Category: Political Movements & Theories

Natural Law, Positive Law, and Rights

There is a ten-part exchange about natural law vs. positive law at Political Questions, the blog of Steven Hayward. (Links are at the bottom of this post.) The exchange pits Hayward and Linda Denno (a.k.a. Lucretia) against John Yoo. Hayward and Denno defend natural law; Yoo defends positive law. The exchange is entertaining but thus far disappointing — to this lay person, at least.

To overcome my disappointment, I am offering my own version of the controversy. It is more straightforward and conclusive than the rather meandering (albeit enjoyable) repartee offered up by Hayward, Denno, and Yoo.

A law, in the realm of human endeavor, is a rule that arises from one or more sources:

  • It may be “ingrained” in human nature, either divinely or through natural processes. Such a rule would be universal and self-enforcing if all human beings were “wired” identically. But they are not. (Think of two squabbling siblings with different conceptions of fairness.)
  • It may a cultural norm, where culture includes religious belief. Here, it becomes obvious that universality is unattainable. (Think of Muslims and Jews.)
  • It may established and enforced by a powerful entity (e.g., a parent, the state). In this instance, it may mimic a norm that is either “ingrained” or cultural in origin (e.g., the prohibition of murder).

The first two points address “natural” law, which has an uncertain provenance. The third point addresses positive law. It is evident that “natural” law cannot be universal or self-enforcing. But even if it were universal (self-enforcement is patently impossible), most of mankind doesn’t agree as to its tenets. Positive law is therefore essential to the functioning of most human groupings, from nations to families.

Having disposed of the main issue, I will venture into the question of rights, which are implicit in law. For example, if there is a law (“natural” or positive) against the murder of blameless persons, all blameless persons must have the right not to be murdered.

Does a right inhere in a person, or is a right an obligation on the part of all persons? In the case of positive law, the answer is obvious: The right not to be murdered is a legal construction that imposes an obligation on all persons.

Regarding “natural” law, I argue at length here that rights do not inhere in persons — at least not through the operation of reproductive processes.

What about through the operation of cultural processes? Culture is an artifact of the inculcation of beliefs and behavior, adherence to which signifies cultural kinship. The belief that something is a right is a cultural artifact grounded in human nature. Thus the commonality of certain rights (e.g., the last six of the Ten Commandments) across many or most cultures.

I put it to you that the (almost) universal desire to live a life in which one is not a victim of murder, theft, etc., is the basis of rights. But what such rights signify are only desires that no law — “natural” or positive — can guarantee.

That observation is consistent with the accumulation of rights (in the West) over the past century-and-a-half. Until the rise of “progressivism” — with its ever-expanding list of rights intended for the attainment of “racial justice”, “social justice”, “equity” and the like — rights were negative in the main. Negative rights require (and even demand) no action on the part of others (e.g., abstention from murder and theft). “Progressivism” gave birth to a panoply of positive rights, through which government usurps private charity (the receipt of which is not a right) and imposes costs on the general public for the benefit of selected recipients. The worthiness of those recipients is determined by arbitrary measures, including (but far from limited to) skin color, record of criminality, lack of intelligence or aptitude for a job, and illegal residence in the United States.

It is true that a person cannot live without food, clothing, shelter, or the effective functioning of myriad biological processes. That fact, like the inevitability death (but not taxes) is a truly natural law. But that law belies to the existence of “natural” rights. If there is no right to live forever, there is no right to anything that enables living at all.

In a post that is now eight years old, I quote the late Jazz Shaw, who penned this:

If we wish to define the “rights” of man in this world, they are – in only the most general sense – the rights which groups of us agree to and work constantly to enforce as a society. And even that is weak tea in terms of definitions because it is so easy for those “rights” to be thwarted by malefactors. To get to the true definition of rights, I drill down even further. Your rights are precisely what you can seize and hold for yourself by strength of arm or force of wit. Anything beyond that is a desirable goal, but most certainly not a right and it is obviously not permanent. [“On the Truth of Man’s Rights under Natural Law“, Hot Air, March 29, 2015]

Amen.

Here are the links, in chronological order:

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/thomas-jefferson-versus-jeremy-bentham

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/is-natural-law-jurisprudence-just

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/the-natural-law-vs-positivism-debate

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/the-natural-law-vs-positivism-debate-174

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/the-natural-law-vs-positivism-debate-37f

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/natural-law-vs-positivism-debate

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/natural-law-vs-positivism-chapter

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/natural-law-vs-positivism-chapter-cb7

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/natural-law-vs-positivism-chapter-335

https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/natural-law-vs-positivism-chapter-3f5

“Our Democracy” and Its Enemies

“Our democracy” is the rule of the many by the few who assume that they know what is best. Not best for the many, necessarily, but best for those parties (themselves included) whose well-being they put above the well-being of others. The “best” is often anchored in — or justified by — “the science”, which is a cherry-picked set of beliefs to which the few can point as “proof” of the rightness of the edicts imposed on they many.

About half of the many agree with the few. Their reasoning (usually implicit) goes like this:

  1. America is a democracy.
  2. The majority should rule in a democracy (except when I am in the minority).
  3. Democratically elected leaders (and their minions) are therefore entitled to rule (as long as I am in the majority).
  4. I trust them to do what is right because they follow “the science”. And they care about “the people” because they are especially solicitous of “oppressed” groups.
  5. Anyone who opposes democratically elected leaders (and their minions) is therefore an enemy of “our democracy”.
  6. Opponents of “our democracy” are “fascists” and “Nazis”.

Sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. Such reasoning isn’t monopolized by adherents of the party and policies that were (barely) voted down in November. (NB: The party’s policies are nowhere near death, thanks to Democrat office-holders and their minions, “news” outlets, etc.)

But similarity of reasoning doesn’t mean similarity of beliefs. There are significant substantive differences between the proponents and opponents of “our democracy”. I won’t bother to detail those differences. If you’ve been paying an attention to “news” and real news over the past two decades, you know what they are. You also know that the differences aren’t just differences of opinion; they are differences of fact.

The real — and strongest — enemies of “our democracy” are the facts and the real science that yields them.

Libertarianism Updated

The subject of updating libertarianism was introduced by Randy Barnett at Law & Liberty (“Libertarianism Updated“). Barnett’s piece was followed by Ilya Somin’s alternative view at The Dispatch (“Libertarianism Needs Careful Tweaks, Not Wholesale Updates“). Then came Timothy Sandefur’s piece, “Libertarianism Doesn’t Need an Update“, which is adamantly against updates (and possibly against tweaks).

I won’t try to reconcile the three writers’ views or explain how they differ. I will focus on a particular aspect of Sandefur’s offering. Among his various defenses of libertarianism as it is, he says this:

[L]bertarianism is skeptical, even pessimistic, about human capacities—especially those of the humans who wield government power, and are as fallible as the rest of us, if not more so. Precisely because libertarianism does not make idealized assumptions about people’s behavior—and holds that utopia is impossible—it concludes that the least bad alternative is to leave people free to make their own choices (subject to legal accountability if they harm others). After all, they have a stronger incentive to avoid bad decisions in their own lives than any outsider could possibly have.

Before I “unpack” this paragraph, I should note that Sandefur’s article doesn’t offer a way to attain a libertarian (or more-libertarian) polity. Not that it matters; the prospect of a polity in which citizens were left to make their own choices is probably frightening to most people. I suspect that such a polity is mainly attractive to intelligent, articulate, self-confident, introverts who are like-minded (or believe themselves to be like-minded) about the rules of the game — you will be left alone as long as you don’t do harm to me — and (most important) about what constitutes harm. Whether they would be self-reliant enough to thrive in such a regime is another matter.

(“Leave me alone” libertarianism was closest to attainment in days long gone by when Americans thought more or less alike about morality and punishments for transgressions of it, and when governments in the United States had yet to regulate the minutiae of economic and social intercourse. Now, libertarianism is a mainly a watchword for the types described above and petulant “rebels” against rules that inconvenience them, such as retirement-community rules about keeping one’s garage door closed and promptly retrieving one’s emptied trash bin from the curb.)

The passage before the preceding parenthetical leads to the question of what happens if a harm is committed. Thus enters the absurd notion private-enforcement agencies (a.k.a. competing gangs) or the more appealing notion of the night-watchman state. The latter isn’t strictly libertarian (as a anarcho-capitalist purist would define it) but is considered by many to be the direction in which libertarianism points, in the context of the typical Western polity: a deeply ingrained regulatory-welfare state with a constituency that comprises most of the populace.

The night-watchman state would enforce the rules against harm, assuming — ridiculously at this point in America’s social history — that America’s “leaders” acquiesce to the wishes of an unshakeable majority of the populace regarding the list of harms. And the night-watchman state and would enforce those rules both within the polity and against outside entities who inflict harm — or are undoubtedly preparing to inflict harm — upon members of the polity’s populace. (NB: The preemptive actions implied in the preceding sentence would also require the support of an unshakeable majority of Americans and the acquiescence of “leaders” to that majority.)

