The University of Cambridge in England is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious academic institutions. Some of history’s greatest thinkers, including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Sacha Baron Cohen, are among its alumni. One would think, then, that a university of this import would only offer the most reputable academic awards, grants, and scholarships to assist its students. Not quite.

Take the Elizabeth Kolb Memorial Trust. Sponsored by Fisher House, the University of Cambridge’s Catholic Chaplaincy, the grants of up to 500 pounds, for the purchase of books and other school-related materials, are to be awarded to female Catholic students born in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. But wait, there’s more:

The trust was created in 1958 by the will of Louis Michael Kolb, “in memory of my truly beloved and unforgettable wife Elizabeth”, to give “grants-in-aid to assist worthy girls of the Roman Catholic faith born in the United Kingdom engaged in any particular course of studies and in their living expenses at the Cambridge University, England”. Applicants must be practising Roman Catholics who were born in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, and must be engaged in any course of studies at the University of Cambridge. Under the terms of the will, preference is to be given to“Roman Catholic girls whose parents or either of them were born in the Jewish faith whether or not such parents shall have remained in the Jewish faith”. (emphasis mine)

So, if you know any British-born practicing Roman Catholic girls whose parents are or were Jews, make sure to get the word out.

Africa’s having a bit of a renaissance moment in the news lately.  Between the Economist‘s retraction of it’s claim that Africa is doomed, the Guardian’s report on Africa’s middle class, and a new EU-funded project that highlights Africa’s other class,  it seems that people are waking up to the fact that there’s more to Africa than the grim war-torn, famine-stricken, refugee-filled images of the 1990s and early 2000s. But most of the attention so far has been on the growing material wealth of Africans (or at least, Eur-Americans’ growing recognition of the material wealth of Africans).  The Africa Report and the FT’s This is Africa are both focused on convincing the business world that Africa is a sound investment.

In a different vein, this past weekend’s FT Magazine, Simon Kuper’s column featured a promising new angle that looks beyond ‘hey, Africans can buy things’ to ‘hey, Africa has a thriving intellectual culture too.’  (Again, in the mainstream media.  Africa is a Country has been doing this for a long time.)  As my own research is on middle class West African diaspora contributions to Atlantic intellectual and social developments in the nineteenth century, and I spend a lot of time convincing my students that much of Africa has a long history of a thriving business class and a thriving scholarly tradition, this shift can only be good for furthering my case.

The focus of Simon Kuper’s article is Chimurenga, a magazine published in Cape Town and founded by Ntone Edjabe (pictured) in 2002. Chimurenga bills itself as ‘a pan African publication of writing, art and politics’.  It’s also published in Nairobi with Kenya’s literary magazine Kwani and Lagos with Nigeria’s independent publisher Cassava Republic Press.  In fact it’s a little McSweeney’s-esque, with different formats and conceits for each issue.  The writing, however, tends to be more non-fiction: hard-hitting journalism; book and art criticism; interviews; and a variety of other forms. Beyond the magazine itself, Chimurenganyana is the book publishing arm of the project.  They are ‘ a pavement literature project consisting of low cost serialized monographs culled from the print journal’ and have published 6 books to date.  They also collaborate with academia, putting out a biennual publication on Africa’s cities with University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities.  All of this is very cool, and certainly does its part to show Eur-America that the Africa we think we know is just an Africa of our imagination.

But what I find the most exciting about this is that it’s not for Eur-Americans.  Sure, I can subscribe and can see articles on their website.  But a look at the stockists reveals that this is a Pan-African magazine for an African audience primarily (and really, for South Africa at that). What I find most exciting is that this is a growing and thriving international African diaspora cultural scene in Cape Town that is spreading beyond Cape Town’s traditional art and music culture, and that has the potential to draw in a generation of intellectuals, writers, and artists just as Paris did in the late 19th/early 20th century and New York did in the early and later 20th century.  Edjabe has helped to foster a creative community in Cape Town – putting up posters around the city, bringing in guest speakers (in collaboration with Penguin Press, for instance, and local bookshops), staging library exhibitions, and creating guerilla music festivals - making it a destination (real or virtual) for African artists, intellectuals, writers, and musicians.

Although it may be a reasonable critique to ask how representative these contributors are, or point out the gross inequalities in South Africa, or Africa as a whole,  neither France nor the US was a shining beacon of equality – material or political – during the Belle Epoque, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age. In fact, the inequalities gave the revolutionary frame to these artistic movements, and, after all, Chimurenga does mean revolutionary struggle.

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.

