THOSE of us who have been trained in US politics courtesy of The West Wing reckon we know a thing or two about the technicalities of caucuses, log-rolling, and stare decisis. But even we will have found in The Battle for the US Constitution (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) a rich source of new political jargon with which to flummox our enemies and impress our friends. That the historian Adam Smith made it so relatively accessible is greatly to his credit; that it was so complicated in the first place says much about the dysfunctionality of US politics.
The issue on the table was the 14th Amendment. Drawn up to ensure citizenship for all who are born in the United States, and thus equal protection of the law, the amendment has caused no end of annoyance. Both Presidential candidates are promising to challenge the 14th if they gain office.
For Donald Trump, it is the promise of citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants which is most galling; while for Hilary Clinton’s Democrats the problem is more convoluted, and comes with the recently established principle of “Corporate Personhood”, which means that corporations are treated like individuals — with a knock-on effect for political sponsorship.
Indeed, the 14th is invoked in cases ranging from gender-neutral lavatories in North Carolina to early voting practices in Ohio. When any group feels that they are not being given equal consideration under the law, they summon up the 14th.
Thus African-American communities are complaining that adjustments to election regulations preventing voting on Sundays in advance of polling day will adversely affect the “Souls to the Polls” brigade: those who, having listened to a rousing Sunday-morning service, will troop en masse to the polling booth and cast their vote.
The permutations and ramifications are eye-wateringly complex; and Smith did well to keep his feet on the ground. There are real people with real problems: like Tito, aged 19 and of Mexican citizenship, and his younger sister Georgina, who was born in the US. Tito is denied all sorts of rights, both large and small, which his sister enjoys: to buy a lottery ticket, to pick up his sister from school, to buy medication from a drugstore. There is one thing he can do: he can enlist in the army.
Radio 4’s Crossing Continents has a laudable reputation for on-the-ground reporting, and for giving us the ambience and texture of an environment. Yet one of the most powerful programmes in recent years — Syria’s Secret Library (Thursday of last week) — was generated largely from phone interviews, a point acknowledged by the reporter, Mike Thomson, as he waited to re-establish contact with his contributors.
The subject of the documentary was a library of more than 14,000 books gathered together, from the bombed-out ruins of houses, into a basement in Daraya on the outskirts of Damascus. Books range from literature to science, from Agatha Christie to astrophysics.
The project is driven by more and less focused ideologies. The librarian explained how reading would improve the moral and resolve of the fighters defending Daraya from Assad’s forces. But the final words were those of a reader whose vision was more universal: “We want to be a free nation, and hopefully by reading we can achieve this.”