Ph.D. Octopus

by Julian 

Scholarship and politics don’t mix. At least not according to literary theorist and New York Times blogger Stanley Fish, who has been arguing for years that professors should “save the world on their own time.” Just last week, he reiterated this point in a column about a conference he attended on “originalism,” the contentious legal doctrine that judges should interpret the Constitution as the framers had originally understood it. Despite the subject matter’s obvious implications for hot-button issues like immigration and the health care mandate, Fish happily reported that conference participants stayed focused only on matters of academic concern. They never waded into the territory of political partisanship.  As he explained,

It would be an understatement to say that these questions provoke heated discussion in the world at large, but at the conference they were not themselves debated; no one stood up to say that he was for or against the individual mandate, or that citizenship standards should be relaxed or tightened. Instead participants argued (vigorously, but politely and with unfailing generosity) about where and with what methods inquiry into the questions should begin. Actually asking and answering them was left to other arenas  (the arenas of the legislature, the courts and the ballot box) where their direct, as opposed to academic, consideration would be appropriate.

While Fish’s insistence on the stark distinction between partisanship and scholarship might strike some as unrealistic, it comes out of his broader view on the nature of academic freedom. From his perspective, academic freedom differs fundamentally from the free speech rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Unlike most workplaces, colleges and universities don’t have the right to fire their academic staff because of their opinions. More accurately, they don’t have the right to do so if they operate under the academic freedom guidelines established nearly a century ago by the American Association of University Professors.

How did faculty members gain these special protections? In the United States, academic freedom began to gain institutional support during the Progressive Era, a period in which many placed a high value on the ability of disinterested expertise to solve social problems.  Academic freedom was originally designed to advance such expert knowledge. The AAUP argued that faculty members needed professional autonomy in order to remain free of the corrupting influence of business interests, religious groups, political parties, and labor unions. To advance knowledge, only accredited specialists could judge the merit of academic work: this explains the necessity of peer review.

By politicizing their work, Fish argues, faculty members weaken these philosophical justifications that protect academic freedom. If the broader public believes that professors at the universities they support promote a political agenda—rather than disinterested scholarship—the public will then have reasonable grounds to insert itself into decisions about research and teaching that had once been reserved for academic experts. The rationale for academic autonomy crumbles.

Not long after reading Fish’s recent column, I happened to come across a speech on academic freedom written by the militant historian, Howard Zinn. As anyone at all familiar with Zinn’s work will have probably guessed, the speech promoted a vision of the academic enterprise diametrically opposed to the one articulated by Fish. Delivered to an audience of South African academics in 1982, the speech implored all scholars to fight against the temptations of political complacency. For Zinn, academic freedom had

always meant the right to insist that freedom be more than academic –that the university, because of its special claim to be a place for the pursuit of truth be a place where we can challenge not only the ideas but the institutions, the practices of society, measuring them against millennia-old ideals of equality and justice.

From Zinn’s standpoint, any understanding of academic freedom that urged scholars to remain aloof from contemporary social struggles remained hollow to the core. Professional autonomy might have its place, but at what cost? 

American higher education, Zinn insisted, had historically served the interests of wealthy elites that dominated the worlds of big business and the state. As long as faculty members quietly went along their business—training the middle managers and professionals that would keep the deeply unequal society running smoothly—the powers that be would grant them a degree of autonomy and prestige. Should scholars really be content with this state of affairs?

Zinn also maintained that in attempting to remain apolitical, academics actually performed a disservice to scholarship. Under the guise of objectivity, academic standards often masked support for the status quo. These standards encouraged social scientists to put on blinders when they examined issues of racial, sexual, and class inequality. In the name of supposed neutrality, professional disciplines such as engineering and finance often eschewed questions of values all together. This kind of thinking, he believed, helped encourage the mindset that led American academics to play important roles developing weapons and providing expertise for the Vietnam War.

