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The Texas Civil Rights Review has signed a petition asking that prisoners no longer be denied their rights to vote.

Like many folks, your editor for decades held the position that the
violation of some ‘social contract’ could serve as moral grounds for
denying convicted felons their rights to participate in elections.

But what is a ‘social contract’? And does a felony conviction
fairly count as the sole criterion for judging that someone has broken
one?

To comment on this article please go to the comment blog.

To skim an easy example from Texas headlines these days, let’s consider
the elected representatives of the legislature, and the role they are
supposed to play in the ‘social contract’, if there is such a thing.

Because, if there is such a thing as a ‘social contract’, one would think that the
state legislature would be the most likely place to look for people who
honor it.

If there is a ‘social contract’, then, state legislators would be the
ones morally obliged to say things like: ‘look, we have a "social
contract" to keep with the children of Texas, etc.’ Then they would pass an income tax, and go home for the summer.

I skim the example, not to get back into all the cruddy history of the
Texas state legislature, especially when it comes to their stewardship of
education. I just use the example of the legislature’s track record in
education
to show how, if there is a ‘social contract’, and if breaking it were
sufficient grounds to deny someone the right to vote, then how would we
begin to apply the enforcement of such a rule, fairly, across
the board?

If breaking a ‘social contract’ is grounds to revoke a person’s right
to vote, then state legislators ought to lead by example, and revoke
their own voting rights next week. How’s that for a modest proposal?

So the argument that prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because
they broke their ‘social contract’, is an argument that runs into all
kinds of Civil Rights problems, if you take the equal protection clause
of the 14th amendment to be a central premise of civil rights logic.

***

But to be honest about it, the flaw of the ‘social contract’
justification was not what really prompted your humble editor to
re-think voting rights for prisoners. More persuasive has been
the trend over my adult lifetime for lawmakers across the USA to
replace
education with incarceration as the great hope of domestic tranquility.

The first time I heard Angela Davis make the argument, I was
startled. She said (I forget exactly which time) that if you
compare the political economy of the prison population today, with the
slave population of 1860, then you get a pattern that expresses some
deep, visceral structure of American power relations.

In fact, at no time in American history have we been able to produce a
sharable system of freedom and justice for all. Seen in this light,
the legislature’s failure this summer to provide
excellent education (let’s face it, for poor kids and brown kids and
black kids) is not simply to be chalked up to conflicting personalities
between three old white men. The failure is deeply structural.

Or put it this way: let’s suppose some court declared the Texas highway
speed limits unconstitutional, and then ordered the legislature to fix the
system, or face the closure of all highways. And suppose at the end of
two regular sessions, with half a dozen special sessions in between,
the result came out that nothing had yet been resolved, and Texans were
told that come October, the highway system would be shut down.

Hang with your humble editor, dear reader. The point is just about done. Now suppose we had some political analysis
that said, well, we have three ornery white guys who just can’t get
their egos (or whatever the folks at PinkDome call that thing) lined
up. Would we be just sitting back, reading that account, and
shaking our heads?

Or even worse–would we be expecting any of these guys to be remotely considering campaigns for re-election?

At times like this I think of my cat, Princess. She is such a
bearutiful and clever creature. Sometimes, if I get busy typing
or reading, and I forget to feed her promptly on time, she has this way
of slipping. She just walks across the table and her foot slides,
ever so accidentally of course, right down onto some fleshy surface,
and ouch! Oh my god, she is such an artist when it comes to
slipping up in just the right way at the right time.

***

No, to get back to the story, the ability of the legislature to
fumble this ball over and over again, with everybody watching, shaking
their heads, and wringing their hands, speaks to our collective
character as a state population, because goddammit, it’s who we deeply
are. We are not ashamed of these guys, because we have no shame when it comes to our own faith in education.

And part of this structure of our collective personality involves the
criminalization and incarceration of the very same people who we never
believed we should share anything with anyway.

