About people coming to America and taking American jobs

Worker spending is a major pillar of economics. Everyone who comes into America and goes to work creates at least as many jobs as they take. With their pay they buy all the things of life, from groceries to cars to houses. This creates or expands industries which employ people. New jobs. This includes our own children (that’s where most of the “job takers” comes from).

Example: America at the founding had three million people. It now has one hundred times  as many, most born here. And one hundred times as many jobs.

So don’t worry about new people taking jobs. They create jobs.

You can count on it.

 

On liking to read the same book over and over

Rebecca Jennings, in "In defense of reading the same book over and over again": “We know how Harry Potter will end, and, more importantly, how that ending will make us feel.”

I like to read Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy over again because it puts me in touch with the moral order. The story contains ordinary people who display decency and moral courage when confronted with someone in need; or a situation that needs rectifying. I find the same qualities in the Harry Potter series, and in a mainstream bestseller such as Nelson DeMille’s Up Country.

Aristotle’s Poetics suggests that the arts enable us to have, vicariously, experiences we need to experience in order to broaden our awareness and deepen our humanity.

Like Jennings, we return to works that afford us this.

Are House Democrats bent on extending the Trump stranglehold?

On July 15, Tara Golshan and Ella Nilsen wrote:

AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley are demanding that moderate House Democrats, including “veteran black lawmakers who have worked their way into the inner circle of House leadership,” conform to their own concept of radical wokeness. “Chakrabarti [AOC’s chief of staff] commented as well, with his tweet comparing current moderate Democrats to the Southern Democrats who enabled segregationist policies in the 1940s.”

 The issue was the border funding vote, the best option available to the Democrats at the time. AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley, freshman House members, are adopting a hard line which leaves veteran, experienced House members no choice. A minority of four are attempting to dictate to a much larger majority having generations of experience.

First, this is not democracy. Second, this sort of intolerance is abhorrent to the American voting public, both Democrats and Republicans. There could be no better way of extending the Trump stranglehold for four more years.

-*—

Tara Golshan:

Late Friday night, the official Twitter account for House Democrats, managed by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) — fired off an incendiary tweet about Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, accusing him of “singling out out a Native American woman of color,” Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS).
[Jeffries wrote:]

Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color?
Her name is Congresswoman Davids, not Sharice.
She is a phenomenal new member who flipped a red seat blue.

At the time, [Saikat] Chakrabarti [AOC’s chief of staff] referred to moderate Democrats who advocated for the Senate plan [as] the “New Southern Democrats,” and said they were “hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.” (Southern Democrats in the 1940s were on the whole conservative, and were opponents of civil rights efforts, including early attempts at desegregation.) Chakrabarti … [saw those members] as enablers of a racist system.

Tensions between House Democratic leadership and progressive lawmakers have been escalating in recent weeks, as progressives see leadership as dismissive of their demands and influence in the party. Chakrabarti sits at an interesting intersection of this dynamic. He works for Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist member whose viral internet presence has helped her platform to dominate conversation at the national level in a manner that has struck the ire of entrenched House members. And he founded Justice Democrats, a progressive group working to unseat ideologically moderate Democrats, some of which are veteran black lawmakers who have worked their way into the inner circle of House leadership. 

Until now, Pelosi has publicly dismissed progressives’ influence and privately told the House majority to maintain a spirit of unity. But the internal strife within her party keeps boiling over into the public.

Since then, Chakrabarti and another AOC staff member, communications director Corbin Trent, have been dismissed.

The AOC four have been referred to as the progressive, left, or even most liberal part of the Democratic Party. This is a category mistake. AOC belongs to a separate tradition not compatible with the fundamental values of the Party, which trace back to two Enlightenment documents, the Declaration and the Constitution. Those values, originating in western Europe, constitute Enlightenment liberalism, and they are centered on equality; the rights, dignity, and autonomy of the single person; universalism; cooperation; toleration; and a passion for optimum outcomes for everybody.

The AOC group's values come from a dark central European mindset which produced Marxism, Freudianism, and fascism. Behind the scenes, they assume that humanity is afflicted by original sin, and they assume that human existence is a zero sum game: when one group gains something, another group loses something. The AOC group's values imply conflict.

The Democratic Party comes from a heritage which imagines win-win solutions and speaks of "enlightened self-interest," in which voluntary service to the public good makes one's own life better. Democratic values imply cooperation and voluntary association; AOC values imply that life is a war of all against all, and favor obligatory membership in a collective in which the group is all and the individual is nothing.

AOC's left is inherently backward and reactionary, not progressive. The modern world, by contrast, is liberal. Democracy is liberal, science is liberal, justice is liberal, and true intellectuality is liberal. All favor openness, cooperation, free communication and freedom of thought, the conviction that no gender or ethnicity is better than another, and complete equality of opportunity for everyone regardless of background. There is no overlap between the AOC outlook and the outlook of the Democratic Party, between an oppositional, adversarial, subversive outlook and an outlook whose most famous three words is “We the People.”

