I sometimes take a mental trip into the past — into the golden past of boyhood, where all the days are sunny and summery, or Christmas-y.
I stand on the sidewalk in front of the first house I lived in. There it is, a cream-colored, two-story, clapboard house with a small detached garage to the right. It sits on a corner lot of some size on a tree-lined street. An alley runs behind it. The streets at the front and left side of the house are unpaved, as were many streets in that small city where I was a boy in the 1940s.
The deep, covered porch runs the width of the house. I walk up the steps to the porch and enter the front door, which opens into the living room. With sunlight streaming through the windows, I wander through the living room to the dining room and kitchen. I go out the back door to the enclosed back porch, from which I can see the garage and the back yard.
I return to the house and venture to the basement, with its huge, coal-fired furnace, coal bin, and my father’s work shop. I go back up — and then up again, climbing the stairs to the second story — the stairs with a wrought-iron railing. I reach the upper hallway and visit, in turn, the three sunny bedrooms and the black-and-white tiled bathroom.
Yes, it was a modest house. But it was the first place I thought of as home, and it’s a place that I always think of as sunny.
At other times I remember my grandmother’s house in a small, lakeside village about 90 miles north of where I grew up. Her modest, two-story bungalow sat on a deep lot that backed up to open fields where doves cooed as I awoke on sunny, summer mornings to the smell of bacon frying. My favorite room was the kitchen, with its massive woodstove and huge, round, oak table, around which my grandmother, parents, and various aunts and uncles would sit after a meal, retelling and embellishing tales from the past.
We often visited my grandmother at Christmas, and I like to relive the Christmas eve when we made the 90-mile trip as feathery snow slowly piled deeper on the deserted, lakeside highway we traversed through quiet villages: Lexington, Port Sanilac, Forester, Richmondville, Forestville, White Rock, Harbor Beach, Port Hope, Huron City, and — at last — Port Austin.
Many of those villages were tiny: a scattering of houses, perhaps a church and a gas station — but not a traffic light. The more substantial villages — those that had 1,000 or even 2,000 residents and a traffic light — boasted rows of well-kept and sometimes stately homes on shady streets, along with prosperous brick and white-frame churches, a few blocks of tidy stores, and perhaps a lighthouse:
The lakeside highway (before it straightened and moved inland) rode atop high bluffs overlooking the vastness of Lake Huron:
Many of the stately homes along the way have become inns:
A short detour through the old part of Huron City would yield a view of Seven Gables, the summer home of William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), a professor of English literature at Yale and a popular lecturer and writer in the early decades of the 20th century:
The village of Port Austin didn’t have a quaint main street (seen here probably in the 1970s), but it was a place where a young boy could wander safely:
The rest of the village had more to offer. An elegant old inn . . .
. . . these sights along the shoreline . . .
. . . and this view of the harbor at sunset:
Golden days, golden nights. Gone forever — but still alive in my reveries.
Happy Thanksgiving! Trump’s lead over Biden has increased (explanation below):
RealClearPolitics maintains a running tally of presidential election polls (among many others). RCP has also assessed the pro-Democrat or pro-Republican bias of the final presidential-election polls issued by major pollsters in 2016 and 2020. On average, the polls were biased toward the Democrat nominee by 2.3 percentage points.
As the pollsters release their results, I adjust Trump’s lead/deficit for bias. I then construct a moving average of the adjusted results, where the average represents Trump’s adjusted margin for the 10 most recent polls (taking the mid-point of each polling period as the date of each poll).
I then convert that 10-poll average to an estimate of Trump’s share of the two-party popular vote. For example, an average margin of +4 indicates a 52-48 split of the popular vote, that is, Trump gets 52 percent of the popular vote.
Finally, I apply my algorithm for the relationship between the GOP candidate’s share of the electoral vote and his share of two-party popular vote.
The estimates of popular-vote and electoral-vote shares don’t account for the margin of error in pollsters’ findings or the margin of error in my estimate of electoral votes. But the movement of the estimates may be taken as indication of the movement in voters’ preferences between Trump and Biden (or whoever might become their parties’ nominees). It is that movement which I will report from time to time.
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The new dispensation isn’t “liberty”, “democracy”, “equity”, or any of the other shibboleths mouthed by its Orwellian architects. The new dispensation is to force human events to follow a certain course by gaining control of the apparatus of the state and coercing its subjects to act according to its dictates through censorship and force.
That is the direction in which the United States is headed. Regardless of dire consequence of the policies favored by those in control of the state. Those consequences — in addition to the loss of liberty — include general inflation, soaring energy and food prices, the suppression of science that gets the “wrong” answers, and (above all) the destruction of civil society.
Those consequences are assured as the regime presses on with heavy handed regulation, the weaponization of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the empowerment of private actors (e.g., Big Tech) to suppress the regime’s enemies, and the division of Americans into desirable and undesirable identity groups.
There is no learning from experience in this regime. Belief — uninformed and ends-driven — rules all. Every failure is met not with an honest reappraisal of policy failures but with the reassertion and expansion of failed policies.
It is the Sovietization of America: the exercise of power for its own sake, justified by the betterment of the people (or some of them), with the effect of impoverishing the people and setting them against one another.
A year ago today, I posted “Don’t Celebrate Yet, Virginia”, wherein I had this to say about the election of Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s first Republican governor in eight years:
Gratifying as the resurgence of Virginia’s GOP may be, I’m not ready to declare Virginia’s return to Red-ness. For one thing, there’s an underlying trend toward Blue-ness, which shows up in Virginia’s presidential election results:
Derived from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. The series for Virginia begins with the gubernatorial election of 1949,which is the earliest for which Leip as posted popular-vote tallies.
