Publishing 2012-05-22

Digital and print editions of "Rousseau's Civil Religion: A Worthwhile Unification Force" are now available on Amazon.  For the next five Fridays, it will be part of #KBFFF.

Updates 2012-05-14

• As you may have noticed, I've permanently discontinued my posting of quotes.  It was simply an issue of time and timing.
• I wrote "How to Become Politically Aware (A Personal Guide)" for someone who asked, but it's generally applicable to anyone interested.
• I graduate from San Jose State University in approximately a week as a departmental honors candidate with a Bachelors in Political Science and a Minor in Computer Science.  My prepared remarks, which will no longer be delivered, have been publicly posted.
• I've been accepted to UC Riverside for the Masters program in Political Theory, and I'll be attending starting this Fall.  A PhD program is likely to follow.
• J'han, my fiancee, has launched a career as an artist, with prints available for purchase.  Please take a look, she deserves attention and success.
• An update of items recently published, organized alphabetically:
• "Thomas Hobbes and the Theory of Consent:  Foreshadowing Modern Systems of Governance"
• [paperback] [digital]
• An update of my reading list, organized alphabetically:
• Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) and The Rights of Man (1792/1792)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract (1762)
• Mary Wollstonecraft's  A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
• articles:
• TJ Colton's "Russian Democracy Under Putin" (2003)
• Michael Emerson's "Putin's Faltering Return" (2012)
• Miguel Faria's "The Russian Political Turmoil (2012): An American Perspective" (2012)
• James Gibson's "Putting up with Fellow Russians: An Analysis of Political Tolerance in the Fledgling Russian Democracy" (1998)
• Henry Hale and Timothy Colton's "Russians and the Putin-Medvedev 'Tandemocracy': A Survey-Based Portrait of the 2007-08 Election Season" (2009)
• Judith Kullberg and William Zimmerman's "Liberal Elites, Socialist Masses, and Problems of Russian Democracy" (1999)
• Andrew Monaghan's "The Vertikal: Power and Authority in Russia" (2012)
• Richard Sakwa's "The Future of Russian Democracy" (2011)
• Kathryn Stoner-Weiss' "Central Governing Incapacity and the Weakness of Political Parties: Russian Democracy in Disarray" (2002)

My Prepared Remarks for the Political Science Department's Convocation

Note:  What follows are my prepared remarks for a brief speech I was going to give at the Political Science Department's Convocation on May 25th, 2012 as President of Pi Sigma Alpha / Epsilon Iota, the SJSU chapter of the national political science honors society.  Unfortunately, I was prevented from giving this speech.

While I have shown this to a number of individuals privately, I wanted to make the remarks public, as they were intended to be.  If you're interested in pacing, I would have delivered this over the course of approximately seven minutes.

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Political Science Department 2012 Convocation Remarks

Honored Guests, Alumni, Faculty, Staff, Imminent Graduates, and Students,

President John F. Kennedy once famously said, in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!” While I naturally understand the sentiment behind such a declaration, especially as I will have a bachelor's degree in political science in just a few minutes, I will have to strongly, but respectfully, disagree with the late President. Given our present situation, as imminent graduates of a state university in a country with high unemployment and statistically poor prospects for those such as ourselves, I believe a more mutual arrangement seems appropriate: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for each other,” perhaps.

Having successfully navigated the department's coursework to graduation, it seems safe to say we know a thing or two about not just politics, but the political machine, the way the world works, the way the world should work, and, most interestingly, humanity itself. This isn't to say that we're experts in any of these fields – we only have undergraduate degrees, after all – simply that our eyes have seen the interior of Pandora's Box, and, just as the box can never again be closed, we cannot unsee what we have seen. In our country alone, we face oppressive socioeconomic inequality, the disparate distribution of power, and dire sociopolitical straits, but we also know how to begin to solve some of these large problems. That, as political scientists, is our mandate, and we should faithfully carry it out, even in the face of questioning opposition or apparent stagnation. I would encourage you to remember this always.