Caitlin Flanagan’s acerbic remarks about ‘justice critics’

‘Truth stands independently of social opinion,’ Robert Pirsig wrote: and that’s one reason ‘social justice’ is an oxymoron.

Caitlin Flanagan: 

The justice critics, the ones who want to count up every movie’s sins against approved sensibilities, say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it. Only another artist would understand the way that Tarantino has deployed that potent force. Guillermo del Toro tweeted that the movie was “[chock-full] of yearning,” that it was “a tale of another time that probably never was but feels like a memory.”

The justice critics aren’t interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be. To them, the movie is too white, too violent toward women, and too uninterested in Margot Robbie, whose Sharon Tate has few lines. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody reviled the picture, calling it “ridiculously white.” But Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact that does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie.

The justice critics want to subject art to ‘constraints and considerations extraneous’ to it. [The phrase comes from Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, who once declared, “Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline.”]

Unaesthetic philistines telling art what to do is nothing new, from the boy-meets-tractor diktat of Soviet Commissars to Plato’s condemnation of Graeco-Roman mythology for showing the gods chasing each other’s wives.

Kudos to Flanagan for daring to critique puritanical dictatorship-of-virtue justice critics and the boring bowdlerized didactic art they would foist on us. Ars grātiā artis

The academic left and the political left, i.e., Democratic Party. Compare and contrast.

There’s no overlap. The academic left today is a form of Marxism. The politics of identity is a recognizable variant of class warfare. The AL’s mantra — “oppositional, adversarial, subversive” — echoes the call to war which ends the Communist Manifesto. It’s an attack outlook incompatible with liberalism.

The political “left” today — Democrats as contrasted with Republicans — is descended from two Enlightenment documents, the Declaration and Constitution. The stirring principles in them, human equality, the rights of man, immunities from unnecessary government intrusion, “the human soul is inviolate,” these are Enlightenment liberalism’s principles. They are positive, constructive principles based on cooperation, as is political democracy.

The tenor of the academic left, “oppositional, adversarial, subversive,” consists of negative, destructive principles based on enmity. It has turned higher education, the university, from a place for the free discussion of competing ideas, an arena, into a place where only the “right” ideas are allowed, a “platform,” where viewpoint censorship of what it considers wrong ideas is routinely justified under a new, anti-intellectual “no platforming” rule.

The Democratic party, an Enlightenment liberal party, needs to be able to speak about its positive, cooperative, constructive principles clearly when some of its members, an AOC, a Tlaib, an Omar, appear more left than liberal.

It can’t, because nowhere in our public discourse today, in the “news,” is liberalism discussed on its own terms, as the underlying conceptual system of our country, and as such an inspiration to the world which unmasks the negativity, hostility, and destructiveness of an undermining “left” which is so alien to it.

The Democratic party’s success in the 2018 election, which gave it a decisive majority in the House, also brought its inability to speak clearly to the fore. It can’t articulate its spiritual opposition to the politics of identity, even though the politics of identity cannot be reconciled with the Democratic party’s most fundamental value, human equality, because valorizing certain identities over others (and thus encouraging discriminatory treatment of other identities) is presented in media discourse as a way of fighting racism. It is torn between another of its intrinsic values, freedom of speech, and the pressure to treat campus viewpoint censorship with benign neglect, out of fear of being accused of countenancing hate speech.

To exercise the forceful leadership needed to topple a malignant presidency, the Democratic party needs the courage to say, as Justice Harlan did in dissent to Plessy versus Ferguson, “our Constitution … neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens” and in no way supports any politics of identity. The Democratic party needs to say that freedom of speech is more important than fear, fear that students may be misled or have their feelings hurt.

The Democratic party’s inability to proclaim what it stands for forcefully may be the greatest undiscussed problem of the calamitous political situation we’ve gotten ourselves into.

-*—

Afterword: In the mid-nineties, shortly after beginning to use the internet, I received an email from Mike Morris concerning something I said in a discussion group. Mike used a term new to me, “Enlightenment liberal.” He meant a liberalism having no taint of Marxism, a perceptive understanding (Mike once teamed with Kip Thorne, in the Morris-Thorne Wormhole Metric and other contributions to astrophysics) I have studied ever since.

Constitutional Crisis in Three Parts, Nullifying Congress, Acting as judge in his own behalf, and Tanking the Constitution

Part I: “Trump's stonewalling of Congress is a Constitutional crisis”

On April 25, 2019, Julian Zelizer wrote:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is mad as hell. Her spokeswoman released a statement saying: "President Trump and his Administration are engaged in unprecedented stonewalling and once again using the legal system to conceal every area of his life as well as his wrongdoing and improprieties from the American people."

