The Court’s memorable language in Romer v. Evans.

Revisiting Romer v. Evans. “The state had impermissibly made them ‘a stranger to its laws.’”

In the ‘Nineties, Colorado Amendment 2 prevented local jurisdictions in that state from enacting or enforcing protections of gay people. The Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans, struck that law down in memorable language.

“[Justice] Kennedy felt that there was no possible justification for the law other than a specific animus against the group that it targeted, since its virtually limitless scope dwarfed the justifications that the state provided. …

First, the amendment is at once too narrow and too broad, identifying persons by a single trait and then denying them the possibility of protection across the board. This disqualification of a class of persons from the right to obtain specific protection from the law is unprecedented and is itself a denial of equal protection in the most literal sense. … the amendment raises the inevitable inference that it is born of animosity toward the class that it affects. Amendment 2 cannot be said to be directed to an identifiable legitimate purpose or discrete objective. It is a status-based classification of persons undertaken for its own sake, something the Equal Protection Clause does not permit.”

/*****/

Digitalcommons_dot_law adds:
“‘These are protections … against exclusion from an almost limitless number of transactions and endeavors that constitute ordinary civic life in a free society.’ The Court concluded that Amendment 2 classified lesbians and gay men, not to further a proper legislative purpose, but to make them unequal to everyone else. In so doing, the state had impermissibly made them ‘a stranger to its laws.’”

[https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1457&context=lawreview]

[https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/517/620/]

“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.

Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives?

Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom,"(1) in three seasons beginning in 2012, took on reality TV, explicitly denounced the tea party as an enormous danger to American democracy,(2) and argued that the news should be "information that's needed in the voting booth." Episode 3 of the first season in several ways forecast a degeneration of movement conservatism which could lead to a so-called president Trump.

Yet Google search, of "The Newsroom review" and "The Newsroom criticism," finds intense criticism mainly from "progressives," including references to "hate watching." "The Newsroom," by the criteria which separate Enlightenment liberalism from the outlook of the left, is one of the most liberal television presentations in recent memory. It is idealistic, concerned for the public good, supports the humanitarian safety net, exemplifies the long range power of ideas (and love of language), supports the intentional moral order delineated by the Constitution, honors the dignity and privacy of the citizen, and speaks freely and without fear.

You would think that a series which includes a number of devastating indictments of today's Republicans, and exemplifies Jeffersonian democracy, would appeal to the progressive left. Why didn't it? Perhaps some of the progressive critiques provide a clue. Verne Gay says "The Newsroom" "actually cares passionately and deeply," but also critiques it for daring to laud an old fashioned moral order:

It's shot through with a 1930s-'40s screwball love-will-conquer-all zest, with rat-a-tat dialogue that zips along at 75 mph. There are distant echoes of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" ... Frank Capra could've written this, and, in a sense, already has. "The Newsroom" is very old-fashioned -- which may be its chief appeal.
Yet at moments it can also be a proxy for Sorkin's politics. He is the off-screen Lord High executioner, who dispatches his enemies -- like the Koch brothers or the Tea Party -- scene by scene, or speech by windy speech.

Other critiques are often vague. The real issue, which is evaded, is cynical objection to pre-60s American idealism. "The Newsroom" has specific references to Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" liberal idealism and public-spiritedness. The aura of tribute to forgotten grandeur lingers over it, complemented by references to the noble futility of Don Quixote.

"The Newsroom" has the most devastating savaging of the sullenly bigoted idiocies of the Tea Party and movement conservatism to be found on mass media, yet its left derogators focus on silly arguments against presenting the news as it should be rather than as it is. Why the total surrender to conformism?

"The Newsroom" nailed the reactionary nature of the tea party in its discussion of  "The American Taliban." Its discussion of "America is the Greatest Nation" placed the meme in its rightful context: Manifest Destiny; and The White Man's Burden. "The Newsroom" gave MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) an early scene in which she owned Will McAvoy. Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is the smartest person in the organization.
 
The critics went with male dominance. There are far more criticisms, of conduct by male Republicans that is harmful to the public good, than of mean social standards in which women may play a part; but the fact that Sorkin dares to criticize, for example, soap opera gossip, is treated as proof of sexism. Margaret Lyons:

Within the Aaron Sorkin world, there's no insult more grave than being a woman. "I'm concerned about the rest of us being turned into a bunch of old ladies with hair-dryers on our heads," Will snapped at one of his dates on Sunday's episode. That's his nightmare, his fear: that our culture has become too invested in gossip or reality TV, which are feminine concerns. ... [as is] the nightmarish senselessness of a fashion TV show.
... Will's boss and mentor Charlie scolds him in "Fix" for dating women "he'd never want to spend daylight hours with." Because it's degrading? Disrespectful? Objectifying? Because it's patronizing? Cruel? Selfish? No, no: Because Will deserves better. Will can be petty, nasty, and immature, but the show insists that he's still worthy of an enormous amount of respect. But that inherent dignity doesn't extend to any of the female characters.
"Fix" seemed to be about how fashion is dumb and news is smart, how gossip is a social cancer and cable news is noble, ... Will's dates all know about one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, but Will can't be bothered because he's too busy covering stories from many months before. ...

