You Say You Want a Revolution

Today, in After Trump, Our Turn, Michelle Goldberg describes a wealthy actress' call for revolution:

Let’s be grateful to Susan Sarandon for exposing just how vapid and callous the left-wing #NeverHillary argument is. Speaking to Chris Hayes on MSNBC on Monday night, Sarandon, a Bernie Sanders surrogate, said she was unsure if she could bring herself to vote for Hillary Clinton in a general election. Hayes was shocked, but Sarandon posited that a Trump presidency might be preferable to a Clinton one, because it would hasten the revolution. “Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in, things will really explode,” she said. (Emphasis added)

A summary of Michelle Goldberg's article:

"In this way of thinking, the real enemy of progress is incremental reform that would render the status quo tolerable. ... The cost of electing a Republican provocateur is human misery on an inconceivable scale, inflicted on people who lack Sarandon’s many resources. ... Its tolerance for human sacrifice. ... The major barrier to such a revolution is not a populace that needs to suffer more in order to reach Sarandon’s superlative level of wokeness. It is the structural obstacles to democracy systematically erected by Republicans and Republican-appointed judges: the widespread erosion of voting rights, the unlimited flood of money into politics unleashed by the Supreme Court, and the epic gerrymandering following the 2010 census that makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to win back the House, even if they win a majority of votes. These things will get worse, not better, in any Republican administration, making the possibility of a peaceful electoral revolution all the more remote." (Emphasis added)

One of the problems of "progressive" politics' underlying class warfare ideology, as cataloged in Preliminary Notes on the Effect of the Class Warfare Paradigm (Item 9), is that it can only work through revolution, not the "incremental reform" which is democracy's methodology. And the too-rapid change of revolution, as serious thinkers since Burke(1) have concluded, wreaks catastrophic damage on society, particularly on its weakest members. (Note the Beatles' critique(2) in "You Say You Want a Revolution") Limousine liberals such as Sarandon promote a "progressive" ideology whose hidden premise is "a populace that needs to suffer more in order to reach Sarandon’s superlative level of wokeness." Since democracy's tender-minded methods haven't worked, increasing the sufferings of the wretched of the Earth will produce an aroused angry mob which will sweep all the evil and corruption away, allowing a wonderful, paradisal world to flower in the ruins.

 

Such magical thinking is scary. The actual result of totalist revolution is, typically, real social harm. The revolution Burke meditated on eventuated in the Terror. Michelle Goldberg describes a Trump ascendancy as eroding civil liberties and diminishing the humanitarian safety net:

Sarandon posited that a Trump presidency might be preferable to a Clinton one, because it would hasten the revolution. ... The results of a Trump presidency ... might just include the widespread persecution of undocumented immigrants, the appointment of Supreme Court judges who will jettison Roe v. Wade, the end of any federal action on global warming, and a ramping up of American war crimes. We certainly won’t see any expansion of family leave or early education. Based on what we’ve seen of Trump so far, we can expect him to use the powers of the federal government, including NSA surveillance, to target and humiliate his personal enemies, especially women.

A Trump presidency would actually be much worse than that. Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols. Commerce would suffer, unemployment would rise, the stock market would plunge, and the various brushfires abroad which diplomacy restrains or prevents would proliferate. The resulting Trump recession would likely dwarf the Bush recession we are still recovering from.

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(1) In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. ... society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, ... - Wikipedia


(2) Excerpts from lyrics:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world ...
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out ...

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're doing what we can
But when you want money
For people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait ...

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow ...

The "Social Justice" Attempt to Portray a Gandhian Pacifist as a Class Warrior

Melinda D. Anderson, in Teaching MLK's Life—the Man, Not the Myth, implies that his was a "social justice" (i.e., class warfare) message, not the "mainstream" message it is made out to be:

The Chicago teacher Gregory Michie says his lessons on the social-justice icon are designed to upend what he views as a simplistic and clichéd image often presented in schools. Since many of his students know King’s famous excerpt hoping for a day when no one is judged by the color of their skin, Michie’s social-studies class zeroes in on lesser-known sections of the “I Have a Dream” speech, like the “fierce urgency of now” and “tranquilizing drug of [white] gradualism.” The youngsters quickly realize that they’ve never really heard the full message of the speech, he said, and “it’s a lot more nuanced, and more fiery, than they’d thought.”