We are getting deeper and deeper into a constitutional crisis.

The president* is “trying to act in imperial fashion”:

Many presidents have attempted to use this power [executive privilege] under specific circumstances with specific hearings. But Trump is making a much bolder claim. The president is being very straightforward. He will defy all subpoenas because he does not believe the investigations are legitimate. His claim has nothing to do with national security. It isn't even being sold as an effort to protect the ability of his advisers to speak freely. He just doesn't agree to participate, claiming that the Democrats are being driven by partisanship. The President will flex his executive muscle because he believes he can. He is daring anyone to stop him.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that has driven much of his presidency, and the guiding philosophy that pops up in the second part of special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Not surprisingly, the way that he is handling the post-report period, with grandiose claims of presidential authority and aggressive postures toward the legislative branches, are confirming the worst impressions to come out of Mueller's investigation. This is the ultimate example of a president trying to act in imperial fashion.

How far will the president* go?: “The President keeps forcing the nation's hand in considering how far it is willing to let a president go before finally saying that enough is enough.”

-*--

Constitutional Crisis, Part II: By Trump’s standard, “Congress could never investigate anything.”

Lee Moran:

Mueller’s report, released with redactions last week, contained a number of damning revelations about the president. Trump has falsely claimed it totally exonerated him.

“If that were the standard, then Congress could never investigate anything,” the Post wrote. “Mr. Trump’s Republican colleagues must remember the battles they fought with President Barack Obama over transparency only a few years ago when they ran the House.

The editorial board also argued that Trump’s “own words” proved he was motivated more “by concealing anything that might land him in political jeopardy” than by “any specific concern about protecting presidential decision-making or some other crucial executive-branch function.”

-*--

Constitutional Crisis, Part III, “Blatant … obstruction of the lawful processes of a coequal branch of government.”

Dylan Scott wrote:

That’s about as blatant an obstruction of the lawful processes of a coequal branch of government as I’ve ever seen,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional scholar, told the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on Wednesday.

From [Matthew] Yglesias:

Trump’s statements about NATO and the leak of Democratic National Committee emails likely pilfered by Russians have raised questions about Trump’s financial relationships with oligarchs tied to the Russian government. Tax disclosure would let us see how Trump’s businesses work — how successful he really is and how much that success hinges on investments from foreign actors who may have a more nefarious agenda than real estate development.

“Trump has set a culture of secrecy that rivals Richard Nixon. He won’t release his financial records. He has been investigated for obstructing justice by Robert Mueller. Now he doesn’t want administration officials testifying in Congress, one of the most routine and sacrosanct examples of the country’s systems of checks and balances. In court, Trump’s lawyers have made a sweeping case to curtail Congress’s ability to investigate the executive branch.”

In conclusion:
1. Stonewalling Congress

2. “Congress could never investigate anything.”

3. “Blatant … obstruction of the lawful processes of a coequal branch of government.”

4. Trump is 1. Nullifying Congress, 2. Acting as judge in his own behalf, and 3. Tanking the Constitution, violating the oath to “protect and defend” it. He is behaving in a dictatorial fashion.

Americans elected today’s Democratic House to demonstrate their disgust with the most corrupt president* in history. The response of the Pelosi-led House is beginning to look like a profile in cowardice.

Americans elected today’s Democratic House to demonstrate their disgust with the most corrupt president* in history. The response of the Pelosi-led House is beginning to look like a profile in cowardice. 

Brian Beutler, Crooked.com: “Their irresolution has allowed Republicans to drown the public in unanswered lies about what Mueller found and what the response to it should be. … The evasive way House Democrats have responded to the report so far has done Mueller a real disservice.”

The victims of the crimes under investigation, which include the voters Trump defrauded in 2016, have only one backstop offering them any hope that justice will be served, and it is House Democrats, who are determined not to impeach the president under almost any circumstances.

1. “Republicans … drown the public in unanswered lies about what Mueller found”

2. Retaliatory, brazen Republican “counter-investigations”

We are now likelier to witness months of full-throttled counter-investigations—of Mueller himself, and everybody who played a hand in the Russia probe—than we are to get the impeachment inquiry Mueller all but declared we need.

3. “The party leadership’s [cowardly] desperation to avoid a confrontation with Trump has been comically unsubtle”

When Mueller finished his work, House Majority Whip James Clyburn immediately described the Russia investigation as a “closed” chapter, and called on Democrats to turn their attention to “everyday issues.”

4. “Their certainty that holding Trump accountable will backfire politically stems from a combination of bad history and poor reasoning”

Because Democratic candidates campaigned successfully in 2018 on protecting people’s health care, Democrats have convinced themselves that it is Trump’s only vulnerability.