And that’s why prisoners should not be denied their right to vote.

***

But there is still one argument more. It has to do with
consequences of social drift. When public policy drifts into
criminalization, and when the felons are at the same time deprived of
their rights to vote, then the politicians who are most reponsible for
the trend have no consequences to fear, because they are busy
disenfranchising their most likely critics.

The trend is reinforced when rural, white populations compete for
prison-related opportunities, importing populations into their counties
who will have no say whatsoever in local elections. Again, as
with politicians, thinly populated rural communities might think twice
about importing swing voters, and, when it comes to prison policy,
thinking twice is really what we need more of.

So, given the incoherence of the ‘social contract’ argument, given the
visceral traditions in America (and in Texas) that continue to
perpetuate ugly structures of power, and given the one-way direction in
which these consequences tend to be dumped–these reasons give us
sufficient warrant to sign a petition asking that prisoners be restored
their rights to vote.

[PS, sorry, I realize Sunday sermons should not use the GD word.
But if we really are the collective character that our legislature is
reflecting back on us, then too many Sunday sermons have needed improvement anyway.]

By Greg Moses

"Texas Civil Rights Review attacks Alex Jones, Defends Plan of San Diego," reads the headline
at InfoWars.Com. The story there is a fairly accurate review of a brief
Sept. 19 commentary posted by yours truly. I do think Alex Jones picked
a poor target for his energies and resources when he chose to protest a
Diez y Seis de Septiembre rally on Saturday. So it is fair to say that
I attacked Mr. Jones, although my attack is limited and carefully
qualified.

But nowhere in the article of Sept. 16 do I defend
the plan of San Diego. In fact, I say in the story, "I am a pacifist.
No killing please." To the extent that the plan of San Diego calls for
killing of any sort, it is not something that I support. This portion
of the article is misrepresented in the headline, and ignored in the
otherwise comprehensive quotations. It may be the only part NOT quoted
by InfoWars.

What I encourage Mr. Jones to consider is another
way of reading references to the Plan of San Diego as a fragment of
historical memory. In the Sept. 19 article I suggest that the language
of Malcolm X provides a suitable analogy for thinking about the meaning
of voices who advocate a right to violence, especially when, just like
Malcolm, the people who preserve that right in speech happen to serve
as poor examples of violence in action. If we notice that expressed references to the Plan of San Diego
accompany peaceful and inclusive public actions, then we might ask: is
this to be taken literally? Or might there be some message intended to
provoke deeper thinking about justice and deeper commitments to the
everyday challenge of justice in our streets.

This is not a new argument from the Texas Civil Rights Review. I have made the case before in two articles: "Are Civil Rights Groups Racist?" and in an editorial entitled, "Measuring Racism.
In those articles I show how Alex Jones proceeds from a libertarian
logic that does many things well (as the work of Alex Jones is valuable
in many ways) but which fails precisely on such occasions as last
Saturday, when Mr. Jones made the Diez y Seis march a venue for his
protest against Chicano nationalism and its language of La Raza.

When
I hear Malcolm talk about the "white devil", when I hear him threaten
the "bullet" if the ballot won’t work, or when I hear the thinly veiled
reference to the right to violence in the call to justice "by any means
necessary", I do not chime with the judgment that this is, as Mike
Wallace once put it, "the hate that hate produced." Yet this is about
as far as libertarian logic can take us, where all parties stand on equal
ground and where demands for civility are evenly spread.

To go
beyond libertarian logic one must first deal with the hard question:
does white supremacy still prevail? I think you will find by and large
that libertarians have no way to answer the question, because they
embrace a logic that cannot do the proper analysis. All the libertarian
sees are individuals, some white, some black, some brown, etc. From
this basis, the libertarian has a difficult time conceiving how racial
power is to be discerned or how collective relations of power enter the
analytical field.