As the country observes the federal holiday named in King’s honor, it seems that schools are increasingly coming under sharp criticism from educators and activists for their approach to teaching King’s life. Some question a sanitized teaching of the black civil-rights movement, its leaders, and other struggles for social justice that denies students an accurate and complete account of history. These debates are complicated by the inherent professional dangers in teaching through a social-justice lens.

In her book Language, Culture, and Teaching, the multicultural educator and author Sonia Nieto writes that schools in attempting to make King “palatable to the mainstream … have made [him] a milquetoast.”

But King cites Lincoln, who emphatically rebuts the class warfare skepticism about the sincerity and legitimacy of the Declaration and the Constitution. (Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) ) More to the point, this is the speech where MLK himself affirms the mainstream:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." ...

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

In these passages King rejects the social justice dogma that the principles in the Declaration and the Constitution are hypocritical; and the dogma that assigns ineradicable class based on skin color.

Ms. Anderson's implied argument—that portraying King as a great American who employed peaceful democratic persuasion to achieve his ends is a "myth"—is deeply dishonest and maliciously divisive. Her article's appearance in The Atlantic is another example of the way class warfare ideology corrupts the editorial judgment of "progressive" journalism.

Well may Anderson complain about "the inherent professional dangers in teaching through a social-justice lens." In King's case, doing so is morally wrong not because it makes the mainstream uncomfortable, but because it is untrue.

Trump's Tribalism Does Not Belong in a Nation Founded on Principles

In Clinton’s Values vs. Trump’s Tribalism, Slate's William Saletan connects presidential year politics to the Enlightenment values of the Founders:

In a shared-values framework, foreign peoples and faith traditions aren’t necessarily your enemies. They can be objects of empathy. [Hillary] Clinton drew an analogy between Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims and an infamous U.S. exclusion of Jewish refugees: “We remember the nearly 1,000 Jews aboard the St. Louis who were refused entry in 1939 and sent back to Europe. ... If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.”

America was founded on values, unlike the other nations which existed at the time, which were founded on kinship. (France was the ethnic French; Spain was the "Spaniards," etc.) The Enlightenment values in the Declaration and the Constitution—equality, natural rights, and government by the people—defined the infant nation, and define us today. Allan Bloom asserted that "it is possible to become an American in a day" (by adopting America's democratic values), while in France it is still debated, he argued, whether Jews (who have been there for centuries) are "constitutively French."

The various forms of kinship politics, by operating in the ad hominem terms of identity rather than the universal principles of liberal democracy, are inevitably behind the times. Backward.

The right's current practice of judging people in terms of religion, which Saletan describes in dissecting Trump's politics; and the left's current class warfare identity politics, are both outdated and dysfunctional. They elevate partisan factionalism and self-interest above principled values and the public good. Saletan argues that such tribalism tends toward "barbarism": "When tribalism is your only guide, reluctance to use extreme measures is weakness. ... The real enemy is barbarism, and it can infiltrate your soul."

Kinship politics is the politics of class, a tribal arrangement utterly foreign to the spirit of the Constitution. Last week Mark Joseph Stern reminded us that, as Justice John Marshall Harlan stated, the Constitution "neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." ... "In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."

Discussing North Carolina’s New Anti-LGBTQ Law, Stern notes:

HB 2 is also unconstitutional—not maybe unconstitutional, or unconstitutional-before-the-right-judge, but in total contravention of established Supreme Court precedent. In fact, the court dealt with a very similar law in 1996’s Romer v. Evans, when it invalidated a Colorado measure that forbade municipalities from passing gay nondiscrimination ordinances.

Stern reminds us that even a democratically elected legislature is not permitted to practice class warfare against a group of citizens it does not like:

As the court explained in Romer, the Equal Protection Clause forbids a state from “singl[ing] out a certain class of citizens” and “impos[ing] a special disability upon those persons alone.” Such a law is “inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects,” and under the 14^th Amendment, “animosity” toward a “politically unpopular group” is not a “proper legislative end.” Just like the law invalidated in Romer, HB 2 “identifies persons by a single trait”—gay or trans identity—“and then denies them protection across the board.” The Equal Protection Clause cannot tolerate this “bare desire to harm” minorities.