The GOP’s edge in the presidential election peaked in 1968, the year of George Wallace, who (in the South) siphoned votes from the Democrat candidate. If 1968 doesn’t suit as a peak year, because of the Wallace effect, then the peak certainly occurred in 1984, with the re-election of Ronald Reagan. In either case, the GOP candidate’s share of Virginia’s presidential vote has been in decline for decades, and seems unlikely to recover unless there is a nationwide shift away from the Democrat party. Such a shift might occur, given the Dems’ suicide pact with the far-left, but cooler heads may yet prevail among party leaders.
It’s true that the downswing in the GOP’s hold on Virginia’s governorship hasn’t been as pronounced — which supports Tip O’Neill’s observation that all politics are local. But the GOP’s edge in the past has been much greater than the razor-thin victory eked out by Glenn Youngkin in the recent election.
Nor is that victory especially impressive when the swing toward the GOP in 2021 is compared with earlier swings:
Source: Leip’s Atlas.
What probably happened in the 2021 election is what seems to have been happening since the early 1970s. The Virginia gubernatorial election reflects a typical “mid-term” reaction to the previous year’s presidential election. When the GOP presidential candidate racks up a gain relative to the showing of the GOP candidate four years earlier (a positive “swing”), the GOP gubernatorial candidate racks up a loss relative to the showing of the GOP candidate four years earlier (a negative “swing”). And conversely.
The results of the yesterday’s elections in Virginia bear out my pessimism. Governor Youngkin had hoped to flip the Virginia Senate, which Democrats held by 22-18, and hold (or build) the GOP lead in the House of Delegates, which Republicans held by 52-48.
At this moment, it looks like the Democrats will continue to hold the Senate, by 21-19, while reclaiming the House by a margin of 51-49.
The outcome in Virginia reflects America’s descent into depravity.
The big issue in Virginia was abortion — of course.
The failure of the GOP to retake the Senate had much to do with the campaign in the 16th district, where I live. The Republican incumbent lost to a Democrat in a contest that centered on abortion. Democrats pounded on the issue in mailings and TV ads. Had the Republican won, the Senate would be tied 20-20, with the Republican lieutenant governor determining the outcome of tied votes. But the “right” to abortion carried the day for the Democrat.
The outcome in House races was similarly linked to the issue of abortion. Again, I saw at first hand the emphasis that was placed on abortion by Democrats in the race for the seat in the 58th district, where I live, and in a neighboring district that the GOP incumbent seems to have held by a narrow margin.
Virginia’s — and America’s descent into depravity is confirmed by the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which hail the outcome of yesterday’s elections with headlines like these (in their online feeds):
RealClearPolitics maintains a running tally of presidential election polls (among many others). RCP has also assessed the accuracy of the final presidential-election polls issued by ten major pollsters in 2016 and 2020.
Adjusting the polling results issued by five of the pollsters in October for each pollsters’ average accuracy in 2016-20, I estimated Trump’s and Biden’s shares of the two-party popular vote. I then applied my algorithm for the relationship between share of electoral vote and share of two-party popular vote,
My initial result: If the election had been held last month, Trump would have won 52 percent of the two-party vote and garnered 58 to 62 percent of the electoral vote.
I will continue this exercise until election day 2024. In the interim, more of the ten pollsters will publish results more often and one or both of the principals may be replaced.
In the original version of this post, I argued that Republicans enjoy a slight edge in the Electoral College. The relevant discussion began with this graph:
I continued with this:
A candidate’s share of the electoral doesn’t change in proportion to his share of the nationwide popular vote. (The dashed red line depicts a proportionate relationship.) That is because all of the States (but two) and D.C. have a winner-take-all method of allotting their electoral votes. In those cases, a candidate wins all of the jurisdiction’s electoral votes whether he wins the popular vote by 0.1 percent or 10 percent. And a slight change in the candidate’s popular vote — from 49.9 percent to 50.1 percent, say — swings the entire block of electoral votes.
Look closely at the regression line in the graph and you will see that it doesn’t cross the dashed red line at the 50-50 mark. Rather, a GOP candidate (on average) can win 52.3 percent of the electoral votes with 49.9 percent of the nationwide popular vote. That’s because the smaller States — a majority of which lean GOP — are disproportionately represented in the electoral college. The upshot is that a candidate who wins the most States has an electoral-college advantage.
The next sentence hits upon the real reason for the statistical artifact:
Throw in some close wins in larger States and you have what looks like a resounding victory; for example, in 2016 Trump won 56.9 percent of the electoral votes with 48.9 percent of the two-party popular vote, nationwide.
Republicans won the electoral vote twice in “modern” times (i.e., from 1920 onward) while garnering less than 50 percent of the two-party popular vote:
The first time was in 2000, when G.W. Bush beat Al Gore solely on the basis of a narrow popular-vote victory in Florida. Florida’s 25 electoral votes gave Bush 1 more than he needed for the win.
The second time was in 2016, when Trump pulled won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — each by less than 1 percentage point. The combined 46 electoral votes delivered by those States gave Trump his margin of victory over Clinton.
And that’s it. One need search no further for the reason that a candidate can win the electoral vote with a minority of the two-party popular vote. It could even happen to a Democrat.
In fact, Democrats have won at least three elections since 1920 because of narrow victories in a few States:
Truman won in 1948 with 49.55 percent of the nationwide tally of popular votes because he won both Ohio and Illinois by less than 1 percentage point. The 53 electoral votes from those States boosted him to victory, even though he lost a big chunk of the “Solid South” (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) to Strom Thurmond.