5. We needed “the realization that the Trump presidency is an emergency and that building a check on his power was a matter of historic importance”

6. “Trump has predictably abused his inherent powers to work around the divided government, and Democrats can’t protect people from him by avoiding confrontation”

All they can do is demobilize their supporters by communicating that they don’t actually believe Trump is much of an emergency after all.

7. We act as if the president* is allowed to act as judge in his own behalf by buying into the “view that Trump can end or throttle those investigations if he claims to believe they’re bogus”

8. “The victims of the crimes under investigation … have only one source of hope that the federal law enforcement apparatus won’t ruin their lives to boost Trump’s political prospects, or help him seek revenge, and it is House Democrats, who are determined not to impeach the president under almost any circumstances”

9. The House Democrats “fear that if they do the right thing, they will not do as well in the 2020 elections as they will if they do the wrong thing … we do know that the wrong thing causes real harm to people right now”

10. “Without the threat of penalty, Democrats will proceed under the impression that abdicating their obligations is costless”

11. “We should all demand that they stand and be counted while it’s still an option, and should interpret failure to do so as a profound, collective failure of character”


_*__

At common law, merchants prohibited “from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

NPR: “Business Leaders Oppose 'License To Discriminate' Against LGBT Texans”

How would you feel if you called a plumber because a burst pipe was flooding your house, and he, seeing a cross displayed, turned around and left because he had “a sincere religious belief” that Christians are infidels? A proposed Texas law would legitimize such bigotry to protect “sincerely held” personal “beliefs.”

For centuries, common law has prohibited merchants “from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

Almost a quarter of a century ago, the Supreme Court ruled against Colorado Amendment 2, which forbade local jurisdictions from passing laws protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ people. In Romer v. Evans, the Court said, “A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”

Romer v. Evans also noted: “At common law, innkeepers, smiths, and others who `made profession of a public employment,' were prohibited from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

Nevertheless, here we go again. Austin Chronicle: Texas Senate Bill 17 is “a far-reaching religious liberty bill that would give any professional licensed by the state of Texas – including doctors, lawyers, teachers, real estate agents, and even mold assessors – a license to discriminate under the guise of protecting “freedom of speech” regarding “sincerely held” religious beliefs. If passed into law, SB 17 would protect licensed professionals who wish to deny services to those who defy their religious beliefs.”

The sad part is that such malevolent religious right foolishness is bad for Texas commerce. Wade Goodwyn:

The convention and travel industries in particular tend to be the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to these types of bills. Phillip Jones, president and CEO of VisitDallas, says they'd be the first to keel over if the controversial 'religious refusal' legislation passes.

"One in ten trade shows held in America are held in Texas. I've got a hundred million dollar's worth of business that's currently at risk, if this legislation were to pass," says Jones. "Based on our experience with the bathroom bill they have a provision in their contracts that spells out that, should Texas pass any form of discriminatory legislation, then they can cancel their meeting in Texas or in Dallas without any penalties."

The irrationality underlying all this is the implied argument that, (at least for people you approve of) “sincerely held personal beliefs” must be true and just. People are often most convinced where they are most wrong. The Inquisition, the Holocaust, and Jim Crow are all examples of how intensely emotional beliefs can have consequences which shock the conscience. They can lead to conduct not bounded by ethics, by the laws, or by the least vestige of humane sympathy. Sincerely held, but wrong, personal beliefs can lack the constraints of justice, resulting in extrajudicial determination of guilt and kangaroo court justice.

“William Barr: is his defence of Trump paving the road to tyranny?”

Here’s AG of the United States Barr arguing that if a defendant “believed” he was falsely accused, the law cannot lay a hand on him:

Lauren Gambino:

Barr’s robust defense of a president’s executive authority to end an investigation into himself if he believed the inquiry was “based on false allegations”, alarmed critics of both parties.

“The president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course,” Barr told senators. “The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.”

In other words, if someone is hauled into court for shooting a person “in the middle of Fifth Avenue,” he “could terminate that proceeding … because he [“believed” he] was being falsely accused.”

Fascinating. According to Attorney General Barr’s revolutionary new legal theory, America’s courts can no longer convict and punish any defendant who “believes” they are innocent.

Whether Barr’s defense of Trump is “paving the road to tyranny,” he’s emasculating the rule of law.

A high price to pay to exculpate a high official who’s at ten thousand lies and counting.

“If the incumbent* wins, there will be four more years of enabled destruction of our political institutions.”

In a democracy, the party out of power is “the loyal opposition.” Under the treason party, election is simply the chance to continue the war of the slave-holding rebels against the United States by other means (as previously argued in “The Enemy Within”). “The upper echelons of the Republican Party in Congress decided to obstruct Barack Obama at a dinner on the night of Obama's inauguration. … [a] Democratic president simply will not be allowed to govern … as a Democrat.”

