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on Hillary Clinton and Julius Jones of #blacklivesmatter

The taped discussion between Hillary Clinton and Julius Jones of Black Lives Matter is a rich and fascinating document (full transcript here). Jones begins by telling HRC, “You and your family have been personally and politically responsible for policies that have caused … disasters in impoverished communities of color. … And so I just want to know how you feel about your role in that violence and how you plan to reverse it?”

HRC acknowledges the very bad consequences of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration. But the two disagree about whether those policies were “extensions of white supremacist violence” (Jones) or else well-intentioned responses to the “very serious crime wave that was impacting primarily communities of color and poor people” and to the “very real concerns of people in the communities themselves” (HRC).

(NB It is possible that both interpretations are true, or at least partly so. For an interesting contemporaneous document on Black politicians and the 1994 Crime Bill, see this clipping, courtesy of the Brennan Center.)

Clinton repeatedly asks Jones for policy proposals, and Jones repeatedly presses Clinton for more explicit expressions of regret or changes of heart. The dialog ends with this exchange:

JONES: The piece that’s most important, and I stand here in your space, and I say this as respectfully as I can, but you don’t tell Black people what we need to do. And we won’t tell you all what you need to do.

HILLARY CLINTON: I’m not telling you—I’m just telling you to tell me.

[snip]

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, respectfully, if that is your position then I will talk only to White people about how we are going to deal with the very real problems—

QUESTION: That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I mean. But like what I’m saying is what you just said was a form of victim-blaming. Right you were saying that what the Black Lives Matter movement needs to do to change white hearts—

HILLARY CLINTON: Look I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. …

One difference here is about mechanisms of change. Clinton acknowledges that there is value to the “the consciousness-raising, the advocacy, the passion, … of your movement,” but she believes that change always requires the passage of laws that reallocate rights and powers. Jones thinks that what Clinton believes and says to other White people about their own responsibility is a crucial element of change.

Another (related) difference is about the diagnosis of social problems. Clinton sees a set of interlocking causes for mass incarceration, including well-intentioned laws, economic factors, racism, etc. “You know, it’s not just an economic issue—although I grant that some of you will see it like that. But it’s more than that and I think there is a sense that, low level offenders, disparity treatment, we’ve got to do something about that. I think that a lot of the issues about housing and about job opportunities—’Ban The Box’—a lot of these things, let’s get an agenda that addresses as much of the problem as we can.”

In partial contrast, Jones sees one root cause to the problem, and it involves the hearts of white people (which Clinton has said you can’t change). Jones says, “Until someone takes that message and speaks that truth to White people in this country so that we can actually take on anti-Blackness as a founding problem in this country, I don’t believe that there is going to be a solution.”

My thoughts, for what they’re worth:

First, if it is ever helpful to ask any candidate about her values and priorities, then it is appropriate to probe Hillary Clinton’s “heart” on questions about race. I tend to think that we rely too much on psychological evaluations of candidates. Our impressions are almost always inaccurate, because our relationships with politicians are mediated; and they have less scope for choice than we assume. But this is a huge issue on which President Hillary Clinton might have quite a bit of scope for choice. She also has a problematic record. It is helpful to know what she deeply thinks now. That is information a citizen can use in deciding how and whether to vote.

But I have doubts about a general strategy of trying to get people to acknowledge their privileges. (This is more about the White voters to whom HRC would talk about white supremacy than about her own opinions.) “Privilege” means an unjustifiable advantage. Telling people they have a privilege may easily remind them of an advantage that they will want to protect. Cases are rare indeed when large numbers of people have acknowledged privileges and then dropped them. One example was August 4, 1789, when representatives of the French aristocracy stayed up all night voting to repeal the various privileges of the nobility. It was a glorious night but it did not end well.

The last paragraph may seem cynical, but I am optimistic about other paths to change that do not involve getting privileged people to acknowledge their privileges. The oppressed can gain leverage (economic or political) and negotiate change. Or a majority can be persuaded that change is in their interests as well. For instance, middle class white people may be persuaded that mass incarceration is unnecessarily expensive. In the transcript, HRC says, “That’s what I’m trying to put together in a way that I can explain and I can sell it. Because in politics, if you can’t explain it and you can’t sell it, it stays on its shelf.” I don’t know if she has in mind arguments about cost, but they would exemplify arguments that she could “sell.”

I am generally committed to a critique of root-cause analysis. (See Roberto Unger against root causes and this post on the idea of root causes in education.) I believe that problems typically involve multiple causes and complex feedback loops; and sometimes you can make the most substantial and lasting difference by attacking an apparently superficial element of a system. That said, the Black Lives Matter campaign is making a strong argument that racism, if not the one root cause of a wide range of problems, is at least necessarily involved in any solution.

