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Samuel Moyn 🔭

22 Mar, 11 tweets, 4 min read

Endless war thread! In #Humane's last chapter, my centerpiece is Barack Obama's extraordinary National Defense University speech on May 23, 2013. (Preorder "Humane," since now is when it counts-links at end!) us.macmillan.com/books/97803741…

@medeabenjamin

What made Obama special was that he was the best critic of his own policies, though-in an absolutely immortal moment that I believe defined the presidency morally more than any other--"heckler" @medeabenjamin pushed him offscript that day. obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-offi…

More in the book on the moral stakes of the moment-its insights soon relinquished-but of special note was Obama's remark that "a perpetual war" including "through drones or Special Forces" alone "will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." He was right.

@jacklgoldsmith

In today's oped, @jacklgoldsmith and I repeat this, for the risk is that Congress will repeal the old AUMFs, or just the 2002 one-leaving the presidency authorities for perpetual war it has been given (by its own lawyers) since 2001. nytimes.com/2021/03/22/opi…

As a commenter on an earlier thread remarked, this is like agreeing to take off a belt once you've donned suspenders in the meantime. And the legerdemain went beyond the Constitution to include latitudinarian interpretations of international law.

Self-defense became a license to kill, not a limit on policy. None of these lawyerly authorizations back to John Yoo's in 2001 have been ripped up, as if pushing those limits (as opposed to ones on detainee treatment) had not been noxious in their own way.

Arguably legitimating endless war by claiming to oppose it has been the plan all along. It is something to require honesty about, if legal constraint and policy change are not in the offing.

@SecBlinken

Poles apart from Obama in 2013, @SecBlinken remarked in a podcast with @MichaelJMorell not long before the 2020 election (34:00) that end endless war means pivoting to the shadow war with special forces. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bid…

That is not what the phrase should be allowed to mean, and deflect from the real choices made, and legal interpretations retained. Good luck!

Here's the Amazon link to the book: amazon.com/dp/0374173702/

Here's one to independent bookstores: indiebound.org/book/978037417…

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Samuel Moyn 🔭

@samuelmoyn

24 Sep 20

1/ There is a difference between due caution or salutary fear, on the one hand, and self-confirming and -fulfilling paranoia, on the other. Whether we stray from one to the other is up to us.

2/ Compliance with the framing of journalists and obedience to cues are choices. Events should compel our mobilization for sure-but a lot depends on how to frame them and seizing the initiative in doing so rather than living in the contrived reality of our enemies.

3/ True: Premonitions of a chilling end can activate and mobilize. A lot of democratic work has been inspired by the surmise that, without rhetorical and real endtimes thinking, democracy would end.

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9 Sep 20

@MadKhosla

1/ Thoughts on @MadKhosla's provocative claim at the end of today's oped: "The legitimacy of courts was never built on popular authorization from the people. It was built on the promise of keeping representation in check and protecting the people from the extremes of politics."

2/ It is a descriptive or prescriptive claim? Unclear. And what kind of legitimacy was built either way? It seems like normative legitimacy is meant. But it would be interesting to find out to decide what is at stake in challenging judges today. nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opi…

3/ To begin w/, it is really credible that we would want to root judicial power entirely beyond popular authorization? Madhav's adviser Richard Tuck might have something to say about that-at least insofar as we would want to trace any forms of "government" back to "sovereignty."

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Samuel Moyn 🔭

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24 Aug 20

1/ Today my review of Eric Posner's interesting "The Demagogue's Playbook" posts - check it out and retweet! thenation.com/article/cultur…

2/ On one level, the review "interrogates" Posner's version of American history - his first attempt at writing history I believe - though I leave the details to the professionals.

3/ It's a revival of Richard Hofstadter, but without the complexity-an elitist history of the crackpot masses. But, I claim, it is refreshing that it is entirely open about its priors and may reflect the broader incidence of antidemocratic belief.

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Samuel Moyn 🔭

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8 Aug 20

@beccarosen

1/ Another thread on our Supreme Court reform piece. Thanks to @beccarosen for editing it!
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

@Mark_Tushnet

2/ It reports the arguments and findings of our underlying new paper - check it out! (And thanks to @Mark_Tushnet and untaggable others for comments so far!)
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

3/ Our central analytical contribution is intended to be to group imaginable reforms into two types: "personnel" management reforms, and "disempowerment" reforms. We then go on to canvass the desirability, legality, and feasibility of the reforms.

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Samuel Moyn 🔭

@samuelmoyn

8 Aug 20

1/ The first of two threads on our new piece on Supreme Court reform--please check it out!
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

@YaleLawSch

2/ For me, this topic arose when @YaleLawSch students responding to a ... difficult semester at the school banded together to study the Supreme Court and alternative imaginable reforms to it nytimes.com/2018/09/26/nyr…

3/ This was an exercise in democratic constitutionalism - but one that started by refusing the premise that the institutional form of the Supreme Court is fixed and democracy is best conceived as mobilization and countermobilization in its shadow.

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Samuel Moyn 🔭

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4 Aug 20

1/ Today my piece on the Never Trump movement posts. This thread nerds out on European history in connection. If analogies are to be made with early twentieth century tumult, let’s not forget the descent into facism followed “the containment of the left.” newrepublic.com/article/158703…

2/ The authors of the book under review cite, as the premise of their study of honorable conservatives, a wildfire meme since 2016: American democracy depends on whether the right evolves in a democratic or undemocratic way.

@dziblatt

3/ The basis for the meme is @dziblatt’s excellent study of the early 20th century, on the “conservative dilemma,” in which old and wealthy interests in England and Germany chose between playing the democratic game and scuttling it (respectively). amazon.com/Conservative-D…

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