...Rand Paul, winner of the Kentucky Republican Senate Primary.
In an interview last night, Paul told Maddow that he agrees with most parts of the Civil Rights Act, except for one (Title II), that made it a crime for private businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of race. Paul explained that had he been in office during debate of bill, he would have tried to change the legislation. He said that it stifled first amendment rights.
The Washington Post has a great article today about the Arkansas Governor and Attorney General saying they won't join in the lawsuits against the new health care reform bill.
"They tried it here in Arkansas in '57 and it didn't work," Gov. Mike Beebe (D) told reporters recently. "I think you got to tell people the truth. And if I understand the law, the truth is the federal government can't just be defied by the state governments."
The analogy to the Little Rock school segregation case in 1957 was on target, and it is no surprise at all that the current resurgence in talk about states' rights comes at a time when we have just passed the biggest change in federal legislation since the civil rights victories of the 1960s.
College is often described as a wonderful institution, a place in which many people have the best experiences of their lives. Students like me forge lasting friendships, take a leap into independence, and even sometimes learn.
College is also a place to make lifelong connections. If you're destined to be a future Wall Street businessman and your roommate an important politician - good things can happen.
Greek fraternities and sororities are particularly good at this. Take the University of Alabama. Its Greek organizations run The Machine, a secretive organization which effectively controls campus politics.
Since student government was initiated in 1915, the Machine's choice for the SGA Presidency has lost a grand total of seven times - the last of which occurred in 1986. That's a century of unchallenged Greek dominance.
Machine candidates often go on to have shining political careers. In 2000, The New Republic reported that:
When the Machine's members leave Tuscaloosa, they typically go on to Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile, and Montgomery, and join Machine alums in Alabama's political and business elite. Machine members work in Alabama's most prestigious law firms and businesses; they have been state legislators, state party chairmen, congressmen, presidents of the state bar, members of the Public Service Commission, and federal judges. For most of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, both of Alabama's U.S. Senators, Lister Hill and John Sparkman, were Machine alums. Alabama's current governor, Don Siegelman, was the Machine-backed SGA president in 1968; Senator Richard Shelby is also said to have been a member of the Machine (although his office has denied this). As one former member of a Machine-affiliated sorority explained to the student newspaper The Crimson White, "The goal is to run campus politics, but the real reason they want to run campus politics is so they themselves can run politics in Alabama."
The meat of The New Republic article, however, does not dwell upon University of Alabama politics - but instead on a rather different theme. It tells the story of one Melody Twilley, a sophomore student at the University of Alabama attempting to join a Greek sorority. Like many of her fellow students, Ms. Twilley "blended right in to the roiling mix of social ambition and social privilege." Compared to her peers, however, Ms. Twilley was unique in two interesting ways:
For one thing, unlike the vast majority of rushees, who are admitted into sororities as freshmen, this wasn't Twilley's first time through. She had tried-and failed-to join a sorority the year before. Which may have had something to do with the other thing that set Melody Twilley apart: She is black.
...Indeed, when Melody Twilley stood in front of the Delta Zeta house last September, it was believed that no white fraternity or sorority at the University of Alabama had ever offered membership to a black student.
(This diary builds on the analysis of lifestyle activism in Part I to look at the related phenomena of lifestyle politics, using an example from the black community, based on the book, Black on the Block. The author of that book, Mary Pattillo, joins us for the discussion. So I invite everyone to take advantage of this opportunity. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
--recycling,
--reducing "carbon footprints," or
--creating a compost piles in the backyard.
rarely contributes in any effective or coherent way to positive social change.
Why? Because:
1) Individuals' private acts, however well meant, have little or no impact on the actions of others (if no one knows you recycle, how does that encourage anyone else to recycle?); and
2) While publicly modeling actions can affect people, there is little evidence that a righteous lifestyle will lead many others to pick it up unless they were already so inclined.
Real social change comes when people gain enough (usually collective) power to make structural changes in social structures or on the incentives that affect individual and group action.
Occasionally, a group of early adopters may get together and start actually organizing to generate enough power to make changes like these.
