Tag: Daniel Patrick Moynihan

What might these two black senators tell us about the direction of racial politics in the country? Both, in my view, point to a core redefining of the black presence in the Democratic Party. Whereas 41 percent of Americans describe themselves as "born again" or evangelical, 61 of blacks do. Thirty-three percent of Americans say they attend church once per week. But the movement of Democrats farther left, highlighted by the divisiveness of the Kavanaugh hearings, could be a watershed in racial politics. Booker and Harris are rooted more in Democratic Party progressivism than the traditional concerns of black Democrats. It was about carrying out the law based on facts rather than unsubstantiated claims by interested parties. It is this kind of perversion of justice, displacing facts with prejudice and claims, that has historically been used to persecute blacks -- particularly sexual assault claims leveled against black men. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, is exactly what they don't need. And more and more black Americans are beginning to understand this.

The two are merging, and as they come together, companies and states will have the power to control our perceptions. The fragmentation social media promotes has been discussed to death. If virtual monopolies are to be tamed, their algorithms cannot be treated as commercially confidential when they order how debates are conducted and information is received. Already most CVs are never seen by human eyes. Those who do the monitoring wield enormous power: a power that is increasingly hard to contest. And here lies a distinctly modern arbitrariness: no one can say why. As China is already suggesting, the new technologies are giving the state powers the dictators of the past could only dream of. As a working principle it ought to be a given that any form of artificial intelligence that can harm the public must be publicly accountable. The great debate of the 21st century will be how much should be directed and controlled by digital systems. It is a tribute to him that his work makes that future a little less likely.