In 1960, Kennedy’s slight margin in the nationwide popular-vote tally (49.72 percent to Nixon’s 49.55 percent) was mirrored by margins of less than 1 percentage point in Hawaii, Illinois, and Missouri. Their combined 43 electoral votes gave Kennedy the election.
Biden won in 2020 not because he beat Trump in the meaningless nationwide popular-vote tally by 4.45 percentage points, but because he “won” both Georgia and Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point and Pennsylvania by a little more than 1 percentage point. The 46 electoral votes thus delivered by those three States gave Biden his margin of victory over Trump in the Electoral College. (Turnabout, in this case, is foul play.)
The statistical relationship in the graph is meaningless. What can be meaningful is a narrow margin of victory (or loss) in a few States. This underlines the lesson from “How Good Are the Presidential Polls?“: Even a large lead in nationwide polls doesn’t signify victory in the Electoral College. Keep your eye on “battleground” States and allow for a lot of uncertainty in the polling results for those States.
Several months ago I published “A More Perfect Constitution”. Its language in many places is directed at abuses that have arisen in America’s governance. Because of its daunting length, I suspect that few readers have digested it whole, and that even fewer reader have been taken notice of the many places in which the document strives to undo the damage that has been done to Americans’ liberties. This series of posts highlights that language in bite-size chunks. Links to all excerpts are given at the end of this post.
V. OBLIGATIONS AND POWERS OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES
….
B. Specific Powers of Congress
….
4. Congress may not:
….
b. sustain or make laws that result in the imposition of costs on the government of any State or the governments of all of them;
c. either directly, through the empowerment of a regulatory agency, or as an incidental effect of legislation determine what goods and services are exchanged in intra-State, inter-State, or international commerce (except to regulate the international flow of weapons, military technology, or information that might compromise national security), or determine how such goods and services are produced or priced; or determine how businesses so engaged are operated;
d. levy taxes or duties on exports from or imports to any State, give any preference to one State over another in its regulation of commerce, or determine the routes of commerce between the States; …
f. except pursuant to an authorization of war, appropriate any monies for the use of foreign nations or peoples….
h. make any law whose direct effect is to establish, support, favor, bestow financial benefits on, or restrict the privileges of a particular person or class of persons, business or class of businesses, or other private institution or class of private institutions;
i. make any law whose direct or indirect effect is to provide old-age, survivors’, disability, or medical benefits to any person, except that Congress may by law provide pension and medical benefits for members and former members of the armed forces of the United States, and pension benefits for civilian employees of the government of the United States;
j. sustain for more than ten years after the ratification of this Constitution any extant programs that provide old-age, survivors’, disability, or medical benefits not contemplated in the preceding clause;
j. authorize or allow any agency of the government of the United States effectively to exercise legislative or judicial power on its behalf;
k. authorize any agency to act independently of one of the three branches of government established by this Constitution; or
k. make any law or appropriation or take any other action that contravenes any part of this Constitution.
5. Treaties
a. The Senate must ratify all treaties and agreements with foreign nations and international organizations, except those agreements that the President is by law empowered to execute pursuant to a ratified treaty.
b. The Senate may not ratify any treaty that directly or indirectly places the United States, its territories or possessions, its property, its citizens, or its armed forces under the jurisdiction or control of any foreign power or international organization.
c. The Senate may not ratify any treaty that contravenes any provision of this Constitution or any constitutional law previously enacted by Congress.
7. Acts of Congress may be revised or revoked as provided in Articles VII, VIII, and IX of this Constitution. [Stay tuned.]
Excerpt 1, from Article II: CITIZENSHIP, VOTING, AND RELIGIOUS TESTS FOR OFFICE
Excerpt 2, from Article III: RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES OF CITIZENS
“Don’t change horses midstream”, an adage attributed to Abraham Lincoln, means (inter alia) stick with the incumbent president during times of turmoil and conflict.
If the present conflict in Gaza leads to a wider war, with heavy involvement by the U.S. and (possibly) attacks on Americans in their homeland, the pro-Biden (or Harris) chorus will sing rousing renditions of “don’t change horses midstream”.
But why would Americans want to stick with an incumbent (or his eager alto) who got us into the mess in the first place by displaying weakness at every turn: bugging out disgracefully from Afghanistan, failing to protect America’s southern border, playing footsie with China (under the table), shoveling billions at the Taliban, shoveling more billions at Iran, throwing more billions at Ukraine instead of building America’s own defense forces, and weakening America’s economic and industrial base in the Quixotic battle against “climate change”?
Leftists, being anti-American, love those things. Let’s hope that a sizable fraction of American voters see them for what they are: weakness in the face of our enemies.
Changing horses midstream would be just the start of a much-needed reversal of America’s economic and security prospects.
I will get around to Israel in due course. But I need to set the stage with an excursion into grade-school arithmetic.
Do you remember learning how to work with fractions? To add, subtract, multiply, or divide fractional numbers with different denominators, it is necessary to convert each number to a common denominator (mentally if not mechanically). A simple example is the addition of 1/8 and 1/4. Because 1/4 = 2/8, the lowest common denominator is an eighth, which is lower than a fourth. So, by the rule of the lowest common denominator (LCD), the addition of 1/8 and 1/4 becomes the addition of 1/8 and 2/8, which yields 3/8.
In the classroom, before AP courses were devised, the pace of teaching was influenced by the pupils who were slower at learning a subject. The practice was known (unofficially) as catering to the LCD. The pace of teaching was tailored to the less-bright students (eighths) instead of brighter students (fourths).
AP courses are under attack (and have been discontinued in some places) because the placement of pupils in them is a form of discrimination — discrimination of the kind that is based on merit, not racial or ethnic prejudice. But because blacks on average are considerably less intelligent than whites (especially Jews) and East Asians, blacks tend to be left behind in educational endeavors. This, of course, is “unfair”, “discriminatory”, and “racist” — and it flies in the face of “equity”.