At any rate, let’s not multiply our
disputes. Here at the TCRR I am clear about which logic is being used
and why. I respect many uses of libertarian logic, but I also reject
its limitations. The decisive question I answer this way: white
supremacy persists in theory and practice. And this is the conceptual
premise upon which I build my working theory of the value of Civil
Rights. Had there never been any white supremacy, there never would
have been a Civil Rights movement, etc.

So I welcome
wholeheartedly the attention that TCRR is receiving from InfoWars. And
I suspect that the InfoWars audience will have some members who agree
that white supremacy is still a problem. Others will not. To those who
agree that white supremacy is still a problem, I ask this question: do
people have a right to self defense?

As a pacifist, I do not
draw quick or easy conclusions from the right to self defense, but I do
think the right exists and the Plan of San Diego was drawn and
conceived during such a time when that right was perceived to have
special urgency as a right. And this is the lesson that the Plan of San
Diego can teach us if we are interested in peace. Because the better
response to those who would recall the Plan of San Diego during these
times of crisis is not to condemn outright their right to recall, but
to ask, what are we going to do about white supremacy today?

For
anyone interested in the people and programs of power that are
disrupting our democratic dreams all over the globe, the work of
InfoWars is a helpful resource. What is too sad is the inability of
Alex and InfoWars to see that what motivates MEChA and Chicano
Nationalism is the living experience of centuries of power that has
always operated in just the way InfoWars says it does. Which I suspect
is why InfoWars hangs onto the Second Amendment with unpried fingers.
And what is this commitment to the Second Amendment about if not the
right to violence?

As Alex Jones and InfoWars protect their
right to bear arms, so do some voices of a beleaguered community
protect the community’s right to self defense. As Alex Jones and
InfoWars demonstrate, where one goes with these rights to violence,
besides defending them, is a complex and auspicious responsibility that
nobody takes lightly, least of all the Texas Civil Rights Review, which
at once respects rights and encourages vigorous militant, nonviolent
activism, and peaceful assemblies such as the "beauty of it all" seen
Saturday in the streets of Austin during the Diez y Seis de Septiembre
celebration.

A View from Mexico
By Rodrigo Saldaña Guerrero

There are people who insist that politics must be pragmatic. Its
purpose is reaching power and using it, not passing a test on party
principles. For others the most important thing in politics is
ideological authenticity. They complain about leftist support to Kerry,
for instance, and about the lack of true left credentials of that
candidate.

One gets the impression that being leftist is a question of ideological
purity, and little else. It does not really matter if the power goes to
someone else, as long as leftists are true to the faith. Both sides
have their pros and cons, of course.

The strength of pragmatism is an insistence in doing things and
(hopefully) a sensibility to detect what one has to have in order to do
things. That’s necessary, because politics is a practical, not a merely
theoretical, activity. Its weakness is that doing something is not an
end in itself.

Doing things is something widely admired today, so much so that someone
who “has done a lot” can be praised even if it is not very clear
whatever he did that for. We have to think of ends and consequences. We
act to do something or to get something. Did we achieve the end we
aspired to? What we do has results. How do we feel about them?

Its strengths and weaknesses mirror those of pragmatism. Its strongest
point is its attention to ends. The loftiest values are very important
to us, give sense to our life and actions. Ideals are not necessarily
utopias (utopia, a word coined by Thomas More, means etymologically no
place).

Ideals are not unrealizable ends, they just can not be achieved
immediately, completely, perfectly. They are in fact found everywhere
in provisional, incomplete, imperfect ways. This is all right, but it
presents us with a problem: if we have to admit that we will never have
a perfect implementation of an ideal, how can we criticize an imperfect
realization? The answer of some idealists is to center their interest
in formulas, not in facts. Since we know that we will never achieve
perfection, the only thing that matters is to be absolutely right in
our formulation of the ideals.