Finally, I do not agree with Clinton that you can’t–or shouldn’t–“change hearts.” In the 2008 primaries, she and Senator Obama had an important debate about the role of bottom-up social movements in reforming society by changing values and perceptions. Clinton tended to disparage their impact, arguing, for instance, that the main impact of the Civil Rights Movement came from politicians’ passing the Civil Rights Acts. I think Obama was right to emphasize the deep changes in values and everyday behavior that arose from the social movement. (See Wilentz v. Ganz on the Obama social movement and the Clinton/Obama spat.)

However, a national political leader is well placed to pass laws but poorly placed to lead a social movement, as I think we have observed during President Obama’s period in the White House. So it could be that HRC is correct about the role she should be playing, even if she is wrong to downplay social movements that change hearts.

(Cf. #Blacklivesmatter and Sen. Sanders: social democracy and identity politics.)

debating the continued importance of institutions

liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution

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Reverence for our written Constitution is a highly unusual feature of the political culture of the USA, sometimes verging on a civic religion. Teaching students to hold the Constitution in high regard is also an unusually prominent purpose of civic education in this country. And of course, our Constitution is the oldest in the world and (to the best of my knowledge) the one least subject to change, which means that it has run as a cord through our whole history since 1788.

According to a 2011 Time/Abt SRBI poll, which is the most recent survey I have found, 64% of Americans believe that the Constitution has “held up well” and doesn’t need change.

That is a majority, but not an overwhelming one, and opinions differ by ideology. According to the same poll, 62% of Republicans are “strict constructionists,” believing that the constitution should be interpreted according to the framers’ original intent. In contrast, 67% of Democrats favor “flexibility.” And Democrats are more open to the idea of a new constitutional convention to change the document.

I would challenge the presumption that conservatives do (or should) like the Constitution more than liberals do. One could argue that everyone reads the document selectively, with some favorite parts and other sections that we would rather delete if we could. Conservatives are enamored of the list of enumerated powers, the Second Amendment, and the Tenth Amendment (among other passages). Liberals are more excited about the Necessary and Proper Clause, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Many liberals have acknowledged that they would get rid of the Second Amendment if they could. But some strong conservatives would like to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment (allowing the income tax) or even the Seventeenth (direct election of US Senators). Candidates Trump, Paul, Santorum, Graham, Christie, Carson, and Jindal, and (less consistently) Kasich and Walker have said that they would end the birthright to citizenship that is central to the Fourteenth Amendment. That hardly reflects reverence for the document as it is today.

At the same time, I would criticize the bipartisan tendency to constitutional piety and the way that it restricts our constitutional imaginations. There are many reasons to think the document is flawed. Just to name one, the separate election of presidents and congresses is a recipe for gridlock or even for constitutional crises, averted so far mostly because our parties didn’t polarize ideologically until the end of the 20th century.

James Madison made sure to study the experience of as many republics as he could before he traveled to Philadelphia to begin writing the Constitution. No one who undertook a similar study nearly 250 years later would design a constitution with a powerful, separately elected president; and actual new democracies never copy our design nowadays.

Another flaw is a set of massive omissions. The real political system of the 21st century is characterized by corporations, political parties, permanent military and security agencies, and a very large administrative/regulatory state. The Constitution is silent on all of those institutions. The Citizens United decision did not–contrary to received opinion on the liberal side–define corporations as people, but it did treat them as regular associations under the First Amendment. Parties and unions also get lumped together as associations because they are not otherwise recognized in the text of the Constitution. And since the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and the regulatory state are missing, courts struggle to understand these entities as creatures of the legislature that are lodged within the executive instead of branches of government with their own powers, perils, and limitations.

If you are a libertarian constitutional originalist, you have a clear and simple solution to these omissions. Get rid of the regulatory state, which isn’t an enumerated power of Congress and which unconstitutionally delegates legislative power to unelected executive branch staff. Once the federal government is unable to regulate, corporate political power will become unimportant because there will be little to lobby on. That is a consistent view, and it reinforces enthusiasm for the text of the Constitution, which becomes the basis for a radical reform movement. But no one has ever seen a globalized corporate economy without a regulatory state. I am not sure it is possible; I certainly doubt that it would be desirable or popular.

Assuming, then, that we will continue to have people like party leaders, lobbyists, spies, and regulators, their powers and limitations should be addressed in the Constitution.

