Text and Republican Government

Early conflicts over religious liberty and freedom of speech reveal that while we can agree on the Constitution’s text, we can profoundly disagree over the unwritten ideas we think the text represents. Debates about religion and free speech point to deeper unwritten principles that are at the very heart of America’s constitutional republic. The first debate deals with the prohibition on religious tests for office in Article VI. The second speaks to freedom of speech and press. In these early debates about religious liberty and freedom of speech, the antagonists agreed on the wording of constitutional text; they disagreed profoundly on the principles and political theory that underlie it in their understanding of America’s new republic. These early arguments reveal the importance of constructing constitutional meaning from the unwritten ideas that underlie the constitutional text.

Weaving Disaster

This chapter is entirely devoted to Alamán’s foundation, in partnership with two other men, of an enormous textile factory, Cocolapan, near Orizaba in the state of Veracruz. The enterprise flourished only for a short time in the late 1830s and went into bankruptcy in the early 1840s. It is the thesis of the chapter that like his involvement in silver mining and his purchase of an hacienda, this venture was spurred by his ambition to lift his family back into the ranks of the rich elite of the new republic. But for a variety of reasons it failed, throwing Alamán into tangled bankruptcy litigation leaving him with a large personal debt overhang that undermined his entire economic position to the end of his life. The truth was that he had had little financial capital of his own to invest and was essentially sued by other investors for fraud.

The Collapse of The New Republic: The Rise and Fall of Ideologies in a Digital Age

The journalism industry is undergoing a profound shift from print to digital media, which has allowed for new modes of storytelling (e.g. Twitter or listicles) and ways of capturing audiences (e.g. click-baiting and data-tracking). This shift in media appears to be attended by a more fundamental ideological shift, where the economic and democratic affordances of digital media have contributed to a privileging of quantity (audience or financial growth) over quality (substance-driven, intellectual journalism). To examine this issue, this paper puts the recent collapse of The New Republic magazine under the microscope. On December 5th, 2014, two thirds of the magazine’s masthead resigned enmass over an ideological dispute involving an increased focus on digital media. Using this profound ideological schism as the launching point for discussion, this paper inquires: what are the opposing ideologies within The New Republic collapse, how do they relate to digital media, and can the collapse at The New Republic be seen as a microcosm for an ideological shift occurring across the journalism industry?

The Collapse of The New Republic: The Rise and Fall of Ideologies in a Digital Age

The journalism industry is undergoing a profound shift from print to digital media, which has allowed for new modes of storytelling (e.g. Twitter or listicles) and ways of capturing audiences (e.g. click-baiting and data-tracking). This shift in media appears to be attended by a more fundamental ideological shift, where the economic and democratic affordances of digital media have contributed to a privileging of quantity (audience or financial growth) over quality (substance-driven, intellectual journalism). To examine this issue, this paper puts the recent collapse of The New Republic magazine under the microscope. On December 5th, 2014, two thirds of the magazine’s masthead resigned enmass over an ideological dispute involving an increased focus on digital media. Using this profound ideological schism as the launching point for discussion, this paper inquires: what are the opposing ideologies within The New Republic collapse, how do they relate to digital media, and can the collapse at The New Republic be seen as a microcosm for an ideological shift occurring across the journalism industry?