LAL #029 — The 2021 Commission on Domestic Discontent: Who Should Be On It?

Law and Legitimacy

Calls for a commission to study the January 6 “insurrection” at the Capitol present an interesting opportunity to take a long and sustained look at what ails the American republic. But the Commission needs to ask the right questions.

And? It needs to be staffed by the right scholars. In this podcast, I provide what I believe to be the proper framing and focus of the Commission, and propose a structure for how to answer the most important question and who should be tasked accordingly. Here's an outline of that structure:

Chapter 1 — The Presidential Election of 2016

• Joseph Uscinski's "American Conspiracy Theories"

Chapter 2 — Big Tech Communications

• Shoshana Zuboff's "Age of Surveillance Capitalism"

Chapter 3 — Is Hate Speech on the Rise?

• Daryl Johnson's "Hateland: A Long, Hard Look at America's Extremist Heart"
• Anne Case and Angus Deaton's "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism"

Chapter 4 — What is the Crisis of Legitimacy?

• Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon's work in the Chronicle of Higher Education re: Max Weber's seminal, "Politics as a Vocation"

Chapter 5 — The Role of the 2020 Pandemic in Lessening the Bonds of Civil Association

• Nicholas Christakis's "Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live"

Chapter 6 — Free Speech in an Open Society

• Jonathan Turley

Chapter 7 — Challenges to Come

• Who do YOU suggest? Let me know.

Bottom line? The violence on January 6, 2021 and the violence throughout the country in the summer of 2020 are related.

We don’t need a commission to study the January 6, 2021, events as though it were a terrorist attack akin to the events of 9/11.

We need something like the Kerner Commission of 1968, which studied the summer riots of 1967.

We have lost a common commitment to a common conception of right. The country is disintegrating. Somehow we transformed a police shooting into a demand for a “racial reckoning” while ignoring growing evidence of “deaths of despair” among older while Americans.

The commission needs to address the cognitive dissonance that has become a part and parcel of our national life.

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