The attainment of “equity” therefore requires the removal of badges of superiority and occasions in which blacks might feel inferior to whites, etc. So out with AP courses; out with SAT and GRE scores as criteria for admissions to undergraduate and graduate programs: in with blatant pro-black discrimination in admissions; in with segregated housing and black-only events and programs; and out with meaningful grades (pass-fail is an old solution; “A” is becoming the new normal where grades are still used).
“Equity” is a way of catering to the LCD, with a twist. The twist is that “equity” requires not just the same reward for everyone, regardless of ability and effort, but extra-special treatment for “victims” of … of what? A “system” that is obviously inequitable because of “white privilege”, “patriarchy”, and whatever other excuse the less able and their leftist supporters can conjure instead of facing facts about genetic and cultural differences that produce different outcomes — not only between identity groups but also within them.
Thus far I’ve only touched on K-12 and university education indoctrination. The search for “victims” is perpetual on the left.
Take the Palestinians as a salient example. They are “obviously” (to a leftist) “victims” of Israel because they live (mostly) in territories that were or are controlled by Israel: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. There is also Israel’s controversial nation-state law, which according to an anti-Zionist source
declare[s] that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid.
The “nation-state” law, backed by the right-wing government, passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Some Arab lawmakers shouted and ripped up papers after the vote.
“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote.
Largely symbolic [not observed in practice], the law was enacted just after the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. It stipulates that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it.”
The usual suspects have declared that the separation of Palestinians (and other Arabs) from Israel and from its governance amount to apartheid., a crime against “international (leftist) law”. From this it follows (to a leftist) that acts of savagery — like those committed by Hamas against Israelis on 10/7 — are justified because Palestinians are “victims”. It further follows (to a leftist) that Israel’s fully justified preventive retaliation is “aggression”.
Let’s take a few minutes to examine those premises.
It’s true enough that the denizens of Gaza are poor and feckless. But what makes them “victims”? They are about on a par with most non-Jewish Semites, except for the relative handful who are members of a professional caste or oil-rich. The basic problem with most such members of humanity —whether in the Middle East or elsewhere — isn’t that they have been put down by anyone (e.g., Israelis) but that they lack the intellectual, cultural, and natural resources to raise themselves up.
A “funny” thing about Israel is that it is of a piece with the surrounding lands occupied by non-Jews, but it has become a relatively prosperous place because Jews have the intellectual and cultural resources that undergird prosperity.
For their success and for the fact that they are Jews, the Jews of Israel are the targets of envious failures (Palestinian and Muslim hot-heads), Jew-haters (in addition to the hot-heads), and leftists who can’t bear to think that Palestinians (like American blacks) mainly have their genes and culture to blame for their failings.
Israel was founded (re-founded, really) in the wake of the Holocaust. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews — a safe haven for a historically oppressed and brutalized people. Israel has been been under attack by Muslims since its modern founding. But Israel has a natural right to self defense and to preserve its Jewish character, just as the American rebels of 1776 had a natural right to declare themselves independent of a despotic King and rapacious Parliament.
So the Gaza Strip and the West Bank become de jure parts of Israel (though the Gaza Strip was foolishly handed over to anti-Israelis) as a matter of the natural right of self-defense. As for Palestinians living in Israel proper, why should they have a voice in the governance of a country that was re-founded for Jews? Well, despite the nation-state law cited above, they do have a voice in the governance of Israel.
So, all of the leftist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, Palestinians aren’t “victims”, except of their own genes and culture. But unlike the “liberals” of old, the left nowadays focuses on demonizing the meritorious instead of helping those who need help.
Finally, there is the accusation that Israelis are sometimes brutal in their own defense. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s impossible to defend a country against determined enemies without being brutal toward them — just as it’s impossible to protect law-abiding citizens by disarming them and depriving them of police protection. The left sees Israelis as brutal because the left despises Israeli Jews, not because Israelis are any more brutal than leftists like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their many successors unto the present day.
Coda: There was a time when most Americans recognized the need for brutality in the defense of Americans — which included existential threats posed by distant enemies. It is a sad commentary on the state of America that a sizable and influential segment of the populace no longer believes that America is worth defending.
Those pampered idiots somehow consider themselves to be “victims” of a system that allows them to spout such nonsense and to tear down the very laws and traditions that shelter them from the wrath of the rightfully aggrieved victims of their beliefs and policies: hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding victims of unfettered illegal immigration, unnecessary Covid lockdowns, prosperity-draining regulations and regulatory agencies, unnecessarily high energy costs because of the climate-change hoax, etc., etc., etc.
Economics is about the production, exchange, and use of goods and services. I focus here on production, though production is influenced by exchange and use. Consumers are the end users of goods and services, and consumers’ wants drive production and exchange, or would do so in a sane world. (I’ll come back to that when I discuss the role of government on the production side.)
The production side of the economy encompasses several types of actor, where some persons may play more than one role in the epic. Some of the actors, as you will see, are responsible for the fact that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP grows at a much lower rate than it would absent their “contributions”. The cumulative effect of the lower rate is what I call America’s long-running mega-depression.
THE ACTORS ON THE PRODUCTION SIDE
Workers
They find or make and deliver the goods and services to consumers. Without them — miners, lumberjacks, farmers, truckers, carpenters, electricians, barbers, waiters, store employees, and so on — the economy (and population) would rapidly shrink to a primitive state of small-holding farms, hunting and gathering, and exchange mainly through barter.
Technologists
They devise methods and devices that enable workers to find, make, and deliver more, different, and better goods and services. This type — from the clever tinkerer to the doctorate in physics — has been indispensable to real economic progress.