When a supposedly leftist party or movement is in power, all this may
lead to a Manichean approval of everything the regime does. The right
(the enemy) is always wrong, no matter what it does. The good side
(ours, of course) is always right, whatever it does. The Soviet regime
probably killed, tortured, terrorized, more people that the Nazi one.
No problem, for some time at least.

It took the left decades to understand the true nature of what was
eventually called real socialism. When they did, the Soviet Empire
dissolved from within, leaving an enormous void in the hearts of the
faithful.

What happens when the left is not in power is what really interests us
here. Policies that have had scarce effect in helping the poor are
defended because they are ideologically correct. A few decades ago many
shared that ideology, but most people have moved in the opposite
direction, and do not like the old leftist prescriptions.

Some social democrats (González, Miterrand, Blair, Lula, Lagos) have
done what to the eyes of the old left is at best a Socialist
administration of capitalism. Whatever the truth of that perception,
those politicians have done something at least for the poor, in
practice, while the pure leftists go farther and farther away from
popular support, and from power.

In the United States the left demands that a politician like Kerry take
positions that may be admirable examples of ideological orthodoxy, but
which now would keep him from any position of power.

I think that Marxism is one of the secular religions proceeding from
the Enlightenment, worldviews that have in their core a secularization
of the Christian History of Salvation (deprived of the divine guarantee
of success offered by the religious version, unless we assume that the
role of divinity has been taken over by History). It sees history as
ineluctable progress: at its end, there will be an earthly paradise,
whatever we do.

This belief did a terrible damage to the left, since it disconnected
rational evaluation and success from the means used by the
revolutionaries. No matter what strategies they used, or how clumsily
they applied them, triumph was assured. Temporary failure was no
argument against their way of thinking, just a setback that would
inevitably give way to final victory.

The self liquidation of what once seemed to be their earthly paradise
was a terrible blow to their faith. Some have faced it in a way that
would have surprised Marx enormously: making Marxism into an
ideological superstructure of a Capitalist society.

It is doubtful whether the unilineal left-right model ever was adequate
for the complexity of the ideological universe, and now everybody
admits that what is called the left is in a serious identity crisis.
Still, many of us would insist that something like that must exist.

I am not going to enter now the whole question of the reinvention of
the left; I will concentrate instead in the attitude of many leftists
toward the realization of its ideals.

Many leftists seem to think that the really important thing is to be
faithful to the right dogmatic formulations of the left ideals. It
matters much less or not at all if they are put into practice. Or, to
put it otherwise, it is clear that they can not be put into practice.
What one must do is to keep the purity of those formulas, and the best
way to do it is to be out of power, in the opposition.

Denouncing the wickedness of the right without the embarrassment of
having to perform a perfect leftist policy, something one knows to be
impossible. That is a way of being leftist. I think the problem is in
the way we see the relationship between the ideals and their
realization. The old left would say, as we have seen, that their
realization was assured, so that was not their problem.

A disenchanted left is used to think that the only possible thing is to
keep saying the right things, even if one knew that had little or no
effect in the real world. My solution is that we can realize those
ideals in the way I said before: provisionally, gradually,
incompletely, imperfectly; moving from a static conception of society
toward a dynamic, historical one. And our duty is not to do them in a
perfect and definitive way, which would be impossible anyhow, but to
keep improving the imperfect, tending asymptotically toward the perfect
realization.

What the left should do, and what it can not see, is to take the
necessary steps to bring social reality nearer and nearer to a real
social good, to a society in which inequality and inequity tend to
disappear, even if they never do in fact disappear.

By static criteria society will always be imperfect, that is to say,
unjust. Knowing that helps little. What matters is that it can be made
less unjust, that we can cooperate to give it a dynamic that means a
real movement toward a more just society and the improvement of the
conditions in which our less fortunate siblings have to live. And the
effective way to do this is to build popular strength, to convince
great numbers of citizens to support what is supposed to be the cause
of the people, a goal that seems to be now, paradoxically, very far
away…

Subject says she bought two rocks of crack from the guy who later leaped the fence.