Labor's love lost
How Britons came to hate Tony Blair and America, and why the next prime minister will pay the price.
By Andrew Brown
Sep. 14, 200
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/14/blair/print.html
As soon as the Conservative Party elected as its leader David Cameron, a man too young to be tainted with Thatcherism, Blair's days were numbered. Cameron wrote much of the very pro-American Conservative manifesto at the last election and must therefore take some responsibility for the failure of the Conservatives to capitalize on Blair's unpopularity. But since then he has navigated shrewdly to put Blair between himself and Bush. On the anniversary of 9/11 he delivered a speech that was widely considered to be a repudiation of neoconservatism. Of course, this doesn't actually mean distancing himself from Washington -- how many neocons will be found there in 2008? -- but it does show clearly what must be done to get yourself elected in Britain today. That Thatcher was at the same moment in Washington offering her support to Bush won't have harmed Cameron at all.
Senate Panel Defies Bush on Detainee Bill
The New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091406R.shtml
Thursday 14 September 2006
Hours after Mr. Bush huddled with House Republicans, he suffered a defeat on the other side of the Capitol, as the Senate Armed Services Committee endorsed legislation that would give suspected terrorists more legal protections than the president desires.
And more:
Mr. McCain was one of the four Armed Services Committee Republicans who voted against Mr. Bush's proposals. The others were Senators John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman, Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina and Susan E. Collins of Maine. The measure that the panel endorsed and sent to the Senate floor would let suspects see evidence against them and would bar statements obtained through torture or coercion.
Learning to Love Again: An Interview with Wendy Brown
We need to go back to Marx once again. In the early work, Marx insists on the inseparability of individual and collective freedom. You can read much of his quarrel with Hegel through that problematic. Where Hegel has an individual consciousness, making its way through history, making its way toward freedom, Marx spies the impossibility of freedom without a collectivization of not just the modes of production, but all the conditions that produce both inequality and unfreedom for the individual. Thus Marx’s appreciation of the social as the domain which has to be revolutionized, which has to be transformed to produce something other than libertarian formulations of freedom. Foucault sounds the same theme. It is the powers that circulate through the social—whether they are for Marx ‘capital’, or for Foucault ‘discipline’ or other forms of ‘biopower’—that have to be transformed in order to produce something other than freedom from one another, freedom from the state, or freedom from something that makes you miserable. It is Marx’s notion of freedom with others that is compelling. Of course, Marx gets this from Aristotle, but he does a lot to it, and Rousseau also develops this in quite beautiful, if finally limited, ways. If you were to ask me what God I believed in in political philosophy, it would be the notion that there is no such thing as individual freedom, that human freedom is finally, always a project of making a world with others. This ‘truth’ expresses, in Marxist terms, our species-nature, in Aristotelian terms our distinct life-form—that is why Aristotle calls the polis ‘natural’ to man. It is also a Spinozist theme. You can, of course, get a limited form of liberty through liberal formulations of freedom, but because of our interdependence and relationality, not only in labour, but in a whole other set of media, we can’t find freedom against one another—it finally will be with. I think this is the altar at which I still intellectually worship.
wendy brown
Wendy Brown: Regulating Aversion
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8306.html
Having seen Ms Brown speak at the APSA conference last weekend in Philadelphia, and the high profile folks that were in the room, I can tell you that her book is the hot topic in political theory circles right now. Unlike many theorists, she is an eloquent speaker on her feet and has an ability to really generate rapport with her audience. Check it out!
How did tolerance become a beacon of multicultural justice and civic peace at the turn of the twenty-first century? A mere generation ago, tolerance was widely recognized in the United States as a code word for mannered racialism. Early in the civil rights era, many white northerners staked their superiority to their southern brethren on a contrast between northern tolerance and southern bigotry. But racial tolerance was soon exposed as a subtle form of Jim Crow, one that did not resort to routine violence, formal segregation, or other overt tactics of superordination but reproduced white supremacy all the same. This exposé in turn metamorphosed into an artifact of social knowledge: well into the 1970s, racial tolerance remained a term of left and liberal derision, while religious tolerance seemed so basic to liberal orders that it was as rarely discussed as it was tested. Freedom and equality, rather than tolerance, became the watchwords of justice projects on behalf of the excluded, subordinated, or marginalized.
wendy brown
empire