The sweet enjoyment of partaking good laws under a free government

I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers. - The conclusion of George Washington's Farewell Address

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias wrote, of The Fast and the Furious franchise,

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .

Yglesias describes this deficit of social capital:

The problem, of course, is that this sort of particularistic outlook is very dysfunctional on a social level.
As David Madland has written, the low-trust ethics it embodies are, in fact, typical of societies featuring a high and growing level of income inequality: 

One study of U.S. states measured the percentage of state residents who think “most people can be trusted”... It found that “a 10 percentage-point increase in trust increases the growth rate of GDP by 0.5 percentage points” over five years. 
Trust reduces transaction costs because less time and resources are spent verifying and policing. And trusting people see the world as full of opportunities. With higher levels of trust, people are more likely to innovate, seek out trade and new technologies, and generally take economically sound risks.

This, says Yglesias, is "a world where the system increasingly seems to be rigged." He speaks of the type of hero who "ultimately ends up violating his obligations to law and order to discharge a personal debt"—that is, someone for whom Washington's mutual cares of fellow-citizens—the public good—have become an unreal abstraction:

[This] outlook is increasingly appealing in an increasingly unequal America. But it's ultimately destructive of the social institutions needed to generate prosperity. And yet at a time when elites long ago stopped caring whether the gains of economic growth would be widely shared, and in recent years seem to have turned their backs on the unemployed altogether, then these are the heroes we'll turn to.

In Arguments for Liberalism, this blog noted that Former President Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, drew our attention to the fact that: 

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

An increasingly callous, unjust and venal society seems, so far, oblivious to the decline which it is bringing upon itself. The Liberal Founding put it somewhat differently:

The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society.

The Social Darwinism of Movement Conservatism

Movement conservatism's covert furthering of class, masquerading as tax and entitlement policy is, in Lincoln's terms, an attempt to "overthrow" the principles of the Founders. (See below.)

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias wrote:

The budget House Republicans have written cuts $0 in Medicare spending over the next ten years. It cuts $0 dollars in Social Security spending ever. It increases national defense spending. It sharply cuts cuts rates on high-income families. And it balances the budget. So who loses out? Poor people. It is true that starting in Year 11, the House GOP budget begins to cut Medicare spending. But it does so in a way that does very little to protect the interests of low-income retirees. And the cuts to Medicare are not used to avoid cuts in programs for the poor. In fact, the cuts to Medicare are not even used to avoid tax hikes on the poor. The style of tax reform favored by the House GOP ensures that along with spending on programs for the poor being cut, working class families will pay more in taxes.
Just to sum up—the actually existing GOP agenda overwhelmingly suggests that not only do Republicans think that government spending is bad, but also that government spending on the poor is an especially pernicious form of spending. They appear to believe that taxes are bad, but that taxes on the poor are an especially benign form of taxes.

Merriam Webster defines Social Darwinism as:

a sociological theory that sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence

Russell Kirk included in his Ten Conservative Principles:

For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

To give further wealth to the wealthy on the backs of the poor, while undermining what remains of the humanitarian safety net meant to succor those afflicted by poverty or illness, in the name of the "health" of a civilization founded on the proposition that all are created equal, is a heartless betrayal of what George Washington called "the public good." In his Farewell Address he spoke of the error which

gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens ... facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. (Emphasis added.)

Public good. Literally, the good of the people. Not the good of the "civilization" at the expense of the sick and the poor in the name of better "orders and classes." Lincoln said that the United States had advanced beyond the Old World order of "classification, caste, and legitimacy," and the first Justice Harlan, in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, declared, "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Yet if Yglesias is correct in his analysis, we now have the Republican Party surreptitiously advancing a wealthy class; and if the Merriam Webster definition above is correct, this favoritism toward the rich reveals a social Darwinist theory of sociocultural advance which is fundamentally incompatible with "all men are created equal."

Let's look at the rest of what Lincoln said about "legitimacy." Lincoln is referring to the sentence from the Declaration which begins "We hold" and asserts, among other things, that all are created equal:

But soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. ... The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities" another bluntly calls them "self evident lies" and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races." These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard ... of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves. (Emphasis added.)

Movement conservatism's covert furthering of class, masquerading as tax and entitlement policy is, in Lincoln's terms, an attempt to "overthrow" the principles of the Founders, "supplanting the principles of free government."

How Fares The Republic: Movement Cruelty Ctd.

This embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. - Ta-Nehisi Coates, In Veritas Vino

Dissenter post How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market noted:

Atlantic columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” (Emphasis added)

Wednesday Tim Carmody of The Verge, in an article on Scott Prouty, the banquet staffer who photographed Mitt Romney's 47 percent remarks, revealed another aspect of conservative insensitivity to the working poor which was revealed in the recent presidential candidate's presentation:

One section in particular stuck with him: Romney excitedly describing touring an appliance manufacturing factory in China where girls in dormitories were "stacked three high." Romney's company paid these girls "a pittance," but barbed wire fences and guard towers were supposedly in place to keep outsiders from coming in to work.