We can thank San Jose State University for many things, such as learning to properly work within highly bureaucratic systems, developing extreme self-sufficiency, ensuring promises are always in writing and in duplicate, and how to not manage our finances – thank you CSU and the State of California. We can thank the Political Science Department for many things as well, including forcibly improved writing skills, a breadth of knowledge and facts that may appear useless to general citizens (but, in fact, is not), the ability to separate emotional responses and academic curiosity, and a substantially increased awareness of the activities of the wider world, often to our own dark despair. We can thank our Professors within the Department, of course, even more than the school or the Department itself, because our interactions with them have been individualized, resulting in, I would hope, a much more fruitful education.

I took a long, winding path to not just graduation, but the Department itself, beginning first with Computer Engineering, eventually moving to Computer Science, and, after considering not finishing my degree, finally to Political Science. It shouldn't surprise you, then, to know that I'm graduating at 24 years old and have been at the college level, in one fashion or another, since I was 17. It may surprise you, however, that I am truly sad my time in this Department, with the Professors I deeply appreciate and respect, and my always entertaining, occasionally enlightening, classmates, is coming to such a quick end. After a brief, whirlwind tour of political science in three semesters, I'm moving on to the real world, with the rest of my fellow graduates.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I'm entering a Masters program in Political Theory at UC Riverside, and hopefully pursuing a PhD after that, so it might be more accurate to say I'm moving on to higher levels of academia to continue doing what I have so fully enjoyed this last year and a half, what I see as my calling. I'm not ready for the real world, and I may never be – I love this too much.

And I hope that sentiment is true for all of you. There are, inevitably, varying degrees of appreciation, interest, and intent amongst us all, since there are so many career choices in, or through, government, consulting, graduate school, law school, punditry, and virtually any other field where you can convince an employer your understanding of government, politics, and the human condition, combined with your unusual ability to write, is of value. Business majors we are not.

San Jose State may have made the process difficult, but we made it, and we did so with the help and encouragement of those within the Department. There naturally were moments of frustration, probably with coursework (sorry Professor Wood, but 195A simply wasn't my favorite class), but the Department did its best to protect us from the machinations of the larger forces that lurk in the shadows of this state-funded institution. However, you have yourself to thank as well, because you wouldn't be sitting here if you hadn't put in the massive time and effort required to pass your classes – this is something most outsiders don't give proper consideration to, I believe, as they don't understand the seemingly insurmountable mountains of papers, projects, readings, concepts, theories, and systems that our program necessarily entailed.

So to the newly minted elite, I say: congratulations on graduating, I wish you all the best of luck wherever your path leads you next. When you reminisce about your experiences here, focus on the political science aspect of your education and how it affected your life – you may not realize just yet what's happened, but you will. I know I already have.

Thank you, Dr. Brent and my five Professors, Dr. Danopoulos, Dr. Christensen, Dr. Peter, Dr. Quill, and Professor Wood, as well as the rest of the Department I was not fortunate enough to study under. Congratulations, Dr. Danopoulos, on your new position as Department Chair, and Dr. Christensen on your much earned retirement. Thank you, Elizabeth, for your assistance to all of us. Thank you, Administration, for often making our lives difficult. And last, but most definitely not least, thank you, J'han, my beautiful fiancee, for helping see me through to this point and, more importantly, wanting to marry me in the face of my academic aspirations.

Instead of closing with a quote from Marx, Marcuse, Hobbes, or Rousseau, let me instead close with something a bit cheerier and less dense from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 Inaugural Address: “Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Thank you, and good luck.

Kyle Brady
Pi Sigma Alpha / Epsilon Iota, President
SJSU Class of 2012, Political Science

Notes on the EU, Germany, and WWIII

Note:  I was asked to clarify my recent comment [on Twitter, Facebook, Google+] about Greece possibly defaulting, dissolving, and sparking World War III, with regard to Germany's current positioning.  The following was my response.

