Stanford University Press Blog

What Would Jefferson Snap?

A Call on Gen Z to Rewrite the Constitution

BEAU BRESLIN

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1901. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.  Additional text added by the SUP Social Media Specialist.

 

Thomas Jefferson would have loved TikTok. He would have been a fierce champion of a generation of Americans – labelled Gen Z or iGen – that grew up with cell phones in their hands, a strong penchant for escapism, and an outsized regard for social media influencers.

You see, for Jefferson, it was all about thwarting tyranny. The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence herald his conviction: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another,” he wrote, “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish [the existing government], and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” His loathing of King George III on full display.

But those same sentiments and that same loathing, Jefferson would argue, should now be directed squarely at him. And at Madison. And Hamilton. At Adams and, yes, even George Washington. America’s most eloquent eighteenth-century wordsmith knew that tyranny was not the sole estate of a mad king. Despotism can also come in the form of one generation holding unconstrained political authority over another. “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living, the dead have neither rights nor powers over it,” he famously wrote to James Madison, by which he meant that one generation has no more right to regulate the lives and liberty of another than does a foreign power have the right to oppress its colonial subjects. Today’s Americans, he would say, should shed the chains that unjustly bind them to the founding generation.

Reproductive Rights recommended Reading

 

In light of the Justice Department’s announcement that they will be seeking an injunction against Texas’ new abortion restrictions, we have assembled a recommended reading list centered around reproductive rights. We have endeavored to include books from not just a political vantage point, but also from historical and international perspectives.

 

The New States of Abortion Politics »

JOSHUA C. WILSON

 

The 2014 Supreme Court ruling on McCullen v. Coakley striking down a Massachusetts law regulating anti-abortion activism marked the reengagement of the Supreme Court in abortion politics. A throwback to the days of clinic-front protests, the decision seemed a means to reinvigorate the old street politics of abortion. The Court's ruling also highlights the success of a decades' long effort by anti-abortion activists to transform the very politics of abortion. The New States of Abortion Politics, written by leading scholar Joshua C. Wilson, tells the story of this movement, from streets to legislative halls to courtrooms.

With the end of clinic-front activism, lawyers and politicians took on the fight. Anti-abortion activists moved away from a doomed frontal assault on Roe v. Wade and adopted an incremental strategy—putting anti-abortion causes on the offensive in friendly state forums and placing reproductive rights advocates on the defense in the courts. The Supreme Court ruling on Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016 makes the stakes for abortion politics higher than ever. This book elucidates how—and why.

 

Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan »

AIKO TAKEUCHI-DEMIRCI

Winner of the 2020 John Whitney Hall Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) - Northeast Asia Council.

 

A transpacific history of clashing imperial ambitions, Contraceptive Diplomacy turns to the history of the birth control movement in the United States and Japan to interpret the struggle for hegemony in the Pacific through the lens of transnational feminism. As the birth control movement spread beyond national and racial borders, it shed its radical bearings and was pressed into the service of larger ideological debates around fertility rates and overpopulation, global competitiveness, and eugenics. By the time of the Cold War, a transnational coalition for women's sexual liberation had been handed over to imperial machinations, enabling state-sponsored population control projects that effectively disempowered women and deprived them of reproductive freedom.

In this book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci follows the relationship between two iconic birth control activists, Margaret Sanger in the United States and Ishimoto Shizue in Japan, as well as other intellectuals and policymakers in both countries who supported their campaigns, to make sense of the complex transnational exchanges occurring around contraception. The birth control movement facilitated U.S. expansionism, exceptionalism, and anti-communist policy and was welcomed in Japan as a hallmark of modernity. By telling the story of reproductive politics in a transnational context, Takeuchi-Demirci draws connections between birth control activism and the history of eugenics, racism, and imperialism.

RED-PILLING, RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACIES, AND RADICALIZATION

SUP is proud to present an adapted excerpt from chapter 3 of Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko with a special SUP blog exclusive introduction.

 SOPHIA MOSKALENKO

SUV in Burbank, CA featuring a pro QAnon message. By Cory Doctorow , CC BY-SA 2.0, Via Wikimedia Commons. The license plate has been whited out by the SUP blog editor.

 

To many of us, QAnon emerged suddenly and surreally, a bizarre collection of outlandish stories that would be laughable if they hadn’t inspired an attempted insurrection on January 6th, 2021, or horrific crimes such as parents murdering their young children because they feared lizard DNA would turn the kids into monsters (1) or be enslaved and tortured by a Satan-worshipping pedophilic cabal (2). National polls report around 15% of American adults believe QAnon conspiracy theories (3), including that COVID is a hoax and that COVID vaccines are actually tracking devices designed by Bill Gates to control population growth (4). How are we to understand what drove tens of millions of people into the QAnon rabbit hole? And how can these people––our family, friends, colleagues and neighbors––be helped out of it?  In Pastels and Pedophiles », Mia Bloom and I explain the QAnon phenomenon through the lens of psychology and political science, tracing QAnon’s rise to individual and cultural causes, and suggesting solutions for curtailing its influence. Below are two short excerpts from the book.

 

Radical right-wing movements, from QAnon to Proud Boys, often talk about “red-pilling,”¹ referencing the Wachowski siblings’ movie, The Matrix (1999). In the pivotal scene, Morpheus, a mysterious wise man, speaks to Neo, a disgruntled computer hacker who has sought him out:

“It’s that feeling you’ve had all your life. That feeling that something is wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”