But when this happens, the results can be perverse. Take recycling, for example:
Early recyclers came together and convinced governments to pass laws to support and mandate recycling. In this way they made real changes in people's daily lives. It turns out, however, that recycling is an incredibly inefficient approach to reducing waste. (Reducing waste on the front end, for example, is much more efficient) In fact, the recycling movement made its most important impact on American society by miseducating people about social change.
The impetus to "recycle" reinforces the problematic idea that alterations in one's individual lifestyle actually make much of a difference in the larger world. Far from encouraging effective social action, the recycling movement has actually degraded progressives' capacity to generate real power.
In this follow-up diary, I look beyond the general arguments of Part I .
I discuss a fascinating case study of the ways lifestyle activism and politics can have distorting effects on social change, drawing from a recent book by the sociologist Mary Pattillo. In Black on the Block she examines what happened when middle-class African Americans used lifestyle strategies in their effort to "reclaim" an impoverished central city neighborhood, North Kenwood-Oakland, in Chicago. This example is especially fascinating because it shows how class-based preferences for lifestyle activism functioned among a group of middle-class African Americans also grappling with racial inequality.
As a special treat, Dr. Pattillo has agreed to join our discussion. A professor at Northwestern University, Dr. Pattillo is one of the most sophisticated analysts of the relationship between race and class in America, among other issues. She is new to this odd world of blog dialogue, so keep that in mind.
After the flip I summarize part of my argument from Part I, and then examine how Pattillo's fascinating case study helps illuminate and complicate my arguments.
The mention of that name, in the right circles, brings back a flood of associations.
Among them: a famous cabaret in Gay Paree, a Nicole Kidman movie rich in costume and set design and...well, a movie, anyway; or, if you really know your films, perhaps the association is with the 1952 John Huston "biography" film of the same name.
The one association that might not quickly come to mind, even though it should: ground zero in a battle that led to the desegregation of Las Vegas.
Today's story will fill in the blanks that you might have regarding that association-and by the time we're done, we'll have covered, just as we promised last time, the 55-year history of a place that began in 1955, lasted for not quite six months, and ended just last week...maybe.
It's another one of those American history stories you never heard before, and it's well worth the telling...so let's get right to it.
There may be no more recognizable icon of "Retro-Cool" than that photograph of the Rat Pack standing in front of the marquee at The Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
They're right there, lined up in front of their own giant names on the marquee: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.
Night after night they would gather with friends such as Shirley MacLaine, Angie Dickinson, and Johnny Carson, to deliver some of the greatest nightclub performances in entertainment history.
Today's story, however, focuses on what happened after the show: when four of those five could leave the showroom, drink at the bar, gamble at the casino, and go upstairs to their rooms.
In a town sometimes known as the "Mississippi of the West", however, one of those five performers could not do any of those things.
Our Journey In Two Parts literally crosses over to the "wrong side of the tracks", tells a story of segregation overcome, and recounts the six-month history of a Las Vegas hotel that has a 55-year history: the Moulin Rouge.
William F. Buckley died this week, at the age of 82. Which makes it as good a time as any to recall just what the "father of modern conservatism" stood for--which is pretty simple, really: making the Middle Ages acceptable to modern minds. Or, in the alternative, turning modern minds into Medieval ones.
Case in point: racism. In 1957, Buckley's National Review came out squarely on the side of the "civilized" white minority in whatever portions of the South where whites were outnumbered by blacks. It's a remarkable piece of writing that starts off rather slowly, but gathers steam as it rolls along, full of the characteristic tangle of asides, lies and appeals to higher virtue. (Aristotle aveered that masters knew their slaves' desires better than the slaves themselves--such knowledge was a part of their superior virtue.)
Thus, the clarion call, where the editorial really hits its stride:
National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
The editorial was unsigned, but it's widely assumed that Buckley wrote it--it certainly sounds like him--and if not, he most certainly approved it.
So, without further ado--drawing on the version that Brad DeLong published on his blog in recognition of the National Review's 50th Anniversary in 2005--the editorial in its entirety begins on the flip, followed by a brief commentary.
STATE BLOGS