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1) Large scale modern wars have broken out either as the result of alliance structures or due to the desperation of a people in the midst of a terrible economic situation, or both - WWI and WWII can be described as this, although the alliances were more WWI than WWII. It's important to note, though, how malleable a people are when they're poor, hungry, and very angry. Many states in Europe can be described as this at the moment, although they're more positioned to enter periods of civil war or unrest than takeover Europe, since there needs to be an industrial strength behind the desperation for economy-boosting invasions to begin.

2) Both world wars obviously started in Europe, but, more importantly, they revolved around Germany and France. There's an argument to be made that the post-WWII economic alliance between the two countries (that ultimately became the EU) has been a good reason for a missing WWIII, since their interests were somewhat mutual. That's why the recent French elections, which amount to a refocusing of French interests, may not be for the best, longterm - France won't be in lockstep with Germany anymore, which will be novel.

3) Germany is financing the EU and supporting the various states who need massive help, and the Germans are beginning to feel unappreciated after so long. Interestingly, Germany has, through the EU, begun dictating domestic policy in states like Greece (a violation of sovereignty), and they actually "approved" the person who became the new Italian Prime Minister (a violation of sovereignty). There's many, then, who look at the current situation and call it the "Fourth Reich through economics."

4) So, if another World War were to break out, in Europe, Germany would likely be at the center of it. But Germany's not about to march all over Europe, because they want the EU and the euro to work, without good reason - the failing of a state within the EU would be good reason, though. That's why Greece is so important, more than the others: it's an economic disaster with a people who are really, really upset about not just the situation, but what their government is being forced to do. Italy appears to have recovered and the rest of the PIIGS are doing semi-alright, but Greece appears to get worse by the day, especially after their recent elections that included some highly questionable choices (like giving a sizeable chunk of power to an openly neo-Nazi party). If Greece defaults on its debt, which it very well may, and the government collapses, which it's teetering on the brink of, then another European power would step in to prevent / stop a civil war - that power would more than likely be Germany (see public comments on what they've considered doing if Greece dissolves, such as "barricading" its borders). Only Germany has the financial and industrial power to enact sweeping change in Europe, their interests in the non-failure of EU states are massive, and Germany has a long history of forcibly involving itself in situations it feels it should or must. Notably, there's also a rising nationalist movement in Germany that's mirroring some of the state's darkest principles. 

5) Finally, a hypothetical WWIII would begin in one of four ways: via Asia (China or North Korea), via the Middle East (states with networks of allies, like Pakistan or Iran), via Israel, or via Europe (Germany or Russia). Asia is unlikely for some time, since China's still too weak to take on too much and North Korea would be more regional than anything else; everyone's careful about how they act in the Middle East at the moment, which means an outbreak is unlikely; Israel is a wash, as always, and can't be expected to behave in any rational or predictable fashion; but Europe isn't too much of a stretch. For the foreseeable future, a European-based WWIII would come out of the collapse of a state, the intervention of another state, and the response of other states - Greece could easily be the catalyst.

How to Become Politically Aware (A Personal Guide)

Note:  I was asked recently how someone could start following and understanding modern politics, without going through a full slate of academic instruction on the subject, and I came up with an eleven-point list.  Personally, I think it's worth sharing, so here it is.

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This is what I've come up with, based on my experience.  You'll need to give the cyclical items a good month of solid follow-through in order to see anything out of it, so stick with it.  The results are worth the effort, I promise you.

1)  Start reading ThinkProgress, Mother Jones, and Foreign Policy each day, even if you only skim them - the Atlantic and the Economist, too, if you have the time.  If you have to triage, make sure you read the daily "Morning Briefing," "National Security Brief," and "Justiceline" posts from ThinkProgress, and Foreign Policy's daily "Morning Briefing."  Use Google Reader to subscribe to their RSS feeds, keeping tabs on new content will be much easier this way.

2)  Don't get too bogged down in some of the details - look for the larger narrative.  If you come across something you don't understand (terminology, concept, structure, person, country, etc.), look it up.  Wikipedia gets a bad name sometimes, but it's good for looking up things like this.