The lawlessness of the brand of Republicanism which has developed since the 1980 presidential election has come home to roost, degrading the United States to banana republic politics in which scores of millions imagine that an utterly unpresidential scoundrel like Trump could legitimately occupy the White House; and North Carolina attempts legislated bigotry expressly forbidden by the Supreme Court to Colorado twenty years earlier.

Jacob Weisberg: "An America in which Trump can represent one of the major parties feels like a very different country from the one many of us thought we lived in."

Saletan, Hayek: Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism

Recently William Saletan: wrote, "What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump."

The reason may be found in a fundamental characteristic of conservatism: its tropism toward wholesale obstructionism, derived from a fundamental lack of political ideas and a resulting tendency to define itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas and practices. Half a century ago F. A. Hayek, in his landmark "Why I Am Not a Conservative," [PDF] wrote:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. ... Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them. (Emphasis added)

"Why I Am Not A Conservative" argues that conservatism has no "distinctive principles" of its own, and seems to imply that at any given moment it defines itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas. (Even though this leaves conservatives with an incoherent outlook.)

In Obama Didn't Create Trump, Saletan begins:

Everything that’s wrong with America is Barack Obama’s fault. That’s what Republican politicians have told themselves and the public for eight years. It began before Obama took office, when Republicans blamed him for a recession that started on their watch. Now they’re blaming Obama for the rise of their own presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.

The delusion that Obama caused Trump has been building since last year. This week, it reached the last bastion of rationality on the right: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat has a long track record of fairness and good sense. When the madness infects even him, it’s time to clear the air. No, Obama didn’t cause Trump. What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump.

The result is incoherence and moral bankruptcy:

Nevertheless, Republicans opposed Obama at every turn. Whatever he embraced, they rejected. They refused to compromise on health care or offer a realistic alternative. They staged dozens of votes to repeal the new health-insurance law in its entirety. They forced a federal shutdown to protest the law. They took the nation’s credit rating hostage in a debt-ceiling showdown. They urged Iran to reject a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the United States.

A consequence of knee-jerk oppositionalism is that, where your opponent pursues wise and constructive political positions, you tend to be maneuvered into foolish and destructive positions:

If Obama had been a leftist, the GOP’s policy of negating him on every issue might have positioned Republicans in the mainstream. Instead, because Obama was a moderate, the GOP’s negation strategy pushed it toward the fringe. Obama was for fiscal responsibility and compromise, so Republicans were for absolutism and drama, risking a federal shutdown and a credit default. Obama was for respecting the Supreme Court, so the GOP was for defying judicial orders. Obama was for using sanctions to pressure Iran into a nuclear deal, so Republicans were for scrapping the deal and daring Iran to provoke a war. Obama, like Bush, was for drawing a clear distinction between terrorists and Muslims. So Republicans were for blurring that distinction.

Furthermore, if your opponents' leader is temperate and decent, the blind pursuit of difference may result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully:

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. Trump validates the maxim that in presidential primaries, the opposition party tends to choose a candidate who differs temperamentally from the incumbent. Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a child.

Saletan adds, "And what Obama wasn’t—insecure, bitter, vindictive, xenophobic, sectarian—is what the GOP, in the era of Trump, has become."

There are disturbing parallels between the rise of Trump and the dissolution of the German democracy in the early thirties of the last century:

• An implied Leader Principle(1) (Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders)
• An emphasis on strength and power (see next item)
• Scorn for "weak" democratic decencies. (A commentator, to Conor Friedersdorf: "It is profoundly ugly when Trump just gleefully says, more or less, I love torture and we’re going to be doing a lot of it.")
• A contempt for civil liberties (Friedersdorf: A pol who seeks to gain power by demonizing ethnic-minority groups and threatening their core rights is engaged in a special category of leadership failure.)
• Expulsion, sometimes violent, of opponents from public meetings
• The belief that Trump is too bombastic, too offensive, too overbearing to survive the electoral process of a modern democracy

(1) Google Führerprinzip