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Quite distinctly, legislation may also include institutional threats, or attacks by legislators that seek to limit the formal or institutional authority of the courts, which represent a more direct challenge to the judiciary (Toma 1991; Clark 2011). In other words, institutional threats are often characterized by the legislative attempt to limit the general independence or future discretion afforded to the judiciary, either broadly or in a more specific area of the law. Toma (1991) and Rosenberg (1992) helpfully catalog a variety of tools that Congress has at its disposal to sanction the judiciary, which include tactics like jurisdiction stripping (a common tool), budget slashing, the imposition of term limits, and alterations in the size of the bench. Additionally, Congress often issues vague “warnings” to the judiciary about its behavior in pending cases. Some work suggests that reliance on these tools is cyclical, with Congresses varying in their willingness to engage in court-curbing behavior (Nagel 1964).3 There is also some evidence to suggest that judicial behavior is indeed influenced by these attacks (Clark 2009; Segal, Westerland, and Lindquist 2011).

Our judge respondents show strong support for a more nuanced view of the threats the judiciary faces. We learn that an overwhelming majority of judges (85%) believe that proposals that contain provisions to threaten the integrity and independence of the judiciary are most concerning. Of these, nearly half of judges (43%) are most concerned about congressional efforts to slash budgets and salaries within the court system, while others described concerns about judicial-retention reforms and congressional oversight. Only a small number of federal judges we interviewed (7%) cite provisions to alter judgemade policies as most concerning. Moreover, many of the judges we talked with mentioned that the mechanism underlying their concerns is the view that institutional threats like court curbing are asymmetric responses to judicial action; in other words, they are disproportionate in nature.

Throughout modern U.S. history, the Supreme Court has proved susceptible to outside pressure. FDR’s proposal is just one of many successful institutional attacks. In the mid-1950s, the liberal Warren Court backed away from protecting victims of McCarthyism because a popular Senate bill threatened to strip the Court’s powers. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, conservative politicians flooded Congress with legislation to stop the Court from ruling on racial integration. The justices retreated from enforcing busing regulations.

For Democrats worried about being railroaded by a 6–3 conservative bench, these conflicts should be instructive. In none of these instances did Congress or the president truly enact laws that changed the Court. In each of them, the Court changed anyway. These attacks can exact costs, as FDR discovered; his particularly aggressive push weakened his power within Congress. But they also have clear payoffs. Threats to expand, strip, or otherwise limit the Court—done with credibility—can influence judicial behavior.

We realize that more perfect union necessarily has many more meanings, discovered and still undiscovered, for us today. The words express the hope that 50 states covering an abundant swath of planet earth’s surface can cooperate. There is of course nothing simple about the challenge of cooperation between the governments of 50 states and the federal government. But this is part of what the endless work of forming a more perfect union entails. Today, more perfect union involves whether states can cooperate with each other and with the federal government over the biggest problems of our times, including a pandemic, economic crisis, public health, social justice, climate change, gun violence, terrorism at home and abroad, immigration and a long list of other pressing issues for humanity and our life on earth.

In July, 2020, protestors and local officials in Portland, Chicago, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Albuquerque, N.M., Louisville, Ky., Kansas City, Mo. and other American cities decried the Trump Administration’s use of federal force in cities dealing with protests and violence in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. In the disorienting summer of 2020, amid pandemic, recession, racial tension, protest, violence, and heated calls for police reform, the stressors on federalism are manifold. The Preamble’s more perfect union is a dream in the sense that Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. It uses poetic-sounding language to express the unavoidable interdependency between We the People and their constituted governments, state, local and federal. It is a dream based on the hard stuff of interdependency in a world where one person’s plastic ends up on another person’s shore. Or where an individual’s infection ends up infecting a community. Abraham Lincoln used the famous house divided, biblical metaphor to express what’s at stake in our dream of union: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” For the Preamble, for Lincoln and for us today, the hard work of cooperation, of getting along with each other, of working together, of sacrificing some self-interest is a practical necessity if the republic is to stand.