Zinn used his own experience teaching courses at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950s and early 1960s to illuminate the limitations of a narrow view of academic freedom.  The Spelman campus, he remembered, was beautiful. Ideas were openly discussed within college walls. However, faculty and students were expected to publicly remain silent on segregation.  If they had publicly expressed themselves on this issue, it would have caused a scandal and threatened the college’s vaunted autonomy. With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, Zinn explains, a critical mass of students and faculty stopped self-censoring themselves. They had realized that a measure of academic freedom within the college meant little if it was not accompanied by the right to fight for justice and equality on the outside too. In stark contrast, to Fish, Zinn concludes,

I did not think I could talk about politics and history in the classroom, deal with war and peace, discuss the question of obligation to the state versus obligation to one’s brothers and sisters throughout the world, unless I demonstrated by my actions that these were not academic questions to be decided by scholarly disputation, but real ones to be decided in social struggle.

Zinn practiced what he preached. He served as a faculty advisor to SNCC in the early 1960s. In the 1970s, he engaged in sit-down strikes with campus workers at Boston University. In 1980, he produced one of the most famous and contentious works of revisionist scholarship in American history.  Throughout his career, he devoted his writing and public life to exposing injustice. Due to his outspoken activism, he was trailed for decades by the FBI and at least one high-ranking member of his university tried to have him fired.

Is there a middle road between the radical commitment demanded by Zinn and the academic formalism celebrated by Fish? It seems to me that academics often produce first-rate scholarship that also happens to promote a political agenda. There are many works based on meticulous research and judicious reasoning that also make clear interventions into contentious public debates.  Just in the past year or two, this appears to be the case in books as varied as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Takes-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, and, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. The authors of these books have all received praise (and criticism) from their peers in academia, while also making important and pointed contributions to debates of major public significance.

By Peter

There are racist execrable hacks, and there is Charles Murray. Murray, of course, is the libertarian thinker and cross-burner best known for his 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued that intelligence is genetically determined and that, well golly gee, white people just happen to have it and blacks and Mexican don’t. Solution: no more welfare so that poor (aka stupid) people stop having so many babies. As Bob Herbert wrote at the time, “Mr. Murray can protest all he wants, his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger.” Stephen Jay Gould, who actually knew a thing or two about biology, wrote that the Bell Curve was “a manifesto of conservative ideology, and its sorry and biased treatment of data records the primary purpose – advocacy above all. The text evokes the dreary and scary drumbeat of claims associated with conservative think tanks – reduction or elimination of welfare, ending of affirmative action in schools and workplaces, cessation of Head Start and other forms of preschool education, cutting of programs for slowest learners, and application of funds to the gifted.”

Well Mr. Murray is back in the news with his book Coming Apart, his explanation about how the white working class is to blame for economic inequality. David Brooks– while failing to actually include the subtitle of the Murray’s book (that would be “the State of White America”), since it might reveal a bit more than Brooks wanted–writes that “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important.” Charles Pierce responds aptly: “David Brooks is impressed that Charles Murray, career hack, has found some white people he can treat like black people, and just in time, too.”

Anyways… there isn’t a ton left to say about Murray. His entire career, from Losing Ground on, has been providing intellectual justification for the base prejudices of the ruling classes. Welfare hurts the poor (and thus, must be removed for their own sake), racial inequality is simply a result of biological determinism (so, once again, might as well get rid of the Great Society so that we don’t upset nature), rich people are that way because they are just so innately smart, etc… And now we learn that economic inequality doesn’t have anything to do with 30 years of top-down class warfare: its not off-shoring, union-busting, privatization, deregulation, tax-cuts for the rich, or the corporatization of our entire society. Its not that one major political party has relentlessly tried to divide Americans by race, using the arguments that Murray provided. Nope, its, as Brooks writes, the fact that the (white) poor “are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms.” And we already knows what he thinks of the black and latino poor…

I think Frederick Douglass had something to say about this, a quotation that pretty much sums up Charles Murray’s career:

Pride and selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify them—and when men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression. Ignorance and depravity, and the inability to rise from degradation to civilization and respectability, are the most usual allegations against the oppressed. The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression, are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defence.

That pretty much sums it up, right? Murray is part of a long tradition that seeks to change the topic from systematic injustice to the personal failings of the oppressed. This has three advantages for the oppressor: 1. It makes the oppressor feel good about how smart and civilized they are (in Douglass’ time that would be paeans about how great the Anglo-Saxons are, for Charles Murray… well, pretty much the same, except take out the poor ones); 2. it creates hostility towards the oppressed (who are now viewed as lazy, uncivilized, unintelligent, etc…);3. It changes the subject so that we’re no longer talking about whether the system is just, but now we’re talking about whether or not the oppressed group really is or isn’t lazy, stupid, unintelligent.