Now, let’s consider the previously quoted paragraph from Sandefur’s article as a justification for making a transition from a regulatory-welfare state to a night-watchman state, beginning with this:

[L]bertarianism is skeptical, even pessimistic, about human capacities—especially those of the humans who wield government power, and are as fallible as the rest of us, if not more so.

I am skeptical of the capacities (and true intentions) of most human beings, in that they are (saints excepted) mostly convinced that things should be organized to suit their individual preferences. Not the least of those preferences is the urge to acquire greater income and wealth with little or no effort.

It follows that, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, most human beings will seek to empower politicians who promise to arrange things in preferred ways and to enrich preferred persons (without acknowledging, of course, that the cost of said enrichment will be borne by non-preferred persons). Those politicians, in turn, will erect bureaucracies devoted to the aforementioned ends — bureaucracies that will continue to churn out edicts that foster the same ends almost regardless of which set of politicians is currently in power. The bureaucrats thereby satisfy their power lusts, and the politicians do the same, as well as gaining opportunities for personal enrichment without (necessarily) committing patently criminal acts.

Given that political contests in the United States usually involve a choice between two candidates with the same motivations toward power (if not enrichment), choosing the least bad alternative becomes a matter of voters’ preferences regarding the policies that competing candidates espouse or represent. And, except in the case of the presidency of the United States, the winner is the candidate who gets the most votes, usually by a combination of voters’ ignorance and inertia couple with the promise of delivering policies favored by a majority. Those policies will include ways to empower and enrich various segments of the populace (at the expense of other segments). Thus the course of American politics and governance has been toward the engrossment of government, its share of the economy, and its command of economic and social transactions from the founding of the Republic. You can look it up.

So much for that. Now for the second sentence of the quoted paragraph:

Precisely because libertarianism does not make idealized assumptions about people’s behavior—and holds that utopia is impossible—it concludes that the least bad alternative is to leave people free to make their own choices (subject to legal accountability if they harm others).

Because true libertarians (as opposed to faux rebels) are as scarce as hens’ teeth (for the reasons adduced above), the least bad alternative lacks enough allure to fuel an electoral revolution. Witness the general state of fear and loathing that accompanies the merest possibility that the federal government might shut down, or the actuality that it does shut down (albeit with many loopholes) for even a few days.

Which brings us to the final sentence of the quoted paragraph:

After all, [people] have a stronger incentive to avoid bad decisions in their own lives than any outsider could possibly have.

Those candidates who campaign on a platform of reducing the size, power, and cost of government are at a great disadvantage because most Americans — as citizens of the United States, the several States, and myriad political subdivisions of the States — are wedded to and dependent upon government-bestowed (and tax- or debt-funded) benefits that they would be loath to forgo. What most of them want is to eat their cake (enjoy government-bestowed benefits) and have it too (reduce the size, power, and cost of government).

In that respect, Republicans have proven to be Democrats who wait a while before accepting the enlargements of government power, size, and cost introduced (usually) by Democrats. (It’s worth noting here that the Nixon-Ford administrations ramped up regulation to a new level; the Reagan-G.W. Bush administrations did nothing to change that and Bush added the Americans with Disabilities Act, which among many things, has resulted in a plethora of unused parking spaces across the land; G.W. Bush contributed Medicare coverage of drug costs, just in time for retiring Boomers and those who will follow them.)

If Trump is reelected that best that can be hoped for is a slowing of the growth in the number of federal regulations and perhaps a return to energy self-sufficiency. That’s not chopped liver; Americans will be better off than they would be under a Harris regimes. But the abolition of one or more cabinet departments and “independent” agencies is a pipe dream. Perhaps the “deep state” will be weeded out, but weeds are notoriously prone to come back, as they will under the next Democrat administration,  unless there’s a great awakening. Don’t count on it.

“Pipe dream” is best thing I can say about libertarianism. Although theorizing about it seems to be an enjoyable pastime for a goodly number of “public intellectuals”. I would say that it keeps them off the streets but effeteness isn’t a scary trait.

“Two Kinds of Leftism?” A Footnote

I ended “Two Kinds of Leftism?” with this:

The existing order in America has to be overthrown again and again to keep it from becoming what America has become and is becoming. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” got it right.

Americans have been insufficiently vigilant and far too ready to go along with schemes that aggrandize government power. They have ignored, to their own detriment, the inescapable fact that there is only one kind of leftism: the leftism of government control. That is a thing entirely different from the night-watchman government which protects Americans from each other and from foreign enemies — though even that government must be carefully and constantly circumscribed.

Today, I opened Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. It ends on a similar note:

As far back as 1934, The New York Times [yes, The New York Times] trumpeted NEW DEAL PATERNALISM IMPERILS ALL INDIVIDUALISM. The article describes a speech by Massachusetts governor Joseph Ely at a conference of America’s governors. “There is no stopping short of the end of the road,” Ely said, “and at the end of the road we shall have a socialistic state.” Invoking Stalin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany—all newly minted dictators—Ely pointed out that where these despots ruled, “individualism had passed from the people to dictators making the people the ‘children of government.’”

Echoes of de Tocqueville. One century earlier, the French visionary described the infantilizing effect of a paternalistic despotism in America. Imagining the “immense, protective power” of a state with “absolute” power, and likening such power to “parental authority,” which keeps citizens in “perpetual childhood,” he wondered, “Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?” It would seem that the mortal blow against the “grown-up”—the free citizen—was struck, softly, once liberty was no longer paramount in this country, once ideology began to take precedence over facts, once we traded in the American ideal of “rugged individualism” for the material markers of “the American dream.” If once upon a time Americans subscribed to our Founders’ belief that our Creator endowed us with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there came a time when we expected a package of perks—car, house, Play Station—to sweeten the deal. Suddenly, those perks became darn near an entitlement, an attitude entirely befitting the subjects in Tocqueville’s absolute state. In fact, measured in material goods as it is, the contemporary “American dream” is a vision driven by the Marxist belief in the primacy of the economic….

No wonder Norman Thomas was tickled by the direction of the country in the Eisenhower years. By 1958, he was beside himself. “The United States is making greater strides toward socialism under Eisenhower than even under Roosevelt,” he enthused. By 1962, the man who had run for president on the Socialist ticket six times had concluded that “the difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted the ideas of socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly.”41 Just not by name. As Upton Sinclair put it in a 1951 letter to Thomas, “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.”

We take the Big Lie instead. Euphemism. Official vocabulary. Language of ideology. The “PC” pact with the devil. The Big Lie as big con. The narrative of authority. How to stand athwart false history and yell “Stop!”? The answer finally seems clear. If once it was vitally important to shore up America’s bastions, something else is called for now. What’s needed is a full-scale assault on those bastions of unreality, those safe houses of secrets, all in a painful but restorative effort to upend the narratives of authority, to break open the conspiracies of silence, which have endured through too many lifetimes. Put another way, it’s time to avenge the victims and the truth tellers, the voiceless and the voices of one. It’s time to avenge the American betrayal of Liberty herself.

I have elsewhere drawn heavily on West’s book. My post and her book are well worth your time.

Two Kinds of Leftism?

Are there two kinds of leftism? I was prompted to ask that question by a colloquy between Megyn Kelly and Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek and author of Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. (The betrayal is common knowledge and the fodder of many a web post; for example, “Democrats See Ordinary Americans as the Great Unwashed” and “You and America’s Unaccountable Class“.)

Leftism in the United States was for many decades a movement aimed mainly at the redistribution of income from the have-lots to the have-littles. That kind of leftism was central to New Deal legislation in the 1930s, especially the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, the latter of which guaranteed the right of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as striking.

Later legislation, most notably the Taft-Hartley Act, diluted the Wagner Act somewhat. But the Social Security Act has been augmented by increasingly generous old-age benefits, the addition of Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and the addition of prescription-drug coverage to Medicare. There is also funding of and subsidization of housing — at all levels of government — which has expanded to encompass homeless persons and, most recently, illegal immigrants.

Today’s leftism — which synchronizes with the Democrat Party — certainly contains elements of what is now called “redistributive justice”, but it is far more than that. It encompasses actions that leftists of old (or most of them) wouldn’t have contemplated:

Flood the country with illegal immigrants with the aim of converting them to voters who will ensure a permanent Democrat majority.

In the name of “critical race theory” (CRT) and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), raise up “persons of color”, sexual deviants, violent criminals, and (generally) those who are less intelligent, capable, or diligent by rewarding them for being what they are, and by doing it at the expense of persons who are white, East Asian, heterosexual, law-abiding intelligent, capable, and diligent. (The negative aspect of raising up favored groups isn’t openly admitted, of course, because to do so would expose its corruptness. Members of non-favored groups who support raising up are either ignorant of the consequences, tormented by misplaced guilt for being what they are, or wealthy and secure enough to avoid the consequences.)

Increase the power of government for the sake of enforcing policies that the purveyors believe to be for the general good, whether or not they are scientifically sound or economically beneficial.