Charles P. Pierce wrote:
“Nobody who watched William Barr's performance before a Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee this past week can sensibly deny that, as long as the Senate remains in the hands of the Republican Party, it doesn't matter what happens in the 2020 presidential election. If the incumbent* wins, there will be four more years of enabled destruction of our political institutions. If one of the Democrats wins, and the Senate stays Republican, the Democratic president simply will not be allowed to govern. Not as a Democrat, anyway.

And this didn't start with El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, either. The record shows that, upon Bill Clinton's election, good ol' Bob Dole announced that he was there to represent everyone who didn't vote for the winner. The Florida burglary in 2000 was in part a refusal to allow another Democrat to succeed Clinton, and the upper echelons of the Republican Party in Congress decided to obstruct Barack Obama at a dinner on the night of Obama's inauguration.”

Sullivan and Naipaul on the link between Christianity, Enlightenment Liberalism, and modern civilization

Last week Andrew Sullivan responded to the burning of Notre Dame by describing [secularized] Christianity as one of the “metaphysical foundations” of liberalism:

“It remains an open question whether liberalism, broadly understood, can survive the loss of its metaphysical foundations [its defense of the individual soul as inviolate]. And as we see liberal democracy struggle to articulate its truth against the ocean of nihilism, the lure of tribalism, the cult of the strongman, and the left’s contempt for the Enlightenment and religion — the burning of this symbol of Christian devotion [Notre Dame] cut me to the quick.”

The heart of “our universal civilization”(1) is the Christian value Sullivan cites: The individual soul is inviolate. From this value stems that Eighteenth Century rallying cry, The Rights of Man, which even a criminal “president” cannot abrogate.
 
-*--

(1) V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”

Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

The Enemy Within

“You will rule or ruin in all events.”

This “enemy” first prevented the Founders from including an anti-slavery plank in the Constitution. Lincoln:
“I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more …” — Lincoln-Douglas Debates

In 1860 Lincoln faced plantation owners’ demand that slavery be extended to the territories which were being added to the original thirteen states. At Cooper Union, according to Wikipedia, he reasoned, “the federal government can regulate slavery in the federal territories (but not states), especially resting on the character of the founders, and how they thought of slavery.”

The Southern Democrats refused to take no for an answer. Lincoln charged:
“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” (Emphasis added)

Beginning April 12, 1861, the plantation states of the Confederacy committed an act of war. Near Charleston, South Carolina, they fired on Fort Sumter, a military installation of their own country.

The Confederate states, defeated in their war against the United States and compelled to release their slaves, never, in their hearts, rejoined the country they had attacked, or accepted its principles of equality and liberal democracy. [As a personal note, in 1964, having graduated from a college in the Pacific Northwest, people in Texas and Arkansas told me I was from “Yankeeland.”]

There was a postwar period of Reconstruction. Wikipedia: “Blacks remained involved in Southern politics, particularly in Virginia, which was run by the biracial Readjuster Party.[206]

Numerous blacks were elected to local office through the 1880s, and in the 1890s in some states, biracial coalitions of Populists and Republicans briefly held control of state legislatures. In the last decade of the 19th century, southern states elected five black U.S. Congressmen before disfranchising constitutions were passed throughout the former Confederacy.

Like an abscessed tooth in the body politic, the Jim Crow South thwarted Lincoln’s aspiration that his beloved country, “shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

A century after their ancestors attacked us and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of us, the ruthlessness of the sullen, resentful enemy within was evident in their response to a crusade for reform: “The brutality displayed towards the [Civil Rights] Campaign's demonstrators and King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", written while he was incarcerated, brought national and international attention to the civil rights movement.”

On the eve of the slaveholding plantation owners’ traitorous attack on America (wrongly, the “civil” war), the Confederacy, relative to the industrialized United States, was like a third-world country: Lower per-capita income; lower average educational level; feeble industrial output; fewer scientists; fewer professionals; more superstitious; in all, far more backward.

Since modern war is won by materiel (cannon, shells, gunpowder, combat engineering), those who made treasonous war on the United States would, predictably, lose, provided they did not overrun our America before we could ramp up our inherently superior war-making capacity.

“This good free country of ours,” as Lincoln called it, endured early setbacks and eventually ran those whose betrayed their nation in the sordid cause of “property in man” into the ground.

Today the descendants of the treasonous slaveholders impose their mindless backwardness on our entire nation. Relative to all other industrialized democracies, the United States is “like a third-world country: Lower per-capita income; lower average educational level; … more superstitious; in all, far more backward.” The sullen, resentful neo-Confederates impose on Americans worse, more expensive health care; shorter life expectancy; hostility to reproductive rights; higher infant mortality; higher maternal mortality; and a gap between rich and poor that shocks the conscience.

No other modern liberal democratic nation endures a ruthless politicization of the courts; practices wholesale voter suppression; or teaches its innocent children that evolution is a wicked fallacy.