Part III: The Impact of the Roberts Court on American Democracy

The Roberts Court’s decisions together have contributed to the recent decline of American representative democracy. Its decisions in Shelby County and Brnovich gutted the most powerful provisions of the Voting Rights Act, hamstringing Congress’s noble efforts to deliver on the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment. These and other decisions have made it easier for states to enact restrictive voting laws and draw electoral maps that dilute votes based on race and political party, and at the same time, harder or impossible for voters to challenge them in court. Finally, the Court has transformed the myth of voter fraud into a free pass to enact burdensome and discriminatory voting rules, while narrowing the acceptable justifications to rein in the distorting influence of money in elections. All of the Roberts Court’s decisions have also led to greater political polarization.

At its heart, the aim of the liberal project is today what it has always been: to build a free, fair, and prosperous society. But liberalism ought never to be confused with mere high-mindedness; it calls for a practical politics, whose ways and means necessarily evolve in response to new conditions and new understandings. A readiness to confront new conditions and absorb the lessons of experience is all the more necessary in a philosophy that asks to be judged by its real effects on human freedom and happiness and the power and peace of nations. Liberalism stands not only for the principle that we all have an equal right to freedom but also for the hypothesis that this is a workable ideal, and that a politics based on liberal principles can produce the power and wealth that make a free society more than a dream.

Liberalism is notoriously difficult to define. the term has been used to describe a sprawling profusion of ideas, practices, movements, and parties in different societies and historical periods. Often emerging as a philosophy of opposition, whether to feudal privilege, absolute monarchy, colonialism, theocracy, communism, or fascism, liberalism has served, as the word suggests, as a force for liberation, or at least liberalization -- for the opening up of channels of free initiative.

So in one respect liberalism requires more than equality of opportunity, important though that principle is. In another respect, however, it may require something less. Liberals need to be concerned about the conditions under which a liberal society can remain stable over time, in the sense that its members remain committed to preserving it, and committed to settling their differences in ways that are consistent with liberalism itself (not trampling on the rights or interests of minority groups, for instance). To achieve this, citizens are likely to need to share not only political principles but also some wider cultural values: I have argued at some length elsewhere that a shared sense of nationality is an essential precondition for democratic procedures to work effectively and for citizens to support the institutions and policies that deliver social justice. 6 There is some dispute about how ‘thick’ these shared cultural values need to be. 7 All I want to say here is that liberal societies may justifiably favour those cultural values that in any given place play this supporting role. For instance, it is not wrong to favour the national language or languages when designing education systems or other public institutions, even if this limits the opportunities of those whose native tongues are different. Liberals should seek to accommodate the minority cultures in cases like this, but they need not aim for strict equality.

And perhaps more importantly, liberalism has liberated billions of people from lives of enforced obedience via slavery and serfdom, from the humiliation of caste, segregation, and apartheid, and generally from having to live as others tell you to live. The promises of the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are being extended, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to people to whom they had long been denied. 

And yet in the face of this overwhelming, though still imperfect, progress, liberalism is under sustained attack from many sides. Ruthless dictators, such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and the Supreme Leader of Iran forcibly crush dissident voices. They’re also waging well-funded information warfare on liberal societies. And some wobbly democracies have seen strongmen consolidate power. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Hugo Chavez and his follower Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Narendra Modi in India, and Viktor Orban in Hungary are very actively developing new models of political dominance and eternal reelection. 

Liberalism’s historic ability to ensure peace, prosperity, and progress means we need it today more than ever.

Liberalism was emerging in continental Europe, too, in the writings of Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant in France, Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany, and others. In the 1820s the representatives of the middle class in the Spanish Cortes, or parliament, came to be called the Liberales. They contended with the Serviles (the servile ones), who represented the nobles and the absolute monarchy. The term Serviles, for those who advocate state power over individuals, unfortunately didn’t stick. But the word “liberal,” for the defenders of liberty and the rule of law, spread rapidly. The Whig Party in England came to be called the Liberal Party. Today we know the philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, the American Founders, and John Stuart Mill as liberalism.

We’ll just delve right in. You explicitly employ a classical liberal lens to address the questions of racial justice in the history of Black America. First of all, what do you mean by classical liberalism, and why do you think classical liberalism is a useful lens for understanding the history and future of racial justice in America?

