Welcome to the Party, Pal
Monumental Disasters
Tocqueville claimed that Americans build grandiose public monuments to compensate for the ordinariness and, to speak bluntly, the insignificance of individual democratic lives (Democracy in America,Vol. II, part 1, c. 12). The architectural results are sometimes preposterous. Nevertheless, he compares Americans with Romans. Presumably their “greatness, enlightenment, and real prosperity” will make these democrats grow into the role. The now “pompous name of Capitol” would soon seem appropriate. But we have become vulgar Imperial Romans in our public architecture. Not content with the glorious Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln monuments, we have added others, which show how empty our souls have become—worse…
The State and Race Equality
From Lee Strang's excellent review of Richard Thompson Ford's Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality: After reading, in the first four chapters, Ford’s relatively detailed description of the civil rights movement’s pathologies, I was surprised by the relative thinness of his recommendations. Indeed, Ford recognizes that his prescriptions are insubstantial stating that “begin is all I aspire to have done in this book.” However, Ford’s move toward an administrative solution is open to obvious counter-arguments that he neither raises nor addresses, and Rights Gone Wrong would have been more persuasive had he done so. Relatedly, Ford’s continual…
Law, Race, and Equality
Discussion of race in America is a minefield, one strewn with casualties. Charles Murray is only the most prominent in a line of scholars whose work on the subject proved to be professionally costly. Richard Thompson Ford, the George E. Osborn Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, has repeatedly waded into this dangerous thicket, and his most recent addition is Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality. Rights Gone Wrong joins two previous works in the same field, The Race Card and Racial Culture, by Ford. Rights Gone Wrong is a well-written and provocative analysis of the…
