Jedediah Purdy: All Publications, Events and Press

Drowning in Lawyers

Articles — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:34:00 -0400

The US Senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water -- and is holding it. Before the committee's Democrats approve Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn't torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice. It's about the integrity of the elite lawyers who assess the president's power -- who answer to the attorney general.… more

Can't Talk the Talk

Articles — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:28:00 -0400

One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons and Bushes, and it's a basic problem for anyone who wants to be the next president: they share an exhausted… more

The New Open Society

Articles — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:48:00 -0500

Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years, when government was flatlining in petty scandal and technology stocks seemed to rise exponentially. Not only was anything possible: If you believed the mavens of Wired magazine and assorted other cyber-prophets, pretty much anything was inevitable. Soon, they assured us, people would spend more time in virtual communities than in "meatspace." Politics would be transformed by the universal pamphleteering of Netizens. Oh, and some of us would go all the way and upload our consciousness into mainframes to live forever as data. The new world… more

The Legacy of Sept. 11... So Far

Articles — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 17:23:00 -0400

I was in Washington, lingering in that immortally perfect fall weather as I walked to work. A friend from Boston called my cell to tell me "not to go near anything." Then I saw that half the people I passed didn’t know, and were blithely planning dinners and video rentals. The other half had blanks for eyes. Two blocks later, I hit a store window with a television, just beginning to replay the image that would never go away.

Everyone has a story like that, many of them full of danger and loss. But the feeling that the world changed that… more

Five Years After

Articles — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:48:00 -0400

The idea that everything changed on September 11, 2001, was always a conceit. It was a conceit not because it exaggerated the importance of the event, but, curiously, because it underestimated it. The attacks on New York and Washington, for all their terrible human cost, did not change much by themselves. They did, however, change the horizon of political possibility. The shock of that morning, followed by the endlessly repeated images of the collapsing towers and New York’s blasted downtown, shook the country from nearly a decade of complacency and gave politics a fresh urgency. A new sense of danger… more

The New Biopolitics

Articles — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:20:00 -0400

Will globalization destroy itself? Every few years, another crisis suggests it might. The Internet, satellite phones, and intercontinental air travel help terrorists cross the world in an instant. The global spread of democracy shakes authoritarian governments -- and opens the way for Islamists in Tehran and Cairo, a populist strongman in Venezuela, and nuke-happy nationalists in New Delhi. Open capital markets wreck the economies of Southeast Asia. Divisions between Muslim immigrants and the rest of Europe explode in French riots and Dutch assassinations.

These unhappy stories are familiar by now. An open, mobile, interconnected world creates new threats,… more

Is the Common Good, Good?

Articles — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 19:20:00 -0400

One of my favorite pieces from the Onion, the satirical newspaper, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, "Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday." True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary's rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media exhaustion. It ends, though, with a middle-American version of the "Yes" at the end of Ulysses as Pearson presents the confection to her neighbors:

"I… more

Democracy and Disaster

Articles — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In a country as wealthy and technologically capable as the United States, there is no such thing as a simple natural disaster. Every disaster is also a social event, made up by human will and ingenuity--or neglect and indifference. Famines, famously, do not happen in democracies, because no matter how severe a drought or blight, only the voiceless and powerless are ever left to starve. Storms may sometimes wreck cities; but if they also claim thousands of lives, that is a not a natural disaster but a political wrong, and the judgment belongs on the city and… more

Neoliberalism Comes to Domestic Policy

Articles — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Understandably, Europeans think of George W. Bush as a president focused on foreign policy. In the three years between al Qaeda's attacks on the United States and his re-election, Bush invaded two countries, reworked America's global alliances, and brought to crisis the traditional relationship across the North Atlantic. It is unlikely that he would have been re-elected without the air of perpetual crisis that his foreign policy brought to the recent presidential campaign.

In 2000, however, Bush was elected as a candidate of domestic policy. His major achievement in the year before September 11, 2001 was slashing… more

Where Progressives Go Now

Articles — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Progressives have to make sense of confronting a radical opponent, because the American Right is now radical, and the president is their standard-bearer. How else to describe an administration committed to changing taxation and social insurance root and branch, revising the basic rules of international order, and remaking faraway societies by force? And, not to forget, an administration willing -- indeed, seemingly delighted -- to bankrupt the country and jeopardize our authority in global currency markets in pursuit of these visionary schemes.

In the face of an extremist program, the first response of the decent and sensible is to fall… more

A Way in the World

Articles — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

How should we use the world's only superpower? Two huge tasks for foreign policy are identifying the threats the country faces and choosing a strategy to address them. I am afraid we may be off track on both.