In no other modern liberal democratic nation are racial minorities routinely shot by fascistic public safety officers; or schoolchildren massacred every few days by machine guns in the hands of psychotics in the defense of an RKBA ideology ferociously defended south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

In no other modern liberal democratic nation are the citizens of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” resigned to such an appalling state of affairs because the Undead Confederacy controls the Congress, the Courts, and the Presidency through a generation’s cynical abuse of the machineries of democracy.

What we have lost:

One person, one vote (gerrymandering, voter suppression)

Impartial justice (McConnell’s theft of the Garland Supreme Court seat; a minority president* who has already made two lifetime Court appointments)

The ability to pass laws restoring democratic principles without a corrupt Court striking them down using crazy constitutional interpretations.

The power to expel a president* who is tanking democracy.

Capacity to remedy policy risks like climate change and health care, currently blocked by spiritual wickedness in high places.

In the Amicus podcast of 3/29/19 (about 33 minutes in), Aaron Belkin suggests that extreme conditions require strong measures. “It’s time to bring a gun to a gunfight. … The progressive agenda is DOA unless we protect it from the courts.” Belkin argues that the Framers left it up to the Congress keep the courts from getting out of hand, by leaving the composition of the courts to the legislature.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was blocked until he proposed to alter the composition of the Court, whereupon the Nine realized that the better part of valor was to cease being obstructionist.

Notes I’ve transcribed approximately from what Belkin(1) said:

Court packing is the moderate, workable way to stop our radical court from continuing to sabotage democracy. …
Court making bizarre convoluted decisions against people of color, women, and workers. …
Packing threat saved FDR’s New Deal.
Packing is honest and people understand it. …
A generation of ruthless judicial politics which put W. in the presidency for no reason. …
No reasonable concept of democracy supports throwing millions of votes away because of gerrymandering. …
Campaign on bold, clear ideas.
Ruthless Republican judicial politics.
Revitalize democracy by reforming the courts.
Theft of open seat (Merrick Garland).
Illegitimate judicial appointments by pres. elected by minority.
Trump should not be making lifetime appointments.
Time to bring a gun to a gunfight.
They prioritize party over the national interest.
Tell the truth.
‘Balls and strikes’ grossly disingenuous.
The Supreme Court has spent the last generation attacking workers and women and brown people.
What the voters saw in the Kavanaugh hearings.
The connection between Kavanaugh and the theft of the Garland seat and the destruction of democracy.
Five presidential candidates have admitted that something needs to be done about the courts.
The voters understand that Trump is tanking democracy.
How to fix broken democratic institutions.
We are in deep trouble.
Change our beliefs when new facts dictate.

In closing:
The liberal democratic nation Lincoln thought he had preserved by defeating the slave-holding rebels has had its government hijacked by brutal, ruthless, sullen, angry Rule or Ruin neo-Confederates nursing centuries-old grudges. Belkin: “They prioritize party over the national interest.”

To them, we are not in their nation. We are in “Yankeeland” and they are implacably opposed to the American idea we represent.

Nevertheless, it is our country, not theirs; we are in the majority; the future is not theirs to determine, but ours.

-*--

(1) Slate's later transcription of Aaron Belkin's remarks:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/court-packing-has-become-a-litmus-test-left.html

A sample:
“But what’s surprising some of the candidates, we hear, is that the voters also are asking them how they’re going to fix broken democratic institutions, and what they’re going to do about our broken democracy.

And so I think that—not just with respect to the courts, but more broadly about democracy and the robustness of the political system—the voters really get that we are in deep trouble, and they’re seeing the connection between Kavanaugh and the theft of the Garland seat, and the court, and the destruction of democracy, and also policy risks like climate change and health care access. And so today is a day when we can make that case in a way that was not possible in the past.”

The Amicus Podcast of March 16 on six ways the current chief executive fails to honor the Oath of Office

The Amicus podcast of March 16 features Protect Democracy and its emphasis on the Take Care clause of the Constitution to counter the effects of the Trump regime:

“Take care clause refers to a clause in the U.S. Constitution that imposes a duty on the President to take due care while executing laws. The purpose of this clause is to ensure that a law is faithfully executed by the President.”

This clause appears in two places in the Constitution, one being the Oath of Office which the Chief Executive must affirm in order to legitimately be President.

In the podcast Protect Democracy’s Ian Bassin and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discuss six ways the incumbent fails to honor his oath:

Politicizing independent institutions, such as the Justice Department

Spreading disinformation (“Fake News,” Nine Thousand lies and counting)

Executive Power Grabs (False emergencies)

Quashing Dissent (Suggesting SNL satire of the president* “should be looked into”)

Delegitimizing Communities (Hispanic “invasion,” demonizing Muslims)

Corrupting Elections (Voter suppression, Gerrymandering)

Ferlinghetti turns 100

Ferlinghetti turns 100

America was founded by profound people.