Romney's lack of empathy, both for the Chinese workers and the Americans whose jobs he'd outsourced there, disgusted Prouty.

The remarks for which the candidate's presentation became famous were:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That's an entitlement. The government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49...he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. So he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. ... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Romney later disavowed these statements:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has described his disparaging remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes as "not elegantly stated." Now he's calling them "just completely wrong."

But as How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty noted, after the election the candidate revealed that he hadn't really meant the disavowal:

"You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor.

As the Dissenter noted in The Condition of Equality Today:

[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added)

The First Six Months' Wrap

This might be subtitled "An Enlightenment Liberal Blog," and probably the most representative post would be The Liberal Founding, which said, among other things,

In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)

The knotty problem of the definition of liberalism is addressed by various posts which attempt to suggest the dimensions of a political philosophy which underlies the modern world, and which may represent humankind's best effort so far to address the problem of achieving liberty and justice for all: Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours'; Defining Liberalism: Hayek, Habakkuk and More; Defining Liberalism: Published Arguments for Liberalism; Defining Liberalism: An Overview; and Defining Liberalism: "Passing".

An unfriendly definition related by Charles K. Rowley:

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

There has also been an ongoing concern with our intellectual heritage, and the state of the academic humanities, as expressed in The Two Realms, Intellectual Prudence, and Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture.

A perhaps related post was a retelling of "Oedipus Rex," This Is The Son of Kings, which attempted a reinterpretation of classical literary criticism on the topic of the most famous play of the ancient world.

A germane concern was Conscience and Language: Orwell, which noted, “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind. … If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

There were a number of posts on the presidential election of 2012: How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market; How Fares The Republic: The Post Truth Candidate; and How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty. Related were: Mendacious Debater Disgraces Self: Media Call Him Victor; and The Third Debate: Mendacious Candidate Disgraces Self Redux.

And a post by an honorable Republican: Mitt's Father Articulates Republican Principles Before Goldwater.

There were various perhaps memorable quotes, including: Snippets 7/27/12:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

- Anna Akhmatova, in Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith

Molly Ball, who wrote:

“A smart [GOP] party strategist” ... wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” (Emphasis added.)

There were two articles addressing a little-known aspect of the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century: In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and The Disabled; and Followup: Courts and the Civil Rights of the Disabled. In the latter a prosecutor noted:

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.

An early post wondered who now believes "that all men are created equal": The Condition of Equality Today, which cited, among others:

 [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.
 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added)

How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty

This embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Romney gives his own explanation for his loss:

"You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."

The only reason for moving the United States toward the universal health care offered by most other prosperous nations is to bribe voters? Let's look at that premise.

Back in 2010 2009 Andrew Sullivan described a good idea:

a healthcare plan that expands access, removes obvious cruelties and inefficiencies, allows more people into the system and can be plausibly described as universal coverage.

In the same year 2010 he wrote:

We now have more public clarity on the critical issue. The Democrats want to provide basic private insurance to the 40m or so working poor who don't have it. The Republicans don't  want to. Both parties want to stop the cruelty of denying people access to health insurance because they have a pre-existing condition, but if you do only that, then the insurance companies will take a big hit and hike premiums even more, rendering even more people without insurance. So you have to have a way to get the companies to agree to this by giving them 40m more customers to outweigh the costs. Only the Obama plan does that. The Republicans have nothing.

Except Romney didn't want to stop the cruelty, because doing a good thing for the people would reflect favorably on the Democratic party. Romney said he had his own plan, but here he is tacitly admitting that he didn't, because if he had, the American people would have given him credit for it and erased the Demo advantage. 

Here is Sullivan (blogging a Republican primary debate) on conservatives' cruelty:

I was surprised by the ineptness of Perry's attack on Romneycare. But I am more surprised at the cheering of someone dying because he couldn't afford intensive care. Yes, the GOP is now not only cheering executions; they are cheering people dying because they cannot afford any health insurance. Cheering death by poverty. "Yeah!" came the cry at the thought of a twentysomething dying because he didn't have insurance. I didn't think I could be more shocked by the instincts of those in the Republican base, but I just was.

Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts an email sent by a federal judge:

"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'" the email joke reads.

"His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"

Coates writes:

What stuns you about this "joke" is the sheer embrace of cruelty. Here is a woman who lost her life to cancer. And [the judge's take on this] is imagining her son as the product of bestiality.

Though less crudely stated, this embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement.

Andrew Sullivan's comment on the Romney excuse for his loss which begins this post:

Romney gives his own explanation for his loss to the only people he really cared about: his donor base. As usual with Republicans these days, there is no real personal responsibility. They do nothing wrong ever. They confess to no mistakes themselves. And we now kinda know that Romney's "47 percent" remarks were actually what he deeply believes.

A number of newspapers endorsed Romney, just before the election, arguing that the kinder gentler Romney who miraculously appeared just at the end of the campaign was the real Romney, the one we'd see in the Oval Office.