By Peter

Ta- Nehisi Coates has been doing invaluable work picking apart Ron Paul’s pro-confederate musings. Paul, if you listen to the speech, argues that the true cause of the Civil War was less slavery (though he magnanimously concedes that slavery did play an “important issue”), and more the desire by Lincoln and the Republicans to enhance state power and to get rid of states’ rights.

There is a lot thats insane about this view. But what’s most remarkable is the conspiratorial tone. Listen to the conscious agency that Paul attributes to Lincoln. Federal power, in this case, did not develop out of the necessities of war, but rather was the conscious goal all along. The abolitionists/Republicans “saw this opportunity and used the issue of slavery to precipitate the war and literally cancel out the whole concept of individual choice.” Slavery was a “rabbling-rousing ” issue. Yes, Lincoln just wanted to share in the glow of the notoriously popular abolitionists. Rather than just buy out the slave owners as the British had, the Republicans seized on the slavery issue in order to fight an unnecessary war under the cover of which they could centralize the government, pass a tariff (odd that they hadn’t needed to kill 600,000 people in order to get the other tariffs passed), and issue the hated fiat currency. Lincoln, then, was basically a nineteenth century Senator Palpatine.

Then, consider the extent of the treachery involved. Hundreds of newspaper editors were convinced to spend the 1850s writing about slavery while ignoring their true desire: an increase in Federal Power. An entire political party had to be developed which pretended to be formed out of outrage over the spread of slavery and pretended to want “free soil, free labor, and free men,” while really devoted to the destruction of liberty. Think of all the Jeffersonians deluded into joining the Republican Party. And then think of how clever it was to convince all the Southerners to draft secession statements in which they listed slavery, not State’s Rights, as the preeminent cause of secession. And finally extraordinary duplicity of the Fireeaters who attacked Federal Forts in order to provide the pretext for the North to invade. A conspiracy to pretend that everyone was fighting over slavery that was so vast and monstrous that an entire society was in on the secret.

Like most libertarian fantasies there is a small element of truth to what Paul is saying. The power of the Federal Government did rise, of course, during the Civil War, though the vast majority of the power was an unintended by product of modern war (War is, after all, the health of the state). Those things that were part of the Republican platform of 1860– like the Homestead Act or the tariffs– were unquestionably constitutional. More to the point, the major changes to the fundamental structure of the US Government were the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th. But does Paul think there is something unconstitutional about passing a Constitutional amendment? Isn’t that what strict constructionists would want us to do?

And there is a plausible case to be made– much as the Beards did– that whatever people thought they were fighting over, the true out world-historical import of the war was that it represented a victory for the Northern industrial and merchant class over the agrarian South. But this is only an argument that can be made with some sort of “ruse of reason,” type logic, where the actors are unaware of the ultimate consequences of their actions. Paul, who I suspect isn’t much of a Hegelian, is making a much stronger argument: that the war was created in order to centralize federal power, rather than centralization being a side effect of the war.

Which brings us to the final point: Paul isn’t just some crackpot amateur historian. He’s a politician who, at least theoretically, is running for President. Giving an address about how slave owners should have been paid for their “property,” while standing in front of a Confederate Flag is sending a pretty direct message about who he imagines his supporters to be. Even if there is a theoretically race-neutral pro-Confederate argument to be made (and I don’t think there is), the simple act of choosing to present oneself that way in 2012, knowing how offensive people find the Confederate Flag, illustrates perfectly the unstated racial assumptions Paul’s ideology.

Which is all another reason why progressives should be cautious about Ron Paul. Yes, he’s anti-war and pro-civil liberties. But these positions develop from an ideological perspective that historically defines “Freedom” as defending the prerogatives of landed white men. He does not come from the broad tradition of the Left that sees emancipation as a goal, but rather a particular type of right-wing libertarianism that sees the protection of inherited privileges as the goal. The dislike of the Federal Government cannot be separated from the historical fact that the Federal Government has been, vis a vis the Southern elite at least, the friend of Southern blacks. Even listen to Paul, while talking about the Declaration of Independence, smoothly define “consent of the people,” to “consent of the states,” as if it would be impossible for a state to not be representative of its citizens.

By Peter

I don’t have a ton to say about Obama’s choice of Chief of Staff. I’ve written about the lovely Jack Lew before. When he was NYU’s Vice President he oversaw busting our union. I have lower wages, higher health care costs, and have seen a number of other terrible policies put into place in the years since Lew left. A union would not have fixed all these, but it would have at least let us fight back. In These Times has a good article about the situation:

In 2004, Jacob Lew was the first hire by newly-appointed New York University President John Sexton. Lew served as NYU’s chief operating officer and executive vice president for the following two years, during which NYU withdrew recognition from its graduate student employees union and punished some participants in the ensuing strike. UAW Local 2110 President Maida Rosenstein, whose local includes GSOC, says Lew was “the point person” in “representing management’s position” against the union. (Full disclosure: the UAW is an In These Times sponsor)

“Every single ruthless tactic from the playbook of union-busting was followed at NYU,” says NYU Professor Andrew Ross. Ross co-edited The University Against Itself, an anthology on the strike.

Of course, Lew, having only destroyed one union and only made a couple of million off subprime mortgages, probably has a better background than a good chunk of the other Obama appointees.

By Peter

There is a threat that all good libertarians must rise up against. State legislatures around the country are debating whether to make it illegal for one private entity to freely sign a type of contract with another private entity. I speak, of course, about Right to Work laws, which make it illegal for one private actor (unions) to sign particular types of contracts with another willing private actor (companies). What an outrageous infringement of individual liberty!

Imagine a situation like this: An employer, lets say a restaurant, signs an exclusive contract with a uniform company. An employee at the restaurant, if they need a new uniform, must buy it from that uniform company. Now, I, as a non-liberatarian might disapprove. But a good libertarian should say that everyone has voluntarily agreed to their position. The worker, after all, doesn’t have to take that job. He knew he would have to buy from the uniform company when he took the job. The restaurant and the uniform company have each voluntarily agreed to do business with each other.

Now lets imagine another: the same restaurant faces pressure from their employees, who are mad about low pay and unsafe conditions. The majority of the employees strike, a boycott is called, and the restaurant’s image suffers. After a while the restaurant decides that it is in their financial interest to sign a labor agreement with the employees, who have constituted themselves as a union. Part of the deal mandates that all employees must pay dues to maintain the union, in order to prevent free riders. Just like before, an individual employee is free to leave the restaurant. So they are acting freely when they come to work. The business and the union have each voluntarily agreed to their conditions. The state doesn’t have to get involved.

Two cases in which private actors act freely. The state doesn’t coerce anyone. Yet libertarians are ok with one, and not with the other.

Of course the fundamental difference– which gets to the heart of modern libertarianism– is that in the second case, working class people are benefiting, while in the first case, businesses are benefitting.

Thus we get to the total Orwellian absurdity of the “right to work.” Do workers in those notoriously high-wage right to work states like Mississippi and Louisiana have the right to work when they want? Do they have the right to tell their boss to fuck off? Or to name their own salary? Or take as many sick days as they want? Or to wear Slayer shirts to work? Or to have safe working conditions? Of course not. Under capitalism, workers lose those rights for the 8 hours they are at work. But, for some odd reason, there is one demand which is absolutely outrageous to make on employees: the demand that they join a union in order to work the job. You could demand that they cut their hair, or get an expensive master’s degree, but never demand that they join an organization that negotiates on their behalf.

And aren’t libertarians supposed to hate government intervention? A true libertarian might say, we’ll pass no laws about it. But if there were no right to work laws in, say Mississippi, then unions might put enough pressure on one employer until it was in the company’s interest to accept a union-shop. And then the union might marshall that strength and work on the next factory, and then the next…So to prevent this holocaust of high wages and safe working conditions from happening, the brave John Galts in the Republican party run to the safety of the nanny state, demanding that they ensure that no unions can ever demand a union-shop in negotiations.

In final words, let us hear what Martin Luther King Jr., whom the modern right is now convinced is one of theirs, had to say on this subject:

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”

By Peter

David Montgomery has died.