Facilitators
Some of these (e.g., wholesalers) are hard to distinguish from workers, and could be classified as such. Others (e.g., trainers, accountants, bankers, and employees of stock-trading firms) perform tasks that enable businesses to launch, function more efficiently, and expand more to satisfy more of consumers’ wants.
On the side — not directly involved in business operations, but essential to them — are security operatives. These are supplemented and complemented by legitimate (if not always effective) arms of government: law-enforcement agencies and defense forces. As security fails, economic activity falters (witness rampant theft, looting, and subsequent store closures).
Bureaucrats
This type is of two kinds: essential and counterproductive. Essential bureaucrats are those persons who perform functions that a sensible business owner would want to have performed even if he weren’t required to do so by statute or regulation. A recruiter who seeks, screens, and recommends some job applicants for hiring is a bureaucrat that a large business might find it advantageous to have. An auditor who looks for waste, fraud, and abuse in the spending of the business’s money is another.
On the counterproductive side we find those bureaucrats whose actions make consumers worse off. This is done by perform functions mandated by governments, the brain-children of HR departments, and out-of-touch overseers who are seeking the approval of their peers for being “enlightened”.
The counterproductive side is guided by myriad government mandates which circumscribe what a business may produce; how it may produce it (even if inefficiently); who it may employ to produce it (even if incompetently); how much it must pay its employees (through the minimum wage and enforced unionization); where and how it may offer its products (e.g., through restrictions on operating hours, interstate transportation, and advertising).
Overseers
The owner-operator of a small business is but a worker (cum technologist and facilitator) who has to pay himself. In somewhat larger businesses, overseers often also serve as workers, technologists, and facilitators. My interest here is with the overseers in larger businesses, each of whom has responsibility for a particular function, or who is charged with the success or failure of the entire business. I omit shareholders— who almost never have an effective voice in the management of a larger business — and boards of directors — who rarely do more than rubber-stamp the CEOs’ wishes, unless a business is doing badly (often for reasons that have nothing to do with dispensable and dispensed-with CEOs).
THE VILLAINS OF THE PIECE: BUREAUCRATS AND OVERSEERS
If you have lived as long as I have lived, you don’t need to cite a bunch of statistics to show that bureaucrats and overseers have overrun the work force, in and out of government.
Part of this is due to the growth of government bureaucracies, which are filled with bureaucrats (of course) and headed by overseers (bureaucrats on steroids) who dream up more and more things that bureaucrats can do to impede the real economy — the one that consists of workers and facilitators. The work of government bureaucrats ineluctably leads to the bureaucratization of private companies.
Not only that, but government actions are driven by politicians (super-overseers), most of whom are in thrall to various identity groups. In the service of those identity groups, governments and the private companies whose fortunes they decide are riddled with incompetent workers and saddled with incompetent subcontractors. (See “Affirmative Action: A Modest Proposal”.)
THE CONSEQUENCES, AND MORE
And you wonder why things cost more than ten times as much as they did in the 1950s? Government itself and the things that it does to the private sector are the driving forces behind inflation.
And when super-duper overseers — the idiots at the top like presidents and governors — do really stupid things like forcing businesses to shut down and workers to “work” at home and pupils to “learn” remotely, things really go downhill: prices up, output and quality down.
That’s merely the frosting on the cake, which consists of shoveling money at corrupt foreign regimes (some of them terroristic) and domestic layabouts, and forcing private companies to hire incompetent workers and facilitators.
At the heart of all this, of course is the central government, which pretty much dictates to other governments and the nation at large. If the central government had to compete for your business with companies that actually produce things, it would disappear in a New York minute. But it won’t disappear. It just keeps growing — gobbling up your tax money and the money “printed” by the Fed to support its shiftless schemes.
When I ponder the question, I note – as I’m sure others have before me – that there are many believers who are amoral or even immoral in their actual behavior, and many non-believers who are moral. But I don’t know percentages. My guess is that more believers than non-believers live moral lives, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the differences were not enormously large. You can see some statistics on infidelity and religion here, for example.
A chart from the article:
Historically, it’s easy to show that religions and religious societies can become corrupt, and societies that are seemingly religious can wage religious wars or pogroms that are very murderous. The same is true of individuals. I’ve personally known a number of religious people with very shaky moral behavior, as well as atheists who are very upright.
Nevertheless, I think there’s something to the general proposition that a society in which most of the people throw religion away, and whose culture starts mocking religious belief, tends to be on the way to ruin. I don’t think that’s the only thing going on, though. Perhaps the loss of religion is a symbol of a decline rather than the main cause, but then it sets up a negative feedback loop a la Sodom and Gomorrah?
Just so.
Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking a few years ago at the dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College, quoted John Adams’s address to the Massachusetts militia in 1798:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thomas underscored the critical point, one that is missing from most lamentations about the failures of the educational establishment. “The preservation of liberty,” he said in his peroration, “is not guaranteed. Without the guardrails supplied by religious conviction, popular sovereignty can devolve into mob rule, unmoored from any conception of objective truth.” [“A Genuinely Transgressive Act: On the Dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College”, The New Criterion, November 2019]
As traditional social norms and civil society were (and are) being shattered by the left, the destructive results — spelled out here by Malcolm Pollack — have merely invited the further growth of the state and the enactment of yet more destructive policies. Failure breeds more failure because the left cares not about consequences of its agenda. Power — absolute power — is its golden calf.
The left’s war on traditional social norms and civil society is of a piece with its abandonment of religion:
A survey from Gallup shows that religious affiliations have decreased dramatically among Democrats over the last 24 years.
According to Breitbart, the Gallup poll reports that in 1999, the number of Democrats who identified as religious in some way was at 60%, compared to 62% of Republicans. In 2023, that percentage is now just 37%, a staggering 23-point decrease that amounts to an average decrease of 1% every year.
“During that time, the percentage of Democrats identifying as spiritual but not religious has increased 14 points,” the survey reports, “while the percentage saying they are neither has tripled.” Meanwhile, “there has been no meaningful change in Republicans’ self-identification as religious or spiritual.” The percentage of Republicans who identify as religious has decreased by just one point since 1999, at 61% today. In the same span of time, the number of Republicans who identify as “spiritual” rather than religious rose slightly, from 25% to 28%.
Among independents, the number of those who identify as “spiritual” has decreased slightly from 37% to 32%, while those who identify as neither religious nor spiritual has risen noticeably, from 13% to 21%.
The decline in religious observance by the left has fueled the displacement of religion, community, and a common culture by the regulatory-welfare state, abortion on demand, anthropogenic global warming, feminism, “choice”, and myriad other totems, beliefs, “movements”, and “leaders”, both religious and secular. As a result of this secular nirvana, are our minds less troubled, do we sleep better, are we happier in our relationships, is our destiny more secure? The answer to each of those questions is “no”.
The tale was told long ago:
[1] Now the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: Why hath God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise? [2] And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: [3] But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. [4] And the serpent said to the woman: No, you shall not die the death. [5] For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil. [Book of Genesis, Chapter 3]
One of the things intellectuals 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. [p. 303]
left’s essential agenda is the repudiation of ordered liberty of the kind that arises from evolved social norms, and the replacement of that liberty by sugar-coated oppression. The bread and circuses of imperial Rome have nothing on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and the many other forms of personal and corporate welfare that are draining America of its wealth and élan. All of that “welfare” has been bought at the price of economic and social liberty (which are indivisible).
Freedom from social bonds and social norms is not liberty. Freedom from religion, which is a key objective of the left, is bound to yield less liberty and more crime, which further erodes liberty.
Some years ago, Dahlia Lithwick of Slateinveighed against opponents of the “Living Constitution” without explaining it. Here’s Dahlia:
To hear Tom DeLay and his cronies tell it, the only alternative to the interpretive theory of “Originalism” or “strict construction” is to have judges swinging like monkeys from the constitutional chandeliers, making up whatever they want, whenever they want….
A Nexis search for the words “living Constitution” turns up literally dozens of stories by conservatives bashing the premise into a hopeless pulp. But it’s hard to find a creditable recent defense of the Constitution as something greater than the span of its own four corners. And I wonder why.
Is it because the words “living Constitution,” like the words “feminist” or “liberal,” have become wholly appropriated by the Rush Limbaughs of the world? Or is it something deeper—a sense on the part of serious liberal thinkers that Roe v. Wade, with its kabbalistic talk of constitutional penumbras and emanations, really is indefensible? Is it, as I have argued before, that we are all secretly afraid that Scalia is right? That a living Constitution is nothing more than a bunch of monkeys on chandeliers?
Well, let me first tell you how we got to the “Living Constitution.” You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand it. The road is not that complicated. Initially, the Court began giving terms in the text of the Constitution a meaning they didn’t have when they were adopted. For example, the First Amendment, which forbids Congress to abridge the freedom of speech. What does the freedom of speech mean? Well, it clearly did not mean that Congress or government could not impose any restrictions upon speech. Libel laws, for example, were clearly constitutional. Nobody thought the First Amendment was carte blanche to libel someone. But in the famous case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court said, “But the First Amendment does prevent you from suing for libel if you are a public figure and if the libel was not malicious” — that is, the person, a member of the press or otherwise, thought that what the person said was true. Well, that had never been the law. I mean, it might be a good law. And some states could amend their libel law….
… There is no text in the Constitution that you could reinterpret to create a right to abortion…. So you need something else. The something else is called the doctrine of “Substantive Due Process.” Only lawyers can walk around talking about substantive process, in as much as it’s a contradiction in terms….
What substantive due process is is quite simple — the Constitution has a Due Process Clause, which says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Now, what does this guarantee? Does it guarantee life, liberty or property? No, indeed! All three can be taken away. You can be fined, you can be incarcerated, you can even be executed, but not without due process of law. It’s a procedural guarantee…. [I]n fact the first case to do it was Dred Scott. But it became more popular in the 1920s. The Court said there are some liberties that are so important, that no process will suffice to take them away. Hence, substantive due process.
Now, what liberties are they? The Court will tell you. Be patient. When the doctrine of substantive due process was initially announced, it was limited in this way, the Court said it embraces only those liberties that are fundamental to a democratic society and rooted in the traditions of the American people.
Then … that limitation is eliminated. Within the last 20 years, we have found to be covered by due process the right to abortion, which was so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that it was criminal for 200 years; the right to homosexual sodomy, which was so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that it was criminal for 200 years. So it is literally true, and I don’t think this is an exaggeration, that the Court has essentially liberated itself from the text of the Constitution, from the text and even from the traditions of the American people. It is up to the Court to say what is covered by substantive due process.
What are the arguments usually made in favor of the Living Constitution?… The major argument is the Constitution is a living organism, it has to grow with the society that it governs or it will become brittle and snap.
This is … an anthropomorphism equivalent to what you hear from your stockbroker, when he tells you that the stock market is resting for an assault on the 11,000 level. The stock market panting at some base camp. The stock market is not a mountain climber and the Constitution is not a living organism for Pete’s sake; it’s a legal document, and like all legal documents, it says some things, and it doesn’t say other things. And if you think that the aficionados of the Living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again.
My Constitution is a very flexible Constitution. You think the death penalty is a good idea — persuade your fellow citizens and adopt it. You think it’s a bad idea — persuade them the other way and eliminate it. You want a right to abortion — create it the way most rights are created in a democratic society, persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and enact it. You want the opposite — persuade them the other way. That’s flexibility….
Some people are in favor of the Living Constitution because they think it always leads to greater freedom — there’s just nothing to lose, the evolving Constitution will always provide greater and greater freedom, more and more rights. Why would you think that? It’s a two-way street. And indeed, under the aegis of the Living Constitution, some freedoms have been taken away.
Recently, last term, we reversed a 15-year-old decision of the Court, which had held that the Confrontation Clause — which couldn’t be clearer, it says, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witness against him.” But a Living Constitution Court held that all that was necessary to comply with the Confrontation Clause was that the hearsay evidence which is introduced — hearsay evidence means you can’t cross-examine the person who said it because he’s not in the court — the hearsay evidence has to bear indicia of reliability. I’m happy to say that we reversed it last term with the votes of the two originalists on the Court. And the opinion said that the only indicium of reliability that the Confrontation Clause acknowledges is confrontation. You bring the witness in to testify and to be cross-examined. That’s just one example, there are others, of eliminating liberties….
Well, I’ve talked about some of the false virtues of the Living Constitution, let me tell you what I consider its principle vices are. Surely the greatest — you should always begin with principle — its greatest vice is its illegitimacy. The only reason federal courts sit in judgment of the constitutionality of federal legislation is not because they are explicitly authorized to do so in the Constitution. Some modern constitutions give the constitutional court explicit authority to review German legislation or French legislation for its constitutionality, our Constitution doesn’t say anything like that. But John Marshall says in Marbury v. Madison: Look, this is lawyers’ work. What you have here is an apparent conflict between the Constitution and the statute. And, all the time, lawyers and judges have to reconcile these conflicts — they try to read the two to comport with each other. If they can’t, it’s judges’ work to decide which ones prevail. When there are two statutes, the more recent one prevails. It implicitly repeals the older one. But when the Constitution is at issue, the Constitution prevails because it is a “superstatute.” I mean, that’s what Marshall says: It’s judges’ work….
… If you don’t believe in originalism, then you need some other principle of interpretation. Being a non-originalist is not enough. You see, I have my rules that confine me. I know what I’m looking for. When I find it — the original meaning of the Constitution — I am handcuffed. If I believe that the First Amendment meant when it was adopted that you are entitled to burn the American flag, I have to come out that way even though I don’t like to come out that way. When I find that the original meaning of the jury trial guarantee is that any additional time you spend in prison which depends upon a fact must depend upon a fact found by a jury — once I find that’s what the jury trial guarantee means, I am handcuffed. Though I’m a law-and-order type, I cannot do all the mean conservative things I would like to do to this society. You got me….
Now, if you’re not going to control your judges that way, what other criterion are you going to place before them? What is the criterion that governs the Living Constitutional judge? What can you possibly use, besides original meaning?… I have put this question — you know I speak at law schools with some frequency just to make trouble — and I put this question to the faculty all the time, or incite the students to ask their Living Constitutional professors: “Okay professor, you are not an originalist, what is your criterion?” There is none other.
… What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean? There is no such thing as a moderate interpretation of the text. Would you ask a lawyer, “Draw me a moderate contract?”…
[W]here we have arrived — [is] at the point of selecting [judges] to write a constitution, rather than [judges] to give us the fair meaning of one that has been democratically adopted. And when that happens, when the Senate interrogates nominees to the Supreme Court, or to the lower courts — you know, “Judge so-and-so, do you think there is a right to this in the Constitution? You don’t? Well, my constituents think there ought to be, and I’m not going to appoint to the court someone who is not going to find that” — when we are in that mode, you realize, we have rendered the Constitution useless, because the Constitution will mean what the majority wants it to mean. The senators are representing the majority, and they will be selecting justices who will devise a constitution that the majority wants. And that, of course, deprives the Constitution of its principle utility. The Bill of Rights is devised to protect you and me against, who do you think? The majority. My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk. And the notion that the justices ought to be selected because of the positions that they will take, that are favored by the majority, is a recipe for destruction of what we have had for 200 years.
The “Living Constitution” isn’t about rights, it’s about the ability of the those in power to impose their will on the masses, without going to the trouble of amending the Constitution or effecting constitutional legislation.
it is self-evident that illusions presuppose consciousness: an illusion cannot exist without consciousness. The ‘cannot’ expresses a very strong impossibility, broadly logical impossibility. The Germans have a nice proverb, Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. “So much seeming, so much being.” The point is that you can’t have Schein without Sein, seeming without being. It can’t be seeming ‘all the way down.’
My purpose here is to offer a simple example of the reality of consciousness.
I enjoy playing four word games offered by The New York Times: Letter Boxed, Connections, Wordle, and Spelling Bee. Sometimes — especially in the cases of Letter Boxed and Spelling Bee — I will abandon a game before finishing it. I do that because coming back to it fresh often yields a word that leads me to victory. In the case of Letter Boxed, its the word that enables me to use twelve different letters to form two words (the sought-after minimum). In the case of Spelling Bee it’s a word that has eluded me but which I know should be added to the list of words that I’ve created from seven letters — sometimes a word that uses all seven letters, finding which is a prerequisite to victory (listing all of the words that can be made with the seven letters).
What happens is this: I abandon a puzzle and sometime later (if I’m lucky) the “right” word pops into my head. What that means, of course, is that my mind has been pondering the problem while I have been doing other things, and then — as if out of thin air — the answer, which must have been lurking in my subconscious mind, suddenly pops into my conscious mind.
