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.

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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.”

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.
 
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(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.

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(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.”

From a social media comment: The milieu in which the UnPresident operates

First, the Presidency is a position of service. Trump cannot understand this and thinks it's a position of power. His whole life has been about aggrandizement. It still is.

The factors in the America we have now:
The Enlightenment liberalism of Washington,(1) Jefferson, Lincoln, MLK, Orwell, etc., which is about friendship, cooperation, and making improvements. Place most elected Democrats here.

The neo-Marxism of today's campus left — "oppositional, adversarial, subversive" — as also seen in the kind of punditry which prostrated itself before Ta-Nehisi Coates during his fifteen minutes of fame.

The re-emergent plantation mentality(2) of today's Republicans, looters heartless about the wretched and the poor. Former British conservative Andrew Sullivan says they're not remotely conservative; and I think he's right.

The media totally confuse the issue by treating the liberalism above and the above leftism as more or less synonymous, which does not work at all.

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(1) Washington's Farewell Address:
“Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, 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.”

Here, as in his Inaugural Address, Washington refers to “the public good.” 


(2) Garrison Keillor in Homegrown Democrat:
“My life depends on the social compact that Republicans are determined to overthrow, cutting taxes and killing off public services and reducing us to a low-wage no-services plantation economy run by an enclave class that I do not wish to be part of, no matter how graceful or thoughtful they are. … ” p. 227
 

Then and now

All democracy is liberal, all intellectuality is liberal, all science is liberal, and all justice is liberal

Personal reflections on the America I knew in high school (I went to high school during the second Eisenhower administration, college during the first Kennedy administration), contrasted with the America I write about now. This will not be particularly organized or structured: it is exploratory.

It is my impression that the Great Break in American principles occurred about the time I graduated from college in the spring of 1964. That fall the news was full of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement on the Cal campus at Berkeley. I had missed the revolution.

Roger Ebert: 

The great divide was November 22, 1963, and nothing was ever the same again. The teenagers in “American Graffiti” are, in a sense, like that cartoon character in the magazine ads: the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. ... The music was as innocent as the time. Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. (Emphasis added)

From the Founding until the counterculture, the methodological, liberal approach of the Declaration and the Constitution had held ideological impulses in check. Ideology is the deformation of thought and language in the service of power, as a result, it feels free to silence expressions of ideas not its own.

The difference was that up through JFK's time the right of people to have diverse opinions was accepted. This had an advantage: the various sides of an argument could be discussed, generally to everyone's benefit.

An acquaintance of mine who works in the state higher education system recently defended "no-platforming," the prevention of speakers who have the wrong opinions from appearing on campus. (I'm reminded of the Stalin era Soviet writer Isaac Babel, who said that he and his comrades had every right except the right to make a mistake.)  Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, spoke of the university [PDF] as the "church of reason," where ideas could be debated. The university was an arena, not a platform. To allow a diversity of ideas to be presented for educational purposes did not arouse the fear of legitimizing wrongthink.

So this is one primary difference between the America of my K-12 years and America now. The earlier America honored a principle which makes ideology uncomfortable: the liberal free speech provision of the First Amendment. And our universities did not need "safe spaces" where one retreats to avoid being traumatized by an opposing viewpoint.

The difference is the difference between liberalism, which is an information methodology that proceeds from foundational values, and constantly advances human knowledge; and ideology, which operates from undiscussable doctrines and dogmas and is afraid of free debate.

The "tribalism"(1) issue of today's media is a symptom. The underlying point is the prevalence of ideology, which turns every conceptual position into an armed camp, and which speaks the language of enmity and battle. This is fatal to democracy, which is based on friendship, cooperation, pluralism,(2) altruism, and constructive thinking.

For example, the watchwords of left ideology are "oppositional," "adversarial," and "subversive." Right ideology is concerned with nationalism, strength, supremacy, and bell curve racial superiority (the post-Nazi euphemism for Herrenrasse).

The ideologies (left and right) are about enmity; liberal information methodology is about friendship. As Amy Walter recently said on PBS, "fight or fix."

Foundational characteristics: Ideologies are characterized by zero-sum-game thinking; liberalism by positive-sum-game, win-win outlook. An acquaintance described zero-sum-game as "when somebody wins, somebody else loses." The leftism of Marx was clear: Everything should go to the proletariat, who by the labor theory of value deserved it, none to the bourgeoisie. The size of the pie is fixed: the point is to get the larger portion. The problem is mostly unnoticed: Under zero-sum-game thinking, there is no reason for generosity, pluralism,(2) or altruism. To be anti-racist makes no sense, for then the other guy wins and you lose.

