#13th amendment

Annual reminder that slavery has not been abolished in the US and is still used as a punishment for people in prison. Learn more on End The Exception's website

If the laws allow for any class of people to be stripped of their rights, then any person could be stripped of their rights. And the State has an active incentive to criminalize its critics (like Briana Boston, who was arrested for terrorism despite never having committed a crime.)

(*i say "so-called" because the US is a settler-colonial construction founded on greed, extraction, and white supremacy) recommended readings/resources:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

"How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended" by Daniele Selby

"So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist" by Mariame Kaba

Many of us are taught that slavery came to an end with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but for enslaved people in Texas, freedom didn’t come until June 19, 1865.

Crime is a social construct. We could eliminate all crime right now, simply by making everything legal. And cops don't stop crime (typically). They don't protect people (typically). They show up, after the fact, and put people into the prison system, where, if found guilty (or coerced into taking a plea bargain, even if innocent), they can be legally enslaved (in the US, at least).

So, um, maybe don't ask the equivalent of 'how will we enforce the laws that the state enacts, if we don't have armed thugs threatening people with death and enslavement?' It kind of makes you look like a bootlicker.

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TONIGHT (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

If Trump's norm-breaking is a threat to democracy (and it is), what should Democrats do? Will breaking norms to defeat norms only accelerate the collapse of norms, or do we fight fire with fire, breaking norms to resist the slide into tyranny?

Writing for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein writes how "every time the forces of democracy broke a reactionary deadlock, they did it by breaking some norm that stood in the way":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-23-science-is-political/

Take the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the Reconstruction period that followed it. As Jefferson Cowie discusses, the 13th only passed because the slave states were excluded from its ratification, and even then, it barely squeaked over the line. The Congress that passed reconstruction laws that "radically reconstructed [slave states] via military subjugation" first ejected all the representatives of those states:

https://newrepublic.com/article/182383/defend-liberalism-lets-fight-democracy-first

The New Deal only exists because FDR was on the verge of packing the Supreme Court, and, under this threat, SCOTUS stopped ruling against FDR's plans:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

The passage of progressive laws – "the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid" – are all thanks to JFK's gambit of packing the House Rules Committee, ending the obstructionist GOP members' use of the committee to kill anything that would protect or expand America's already fragile social safety net.

As Perlstein writes, "A willingness to judiciously break norms in a civic emergency can be a sign of a healthy and valorous democratic resistance."

And yet…the Democratic establishment remains violently allergic to norm-breaking. Perlstein recalls the 2018 book How Democracies Die, much beloved of party elites and Obama himself, which argued that norms are the bedrock of democracy, and so the pro-democratic forces undermine their own causes when they fight reactionary norm-breaking with their own.

The tactic of bringing a norm to a gun-fight has been a disaster for democracy. Trump wasn't the first norm-shattering Republican – think of GWB and his pals stealing the 2000 election, or Mitch McConnell stealing a Supreme Court seat for Gorsuch – but Trump's assault on norms is constant, brazen and unapologetic. Progressives need to do more than weep on the sidelines and demand that Republicans play fair.

The Democratic establishment's response is to toe every line, seeking to attract "moderate conservatives" who love institutions more than they love tax giveaways to billionaires. This is a very small constituency, nowhere near big enough to deliver the legislative majorities, let alone the White House. As Perlstein says, Obama very publicly rejected calls to be "too liberal" and tiptoed around anti-racist policy, in a bid to prevent a "racist backlash" (Obama discussed race in public less than any other president since the 1950s). This was a hopeless, ridiculous own-goal: Perlstein points out that even before Obama was inaugurated, there were more than 100 Facebook groups calling for his impeachment. The racist backlash was inevitable had nothing to do with Obama's policies. The racist backlash was driven by Obama's race.

Luckily, some institutions are getting over their discomfort with norm-breaking and standing up for democracy. Scientific American the 179 year-old bedrock of American scientific publication, has endorsed Harris for President, only the second such endorsement in its long history:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vote-for-kamala-harris-to-support-science-health-and-the-environment/

Predictably, this has provoked howls of outrage from Republicans and a debate within the scientific community. Science is supposed to be apolitical, right?

Wrong. The conservative viewpoint, grounded in discomfort with ambiguity ("there are only two genders," etc) is antithetical to the scientific viewpoint. Remember the early stages of the covid pandemic, when science's understanding of the virus changed from moment to moment? Major, urgent recommendations (not masking, disinfecting groceries) were swiftly overturned. This is how science is supposed to work: a hypothesis can only be grounded in the evidence you have in hand, and as new evidence comes in that changes the picture, you should also change your mind.

To my fellow Americans, especially African-Americans who are descended from slaves, happy Juneteenth. For any non-Americans (or white Americans unfamiliar with the holiday) reading this, Juneteenth marks June 19th 1865, when the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation freed the last southern slaves in Texas. Of course, there were still enslaved African-Americans in some northern states--namely Delaware and Kentucky--who were not emancipated until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6th and went into effect on December 18th 1865. Of course, the 13th Amendment says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." So slavery is legal for convicts. Convicts who are disproportionately black. Who are forced to work in agriculture, tech, and even furniture. In for-profit private prisons, remember. Companies profit from enslaved black labor in the US to this day.