Maverick Philosopher

Rawls and the Rejection of Truth

An important essay by Michael Pakaluk

Is There a Political 'Use it or Lose it' Principle?

If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you must exercise regularly. Use it or lose it!  Not so long ago  I thought that the same principle had a political application: if you want to maintain your freedoms, you must exercise them.  Use 'em or lose 'em! But times have changed.  And when times change, the wise re-evaluate. I'll give two examples.

In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it.  This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right.  For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated.  Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion.  Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list.  After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'

So here is my thought: The exercise of a right in a society in which that right  is no longer widely recognized but is instead perceived as hurtful, hateful, 'racist,' etc. has no tendency to secure that right; on the contrary, the exercise of the right endangers both the right and the exerciser thereof.  The same goes for the mere invocation or mention of the right. 

Here we may have the makings of an argument against speaking out. But we will have to think about this some more.  Civil courage is a beautiful virtue but it is sometimes trumped by that of prudence.

My second example is the right to keep and bear arms, an individual right, one that is protected and secured, but not conferred, by the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  To exercise this right openly, as by 'open carry,' is inadvisable.  You may think that you are standing on your rights, and by exercising them securing them,  but in a society dominated by group-thinking leftists, your constitutionally-guaranteed rights are not respected or even acknowledged. You are arguably undermining your rights and their exercise.  You are reinforcing their mindless fears and fantasies. After all, prominent progressive politicians view the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization! What then will they think of you if they see you packing heat? It would be best to conceal both your weapons and your views.

The practice of ketman is advisable. Rod Dreher:

Ketman is the strategy that everyone in our society who isn’t a true believer in “social justice” and identity politics has to adopt to stay out of trouble. On Sunday, I heard about a professor in a large state university in a state that yesterday went for Trump, who is filled with constant anxiety. He believes that his interactions with colleagues and students are filled with the potential to destroy his career. Why? Because all it takes is an accusation of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry to wreck a lifetime of work. This is the world that the identity politics left has created for us. 

More on ketman later.

Thomas Sowell on the Root of What Divides Us

Thomas Sowell interviewed on the conflict of visions, the conflict between the constrained vision of conservatives and the unconstrained vision of leftists. 

The constrained vision "sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings."

"When Rousseau said that 'man is born free' but 'is everywhere in chains,' he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which the fundamental problem is not man or nature, but institutions."

Less than ten minutes, and WELL worth your time.

To paraphrase Sowell, for the leftist, when good things happen, they happen naturally; when bad things happen, however, it is due to institutions and civilization itself. 

When this is understood, a lot falls into place. One begins to understand why leftists are out to erase the historical record  by toppling  statues, destroying monuments, burning books and otherwise suppressing open inquiry and the free flow of ideas. One begins to understand why the Left is at war with the family and religious traditions. One begins to understand the leftist hatred and denial of reality itself below the level of social construction, and what drives their blather about 'systemic racism' and 'gender,' not to mention their celebration of freaks and losers and criminals and 'the other.'

What is Nullification in Political Theory?

Here is one explanation:

Nullification is a fundamental part of the American political system. But what exactly does it mean? There are two definitions. One is legal. When a court strikes down a law, it literally wipes it off the books. But there is also a practical definition – to make something of no value or consequence. When we talk about nullification happening today, we generally mean it in the practical sense – to end the practical effect of a federal act. Here is a succinct definition of nullification as we apply it: Any act or set of acts which has as its result a particular law being rendered legally null and void, or unenforceable in practice.Madison gave us a blueprint on how to do this in Federalist #46.

He suggested four steps to take on counteract and stop federal programs – whether “warrantable” or “unwarrantable,” the most significant being a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union.” The federal government involves itself in almost every aspect of life, but depends on state assistance to do almost everything. If states refuse to help, it becomes nearly impossible for the feds to enforce their laws or implement their programs. We can use this strategy to undermine and nullify all kinds of federal acts in practice – from warrantless spying, to gun control, to plant prohibition and more.

Here is an application of the theory:

The "Second Amendment Preservation Act of Newton County Missouri" reads, in part:

All federal acts, laws, orders, rules, and regulations passed by the federal government and specifically any presidential administration whether past, present, or future, which infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article 1, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution shall be invalid in the county, shall not be recognized by this county, and specifically rejected by this county, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in this County.

Newton County Commission letter dated 2/3/21

It may well be that the cure for what ails the body politic, if there is a cure, is a combination of voluntary segregation and nullification, not secession.

The State under Leftism

Substack

Procedural Liberalism

The law ought to be both protective  of rights and directive of duties. This requirement rules out a purely procedural liberalism.

You Want Anti-Government? I'll Give You Anti-Government!

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

An Important Issue in Political Philosophy: Robert Barron versus George Will

For many of us who reject leftism, and embrace a version of conservatism, there remains a choice between what I call American conservatism, which accepts key tenets of classical liberalism, and a more robust conservatism.  This more robust conservatism inclines toward the reactionary and anti-liberal. The difference emerges in an essay by Bishop Robert Barron entitled One Cheer for George Will's The Conservative Sensibility. The bolded passages below throw the difference into relief.

And so it was with great interest that I turned to Will’s latest offering, a massive volume called The Conservative Sensibility, a book that both in size and scope certainly qualifies as the author’s opus magnum. Will’s central argument is crucially important. The American experiment in democracy rests, he says, upon the epistemological [sic] conviction that there are political rights, grounded in a relatively stable human nature, that precede the actions and decisions of government. These rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not the gifts of the state; rather, the state exists to guarantee them, or to use the word that Will considers the most important in the entire prologue to the Declaration of Independence, to “secure” them. Thus is government properly and severely limited and tyranny kept, at least in principle, at bay. In accord with both Hobbes and Locke, Will holds that the purpose of the government finally is to provide an arena for the fullest possible expression of individual freedom. [. . .]

With much of this I found myself in profound agreement. It is indeed a pivotal feature of Catholic social teaching that an objective human nature exists and that the rights associated with it are inherent and not artificial constructs of the culture or the state. Accordingly, it is certainly good that government’s tendency toward imperial expansion be constrained. But as George Will’s presentation unfolded, I found myself far less sympathetic with his vision. What becomes clear is that Will shares, with Hobbes and Locke and their disciple Thomas Jefferson, a morally minimalistic understanding of the arena of freedom that government exists to protect. All three of those modern political theorists denied that we can know with certitude the true nature of human happiness or the proper goal of the moral life—and hence they left the determination of those matters up to the individual. Jefferson expressed this famously as the right to pursue happiness as one sees fit. The government’s role, on this interpretation, is to assure the least conflict among the myriad individuals seeking their particular version of fulfillment. The only moral bedrock in this scenario is the life and freedom of each actor.

Catholic social teaching has long been suspicious of just this sort of morally minimalist individualism. Central to the Church’s thinking on politics is the conviction that ethical principles, available to the searching intellect of any person of good will, ought to govern the moves [sic] of individuals within the society, and moreover, that the nation as a whole ought to be informed by a clear sense of the common good—that is to say, some shared social value that goes beyond simply what individuals might seek for themselves. Pace Will, the government itself plays a role in the application of this moral framework precisely in the measure that law has both a protective and directive function. It both holds off threats to human flourishing and, since it is, to a degree, a teacher of what the society morally approves and disapproves, also actively guides the desires of citizens.

I applaud the idea that the law have both a protective and a directive function.  But to what should the law direct us? 

On a purely procedural liberalism, "the purpose of the government finally is to provide an arena for the fullest possible expression of individual freedom. " This won't do, obviously. If people are allowed the fullest possible expression of individual freedom, then anything goes: looting, arson, bestiality, paedophilia, voter fraud, lying under oath, destruction of public and private property, etc.  Liberty is a high value but not when it becomes license. Indisputably, ethical principles ought to govern the behavior of individuals. But which principles exactly? Therein lies the rub. We will presumably agree that there must be some, but this agreement gets us nowhere unless we can specify the principles.

If we knew "with certitude the true nature of human happiness or the proper goal of the moral life" then we could derive the principles. Now there are those who are subjectively certain about the nature of happiness and the goal of life.   But this merely subjective certainty is worth little or nothing given that different people and groups are 'certain' about different things.  Subjective certainty is no guarantee of objective certainty, which is what knowledge requires.  This is especially so if the putative knowledge will be used to justify ethical prescriptions and proscriptions that will be imposed upon people by law.