David Montgomery, one of the founders of the “New Labor History” in the US, who inspired a generation of activists and historians, died Dec. 2. He was 84. David lived a remarkable life: blacklisted as a union organizer in the 1950s, twenty years later he was named Farnam Professor of History at Yale. Even as Farnam Professor he remained a deeply political animal, working with local labor activists, black and white, in New Haven and elsewhere.

Yesterday saw violence at CUNY, when students protesting the proposed rise in tuition clashed with security guards. By “clashed with security guards,” I mean the police needlessly attacked a bunch of unarmed, non-violent students who dared to believe that they should be able to get an education without going massively into debt. You can watch the relevant videos here. Note what happens at about 3:50, when the students are peacefully sitting down and then are violently attacked by police.

A friend of mine, though, pointed out something interesting. The same day that security forces attacked their own students, and, at the same time that they are raising tuition because of a fiscal crisis, the CUNY Board of Trustees proposed to add an extra $15 million dollars towards the budget of the security guards. This appears to have been done after seeing the student protest.

G. (ADDED ITEM) THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK – PURCHASE OF UNARMED SECURITY GUARD SERVICES:

RESOLVED, That the Board of Trustees of The City University of New York authorize the General Counsel to execute a contract on behalf of the University to purchase unarmed security guard services. The contract shall be awarded to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder after public advertisement and sealed bidding by the College pursuant to law and University regulations. The contract shall be available for use by the constituent colleges, and the total estimated annual cost shall not exceed $15,000,000, chargeable to the appropriate colleges’ FAS codes. The contract term shall be five (5) years, from January 2012 through December 2017. The contract shall be subject to approval as to form by the University Office of General Counsel.

Isn’t this a perfect illustration of how neoliberalism works? All services must be on the cutting board: education, transportation, housing, jobs, etc… But the only sacrosanct part of our budgets is security. And it makes sense, doesn’t it. The ruling class needs to have people to protect them from the unruly mob, who’ve they’ve created by their own policies. Endlessly fuck over your population, but, for god’s sake, keep a good private security force to man the gates and keep your moat in good shape.

This is why liberals like Josh Marshall—who takes a day off from gossiping about whatever meaningless trite that Newt Gingrich said yesterday to worry about our movement—don’t understand OWS. Yesterday he worried that “the core message about economic inequality is being overwhelmed by a distinct story about (depending on your perspective) street violence and police brutality or excessive militarization of crowd control.” But, as both radical protesters, and members of poor communities have long known, these are one and the same problem. The less and less stable our society becomes, the more the 1% hoover up all remaining resources, condemning the rest of us to ever more debt, unemployment, low wages, and social alienation, the more they will need a military style police force to act as riot control.

By Peter

What would happen if Occupy protesters showed up like this:

“Just a couple of dozen people showed up for a tea party rally outside the Montana Capitol in which participants were encouraged to bring their guns. The Lewis & Clark’s Conservative Tea Party group received permission to bring unloaded and secured weapons onto Capitol grounds Friday, an area where firearms are usually prohibited. Similar gun rallies have taken place on Capitol grounds in years past but this year’s rally was sparsely attended in comparision”

By Peter Wirzbicki

Watch this video:

Surely clown based police repression is not the worst thing that the NYPD has done lately. But here’s a question: Why are tax dollars being used to protect a metal statue owned by the public and on a public park? What was the clown going to do to a gigantic metal statue? Shouldn’t those cops be, I don’t know, protecting some corner store in the Bronx or maybe, god forbid, looking into corporate crime? Is the public really paying to ensure that protesters don’t get close to the bull in order to make symbolic political statements? What were they charged with? Creeping militarization of public spaces is no good, especially when it results in such flagrant discrimination against our nation’s hardworking clowns.

By Peter

Occupy Wall Street was just evicted from Zuccotti Park. Violently and abruptly, using military tactics on non-violent protesters. The peaceful Occupiers have been replaced with an occupying army of NYPD riot police, vans, helicopters, and police cars. A stranger who walked down Broadway or Nassau right now would think that terrorist attack or foreign invasion was imminent, not that a couple hundred citizens were exercising their acknowledged rights to peacefully protest.

