Bag O' Books: James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"

I came to this book after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me", which a number of reviews suggested followed in Baldwin's footsteps. It's true there are similarities — both relatively short, yet incisive, essays on what it's like to live as a black man in America — but there are differences: Baldwin's book is written when (in 1963) it seems like white supremacy in America might be undone; perhaps as a result, it's a more hopeful book than what Coates delivered. Which is an odd thing to say about a book that remains bracing, angry, and uncompromising after all these years.

A few quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussions. These are all taken from the second part of the book, ""Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind":

Steve Hayward's Wrong About Diversity and "Trump 101"

My friend Steve Hayward is put out with The Chronicle of Higher Education for not including non-white-guy voices in its recent “Trump 101” syllabus:

Where to begin. First, let’s note that Trump has caught on precisely because he speaks to “marginalized groups” that the fashionable, race-obsessed academic left (and much of the GOP establishment—ahem) disdains. So the identity politics set gets a failing grade here for low self-awareness. Second, it is embarrassing but necessary to point out that when inquiring about any subject, any serious list will want to include only the best work that bears on the subject. When Ta Nahesi Coates writes something sensible about Trump, someone will include it on a recommended reading list.

So let’s talk about the “identity politics” involved here.

John Hinderaker Misses White (Electoral) Supremacy, But Thinks It's Dems Who Stir Racial Resentment

This post from John Hinderaker is a doozy, oozing wistfulness for a time when white folks decided how the country was run:

One thing is worth pointing out, however: even in this outlier poll, Trump holds a ten-point lead among white voters, 50%-40% (down from 57%-33% in May!). It is remarkable that even at his low ebb, Trump wins by a near landslide margin among white voters, a majority of the electorate. Not many years ago, that would have assured him of victory.

This is why Democrats stir up racial resentment, he says:

This is why Democrats are so anxious to “fundamentally transform” the United States through mass immigration from Third World countries. Only by building up the minority population do they have a chance to stay competitive. But that still wouldn’t be enough, even if the Democrats got most of the votes cast by minorities, if minorities voted in anything like a normal pattern. In order to win, the Democrats need to roll up ridiculous margins, like the 90%-8% lead that Clinton holds with blacks in the ABC/WaPo poll.

Hinderaker's got a couple of presumptions going here:

• That minority groups are incapable of determining their own best interests and easily suckered by Democrats who are playing them. This is, er, patronizing, let's say. 

• It ignores the role Republicans have played in their own marginalization — they're on the verge of nominating a presidential candidate who regularly demonizes persons of minority races and religions, and who has a personal history of racial nastiness. White people are the only voting group he can appeal to, given that rhetoric. What's more his positions merely echo the nasty stuff that's been said by conservative popularizers like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and the Fox News crew for years. Physician, heal thy own goshdarn self.

Now: Yes, Democrats have their own problems with race. I won't pretend otherwise. But Hinderaker's play-it-both ways game — pining for white (electoral) supremacy and blaming Democrats for exploiting his preferences — doesn't bear scrutiny.

I'm for an assault weapons ban

I believe in the right to self-defense. I believe that that right encompasses, to some extent, the right for individuals to bear arms — even though that's a particular right I personally choose not to exercise it.

By recognizing that right I have, in recent years, focused my solutions to the gun-violence problem around the edges — solutions I thought might be effective in keeping guns out of the wrong hands (convicts, the mentally ill, domestic abusers, and so forth). I've even suggested expanding gun-safety classes. (Yes, I've also argued that guns, far from being the inanimate objects their defenders try to suggest they are, are uniquely efficient tools of death. It's possible to hold both ideas in my head.)

It's meant nothing.

 The latest mass shooting has changed my mind on one part of the issue, though. I now favor an assault weapons ban.

 My conservative friends will be angry with me. Some will say "what do you mean by assault weapons?" They've decided to contest such efforts, essentially, by essentially denying that any such category exists or can even be reasonably defined, mocking the lack of gun knowledge possessed by anti-gun activists.

 But — my conservative friends will object to this — we know assault when we see them. As I say in my latest column with Ben Boychuk: "

 The Orlando attacker used a high-power semi-automatic rifle with a large, easily reloadable magazine. This allowed him to kill or injure a large number of people in a relatively short time. Most people recognize such a gun for what it plainly is: An assault weapon." 

 I'll let the lawyers come up with a more precise definition.

But yeah: An assault weapon makes it easy to fire rounds quickly, and features a large magazine so the shooter can fire many rounds quickly. If guns are uniquely efficient tools of death, then what we commonly understand to be assault weapons exist on a whole other plane. The fair question to this is:

Will it work? The answer: It probably depends on how the law is executed. I don't pretend this is a perfect answer to the gun violence problem. But reducing the number of assault weapons available to the public might begin to reduce the number of mass shootings American experiences. Even that won't be perfect: Dylann Roof, after all, killed nine people in a Charleston church using nothing more than a handgun.

 My conservative friends will suggest I want to infringe on their rights — that I'm on the side of gun grabbers or tyrants or worse. The truth is, though, we have few rights in American life that aren't at least a bit curtailed because of the harms they can create. As a working journalist, I'm a big fan of the First Amendment, but I'm not allowed to libel or slander people without consequence. The American people can judge that some types of weapons create more harm than good, and act accordingly.

 My conservative friends will suggest such a law would be ineffective. They might be right! But it might also be the case that the law does its job, but does it imperfectly. That's the great thing about conservative and libertarian views of governance: Government only has to be imperfect once to validate anti-government beliefs. The rest of us should not let perfect be the enemy of good.

What's more, the Supreme Court has just turned away challenges to state assault weapons bans. It suggests that even the gun-friendly court sees the right to guns as having some limitations.

