By Michael Wolraich
HAS the USA misplaced ITS MARBLES?
Television sensation Glenn Beck warns of White residence plots to institute fascism, communism, and different terrifying “isms.” Radio titan Rush Limbaugh fees racist Obama regime encourages black schoolchildren to overcome up white youngsters. Evangelical luminary James Dobson frets that Christians might be arrested for proposal crimes and folks should be allowed to marry donkeys. Protesters in knickers and colonial-style hats march on Washington with indicators that order Hitler-like caricatures of President Obama to come back to Kenya. As insanity reigns, pundits, politicians, and cab drivers debate the resource of the hysteria. a few blame lack of knowledge; a few blame racism; a few blame the economy.
After poring over mountains of political screeds and heedlessly subjecting himself to numerous hours of Fox information, writer Michael Wolraich stumbled on the key formulation that turns usual women and men into fire-breathing, smoke-blowing, correct wing maniacs. It’s “persecution politics” . . again.
In Blowing Smoke, Wolraich records, dissects, and deconstructs the myths that underlie the right’s transforming into reliance at the politics of persecution, from Joe McCarthy to the Tea social gathering circulation. within the method, he can provide an unique and compelling speculation with penetrating perception and blistering wit.
At turns hilarious, worrying, and edifying, Blowing Smoke is a must-read account of recent American politics.
Read or Download Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies About the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior Into a Raging Homosexual PDF
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Extra resources for Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies About the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior Into a Raging Homosexual
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Robert A. Dahl, Ian ´ Antonio Cheibub (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003 [1957]), Dahl Shapiro, and Jose did much to spur empirical work on such issues in the United States context by showing that in fact the Supreme Court had not historically lived up to the ‘‘standard view’’ of it as a bulwark against majoritarian tyranny by protecting the right of majorities. In fact, according to Dahl, as one policy initiating institution among others in the government, and where its justices are members of the political elite and the currently empowered national governing coalition, the Supreme Court has been largely irrelevant to whether or not legislative majorities have enacted policy: ‘‘lawmaking majorities generally have had their way,’’ 248.
Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004], 170). Discussion of other ways of measuring instances of judicial review, with figures including constitutional nullification of state laws and local ordinances, can be found at footnote 55 of Chapter 8. One method yields a measure of the yearly rate of all statutory nullifications as a percentage of the number of cases decided with full, signed opinions. The contemporary percentage here is just above 10 percent of Supreme Court cases per year. As is evident by my omission, in the previous list of five functions, of the United States Supreme Court’s powers concerning international and transnational law and issues.
Thus, although the deliberative democratic arguments for and against judicial review considered later reject, to varying degrees, the central elements of the majoritarian democracy–minoritarian constitutionalism conception, they can still be usefully characterized in terms of how they approach the questions of political legitimacy and political process. 31 Deliberative Democracy and Institutions of Judicial Review 32 a. judicial review as substantially legitimate protection of minority rights 1.