Do you own dog-eared copies of David Hollinger and Charles Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition? Do you get into heated arguments with your philosopher friends about the continued relevance of the pragmatist tradition? Did you consider a career in finance, but instead opt for the much more sensible life choice of writing academic articles about the social history of ideas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there’s a good possibility that you might be interested in putting together a panel for the Fifth Annual United States Intellectual History Conference next November in New York City. The Call for Papers has just been posted here. This year’s theme is “Communities of Discourse.”

Speaking of intellectual networks, and in the interest of full disclosure, three out of the five of us here at PhD Octopus have presented papers at this conference in the past. There’s no doubt that our own communities of discourse have expanded as a result. Since I began attending the meetings four years ago, I’ve always come away impressed with the conference’s sustained growth, the quality of scholarship on the panels, and its organizers’ tendency to highlight innovative historical work that also has obvious contemporary relevance. Besides all that, it’s nice to attend a meeting where the participants actually seem happy to be there, rather than nervous about the anxiety-inducing job interview to come.

The Ph.D Octopus (image by Parsiri Audcharevorakul)

Today we launched the official Ph.D. Octopus Facebook page. We’re finally entering the 21st century, I guess. Heck, we haven’t even really decided how we’re spelling Ph.D. But I guess it’s fitting that I contribute this post along with that piece of news, and the above image, which we’ve been hiding for far too long, crafted by the lovely and talented Parisi Audchaevorakul.

See, over the weekend I was having a conversation with my new friend Holger Syme, a professor of English at University of Toronto. Holger also has a wonderful academic blog called Dispositio. And so we discussed our blogs. Eventually, the conversation turned to the horrendous state of the academic job market (as it does) and then to the process of acquiring those disappearing jobs, and getting tenure, and to the process of peer review.

For those who don’t know, peer review is the process by which academic work is rendered legitimate. In practical terms, it means that when we submit articles to academic journals, the article is reviewed by two of our peers, that is to say, by two other academics in our field, two similar specialists, who might be able to speak the article’s accuracy, originality, and importance, and to the author’s general competence.

The goal of the system is for our peers to operate as gatekeepers. They are the ones who decide if the article is good enough to get in, and the number and quality of articles (and books) that we write determines the fellowships and jobs that we get, and whether we get tenure.

It’s not bad in principle. But there are problems. First, it’s never entirely clear that these two readers are actually experts in your field, or that their judgments are good. If your article is rejected by one journal, of course you can take it to another. But the reality is that two people may dislike your piece but a dozen other equally qualified “peers” might have loved it, and you have no way of knowing, because the peers are anonymous and the process is rather opaque.

Second, and perhaps more important, the process is painfully slow. Even if the two reviewers like your article, it might take weeks or even months for them to actually read it, then they send it back to you with the instruction “revise and resubmit,” and then the process repeats itself. Actually getting it to print can take even longer. Sometimes it takes years before the actual discovery or innovation that your work produces ever sees the light of the day, and that being the very dim light of an academic journal, which even at their most prestigious are read by very view people indeed.

What Holger did that so fascinated me was compare this peer review process to his own blogging. Because Holger has tenure, he can write (within reason) anything that he wants on his blog. He can share his academic work there. And so he does. And when he does, he gets responses in real time. If he provides a novel piece of research, say, a new analysis of one of Shakespeare’s plays, or even digital images of marginalia from the early 17th century, he can get comments, that is to say, peer reviews, immediately. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in the above post. Holger wrote it on December 21, 2011. Professor Martin Wiggins, of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, offered comments and corrections on December 22, 2011, the very next day. Then Holger edited the post, and thanked and responded to Dr. Wiggins in the comments.

Now, if Holger didn’t have tenure, and Professor Wiggins wasn’t a nice person, he could have stolen Holger’s work and done published it with more correct information, or simply published it first in a more reputable setting, and Holger’s path to tenure might have been thwarted. After all, we don’t get credit for our blog posts on the tenure clock. So for someone like me, or any of my non-tenured (or unemployed) co-bloggers, it might be academic suicide to publish our original research out here in cyberspace, rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, or in a book printed by a university press.

On the other hand, I wonder if, in the future, blogs such as these will sort of play the role that Sean Parker’s Napster did for the music industry. If we could all publish our work, safely, in real time, and have legitimate critics respond to it in  real time, and edit it in real time, wouldn’t that be a more effective way of advancing scholarship?

This is not to say that peer review should be done away with entirely. But it seems like a community of academic bloggers should at least have some effect in speeding the process up, and ideally in making it more transparent and democratic as well. For example, suppose Dr. Martin Wiggins was simply Mr. Martin Wiggins, amateur Shakespeare buff, who knew enough to provide relevant criticism to Holger’s post. Theoretically, as long as the scholarship is sound, it shouldn’t really matter where it’s coming from.

That’s precisely the point of William James’ 1903 essay, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” that we should not fetishize degrees, like the Ph.D., but instead evaluate work, and academics, on their scholarly merit. We’re not quite there yet, and I’m not quite sure where there is. But I think I’d like to get there eventually.

Yale Quarterback Patrick Witt aka Captain Douche

As a Harvard alum, I suppose I could take some obscene pleasure in the recent revelations about Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. You know, the guy who chose to play in the Harvard-Yale game instead of attend his Rhodes Scholarship interview? Yalies celebrated his upholding team and school loyalty over personal prestige–even as Harvard crushed Yale in The Game, 45-7. Except, according to this New York Times story, Witt rescinded his Rhodes application not because of the scheduling conflict, but because of a sexual assault allegation issued against him by a fellow student.

This was already a bizarre tale. Witt’s coach at Yale, Tom Williams, had lied about having been a Rhodes Scholarship candidate himself to suggest that he was in a prime position to advise his star quarterback. Then we find out that the campus paper, the Yale Daily News, had known about the sexual assault charges and been sitting on the story for months.

The thing is, I don’t take any pleasure in this at all (nor should anyone). Instead, we should lament the perils of athlete worship, which has reared its ugly head recently, most notably in the rioting of Penn State students over the firing of the late and disgraced Joe Paterno, protector of alleged child-rapist Jerry Sandusky.

I don’t know if Witt is guilty of sexual assault. But as the NY Times piece indicates from his prior arrests, he has a clear record of extreme douchebaggery. What we have here is a problem of the over-emphasis of collegiate athletics, and particularly the worship of male college athletes. These are people whose already inflated egos are fed from the moment they arrive on campus. This problem can lead to an equally inflated sense of privilege. Sometimes, this privilege just creates more and bigger douchebags. But other times, it can create atmosphere where real crimes go unnoticed, unreported, or unpunished.

This week I lectured on ‘The First World War and Africa’.  My students seemed to really enjoy the topic, which isn’t surprising; in a course (African History since 1800) where so much is new to first year undergraduates, the First World War is a topic they know quite a lot about and for which they have an extensive frame of reference.  This is because the First World War is constantly talked about here.  Between high school course work on the causes of World War One, and the pervasive cultural memory – enhanced by Downton Abbey and recent BBC miniseries like Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong – students arrive at university with a pretty solid foundation in World War One history.

Obviously, the First World War was pretty devastating to Britain.  Not only did 2.19 per cent of the population die in the war, but over a million and a half servicemen were wounded as well.  Its social and economic impacts in the British and French colonies in Africa were similarly devastating.  Contrast this with America’s 0.13 per cent casualty rate (as a percentage of the population) and its easy to see why this is a topic that has a much greater, more lasting emotional impact here. World War I was the event that catapulted Britain – like it or not – into the modern age. Add to that the historiographical line that has made its way down to the classroom level – the futility and pointlessness of the war – and it becomes clear that all my student essays this term are going to be about the impact of the Great War on Africa.

I think all of this is interesting because, although I feel like I had a really excellent high school history education, and a fantastic undergraduate history education, I arrived in Britain knowing only a few key facts about the First World War: that it had been the first major conflict in which the flame-thrower was used; it gave rise to Egyptian nationalism; and it was a major influence on Hemingway.  My husband was pretty dismayed when I explained that in a lot of American schools, World War I is taught as basically the pre-World War II: the same actors, basically; the same plot-line from an American perspective (we come in late and end the war); and pretty much important (from our perspective) because it lines up the causes of the Second World War.  Obviously this is not the case everywhere in America, and I’m sure that if you chose to focus on this in college, there’s loads of good teaching out there.  But it is possible to come through the American education system without too much emphasis on this conflict.

Despite my explanation, I’m not sure he believed me until we (finally) watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire.  Talking about it afterward, we were commenting that if this had been a story set in Britain at the same time (1920), it would have been all about the war, the changes in society after the war, the crumbling British institutions, etc that are all the fodder for Downton drama [in fact, the first episode of season 2 of Downton drove me nuts a little because they just wouldn't shut up about the war! even though it was supposed to have been going on for a couple of years by that point!].  Instead, the characters who fought in the war are outsiders, are really not supposed to bring it up, and are even shunned a little for having participated (especially for having volunteered).

In fact, the big cultural shared moment that pushed the US into modernity in the way most like World War I for Americans is the Great Depression, an event that really didn’t affect Britain to the same degree.  For both countries, there’s a heyday for the wealthy before an almost hubristic crash, which brings about more equality and more social programs. A recent piece in the FT Magazine by Gillian Tett points out that the reality of economic austerity is much closer for those in Britain than for those in the US precisely because our big cultural shared memory of austerity in America is over a generation ago, while the memory of the pain Britain felt in the 1970s is still relatively fresh.