 Curbing guns is not the only answer to curbing gun violence. But it might well be part of the answer. We should act accordingly.

This is why "empathy" on the Supreme Court is a good thing

A few years back, President Obama earned sneers from conservatives when he said "empathy" is a quality he looks for in making judicial nominations. I thought about that today when reading about Justice Sotomayor's dissent in a police evidence case.

Essentially, the court ruled that evidence can sometimes be used against defendants even if that evidence was gathered by police illegally. Sotomayor was cranky. From TPM:

She was joined in most of her dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who also joined a dissent penned by Justice Elena Kagen). But, in the final portion of Sotomayor's dissent, she said she was "[w]riting only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences." There, she expounded upon the "severe consequences" the unlawful stops in question have, including being "degrading" and causing "indignity." 

"Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more," Sotomayor, the first Latina justice on the Supreme Court, said. "This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact." 

In this case, "empathy" means having a visceral understanding that some people — minorities — are targeted for stops that have "pretextual justification after the fact" more than others. "Empathy" means knowing that outside the ivory-tower domain of an appellate courtroom, the law falls on different people in disproportionate and burdensome ways. "Empathy" seeks, then, to hold the law not just to the letter of the Constitution but the spirit. Justice Sotomayor is an asset to the court.

About those terrorist watch lists

Eliminating One Constitutional Right Does Not Make All the Rest Fair Game | Kevin Drum

"Due process" is the key phrase here: the US government should never be able to revoke fundamental liberties based on mere suspicion. This doesn't necessarily mean that suspects are entitled to a full-on court hearing, but due process does mean something substantive, speedy, and fair.

That's why I'm not comfortable with proposals to use watch lists — as currently constructed — to deprive suspects of gun rights. I think it's wrong that those lists are used to deprive suspects the right to fly.

Understand: I'm not against depriving guns or flight rights to terrorists. But there's got to be a process that's open, understandable, and lets the accused make a legitimate effort at challenging the designation.

Does "domestic gun violence" cause "domestic gun violence?"

When nonsense becomes the party line | Power Line

Surfing past Fox News this morning, I heard someone report on a poll about what caused the massacre in Orlando. Apparently, most Republicans believe it was caused by Islamic extremism, whereas most Democrats believe it was caused by “domestic gun violence.”

But the massacre was domestic gun violence. Democrats might just as well say that murder caused of murders.

I dunno. It occurs to me that it might be more like saying that the flu virus causes the flu. In such case, I guess, you could say "the flu causes the flu" and people would laugh at you, but you wouldn't be wrong.

We have a culture unique in its access to and (I'd say) worship of guns, a founding that depends on righteous violence to achieve, and a political culture that to a large degree believes might makes right. And we have an awful lot of gun violence that, in some cases, leads to copycat gun violence. I'm not so sure that domestic gun violence isn't the cause of domestic gun violence.

Why we debate the Second Amendment the way we don't debate other rights

NRO's Charles CW Cooke:

“It is not acceptable to treat the Second Amendment as if it is a second class or less important right, and it’s not acceptable to deprive individuals of it purely because they are under suspicion… In my view, the way to take someone’s rights is to convict them of something.”

I hear this kind of thing a lot from my conservative friends, but it seems there's a kind of willful naiveté involved here. The reason our discussion of the Second Amendment is different is because the effects are different.

As I've said a million times: The function of a gun is to kill. Other things that a gun is useful for — hunting, self-defense — are a byproduct of its function to kill. That differentiates it from other tools or inanimate objects that can also cause death:

Yes, lots of people die in cars each year, but that's an accidental and unfortunate byproduct of the car's essential function to provide fast transportation — and, incidentally, we've worked successfully to mitigate that accidental byproduct. When a person takes a gun and kills 50 people in a nightclub, the person is defective, but the gun is working precisely as it should. No other civil right has quite the same results.

The First Amendment doesn't result in a Sandy Hook. The Fifth Amendment doesn't create a Columbine. But guns — and a Second Amendment that makes access to guns easy and widespread — often result in death. Lots of it.

 Now: Just because this is true doesn't mean the policy discussion should go one way or another, necessarily. But it's the reason, sensibly, we don't just say "welp, it's a Constitutional right" and shrug our shoulders. Guns are different. The Second Amendment is different. We shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Karl Rove is the reason we can't get along after big terror attacks

For a few years now there's been a fond hearkening back to the so-called "9/12 moment" — a memory of the last time the United States responded to a terror attack with something like unity. Now, whenever there's a man-made disaster, everybody retreats to their usual battle lines and starts throwing grenades.

 David French laments this today at National Review:

I can’t recall a better time to be an enemy of the United States. The message to the jihadist world is clear: Not only is it open season on Americans wherever they live, work, and play, but jihadist attacks will have the added strategic benefit of further dividing a polarized country.

So what happened? My guess: Politics, of course.

The problem with Tom Friedman's "New Republican Party."

Tom Friedman tells thoughtful never-Trump conservatives it's time for them to go form their own party today:

America needs a healthy two-party system. America needs a healthy center-right party to ensure that the Democrats remain a healthy center-left party. America needs a center-right party ready to offer market-based solutions to issues like climate change. America needs a center-right party that will support common-sense gun laws. America needs a center-right party that will support common-sense fiscal policy. America needs a center-right party to support both free trade and aid to workers impacted by it. America needs a center-right party that appreciates how much more complicated foreign policy is today, when you have to manage weak and collapsing nations, not just muscle strong ones. But this Republican Party is none of those things.

Sounds good. Here's the problem: What kind of electoral success would thoughtful conservatism have without its Trumpkian allies? Not much of one.  Damon Linker identifies the problem: