Can We Escape Chaos?
Lessons from Libya, Samuel Alito’s Constitution, the long history of the Big Lie, and more
June 16, 2022
In this week’s issue of Public Seminar, Jo Freeman joins thousands of protestors denouncing gun violence, Sabina Henneberg reviews Jason Pack’s portrait of global disorder, Peter Nohrnberg ponders the unenumerated rights up for grabs in Justice Alito’s United States, Claire Potter digs into the fascist history of “the Big Lie,” and more.
World Powers
Sabina Henneberg reviews Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder by Jason Pack (Oxford University Press, 2022), and examines Pack’s claim that the era of post-Cold War American hegemony is being replaced by a system in which persistent global coordination failures perpetuate civil wars: “The danger of global disorder, according to Pack, includes more than festering civil wars; even more threatening is a growing global inability to respond proactively, through global governance, to face such global threats as climate change, terrorism, and cybercrime.” (June 15, 2022)
Local Lawmakers
Watching the televised hearings of the January 6 Select Committee, Claire Potter realizes that the phrase “the Big Lie” ties the former president’s plot against America to the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, beginning with Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto, Mein Kampf. “Hitler demonstrates the complexity of how a Big Lie works: it relies on distracting your audience with accusations that someone else, over there, is telling their own Big Lie. In Mein Kampf, he explains that the Big Lie flips reality so completely that it is inconceivable to the public that anyone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.’” (June 13, 2022)
In the late final hours of the 2022 legislative session, New York lawmakers have approved a $10 billion bill to subsidize semiconductor manufacturers. It was a shameful performance, Pat Garofalo reports, and part of a larger feedback loop of inflated subsidies for big semiconductor corporations. “Not only was New York’s handout banged through the legislature at the last moment without any public input, but it is also dressed up in sham ‘green’ language, even though the only environmentally-related provision in the bill is that projects funded by the program include ‘sustainability measures to mitigate the project’s greenhouse gas emissions impact over its lifetime.’” (June 13, 2022)
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The Right Wing vs. Our Rights
“Given that the legal right to an abortion was premised on the right to privacy established in a case involving the distribution of birth control, the Supreme Court may one day uphold a ban on contraception. Because of the difficulty of enforcing such a ban, however, it is more likely that a Republican-controlled legislature would simply enact restrictions on the use and purchase of contraceptives, much as nineteenth-century legislators banned the transportation and sale of ‘rubber goods.’” Like abortion, Peter Nohrnberg writes, contraception has always existed in some form and was left unmentioned by the authors of the Constitution. In Justice Samuel Alito’s vision of the United States, what other unenumerated rights are under threat? (June 13, 2022)
On June 12, 20,000 people rallied on the DC Mall to denounce gun violence. Jo Freeman shares the protest in pictures. (June 13, 2022)