Happy Birthday to Tim Minear, 50.
Good stuff:
1. Regular readers will know that I strongly agree with Ilya Somin about the words "democracy" and "republic." There are two reasonable choices: treat them as synonyms, which is what we should do in most contexts...or treat them as about the concepts of Athens vs. Rome, which is interesting and all but has nothing at all to do with the USA or any other modern polity. I mean, of course some of our ideas come from Athens and Rome, but our institutions really don't, and can't. See more here -- really the first three, which are all more or less repetitive, but if you go down a bit you'll see a pretty good point about why it might matter if a nation thinks of itself as a Republic, and also some stuff about Palpatine.
2. Joseph Neeley on "The Republican Brian." I'm no expert at this stuff...but my inclination is to believe it's mainly bunk.
3. And Kevin Drum on Medicaid and transferring money from Republican states to Democratic states.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
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"The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy" is one of my pet peeves. It's the sort of remark you hear from know-it-alls who are in fact mindlessly parroting a cliche they learned in 3rd grade. It is particularly stupid where I hear it most often--in defense of the electoral college, which in fact has got nothing to do with the republic/democracy distinction. (By that logic, most elections in this country would be deemed democratic, and only the president would be chosen in a "republican" manner.) Indeed, this trope is almost always a non sequitur to the subject at hand.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of being pedantic, I think you mean the Republican "brain," not "Brian."
ReplyDeleteWelease... Wepublican... Bwian!
ReplyDeleteIt does make me laugh when you say....Welease...Wepublican....Bwian...
DeleteI was really interested in reading about "The Republican Brian", "The Repubican Brain", not so much...
ReplyDeleteI don't want to beat up on my boy Bernstein for a mistake anyone could make, but I just love "Republican Brian."
ReplyDeleteAlso, Jonathan - if you need a copyeditor, hit me up! :)
I've often thought about offering the same service. For Ta-Nehisi Coates, too. Such a nice writer, but so many typos!
DeleteWhen I turned 18, I became a registered Republican Brian.
ReplyDeleteI got better.
So firstly, I agree that the whole "America's not a democracy it's a republic blargity blarg" is pedantic, silly stuff. But I am nevertheless going to go ahead and make a case that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between "democracy" and "republic."
ReplyDeleteFirstly, it is clear that a polity can be a democracy without being a republic. A small town of 1,000 residents could quite likely self-govern by referendum or town meeting without electing public officers with independent decision-making authority.
I think it is ALSO possible for public officers with some sort of representational element and appointed independent of the head of state/government to emerge without elections. A friend of mine argued quite passionately and not-unconvincingly that the PRC currently has a government effectively like this. One could imagine an alternate universe where a body like the House of Lords effectively governs a nation, in which a polity is divided geographically and representatives from districts convene to make policy delegated to appointed administrative officers to enact, yet are not selected by elections but perhaps by inheritance, lottery, appointment from local power-broking associations. It's not exactly likely, as elections are a powerful legitimacy-conferring institution, but it's not entirely infeasible.
Anyway, this is my case for what I call the Venn Diagram model of democracy v. republic, in which 99% of all feasible cases fall in the overlapping zone and the remainder are either wacky hyper-democratist or wacky non-democratic-yet-somehow-rule-of-law-and-constitutionally-based-systems-of-representational-assembly.
Republican Brain is actually a decent read. Mooney is a good writer.
ReplyDeleteThe conclusions are slapdash, though. The 800-pound gorilla in the room is the definition of "conservative" that he employs which is, well, whatever he wants it to mean in reference to the results of a study. Self-identified conservative? Maybe. Conservative by some index of positions on issues? Maybe. Republican party ID? Sure, why not? High on conscientiousness, which self-identified conservatives tend to be higher on than self-ID'd liberals? Again, yes.
So, he has all kinds of studies showing confirmation bias/motivated reasoning/cognitive dissonance (as far as I'm concerned, Festinger gets the original credit here, and the rest is old wine in new bottles). Then, he really does just kinda claim that all these studies point to "Republicans" (who equal conservatives, who equal the conscientious).
Unfortunately, the book is too provocative (meant exactly that way....he's really trying to PROVOKE) to use well in teaching, for my purposes. I tried a couple of chapters last year (his chapter on Fox is one of the better ones in there), and all I got out of students was a great demonstration of confirmation bias: the conservatives refused to engage his arguments, the liberals thought he was so obviously right that they didn't actually engage the material. Bummer...it's fun stuff.
Does the book make any cross-national or cross-time period comparisons? Otherwise it's simply taking the case of contemporary US/Republican conservatism and unjustifiably universalizing it through neurobiology, as if political ideology doesn't have historical and contextual aspects that are integral to its meaning.
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