Letters From the April 2025 Issue

Please gather

Thank you for the thoughtful reviews of Daniel Bessner’s Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson. Myth of American Idealism [“Empire’s Critic,” February 2025]. Bessner’s main criticism is strategic rather than analytical. “The left should spend time denying people in mythology. Instead, they should develop more effective strategies to shape the behavior of the state.”

Effective declaration of mass action on empirical grounds appears to assume that Chomsky and Robinson have insisted: x Number of demonstrations y Number of people within that period z The targeted policy changes over a few months. “Of course, that would be ridiculous, and of course no one ever proposed such an empirical test. Instead, in a capitalist society, all institutions of governance, opinion formation, and economic regulation are managed by people who serve as a single goal: to form and recreate capital, to promote the business environment and culture that encourages it. These institutions function efficiently and do not allow large opposition from within. Therefore, the only way to counter them is large, continuing popular opposition.

Is it too early to amortize a massive amount of action as a dead end? Abolitionists, populists, socialists, early union organizers, suffrages and civil rights activists were little unqualified failures. It is understandable that the public is about to give up on the actions of the public right after allowing them to be surrounded by bamboo in the Charlatan vote. But ultimately, there is no alternative to continuing to persuade people. There is no other offsetting power.

gage sCiarava
Cambridge, Massachusetts
 

I agree with most of Bessner’s reading. It includes his conclusion that Pace Chomsky and Robinson “will not be able to turn around by marching and propaganda campaigns alone. [America’s many revanchist] The surrounding institutions. Political, that is, state-powerful. “However, I am also very pessimistic about command strategies to each other in such an alternative long March.

For me, the decisive lesson of the 2024 US election was that, despite both dual-rival candidates continuing to be enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s still ongoing genocide actions, when the vote total came, less than 2% of voters tried to register to vote in favor of one of the third candidates. The magnitude of such coronavirus among Americans has revealed that intellectual critique, massive demonstrations, and even institutional struggles within the state could challenge the US’s entrenched control, as it dismisses both rulers of both “lower evil” parties.

wIliam D. fUSFIELD
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
 

Daniel Bessner argues that the movement against the Vietnam War “has little impact on policy.” On the contrary, many studies such as Carolyn Woods Eisenberg’s recent Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger and the War in Southeast Asiadetailing how the Nixon administration took action into account when making major decisions about the war. One example: Nixon admitted in his memoir that he retreated his threat to unleash a massive escalation in North Vietnam, including the possibility of nuclear weapons use, due to moratorium and mobilization demonstrations in the fall of 1969. This story is told in a PBS documentary. Movement and “madman.”

rOvert lForever
San Francisco, California
The author is an executive producer Movement and “madman.”
 

Constitutional conspiracy

I was happy to read it Nation Until the 1870s, they called for election universities. [“A Popular Opinion,” December 2024]. In his article, Richard Kreitner laments the fact that he could not destroy the “aged constitutional machine,” known as the electoral college, and cites the presidential elections that have been muddy since the end of the Civil War. However, the agency’s role was even more malice before the war began. The concept and design of the electoral university, established in the constitution of 1787, was directly responsible for the filling of all three branches of the new central government with planter/slave owner representatives. The Constitution created and fused two forms of government: constitutional republicanism and constitutional slavery. The latter used representative republican tools to protect and expand human ownership.

mIchael sMidi
Plattsburgh, New York
 

Executive Delete

Eric Foner has investigated many precedents in US history for racist elimination, claiming that “none of them have finished well.” [“America Has Done Mass Deportation Before,” TheNation.com, November 25, 2024]. His best example is an explanation of Abraham Lincoln’s plans for African Americans, particularly for expatriates in the Central America and the Caribbean. Foner argues that opposition to the ideas of slave owners and black leaders, and Epiphany’s opposition to the president’s own values ​​as an African-American soldier, permeated the “dramatic change in his outlook” on January 1, 1863, by issuing the issue of a liberation declaration. Island, he plans to revive that April.

So, the Fourner hedge and “” that Lincoln took a “important step to recognizing black men as American citizens”;[began] I imagine the United States as an equal interracial society. “The awkward, sudden but gradually changing of Foner’s Lincoln hints meant that the White House had not stopped black men from actually trying to resettle African Americans, even if they were wearing blue uniforms. Lincoln negotiated with British diplomats until 1863 to send African Americans to present-day Belize and Guyana, and fought to maintain the black immigrant commissioner despite Congress withdrawing funds for the latter in late 1864.

No historians would speculate that Lincoln’s removal scheme failed, and they weren’t see through to predict that Trump would suffer the same fate. However, Foner would have strengthened his case by shunning the 16th President’s “evolution” PAT story against race, and instead highlighting the panoply of obstacles Lincoln faced. 160 years later, it all sounds very familiar.

sEbastian pyear
Oxford, UK
 

FONER Reply

During the first two years of the civil war, Lincoln promoted a plan modeled on the views of his political idol Henry Clay, combining slavery and the end of slavery to slave owners, a progressive path to liberation, and the voluntary colonization of freed slaves other than coalition. The plan was partly intended to gain the support of slave owners for their liberation.

When he issued the Emancipation Declaration, the plan became controversial. The declaration was immediate, not gradual. He said nothing about colonization (in fact, he assumes that black people remain in the country, where they “work faithfully for reasonable wages”). No provision for payment to the owner was made to compensate for the loss of human property. Lincoln mentioned colonization once or twice in the war, but did not publicly mention it. The Emancipation Declaration itself was his plan to remove slavery now, without colonization, compensation, or progressiveism.

eRick fOner
New York City