But it wasn't. Romney lied when he said his "47 percent" remarks didn't reflect his actual beliefs. He had no plans to "stop the cruelty of denying people access to health insurance" because they were poor, because he sees such things solely from the self-aggrandizing politics of political advantage. The enormous contribution to the public good of a health plan which will prevent millions of Americans' needlessly dying from preventable illnesses meant nothing.

This is the mindset that without shame practices the politics of obstruction. This is the cruel worldview which is willing to sabotage the nation's wellbeing for partisan advantage.

If the shoe were on the other foot, if it were the Democrats who were wreaking havoc with our politics, the party that was just repudiated at the polls by the American people would call it treason.

It is not partisan to object to the Republican party as it now stands, because at the present day  it does not represent a viable political alternative. It is not partisan to object to cruelty and heartlessness and destruction. One instead notes that one is dealing with cruelty and heartlessness and destruction, and passes regretfully on.

The Third Debate: Mendacious Candidate Disgraces Self Redux

JohnMH127@gmail.com

From andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com [By Andrew Sullivan and others]:

Romney will say things that are completely incompatible with each other.
 
Romney keeps saying that sequestration was Obama's policy. That's an obvious lie.
 
I've never seen any human being up close like this - a mechanical, unstoppable machine of say anything, forget everything in the past, refuse to take any responsibility for anything he has said in the past, and just smile and golly-gee smile his way along.
 
In a sane world, Obama would count as the clear winner.
 
Romney ... just lashed away at Obama without regard to subject or logic.
 
Chris Matthews says Romney should "apologize to America for being a complete cynic."

What does it say about the state of democracy in the United States that the race is considered a tie?

The Condition of Equality Today

JohnMH127@gmail.com

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .

- Declaration of Independence   

A distinguished senior professor, in a class on Plato's Republic, spoke at length on the foolishness of egalitarianism. A student said, “You've just described equality of results. Don't you think the situation would be different in the case of equality of opportunity?”

The professor replied, “No, I don't think so.”

There is detectable within [Elaine Showalter’s] literary criticism a strong, unquestioned belief in the values...of traditional bourgeois humanism of a liberal-individualist kind.... Showalter in her own criticism takes no interest in the necessity of combating capitalism and fascism. Her insistence on the need for political art is limited to the struggle against sexism.... What feminists such as Showalter...fail to grasp is that the traditional humanism they represent is in effect part of patriarchal ideology. At its centre is the seamlessly unified self–either individual or collective–which is commonly called “Man.”

- Toril Moi, linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9809/showalter.html

Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” - Plato

5. [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” [Emphasis added]

“We are not egalitarians, and justice doesn’t require economic leveling.”

- Rod Dreher, 1/12/12 - www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/romney-the-42-million-man/

The preceding five selections represent criticisms of the liberal principle of human equality, two from what would probably be called the academic left, two from avowed conservatives, and one from Plato himself. Is there a creeping anti-egalitarianism?*

If it should be the case that not only the right but also the left have abandoned the Founders’ stirring declaration of human equality, what happens to a closely related principle, human rights? Ta-Nehisi Coates, an editor at The Atlantic, notes the connection between the rejection of equality and one of the greatest violations of human rights, slavery:

If black people were part of "man," and all "men" were created equal, how could one justify slavery? Well, one could completely ignore the discrepancy, which is exactly what a lot of Confederates did. But a more radical proposal, one I find interesting, is the assertion that Thomas Jefferson was quite wrong.

On the eve of War, Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy explicitly dismissed [the] Jeffersonian view of slavery: ...

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.

It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.  ...

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. …  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/05/in-defense-of-slavery/239719/

It is not difficult to see why the Plato specialist, above, would critique equality. Plato did so, and that was very powerful with him. What would he do if he realized that the concept of human equality is the great principle upon which human rights and unalterable opposition to slavery stand?

As for the right, there seems to be, lurking beneath everything that today’s American conservatives say—the tropism toward “heroes,” the affluent bias toward an oligarchy of the obscenely rich—what Mark Lilla called “the aristocratic prejudice that ‘some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.’” It is not difficult in this context to understand a rejection of “all men are created equal,” assuming that those who do so are able to deny the inconsistency between this and any posture of patriotic loyalty to the Founders.

The liberal Founding declared that all possess “unalienable rights.” Its three most famous words are “We the People.” When this is contrasted with phrases such as “group rights,” “oppressor groups,” or “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” a profound difference is apparent. The liberal outlook posits no Other, no enemy, because it doesn’t need one to function. Liberalism is a philosophy of harmony, cooperation and altruism—of the phrase Washington used in his inaugural address: “The public good.”
 

Contrast the ending of the Communist Manifesto, above, which implies an enemy and issues a call to war; and contrast the “group” discourse which was bequeathed to the modern left which, to use the left’s own terms, “privileges” group members and “marginalizes” or “disenfranchises” those it excludes. Inequality—discriminatory inequality—is the modus operandi of the left.


(*) This is particularly curious in the case of patriotic conservatives. What does this imply about reverence for the moral values of the Founders?