A colloquium in Boulder

Earlier this month I participated in a small colloquium out in Boulder on "Liberty and the American Character," featuring a mostly conservative group of scholars and thought leaders, many of them trained in political philosophy. Five of us presented papers -- mine used ideas in American Nations, American Character and a forthcoming book on the struggle to create America's first myth of national purpose to show why U.S. self-definition an especially fragile and vital project -- and all fifteen discussed them. It offered a fascinating window into how conservative academics trained specifically in republican theory look upon the republic's contemporary crisis.

A few takeaways:

This group -- convened by Michigan State University's Willam Allen and including Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, New York University's Lawrence Mead, Mark Lilla of Columbia University (and the New York Review of Books), and Colleen Sheehan of Villanova -- sees a pressing threat to liberal democracy. For most, however, the threat that preoccupies them is that which identity politics presents to liberal education at universities. Without prodding -- occasionally provided by yours truly -- Trump and Trumpism played surprisingly little role in the conversations. When it came up, most voiced concerns, but the gravitational pull of the identity politics issue was too great to allow this the topic to ever achieve escape velocity. I personally found this fascinating and, on an intellectual level, extremely difficult to understand. (Even if you think Trumpism is a good thing, it's clearly a topic for debate.)

Lawrence Mead, the intellectual force behind welfare reform of the 1990s, presented a shocking paper apparently based on his new book, which was released yesterday. The paper argued that people descended from "non-western" cultures are unfit for the rigors of American republican citizenship and undermine the nation's vitality. This included African-Americans on the theory that -- despite eight to twelve generations in this country and a legacy of slavery that included the intentional destruction of family units and associated cultural transmission -- they retain African, "non-western" cultural characteristics. Ditto for Asians (despite doing better than whites in academic attainment), Latinos, and everyone else not descended from Europeans who, even if their people came from feudal Russia or Sicily, are apparently especially fit for the rigors of liberal democratic life. This paper was not well received.

Most of the session on my paper stuck to the opening part on the American Nations paradigm, defining terms (nation, state, cultural transmission) and probing its relevance. The message of longstanding structural disunity seemed to dissatisfy some participants, particularly when applied to undercut things like the universal relevance of Tocqueville's observations on (Yankee) municipal government or the legacy of Puritan values for the Founders. [Update, 9/12/19: Here's a blog post I wrote in connection with my contribution.]

I had a few hours free one morning and drove through the Rockies, stopping at Estes Park to see The Stanley, the hotel that inspired Steven King to write The Shining (after a creepy 1974 stay in Room 217.) After this photo on Facebook, I leaned from fellow Mainers that the hotel was built by the Stanleys of my home county in western Maine, and used to entertain their friends from Kingfield, one of the four hamlets that made up my school district. See, I've always been the caretaker.

Talking American Nations in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, April 30

I'll be speaking about the concepts, ideas, and historical lessons in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth, Maine on Tuesday, April 30th.

The event kicks off at 6:30 pm at the library, 6 Scott Dyer Road, and is free and open to the public. Some event details can be found here. Come if you can.

I have several public talks in the works and will post them at the speaking events page on my website as they're locked down. [Update, 4/22/18: I'm speaking on American Nations at the public library in Needham, Massachusetts on June 5th.]

Maine tribes could get power to try non-Indians accused of domestic violence

Maine's tribes have been excluded from provisions of the 2013 Violence Against Women Act that allow tribal courts to try non-Indians accused of domestic violence on reservations, but that may be changing.

The Penobscot Nation court was blocked from participation when the state of Maine -- and then-attorney general Janet Mills -- argued VAWA did not apply to Maine tribes under its interpretation of the 1980 laws that settled the tribes' claim to more than half of Maine's territory. As I report in today's Portland Press Herald, the US House has just passed a revised version of the act with language introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME01) that would explicitly include the Maine tribes.

For background and the bill's prospects in the Senate, please read the story.

For deeper background, settled into the 29-part series "Unsettled" on the land claims, the Passamaquoddy, and the fraught state-tribal relationship.

John Hickenlooper's time Down East in 1970

A few years ago, I was in Denver writing this POLITICO story on how the city built a metro-wide light rail system from scratch, a story that led to my interviewing then-governor (and former Denver mayor) John Hickenlooper.

He gets on the phone, hears I'm from Maine, and first thing he says is "You must know (D.L Geary Brewing founder) David Geary" (both men are micro brewing pioneers); the second is that as a teen he spent a summer volunteering at a free school in Maine. That school, it turned out, was in Robbinston and had been co-founded by Susan Tureen, who had been pushed out of her public school teaching job probably because she was married to Tom Tureen, the Passamaquoddy tribe's new attorney, in the midst of the epic land claims fight.

Now Hickenlooper is running for president, so I put a fuller story together for this week's Maine Sunday Telegram. Enjoy.

For more on the situation in Easternmost Maine in 1970, see the 29-part Press Herald series "Unsettled," especially Chapters 10 to 13.

Rep. Pingree reintroduced ocean acidification bill; this time it might pass

Ocean acidification, a potentially catastrophic threat to shellfish harvesters and the coastal communities they live in, is one of a variety of climate related risks confronting both the Gulf of Maine and Alaska.

This week, Maine US Rep. Chellie Pingree (D) and Alaska's Senator Lisa Murkowski (R) reintroduced bills in their respective chambers that would take the first steps in mitigating the problem by directing federal authorities to identify exactly where the greatest risks and gaps in knowledge are. With Democrats in control of the House, Pingree told me she's pretty upbeat the measures might become law.

I have the story in yesterday's Portland Press Herald.

For more context on the problem, start with this series.

Frederick Douglass and "Allender's Jake": a research note

There are very few people who will be interested in this post, but for the few among you who study Frederick Douglass, a small research discovery.

Jake Ellis -- aka "Allender's Jake", aka William Dixon -- the fugitive slave Douglass encountered on his first day of freedom in New York City, the one who warned him about slave catchers and who was at the center of a years-long legal battle that pulled in underground railroad conductor David Riggles -- was not the property of Dr. Joseph Allender, as Blassimgame et al. suggested in the footnotes to their (excellent) annotated edition of My Bondage, My Freedom.

Period newspaper accounts of Ellis's trip explicitly say Ellis was the property of "Dr. William T. Alexander" of Baltimore. They got the name wrong. This would be William T. Allender (1807-1880), Dr. Alexander's son.

That is all. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking on American Nations / American Character, Bath, Maine, Mar. 2

I'm pleased to be speaking about North American regionalism, the central political argument it has fostered over the past 400 years, how it interacts with Trumpism, and the path forward to shoring up the world's oldest liberal democracy.... all on March 2nd at the Patten Free Library in Bath, Maine.

The event, based on American Nations and American Character, kicks off at 10:30 am and is free and open to the public. More details here.

My next American Character talk is at the HR Policy Association annual meeting in Orlando later in March, but that one isn't open to the public at large.