The national state itself is legitimate for Green to the extent that it upholds a system of rights and obligations that is most likely to foster individual self-realisation.
By default, all White people are on the spectrum of complicity in upholding a system of White supremacy, but we only give the negative label of "White supremacists" to the really hateful people at the far end.
Her marriage at 14 to a stranger in the dust of the al-Am'ari refugee camp has "made a warrior out of her," yet she fights to uphold a system where "the shame of her gender was engraved on her bones". It's a startling portrait of the mechanics of complicity, of the intergenerational pathology of silence.
However, it is also a means of social construction: those who hold power (and those who are able to struggle to gain more opportunity for their children) value and uphold a system that maintains existing social status and opportunity.
Mr Meles accuses the emperor of upholding a system which allowed the feudal class to lead a life of luxury at the expense of the "toiling masses", while he amassed a huge personal fortune and deposited it in foreign banks.
#AllLivesMatter is an insidious fiction that suppresses historical fact and contemporary circumstances in order to uphold a deadly system of racial oppression.
Similarly, the placement of Jackson on the $20 bill likewise reflected the values of a 1920s America that was dedicated to upholding a Jim Crow system of segregation and racial oppression.
"Grunge" and plain old "alternative" were embarrassing, even dangerous; in as far as their music comprised part of a larger movement, described and upheld an ideal, a system of belief and disbelief, much was deferred to punk.
Rolando Cordera, director of the political magazine Nexos, speculated that people intentionally used their ballots to uphold a multiparty system and limit the powers of the president by electing an opposition Congress.
I concur; it's exactly what I told my French friends several years ago: that the quality of writing by young Americans is upheld by the equivalent of a system of apprenticeships, in which professional writers, employed as teachers, help to foster the talents of newcomers.