To tease this up, let me lift this quote from your book where you’re referring to John Tomasi’s book “Free Market Fairness,” where you’re highlighting that the liberal revolution is by far the greatest thing that could happen to poor people, marginalized people and oppressed people since it restricts the power of government to oppress you, requires that the law protect you from the oppression of your neighbors and frees you up to participate in really effective systems of voluntary cooperation, whether these be economic or social. Tell us more about classical liberalism.

In Capitalism, each man is entitled to what he produces. Under Capitalism, fairness requires society to provide equal opportunity to achieve success. Capitalism is comparable to a race in which every participant begins at the same point and the sole determinant of his results is his merit. However, without basic levels of education and standards of living, the race is no longer based on merit—the starting points differ. Intrinsic strength, intelligence and dedication should decide the ultimate outcomes in this model, not extrinsic preconditions such as luck or wealth. Therefore, for Capitalism to fully function as the theory dictates, a government is required to act as a referee. As a referee, the government ensures no one cheats the system and government implements fair regulations on the market so that no one entity dominates the entire system. With these government actions, each individual has what he needs to run a fair race.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/capitalism-not-racist-capitalism-undermines-racism/]//ETang

Anticapitalist intellectuals have infused mainstream discourse with the idea that racial discrimination is baked into the DNA of capitalism. Usually, evidence of racial disparities in professional quarters is cited to buttress the narrative that capitalism is penalizing minority groups. Though it has become commonplace to argue that disparities constitute racism, the issue is more complex. Racial discrimination is not an entrenched feature of capitalism, yet businesses must discriminate to remain competitive. Failing to reward the right competencies will result in failure. Therefore, discrimination is a legitimate policy that only becomes objectionable when done for nonmarket reasons. Even consumers discriminate on a daily basis, although they might not recognize it as such. When parents insist that their children attend schools managed by capable educators, this is a form of discrimination because they are rejecting inferior schools. Secondly, other consumers prefer employing the services of formally educated workmen in contrast to their self-taught peers and are willing to pay a premium to obtain that labor. An unwillingness to discriminate is tantamount to incompetence, since the costs of inaction are detrimental to one’s business and well-being. Using this pragmatic model of discrimination, it becomes easier to appreciate why some groups are less likely to be employed in white-collar jobs. Robert J. Morris presents data showing that the paucity of minorities in white-collar jobs is possibly a consequence of the achievement gap: Black students made up less than three percent of the approximately 330,000 students from the graduating class of 2020 who took the ACT and were considered to be ‘‘STEM ready’’ students based on their Science and Math scores. Hispanics made up eight percent of the “STEM ready” students, whereas white students and Asian students made up 64 percent and 11 percent respectively. Mediocre scores automatically disqualify minority students from attending elite colleges and becoming white-collar professionals. Likewise, in reading, the performance gap between whites and minority groups is abysmal. In Florida’s Alachua County public school district white pupils are reporting 72 percent achievement in reading and black students are reporting a paltry 25 percent. Activist Tia Leather in an interview viscerally explained the implications of inept reading skills: The reading level can mean that there are certain jobs, you can’t apply for. Certain levels of life, you just will never get to…. And as we know, through the research, it could mean jail time. And that’s how they’re building our prisons based on how well you’re reading by … third or fourth grade. So, the issue is there’s so many layers to unpack. Moreover, Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf was recently vilified for observing that reaching diversity targets might be impossible due to the shortage of qualified minority talent. If the intellectual achievements of some minority groups are too meagre for them to join the ranks of the elite, then this is a problem to be solved by minority communities. Sociologists have penned compelling narratives linking the fortunes of students to family stability, and others assert that equivalent family patterns would narrow the racial wealth gap, but despite a treasure trove of evidence contradicting the racialist theory of capitalism, it continues to wield enormous clout in policy circles. However, the sharpest evidence against the theory of racial capitalism is the preference for black workers during an era shaped by virulent racism. If capitalism is judging people on the basis of race, then in an environment where racism is acceptable, racist businessmen should refrain from conducting business with blacks. But this is not what we observe when studying the history of slavery. Unsurprisingly, entrepreneurs are motivated by money, so even when they are racist, the pressure to accumulate wealth propels them to engage blacks. On slave plantations, overseers were responsible for executing important tasks requiring managerial competence. They supervised junior staff, disciplined slaves, and reported to planters. Overseers had to possess intimate knowledge of plantation management to reap success, hence planters selected for highly intelligent people. Yet in the American South, black overseers were favored due to the deficiencies of their white peers, as Laura Sandy points out in a research article: When compared with white overseers, the enslaved were not simply viewed as equivalent, and publicly advertised as “known to be equal to the management” capabilities of their white counterparts, but they were frequently considered to be superior. Sandy’s account is corroborated by primary sources: In 1784, Alexander Rose posted an advertisement in the Gazette of the State of South Carolina, which praised an enslaved man named Jonathan as having “more general or better knowledge of planting” than the majority of “White Men” in the state. Later in the decade another planter, who claimed to have purchased “perhaps one of the most valuable Negroes” in the Lowcountry, broadcasted the use of an enslaved man to manage his plantation without a white overseer present. With the enslaved at the helm, “any manager or overseer” was unnecessary; the enslaved overseer could direct plantation operations very profitably, independent of white supervision. Relying on incompetent whites to manage estates was a losing strategy for planters, so to avert the demise of their plantations, they eagerly employed the services of blacks. Other than managing estates, enslaved workers were so competent at the trades that by the eighteenth century they were outperforming white men. Such findings are not peculiar to the American South: in Bridgetown, Barbados, free blacks dominated the market for skilled labor to the detriment of white artisans. Irrespective of ideological positions, employers will prefer quality labor to inferior substitutes. Racist planters chose competent blacks over incompetent whites to the chagrin of their colleagues when racism was tolerable, so why would employers in an age where racism is perceived as deplorable penalize employees because of race? Luckily, we don’t need to belabor the debate because the issue is indeed simple—some minority groups fail to attain parity with whites due to lower levels of human capital. In short, only lagging groups and their leaders can correct the achievement gap but a fixation on dubious theories of racial capitalism is sure to distract them from achieving worthwhile goals.