Use government power — in collusion with corporate and media power — to decree that certain policies are beyond debate, and to harass, suppress, and even criminalize those who dare to “deny” (i.e., question) the official “truth”. (This is straight out of the Hitler-Stalin-Mao playbook.) To date, the subjects that government and its cronies have or are striving to enforce include (but are far from limited to):

    • massive redistribution of income, directly and in kind, with the consequence of significantly lower economic growth;
    • discouragement of the more intelligent, more capable, and more diligent members of the populace, with the same consequence;
    • promulgation and enforcement of policies that reduce the well-being of most Americans — most notably the anti-scientific doctrine of human-induced climate change, and the futile and vastly counterproductive response to Covid-19;
    • deliberate (and sometimes incidental) undermining of beneficial social norms, including but not limited to marriage, religion, sanctity of life, and dignity of work; and
    • anti-Americanism and pusillanimous behavior toward enemy regimes, beginning with the Korean War and continuing through today’s behavior toward China, Iran, and Iran’s proxies — coupled with heedless, needless, and costly provocation of Russia (the Eurasia of the saga) — and accompanied by the willful (relative and absolute) weakening of America’s military might.

If this all reads like something out of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Theory and Practice of Oligarchichal Collectivism — the fictional book that plays a central role in the novel — you can chalk it up to Orwell’s keen but fallible understanding of human nature.

I say fallible because, even though Orwell was a leftist of the old-fashioned kind, he seemed to believe that some kind of economic leveling could be managed without harm to liberty or prosperity. He, like other old-fashioned leftists, could not (or chose not to) see that economic leveling means greater and greater government control of greater and greater swaths of the economy.

Further — and this is the crucial part — liberty cannot survive economic interventions by government. Friedrich A. Hayek put it this way in part 16 of Liberalism :

There is, however, yet another reason why freedom of action, especially in the economic field that is so often represented as being of minor importance, is in fact as important as the freedom of the mind. If it is the mind which chooses the ends of human action, their realization depends on the availability of the required means, and any economic control which gives power over the means also gives power over the ends. There can be no freedom of the press if the instruments of printing are under the control of government, no freedom of assembly if the needed rooms are so controlled, no freedom of movement if the means of transport are a government monopoly, etc. This is the reason why governmental direction of all economic activity, often undertaken in the vain hope of providing more ample means for all purposes, has invariably brought severe restrictions of the ends which the individuals can pursue. It is probably the most significant lesson of the political developments of the twentieth century that control of the material part of life has given government, in what we have learnt to call totalitarian systems, far‑reaching powers over the intellectual life. It is the multiplicity of different and independent agencies prepared to supply the means which enables us to choose the ends which we will pursue.

The accretion of power by government in order to attain economic ends necessarily involves the use of that power to ensure that the populace is aligned with those ends, and with the resulting restrictions on liberty. Power-lust breeds power and more power-lust. The only way to put a stop to it is to overthrow the existing order and strive to prevent its resurrection.

In Madison’s words:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. [The Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788]

But men are not angels — not even those who profess goodness. Look at history. Look around you. Look into your soul.

The existing order in America has to be overthrown again and again to keep it from becoming what America has become and is becoming. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” got it right.

Americans have been insufficiently vigilant and far too ready to go along with schemes that aggrandize government power. They have ignored, to their own detriment, the inescapable fact that there is only one kind of leftism: the leftism of government control. That is a thing entirely different from the night-watchman government which protects Americans from each other and from foreign enemies — though even that government must be carefully and constantly circumscribed.

See also “Election 2024: The Bottom Line” and “What Happened to America?“.

Second Thoughts

I read here that Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, and eminent economist at Princeton University, has changed his mind about a few hot topics. One of them is globalization:

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

Another is immigration:

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

I hope that Professor Deaton’s example will be emulated by many more academics. Not just with respect to the issues that he addresses in his essay but also with respect to the many other issues where academics — and so-called intellectuals — have abetted dangerous and/or costly errors (to which I will come).

There was a time when it was considered sound thinking to gather evidence — facts, not opinions or talking points — and to base judgments and policy recommendations on the evidence. That time is past, though not irretrievably. Professor Deaton’s epiphanies are proof of the possibility that science, in all its forms, might once again become evidence-based. That’s not to say that there is never room for disagreements. There always is. But science, properly done, advances because of disagreement. It stagnates and regresses when dogma replaces debate.

But that is what has happened in so many fields of inquiry. Science, in too many fields, has become captive to “scientists” who put their preconceptions ahead of the evidence and who howl for the heads of heretics. It is dispiriting to know how many so-called scientists have become willing and eager handmaidens of wokeness. (Prostitution takes many forms.)

Thus the dangerous and/or costly errors, of which these are leading examples:

  • The “war” on “climate change” is making Americans and Europeans generally poorer and less comfortable.
  • The unnecessarily draconian response to Covid-19 made billions of people poorer, less well educated, and uncomfortable in their daily lives. It also had a lot to do with the rampant inflation of recent years, which will never be rolled back.
  • The LGBTQ/non-binary craze is causing parents and young adults to do things to their children and themselves that will cause them much misery for years to come, if not forever.
  • The anti-racism craze has been endorsed by “scientists” and “scientific organization” (as well as elites, pundits, and politicians). The main result is that “persons of color” get “bonus points” which enable them to commit crimes with impunity; acquire jobs for which they aren’t qualified, and gain entrance to colleges and graduate schools despite their lower intelligence than whites and Asians with whom they are competing. The cost in social comity and inferior products and services (e.g., surgery) may be subtle, but it is real and long-lasting. And it will get worse as long as wokeness prevails in high places.

Needless to say, the politicians and wealthy elites who favor such things are well insulated from the dire effects. Among the wealthy elites are tens of thousands of academics at top-tier and even second-rate universities who rake in money and dispense lunacy.

Smugness Rampant

Definition of smug:

adjective

  1. Exhibiting or feeling great or offensive satisfaction with oneself or with one’s situation; self-righteously complacent.
    “a smug look; a smug critic.”
  2. [irrelevant]
  3. Irritatingly pleased with oneself; self-satisfied.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
Classic example of smugness (from the Voltaire’s Candide):
Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses.

“It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings—and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles—therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Pigs were made to be eaten—therefore we eat pork all the year round. Consequently they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said all is for the best.”

Today’s smugees (my coinage) evidently want this world (or the Western part of it, at least) to be all for the best. To that end, they (and their predecessors) have been busy for decades (more than a century, actually) laying the groundwork for the new dispensation that is rapidly overtaking (and supplanting) the traditional liberties and social norms that are obstacles to their vision of nirvana.
What is that vision and what are its dire consequences? Rather than repeat myself, I urge you to read “What Happened to America?“.

The Mainstream

When I hear the complaint that conservatives are “out of the mainstream,” this is what I visualize:

THE MAINSTREAM THEN


THE MAINSTREAM NOW

The mainstream has shifted considerably to the left in the past 90 years. Being in the mainstream of current political thought is no virtue; being out of the mainstream of current political thought is no vice.

Political Conservatism Is Centrist

I have described the spectrum of political ideologies as a circle. But as I rethink my analysis, I conclude that the spectrum should be thought of a straight line. At the left is statism (which is really leftist even when it is said to be rightist), conservatism is in the middle, and pure libertarianism (anarchy) is at the right.

Statism is statism: The ruler or ruling class decides how you should live and ensures, through physical and psychological coercion that you live as you are told to live.

Anarchy is the opposite of statism: No one is in charge of everyone. Whether anarchy is good or bad depends on the morals of the potentially most powerful persons or coalitions.

Conservatism is therefore centrist because it recognizes the need for a state of defined and limited power — just enough power to enforce a benign morality.

The Meaning of “Liberalism” is Beside the Point

Cass Sunstein attempts to define and justify liberalism in “Why I Am a Liberal” (The New York Times, November 20, 2023). Sunstein makes 34 claims about liberalism, most of them complicated and nuanced. The result can be described (charitably) as a dog’s breakfast. Take the first sentence of Sunstein’s first claim:

1. Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy.

What’s not to like? Well, those six things sound nice, but not when some hard questions are asked about them.

Is freedom unbounded? If not, how and by whom are the bounds to be determined? By bureaucrats whom democratically elected officials have empowered to dictate the minutiae of the citizenry’s existence, including but far from limited to the kinds of products and services they may buy and how those products and services may be made?

If freedom is unbounded, do human rights include the right to kill other persons randomly, including unborn persons? If freedom is bounded, do human rights include the right (for example) to take the income and wealth of some persons and give it to others? Who makes and enforces the rules that allow that to happen? Are they democratically elected officials and their bureaucratic surrogates who make laws for the benefit of their favored constituencies or in the service of an illiberal ideology that looks askance at wealth and property ownership?

Does pluralism contemplate the right of persons to invade another country, commit crimes against the inhabitants of that country, burden the taxpayers of that country by accepting, for example, “free” housing and education, and eventually to be proclaimed citizens of that country in order to perpetuate that kind of pluralism and its consequences (see the preceding and following paragraphs).