For example, there are atheists and there are theists in almost every society. No atheist could possibly believe that the purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy with him in the next.  From this Catechism answer one can derive very specific ethical prescriptions and proscriptions, some of which will be rejected by atheists as a violation of their liberty. Now if one could KNOW that the Catechism answer is true, then those specific ethical principles would be objectively grounded in a manner that would justify imposing them on all members of a society for their own good whether they like it or not.

But is it known, as opposed to reasonably believed, that there is a God, etc.?  Most atheists would deny that the proposition in question is even reasonably believed.  Bishop Barron's Catholicism is to their minds just so much medieval superstition. Suppose, however, that the good bishop's worldview is simply true.  That does us no good unless we can know that it is true. Suppose some know (with objective certainty) that it is true. That also does us no good, politically speaking, unless a large majority in a society can agree that we know that it is true. 

So while it cannot be denied that the law must have some directive, as opposed to merely protective, function, the question remains as to what precisely it ought to direct us to.  The directions cannot come from any religion, but neither can they come from any ersatz religion such as leftism.  No theocracy, but also no 'leftocracy'!  Separation of church and state, but also separation of leftism and state.

This leaves us with the problem of finding the via media between a purely procedural liberalism and the tyrannical imposition of  prescriptions and proscriptions that derive from some dogmatically held, but strictly unknowable, set of metaphysical assumptions about man and world.  It is a dilemma inasmuch as both options are unacceptable.  

I'll end by noting that the main threats to our liberty at the present time do not emanate from a Roman Catholicism that has become a shell of its former self bereft of the cultural relevance it enjoyed for millennia until losing it in the mid-1960s; they proceed from leftism and Islam, and the Unholy Alliance of the two.

And so while the dilemma lately noted remains in force, a partial solution must take the form of retaining elements of the Judeo-Christian worldview, the Ten Commandments chiefly,  and by a restoration of the values of the American founding. Practically, this will require vigorous opposition to the parties of the unholy alliance.

David Gordon Reviews Michael Anton's America at the Point of No Return

Excerpts:

Anton notes that the founders believed that the American Revolution was grounded in universal truths, “but they did not expect their declaration to revolutionize the world—nor were they under any illusion that it, or they, had the power to do so….America is—in the words of John Quincy Adams—‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all’ but also ‘the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”

Those who wish to restore these principles face a challenge of unprecedented severity. Anton argues that an elite based in certain blue states disdains ordinary Americans. “The core message of the meta-Narrative is that America is fundamentally and inherently racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so on. The flaws and sins of America derive directly from those of its founding stock, who are natural predators, inherently racist, and malevolent.”

Elite policy is at its worst in California, now under the near-total domination of the left wing of the Democratic Party. “In modern California, hypocrisy and double-standardism aren’t merely part of the business climate; they’re endemic to the whole society….Sam Francis dubbed this system ‘anarcho-tyranny’: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions on the disfavored.” Anton fears that if President Trump isn’t reelected, the Democrats will seek actively to suppress whomever in the red states challenges them, and they will prove very difficult to dislodge from power.

Who are the ordinary Americans the elite disdains, and who are the elite? The ordinary Americans are those whom Hillary Clinton called “deplorables,” i.e., white males who value their family, their religion, and their property, including their guns. “Funny thing, too: a core tenet of modern liberalism is supposed to be the sanctity of ‘one man, one vote.’ Except, you know, not really. The barely concealed presupposition of denouncing Republicans as ‘racists’ simply because whites vote for them is that all votes are not created equal. Votes of color are morally superior to white votes, which are inherently tainted. Which is why the left holds any election won by a Republican to be morally if not (yet) politically illegitimate.”

The elite consists at its core of wealthy financiers and business interests allied with government. It is buttressed by professionals who have attended top universities, especially those of the Ivy League. In a way that readers of Hunter Lewis on “crony capitalism” will recognize, Anton writes: “So-called ‘public-private cooperation’ will increase. This benign-sounding phrase—who could object to ‘cooperation,’ to government and business ‘solving problems together’? —masks a darker reality. What it really describes is the use of state power to serve private ends, at private direction. Hence foreign policy…will be further reoriented around securing trade, tax, and labor ‘migration’ patterns and paradigms that benefit finance and big business.”

If elite dominance continues, Anton predicts that those of us who dissent will be rigidly restricted. “Free speech as we have known it—as our founders insisted was the bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule. The playbook is already being expanded to include banking and credit. Getting on the wrong side of elite-woke opinion is increasingly to find oneself locked out of the financial system: no bank account, no credit card, no ability to get a loan or pay a mortgage. Pay cash? The move to a ‘cashless society’…will obviate that option right quick.”

Anton cites an especially chilling instance of the policy of suppression. “A new regulation in the United Kingdom—which we must assume will be proposed here sooner or later—would allow Britain’s National Health Service to deny non-emergency care to those deemed ‘racist, sexist, or homophobic.’ Government bureaucrats, naturally, will be the ones doing the deeming.” Small wonder that Anton has had enough.

The author seems to me misguided in what he says about “industrial policy,” but I’ll pass over that in silence. He criticizes Murray Rothbard who suggested that the principle of secession has no logical stopping point, down to the level of each person. Anton says, “Every-man-a-government-unto himself is literally Hobbes’s ‘state of nature,’ yet Rothbard appears to approve.” This rests on a misunderstanding: it hardly follows that if you have a right to secede that you will in fact do so, and Rothbard did not favor a world of one-person “nations.” Also, Anton doesn’t understand John Rawls very well.

But enough of criticism. Anton’s rhetorical talents are remarkable, and I urge everyone to read his book.

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bi-cultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages.  My mother was both bilingual and bi-cultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not to me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a  difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values.  Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African?  Does he enjoy dual citizenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead.  There is no 'institutional racism.'  There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals.  Man up and move forward.  Don't blame others for your problems.  That's the mark of a loser.  Take responsibility.  We honkies want you to do well.  The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

It must also be said that the alt-Right identity-political counter to POC tribalism is just as bad, although it may be excusable as a pro tem tactic on some occasions.

The Conservative Mind

Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent.  There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work.  By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better.  But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Conservatives are not opposed to change.  We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.

And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation?  How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation? 

You love a girl and want to marry her.  But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover:  butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your currently uninstantiated idea of what a girl should be?

The extension to love of country is straightforward.  If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation.  Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.

Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent.  There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work.  By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better.  But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  Conservatives are not opposed to change.  We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.

And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation?  How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation? 

You love a girl and want to marry her.  But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover:  butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your currently uninstantiated idea of what a girl should be?

The extension to love of country is straightforward.  If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation.  Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.

The Main Threat of the Left to the Right

The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement:

. . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.

In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.

This is why sane and decent Americans absolutely must vote for Donald J. Trump.  Dreher doesn't draw this conclusion due to his irrational Trump hatred, but indications are that he too will vote for Trump come November.

Addendum (9/7). Dr. Vito Caiati comments:

Thank you for posting that long quotation from Rod Dreher, which well sums up the principal threat of the social, cultural, and intellectual threat of the Left.

Today, Malcolm Pollack calls attention to the coming post-election mayhem that the Left will unleash given a Trump victory in November  He links to Michael Anton's "alarming" essay on the form this "coup" will take (https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/).  Anton may well be right, and if so, the threat that we are facing goes far beyond that of the "soft-totalitarianism" so often discussed by Dreher. Very dark times have arrived if even a fraction of Anton's prognostication occurs.

I am increasingly convinced that this federal republic of ours, the product of early capitalist and pre-capitalist social forces, that is, of a particular historical conjuncture in the history of early modern Europe and its colonial offshoots, is at odds with the underlying interests of contemporary corporate capital,whose ruling class and the myriad of minions who either serve it directly or are sustained and tolerated by it--all anti-national, globalist, technocratic, anti-democratic,  and anti-(classical) liberal to one degree of another--and that they are determined to sweep it away.  The Left today is bizarrely made up of the most disparate and far-flung social elements, from the anarchist or pseudo-Marxist Antifa shock troops in the streets; the apparatchiks of the federal, state, and local governments; the swarms of  ill-educated "intellectuals" in and out of the universities; the leftist heretical or  cowed"Christian" leaders of the Catholic and other churches; and of course the hacks  of the media and the culture industries.  Whether this coalition, wielded together only partially by ideology, can withstand the inevitable leftward track that would come with full power is unlikely, but in the meantime it will have reduced what remains of the Old Republic and its traditions to ruins.

