Modernity and its Discontents

The Supreme Court We came close to a constitutional crisis of legitimacy once before.   Richard Hanson writing for the Atlantic notes that it was the third branch of the American polity that settled the month-long dispute between Al Gore and the younger Bush over Florida’s electoral results.   It was Bush vs. Gore that settled the matter in Bush’s favor.   Future historians might see that as a tipping point, when the legitimacy of the Supreme Court first called itself into question.   It was followed by the Senate’s refusal, under Mitch McConnell, to consider Obama’s appointment of centrist Merrick Garland and the subsequent appointment of conservative Neil Gorsuch.   As Hanson notes, “although McConnell justified his delaying tactics by citing the ‘Biden Rule’ not to confirm a Supreme Court justice in the last year of a presidency, he has now reversed himself and says he would hold a confirmation hearing should a justice leave the Court in the run-up to th...

The Existence of an Unsolvable Problem As a thought, I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Roosevelt and Taft in Bully Pulpit.   Although for the most part narrative history, she does make one analytical point – Roosevelt was able to push through progressive reforms – that is to say, trust busting reforms – for a number of reasons, the most salient being his informal partnership with the journalists of McClure’s Magazine.   The journalists successfully exposed the abuses of power associated with the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and Roosevelt was able to leverage that exposure to develop popular (almost populist) pressure against the entrenched forces of wealth.   As many have noted, we live in a new Gilded Age, with enormous concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few people, though there are some salient differences, one of which is the influence of the press.   We have a muck-raking press just as thorough, just as evidence-based ...