By contrast, for liberalism a foundational value, such as liberty or freedom of speech, benefits everybody. For example, while freedom of speech allows bad people to get away with verbal abuse and racial slurs, without freedom of speech Martin Luther King would have had no influence on civil rights history. With liberalism you have democratic dispositions, what Washington described as "the public good," and enlightened self interest.

A probable second foundational characteristic of ideological thinking: belief in original sin. Original sin is a negative, destructive, theological notion which has no place in liberal democratic thinking. (The parable of the prodigal son seems to indicate that the founder of Christianity had moved beyond original sin. The son's prodigality is presented as reversible error ("he came to himself"), and the successful outcome is presented as developing without needing the intervention of a Redeemer or an Atonement.)

There is no upside to thinking in terms of original sin. "We are all sinners!" does not point to a solution: it displaces the solution. Original sin creates a hostile, "gotcha" social climate with what literary critic Frederic C. Crews called "the reckless dispensation of guilt." Original sin facilitates targeting and provides spurious justification for imputing bad motives to others.

(1) Andrew Sullivan: nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/09/can-democracy-survive-tribalism.html

(2) The acceptance of Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign by the mainstream is an example of liberal democratic pluralism. The mainstream for years worked against segregationist opposition to make their country more just towards African Americans.Pluralism in this sense is ethically responsible action to benefit those who are different from oneself.

Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem"

No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. — Randall Kennedy

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. ... In choosing how to proceed in the face of all that they encounter, blacks should insist, as did Martin Luther King Jr., that acting with moral propriety is itself a glorious goal. — Kennedy

Unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. — Kennedy

I would propose a shoe-on-the-other-foot test for the propriety of racial sentiment. If a sentiment or practice would be judged offensive when voiced or implemented by anyone, it should be viewed as prima facie offensive generally. — Kennedy

In 1997 Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote "My Race Problem: A consideration of touchy matters -- racial pride, racial solidarity, and racial loyalty -- rarely discussed."

"What," he asked, "is the proper role of race in determining how I, an American black, should feel toward others?"

It was a liberal African American's response to a left issue of the time, multiculturalism. Today we would call it the politics of identity.

The politics of identity is the politics of approved identity. Professor Kennedy immediately objects to the proposition that

There is nothing wrong with having a special -- a racial -- affection for other black people. Indeed, many would go further and maintain that something would be wrong with me if I did not sense and express racial pride, racial kinship, racial patriotism, racial loyalty, racial solidarity -- synonyms for that amalgam of belief, intuition, and commitment that manifests itself when blacks treat blacks with more solicitude than they do those who are not black. ... [There is a] notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society.

Professor Kennedy replies, "I reject this response to the question. Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory. ... the belief that because of racial kinship blacks ought to value blacks more highly than others." Such attempts to counteract discrimination recreate discrimination in another form.

Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School writes, in Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, "Each December, my wife and I host a holiday dessert for the black students at the Yale Law School." He says that he feels a special "solidarity" with them, a racial love for "one's people."

Professor Kennedy:

I contend that in the mind, heart, and soul of a teacher there should be no stratification of students such that a teacher feels closer to certain pupils than to others on grounds of racial kinship. No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. Every student should be free of the worry that because of race, he or she will have less opportunity to benefit from what a teacher has to offer.

Randall Kennedy suggests that instead of the left principle of solidarity, which tends to result in a double standard, we should engage in a liberal method: outreach:

The justification for outreach ... is that unlike an appeal to racial kinship, an appeal to an ideal untrammeled by race enables any person or group to be the object of solicitude. No person or group is racially excluded from the possibility of assistance, and no person or group is expected to help only "our own." If a professor reaches out in response to student need, for instance, that means that whereas black students may deserve special solicitude today, Latino students or Asian-American students or white students may deserve it tomorrow.

History, Kennedy argues, is a poor argument for a double standard:

Some will argue that I ignore or minimize the fact that different groups are differently situated and that it is thus justifiable to impose upon blacks and whites different standards for purposes of evaluating conduct, beliefs, and sentiments. ... A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice -- constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. In choosing how to proceed in the face of all that they encounter, blacks should insist, as did Martin Luther King Jr., that acting with moral propriety is itself a glorious goal.

People who have suffered past wrongs, unfortunately, are no more immune than anyone else to the temptation of favoritism toward one's own:

In seeking to attain that goal, blacks should be attuned not only to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses of others but also to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses in themselves. A good place to start is with the recognition that unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. This is certainly true of those who inherit a dominant status. But it is also true of those who inherit a subordinate status. Surely one of the most striking features of human dynamics is the alacrity with which those who have been oppressed will oppress whomever they can once the opportunity presents itself. Because this is so, it is not premature to worry about the possibility that blacks or other historically subordinated groups will abuse power to the detriment of others.