PS. In my quick list of the Left's "disparate" elements, I forgot to include the significant portion of very rich corporate elite, the core of the ruling class, which have become the key funders and advocates of its ideology and policies, whether through conviction or convenience. Here, one can speak of a strange compromesso storico, one based on continued corporate dominance (for example, silence on real economic and social problems), and hence the interests of the ruling class, in return for the advancement of the tribalist, racist, anti-American, anti-Western ideology and policies of the Left. This is not the first time that capitalists and corporate elites have coalesced with anti-democratic and anti-liberal political formations; one only has to consider the accommodations of German big capital with the Nazi regime or that of Japanese zaibatu with Japanese militarism. This time, however, the dance is with the Left.

Vito Caiati on the Tension between Corporate Capitalism and Conservatism

Dr. Vito Caiati by e-mail (emphasis added):

I am increasingly convinced that we on the Right are caught up in a set of contradictions of our own making, in that we wish to uphold, on the one hand, a particular political, social, and cultural inheritance and, on the other, an economic system, which in the past was largely supportive of or at least conducive to the former but which now, that is, in the form that it has attained in the last century, its principal solvent.  The capitalism of which we often so glowingly speak on the Right is long-gone, along with the social classes and modes of life tied to it. How do we not fall into the trap of denouncing the latter while upholding the former?  I see this as the hardest of puzzles to solve, and it may well mean that something is at work deep in the American social formation that deprives us on the Right of a firm footing in existing reality, which would explain why the Left has succeeded in conquering one political and cultural institution after another: The nature of contemporary capital, not merely its economic nature but the ways of life and cultural norms that arise from it, is inherently antagonistic to the nation state, classical liberal polities and rights, and traditional forms of civic society and belief systems. If this is so, then the Right has the unenviable task of opposing all forms of collectivist organization and control, public and private (that is, corporate), the latter of which is the inevitable form of corporate capitalist development today, while proposing some viable alternative, one that would inevitably result in a direct challenge to the dominance of the present ruling class. This is a very contradictory situation for the defenders of order, since we ordinarily do not seek to undermine the leading institutions of society. At best, we on the Right have so far only snipped at this dominance, speaking of outsourcing of manufacturing or corporate censorship, but all of these efforts leave the beast intact. What would a real assault from the Right look like, and how could it be mounted without giving up basic philosophical commitments to private property and initiative? For me, this is a real dilemma, but perhaps you disagree?

The following may serve as an illustration of Vito's dilemma.  Consider Amazon.com.

I love it and its fabulously efficient services. I fund it to the tune of about $100 per month buying books and other merchandise.  The company is a perfect example of how a man with an idea can make it big in America and enrich the lives of millions with his products. This is made possible by capitalism and the rule of law, not one or the other, but both in synergy. An enterprise like Amazon is unthinkable under socialism. The man in question, Jeff Bezos, is now the Croesus of the modern world. I have argued many times that there is nothing wrong with economic inequality as such. But money is translatable into power including the power to shape attitudes and work cultural changes.  Bezos' vast resources translate into formidable political and cultural clout. As you know, Bezos owns the left-leaning Washington Post.

By buying from Amazon, I support the Left nolens volens and its censoring of conservative books, not all of course, but many that only a hard-core leftist would think of censoring.  I also aid and abet the hollowing out of that buffer zone between the individual and the state apparatus that is called civil society. Amazon puts small book stores out of business which are not merely places of business but meeting places for citizens. But haven't I called repeatedly for the defunding of the Left? I have. Ought I not use Amazon? But that would be an impotent protest on my part. The company is a juggernaut that won't be stopped by any boycott or influenced in its corporate policies by any boycott.

There is a tension between advanced corporate capitalism and conservative values. The question I would have for Dr. Caiati, however, would be whether advanced corporate capitalism is inherently or essentially antagonistic to conservative values as he maintains. (See bolded sentence above)   Perhaps there is no necessity to this antagonism and that a sufficiently strong state headed by a nationalist such as DJT could rein in such corporate behemoths as Amazon. 

Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

Democrat Extremism Has Deep Roots

Issues and Insights:

While the Democrats’ lurch to port looks like a recent event, it’s been decades in the making. The party has been a comfortable home to closeted authoritarians for decades. Its big government agenda is a safe harbor for socialists, statists, coercionists, and sworn enemies of liberty.

Democrats have a history of rejecting civil society in favor of political society. They have long believed all ills, both the real and imagined, can and should be resolved by government intervention. The party has rejected freedom and individualism and adopted a collectivist mindset that needs a fortune (always someone else’s) in tax revenues to function.

A man is known by the company he keeps and this is true of political parties. Long before anyone was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, Democrats were supporting some of history’s worst tyrants. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is a Sandinista devotee, as is Sanders, who made a “sympathizer” trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, and believed that Fidel Castro was just a prince of a fellow who generously kept “his” people fed, housed, and schooled.

[. . .]

The roots of today’s Democratic Party reach deep into the red soil of socialism and anchor the real and implied violence of extremism. The dense and twisted forest is nearly grown now, with more than three-fourths of Democrats saying they would vote for a socialist presidential candidate, according to a Gallup poll taken earlier this year. Anyone wondering why many of our big cities are under siege from rioters can quickly figure out why just by looking at that poll.

Civil society and its institutions form the buffer zone between the individual and the State. As the Democrats lurch ever leftward, they hollow out ever more of the buffer zone with the goal of eliminating it entirely. The Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule is a prime example. Fortunately, President Trump put a stop to it.  But the Left never rests in its quest to quash liberty and empower an omni-invasive State apparatus.  It is undeniable that the Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party.  This is not the party of your father or even of your older brother.   If you are still a Democrat, I ask that you make sure you understand what this party now stands for.

Old Left and New Left

A succinct differentiation:

The New Left retained the values and ultimate goals of the Old Left. They also retained elements of their philosophical framework. They then set about spreading their ideas throughout the culture by means of propaganda and institutional subversion. And they won. Aside from Cuba and North Korea, orthodox Communism is dead. Capitalism seems everywhere triumphant. And yet in the realm of culture, leftist values are completely hegemonic. The left lost the Cold War, but they won the peace.

If We Lose Locke, We Lose America

Ben Shapiro, Prager U, 5:05.

Which Side Are You On?

A snatch of dialog in illustration of the aporetics of our political predicament:

A. It's a war! Don't say anything bad about our guys! Which side are you on? Don't preface your defense of Trump by conceding that he has these and these negative qualities. Don't give ammo to the enemy!  In a gunfight against a home invader  would you allow your enemy time to re-load, in the interests of a fair fight? Hell no! He is in the wrong and you are in the right. He is out to kill you. You must stop him, and if that ends up killing him, so be it.

B. But then truth and objectivity go out the window. Onesidedness and blind partisanship rule. Oppositions intensify. Polarization increases. Polarization issues in demonization. We need to come together and work together. Trump is deeply flawed. How can you blind yourself to his flaws?

A. This is a war, not a gentlemanly discussion, or an attempt at an objective personality assessment.  You cannot be objective and conciliatory in a war. You must defeat the enemy before he defeats you. Trump is all we have. Can't you see that? Your attempt to be fair and conciliatory and reasonable and 'moral' will be taken as a sign of weakness and will only embolden our enemies on the Left.  We cannot 'come together' with them because there is no common ground on which to do so.  They do not share out values. The enemy is committed to our destruction.

B. So you are OK with any and all means sufficient to destroy the enemy?  Do the ends justify the means? Were the Allied atrocities during World War II justified by the good outcome?

A. I don't like saying yes, yes, and yes, but I fear that I have to. This is the problem of dirty hands. The buck stopped with President Harry Truman. Would you not have ordered the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese population centers? Or, comfortable in your ivory tower, would you have taken the position of Elizabeth Anscombe possibly sacrificing civilization itself to a just war THEORY?  Which is better known, the premises on which Just War doctrine depends, or the consequences of Allied defeat and Axis victory?

B. This is scary stuff. Isn't there some alternative to war?

A.  And what might that be?  I see only three alternatives to war, none of them good.  One can attempt to WITHDRAW from the fight. Head for the hills. Build alternative communities and hope to be left alone.  Unfortunately, the totalitarians, being totalitarians, won't leave us alone. That's not 'who they are.'

Or one can accept POLITICAL DHIMMITUDE.

Finally, one can attempt the POLITICAL EQUIVALENT OF DIVORCE, whether through secession, partition, a return to federalism, or something else.

B. Those are the only options?

A. As far as I can see.

Related:

Is Disunion in Our Future?

 

Another Reason Why Defunding the Police is Idiotic

Government is by its very nature coercive. To be effective, it has to have the power to force people to do what they might not want to do, and to refrain from doing what they might want to do, such as drive drunk, loot, and rape. It follows straightaway that eliminating enforcement agencies eliminates government.

In an ideal world in which everyone is an angel, there would be no need for government. But our world is not ideal and there is no reason to think it ever will be. Government is therefore a necessary evil as are the enforcement agencies without which government cannot exist.

To think otherwise is to live in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Anarcho-Tyranny: Where Multiculturalism Leads

Samuel Francis:

Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding.

This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as “anarcho-tyranny”—we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).

The Francis article is from 2004.  What struck me is how well the quotation applies to recent events, especially those of the last few days.  The authorities stand back and allow looters and thugs to destroy public and private property and generally disrupt our cities while at the same time imposing draconian restrictions on law-abiding citizen using an exaggerated pandemic as a pretext.

Abdication and over-reach at once.  The empowerment of criminals by virtue-signaling elites with no skin in the game to the detriment of the meek middle-class law-abiding.

More grist for the mill; more blog-fodder for the Bill.  But it is not just blog-fodder. The survival of the Republic is at stake. That is not an exaggeration. I wish it were.

Read it all.

Samuel Francis

Matthew Rose, The Outsider

Quality and Equality

Quality of life is what counts, not equality of outcome. Enforce the latter, destroy the former.

David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump:

The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny few believers would agree that a Christian should not violate the Ten Commandments or any other clear, biblical command while pursuing or exercising political power.

But of course we see such behavior all the time from hardcore Christian Trump supporters. They’ll echo Trump’s lies. They’ll defend Trump’s lies. They’ll adopt many of his same rhetorical tactics, including engaging in mocking and insulting behavior as a matter of course.

Farther down:

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable. (Emphasis added.)

French has just touched upon the deepest issue in this debate.  He is right that it makes no sense for conservative Christians not to support Trump if politics is seen through worldly eyes. The question, however, is whether one can avoid doing so. Can one see politics and pursue it through unworldly eyes?  Can one participate in politics at any level, and especially at the higher levels, while adhering strictly and unwaveringly to Christian principles and precepts and while practicing Christian virtues?  Can one combine contemptus mundi with political action?

I don't believe that this is possible.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible. then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

I say that we need to face the problem honestly.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? Do they accept the Enlightenment values enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not.  Christianity has civilized us to some extent. Has Islam civilized them? Their penology is barbaric as is their attitude toward other cultures and religions. 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare.

This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

David French is such a one.

Good Societies and Good Lives: On State-Run Lotteries

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. Here I discuss just one such feature, state-sponsored lotteries.

Any government that promotes lotteries is promoting behavior that is harmful to many and positively good for none, not even the few winners who are morally if not economically undermined by them.  Sufficiently disciplined people can of course gamble without harming themselves economically. They gamble for diversion and they know when to stop. They have no illusions about it and they appreciate that in the long run it is a losing proposition. But even these people are not doing themselves much good by gambling: they are wasting time that could otherwise be used in some productive way. The undisciplined, however, positively harm themselves, and not only by going into debt. They wallow in irrationality and ‘innumeracy’ (the mathematical analog of illiteracy). How many gamblers could explain the Gambler’s Fallacy? They associate with people who are likely to have a bad influence on them. Since the virtues and vices tend to come in clusters, the gambler is likely to become a drinker, a glutton, and so on. In the words of the old song: "Drinkin’ and gamblin’, stayin’ out all night; . . . you're just livin’ in a fool’s paradise."

I am not saying that gambling should be illegal; nor am I saying that it is immoral. Some gamble for relaxation, and no ill comes of it. I am saying that gambling ought not be state-sponsored. Government should cause no harm. Primum non nocere! 

 

Some will respond by pointing to the supplemental revenue that state lotteries generate, revenue that can be put to good uses. The tacit assumption seems to be that, if X is a source of supplemental revenue, then X is a good thing.

 

This assumption is false. State-sponsored prostitution would be an excellent source of revenue — there would be no lack of eager customers — but prostitution is not something a state should sponsor. If it is wrong for the government to promote prostitution, the use of tobacco products, the drinking of alcohol, and the taking of drugs, then it is wrong for the government to support gambling in the form of lotteries.

One can argue with some show of plausibility that governments should permit the aforementioned activities; but I cannot see how any rational and morally sane person could argue that governments should support or promote them.

National Breakup?

At First Things, a podcast in which F. H. Buckley discusses his book American Secession. A little less than 32 minutes.

Why We Defend Donald Trump

Replying to a young friend who loathes the man, Malcolm Pollack explains why so many of us stand with President Trump despite his manifold and manifest faults:

I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge), he lacks dignity and gravitas, he calls people childish names, he can be vulgar (though surely no more so than LBJ, Clinton, and a host of others), he is a philanderer (though of course JFK and Clinton put him to shame in that department, with the latter likely being guilty of actual rape). He is, as you say, not one to show much in the way of humility (though of course he is a dwarf in that regard compared to his immediate predecessor, whom Mike Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg! — called “the most arrogant man he’d ever met”).

He is, however, the duly elected president of the United States, elevated to office by a vast segment of the traditional American nation who rightly have felt despised and marginalized for a long time now by their globalist, “progressive” overlords — a scornful and condescending secular priesthood who occupy, by powerful means of enforcement, the commanding heights of media, academia, popular culture, and the enormous edifice of the unelected, administrative state. Donald Trump was seen by these “Deplorables” — and rightly so — as their last hope against a leftist juggernaut that sought to trample into dust all of the founding norms and traditions of the American nation, to throw open the borders, to distend and distort the Constitution into gelatinous goo, and to crush all resistance by a combination of judicial activism, executive fiat and suffocating social ostracism.

Trump’s voters understood that the First and Second Amendments, those great bulwarks of liberty, were under increasingly withering assault; they had to look no further than Canada, Britain, and Europe — where the people are forcibly disarmed, and criticism of government policy is now enough to land you in jail — to see what lay ahead if the eight -year catastrophe of the Obama administration were to be repeated by re-installing those despicable grifters the Clintons. They saw in Donald Trump, for all of his obvious flaws (and yes, they are just as obvious to me as they are to you), a man who genuinely loved the free and self-confident America of his youth, who saw the nation’s long story, though of course tainted by sin and error (as all national stories are), as a story of the triumph of the human spirit, guided by a set of transcendent principles rooted in the natural, God-given dignity of every human being, and given form by a Constitution unlike any ever seen in history: the product of the coming together at a unique moment in the development of mankind by men of genius (compared to whom, by the way, our current crop of “statesmen”, including both Trump and his predecessors, are intellectual gnats).

Donald Trump clearly, if only intuitively, understood the existential horror of this century-long acceleration of consolidating, totalizing statism, the effect of which is to reduce men to children, and to crush from existence the essential mediating layer of “civil society” — the great web of voluntary and independent association that forms the sinews and ligaments of healthy, organic societies — replacing it with an atomizing, vertical order in which every man and woman depends first and foremost upon the great State above, from which all blessings — and all guidance — must flow.

The conservative commentariat does not pay sufficient attention to the Left's assault on civil society. So I am pleased that Mr Pollack has reminded us of this "great web of voluntary and independent association" that stands between the naked individual and Leviathan.  

For more on civil society see my

Subsidiarity as Bulwark Against the Left's Assault on Civil Society

and 

Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Clemency

Is a presidential pardon an act of mercy? If it is, then it cannot be said to be just or unjust. 

Elias Canetti and Greta Thunberg

The former has the latter's 'number.'

Zwei Tendenzen, die sich nur scheinbar widersprechen, kennzeichnen die Zeit: die Anbetung der Jugend and das Absterben der Erfahrung.

Two trends, which only apparently contradict each other, epitomize this era: the worship of youth and the extinction of experience. (The Agony of Flies, Noonday, 1994, p. 168/169, emphasis in original.)

American Conservatism

My brand of conservatism could be called American. It aims to preserve and where necessary restore the values and principles codified by the founders. Incorporating as it does elements of classical liberalism and libertarianism, American conservatism is far from throne-and-altar reaction. While anti-theocratic, it is not anti-religious. It stands for individual liberty and its necessary supports, private property, free markets, and limited government. It is liberal in its stress on liberties, but conservative in its sober view of human nature, a nature easily corrupted by power and in need of restraint. It avoids the reactionary and radical extremes. It incorporates the values of the Enlightenment. American conservatism presupposes the existence of “unalienable rights” which come from nature or from “nature's God.” First among the liberties mentioned in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is religious liberty which includes the liberty to exercise no religion. It is first in the order of exposition and (arguably) first also in the order of importance. The second liberty mentioned is free speech. Both of these classically American values are under assault from the utopian Left which has taken over the Democrat party in the USA.