3)  Avoid network and cable TV news, at all costs.  Talk radio, too.

4)  Poke your head into NPR fairly regularly.  "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" are great, but you can't easily find them online if you're not listening live, so "Talk of the Nation" is a good politics-of-the-moment multi-topic show and "Fresh Air" is great for longform, in-depth discussions.  Others worth noting are NPR's "On the Media," PRI's "To the Best of Our Knowledge," APM's "American Radio Works," BBC's "Documentaries," and PBS' "Frontline."  These are easy to listen to, too, if you subscribe to their podcasts through iTunes, or if you add them to Google Reader under a "Listener Subscriptions" folder and install Google Listen on your phone.

5)  Don't bother with the latest popular book on politics that's on the NYT Bestseller's list or Oprah's Book Club, or similar.  Also avoid reading OpEd columns and pieces from both magazines and newspapers.

6)  Read my work, of course.

7)  Look at taking a few politics classes, even at a community college.  I would recommend four along the lines of introductions to American politics, American foreign policy and international relations, political theory/thought, and comparative politics.  The first two are relevant to alot of the day-to-day politics, the third for the much wider scope of things, and the fourth to understand the different ways of governing and why the way things are done in various states matter.  If you can't take the classes, at least pull up the syllabi from a college and look at their reading list - the textbooks/books are usually much easier to read than you'd think.

8)  Start poking around for books on political topics you're interested in, like Russia's post-Cold War behavior or the history of the power of the American Presidency.  Use Amazon to search, and filter by popularity, to avoid the crazies.  Before you buy anything, read the reviews and do some Googling on the author to make sure you're not about to buy a discredited work by a highly partisan author.

9)  Make sure you're reading the subtext of public statements, political maneuvering, etc. - the truth is very rarely on the surface, but it's usually easy to find with a bit of effort.  With domestic American politics, understanding the political process and the sociopolitical and economic tides of the moment (ideological sway of the country, GOP bloc behavior, etc.) are key.  With larger picture issues, international relations, or other states' politics, history becomes very important; for example, when you look at domestic German politics and their actions within the EU through the lens of what it means to be German and the last hundred years of German history, their behavior is not only much more clear, but very predictable.

10)  Don't bother arguing politics with friends or family, especially if they're not well informed and their personal politics is based upon some ludicrous single-issue item, like "I just don't like Obama" (or far worse) or "it's the economy, stupid."  This is a cyclical waste of time, so save your efforts for enriching yourself and maybe helping to affect change in another way.

11)  Try to separate your personal politics and emotions from a more distanced and nuanced understanding.  You may disagree with something or someone (you will), and the politics of an issue may infuriate you (it will), but understand the who/what/when/where/how/why of the item in question and look at it from that perspective.  Then, consider that while the situation isn't ideal, you understand why it isn't, which necessarily means you have an idea of how it could be bettered.  You also have a reason to not become so frustrated so as to lash out at someone or something:  academic understanding will help soothe the emotional aspect.

I hope this helps you, rather than overwhelms you to the point where you decide not to even try...  It's not a comprehensive process, by any means, but it's very similar to how I started down my current path:  this was my process from 2008 through 2010, and it's since been adapted/modified to better work with my academic career.  

The largest part missing from my eleven items above is the hardest:  be interested and dedicated, if slightly obsessed.  But only take up a formal education, beyond an Associates, in the subject if you can handle doing all of this for the rest of your life, because it will take over many of your other interests.  It's not something I regret, or even mind in the least, but it's important to keep in mind here.

Good luck!

Publishing 2012-04-11

Digital and print editions of "Thomas Hobbes and the Theory of Consent: Foreshadowing Modern Systems of Governance" are now available on Amazon.  This newest work will, of course, be a part of #KBFFF.

In fact, most of my bibliography will be, as of Friday, participating in #KBFFF.