Another argument against double standards concerning identity is reciprocity: They don't meet the "shoe-on-the-other-foot test":

A second reason I resist arguments in favor of asymmetrical standards of judgment has to do with my sense of the requirements of reciprocity. I find it difficult to accept that it is wrong for whites to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of white advancement but morally permissible for blacks to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of black advancement. I would propose a shoe-on-the-other-foot test for the propriety of racial sentiment. If a sentiment or practice would be judged offensive when voiced or implemented by anyone, it should be viewed as prima facie offensive generally. If we would look askance at a white professor who wrote that on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of whites more than those of blacks, then unless given persuasive reasons to the contrary, we should look askance at a black professor who writes that on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of blacks more than those of whites.

Liberalism is the underlying principle of modern civilization. It has nothing to do with the outlook of the left.

Because Enlightenment liberalism is universalist, egalitarian, committed to the dignity and rights of the single person, committed to evidence and reason where they apply, and characterized by a passionate desire for optimum outcomes, all democracy is inherently liberal, all justice is liberal, all genuine intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.(1) As argued in The Liberal Founding, what is sometimes called the American idea is liberal.

One guide, in a milieu where media often treat "liberal" and "left" as more or less synonymous, is that liberalism has no Marxism in it. No collectivism with its "moral ties antecedent to choice";(2) win-win thinking instead of zero-sum-game thinking; cooperation, friendship, altruism, and meliorism rather than "adversarial," "oppositional," and "subversive." Liberalism rejects Marxism's romantic, anarchic, faux-heroic, anti-institutional, visionary narcissistic ruler whose self-affirmation is ultimately autocratic.

Stephen Holmes, in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, distinguishes nonmarxist antiliberalism from Marxist antiliberalism:

Marxists are no less secular than liberals (they would eradicate religion, while liberals would depoliticize it). Nonmarxist antiliberals see secularism as a moral disaster. Like liberals, Marxists view ethnic identity and national solidarity as particularistic atavisms (they would eradicate ethnicity while liberals would demilitarize it). Nonmarxist antiliberals, by contrast, see the cutting of ethnic roots as an unparalleled human catastrophe. ... Marxists extol science, technology, and economic development, for example. Nonmarxist antiliberals interpret the authority of science and the spread of materialistic attitudes as two of liberalism's most abhorrent sins. ... Antiliberals in my sense assert with one voice that Marxism and liberalism, while superficially opposed, share a common ancestry and are secretly allied. They are two offshoots of a single and spiritually hollow Enlightenment tradition. (pp. 1-2)

An important difference in how the term "left" is used today is that the campus left, and opinion writers under their influence, such as the recently highly popular Ta-Nehisi Coates, are, as Andrew Sullivan recently described them, "neo-Marxist."(3)

Elected Democrats, with some exceptions, are closet liberals. As would be expected in a nation with an Enlightenment liberal founding, they honor such liberal principles as reason and universalism ("let facts be submitted to a candid world," says the Declaration); The Rights of Man (see Bill of Rights in the Constitution) and optimum outcomes ("We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty ..."). "Closet liberals" because in the current media climate we do not have a politician who can discuss liberalism as liberalism effectively with the American public.

Both Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, and I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates are about liberalism, but seldom use the term. By contrast, Fritz Stern's Five Germanys I Have Known, and The Failure of Illiberalism, address applied liberalism directly. All are recommended, the last three highly so.

This cultural inability to have a meaningful discussion of liberalism in our politics may be a substantial reason for the calamitous dysfunction in which the Republic finds itself at the current moment.



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(1) Commitment to evidence and reason: Democracy (the informed consent of the governed); Justice (rules of evidence); Intellectuality (rejects false premises and invalid syllogisms); Science (testable predictions). Egalitarian and universalist: Lincoln, praising the Declaration's "All men are created equal," called it "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times"

(2) De Tocqueville, surveying the young American nation, found "voluntary associations"

(3) Andrew Sullivan: We All Live On Campus Now: "Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet ..."

The Liberal Founding (Reposted)

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012. 

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” - (Below)

Professor 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. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. 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.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. 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

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” ... In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This, and the following, from Five Germanys I Have Known

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

The Defeat of Thought and the Crisis of Democracy

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern describes the way the American electorate has become an irrational factor making possible calamitous politics:

McConnell ... brought the Senate to a grinding halt, then blamed Obama and the Democrats for his handiwork. This gambit was wildly successful, sowing anger and [frustration] toward Democrats . . .