As against certain factions of the alternative Right, American conservatism insists that the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. I don't see how that could be reasonably denied. These propositions define the American identity and provide a bulwark against the identity politics shared by the cultural Marxists and their alt-right opponents. But I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition and will be preserved, if it is preserved, only by people in that tradition or who can be assimilated into it. This has consequences for immigration policy.

To allude to e pluribus unum, a One cannot be made out of just any Many. Some groups are unassimilable. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be defined in merely economic terms. And so I ask a politically incorrect but perfectly reasonable question: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration? Immigrants bring their culture with them. Muslims, for example, bring with them a Sharia-based, hybrid religious-political ideology that is antithetical to American values. We are under no obligation to allow the immigration of subversive elements. The founding propositions are universally true; they are not the property of whites even though whites discovered them. But such propositions, while true for all humans and in this sense true universally, are not recognized by all humans, and not presently capable of being recognized or put into practice by all humans. The attempt to impart these propositions to some groups will be futile, especially if it involves force, or can be interpreted by the group in question as a cover for an attempt to dominate or control them for ulterior motives. The implication for foreign policy is that the USA must adopt an enlightened nationalism and not attempt to teach the presently unteachable.

Subsidiarity as Bulwark against the Left's Assault on Civil Society

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest left-ward drift of Democrat administrations such as President Obama's, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature, and as the Democrat party drifts ever left-ward, it becomes ever more totalitarian and socialist and ever more a threat to individual liberty and the private property that is its foundation.  

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Democrat candidates.  'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose the Left.  The argument is this:

1) The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2) Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3) If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Marx at 200: Classical versus Cultural Marxism

Here

What is Cultural Marxism?

Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.'  It is alleged by leftists  to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews, even Adorno.  Adorno's original name was not 'Theodor W. Adorno,' but 'Theodor Adorno Wiesengrund.'  

But what is cultural Marxism?

For Karl Marx, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict. In market societies the two main classes in conflict are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which stand to each other as oppressor and oppressed. This is not a conflict that can be mediated: it can be overcome only by the defeat of the oppressors. Herein lies an important difference between (classical) liberalism and Marxist leftism.ⁱ For the latter, politics is war, not a process of bargaining and accommodation on the basis of mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Cultural Marxism, retaining both the oppressor-oppressed motif and the belief in the intractability of the conflict, moves beyond classical or economic Marxism by widening the class of the oppressed to include blacks and other 'people of color,' women, male and female homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, Muslims, immigrants legal and illegal, and others deemed to be victims of oppression.

Correspondingly, cultural Marxism widens the class of oppressors to include potentially all whites, males, heterosexuals and religionists, Christians mainly, regardless of their economic status. Thus within the ambit of cultural Marxism, a working-class Southern white male heterosexual Christian ends up among the oppressors. Such are Hillary Clinton's deplorables and irredeemables, and those about whom Barack Obama said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”ⁱⁱ

^{___________________________}

i cf. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17.

ii https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008. Read the sentence carefully. It makes no sense.

Would a Cut in the Capital-Gains Tax be Racist?

But of course:

Most of us think of the capital-gains tax, if we think about it at all, as a policy that is neutral as regards questions of race or racism. But given that blacks are underrepresented among stockowners, Klein asked, would it be racist to support a capital-gains tax cut? “Yes,” Kendi answered, without hesitation.

I will leave the logical analysis to my readers.

First step: scrutinize 'underrepresented.' What does it mean? Is it perhaps ambiguous? Does it paper over an important distinction?

Second step: find other arguments of the same logical form and see if they have true premises and a false conclusion.

The purpose of such an exercise is to convince oneself that leftists have lost their minds. There is no point in trying to change their minds. They have vacated the plane of reason. 'Dialog' with them is pointless. They simply have to be defeated or 'quarantined.' Let us hope that their defeat or 'quarantine' can be achieved politically.  

We will have to think further about political quarantine.  That may sound ominous, but the contemporary hard Left, as represented in the USA by the Democrat Party, is a cesspool of political pathogens inimical to the health of the body politic.

Third Parties: Discussion Societies in Political Drag

A so-called 'third party' is any party in U. S. politics other than the Democrats and the Republicans.  There are many third parties. My thesis is that third parties are discussion societies in political drag.  Corollary to that is my claim that anyone who has anything to do with a third party thereby demonstrates ignorance as to the nature of the political. (Recent possible exception: the Reform Party when it backed Ross Perot.)

Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two. It is praxis, not theoria. The political life is a form of the vita activa, not of the vita contemplativa. Here is a working definition of 'political activity.'  

Political activity is human activity in concert with like-minded others in pursuit of governmental power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies contributory to the common worldly good or the worldly good of those the party represents.

Now the vast majority of third parties have no chance of coming to power. It follows that those who vote for third-party candidates are almost in every instance wasting their vote.  These voters don't understand the nature of the political as above defined.

Some vote third-party to 'make a statement' or to 'lodge a protest.' But these gestures are futile. No one gives a damn about Joe Blow's 'statement' or 'protest' or would even be aware of them.  Consider the American Solidarity Party: 

Writing for First Things in July 2016, David McPherson, assistant professor of philosophy at Creighton University, urged voting for the ASP ticket as “a protest vote against a system that presents us with such poor choices.” Moreover, by supporting the ASP, he argued, “‘a man [sets] an example,’ so that the idea of human solidarity, based on the equal dignity of all human beings, may not die away.”

The sentiment is noble, but the proposed course is impractical. Politics is a practical game! It is not about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And only a fool lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  It is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances.

So what should you do if you are a Libertarian, or rather 'Losertarian'?  Do what Ron Paul did: become a Republican and try to push that stodgy bunch in a more libertarian direction.  Similarly with ASP members. Stop wasting your time and become Republicans. Try to inject some subsidiarist ideas into the mix.

In 2020, ASP members ought to vote for Trump, and not abstain. It is folly to believe in 'political equivalentism' as between Left and Right in the present constellation of circumstances  here in the States.

Don't confuse a discussion society with a political party!

The Virtuous are Too Scrupulous to Rouse the People against their Tyrants

Here:

Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”

Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.

There comes a time when a corrective is needed, an outsider self-powered, unowned, and unafraid to kick the asses of the Demo Rats to his Left and expose the fecklessness of the cuckservatives to his Right.  A corrective and a clarifier. No more of the usual Left versus Right. The battle for the soul of America is now a contest between the borderless globalism of the greedy elites and an enlightened nationalism, populist and patriotic.  Hillary versus Donald, to personify it.

The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism cum pane et circensibus

Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption.  A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.

Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of  Big Government and its leftist enablers.

The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left Big Government by 'woke' elites. There is nothing democratic about them.  Damn these Demo Rats!

Democratic Socialism?

The label smacks of an oxymoron. Essential to socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialists will presumably want to distinguish socialism from statism, which may be defined as state control of the economy, where the state control is not in turn democratically controlled. Historically, however, the tendency is for supposedly collective, democratic control to transmogrify into control by an elite group of central planners who, exulting in their power, will use all the means at their disposal to hold on to it and expand it -- and 'the people' be damned.

The tendency, then, is for socialism to terminate in statism and totalitarianism. Power to the people? Hardly. 'The people' end up among the socially planned and not among the social planners. Either that or they end up in a gulag.

Addendum 8/31. London Ed comments:

Good post, and the seed of an answer to the ‘No true Marxist’ argument. As you say, collective ownership of the means of production is essential to socialism, not just a mere accident.

The next step in the proof would be to show that it is essential, not just accidental, to collective ownership that supposedly collective, democratic control will inevitably transmogrify into ‘control by an elite group of central planners who, exulting in their power, will use all the means at their disposal to hold on to it and expand it’. Hence, the bad history of Marxism is not a mere accident, despite what its supporters claim.

This would be the next step in the proof if a proof in the strict sense could be had. Here socialists enjoy some 'wiggle room.' A strict proof is not available. My first point above is non-negotiable since it is merely a consequence of the definition of 'socialism.' But how do we prove that collective ownership necessarily and inevitably issues in statism and totalitarianism?  Of course, repeated failure is a good inductive argument for an ideal's being unrealizable. But induction is not demonstration. Without a demonstration, we cannot deny the socialist his 'wiggle room.' 