Does security include the right to retain the fruits of one’s labor and capital, or are such decisions made to democratically elected officials (and designated bureaucrats) who favor certain constituencies and ideologies? Does security include the right to be safe in one’s own home or while peacefully going about one’s own business when pluralism leads to an influx of criminal non-citizens and to the freeing of dangerous felons because they are considered “victims” of a system that (oddly enough) strives to punish wrongdoing.

My questions suggest that democracy and the rule of law aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The value of democracy and the rule of law depend very much on who is making and enforcing the laws, and for whose benefit they are making and enforcing those laws.

What matters isn’t whether a people seeks freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. What matters is whether a people can cohere in voluntary, peaceful, and mutually beneficial coexistence.

Freedom and all of those other nice-sounding things are meaningless shibboleths absent a common culture grounded in traditional morality and shared by a people bound in genetic kinship.

Related posts:

Social Norms and Liberty

On Liberty

Facets of Liberty

Burkean Libertarianism

Genetic Kinship and Society

The Poison of Ideology

How the Constitution Was Lost

Liberty vs. Security

An esteemed correspondent makes some good points in the following message (which I have edited lightly):

Our country is in more dire straits than it has been at any time in my lifetime [he is 85]. Maybe not as bad as when a Vice-President shot and killed a former Secretary of the Treasury or when there was an armed insurrection and each faction tried to take the other’s seat-of-government by force. I think our current divisions and divisiveness are detrimental to the continuation of the “greatest nation the world has ever known”; and I don’t think they can be fixed.

Liberty and security pull in opposite directions. More of one, less of the other. History and common-sense tells us that is so.

I’d like to start with Benjamin Franklin’s saying that is often misinterpreted. He said that our form of government is a republic, if you can keep it. That has been misinterpreted, repeatedly and emphatically by the current speaker-of-the-house to mean that Franklin was warning against a strong executive emulating a monarch. I think he was warning against the opposite, which he had witnessed in France. He also was fearful of our becoming a pure democracy with a people’s parliament becoming a law unto itself. This is similar to the tradeoffs between liberty and security. Either extreme is undesirable.

The geniuses who designed our government provided a number of checks and balances to try to keep things sort of in the middle. We are a federated democratic republic, not a democracy as is so often misstated. The Framers of the Constitution designed a government, but they neglected to explain the relationship of the government to those that were being governed. It took the first ten amendments to the Constitution to make that explicit. Those ten amendments delineate the limits that the federal government has over individuals. The 14th amendment essentially extends that to state governments. I especially like the tenth amendment. It is simply worded and says in plain English, any rights and authorities not specifically given to the federal government in this document belong to the people and/or the states.

Two constitutional issues were settled by the Civil War: slavery was no longer legal anywhere; and secondly, it was not permissible for states to secede from the union. It took later amendments to confirm that Blacks were not property; they are human beings with all rights of other human beings. Unfortunately that didn’t sit well with many Americans and we are still trying to sort out that issue in practice.

I don’t think that our current problems can be solved by appealing to the consent of the governed to be governed, namely by voting. Nor do I think secession (breakup) is feasible.

Voting: A significant fraction of those that voted in the November 2020 election think the the “results” are not honest. You can dismiss that view, but it is necessary to have a buy-in to the results of an election to have an election that conveys the consent of the governed. To me it is beside the point whether there is any evidence of “stealing an election” or not. There were enough irregularities that a demagogue can and did stir up doubts. Elections need to appear incorruptible, and today they are not. Could that be fixed? Not in our polarized society.

Furthermore, and this is more important, there isn’t balanced news coverage leading up to our elections or in analyzing the results. When there is overwhelming bias in the media, or there is no fair representation of both sides of the coin, we don’t have an environment for fair elections. Today one political party and the media are indistinguishable. The “media” is totally biased and deceitful in reporting “facts”. Remember Hamilton and Jefferson, who were arch political enemies. Each funded media that parroted his version of “truth”. But there were two sides. Add to the mix today’s “social media”, controlled by those favoring security over liberty. So the voices of liberty over security are relegated to fringe “nuts”. [The last bit is a gross error on the writer’s part, unless the millions who take my position on the matter are all on the fringe.]

Maybe even more importantly and indicative of a long-term fundamental change in America is the influence of “educators”. Uniformly, from those teaching young minds to the teachers of those teachers, in the formulators of “correct” history they favor security at the expense of liberty and are militant about spreading the “gospel”. They are children of the 1970s. Many grew up at a college their parents paid for and they didn’t have to work when they got out of college. They didn’t have any useful skills and of course the remedy for that is the old saying, “Those who can’t do, teach”.

So I don’t think there is any chance of “voting” to obtain the consent of the governed for their government is achievable. The influences wielded by the media and the educational system can’t be alleviated. There is only one perspective instead of a balance between liberty and security. I have avoided using the words liberal or conservative, or republican or democrat. I think that liberty and security are the two concepts that should be discussed more often as the heart of the country’s differences.

Secession: The possibility of secession, peaceful of not, was foreclosed by the Civil War. Since then the entanglements between the federal entity, the state entities, and the states themselves rule out out any practical solution those bindings.

Bottom Line: We’ll muck around for quite some time until it is realized that our system with all its faults is better than any feasible alternative. If and when it happens, I’ll be long gone.

I responded at length, in two epistles. Here’s the first one:

Your analysis of the present situation in the U.S. is spot-on. And, as you say, it’s not going to get any better on its own. There really are two Americas and they are irreconcilable. There are a lot of Americans — me included — who will not stand for “mucking around” that legitimates the present state of affairs or its ultimate destination: an imperial central government that is beholden to and effectively run by ultra-rich oligarchs and their lackeys and enablers in the bureaucracies, public schools, universities, information-technology companies, and media.

As for secession, the Civil War settled nothing — Justice Scalia to the contrary notwithstanding — except to underscore the fact that the North was able to muster superior forces thanks to its larger (free) population and industrial strength. If you have the time, read my analysis of the Court’s infamous ruling in Texas v. White, on which Scalia founded his baseless dictum: https://politicsandprosperity.com/constitution-myths-and-realities/. Scroll down to Section VI.F. for the bottom line about the legality of secession.

I also discuss in another section the practicality of secession or, rather, its impracticality. But there is another way to skin the cat. It is the nullification of federal edicts by the States. I refer to a new kind of nullification, which — unlike the kind attempted by South Carolina in the early 1830s — doesn’t involve formal declarations by State legislatures and governors. Rather, it involves non-compliance, acts of defiance, and foot-dragging. We saw some of that during Trump’s years, as States and cities declared themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants and refused to cooperate with ICE. We are beginning to see it from the other side as GOP-controlled States bring suit after suit against various federal actions (e.g., Keystone pipeline, Biden’s immigration fiasco), and GOP-controlled cities and counties declare themselves pro-life and gun-rights “sanctuaries”. This could be the wave of the future, with effective diminution of the central government through non-compliance with federal edicts. Federal courts have no power to enforce the edicts, and must rely on the federal government for enforcement. How many brushfires can the federal government put out? Would it resort to force against a state? I don’t know the answers, but it’s not clear that the federal government will come out on top, especially if it tries to enforce things that are wildly unpopular in some States and regions, such as abortion, strict gun-control measures, vaccine passports, or (the coming big thing) climate lockdowns.

So, unlike the earlier secession and its violent conclusion, there could be a non-violent kind of secession. It wouldn’t involve the formal breakup of the U.S., just a new modus vivendi between the States and the central government. Or, rather, a return to the modus vivendi that was intended by the Framers, enshrined in the 10th amendment, and then frittered away by the central government’s “mission creep”.

There is another, complementary, possibility. It is that Americans in the center turn their backs on the radical direction the country seems to be taking. (Resistance to CRT is a good case in point.) If enough of them do it, the GOP will retake Congress. And if in 2024 the GOP were to nominate someone more like Reagan than Trump, the Democrats could be kept out of power for a while — at least until they come to their senses. In the meantime, the Supreme Court could, without fear of being packed, make some libertarian rulings. A key one would be to find that Big Tech is s state actor (because of its immunity under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), and therefore acts illegally when it censors views on the pretext that they are “hate speech” or “anti-science”, etc. In the way of the world, such an electoral and judicial turn of events could trigger a “cascade” in the direction opposite the one in which the country has been heading. And so, the “mucking around” might come to a better end than the one foreseen by you.

Here’s the second one:

A further thought about the tension between liberty and security.

It is really a tension between left and right, which is a deep psychological divide, as I discuss here: https://politicsandprosperity.com/2018/05/03/can-left-and-right-be-reconciled/. (The missing figure, which I will have to reconstruct, is derived from polling results that support the point made in the text.)