More generally, to imagine improvements to a society’s constitutional order seems an important form of citizenship. Even for children, it is interesting and valuable to debate changes in the Constitution or whole alternative documents. Adolescent and adult activists should be free actually to pursue such changes. Our constitutional piety has advantages (reinforcing the stability of our system, restraining certain kinds of populist excess, and providing a superior alternative to ethnic nationalism), but it badly restrains acts of constitutional imagination that should be part of active and creative citizenship.

blogging lightly this week …

… because I am taking some time off and also because traffic to the blog is low in mid-August, as in past years.

latest thoughts on animal rights and welfare

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When we stand to affect another person or animal, at least four moral considerations seem potentially relevant:

The creature’s suffering or distress versus its happiness, contentment, or satisfaction.
The creature’s sense of meaning, purpose, and agency.
The creature’s ability to live in its natural way or to be itself. And …
The impact on other creatures that know and care about the creature that we are directly affecting.

The first consideration is relevant to all sentient beings in proportion to their capacity for sensation and experience. Perhaps a clam cannot suffer appreciably. But there is no reason to think that we human beings are the most sensitive of all creatures–or at least, not by much. And since the first consideration applies to most other animals, it is wrong to reduce their happiness or increase their suffering.

A more difficult question is whether a sudden and painless death reduces happiness. On one account, the net of a creature’s happiness accumulates like a running tally over the life-course. In that case, a painless death freezes the score permanently in place, which can make the total higher than it would have been if the future would have been less happy than the past was. A different views is that a creature has no happiness or suffering at all after death, and therefore death has no impact on happiness. In Epicurus’ phrase, “Death is nothing to us.” I am dissatisfied with both views but not sure that I have a better proposal. Certainly, happiness has a temporal aspect, because suffering on one day lingers on the next. But I struggle to say what impact ending a life has on the creature’s happiness.

The second consideration depends on an ability to make meaning or sense of one’s life and to make consequential choices according to one’s sense of purpose: in a word, “agency.” I am not committed to the premise that agency is a capacity of human beings alone, but we certainly have a very advanced version of it. Note that this capacity is temporal: we make meaning by putting our present state and our current choices in a longer narrative that includes a past and a future. One reason that killing a human being is badly wrong is that it ends the narrative that the person is constructing and thereby destroys her agency. I don’t think the same argument applies to the instantaneous and painless termination of the life of a chicken.

The third consideration–naturalness–seems to apply most to creatures that are not human beings. If possible, a bear should be left alone to live as a bear. Our family dog would not be better off if he were left in the woods to fend for himself like coyote, but he should be able to live the life natural to a domesticated dog, with activities like walks and cuddles. And as for a cow–I am inclined to think that its natural state must include time grazing in a field and nursing a calf. I am not sure that suddenly being slaughtered violates its ability to live a natural life. That means that factory farming is unacceptable but family farming may be consistent with respecting the natural states of farm animals.

As for human beings, we are also natural creatures in the sense that we are an evolved species with many innate limitations and tendencies. But we are capable of reflecting on the whole range of our inherited traits and distinguish the better from the worse. We have a natural proclivity to altruism but also to aggression, even to rape and murder. For us to live according to nature is not nearly good enough. We build institutions and norms to change our inherited natures for the better. That forfeits a right to live naturally and makes the third consideration irrelevant to us.

The fourth consideration applies to any animal that cares for another. In the old Disney cartoon, the death of Bambi’s mother deeply hurt Bambi. Although the cartoon anthropomorphized its animal characters, Bambi’s emotional reaction seems plausible enough for a deer. Still, people may be unique in that our relationships with other people are mediated by language and other forms of communication. We can suffer–or have our sense of purpose and agency frustrated–by learning of the death of someone we have never even met. In contrast, if Bambi had not directly experienced his mother’s death, he wouldn’t have suffered from it.

Freedom is certainly a moral consideration as well, but for human beings, it has a lot to do with #2 (purpose and agency), whereas for animals, it is related to #4 (naturalness). For a person, to be free is to be able to live according to her own sense of purpose. But a bear is free if it’s left alone to be a bear.

What all this means: Intentionally causing the suffering of another creature is always wrong, albeit a wrong that should be balanced against other considerations. Reducing the ability of a non-human creature to live naturally is also a wrong, at least ceteris paribus. But that is a complex question when it comes to farm animals. Killing a person is a special evil because it not only causes suffering but it ruins the purpose and agency that came from that person’s ability to plan and foresee the future. Furthermore, the impact on other human beings of killing a given person is particularly deep and widespread. This is one reason that it is badly wrong to kill even a human being who does not have much agency, such as a neonate. Killing an advanced animal painlessly and suddenly (beyond the sight of its kin) does not necessarily violate considerations #3 or #4. It may violate #1, depending on how we understand the temporal dimension of happiness and suffering. And it may violate #2, but only to the degree that other advanced species have capacities for long-term planning.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal