E-books are not the end of democracy

Ben and I use this week's Scripps Howard column to consider recent comments by novelist Jonathan Franzen. Do e-books signal the end of democracy? My take.

Last year, I read "The Federalist Papers" for the first time. The book is a collection of 200-year-old newspaper essays from Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison -- Founding Fathers all -- explaining and defending the Constitution of the United States. I read almost none of it on paper.

Instead, I read the venerable document on these devices: a netbook, an iPhone, my iPad, a desktop computer and a Kindle. I took notes and made highlights, and many of the ideas I discovered and engaged in that book, on those devices, later became the basis for points I make in this weekly column.

According to Franzen, though, my experience is impossible. According to Franzen, I should've opted to use those devices to play "Angry Birds" instead.

When new technologies come along, old technologies are replaced. It's true that sometimes we lose something of value as a result. I've been an avid reader since I learned how to read; I love bookstores and I love having shelves of books. It makes me sad to see stores like Borders go out of business because times have changed.

Here's another truth: The rise of e-books has opened up worlds of opportunity for writers whose work didn't fit the templates of old-school publishers. A friend of mine, Justin Blessinger, self-published a comic novella at Amazon, because print publishers don't have much use for novellas. More famously, writer Amanda Hocking got rich selling her fantasy novels as e-books -- and only then was signed to a major publisher. Similar stories abound: Publishing has become more egalitarian, and democratic, thanks to e-books.

The Founders didn't need books, exactly, to break away from Britain and create the Constitution -- they needed the ideas contained in those books. E-books are just a new way to create and pass down those ideas.

They're doing the job quite well

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I tried to avoid utopian-type talk in my take; Ben gives in to his dystopian side, basically suggesting us e-book readers will rue our proclivities when the revolution comes and electricity is denied the masses. Less darkly, he also notes that cloud-based reading puts readers at the mercy of the cloud providers. A good objection. Not, at this point, a fatal one for me.

The Tea Party, the states and the Constitution

That's what Ben and I talk abut in this week's Scripps column. Stop me if you've heard this before:

The proposed amendment spits in the eye of the same Founders whom conservatives make such a show of revering.

Before the Constitution, the United States was governed -- if you can call it that -- by the Articles of Confederation. Under that system, Congress functioned more like today's United Nations Security Council, a fractious and paralyzed body that let each state act as a sort of sovereign nation with veto power over every act of the national government.

It didn't work. Letting the states have that much power made it impossible to get anything done. The adoption of the Constitution didn't just fix those shortcomings: Read The Federalist Papers and it's clear the Founders believed the new system represented a decisive point when the multiple states decided they truly were a nation rather than a collection of small, weak, independent kingdoms.

There was opposition to that vision. A group of men who called themselves the "Anti-Federalists" wanted to continue the old ways of state primacy and campaigned hard against the Constitution. They lost the argument, or so it seemed. The emergence of the proposed new amendment suggests that -- for all their tri-corner hats and Gadsden flags -- today's Tea Party set has more in common with the Anti-Federalists who tried to stop the Constitution from becoming law than they do with the actual Founders. It's funny, if you think about it.

As a practical matter, giving states more federal power would also blur the lines between the two forms of government, making a real hash of things. Voting for state senators and governors and attorneys general might be determined by their stands on national -- rather than local -- issues. The proposed amendment doesn't just repudiate the work of the Founders; it's probably just a bad idea on its own merits.

Books I read in 2011

This was a really terrible book-reading year for me. Three surgeries clouded my head enough to make sustained concentration difficult: I started a lot of books, but finished precious few. The only novels I finished were, frankly, pulpy stuff. I hope to get my game back in 2012.

Here are some of the books I read to completion this year:

"Bossypants" by Tina Fey.

"The Conscience of a Liberal" by Paul Krugman.

"Winner-Take-All Politics" by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker.

"Cooking Solves Everything" by Mark Bittman (Kindle Single).

"The Gated City" by Ryan Avent (Kindle Sngle).

"The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen (Kindle Single).

"Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.

"Star Trek: The Lost Years" by J.M. Dillard.

"Power Wars" by Charlie Savage (Kindle Single).

"The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" by Alan Jacobs.