A point that I don’t make explicitly, but which should be obvious, is that compromise invites further compromise, to the detriment of liberty. The ransomware attacks, for instance, wouldn’t be happening if the U.S. hadn’t long ago abandoned the principle of unconditional surrender by the enemy. The track record of the U.S. government since the Korean War invites aggression. China and Russia know that and are playing the long game while Biden is tilting at global-warming windmills and (overtly and tacitly) endorsing a leftist agenda that will drive the U.S. economy to its knees while ensuring that the U.S. remains irreconcilably divided.

The end result of “mucking around” may well be not the kind of “social democracy” that keeps Eurpeoans fat, dumb, and happy. It may well be something far worse than that. You have been warned.

And I have been among the warning voices for many years.

Related reading on polarization: John Sexton, “The CRT Backlash and Progressives’ Big Lie about the Culture War“, Hot Air, July 8, 2021

The Poison of Ideology

Ideology, which drives political and social discourse these days, is

a set of doctrines or beliefs … shared by the members of a social group or that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

Get that? An ideology comprises doctrines or beliefs, not hard-won knowledge or social and economic norms that have been tested in the acid of use. An ideology leads its believers down the primrose path of a “system” — a way of viewing and organizing the world that flows from a priori reasoning.

An ideology, because of its basis in doctrines or beliefs, puts something at its center — a kind of golden calf that is the ideology’s raison d’être. The something may be the dominance of an Aryan Third Reich; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the destruction of infidels; big government as the solution to social and economic ills; free markets at all costs regardless of the immorality that they may spawn; “social democracy” in which all matters of social and economic importance are to be decided by a majority of the elected representatives of an electorate that has been enfranchised for the purpose of arriving at the “right” decisions; stateless societies that (contrary to human nature) would be livable because disputes would be settled through contractual arrangements and private defense agencies; etc., etc., etc.

You might expect that the bankruptcy of ideological thinking would be obvious, given that there are so many mutually contradictory ideologies (see above). But that isn’t the way of the world. Human beings seem to be wired to want to believe in something. And even to suffer and die for that something.

That can be a good thing if the something is personal and benign; for example, the satisfaction of raising a child to be mannerly and conscientious; sustaining one’s marriage through trials and tribulations for the love, companionship, and contentment it affords; getting through personal suffering and sorrow without resort to behavior that is destructive of self or relations with others; believing in God and the tenets of a religion for one’s own sake and not for their use as weapons of judgement or vengeance; taking pride in work that is “real” and of direct and obvious benefit to others, however humdrum it may seem and how little skill it may require. In other words, living life as if it has meaning and isn’t just an existential morass to be tolerated until one dies or an occasion for wreaking vengeance on the world because of one’s own anxieties and failings.

What I have just sketched are the yearnings and tensions that modern man has acquired, bit by bit, as old certainties and norms have been undermined. Is it any wonder that so many people since the dawn of the Enlightenment — where modernity really began — have wanted to quit the “rat race” for a meaningful life? Not creating an empire, leading a conquering army, or founding a dynasty. Just doing something self-satisfying, like farming, owning a small business in a small town, or teaching children to play the piano.

Ironically, Voltaire, an icon of the Enlightenment, sums it up:

“I know also,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.”

“You are right,” said Pangloss, “for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle.”

“Let us work,” said Martin, “without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the[Pg 168] linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”

“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”

That is to say,

the main virtue of Candide’s garden is that it forces the characters to do hard, simple labor. In the world outside the garden, people suffer and are rewarded for no discernible cause. In the garden, however, cause and effect are easy to determine—careful planting and cultivation yield good produce. Finally, the garden represents the cultivation and propagation of life, which, despite all their misery, the characters choose to embrace.

And so should we all.

Related posts:

Alienation
Another Angle on Alienation
An Antidote to Alienation

The Four Americas

Arnold Kling’s latest post is somewhat related to the one on which I commented yesterday. The new post recaps and assesses George Packer’s thesis that there are four American mindsets:

Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. Free America means the libertarians who favor limited government. Smart America means the management elites who favor economic and technological progress. Real America means the blue-collar Americans who favor dignity and patriotism. Just America means the progressive “woke” who favor economic equality and moral rectitude.

Kling, toward the end of his post, writes: “Real America takes distrust of elites too far. It resists hard truths (about the pandemic, for example). It puts too much faith in Donald Trump.”

I object. The distrust of elites and faith in Trump are reactions to the egregious overstepping by the elites who populate the other three Americas. The overstepping dates back to the anti-war (anti-American) antics of collegians, academics, media types, and politicians in the 1960s (and since). If the elites were somehow tamed or made irrelevant, the passions stirred in Real Americans would subside and they would revert to the kind of moderate behavior that they exhibited in the 1950s.

A reversion to the 1950s would be a welcome relief. The main accomplishment of the libertarians who later came on the scene has been to encourage and abet the breakdown of civilizing moral codes (think abortion-on-demand and homosexual “marriage”). The main accomplishment of Smart America has been to pursue economic growth for its own sake, regardless of the effect on Real America (think off-shoring and globalization). And the main accomplishment of Just America has been to foment discord and discontent for the sake of virtue-signaling. A pox on their houses (think urban riots, the encouragement of homelessness by subsidizing in, and the demonization of straight white males of European descent).

Related post: 1963: The Year Zero

Is Optimism Possible?

I have been, for many years, pessimistic about the future of liberty and prosperity in America (e.g., here). I am not alone, of course. The estimable Arnold Kling isn’t as openly pessimistic, but it isn’t hard to read between the lines of his many posts about the present state of affairs. Take this one, for example, in which he writes about

some possible outcomes for the future:

1. The “good left” ([Jonathan] Rauch and others) overpowers the illiberal Woke left. p = .05

2. The illiberal Woke left suffers a catastrophic electoral defeat at the hands of a non-populist right. p = .05

3. The illiberal Woke left and the populist right continue to dominate political dynamics, with today’s level of discomfort or more. p = .40

4. The U.S. experiences an era of Woke totalitarianism that lasts for a couple of decades, but which eventually collapses into something else (not necessarily good) p = .25

5. Academia, journalism, traditional media, and government become empty battlegrounds, as technological change results in very different forms of social organization (call this the Balaji scenario, if you will). p = .25

There is a sixth possibility, or perhaps it’s a combination of Kling’s #1, #2, and #5, with a higher probability that Kling assigns to them.

People, except for a small but loud minority, will simply quit caring about ideology and just get on with living their lives and engaging personally with people who matter to them. This turn of events won’t be obvious at first, but it will begin to show in such ways as the declining use of social media. Astute politicians who have been too quick to embrace “wokeness” will sense the turning tide and begin to moderate their positions in the hope of appealing to a broader electoral base. As things go in politics, this new moderation will catch on. The illiberal left won’t shrink in numbers or volume, but the moderate (i.e., more liberal) left will grow in influence. And there will be much more common ground for the empowered moderate left to share with the sane liberal right (i.e., actual conservatives as opposed to attitudinal zealots). A new center will form around deeply shared values (defense of life, liberty, and property) as opposed to fatuous slogans (defund the police, all whites are racist, etc.). The media, in turn, will embrace this new zeitgeist and quit antagonizing viewers with daily injections of wokeness. And so it will go, until something line the zeitgeist of the 1950s has been restored.

A lot of history would have to be overcome, including (but far from limited to) decades of leftist indoctrination in public schools and universities, massive dependency on big government, political and bureaucratic inertia, and the degree to which key institutions (e.g., schools and media) have become locked in to wokeness. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the tides of human affairs do turn.

I don’t expect to see the tide turn (by very much) in what remains of my lifetime. But I still hold out hope that it will, for the sake of my children and grandchildren and on down the line.

What Do Wokesters Want?

I am using “wokesters” as a convenient handle for persons who subscribe to a range of closely related movements, which include but are not limited to wokeness, racial justice, equity, gender equality, transgenderism, social justice, cancel culture, environmental justice, and climate-change activism. It is fair to say that the following views, which might be associated with one or another of the movements, are held widely by members of all the movements (despite the truths noted parenthetically):

Race is a social construct. (Despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary.)

Racism is a foundational and systemic aspect of American history. (Which is a convenient excuse for much of what follows.)

Racism explains every bad thing that has befallen people of color in America. (Ditto.)

America’s history must be repudiated by eradicating all vestiges of it that glorify straight white males of European descent. (Because wokesters are intolerant of brilliance and success of it comes from straight white males of European descent.)

The central government (when it is run by wokesters and their political pawns) should be the sole arbiter of human relations. (Replacing smaller units of government, voluntary contractual arrangements, families, churches, clubs, and other elements of civil society through which essential services are provided, economic wants are satisfied efficiently, and civilizing norms are inculcated and enforced), except for those institutions that are dominated by wokesters or their proteges, of course.)

[You name it] is a human right. (Which — unlike true rights, which all can enjoy without cost to others — must be provided at cost to others.)

Economics is a zero-sum game; the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. (Though the economic history of the United States — and the Western world — says otherwise. The rich get rich — often rising from poverty and middling circumstances — by dint of effort risk-taking, and in the process produce things of value for others while also enabling them to advance economically.)

