Voter Suppression Depression

This was my first election as an American citizen. Today of all days there's no shortage of voting stories and political analysis, so it occurred to me that I might write a little something about the experience of voting as a new citizen. But I don't really have any grand thoughts about the experience.

As a long time voter in Canada, the differences were pretty obvious, and probably not all that surprising. Voting in Canada was much easier and I never had any doubt that my vote would be counted. And this wasn't the case here. The voting process is a mess, the ballot is extremely complicated, and I have little faith that my ballot will be counted, especially as I had two write-in votes.

And while I'm a huge fan of more democracy, this country also has a tendency to use democracy in an extremely undemocratic way.

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Jamie AroosiKirsten Glibrand, Chuck Schumer, Elections, Canada, United StatesComment
You're not Ignorant, You're a Liar

I just finished reading the pages and pages of letters published by the NYRB regarding their recent piece by Jian Ghomeshi. And while it was refreshing to read many of these letters, because the vast majority of them were both powerful and deeply critical, I find myself somehow being angrier with the NYRB than I was beforehand.

While most of these letters were critical of the Ghomeshi piece and the NYRB's decision to run it, and often quite appropriately scathing in their condemnation, the NYRB peppered in supportive letters among the critical ones. And I found this in almost worse taste than I did the original publication of the Ghomeshi article, because it indicates that the NYRB still fails to understand the problem.

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Jamie AroosiIan Buruma, New York Review of Books, Jian Ghomeshi, Lying, IgnoranceComment
The Emperor Is Fully Clothed

I've been thinking a little about the Kavanaugh nomination, and about Kavanaugh's decision to let loose at the hearing. Everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that Trump was the audience, and that Kavanaugh was worried about the possibility that Trump might pull the nomination. But this always seemed odd. At that point in time, you would think that the "swing" senators were the audience, and Kavanaugh's display didn't seem well calibrated to win over "moderates." But then it came out that the White House itself counselled Kavanaugh's approach, which superficially seemed to confirm that Trump was the audience. But I don't think that this is the case. Instead, I think we're getting a peak behind the curtain. Trump wasn't the audience, his deplorables were. And Trump knows this.

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Jamie AroosiBrett Kavanaugh, Donald J. Trump, United Nations, DeplorablesComment
The Last Working-Class Professor

A colleague recently posted about the role that student debt plays in perpetuating class inequalities in education, which essentially creates an insurmountable obstacle preventing almost all people from attending the type of elite institutions from which our ruling class emerges. In other words, student debt is a mechanism for preserving elite rule. Brett Kavanaugh isn't the sharpest tool in the box (not to mention that other Yale alum, George W. Bush), but the high cost and prohibitive debt load ensure that they can continue to monopolize the resources and benefits of these institutions, while claiming them to be meritocratic. As Kavanaugh mentioned, he "earned" his seat on the Supreme Court, even though the fact that there will soon be two Supreme Court justices from his prep school seems to indicate a different story.

But this point aside, it prompted me to respond that we're now seeing the last generation of working-class faculty members die off.

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Jamie AroosiBrett Kavanaugh, Academia, Walter Benn Michaels, Inequality, Neoliberalism, Working-Class, Faculty Comment
Complicity and Responsibility

One of the questions that's always interested me is the question of complicity. For the past few hundred years, ever since the rise of democracy gave individuals a stake in political life, our social and political reality has in some ways depended on us. For example, in an obviously extreme case, phenomena like Nazism don't merely involve a leader imposing their rule on others, as might have been the case for feudal Kings. Instead, these regimes require that a significant part of the population buys into it, thereby becoming complicit. And this is a fundamental dynamic of democracy—we are, at some level, responsible for our reality.

I was reminded of all of this when reading a New York Times article about the low voter turnout in this country. For many Americans, voting for either candidate seems worse than not voting at all. And I think the explanation for this lies in the question of complicity.

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Jamie AroosiHillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald J. Trump, Complicity, Responsibility, VotingComment
The Hamster Wheel Economy

Every once in a while I'm amazed by the degree to which we've become a rentier economy.