The Chesterton Move

The true-believing socialist will most likely make what I will call the 'Chesterton move.'  G. K. C. famously asserted,  or at least implied, that Christianity hasn't failed; it's never been tried.  "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910), ch. 1.5)

The idea here is that Christianity is a  realizable ideal, but that we simply haven't realized it.  Now if an ideal is realizable, then its never having been realized is no apodictic proof of its not being a genuine ideal, one  that we ought to try to realize.  Our democratic socialist can say something similar. Insufficient attempts have been made properly to implement the socialist ideal; the fact that it has never been achieved is no knock-down argument against the ideal.  We have to organize and make a concerted effort and suppress the evil capitalist greed-heads who stand in our way.

The Chesterton Move and the 'No True Marxist' Fallacy

Now if our democratic socialist has available to him the Chesterton Move, then he is in a position to deny that 'No True Marxist' is a fallacy.  He can say that true Marxism, or rather true socialism, will not lead to totalitarian tyranny. If it does, then it was not true socialism!

A Deeper Issue

Can we know from experience the natures of things and thus what is possible and impossible?  Can we know a posteriori that socialism without totalitarian tyranny is impossible?

The conservative will presumably answer this question in the affirmative, but he won't be able to prove that he is right. Or so say I.

The Aporetics of the Situation

1) An ideal that has never been realized, despite repeated attempts to realize it, cannot be realized.

2) An ideal that cannot be realized is no (genuine) ideal at all

3) Democratic socialism  is a genuine ideal.

The above is known in the trade as an antilogism or an inconsistent triad. The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. 

If you are not willing to accept that the triad is a genuine aporia or insolubilium, then you must reject/modify one of the constituent propositions.   I don't believe that (2), an analog of the 'Ought implies Can' principle, can be reasonably rejected. So we either reject (1) or (3). I reject (3). The democratic socialist would have to reject (1).

Can I refute him? No. Can he refute me? No. And yet we must act. So I battle socialism and stand with Donald Trump:

America will never be a socialist country!

Watch the video and check out the expression on Bernie Sanders' face. And how about the tribal females all in white?

We are Bothered by Different Things

Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141:

Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested in the fact that some were very rich and some were very poor?'  To this question Anderson replied that 'we are all bothered by different things.  That finished him with the Melburnians'. [Kennedy quotes Manning Clark, The Quest for Grace, Melbourne, 1991, p. 193]

"We are all bothered by different things."  And even when we are bothered by the same things, we prioritize the objects of botherment differently.  Now suppose you and I are bothered by exactly the same things in exactly the same order.  There is still room for disagreement and possibly even bitter contention: we are bothered to different degrees by the things that bother us.

"It angers me that that doesn't anger you!"  "It angers me that  you are insufficiently angered by what angers both of us."

Here then is one root of political disagreement.  It is a deep root, perhaps ineradicable.  And it is a root of other sorts of disagreement as well.  We are bothered by different things.

Are conservatives bothered by gun violence?  Yes, of course.  But the Americans among them are bothered more by the violation of the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. Liberals, even if they are slightly bothered by the violation of these rights, assuming they admit them in the first place, are much more bothered by gun violence.  Now there are factual questions here concerning which agreement is in principle possible, though exceedingly unlikely.  For example there is the question whether more guns in the hands of citizens leads to less crime.   That is a factual question, but one that is not going to be resolved to the satisfaction of all.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the facts.  Each side sees the other as having its own 'facts.'

But deeper than facts lie values.  Here the problem becomes truly intractable.  We are bothered by different things because we differ about values and their ordering.  American conservatives and presumably most liberals value self-reliance but conservatives locate it much higher up in the axiological hierarchy.  This probably explains why liberals are more inclined to rely on professional law enforcement for protection against the criminal element even while they bash cops as a bunch of racists eager to hunt down and murder "unarmed black teenagers" such as Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri fame.  (Brown was unarmed, but tried to arm himself with the cop's gun. This is an important detail conveniently left out of the biased mainstream media accounts.)

As for what finished Anderson with the Melburnians, he was apparently not sufficiently exercised by (material) inequality for the tastes of the latter despite his being a man of the Left, though not reliably so due to his iconoclasm.

Does it bother conservatives that there is wealth inequality?  To some extent.  But for a(n American) conservative, liberty trumps equality in the scale of values.  With liberals it is the other way around.  Liberals of course cherish their brand of rights and liberties and will go to absurd extremes in defending them even when the right to free expression, a big deal with them, spills over into incitement to violence and includes the pollution of the culture with pornography.  Of course, this extremism in defense of free expression bangs up against the liberals' own self-imposed limit of political correctness.  The trashers of Christianity suddenly become cowards when it comes to the trashing of Islam.  That takes more courage than they command.  And they are easily cowed by events such as the 7 January 2015 terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  Liberals are also absurdly eager to spread the right to vote even at the expense of making the polling places safe for voter fraud.  How else do you explain their mindless opposition to photo ID? But not a peep from liberals about 'real' liberties and rights such as gun rights, the right to private property, and the right to freedom from excessive and punitive taxation.

Is material inequality a problem?  Not as such.  Why should it be?  

As I recall John Rawls' Difference Principle, the gist of it is this: Social and economic inequality is justified ONLY IF the inequality makes the worse off better than they would have been without the inequality.  Why exactly?  If I'm smarter than you, work harder, practice the ancient virtues, avoid the vices, while you are a slacker and a screw-up who nevertheless has what he needs, why is my having more justified ONLY IF it makes you better off than you would have been without the inequality? (Yes, I know all about the Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance, but I don't consider that an argument.)

At the root of our differences are value differences and those, at bottom, are irreconcilable. 

On that cheery note, I punch the clock. Have a pleasant weekend.

Too Many Lawyers in Government, not Enough Doctors

(Written 10 September 2012)

 

Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government -- and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

Lawyers are especially over-represented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."

(Written 10 September 2012)

 

Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government -- and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

Lawyers are especially over-represented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."

Two from Malcolm Pollack

A Taxonomy of Civil War

Vallicella on the 'Proposition Nation': Between Scylla and Charybdis

Private Property

The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property. 

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:

The Revolution is good.  But why?  One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create.  The abolition of property is not an end.  It is a means.

This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about.  I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.  

Integralism in Three Sentences

Here:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

The crucial proposition is the first. By 'end of human life' is meant the ultimate or final goal or purpose of human life, not its cessation or stoppage.  It is presupposed that all human lives share the same final purpose. And what might that be? For a traditional Catholic, the Baltimore Catechism gives the answer:

LESSON FIRST
ON THE END OF MAN

1. Q. Who made the world?
A. God made the world.

2. Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.

3. Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image
and likeness of God.

6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

The Catholic integralist is making the following claims. First, every human life has an ultimate purpose. Second, the  purpose is not different for different people: all, regardless of race, sex, or any other difference, share the same purpose. Third, the final common purpose is known and not open to doubt or debate: it is not a matter of conjecture or speculation or private opinion.  Fourth, the final common purpose is to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. And of course the Catholic integralist is committed to the presuppositions of these claims, e.g., that there is a God, that he created everything distinct from himself, that man has a destiny that transcends this life, and so on.

Suppose all of the above is true. Then the political order here below must subserve the divinely ordained eternal order.   The temporal power, the State, must be subordinated to, and therefore cannot be separated from, the true church, the Roman Catholic Church.  If so, classical liberalism is an erroneous and pernicious political philosophy.

One consequence of this view seems to be that state power can be justifiably used to coerce dissidents.  Some of them hold that human life has no purpose at all. Others hold that it has a purpose but one that is determined by the individual. Still others think that there is a common ultimate purpose but that it is secular and humanistic and therefore atheistic.

And then there are the classically liberal theists who hold that when it comes to the final purpose of human life and how to attain it, there is reasonable belief, but no knowledge. If there is no knowledge in this area then coercion of atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics could not be justified.  Finally, there are those who, while holding that there is knowledge in this area, knowledge that justifies the coercion of dissidents, reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants for example, or Islamists.

My view is that we ought not stray too far from the classically liberal view of the Founders. We do not KNOW that the Catechism worldview is true. ONLY IF it were known to be true could it be justifiably imposed via the awesome power of the State. In a well-ordered Republic, the dissent of secular humanists, atheists, and non-Catholic theists ought to be tolerated. At the same time, State power must never be used to violate the consciences of Catholics by, say, forcing them to support the grave moral evil of abortion on demand with their tax dollars.