Can we expect capitalist societies to be “equal” and “just”? Its advocates portray capitalism as the triumph of the individual. The individuals in this account are not gendered or differentiated by race, religion or, for that matter, time. That is, capitalism is seen as a system equally appropriate to all people and all times. Each individual can, and indeed wishes to, advance their material interests and claim their individual freedom by participating voluntarily in the capitalist market system. Each person has an equal right to that freedom; equality here is equality to participate in the market. A further claim is that a competitive capitalist market is, to use Hayek’s (1944) word, “blind”. That is, when we buy goods we do not know who made them; we are unable to discriminate on the basis of our prejudices and, as a result, the market system is capable of delivering a non-discriminatory society in which many beliefs can be held because the means of discriminating between people are absent in the “blind” market process. The market, in the views of the Friedmans (1962) and fellow conservatives, is the friend of “minorities” and their best defence against discrimination. The “commodity fetishism” derided by some as concealing production conditions, is celebrated by others as a bulwark against discrimination.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/results-are-free-market-capitalism-improves-lives]//ETang

The credibility of free market capitalism is constantly threatened by critics who doubt its propensity for engendering prosperity. Its reputation is battered daily by the venomous pens of left-leaning writers advocating statist alternatives and their conservative allies touting economic nationalism. However, such narratives are frequently punctured by the piercing evidence of empirical data. Anticapitalism offers nothing beyond the appeal of emotional rhetoric. When tested, its assumptions collapse under scrutiny by showing the superiority of free markets. Globalization, for example, is a primary target of antimarket critiques, but instead of harming local economies, as some suggest, research indicates that trade liberalization raises growth rates. Trade openness enables entrepreneurs to access larger markets and benefit from technology transfers. Governments expand business opportunities for citizens by reducing trade barriers thereby making globalization a vehicle for entrepreneurship. Lifting barriers to international commerce increases a country’s potential for growth. Rather than devastating economies, globalization builds learning capacity by exposing countries to updated business techniques and innovative technologies. Of course, globalization makes some jobs redundant by disrupting protected sectors, but these inefficient jobs are replaced by employment in more productive sectors with better compensation. Contrary to the claims of protectionism, workers in open economies receive higher wages than their counterparts in closed economies. For example, Chileans employed in the most globalized sectors earned on average 25 percent more than those in low-openness sectors. What Has Government Done to Our Money? Another favorable effect of globalization is that it improves working conditions. Because they are under the microscope of public opinion, global companies are incentivized to ameliorate labor conditions and offer competitive wages to employees. Further, the expectations of protectionists that labor rights are infringed by economic openness are contradicted by evidence highlighting a positive association between openness and flexible labor environments. The fables of anticapitalism are also contested by the finding that instead of swelling the ranks of the poor, globalization lowers absolute poverty. Anticapitalists interpret trade as a zero-sum game, enriching one party to the detriment of another, when the truth is that globalization is leading to income convergence and the rise of developing countries has not crippled growth in the developed world. The rapid economic ascent of a large proportion of developing countries upsets the theory that globalization is designed to elevate Western countries. Due to globalization, developing countries in Western and non-Western regions have