Month: November 2013

Book Review – My Grandfather’s Son by Clarence Thomas

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My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas

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A few days ago Ann Althouse linked this wonderful interview with Clarence Thomas. I encourage you to watch it if you have a few spare minutes:

While watching it, I was reminded that I had his book sitting around somewhere. I got it years ago.

Remembering that I had made myself a vow that I was not going to buy anymore books until I had gotten through my current stack (with the notable exception of the Scott Walker book) I decided to pick up “My Grandfather’s Son” and get to it.

I am really glad I did.

Clarence Thomas came from the most poverty stricken circumstances you can imagine, and fought a lot of demons along his path to Supreme Court Associate Justice.

As a boy he grew up in rural Georgia but it seemed that he enjoyed his childhood. Until he had to move to Savannah. Here he was faced with grinding poverty and the hunger and cold that comes with being poor in the city. It was interesting for me to hear how Thomas was happier and better fed when he was living in rural Georgia. There, at least, he could fend for himself on the land and keep the hunger pangs away, while in Savannah he was basically stuck.

His father was never really in the picture, so he was being raised by his mother. One day she told Thomas and his brother to pack their stuff (such as it was) and head down the street to his grandfather’s house. He would be living there.

While this was heartbreaking for Thomas, the new place was a palace compared to what they were living in. The brothers were taken care of and were introduced to the Catholic church. The grandfather ran his house with an iron fist, but in a good way. The boys now had schooling, structure, and someone to answer to if they were fooling around. I would like to add here that it is my firm belief that many of the woes of black society in the inner cities, and many of the woes of society in general, can be squarely blamed on broken families, and children not having structure in their lives in their formative years. But this is certainly grist for another post.

Thomas looked back upon these times in his formative years fondly. Sure, he would have wanted to played in the streets, but Thomas’ grandfather was determined to make Thomas and his brother see the value of studying and hard work.

Eventually, Thomas graduated high school and found his way to Holy Cross, then to Yale. All along the way he experienced racism, both overt and covert. I found it interesting that he respected the whites in and around Savannah more for their openness about how they thought blacks inferior versus the covert racism deployed by urban liberals.

Thomas held a succession of jobs, working for Monsanto, the EEOC, the DC Court of Appeals, and eventually the Supreme Court. He describes in detail the bruising confirmation hearings and how awful the politics were.

More interesting to me was how he described his problems with his personal life, with alcohol (he no longer drinks) and the problems he eventually has with his family relationships. I will leave the details out because I want you to read the book, but it was refreshing to hear someone of a stature like Thomas to describe how he had to fight a lot of demons along his path.

The book is very easy to read and I couldn’t put it down. Thomas is a great American and has a great American story to share. I recommend that you read it someday.

Cross posted at LITGM.

Daniel Hannan’s New Book Is Out! (Read It As Soon As You Finish America 3.0)

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The long awaited book by Daniel Hannan, entitled Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.

My copy arrived last week, and I am more than eager to read it.

The Amazon page for the book is here.

The blurb for the book says:

British politician Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom is an ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of the principles that have made America great, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled.
 
According to Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms—individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government—are the legacy of a very specific tradition that was born in England and that we Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited.
 
By the tenth century, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to inherited common-law rights. The story of liberty is the story of how that model triumphed. How it was enshrined in a series of landmark victories—the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. Constitution—and how it came to defeat every international rival.
 
Today we see those ideas abandoned and scorned in the places where they once went unchallenged. Inventing Freedom is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism. And it is offered at a time that may turn out to be the end of the age of political freedom.

Mr. Hannan’s argument sounds terribly convincing! In fact, it is much the same argument that we make in America 3.0.

We previously post about the wonderful review of America 3.0 which Mr. Hannan wrote. As he noted, we draw on many of the same sources:

Here is a powerful and persuasive book. I confess to using the phrase “powerful and persuasive” in the sense that most bloggers do, to mean “agrees with me”. The authors have drawn on the same sources that I most frequently turn to: the brilliant Cambridge historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane; Oxford’s James Campbell, the supreme authority on late Anglo-Saxon England; David Hackett Fischer and Kevin Phillips, whose histories of the United States contextualise the great republic within the Anglosphere continuum. They have returned, too, to the foremost Victorians, notably Stubbs, Freeman and Maitland, who fell out of fashion during the twentieth century, but whose truths will endure when more recent interpretations have been found wanting. I think I also detect Macaulay’s elegant spoor, though he isn’t cited directly. And, of course, they pay due reverence to America’s founders, above all Jefferson – whose words were unfailingly wise, even if his deeds didn’t always match them.

One further influence on Mr. Hannan, cited in his book, is my coauthor James C. Bennett. Jim popularized the term “Anglosphere,” which first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel The Diamond Age.

Jim’s 2004 book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century is essential reading.

Read The Anglosphere Challenge after you have finished America 3.0 and Inventing Freedom!