Government by ts very nature is coercive. I stand for limited government and limited coercion.

So that's my initial take on Catholic integralism. It is a non-starter.

Politics is War: Civility and Decency are Secondary Values

Sohrab Ahmari, Against David-Frenchism, conclusion:

Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

I have been coming to something close to this view over the last few years. If the Left sees politics as a form of warfare, we are fools to continue supposing it to be gentlemanly debate  under the umbrella of shared principles and values. Civility is for the civil; it is not for those who represent an existential threat.

An existential threat need not take the form of a threat to one's physical existence; a threat to one's way of life is an existential threat. This is because human life is not merely physical or biological; it is also cultural and spiritual.  It is our culture that values civility; a progressive threat to our culture of civility, being uncivil,  demands an uncivil response. Civility is like tolerance. Tolerance is a high value, but it has limits: one cannot tolerate the intolerant.

Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?

Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.  That is a foolish and irresponsible view.

1) Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot productively order their own lives. Why then should they have any say in the ordering of society?  Why should the thoughtful vote of a decent, law-abiding citizen be canceled out by the vote of an armed robber, a rapist, a drug dealer, a terrorist, or any other miscreant?  That could make sense only to someone who substituted feeling for thought.  

Criminals have no interest in the common good; their concern is solely with their own gratification.   They do not, as a group, contribute to society; they are, as a group, a drag on society. So I ask again: why should they be allowed to vote? And how many of them would even want to vote if they weren't given incentives by leftist activists?

I concede the following. Some 'felons' have been wrongly convicted. Some felonies should be misdemeanors.  There are different classes of felonies.  Some felons reform themselves and become productive members of society. But none of these concessions affects the main point, namely, that  it is foolish and irresponsible to maintain  that felons as a group should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.

2) Sanders:

. . . the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period. As American citizens all of us are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

By this logic, felons have the right to keep and bear arms even while incarcerated. After all, Second Amendment rights are "enshrined in our Bill of Rights."  And they are "inalienable and universal." But of course, there are excellent reasons to deny felons the right to buy and own guns, and in particular the 'right' to pack heat while in prison!  You would have to be insane to to think that an armed robber's right, qua citizen, to keep and bear arms is in no way affected by his history of armed robbery.  Rights can be lost, limited, and forfeited. Rights cannot be coherently thought of as absolute and unexceptionable.

The right to free speech does not give a person the right to say absolutely anything in any context.  There is no right to freedom of religion if your 'religion' involves human sacrifice. The right to freedom of assembly is limited by property rights.  You have no right to assemble on my property without my permission. There is no right to block public thoroughfares or destroy public property. Individual property rights are limited by legitimate eminent domain considerations. Eminent domain laws have been misused, but that is no argument against them in principle. 

But doesn't capital punishment violate the right to life? Capital punishment does not involve a violation of a citizen's right to life: the murderer or anyone who commits a capital crime forfeits his right to life by committing a capital crime.  If I use deadly force against you in a self-defense situation in which you threaten my life, and in so doing cause your death, I have done something both morally and legally permissible. It follows that I haven't violated your right to life. Rights violations are by definition impermissible.   By your action, you have forfeited your right to life.

Sanders tells us that the right to vote is a "universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older."  But if it were truly universal, then  children should allowed to vote.  Why the restriction to 18 years and older?  Nancy Pelosi recently maintained that the voting age should be lowered to 16 so as to involve young people in politics. But why 16 and not 14?  Think of how many more young people would be involved in politics if the voting age were reduced to 10.  The stupidity of this is obvious  and the motive behind it is transparent.

3) Sanders on voter suppression:

Indeed, our present-day crisis of mass incarceration has become a tool of voter suppression. Today, over 4.5 million Americans — disproportionately people of color — have lost their right to vote because they have served time in jail or prison for a felony conviction.It goes without saying that someone who commits a serious crime must pay his or her debt to society. But punishment for a crime, or keeping dangerous people behind bars, does not cause people to lose their rights to citizenship. It should not cause them to lose their right to vote.

It is true that a person who is justly incarcerated does not cease to be a citizen. But it hardly follows  that he retains every right of a citizen. To underscore the obvious, the prisoner is not free to come and go as he pleases.  He is not immune to searches and seizures. Etc. Limitation and suspension of rights is part of the punishment.

And then we have the obfuscatory leftist talk of 'voter suppression' and 'mass incarceration.'  One does not suppress the vote of illegal aliens; they have no right to vote in the first place.  Similarly, one does not suppress the vote of felons; they have no right to vote.

Sanders apparently thinks that 'people of color' are the victims of voter suppression because they are disproportionately represented among the prison population. The suggestion is that they are incarcerated to keep them from voting. Nonsense. They are disproportionately incarcerated because they are disproportionately involved in criminal behavior. 

The Central Dividing Line in American Politics

The central dividing line, according to Samuel Huntington, is between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.  The former comes in two unpalatable flavors, neo-conservatism and cultural Marxism.

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed by force on  peoples riven by tribal hatreds who do not share our values and are depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment.  Besides, our moral stock is at an all-time low.  Given our decadence and immorality how can we presume to teach Muslims how to live?

The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

Along comes Trump. Whatever you think of the man and his ostentation, self-absorption, slovenly speech, occasional feel-ups of members of the distaff contingent, and all the rest, he is a powerful vehicle of a necessary correction away from both forms of cosmopolitanism/globalism toward a saner view, a nationalist view. And, contrary to leftist slanders, there is nothing white or white supremacist about it.

Donald J. Trump is the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a necessary correction.  Without course correction the cliff is up ahead to be approached either by Donkey Express (Hillary and her ilk) or more slowly but just as surely by Elephant (Jeb! and colleagues). We should be grateful to Trump for having destroyed both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

So how does the Left respond? In their usual vile and thoughtless way by the hurling of such epithets as sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, fascist . . . you know the litany. According to Chris Mathews of MSNBC, Trump's inaugural speech was "Hitlerian."

The alacrity with which these leftist bums reach for the Hitler comparison shows the poverty of their 'thought.' 

What's Wrong with Economic Inequality?

We are naturally unequal with respect to empirical attributes, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. Is this inequality evil? Why should it be?  Is economic inequality as such morally wrong? I have a right to what I have acquired by my honest hard work, deferral of gratification, and practice of the ancient virtues. It is therefore to be expected that I will end up with a higher net worth than that of people who lack my abilities and virtues.  It seems to follow that there is nothing morally wrong with economic inequality as such.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I "mix my labour" (Locke) with the soil and grow tomatoes, I have caused new food to come into existence; I haven't taken from an existing stock of tomatoes with the result that others must get fewer.  If my lazy neighbor demands some of my tomatoes, I will tell him to go to hell; but if he asks me in a nice way, then I will give him some. In this way, he benefits from my labor without doing anything. Some of my tomatoes 'trickle down' to him.  To mix some metaphors, a rising tide lifts all boats. Lefties hate this conservative boilerplate which is why I repeat it. It's true and it works. When was the last time a poor man gave anyone a job? When was the last time a poor man gave anyone a loan?  When was the last time a poor man made a contribution to a charity?  Who pays taxes? 

I deserve what I acquire by the virtuous exercise of my abilities. But do I deserve my abilities? No, but I  have a right to them. I have a right to things I don't deserve. Nature gave me binocular vision but only monaural hearing. Do I deserve my two good eyes? No, but I have a right to them. Therefore, I am under no moral obligation to give one of my eyes to a sightless person. (If memory serves, R. Nozick makes a similar point in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)

At this point someone might object that it is just not fair that some of us are better placed and better endowed than others, and that therefore it is a legitimate function of government to redistribute wealth to offset the resultant economic inequality. But never forget that government is coercive by its very nature and run by people who are intellectually and morally no better, and often worse, than the rest of us. Their power corrupts them and you can be sure they will do all they can to preserve their power, pelf, and privileges all the while professing to be democrats and egalitarians.

The levellers are not on the same level as us, and they are often 'not on the level.' You catch my drift, no doubt.

The equalizers have vastly unequal power compared to us.  So there is a bit of a paradox here, to put it mildly. One would have to be quite the utopian to imagine  that the socialist-communist  Leviathan will "wither away" in the fullness of time, as Lenin and Lennon 'imagined.'

And surely it is the silly liberal who imagines that we are the government or that the government is us. That is mendacity that approximates unto the Orwellian.