Profit is a dirty word. (But I — the elite lefty who makes seven figures a year, thank you, deserve every penny of my hard-earned income.)

Sex gender is assigned arbitrarily at birth. (Ludicrous).

Men can bear children. (Ditto.)

Women can have penises. (Ditto.)

Gender dysphoria in some children proves the preceding poiXXXX

Children can have two mommies, two daddies, or any combination of parents in any number and any gender. And, no, they won’t grow up anti-social for lack of traditional father (male) and mother (female) parents. (Just ask blacks who are unemployed for lack of education and serving prison time after having been raised without bread-winning fathers.)

Blacks, on average, are at the bottom of income and wealth distributions and at the top of the incarceration distribution — despite affirmative action, subsidized housing, welfare payments, etc. — because of racism. (Not because blacks, on average, are at the bottom of the intelligence distribution and have in many black communities adopted and enforced a culture the promotes violence and denigrates education?)

Black lives matter. (More than other lives? Despite the facts adduced above?)

Police are racist Nazis and ought to be de-funded. (So that law abiding blacks and other Americans can become easier targets for rape, murder, and theft.)

Grades, advanced placement courses, aptitude tests, and intelligence tests are racist devices. (Which happen to enable the best and brightest — regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic class — to lead the country forward scientifically and economically, to the benefit of all.)

The warming of the planet by a couple of degrees in the past half-century (for reasons that aren’t well understood but which are attributed by latter-day Puritans to human activity) is a sign of things to come: Earth will warm to the point that it becomes almost uninhabitable. (Which is a case of undue extrapolation from demonstrably erroneous models and a failure to credit the ability of capitalism — gasp! — to adapt successfully to truly significant climatic changes.)

Science is real. (Though we don’t know what science is, and believe things that are labeled scientific if we agree with them. We don’t understand, or care, that science is a process that sometimes yields useful knowledge, or that the “knowledge” is always provisional, always in doubt, and sometimes wrong. We support the movement of recent decades to label some things as scientific that are really driven by a puritanical, anti-humanistic agenda, and which don’t hold up against rigorous, scientific examination, such as the debunked “science” of “climate change”; the essential equality of the races and sexes, despite their scientifically demonstrable differences; and the belief that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.)

Illegal immigrants migrants are just seeking a better life and should be allowed free entry into the United States. (Because borders are arbitrary — except when it comes to my property — and it doesn’t matter if the unfettered enty ro illegal immigrants burdens tax-paying Americans and takes jobs from working-class Americans.)

The United States spends too much on national defense because (a) borders are arbitrary (except when they delineate my property), (b) there’s no real threat to this country (except for cyberattacks and terrorism sponsored by other states, and growing Chinese and Russian aggression that imperils the economic interests of Americans), (c) America is the aggressor (except in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Gulf War I, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and in the future if America significantly reduces its defense forces), and (d) peace is preferable to war (except that it is preparedness for war that ensures peace, either through deterrence or victory).

What wokesters want is to see that these views, and many others of their ilk, are enforced by the central government. To that end, steps will be taken to ensure that the Democrat Party is permanently in control of the central government and is able to control most State governments. Accordingly, voting laws will be “reformed” to enable everyone, regardless of citizenship status or other qualification (perhaps excepting age, or perhaps not) to receive a mail-in ballot that will be harvested and cast for Democrat candidates; the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (with their iron-clad Democrat super-majorities) will be added to the Union; the filibuster will be abolished; the Supreme Court and lower courts will be expanded and new seats will be filled by Democrat nominees; and on, and on.

Why do wokesters want what they want? Here’s my take:

  • They reject personal responsibility.
  • They don’t like the sense of real community that is represented in the traditional institutions of civil society.
  • They don’t like the truth if it contradicts their view of what the world should be like.
  • They are devoid of true compassion.
  • They are — in sum — alienated, hate-filled nihilists, the produce of decades of left-wing indoctrination by public schools, universities, and the media.

What will wokesters (and all of us) get?

At best, what they will get is a European Union on steroids, a Kafka-esque existence in a world run by bureaucratic whims from which entrepreneurial initiative and deeply rooted, socially binding cultures have been erased.

Somewhere between best and worst, they will get an impoverished, violent, drug-addled dystopia which is effectively a police state run for the benefit of cosseted political-media-corprate-academic elites.

At worst (as if it could get worse), what they will get is life under the hob-nailed boots of Russia and China:; for example:

Russians are building a military focused on killing people and breaking things. We’re apparently building a military focused on being capable of explaining microaggressions and critical race theory to Afghan Tribesmen.

A country whose political leaders oppose the execution of murderers, support riots and looting by BLM, will not back Israel in it’s life-or-death struggle with Islamic terrorists, and use the military to advance “wokeism” isn’t a country that you can count on to face down Russia and China.

Wokesters are nothing but useful idiots to the Russians and Chinese. And if wokesterst succeed in weakening the U.S. to the point that it becomes a Sino-Soviet vassal, they will be among the first to learn what life under an all-powerful central government is really like. Though, useful idiots that they are, they won’t survive long enough to savor the biter fruits of their labors.

Centrism: The Path to Dystopia

Centrism is the habit of seeking compromise between opposing positions. It is the expression of the centrist’s personality, not a political philosophy. (I speak from personal experience with a self-proclaimed centrist who is chameleon-like in his willingness to adapt to his political environment — integrity be damned.)

Centrism fails because it doesn’t offer a concrete position to which one might adhere. Centrism is nothing but a reluctance or refusal to choose between concrete positions. A centrist has no principles to offer, unless you think of indecision and conflict avoidance as principles. But they are in fact the personality traits that underlie centrism.

Conflict is unavoidable — at least when it comes to political conflict that involves the foundational principles of governance. There are only two foundational principles that are viable in the long run: conservatism of temperament and left-statism (see this). Conservatism of temperament underlies ideological conservatism, which propounds government that is limited to the defense of life, liberty, and property — where liberty is negative liberty, the right to be left alone.

Left-statism is also a matter of temperament. As I say here,

If there is a distinction between “liberalism”, “progressivism”, and left-statism, it is one of attitude rather than aims. Many a “liberal” and “progressive” wants things that require oppressive state control, but is loath to admit the truth that oppressive state control is required to have such things. These naifs want to believe the impossible: that the accomplishment of the “progressive” agenda is compatible with the preservation of liberty. The left-statist simply doesn’t care about liberty; the accomplishment of the left-statist agenda is the end that justifies any and all means. Those “liberals” and “progressives” who aren’t left-statists by attitude are merely useful idiots to hard-core, Lenin-like left-statists.

So in the battle between conservatism and left-statism, the centrist abets left-statism by encouraging compromises that allow it to creep into governance step by step. As the Chinese proverb says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. All it takes to achieve left-statist aims is to keep moving toward them as centrists clear the way by giving in, a foot at a time.

Political centrists include any Republican who has or would collaborate with Democrats on any matter that led or will lead to the further empowerment and aggrandizement of the central government. Religious centrists include any Catholic cleric who would or does administer Holy Communion to a “pro-choice” politician. Judicial centrists include any justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who rescues a statist policy (e.g., John Roberts’s rescue of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate by calling a penalty a tax). I am sure that you can add to that list.

There is plenty of centrism around. But the only excusable centrism is the kind that is practiced out of politeness, to avoid pointless conflicts (e.g., Thanksgiving dinner arguments about politics and football). The rest of it is just weakness in the face of left-statism, weakness that is not and will not be rewarded by favors from left-statists when they prevail.

To quote Karl Popper:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

The defense of toleration may well require something that centrists cannot contemplate: a violent showdown with leftists.

Related reading:

Roger L. Simon, “How ‘Woke’ May Be Leading Us to Civil War“, The Epoch Times, May 9, 2011

“Tyler Durden”, “The American Cyber Stasi Will Suppress All Digital Dissent in Biden’s Dystopia“, ZeroHedge, May 11, 2011

What Is the Point of It All?

If you have read the preceding post you may have surmised that I have surrendered to statism; for example:

This solution [devolution of political power] is superficially appealing. But it omits crucial realities, which are reflected in the state of the world throughout recorded history (and probably for eons before that). Human beings band together in order to accomplish certain ends (e.g., defense against marauders), and the banding together almost always creates leaders and subjects. Thus is a primitive state established. And once it is established, it exerts control over a geographic area (or a roving band), and everyone who lives in that area (or joins the band) becomes a subject of the state. Primitive states then band together — either for self-defense or because of conquest — forming larger and larger states, each of which holds its subjects in thrall. An occasional revolution sometimes leads to the dissolution of a particular state, but the subjects of that state simply become subjects of a successor state or of neighboring states avid to control the territory and subjects of the defunct state.

So it has gone for millennia, and so it will go for millennia to come.

The tide of statism may pause in its rise — and even recede a bit — but the aggrandizement of the state and its power over the people seems inexorable. Or is it?