Perhaps, following on from Gillian Tett, this all helps to explain both countries’ recent behavior, then.  If the First World War is such a dominant theme in British life and education, maybe that explains their unwillingness to get sucked into the entangling alliances of European politics and finance.  And if the Great Depression is a strong cultural memory in America, perhaps the idea of austerity and life before safety nets, and the pre-modernity it implies, makes the total return to Gilded Age politics distasteful enough to prevent too many cuts.  Here’s hoping, at least.

Education is increasingly become a central domain over which class conflict is being fought in the 21st century. Will corporate “Education Reform” succeed in privatizing our nation’s high schools, turning them into union-free charter-schools? Will there be any affordable public colleges in ten years? Will the burden of education be borne by society? Or by individuals who must go massively into debt to finance their own education? Is high-quality education a social good that benefits the whole community? Or is it a commodity, a form of individual social capital that each person should finance themselves through debt?

In this light we see the devastating cuts to public higher education:

Total state support for higher education declined 7.6 percent from the 2011 to the 2012 fiscal years, according to an annual report from the Grapevine Project, at Illinois State University, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers. As a whole, state spending on higher educa­tion­—after being supported by the recovery-act money for three budget years—is now nearly 4 percent lower than it was in the 2007 fiscal year. Twenty-nine states appropriated less for colleges this year than they did five years ago.

As public colleges that were formerly free or cheap increasingly rely on donations and tuition to fix their budgets the line between public and private college further erodes. Increasingly the only difference between, say UCLA, the public school, and USC, the private school, is that UCLA gets a nominal portion of their budget from the state. At both schools, of course, students can only even come close to affording tuition through back-door Federal subsidies, via Pell Grants and various student loan deals. The average student starts life burdened with $25,000 in student loan debt (and going up every year). Its very plausible for a student to attend a public university (like say $22,000 a year UConn) and have almost $100,000 of debt when they are 21.

All of which brings out the generational warrior in me. If I hear another old white Fox News watching person talking about how he had no problem making it, back when tuition was negligible and good jobs were aplently, I’m going to fucking lose it.

The roots go much deeper.

By Julian

Last week, Newt Gingrich reinvigorated his presidential campaign with a fiery appeal to conservative victimhood. Questions about his past infidelities, Gingrich explained, reflected the liberal media’s efforts to destroy the conservative movement. “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he thundered. Cue the multiple standing ovations from the rapt audience of South Carolina conservatives. Never mind the fact that Gingrich had helped build his career by denouncing Bill Clinton’s commitment to “family values” while he himself engaged in extra-marital affairs. For those in this audience, all that mattered was that they had found a politician willing to voice their grievances against the all-powerful liberal establishment.

The right-wing populism that Gingrich so effectively marshaled at last week’s debate is often contrasted with a more reasonable brand of conservative thinking that supposedly flourished in a past golden age. In this declension narrative, touted by Mark Lilla in his controversial review of Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, a sophisticated conservative intellectual tradition has recently descended into the swamplands of populist demagoguery. As Lilla explains, “Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”

The problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that American conservatives have been bashing the “liberal elite” now for going on six decades.  It’s part of their DNA. William Buckley Jr., the most influential intellectual in the postwar conservative movement, might have rejected the conspiracy theorists at the John Birch Society, but he also supported massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a book defending Senator McCarthy, and praised the fascist government in Franco’s Spain. While he could be witty and charming, Buckley was also merciless in attacking a liberal elite that he believed had come to dominate (and enervate) American society since the New Deal.

In fact, Buckley launched his career in 1951 with a book that claims liberals had used “academic freedom” as a tool to monopolize higher education and suppress conservative thought. During a period in which over 100 professors lost their jobs because of the Second Red Scare, Buckley asserts that conservatives were academia’s true victims. In God and Man at Yale he also calls for the elimination of peer review and tenure in favor of a system that would allow those who pay for colleges and universities—typically parents and alumni—to determine their ideological content: “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Universities needed to be run by the people who paid for them, not a band of unaccountable academics. It’s hard to imagine a critique more populist in character.

To be fair, right-wing appeals to populism explain why conservative intellectuals helped inspire a mass movement rather than a club for disenchanted, antediluvian curmudgeons. Still it’s worth remembering that intellectuals such as Buckley gained fame and notoriety by providing learned support for causes such as McCarthyism, Massive Resistance, and the firing of liberal faculty at Ivy League Universities. They provide a blueprint for today’s Newt Gingrichs, not an antidote.

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.