been experiencing an economic renaissance. Formerly poor countries that abandoned socialist policies in favor of promarket reforms like Poland and Estonia are now lauded for their astounding economic performance. Economist Marcin Piatkowski argues that Poland’s success is due to its meticulous approach to economic reforms: “First of all, Poland seems to have been more thorough in introducing market reforms at the beginning of the transition.” This proactive approach sparked a boom in the private sector and laid the foundation for Poland’s resurgence. Furthermore, other observations report that income growth is not limited to a small subset of countries: “Since the mid-1990s, it is not ‘just’ China, India, or a select group of Asian countries that have done well; developing countries on average have outpaced the developed world. And in this era of unconditional convergence, middle-income countries—far from being stuck in the trap—experienced reduced volatility and more persistent growth.” Anticapitalism initiatives don’t promote human flourishing, and the evidence for promarket policies is accumulating. A popular suggestion of the left is to tax the rich at higher rates so that wealth can be redistributed. However, according to a new study, marginal tax cuts encourage entrepreneurs to stimulate investment by expanding businesses, thus increasing capital intensity and boosting the wages of workers. Similarly, a complementary study finds that progressive taxation reduces growth and income per capita in the United States. If economic progress is the goal, then obviously left-leaning proposals should be abandoned. Although anticapitalist narratives dominate the airwaves, they are unlikely to enable economic prosperity. Eventually, these platitudes only lead to poverty and stagnation, as the evidence ably reveals.

Capitalism is also the most economically productive system. Implicit in much of the argument so far, of the philosophical justification of capitalism as an abstract system, is the argument that such a system also happens to be economically desirable. That is, to the philosophical argument that capitalism is capable of delivering human freedom must be added a pragmatic argument that capitalism is a system which is not only capable of, but is also the best suited to, delivering material benefits and has reduced global poverty over the long run. This pragmatic argument receives wider support and is accepted by many as the justification for capitalism, even if they do not embrace all of the philosophical arguments with enthusiasm. As a practical matter, it is argued that the capitalist market system best solves the “coordination problem” and, secondly, that it best provides the incentives for innovation and technological progress. The coordination problem is simply this: how can the production and consumption decisions of millions of agents be organized so that the outcome is desirable rather than chaotic? The coordination problem is resolved in capitalism by the use of markets. Markets – the interactions of buyers and sellers – determine prices which permit goods to be sold for all those willing to offer their goods for sale at the market price and all purchasers willing to pay the market price to buy the goods. In this way, markets, by establishing prices, allow voluntary exchange to coordinate the economy. Central to the claim that this process is desirable, in the sense that it solves the problem well, is the proposition that markets lead to equilibrium. That is, both individual markets and the economy as a whole have a tendency to equilibrium. Capitalist markets are seen as robust and self-adjusting; equilibrium can be expected if the market is allowed to operate freely. Disequilibrium in individual markets – meaning an imbalance between supply and demand – is restored through a change in price. This may be obvious in the case of many goods. However, Friedman (1953) also famously argued that the same mechanism can be relied upon in markets, such as the foreign exchange market, where fluctuations are often the norm. In such cases, the price mechanism should again be allowed to work and the actions of speculators are argued, in general, to be “stabilizing rather than the reverse” (1953: 175).