There are many good reasons to oppose and resist the aggrandizement of the state. And this blog is replete with arguments for devolution. But this blog and the many like it (most of them more widely read and quoted) seem to be as effective in curbing and shrinking big government as aluminum foil is in stopping bullets.

Facts and logic may be on the side of devolution — and they are — but facts and logic have almost nothing to do with the practice of politics. In the end, it comes to down power-lust, rent-seeking, and free-loading.

So, what is the point of it all — of the incessant if largely ineffective barrage of arguments against the aggrandizement of the state? Well, as long as the minions of the state and the state’s powerful allies are unable to completely suppress dissent from statism, there is at least some hope that totalitarianism can be averted. There is also at least a (dimmer) hope that something will happen to reverse the tide and return to an America that still lives in the memories of many of us: America between the end of World War II and the 1960s.

What might that something be? Who knows? It is impossible to describe the confluence of events that causes a sudden change in the course of history, except in the aftermath of that change. But the change will not occur unless there are pressures that can lead to its occurrence. The Soviet Union, for example, wouldn’t have dissolved were it not for Reagan’s defense buildup, but the defense buildup wouldn’t have made a difference if the Soviet Union hadn’t been economically weak in the first place, and subject to other, internal pressures.

The American state, as it exists today, is an alliance of big-government politicians; their enablers in the academy, the media, and major corporations; and huge blocs of voters who are fueled by greed, envy, anger, and the belief that bigger government will assuage those emotions. This concoction has many potential failure points. By constantly working away at those potential failure points, it is possible — though by no means certain — that one or a few will fail and bring down the entire edifice of the presently constituted American state.

That is the point of it all. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only way to avert the triumph of evil is to keep on fighting it.

State Action As Private Action

Anarchists and defenders of non-governmental censorship to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no dividing line between private and state action. I address this point in “Is Anarchy a Viable Concept?“. I elaborate the point here.

Anarchists like to draw a bright line between the state and the private sphere so that they can argue, foolishly, for the replacement of the state by private actors. Defenders of non-governmental censorship (e.g., deletion of tweets by Twitter and deplatforming by Facebook) are simply political theorists in thrall the mistaken belief that the “marketplace of ideas” is self-correcting and eventually yields truth. (Even if it were self-correcting, devastating harm often results before truth emerges.)

I will begin with the futility of drawing a bright line — or any line — between state and private action. Before going any further I should be clear about what I mean by “state”.

A state is defined as “the supreme public power within a sovereign political entity” (4.a.). This definition reflects popular usage, which suggests that a state is some kind of disembodied essence. But a state does not exist unless it is embodied in institutions that are operated by human beings. And the power exercised by those human beings is meant to serve specific (if inchoate) aims that are personal to them or to persons to whom they are beholden; for example, higher-ranking government officials, major campaign contributors, influential voting blocs, or a person or group with whom one wishes to curry favor (e.g., the media). (It is a long-standing custom to refer Queen Elizabeth II as “head of state” of the United Kingdom, but she is no such thing inasmuch as she wields almost no power.)

Government power is exercised through agencies that are usually characterized as legislative, executive, and judicial. But there is a fourth type of agency that operates, much of the time, independently of the other three types. It is the “administrative state”, a conglomeration of executive agencies that usurps legislative and judicial functions. The “deep state” of recent controversy refers to members of the administrative state who strive (often successfully) to thwart the will of the chief of the executive branch through their direct control of the minutiae of government operations. This phenomenon underscores the essentially private nature of state action.

The power of the four types of agency is exercised through a combination of force, fear on the part of the governed, and submission by those among the governed who naively view the state and its edicts as something akin to divinity and divine writ.

The power of government is augmented by its ability to control information and perceptions about governmental activities. Such control, nowadays, is abetted by (most) members of the media when government is controlled by Democrats and undermined by (most) members of the media when government is controlled by Republicans.

The state, thus properly understood, is merely an outlet for private action. In so-called democracies (democratic republics) elections and appointments determine which private interests control the power of the state.

Democracies differ from oligarchies only in that voters in democracies go through the exercise of choosing the oligarchies — the collection of interest groups — that will rule them.

The difference between democracies and dictatorships is one of degree, not of kind. The ruling interests in a democracy are simply somewhat more changeable than the ruling interests in a dictatorship. But in both cases the ruling interests pursue private agendas. Dictatorships are more blatantly oppressive. Democracies hide their fascism behind a friendly face.

The bottom line: The state embodies and implements private action.

Given that the state, in the service of many (and sometimes competing) private agendas, must trample on the lives, liberty, or property of most of its subjects it would seem obviously desirable to devolve political power. And, logically, devolution ought to proceed to the lowest level: the person or a group of persons who choose to be treated as a unit (e.g., the nuclear family).

This solution is superficially appealing. But it omits crucial realities, which are reflected in the state of the world throughout recorded history (and probably for eons before that). Human beings band together in order to accomplish certain ends (e.g., defense against marauders), and the banding together almost always creates leaders and subjects. Thus is a primitive state established. And once it is established, it exerts control over a geographic area (or a roving band), and everyone who lives in that area (or joins the band) becomes a subject of the state. Primitive states then band together — either for self-defense or because of conquest — forming larger and larger states, each of which holds its subjects in thrall. An occasional revolution sometimes leads to the dissolution of a particular state, but the subjects of that state simply become subjects of a successor state or of neighboring states avid to control the territory and subjects of the defunct state.

So it has gone for millennia, and so it will go for millennia to come.

That would be the last word … but the duped defenders of corporate censorship cannot go unanswered. As I once observed, power is power. If government censorship is wrong, why is it right for powerful corporations to censor speech and effectively nullify the First Amendment? To put a point on it, why is it right for powerful corporations whose leaders share the ideologies and interests of a particular political party to act as surrogates for that party, and to suppress and distort opposing views?

The revised bottom line: The state embodies and implements private action, and private actors who do the bidding of state actors are merely minions of the state.

Related posts:

Anarchy: An Empty Concept
The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism
A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism
Anarchistic Balderdash
Old America, New America, and Anarchy
Extreme Libertarianism vs. the Accountable State
A Few Thoughts about Anarchy
Anarchy: A Footnote
Another Footnote about Anarchy
Is Anarchy a Viable Concept?

Preemptive (Cold) Civil War
Whence Polarization?
Social Norms, the Left, and Social Disintegration
“Liberalism” and Virtue-Signaling
The Fourth Great Awakening
It’s Them or Us
First They Came For …
Conservatism, Society, and the End of America
The Paradox That Is Western Civilization
Insidious Leftism
Thinking About the Unthinkable
Intellectuals and Authoritarianism
Leninthink and Left-think
Society, Culture, and America’s Future
The Democrats’ Master Plan to Seize America
The Allure of Leftism
Leftism in Summary
Peak Civilization?
A Footnote to “Peak Civilization?”
A Warning Too Late?
FDR’s Fascism, Underscored
Oh, That Deep State
It’s the 1960s Redux
Some People Are More Equal than Others, Illustrated

Is Anarchy a Viable Concept?

Even within a family, clan, or voluntary community there are usually persons who possess some combination of status, physical strength, strength of will, cunning, or persuasiveness that enables them to impose their will on the group. The motivation — an urge to control the group or a sincere belief that the group will benefit from their control — is unimportant; the fact of control is what matters.

There is the complementary need, felt by many persons, to be led or dominated because of lack of status, physical weakness, weakness of will, lack of cunning, etc.

Thus do leaders emerge, even within a family, clan, or voluntary community. And they may be venerated and prized just as they may be feared and hated. But they do lead (command) the group, and in doing so they set state-like rules that may help the family, clan, or community to thrive and survive — or put it on a path to strife, poverty, or extinction.

Businesses, of course, are notoriously and unavoidably commanded. As are gangs (which aren’t necessarily voluntary), cults, religious organizations — and on and on.

All of the organizations mentioned thus far (and their unmentioned ilk) may not be dictatorships or oligarchies. That is, their leaders may, formally or informally, seek the advice or consult the preferences of those whom they lead. But in all cases, there is a hierarchy of some kind, and the person or persons at the top have the moral or physical means to command obedience to their decisions.

In sum, the removal of a formal state does not mean the removal of state-like control over the lives of individual persons. At best, it devolves that control to smaller — but still state-like — institutions. And those institutions — like formal states — will devise various means of cooperation and conflict resolution, or like states they will engage in outright coercion and conflict of one kind or another (ostracism, rules enforced by sanctions, combat, economic warfare, etc.).

The argument for anarchy is therefore an argument in favor of replacing a formal state with myriad state-like institutions. These will range, in their preference for cooperation or conflict, from close-knit neighborhoods to mutually beneficial contractual arrangements to violence-prone gangs (of many scales) to uncompromising sectarian and religious organizations that are bound ideologically (e.g., Communist and Islamic cells).