Take a look at any graph that measures debt levels, be it credit card, student loan, home loan, or medical, and there's a sheer explosion of indebtedness. From one point of view, this is a consequence of stagnating or falling wages, which is a process that began in the early 70s. Since that time, the American economy has in fact grown, oftentimes quite dramatically. But wages have been kept flat, so that every dollar of new growth has been funneled to those at the top. Consequently, in order to maintain a half decent quality of life, most of us have to finance this on debt. For example, people used to be able to pay for college by working summers, but wages have been kept flat for almost 50 years, so that paying your way through college is now impossible. As a result, we see an explosion in student debt, as it's the only way most people can finance higher education.

Aside from the knee jerk conservative reaction that ignores or doesn't care about the economic reality that created this indebtedness, and that instead chooses to blame debtors for their indebtedness (being poor or homeless is always a choice!), we don't give enough attention to what this means about how the economy has changed.

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Jamie AroosiDebt, Rent, Puerto Rico, Economy, Wall Street, InequalityComment
New York State Inside Baseball: Simcha Felder and Blake Morris

I live in New York State’s District 17, and our state senator happens to be Simcha Felder. No doubt many of you in the state know Felder because he’s an almost infamous character in New York State politics, but for those of you who don’t know him, I’ll try to offer a brief explanation.

While New York State should be a reliably Democratic state, our politics are actually fairly conservative, because the Republicans essentially have control of the state government. The reason they have control of state politics has to do with a few issues. First, it has to do with the IDC, who were a group of “turncoat” Democrats who don’t caucus with the Democrats, essentially empowering the Republicans. Second, Andrew Cuomo, our Democratic Governor, quite likes having a Republican controlled state senate, because it allows him to talk a somewhat “liberal” game, but he never has to legislate in that way, because the legislature is conservative. So, he can appeal to his constituents with liberal talk, but he never runs the risk of actually having to legislate progressively, which might alienate him from his very wealthy donor base. And last, there is Simcha Felder, our state senator. Felder runs as a Democrat, but he’s essentially a Republican. But he typically runs unopposed in the Democratic primary, because no one wants to waste their time challenging him, because it’s presumed he has a lock on the district. Our district is heavily gerrymandered, creating a district with a very large Orthodox Jewish population, and Felder himself is Orthodox. But outside of this issue of identity, he’s very effective at representing the interests of the Orthodox community. So, it’s long been thought that it would be a waste of time to challenge him, because the district is his. And along with the IDC, Felder helps make the New York State Senate a Republican legislature.

That’s the backstory. And then, as happened in many places in this country, the election of Trump was an awakening. In my neighborhood, a group of people began organizing with the intention of challenging Felder by either putting pressure on him to legislate in a progressive way, or else, by running a primary challenger against him.

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Jamie AroosiSimcha Felder, Blake Morris, Julia Salazar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York State, Andrew Cuomo, ActivismComment
Oh, to be Illiterate!

I generally try to avoid reading whatever the latest "must-read" article happens to be because they generally seem part of the pageant of hand-wringing that every week forgets the article from last week in favor of the must-read du jour. But for some reason, I bit the bullet and read Anne Applebaum's much-too-long article in The Atlantic, "A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come." And boy I wish I hadn't.

Anne Applebaum, a "winner" under the former neo-liberal regime, is slowly waking to the fact that many people weren't winners, and that these "losers" are kind of mad about it. Worse yet, she's now even losing some faith in the fairness of neo-liberal meritocracy.

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Jamie AroosiAnne Applebaum, The Atlantic, Neoliberalism, LiteratureComment
The Freight Train of History

I was never sympathetic to the idea of historical determinism. If anything, I've always had a knee-jerk reaction to it. I've even written a bit about it, and about how it's not only an untenable theoretical position, but also how it's symptomatic of a deeper despair from which we’re suffering. However, lately, I feel like I maybe get the appeal. Not that I'm actually entertaining the idea of historical determinism, but by the same token, I suspect that I'm not alone in feeling like history's wheel turns because of forces that dwarf any of us.

I always liked Marx's description of capitalism where he spoke of it in terms of the story of the Sorcerer's apprentice. Like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, capitalism has unleashed such awesome forces that not even the most powerful capitalist is capable of controlling them.

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Jamie AroosiKarl Marx, History, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Mush, BillionairresComment