Updates 2012-03-31

• I'm now offering online editing and tutoring services.
• An update of items recently published, organized alphabetically:
• Properly, Politically Educating the American Public:  Examining Great Thinkers and Theorists - Bohm, Dewey, Habermas, and Walzer
• [paperback] [digital]
• "The City of San Jose, the City Council, and the Public:  A Demonstrated Power Differential"
• [paperback] [digital]
• An update of my reading list, organized alphabetically:
• Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino's Assessing the Quality of Democracy (2005)
• Ronald Kessler's In the President's Secret Service (2009)*
• Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father (1995)
• Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1724)
• articles, ordered alphabetically by author:
• Nancy Bermeo's "The Import of Institutions" (2002)
• Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner's "Rethinking Civil Society" (1994) 
• Larry Diamond's "Thinking About Hybrid Regimes" (2002)
• Larry Diamond's "Toward Democratic Consolidation" (1994)
• Steven Fish's "Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies" (2006)
• Terry Karl and Phillip Schmitter's "What Democracy Is ... and Is Not" (1991) 
• Arend Lijphart's "Constitutional Design for Divided Societies" (2004)
• Guillermo O'Donnell's "Delegative Democracy" (1994)
• J. Judd Owen's "The Tolerant Leviathan: Hobbes and the Paradox of Liberalism" (2005)
• Marc Plattner's "From Liberalism to Liberal Democracy" (1998)
• Giovanni Sartori's "How Far Can Free Government Travel?" (1994)
• Alfred Stepan's "Religion, Democracy, and the 'Twin Tolerations'" (2000)
• Faheed Zakaria's "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy" (1997)

*not recommended, as it's highly partisan (pro-conservative), gossipy, and poorly written

Publishing 2012-03-26

The City of San Jose, the City Council, and the Public:  A Demonstrated Power Differential is now digitally available on Amazon.

The print edition of Properly, Politically Educating the American Public:  Examining Great Thinkers and Theorists - Bohm, Dewey, Habermas, and Walzer is also now available.

Publishing 2012-03-23

Remember that today is #KBFFF!  Visit my bibliography on Amazon.

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

... the best name for the balance itself - the political creed that defends the framework, supports the necessary forms of state action, and so sustains the modern regimes of toleration - is social democracy.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

The centrifugal forces of culture and selfhood will correct one another only if the correction is planned.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

Publishing 2012-03-09

Beginning today, and every time I digitally publish something new on Amazon, I'm instituting "Five Free Fridays," or #FFF:  every Friday, for five consecutive weeks, the item will be free.

Today is #FFF1 for Properly, Politically, so go get it!

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

... many of these dissociated individuals are available for far-right, ultranationalist, fundamentalist, or xenophobic mobilizations of a sort that democracies ought to avoid if they can.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

Publishing 2012-03-08

My four-author exegesis on dialogue, education, and tolerance, examining David Bohm, John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, and Michael Walzer, is now digitally available on Amazon.  The print edition is coming in approximately two weeks.

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

The political environment, however, is what it is, and it does not offer much short-term hope.  Weakness is the general, if uneven, feature of associational life in today's America; any program for political renewal must start from this reality.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Quietness is not one of our political conventions; becoming an American often means learning not to be quiet.  Nor is the success that is sought by one group always compatible with the success of all (or any of) the others.  The conflicts are real, and even small-scale victories can be widely threatening.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Even for people who have no fundamentalist inclinations, however, the close-up encounter with difference may be disturbing.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

The point of separating church and state in the modern regimes is to deny political power to all religious authorities, on the realistic assumption that all of them are at least potentially intolerant.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

Perhaps every immigrant society is a nation-state in the making, and civil religion is one of the instruments of this transformation.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)

A Word from Michael Walzer, Ctd.

... political creeds take on the baggage of genuine religious belief at their peril.  ... Most civil religions wisely make do with a vague, unelaborated, latitudinarian religiosity, one that is more a matter of stories and holidays than of clear or firm beliefs.

from Michael Walzer's On Toleration (1997)