Their descendants are incapable of profundity and would not want it if it were in their power to achieve it.

What they want, and what they produce:

Venting

and platitudes.

Shields and Brooks, discussing the social attack on Ralph Northam,(1) noted that it lacked “a path to redemption.”

This is a characteristic of a people who have lost the faculty of empathy and the concept of pluralism.

Martin Luther King appealed to the American mainstream of his time to “rise up and live out the meaning of their creed, that all men are created equal”; and the majority ended Jim Crow for people who did not look like them, in an enormous nationwide effort which required decades.

Contrast: When Hispanics and Native Americans, thinking Ta-Nehisi Coates was leading a civil rights crusade, came to join him, he said they were “disrespectful.” The situation of black people, he said, was unique and deserved its own focused examination.

It’s not that Ta-Nehisi lacked the concept of pluralism — that he might be called on to be his brother’s keeper — it’s that the progressive journalists who adulated him did not notice that this new version of the American crusade for reform wanted no part of empathy and altruism.

It’s all about ego and group aggrandizement. It lacks compassion and the milk of human kindness. It lacks public-spiritedness. The democratic disposition and concern for the public good is alien to it.

I Am Waiting
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe …
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

-*--

(1) Ralph Northam, an exemplary governor in Virginia, under social media attack because of blackface photo in the early eighties.

Hayek on The Liberal Founding

What in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. — Hayek

The term “liberal” in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today. (1) — Hayek

F. A. Hayek, “Why I am Not a Conservative” 1960:

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. ... Some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.” I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold ... I shall later have to consider what would be the appropriate name for the party of liberty. The reason for this is ... that the term “liberal” in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today, ... (Emphasis added)

“Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change.”

This is why English conservative Andrew Sullivan, now an American citizen, believes that American conservatives are not at all conservative. Mocking “presidential,” as our current president* does; doing whatever he can to violate the Constitutional separation of powers, particularly with respect to the independence of the judiciary; doing the best he can to undermine and sabotage the guardrails of liberal democracy; and abrogating the faith and credit of the United States by subverting international treaty obligations, is not “opposition to drastic change”: It is a most un-conservative disruption of constituted authority and public order. More anarchy than prudence.

It resembles the childish narcissism described by Stu Rothenberg on a recent PBS broadcast:

Do Democrats want to feel good, or do they want to win? … Many Democrats just can't resist themselves. … Many of the younger Democrats, insurgents, anti-establishment ...

Trump's fawning prostrate “conservative” sycophants practice an insurgent, anti-establishment anarchy not remotely conservative. They didn't drain the swamp, they wallow in it. They didn't balance the budget, they instituted a burn-the-candle-at-both-ends era of heedless borrow-and-spend regime involving unprecedented budgetary stimulus during a fevered prosperity: The consequence will likely recapitulate W Bush's world-wide recession. They didn't Make America Great Again; they put a compulsive liar at the helm of the free world, who “immediately set about dismantling it.” America First has the same paradoxical flaw as Deutschland über alles: proclaiming “I am the greatest” is a clue that you're not.

The cultural Marxist left ideology of today is as dysfunctional, as illiberal, as anti-democratic, as the neo-Confederate Trump right ideology.

-*--

(1) “The term “liberal” in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today.” — The more extreme, radical, Marxist the left is today, the more the news media tend to characterize it as “liberal.” (Hayek: American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.”) 

As Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

“Good” discrimination?

Introductory note: The implied reference of Patai's nearly quarter-century-old article below is Enlightenment liberalism (as it is for Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, and I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates; for publications which discuss liberalism explicitly, see Historian Fritz Stern's works, such as The Failure of Illiberalism). Patai is arguing against what Jonathan Chait called  “the illiberal [campus] left.” That left is still with us, as Andrew Sullivan, “We All Live on Campus Now,” wrote recently.

(Elected Democrats are generally liberal, not left in the above sense; but results are still out on some, such as Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and others.)

I hold that liberalism — the liberalism of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, MLK, and George Orwell — is the methodology of the good life, and as such not “political.” Furthermore, as in a previous post, “all democracy is liberal, all justice is liberal, all [genuine] intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.”

Contrary to the habits of our media discourse, then, the counter to our increasingly anti-democratic right, or conservatism, is not leftism but liberalism. It was not the left but liberalism which proclaimed the Rights of Man, and declared without any reservation whatsoever that all people are created equal, transcending the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the politics of identity. (As Patai notes below, “Truth, righteousness, and automatic justification in the world of women's studies now reside with "women of color."”)

The cure for bad discrimination (against minorities and women, for example) is not good discrimination (against Caucasians and men, i.e., “Smite the oppressor”). Prejudicial discrimination is not a valid means to a legitimate end at any time in any way. In a liberal society, the point is to avoid anything that is discriminatory, because it is unjust.