About two months ago, when I was in Cambridge, UK speaking about my work on Afrofuturism, a professor asked me: Do you think Afrofuturism is apart of the [Western Art Historical] canon?

I often get asked this question a lot by others — artists, professors, lovers of art, and so on. Or at least some variance of it — do you want it to be apart of the canon, what ways do you see it in the canon, etc. And my answer will always be the same: No.

No matter the setting, shiny futurist scenarios are often the same: Perfect people in perfect settings, using tech that never fails. The world seemingly becomes more perfect with the addition of expensive, battery-intensive, and visually complex technology. While these fantasies might seem benign, I believe their narratives are corroding the way we develop the future by distorting our perceptions of how we think the future will actually be implemented.

There is a long-standing body of literature on Black teacher pedagogies.Footnote1 Many scholars have described Black teacher pedagogies by emphasizing how Black teachers support positive racial identity formation for Black and other racially minoritized youth and teach students to be critical consumers of the racialized world in which they live. Black teacher pedagogies undergird a legacy of activism, high expectations, and innovative teaching for their students, and their beliefs around addressing anti-blackness show up in their curriculum, classroom practices, and leadership (Givens, Citation2021). Accordingly, Black teachers have used innovative pedagogies to support students to learn academic and social content that does not compromise their racial and cultural identities.Footnote2

Due to their understanding of anti-blackness and the underlying systemic issues in their students’ lives, Black teachers are less likely to blame Black students for academic or behavioral imperfections (Foster, Citation1990; Mitchell, Citation1998). Black teachers also tend to have high expectations for academic achievement, use their experiential knowledge of navigating anti-Black bias to expose the hidden curriculum of school, and offer a positive example of the outcome of schooling (Milner, Citation2006). A McKinney de Royston et al. (Citation2021) study found that Black teachers felt a need to protect Black students from racialized harm, and they used their knowledge of institutionalized racism to reframe Black students’ behavior through more asset-based lenses. Black teachers are generally more likely to interpret Black student behavior more positively and less subjectively, significantly decreasing the likelihood of Black students interacting with the school discipline system (Gregory & Weinstein, Citation2008).

Reward engagement. Like anyone else, faculty and academic researchers engage in activities they know will be rewarded. Higher education leaders should encourage discussion about how public engagement and engagement with policymakers are evaluated in different disciplines in terms of appointments, tenure, promotions, and salary-setting (June, Citation2018). Recognizing that humanities scholars may be engaged with different communities, the Modern Language Association (Citation2022) offers a set of principles to guide evaluation of public humanities scholarship in language and literature programs. These principles could be a guide for universities and departments seeking to provide guidance to faculty regarding public and policymaker engagement.

Provide media training and communications support. Colleges and universities can encourage academic researchers to engage in these recommended activities by providing training and other supports. Media and communications training can help academic researchers more effectively engage with policymakers, staff, reporters, and intermediaries. Communications experts can also help faculty develop one-page overviews of their work, craft press releases, and facilitate connections to reporters. They can also identify faculty who are content experts on particular subjects and issues for the press and other interested parties.

Throughout its history, higher education in the U.S. has served as both an institutional oppressor of Black Americans and as a stronghold for resistance against racism and discrimination in society. In honor of this year’s Black History Month theme, “Black Resistance,” designated by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), INSIGHT examines the role that higher education has played in Black activism and how academia can support anti-racism by empowering students and faculty.

Although Black History Month was federally designated in 1986, similar weekly and monthly celebrations had already existed for more than 50 years. In the 1960s, many higher education institutions, especially historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), began recognizing Black History Month with campus observances. These celebrations served as a way for Black educators to lionize people and narratives that advanced ideals of equality and social justice, according to the ASALH.