It is beyond me how this would make the United States (let alone the world) a better place — in practice, that is, as opposed to Utopian dream-spinning. The realistic alternative, therefore, is an accountable state, the power of which is checked by constitutional means. It is far from a perfect alternative, as I will soon explain, but it is the only viable one.

Arguably, the United States was once something like an accountable state. And even then (from the late 1700s until the early 1900s), it was far less than a paragon of classical liberalism. Since then, aside from participating in at least a few senseless and horrendously costly wars, the central government has been depriving Americans of much of their liberty. Even the advances for blacks and other identity groups have not been unmitigated gains for those groups — think “welfare dependency”, for example. And those advances have imposed on most Americans the deadweight losses of taxation, reverse discrimination, punishments for “wrong thinking”, etc., that inevitably accompany favoritism for some groups at the expense of others.

But the retrogression of the United States as a force for liberty doesn’t mean that anarchy is a viable alternative to the kind of state represented by the United States. All it means is that no kind of human endeavor is exempt from corruption. Anarchy is just another kind of human endeavor, one that can deliver economic and social liberty only if the all-too-human urges to dominate others and to commit violence against them could be eradicated.

Those urges can’t be eradicated or kept in check — as history amply attests. The urge to perfection — as history also amply attests — only gives the “perfectionists” (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc., etc.) an excuse for waging war on their own people and on the wider world.

What would a doctrinaire anarchist do if he saw others behaving un-anarchically to his detriment? Well, I suspect that if he were not a pacifist (i.e., self-destructive) he would organize his fellow thinkers into some kind of pro-anarchic army (oxymoron alert), and that the army would have to be hierarchical in order to succeed. I suspect, further, that if it did succeed, the result would be the de facto creation of an anti-anarchic “anarchy”, for the protection and preservation of anarchistic dogma. Shades of dictatorial “peoples’ republics” and Orwellian double-think.

Anarchy, after all, is an ideology. And ideologies always run afoul of human nature, in one way or another. And ideologies aren’t to be trusted because ideologues are dangerous, no matter what they profess to believe. If the Constitution of the United States, which was framed in the light of human nature, failed to deliver lasting liberty to Americans, what can one expect of a naive ideology that dismisses human nature?

The answer to the question posed by the title of this post is a resounding NO.

Related posts:

Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style
Fundamentalist Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Self-Defense
Anarchy: An Empty Concept
The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism
A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism
Anarchistic Balderdash
Old America, New America, and Anarchy
Extreme Libertarianism vs. the Accountable State
A Few Thoughts about Anarchy
Anarchy: A Footnote
Another Footnote about Anarchy

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism, and America’s Present Condition

Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), an English philosopher and political theorist, is remembered by Alberto Mingardi in a post at Econlib:

He was a self-confident thinker who did not search for others’ approval. He had an impressive career but somehow outside the mainstream, was remembered by friends (like Ken Minogue) as a splendid friend who cared about friendship deeply, eschewed honors, and was happy to retire in Dorset and lead a county life. In a beautiful article on Oakeshott, Gertrude Himmelfarb commented that he was “the political philosopher who has so modest a view of the task of political philosophy, the intellectual who is so reluctant a producer of intellectual goods, the master who does so little to acquire or cultivate disciples” and then all of these features perfectly fit in his character.

Oakeshott strongly influenced my view of conservatism, as you will see if you read any of the many posts in which I quote him or refer to his expositions of conservatism and critiques of rationalism. I drew heavily on Oakeshott’s analysis of rationalism in my prescient post of ten years ago about same-sex “marriage” and the destruction of civilizing social norms. Here is the post in its entirety, followed by my retrospective commentary (in italics):

Judge Vaughn Walker’s recent decision in Perry v. Schwarnenegger, which manufactures a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, smacks of Rationalism. Judge Walker distorts and sweeps aside millennia of history when he writes:

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage. Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.

Judge Walker thereby secures his place in the Rationalist tradition. A Rationalist, as Michael Oakeshott explains,

stands … for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligations to any authority save the authority of ‘reason’. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious; he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his ‘reason’; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason … to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a ‘reason’ common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration…. But besides this, which gives the Rationalist a touch of intellectual equalitarianism, he is something also of an individualist, finding it difficult to believe that anyone who can think honestly and clearly will think differently from himself….

…And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. (“Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5-7, as republished in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays)

At the heart of Rationalism is the view that “a problem” can be analyzed and “solved” as if it were separate and apart from the fabric of life.  On this point, I turn to John Kekes:

Traditions do not stand alone: they overlap, and the problems of one are often resolved in terms of another. Most traditions have legal, moral, political, aesthetic, stylistic, managerial, and multitude of other aspects. Furthermore, people participating in a tradition bring with them beliefs, values, and practices from other traditions in which they also participate. Changes in one tradition, therefore, are likely to produce changes in others; they are like waves that reverberate throughout the other traditions of a society. (“The Idea of Conservatism“)

Edward Feser puts it this way:

Tradition, being nothing other than the distillation of centuries of human experience, itself provides the surest guide to determining the most rational course of action. Far from being opposed to reason, reason is inseparable from tradition, and blind without it. The so-called enlightened mind thrusts tradition aside, hoping to find something more solid on which to make its stand, but there is nothing else, no alternative to the hard earth of human experience, and the enlightened thinker soon finds himself in mid-air…. But then, was it ever truly a love of reason that was in the driver’s seat in the first place? Or was it, rather, a hatred of tradition? Might the latter have been the cause of the former, rather than, as the enlightened pose would have it, the other way around?) (“Hayek and Tradition“)

Same-sex marriage will have consequences that most libertarians and “liberals” are unwilling to consider. Although it is true that traditional, heterosexual unions have their problems, those problems have been made worse, not better, by the intercession of the state. (The loosening of divorce laws, for example, signaled that marriage was to be taken less seriously, and so it has been.) Nevertheless, the state — pursuant to Judge Walker’s decision — may create new problems for society by legitimating same-sex marriage, thus signaling that traditional marriage is just another contractual arrangement in which any combination of persons may participate.

Heterosexual marriage — as Jennifer Roback Morse explains — is a primary and irreplicable civilizing force. The recognition of homosexual marriage by the state will undermine that civilizing force. The state will be saying, in effect, “Anything goes. Do your thing. The courts, the welfare system, and the taxpayer — above all — will “pick up the pieces.” And so it will go.

In Morse’s words:

The new idea about marriage claims that no structure should be privileged over any other. The supposedly libertarian subtext of this idea is that people should be as free as possible to make their personal choices. But the very nonlibertarian consequence of this new idea is that it creates a culture that obliterates the informal methods of enforcement. Parents can’t raise their eyebrows and expect children to conform to the socially accepted norms of behavior, because there are no socially accepted norms of behavior. Raised eyebrows and dirty looks no longer operate as sanctions on behavior slightly or even grossly outside the norm. The modern culture of sexual and parental tolerance ruthlessly enforces a code of silence, banishing anything remotely critical of personal choice. A parent, or even a peer, who tries to tell a young person that he or she is about to do something incredibly stupid runs into the brick wall of the non-judgmental social norm. (“Marriage and the Limits of Contract“)

The state’s signals are drowning out the signals that used to be transmitted primarily by voluntary social institutions: family, friendship, community, church, and club. Accordingly, I do not find it a coincidence that loud, loutish, crude, inconsiderate, rude, and foul behaviors have become increasingly prominent features of “social” life in America. Such behaviors have risen in parallel with the retreat of most authority figures in the face of organized violence by “protestors” and looters; with the rise of political correctness; with the perpetuation of the New Deal and its successor, the Great Society; with the erosion of swift and sure justice in favor of “rehabilitation” and “respect for life” (but not for potential victims of crime); and with the legal enshrinement of infanticide and buggery as acceptable (and even desirable) practices.

Thomas Sowell puts it this way:

One of the things intellectuals [his Rationalists] have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class — and more recently “gender” — have been projected as either more real or more important….

Under the influence of the intelligentsia, we have become a society that rewards people with admiration for violating its own norms and for fragmenting that society into jarring segments. In addition to explicit denigrations of their own society for its history or current shortcomings, intellectuals often set up standards for their society which no society has ever met or is likely to meet.

Calling those standards “social justice” enables intellectuals to engage in endless complaints about the particular ways in which society fails to meet their arbitrary criteria, along with a parade of groups entitled to a sense of grievance, exemplified in the “race, class and gender” formula…. (Intellectuals and Society, pp. 303, 305)

And so it will go —  barring a sharp, conclusive reversal of Judge Walker and the movement he champions.

There was no sharp or conclusive reversal — quite the contrary, in fact. And the forces of rationalism have only grown stronger in the past decade. Witness the broadly supported movement to renounce America’s history for the sake of virtue-signaling, to blame “racism” for the government-inflicted and self-inflicted failings of blacks, to suppress religion, to undermine the economy in the name of a pseudo-science (“climate science”), and to destroy the social and economic lives of tens of millions of Americans by responding hysterically to the ever-changing and often unfounded findings of “science”.