"Empire of Illusion" by Chris Hedges.

"The Score" by Richard Stark.

UPDATE: "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Surprised I forgot this one, since it unsettled me so.

It's cheating, really, to count the Kindle Singles. Like I said: It was a horrible reading year for me. I have an excuse, but it still feels like I wasted time. Grrr. 2012, excelsior!

UPDATE II: A week later, I've added Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night," Justin Blessinger's "The Favorite," and Founding Fathers' "The Federalist Papers" to my list of completed books for 2011. That makes the list a bit less lame.

Slate: Are Conservatives Trying To Destroy The Constitution?

Apparently unlike Dahlia Lithwick and Jeff Shesol, I don't think there's a big "aha!" moment in the idea that some conservatives who supposedly revere the Constitution also want to amend it. After all, the Constitution itself does provide for being amended. There are some constitutional fetishists, I suppose, who think the document was divinely inspired and thus must never be touched. Most conservatives I know think, roughly, that the class of men who created the Constitution have never been equaled -- and that the document should be touched rarely. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of our debates obscures even this small level of nuance.

That said, I agree with Lithwick and Shesol that this bit of information probably runs counter to the Founders' intentions:

It started quietly enough: In April 2009, constitutional scholar Randy Barnett published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering proposals by which the Tea Party might amend the Constitution to "resist the growth of federal power." The most radical among them was an amendment permitting two-thirds of the states to band together and overturn any federal law they collectively dislike.

This week, completing the proposal's rapid march from the margins to the mainstream, Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah introduced the amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, pledging to put "an arrow in the quiver of states." The soon-to-be House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, said this week that "the Repeal Amendment would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach, and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around." Fawning editorials in the Wall Street Journal and chest-heaving Fox News interviews quickly followed.

What these conservatives want, it seems to me, is to return American governance to something much closer to pre-Constitution days, around the era of the Articles of Confederation. Under those articles, the United States was something less than a fully functioning nation and more like the United Nations security council, a collection of sovereign governments who could put the kibosh on anything one of them didn't like.

It didn't work. And the adoption of the Constitution may have represented a point when the multiple states decided they truly were a nation, that they had to cede some sovereignty to each other, rather than each being a kingdom unto itself. (Certainly, in reading The Federalist Papers, it's clear that the creators of the Constitution saw that as the choice.) It was the Antifederalists who wanted to continue the old ways of state primacy; and the emergence of this proposed amendment confirms my opinion that today's Tea Party set has more in common with the people who tried to stop the Constitution from becoming law than they do with the men who actually founded the country as we know it.

(It also confirms my continuing believe in the Tea Party as an expression of sore loserdom. We didn't see much talk about amending the Constitution to give states more authority when the GOP controlled the White House and Congress, did we? There may be some principled beliefs at work here, but it seems to me that the amendment is also the result of efforts by the Republican Party to claim power however it can.)

If giving states a stronger voice at the federal level is the main goal, I think it might be better if another suggestion were adopted: To return to the practice of having U.S. senators appointed by their state legislators instead of being popularly elected by the citizenry of the states where they serve. I'm not certain how much that would change the dynamics of Capitol Hill -- except, maybe, to make U.S. senators more appointed to the political elites of their states instead of the citizenry at large. Certainly, there are plenty of examples of bad-idea programs continuing because a powerful senator comes from a coal state or a farm state or whatever, so it's not like these guys aren't thinking of their states when they're in Washington. I don't think it's a great idea, in other words. But it seems to me returning to the way it was originally done does less violence to the overall construction and intent of the Constitution than outright giving the states veto power. And hey, do we really need to popularly elected houses of legislative government? What's the point of that?

Giving the states veto power runs contrary to the Founders' vision; from that standpoint the proposal really does belie the idea of conservatives as somehow more faithful to that vision. And I suspect that clearing the way for smaller federal government, what it will do is add an entirely new layer of bureaucracy and politics to our public life. Instead of voting for congressmen to represent our interests in Washington and governors to take care of stuff at home, we'll start having to include national politics in our calculations of whom to vote for for state senator. Giving the states more federal power, in other words, might blur the lines between the two forms of government and make a real hash of things. So it's not just an anti-Constitutional proposal; it's probably also a bad one.