Today’s lesson, or really the lesson of the last two months, is the sheer amount of force that the state is willing to deploy against its own citizenry: helicopters, sound cannons, tear gas, a division of armed police, barricades, shuttered subways and bridges, restrictions on the press. One begins to question whether anyone even goes through the motions of taking seriously the naive and innocent ideas of dignified citizenship, meaningful democracy, and a self-ruling population anymore. What type of nation is willing to deploy and threaten such violence against a group that never once been responsible for serious violence, against whom the biggest complaint has involved drumming? The chant, “whose streets, our streets,” seems so sad, as it should be brutally clear by now that the streets are not ours, nor are the sidewalks, public parks, plazas or walkways. They belong to the 1% and their paid lackeys.

The arrogance of the police, the ubiquity of state violence, the dereference expected for the most arbitrary of commands: earlier generations of Americans associated these things with Czarist Russia or Absolutist Germany. This wasn’t supposed to happen in the Lincoln Republic, with Whitman’s haughty democrats who demand the President doffs his cap to them.

I was sitting in my couch, watching Hulu in my underwear when I saw over facebook that the eviction was happening. Shit, I thought, and threw on a sweatshirt and jeans, heading out less in righteous anger than in disappointed fatalism. But I could already tell something was wrong when I got to the 4th Ave and 9th St. Subway stop in Park Slope to get on the R train. There were 3 cop cars waiting by the entrance, a cop on the stairwell, and 2 walking the platform. I’ve long noticed the difference in atmosphere between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The disease hadn’t yet spread to Brooklyn, and the fear, fed by thousands of glassy eyed police and soldiers, isn’t present. Brooklyn had felt normal, not like Prague circa 1968. Or at least it had. The culture of paranoia or fear is spreading to our boroughs now as well.

Getting off at Cortland, by the half completed Freedom Tower, there were barricades and riot police everywhere. The smell of pepper spray in the air. The word “freedom,” has been so degraded and emptied of meaning that it takes effort to feel the absurdity of a city celebrating “freedom,” while so desperately ensuring that its own citizens enjoy nothing of the sort.

There were a couple of hundred confused people milling around north of Zuccotti on Broadway. Above, of course, was the omnipresent police helicopter with its ominous Eye of Sauron light. At one point a couple of hundred protesters decided to march north. They took Broadway, collected at Foley Square for a bit, and then led the police on a wide chase uptown through Soho. Two kids are tackled and violently wrestled to the ground, one almost run over by a speeding cop car, all to catch the fiend who overturned a garbage can in front of Uniqlo. In order to prevent us from blocking traffic, the cops, of course, have completely occupied the street, thereby blocking traffic.

Eventually we end up back in Foley Square, where a GA is trying to get itself off the ground. Looking for coffee, we wander back to Broadway and Pine, where the mood is uglier. Protesters face off against a line of riot cops; this seems to be where the drunks have collected. Someone with a bandana covering his face starts letting the air out of parked police cars. Back to Foley, where there are rumors that the Unions will be mobilizing at 7.

This whole time, the NYPD has completely blacked out the press. Not only were mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal prevented from getting close to the eviction, but they even had created a no-fly zone over lower Manhattan, so that newscopters couldn’t see anything. Twitter reports journalists being beaten and shoved by cops. No right to assembly peaceful to petition, no free speech, no free press; Bloomberg just needed to shut down a church or Mosque somewhere tonight to have invalidated every last word of the First Amendment.

At 5:30, I take my leave, and as I walk worth street towards East Broadway and the F train that will take me home, I see some of the police vans with arrested protesters in them. I yell some encouraging things and then move on.They appear to be having some sort of discussion amongst themselves. Democracy lives on somewhere.

Chinatown is coming alive as I walk down to the subway. I always find New York at this time of morning particularly inspiring; the food carts being unloaded, the smell of bakeries, the calm quiet. I remember how much I love this city, how much there is to fight for. How beautiful it will be when we can walk it as free Americans and not cringe in fear. When cops can’t “stop and frisk” every person of color who looks at them the wrong way, when people can assembly peacefully and aren’t presumed to be criminals, when the police remember they work for us, we don’t exist for them. I think of what better patriots—even if I doubt they would use that word themselves—those protesters are than the cowards hiding behind the glass shields and sitting in the mayor’s office.