by Michael Liss
[T]he most important political office is that of the private citizen. —Justice Louis Brandeis

We are losing that essential bit of democracy. Bit by bit, not all at once, not linearly, but the decline is there. Fading is Alexis de Tocqueville’s young country of joiners of civic associations, maintaining their differences, but working together for a common good. The new reality is a more atomized society that may share more grievances, but fewer communitarian urges.
We would be foolish and lazy to ascribe this all to Trump. Yes, he is a talented accelerant, but the fuel was there well before 2016. The reality is that the importance of the ordinary private citizen has been shrinking. Those charged with protecting the freedoms that are essential to a productive civil life have often been either dismissive or actively hostile to them. Couple this malign neglect with the rise of a new Gilded Age cohort that can buy anything—influence, access, and platforms to amplify its views, and the public squares have suddenly become a lot less appealing.
How did this all come about? Let’s start with the lawyers (no Shakespeare joke please). The lawyers have let us down, and more than once.
They rode in on their horses, came for our votes and took them. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).
Let us not mince words: Shelby and Rucho are, with their progeny, among the most corrosive, most destructive Supreme Court decisions handed down in the past century. They diminish what should be fundamental rights of American citizens—the right to vote to select the candidates of their choice without molestation or excessive obstruction, the right to have their votes counted, and the right to be fairly represented in the corridors of power.
The Shelby line of cases puts to death critical sections of the Voting Rights Act, plowing the field for all types of discriminatory behavior. Read more »


The debate about whether artificial intelligence might one day become conscious is philosophically interesting. It raises age-old philosophical questions in a new form: What is a mind? What counts as experience? What would it mean for something made of code and silicon to have beliefs, desires, or a point of view? I covered some of those issues in a 




My previous 3QD column 

Deborah E. Roberts. When You See Me, 2019.
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