That’s not an illusion. I have had so many similar experiences in my lifetime that I can say this with confidence: There is a real separation between thoughts of which I am aware (consciousness) and those of which I am unaware but which are occurring (subconscious mental operations).
Several months ago I published “A More Perfect Constitution”. Its language in many places is directed at abuses that have arisen in America’s governance. Because of its daunting length, I suspect that few readers have digested it whole, and that even fewer reader have been taken notice of the many places in which the document strives to undo the damage that has been done to Americans’ liberties. This series of posts highlights that language in bite-size chunks. Links to all excerpts are given at the end of this post.
III. RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES OF CITIZENS
Rights and privileges conferred by and reserved under this Constitution apply equally to citizens of the United States but not to persons who are not citizens, except as provided herein. Neither the government of the United States nor any State may abridge any rights conferred by or reserved under this Constitution.
A. Equality and Guarantee of Rights and Privileges
Neither the government of the United States nor that of any State may do any of the following things:
1. Deprive any person, corporation, or other private entity living or operating lawfully within the jurisdiction of the government of the United States or any State of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Due process, for this purpose, shall be understood as the disposition of a civil suit or criminal charge by verdict or settlement, and not any other act of government.
2. Prohibit the free exercise of religion, except where a particular religious activity would result in the commission of an act that otherwise is criminal, irrespective of its religious connotations or provenance (Article III, Section A, Clause 6 pertains). The free exercise of religion includes but is not limited to the use of government-owned, -operated, or -funded property — including institutions of learning — for brief periods of meditation and for teaching about religion, as long as such teaching is comparative. Such property, when not in use by a governmental unit, may be used for religious activities or observances of any lawful kind, as long as such functions are not endorsed or sponsored by a governmental unit, and as long as the same property is made available under the same terms and conditions to other users. It is a denial of the free exercise of religion for any governmental unit to bar the invocation or mention of a deity or other religious figure by any person at any time or place.
3. Establish religion, either directly or by funding or giving material aid to any religion, religious activity, or any activity conducted by or on behalf of a religion or religious institution. Allowing the free exercise of religion in accordance with the preceding clause is not an establishment of religion. Further, this clause shall not be construed to prohibit the giving of funds or material support directly to individual persons, even though such funding or support might be used by those persons to underwrite a religious purpose — including but not limited to religious education — as long as such funding or support is given for a non-religious purpose, including but not limited to education, and is made generally available to all eligible persons without regard for their religious affiliations or lack thereof.
4. Abridge, influence, shape, restrict, or give preference to the expression of ideas or information for any purpose by any citizen of the United States or on behalf of a business or other private organization operating lawfully within the United States. Congress may nevertheless enact laws prohibiting and punishing the release of information by any person, whether or not affiliated with the press, that would endanger the security of the United States or any State or citizen (including their businesses wherever located), or that would jeopardize the ability of the armed forces of the government of the United States to perform their missions. Congress may also enact laws prohibiting and punishing the utterance or publication of ideas that would circumscribe the economic or social liberties of citizens of the United States, as they are recognized in this Constitution.
5. Abridge the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition government for the redress of grievances. This right does not include acts that threaten or harm persons or their property or which impede or obstruct the access of any person to any place, public or private. Neither the government of the United States nor any State shall incur or reimburse any expense related to or arising from acts of assembly and petition, except to indemnify or rectify damage that may have arisen pursuant to such acts.
6. Establish or delineate special classes of citizens or special rights or privileges for classes of citizens within its jurisdiction, for any purpose. Prohibited delineations include but are not limited to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or preference, and status as a veteran of the armed forces of the government of the United States or any State. But this clause does not limit the ability of Congress to provide by law for the treatment by employers of members of the armed forces when they are called to active duty, or to compensate or provide material support to veterans of the armed forces. Veterans of the armed forces otherwise may not by law be granted special rights or privileges, such as preferential treatment in hiring or promotion based on their status as veterans.
7. Abridge the right of any citizen, business, or other private entity operating lawfully within the United States to choose freely the persons or organizations they will associate with, employ, or do business with, notwithstanding any contractual or funding relationship with the government of the United States or any State. This clause specifically, though not exclusively, bars any form of governmental interference in the decisions of private employers to hire, promote, transfer, or terminate employees. Also barred specifically, though not exclusively, is any governmental act that requires, enables, or recognizes the formation of any organization of employees for the purpose of bargaining with employers about the terms or conditions of employment.
8. As an employer, discriminate or authorize discrimination, in any explicit or implicit way, for any reason, with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status, except that a governmental unit may by law be authorized to practice such discrimination for the sole purpose of ensuring the effective performance of that unit. This clause may not be construed to prohibit the establishment of mental and physical standards of performance, as long as those standards are job-related and applied impartially to all classes of employees and persons eligible for employment.
9. Nullify, alter, or otherwise affect any contract, either expressed or implied, that does not contravene this Constitution or otherwise constitute or suborn a crime against any third party. This clause applies to any voluntary transaction of any kind, where the parties to such a transaction are adult persons, corporations, or other private entities authorized by law, or any combination of these. This clause does not apply to marriage, civil unions, or similar arrangements, which shall be regulated by the States, individually.
10. Grant any rights, benefits, or privileges to non-citizens, except that non-citizens, including persons and corporations or other private entities operated by non-citizens, shall be entitled to due process of law for civil and criminal proceedings of the government of the United States or any State to which they may be subject. This clause does not apply to enemy combatants, the definition and treatment of which are prescribed elsewhere in this Constitution.
Excerpt 1, from Article II: CITIZENSHIP, VOTING, AND RELIGIOUS TESTS FOR OFFICE
Politics and Prosperity 