“Justice ... cannot be won by means that are themselves unjust.”

The following was from vix.com but apparently is no longer on that site. Daphne Patai, 3/30/96:

I tried to explain that "racism" had nothing to do with the events in question. This simple denial brought a storm down upon my head. I was told by a young black colleague that when a woman of color says she has experienced racism, she is the authority on that experience and cannot be challenged. [Ed. note: This is the ad hominem(1) fallacy]
...
I began to realize that we were confronting a new dogma sanctifying a reversal of privilege: instead of the old privileges accompanying the status of "white," truth, righteousness, and automatic justification in the world of women's studies now reside with "women of color." As if in compensation for past oppression, no one now can challenge or gainsay their version of reality. What can be said for such a turnabout, of course, is that it spreads racial misery around, and this may serve some larger plan of justice, sub specie aeternitatis.(2)

But this is hardly adequate for those who believe earthly justice must be pursued case by case, and cannot be won by means that are themselves unjust. In this instance, however, the facts of the case were of no importance: only identity counted.

This, let me emphasize, was no misinterpretation on my part, for some memos actually did state that it was absurd for a white, tenured professor to claim she was being unjustly accused. By virtue of having a certain identity (white) and occupying a certain position (tenured), an individual would necessarily be guilty of whatever accusations a woman of color (or an untenured individual) might make against her. [Ed. note: If this is Original Sin, or inherited guilt, that is in the realm of theology and has no place in the adjudication of justice. Also, it violates various aspects of due process, such as presumption of innocence; and rules of evidence.]

Among my other offenses was an expression of concern at the way some of our students were using the term "Eurocentric" as a new slur: by dismissing an entire culture as "racist," they relieved themselves of the burden of learning anything about it.

-*--

(1) Argumentum ad hominem “A person is not an argument.” A valid argument is not discredited if the person proposing it has low status or is thought to be in disrepute. (Cf. Hitler, “Relativity is Jewish science.”) On the other hand, neither is a fallacious argument legitimated by personalistic considerations. It does not matter how high the prestige or reputation of the person or community advancing it, any propositional assertion must stand on its own.

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_specie_aeternitatis
Sub specie aeternitatis (Latin for "under the aspect of eternity"), is, from Baruch Spinoza onwards, an honorific expression describing what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon the temporal portions of reality.

Alexander Hamilton: “Good government from reflection and choice,” or from tweets and lies, “accident and force”?

Jim Sleeper, 1/7/13: “Where should power come from in a free country? Alexander Hamilton wrote that history had destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined for their political constitutions on accident and force.””(1) 

Andrew Sullivan warned, three years ago, that the ascension to power of the illiberal, anti democratic, “post truth” regime which now rules us against our will, would be an “extinction level event.”

“[History has destined Americans, said Hamilton,] “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable … of establishing good government.”” (Emphasis added)

Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, attributed the vigor of the early American republic to Americans' “habits of the heart.”

James Madison spoke of Americans' democratic dispositions, chief among which was virtue:

“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea, if there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.” (James Madison, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, vol 3, pp. 536-37.)

Absent virtue, we will not “select men of virtue and wisdom,” Madison wrote. In that case, “No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.”

Enough of us, fed up with decades of neither Democratic nor Republican presidents addressing growing inequality, gambled, despite Madison's warnings, on a wild man. And the “theoretical checks” are near the breaking point.

Ironical point from The Onion: “We refuse to allow a clickbait-driven journalism industry that privileges scandal and controversy over facts and nuance to shape our discourse. Our democracy is too important.”


-*--

(1) Federalist No. 1 [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Federalist]

Trump: We know already. And our response is …

David Graham: 

But if one is not already convinced that the president’s behavior is unacceptable, it would require an immense revelation to change one’s mind—if that’s even possible. Conversely, if one looks at these facts and believes they merit impeachment (or another sanction), then standing sentry for a nebulously timed, nebulously structured report hardly seems worth the effort.

Perhaps it’s the paralysis implied by Andrew Sullivan a year ago: "Think of the wonderful SNL sketch recently, when three couples at a restaurant stumble onto the subject of Aziz Ansari. No one feels capable of saying anything in public."

For all our platitudes and our venting, our language has lost the power it had in 1776. What Hayek called “The long-range power of ideas” — the very essence of a free, liberal society — has fled us as we’ve lost the democratic voice. “We’re an empire now,” and as we deliberate “judiciously, as you will,” our rulers, way ahead of us, have subverted the rule of law, slammed innocent children in prison, and joked about knocking reporters to the ground.

We the People, who cannot even prevent the manifestly illiberal, unjust, unfit Goresuch and Kavanaugh from being imposed on the highest court of the land in rapid robotic succession, have lost control of our destiny.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” said the Founders, as they bequeathed us a marvelous creation, something new in history.

*If*