He adds:

A huge chunk of the electorate does not care whether politicians hold regular press conferences or release financial disclosures or refrain from saying horribly bigoted things on TV. It doesn’t matter if a presidential candidate mocks or vilifies disabled people and women and immigrants. It doesn’t matter if he releases coherent policy papers and adheres to clear positions on important issues.

M. J. Stern's analysis leaves out the underlying reason behind the symptoms he describes: the failure of the American electorate to think about the liberal principles without which democracy is a house of cards: universalism, egalitarianism, civility, altruism, public spiritedness, desire for optimum outcomes, pluralism, toleration, respect for each person's dignity and autonomy, commitment to representative deliberation rather than mob rule. As Obama said, We need a government of evidence and reason rather than ideology.

Historian Fritz Stern, describing the calamity his native Germany drew down on itself in the last century, called it "The Failure of Illiberalism." He cited the OED's definition of "illiberal": Not worthy of a [free citizen]; not generous in respect to the opinions, rights and liberties of others; narrow minded.

Dr. Stern also quoted the prophet Jeremiah 5:31: The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and my people love to have it so, and what will ye do in the end thereof?

Both camps of the electorate, left and right, subscribe to a vicious epistemic closure in which thought, as contrasted with rote repetition of dogma, is a sin. It breaks ranks. It offends the community. When, as in this case, any propositional assertion is treated as a de facto loyalty oath, we have lost our ability to use our minds to avoid catastrophic decisions, such as we Americans made in the last election. We have substituted ideology for evidence and reason, and ideology is the deformation of language and truth in the service of power.

Intellectual thought can never be ideological, because intellect always goes beyond foregone conclusions — that is its very reason for being — thus always in disagreement with dogma. As Orwell wrote, "If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."

The dogma that liberal and left are pretty much the same thing — tacitly assented to by both left and right in the recent election — prevented informed discussion of the way the illiberal choice made would drive a dagger in the heart of a civilized society. Thus we, to paraphrase Thomas Paine, sacrificed a world to folly and baseness.(1)

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(1) Thomas Paine: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness."

Democratic National Convention Speeches which Praise Liberalism

Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.

Cory Booker's speech at the DNC 2016 was a full-throated praise of liberalism. Selections below, with some comparisons to President Clinton's speech to the DNC four years earlier:

• We must empower each other, ... [Clinton: You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."]
• We've watched [Donald Trump] cruelly mock a journalist's disability. ... [Clinton: When you stifle human potential, ... it hurts us all.]
• Americans, at our best, stand up to bullies and fight those who seek to demean and degrade others. ... [Spider Robinson:(1) John Wayne would never beat up a little guy.]
• Long before [Hillary Clinton] ever ran for office, in Massachusetts, she went door-to-door collecting stories of children with disabilities. ...
• We are not a zero-sum nation, it is not you or me, it is not one American against another. It is you and I, together, interdependent, interconnected with one single interwoven American destiny. ... [Clinton: 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.]
• A neighbor with a beautiful special needs child ... [From a disability blog: A reciprocity principle - If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for the disabled. The disabled have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if they do. ]
• Liberty is not secure for some until it's secure for all, ... [MLK: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."]
• Because still the only thing necessary for evil to be triumphant is for good people to do nothing. My fellow Americans, we cannot be seduced into cynicism about our politics, because cynicism is a refuge for cowards and this nation is and must always be the home of the brave. We are the United States of America. We will not falter or fail. We will not retreat or surrender – we will not surrender our values, we will not surrender our ideals, we will not surrender the moral high ground. ... [Clinton: Advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics.]
• Let us declare again that we will be a free people. Free from fear and intimidation. Let us declare that we are a nation of interdependence, and that in America love always trumps hate. ... [Clinton: What works in the real world is cooperation ... it passes the values test.]

Read the whole thing.

So was Bill Clinton's speech at the DNC four years earlier. Highlights:

• You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."
• 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.
• What works in the real world is cooperation.
• In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy: we left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.
• In order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they couldn’t because they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place.
• It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.
• I’m not making it up. That’s their position. See me about that after the election.
• Really. Think about this: President Obama's plan cuts the debt, honors our values, brightens the future of our children, our families and our nation. It’s a heck of a lot better. It passes the arithmetic test, and far more important, it passes the values test.

Again, read the whole thing.

See also: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/the-duty-of-civility.html - "The relevant kind of respect ... has to do with the ways in which we acknowledge our fundamental equality as sharers in self-government".



(1) From Very Hard Choices:
All my life, if there was anything everyone in America knew for sure, without even thinking about it, it was that John Wayne would never beat up a little guy.