The evil of massive, omni-intrusive government is far worse than economic equality is good. Besides, lack of money is rooted in lack of virtue, and government cannot teach people to be virtuous. If Bill Gates' billions were stripped from him and given to the the bums of San Francisco, in ten year's time Gates would be back on top and the bums would be back in the gutters.

Perhaps we can say that economic inequality, though axiologically suboptimal, is nonetheless not morally evil given the way the world actually works with people having the sorts of incentives that they actually have, etc.  There is nothing wrong with economic inequality as long as every citizen has the bare minimum.  But illegal aliens have no right to any government handouts.

Capitalism, Competition, and Cooperation

One reason capitalism is superior to socialism is because competition is good and breeds excellence.  It also fits with human nature.  People are justifiably concerned with their own well-being first of all and will strive mightily to enhance it.  They are much less motivated to work for 'the common good,' especially if what that is is decided by an omni-intrusive state apparatus vastly unequal in power to the people, an apparatus that violates their liberty and removes their incentives to work.

But my main point is that competition is good.

Liberals tend to oppose cooperation to competition, and vice versa, as if they excluded each other. "We need more cooperation and less competition." One frequently hears that from liberals. But competition is a form of cooperation. As such, it cannot be opposed to cooperation. One cannot oppose a species to its genus.

Consider competitive games and sports. The chess player aims to beat his opponent, and he expects his opponent to share this aim: No serious player enjoys beating someone who is not doing his best to   beat him. But the competition is predicated upon cooperation and is impossible without it. There are the rules of the game and the various protocols governing behavior at the board. These are agreed upon and respected by the players and they form the cooperative context in which the competition unfolds. We must work together (co-operate) for one of us to emerge the victor. And in this competitive cooperation both of us are benefited.

Is there any competitive game or sport for which this does not hold? At the Boston Marathon in 1980, a meshuggeneh lady by the name of Rosie Ruiz jumped into the race ahead of the female leaders and before the finish line. She seemed to many to have won the race in the female category.  But she was soon disqualified. She wasn't competing because she wasn't cooperating.  Cooperation is a necessary condition of competition.

In the business world, competition is fierce indeed. But even here it presupposes cooperation. Fed Ex aims to cut into UPS'  business -- but not by assassinating their drivers. If Fed Ex did this, it would be out of business. It would lose favor with the public, and the police and regulatory agencies would be on its case. The refusal to cooperate would make it uncompetitive. 'Cut throat' competition does not pay in the long run and makes the 'cut throat' uncompetitive.

If you and I are competing for the same job, are we cooperating with each other? Yes, in the sense that our behavior is rule-governed. We agree to accept the rules and we work together so that the better of us gets the appointment. The prosecution and the defense, though in opposition to each other, must cooperate if the trial is to proceed. And similarly in other cases.

Competition, then, contrary to liberal dogma, is not opposed to cooperation. Moreover, competition is good in that it breeds excellence, a point unappreciated, or insufficiently appreciated, by liberals. This marvellous technology we bloggers use every day -- how do our liberal friends think it arose? Do they have any idea why it is so inexpensive?  Competition!

Not only does competition make you better than you would have been without it, it humbles you.  It puts you in your place.  It assigns you your rightful position in life's hierarchy.  And life is hierarchical.  The levellers may not like it but hierarchies have a way of reestablishing themselves. 

Money, Power, and Equality: An Egalitarian Paradox

Here, at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical. Excerpt:

If the egalitarian wants to equalize wealth, perhaps via a scheme of income redistribution, then he will need to make use of state power to do it: the wealthy will not voluntarily disembarrass themselves of their wealth. But state power is of necessity concentrated in the hands of a few, those who run the government,  whose power is vastly greater than, and hence unequal to, the power of  the governed.

The paradox, then, is that the enforcing of equality of wealth requires inequality of power. But, as Lucas points out, the powerful are much more dangerous to us than the wealthy. Your being wealthy takes away nothing from me, and indeed stimulates the economy from which I profit, whereas your being powerful poses a threat  to my liberty.

A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt.  Excerpt:

Political existentialism?

Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from Schmitt’s point of view a fact of human psychology. We are naturally hostile not only to strangers, but to others. In this regard, his position is close to Thomas Hobbes. [Walter] Benjamin subverts this idea by adding a perspective of compassion: We may be hostile to strangers, but most of us are also strangers, aliens, immigrants, or refugees. We live in times of global migration, and nation states have lost their importance for the definition of political identity. But Schmitt would counter that any call for an inclusion of the “tradition of the oppressed” never brought us closer to a humanitarian turn in history. Instead, Marxist, anarchist, or liberal progress thinkers have several traits in common: they  dream of a better future, but by doing so they instrumentalize the present.  In reality, they attempt to overcome the political dimension, because for them the struggle for political power is dirty, and fundamentally, they want to abolish political power altogether. But politics with utopian aims often culminates in the creation of a Leviathan – an uncontrollable and powerful sovereign entity that forces us to abandon our humanity in exchange for the membership in a system that tends to become totalitarian.

That's a good insight on the part of Schmitt.  Anarchists and 'progressives' try to "instrumentalize the present," that is, to make of it a means to achieve a utopian state (condition) that will justify the violent and by bourgeois standards immoral means necessary in the present to reach the political eschaton in which the political as such will be aufgehoben. But the quest for 'pie in the future' reliably results in the creation of a totalizing monster state complete with gulag and Vernichtungslager in which our humanity is extinguished.

Carl Schmitt is eerily relevant at the present moment in American politics. And the unlikely Donald J. Trump has unwittingly made political philosophy come alive like never before. Read this:

The sovereign and the state of emergency

In his book “Political Theology” (1922), Schmitt famously declares that the sovereign is he who determines the state of emergency, and thus has the political power to act outside the boundaries of the law in times of crisis. With this definition of the sovereign, Schmitt distinguishes between the rule of the law, and the rule of people. Should we allow society to be ruled only by a system of by laws, which means that the actions of rulers also have to be law-abiding? Or should we accept that we need people to be in control of the system, who can at times override or disable the law in order to deal with an emergency, or with a situation for which the law has no provision? According to Schmitt, the essence of political power is the ability to suspend normal law and assume special powers, just like the ancient dictators did. In his definition, the exception defines the limit, and this boundary constitutes what politics is. The answer to “Who decides the exception?” is the precondition of the law being obligatory and being, in fact, obeyed. Even proto-liberals such as John Locke, admitted that the executive must be permitted the power to suspend the laws if necessary for the good of society. The conflict between executive and legislative branches of the government plays itself out in US constitutional law in the different interpretations of the power of the President, or in cases where the President overrides or evades congressional authority.

I am not suggesting that President Trump, in declaring a national emergency anent the southern border, is operating outside the law. But some whom I respect are claiming just that.  I am simply drawing attention to Schmitt's relevance to the question.

We are living in exciting times, philosophical times!  If I were a young man I would be worried, but I am not, and "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk."

Related: The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

Addendum. Heather MacDonald needs to read Schmitt. Here is how her A Threat to the Constitutional Order ends:

For centuries, Western political theory has struggled with the problem of how to free individuals from the yoke of capricious power. Humanity’s greatest minds conceived of a government constrained by neutral principles. The ground rules in a constitutional polity are set in advance; they cannot be gamed to give one side of a political struggle an unfair and possibly insuperable advantage. The United States does need a wall on its southern border, accompanied by a radical revision of the legal-immigration system to prioritize skills, language, and assimilability. But if we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump’s emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world. The Supreme Court, when the inevitable legal challenges reach it, should strike Trump’s declaration down.

Heather Mac is telling us that the ground rules cannot be gamed to give one side an advantage.  Well, if she means that they ought not be gamed, then she is right. But they are gamed, and so they can be. If SCOTUS is dominated by leftists who think of the Constitution as a 'living document,' then their rulings will constitute serious 'gaming' in the form of legislating from the bench. How is that for a removal of constitutional boundaries between branches of government? Besides, the law has to be enforced to count as law in any serious sense.   If the Congress does not provide the funding necessary for proper enforcement of the immigration laws, then that too is a serious 'gaming' of the system.  If the Left does not respect the rule of law, then why is the chief executive not justified in declaring a national emergency?

It is all very well to speak of "the rule of law not of men," but when Congress refuses to uphold the rule of law then we may have a Schmittian state of exception wherein the chief executive may and perhaps must override the Congress.  I say "may have" because it is not clear to me that Trump's  declaration of a state of emergency is illegal or extralegal.

Is There a Right to Health Care?

Here, at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.