It is easy these days to say that terrorism, or Islamic extremism, presents the main threat to the United States. This seems obvious only if we rank threats by the chance that they will kill a large number of Americans tomorrow. Islamic terrorism probably counts first by that grim metric. But try a more complicated measure. … more

Democrats After the Election

Articles — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The feeling of alienation and defeat among John Kerry's supporters would be hard to exaggerate. People are moving money out of the country, renewing or applying for foreign passports, and deliberating whether to buy property abroad. These actions, though, are not necessarily portents of an exodus. They may simply be symptoms of massive disappointment and frustration, expressions of how gravely Democrats regard their defeat. Confusion and ephemeral despair are the signal Democratic emotions this week. Those are transient sentiments, and it is impossible to tell from them where the country will be in one year… more

American Eating, American Politics

Articles — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The so-called American character usually turns out to be a chimera. Americans are said to be blunt to a fault, or desperate to please. They are too soft and complacent to stomach combat, or they are warmongers quick to sacrifice their children. They are merciless materialists, or else they are hopeless sentimentalists and irrational religious believers. One quality, however, has grown unmistakable in the eyes of the world, and now enjoys the consecration of statistical confirmation: Americans are fat. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, it seems that the percentage of Americans categorized as "obese," which… more

After the First Debate

Articles — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

John Kerry is caught in a pragmatic dilemma. George W. Bush is reciting a philosopher's dilemma. After the first debate, the American presidential election is not much closer to resolution.

First, Kerry's dilemma. American politicians -- especially presidential candidates -- face three strictures. First, they must not show a hint of pessimism. Second, they must not admit that the United States might be in the wrong. Third, they must maintain that every problem has a solution.

Kerry is smart enough to know that the disaster in Iraq may not have a palatable solution, that the United States was wrong to go… more

Fools, Drunks, and the United States

Articles — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

It is necessary to begin by noting the fraudulence, even the criminality, of the analysis that follows. I will explain at the end.

That said, something remarkable began to happen after the first presidential debate last Tuesday. Democratic common sense began to reassert itself. Whether it will hold through the election is another question.

The last turning point of this sort came after the revelation in the spring of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. At that time, democratic decency -- cousin to democratic common sense -- reasserted itself. The Bush administration and its allies in Congress… more

Being America

adminn — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 04:00:00 -0500

Selected reviews of Being America are featured below:

Los Angeles Times

Tuesday, February 18, 2003 We in America tend to think of ourselves as the world's universal nation. "Being French is an affectation, being Russian a perversion, being from the world's poor regions a deprivation; but being American is just being human.... [W]e secretly believe that everyone is born American, but that certain people become something else due to bad upbringing," writes social critic Jedediah Purdy in "Being America," an incisive and timely book that anyone concerned with the looming war with Iraq should read.

In this… more

Suspicious Minds

Articles — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Without trust, social life is all but impossible. We walk down the street unarmed, invest our money with strangers, and pay taxes -- all because we trust that nobody will mug us, take the cash to Cancun, or use government revenue to enrich a family company. The only other way to coordinate complex activity is coercion -- which, as the Soviets learned, is neither efficient nor pleasant. Today, when your credit-card number makes regular trips to Bangalore and Ghana, start-ups get their money from millions of pensioners and private investors, and you put your life in the hands of several… more

The Young American

Articles — Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0500

I was in a TGI Friday's in Cairo last October, sharing dessert with a group of stylish young Egyptian women, when one of them flipped open her cellphone to show me this text message: SATURDAY NIGHT DANCE PARTY BOMBS IN WORLD TRADE CENTER DJ OSAMA BIN LADEN FLY-IN COURTESY OF AMERICAN AIRLINES

My companions, two lawyers and a medical student, laughed with delight, the sounds blending with American pop music and the wind from the Nile.

In the months after September 11, I found these paradoxes around the world: Westernized Egyptian party girls who consider Osama bin Laden a hero; an… more

The Values of the Market

Articles — Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Whether "globalization" is a useful concept remains open to doubt. Semantically, it is empty when it lacks critical detail: globalization of what? For some the answer is the free market, and globalization has become a lightning rod for praise and blame of laissez-faire. For others, it is culture and communication, and globalization means either homogeneity or new forms of cosmopolitanism, hybrid identities, and diaspora sensibilities. Still others take globalization as an ethical fact -- more acts than ever before affect faraway people -- and it has been the occasion for much talk about the obligations… more

Civilization of Violence?

Articles — Thu, 15 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Europeans can be forgiven the belief that they are confronted by what the American president might call an axis of violence. Bush administration officials are hunched over maps of Iraq, planning an invasion with or without European support. In recent months the United States has repudiated all obligations to the International Criminal Court and announced that it will not help prosecutors working for that court. At home, Americans have eagerly revived the death penalty and increased incarceration rates more than threefold in the last twenty years. The Attorney General believes that the American Constitution protects an… more