Daniel Hannan’s new book: Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World

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I am up to 138/377 in Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. It is very good, and covers much of the same history, and relies on many of the same sources, as America 3.0.

It is nice to see Jim Bennett cited at the beginning, and the word “Anglosphere” used throughout.

I will have more to say once I have finished it.

Get Dan’s book and read it once you have finished reading America 3.0!

Another Look at ‘The Rise of the West’ – But With Better Numbers

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Originally published at The Scholar’s Stage on 20 November 2013.

Why the West? I do not think there is any other historical controversy that has so enthralled the public intellectuals of our age.  The popularity of the question can probably be traced to Western unease with a rising China and the ease with which the issue can be used as proxy war for the much larger contest between Western liberals who embrace multiculturalism and conservatives who champion the West’s ‘unique’ heritage.

A few months ago I suggested that many of these debates that surround the “Great Divergence” are  based on a flawed premise–or rather, a flawed question. As I wrote: 

“Rather than focus on why Europe diverged from the rest in 1800 we should be asking why the North Sea diverged from the rest in 1000.” [1]

I made this judgement based off of data from Angus Maddison‘s Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD and the subsequent updates to Mr. Maddison’s data set by the scholars who contribute to the Maddison Project.

 As far as 1,000 year economic projections go this data was pretty good. But it was not perfect. In many cases–especially with the Chinese data–it was simply based on estimates and extrapolations from other eras. A more accurate view of the past would require further research.

 That research has now been done. The economic historian Stephen Broadberry explains:

As it turns out, medieval and early modern European and Asian nations were much more literate and numerate than is often thought. They left behind a wealth of data in documents such as government accounts, customs accounts, poll tax returns, Parish registers, city records, trading company records, hospital and educational establishment records, manorial accounts, probate inventories, farm accounts, tithe files. With a national accounting framework and careful cross-checking, it is possible to reconstruct population and GDP back to the medieval period. The picture that emerges is of reversals of fortune within both Europe and Asia, as well as between the two continents. [2]

Drawing on a multiple specialized studies, Mr. Broadberry is able to create a table that is more accurate than the one I used earlier:

Taken from Stephen Broadberry. “Accounting for the Great Divergence.” voxEU.org. 16 November 2013.

There are a few things here worth commenting on.

Read more

Here comes 1933

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The Depression did not really get going until the Roosevelt Administration got its anti-business agenda enacted after 1932. The 1929 crash was a single event, much like the 2008 panic. It took major errors in economic policy to make matters worse. Some were made by Hoover, who was a “progressive” but they continued under Roosevelt.

James Taranto has a good take and quotes a couple of lefty commentators. Like Ezra Klein.

There’s a lot of upside for Republicans in how this went down. It came at a time when Republicans control the House and are likely to do so for the duration of President Obama’s second term, so the weakening of the filibuster will have no effect on the legislation Democrats can pass. The electoral map, the demographics of midterm elections, and the political problems bedeviling Democrats make it very likely that Mitch McConnell will be majority leader come 2015 and then he will be able to take advantage of a weakened filibuster. And, finally, if and when Republicans recapture the White House and decide to do away with the filibuster altogether, Democrats won’t have much of an argument when they try to stop them.

As Taranto puts it:

“”The political problems bedeviling Democrats” is a marvelous bit of understatement. The abject failure of ObamaCare has made the prospect of a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017 much likelier. Thus even from a purely partisan standpoint, rational Democrats would have been more cautious about invoking the nuclear option when they did than at just about any other time in the past five years.”

The filibuster maneuver by Reid is not a demonstration of strength. It is an admission of weakness. The idiots at HuffPo and the LA Times are beating their chests in joy at the prospect of eternal Democrat majorities that can ignore those pesky Republicans.

In fact, what Reid is acknowledging is that the Democrat majority in the Senate is going away and now is the time to pack the courts and regulatory agencies with ideologues and get all the anti-business regulations in place while they can. The hard left, which believes in magic and Cargo Cults, is cheering them on.

Bloomberg sees what happened, too.

“Under any administration, federal agencies seek to implement the president’s policies by developing regulations,” Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP in Washington who has represented coal-heavy utilities, said. “But in most cases, the judges on the D.C. Circuit are the people who decide whether those regulations comply with federal law.”

I fully expect to see anti-fracking regulations roll out soon, once the Obama appointments get confirmed by the rump Senate. However, what goes around, comes around.

It is our understanding that the Supreme Court exception was included to satisfy pro-abortion extremists, the most active and basest part of the activist base. The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler reported yesterday that the two biggest such groups, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and NARAL Pro-Choice America, both declined comment on the nuclear move, “leaving it unclear whether they are concerned about their ability to block future objectionable”–i.e., Republican–“nominees.”

The abortion lobby sees the future better than giddy leftists who think government creates wealth and jobs.