, just as it assisted Obama in uniting the rest of the fractured social body to form a single voting majority, the Right did an excellent job of driving the activist Left directly into the waiting arms (and stacks of phone bank lists) of the Obama campaign.

The activist Left will be disappointed with Obama. We all know that. But the present day Left’s aversion to party politics—and to the Democratic Party in particular—may not soon return to its pre-Obama state. For one thing, the paranoid Right won’t silence its chatter anytime real soon, and may even amplify it in the coming months. Every time Bill Ayers is trotted out as a bogeyman, the Left has a responsibility to respond, if only to defend our own history. But each response probably will, conveniently for Obama and the revitalized Dems, contain at least a trace defense of Obama, and therefore remain somewhat positionable within that camp. The regional, ideological, cultural, and, most importantly, political marginalization of the Right is one consequence of this united Center-Left. And for that I will not complain.

*
Watching the Republican television commentators tonight was alternately baffling, wince-inducing, and just plain infuriating. Baffling, because they just didn’t seem to get it. Not a single one of them whom I saw—Karl Rove, John Bolton, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Tom Delay, and others--acknowledged their failures and looked in the mirror. I can’t help thinking, don’t they want to know what went wrong and why they lost? For example, Rove smugly reminded viewers that Democratic Congressional leadership has earned negatives right down there with his old boss, W. But he never stopped to consider the possibility that Pelosi’s disapproval numbers might have something to do with the fact that in one of her first (non) acts as House Speaker, she took impeachment ‘of the table.’ Their pathetic attempts to cast early doubt on an Obama administration by continuing the very lines of attack that earned them the evening’s national electoral doghouse caused me to wince out of a combination of embarrassment and irritation. The infuriation came when after the election had been called and the discussions turned to how Obama’s achievement stands in the context of the struggle for racial justice in America. John Bolton’s first remark on this topic to BBC telejournalists was a belligerent demand that Europeans never again accuse America of having a racial problem—as if all racial problems were done with, and, furthermore, that he and his extremist wingnut gang had something to do with solving this problem! Others spoke of having lifted the ‘excuse’ of racism—as if they could take credit for this positive turn in American social evolution! Unbelieveable.

*
The world is getting to know Chicago. The faces we saw at the Grant Park celebration? That is Chicago, and that, Sarah Palin, is the real America. It is the America I love seeing. And what about the bullet-proof glass behind which Obama delivered his victory speech? That, too, is Chicago—specifically, the South Side, where in some parts a majority of one’s consumer purchases may be conducted through bullet-proof glass. I know it was a Secret Service thing, and it wasn’t to protect against a stick-up, and they had them polished to near-liquid invisibility, but having made my home on the South Side for more than a decade, I must say, it was the slightest bit ghetto. You could even say, as far as bullet-proof protection goes, it was ghetto fab. Which is also very Chicago. These were to the world of bullet-proof glass what glittering, spinning rims are to the world of hydraulic rides.

*
In the discussions of an expanded Democratic electorate, it is worth noting that the election to the US Senate of the Udall cousins in Colorado and New Mexico marks a return as much as it does a departure. Sure, Obama broke ground as an urban-based, minority candidate who found success in the West, but the Udalls bring the federal political profile of the mountain west back to its progressive roots. Being the sons of Mo Udall and Stewart Udall, putting conservation on the federal agenda runs in their blood. Hopefully, the younger Udalls will bring to the Senate a full backlash against the evisceration of America’s wilderness heritage and the deliberate despoilation of western government land under the Bushites. This is an incredibly important moment for such issues, as last minute orders on use of federal lands—sometimes impossible to undo—have become standard fare for lame duck presidents in recent administrations.

*
On the morning of Election Day I had my semi-regular meeting with my language tutor/coach, a native of Beijing. The day’s discussion of course went straight to the elections. Never having voted, and not having grown up in a society with elections, he had many questions for me. When are the votes counted? Is a winner announced the same day? If this is a federal election, then why do all the states have their own voting rules, hours, and machines? In my halting Mandarin and spotty knowledge about the ins and outs of election operations, I tried to explain the American way. He described the Chinese way, by contrast, as really simple. You never vote. There are elections for representatives to the National Congress, but they are never announced, never publicized, there are no campaigns, and most people hear about them only after the fact, if at all. And there is no information about what the representative then does or says. Worse yet, in the various congresses, all votes are taken by a show of hands, which serves to encourage super majorities and frequently unanimity, especially on sensitive measures. So it is true—China is not a democracy. On the other hand, how would it even begin, should the CCP decide to start an electoral process? Does India’s system work any better? By and large, the Chinese do not think so.