"The Newsroom" took on:

• The entertainment media takedown.
• The immediate appearance of a wrathful self-righteous witch hunt mob at any act or utterance which deviates in the slightest from identity politics/class warfare orthodoxy.
• A media site which prefers rating worst movies to rating best movies.
• News-as-entertainment (lurid hurricane reports; "what's going on with the McRib"; Angelina vows revenge after Brad dalliance; Tot Mom's secret beau; love child dumped on star's mother; you won't believe what child actor looks like now).
• Mean, petty, uncivilized practices.
• Reductivism, as when a gossip columnist tells a journalist, "After all, we're in the same business."
• Disrespect for dignity and privacy, as in the readiness to call out others, particularly if they're guilty of being prominent or wealthy.

It was fashionable to denigrate "The Newsroom" as moralistic and self-righteous. (One is reminded of those whose hopefully inquired, after the cleansing shock of 9/11, "Is this the end of irony?") "The Newsroom" foretold the lizard-brained era of Trump's alternative truth. It's true that truth is disrespectful of the Liar-In-Chief who has usurped the Oval Office; still, truth is the most valuable resource of Homo sapiens ("Thinking human"). (If you think that truth is political, you have greater problems than can be resolved by reading an article that dissents from the Received Wisdom.)

Newsroom's Charlie Skinner dares to say, "I'm too old to be governed by fear of dumb people." As Bill Brioux writes:

Sorkin’s complaint about America is that intelligence is in a semi-apologetic retreat, while emotionalism and stupidity are on the rise—in public policy and in the media. He’s setting up an ideal. He is an ethical writer—a moralist, if you like. He’s neither ironic nor self-deprecating; he dislikes that part of our derisive culture which undercuts, as a ritual form of defense, any kind of seriousness. He’s a very witty entertainer who believes that there’s a social value in truth. I don’t think this belief should be confused, as it has been recently, with self-righteousness.

The Writer's Almanac for February 14 reported on something Carl Bernstein, of Woodward and Bernstein, wrote in 1992:

“For, next to race, the story of the contemporary American media is the great uncovered story in America today. We need to start asking the same fundamental questions about the press that we do of the other powerful institutions in this society — about who is served, about standards, about self-interest and its eclipse of the public interest and the interest of truth. For the reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation. They — or more precisely, we — have abdicated our responsibility, and the consequence of our abdication is the spectacle, and the triumph, of the idiot culture.” (Emphasis added)

"The Newsroom" promoted Frank Capra/Don Quixote idealism; naive, sentimental public-spiritedness; thinking (and writing) fearlessly; the vital importance of truth and good information to a democracy; respect for dignity, privacy, and autonomy; and indifference to orthodoxy. It criticized gossip columns and TV shows dedicated to gossip; the associated glee for the "takedown" of prominent or successful public figures; news-as-entertainment; and mean, petty, uncivilized social practices.

It is telling that the progressive left responded with indignation. Their blindness to "tectonic shifts" was a large part of changes in American character which made possible the elevation of a totally unfit charlatan to the presidency.


(1) See "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", April 2016
(2) See "The American Taliban"

The Atlantic Revives Radical Chic: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the English Language

Recently Chris Bodenner's In the Wake of Baltimore: Your Thoughts quoted Ta-Nehisi Coates:

White Supremacy is foundational to America. White Supremacy is not a bump on the road toward a better America. It is the road itself, the means by which America justified the taking of land and enslaving of humans, which is to say the means by which America came to be.

Last year TNC wrote, "I would be remiss if I did not offer two other entries into the debate." In this case, what he left out is what the Americans themselves said was foundational: "All men are created equal." While this is a principle oft more honored in the breach than the observance, particularly in the early days of the nation, TNC's sweeping assertion leaves out what is most important.

Equality—liberty and justice for all—is a hard fight. But that fight was and still is the essence of our nation. It gave the suffragists an unanswerable argument for extending the vote to women. It gave Martin Luther King the argument for persuading the nation to undertake the monumental effort to end Jim Crow.

The effort to achieve a free democratic society marshals justice to constrain the abuse of power. Our past—"the taking of land and enslaving of humans"—was a consequence of the enormous advantage of modernity relative to the native societies of North America, and Africa, at that time, which inadequate justice failed to constrain. The nation which did these things has improved since then, because contrary to TNC's misleading language, equality is a fundamental principle, beside which "supremacy" is an aberration. Example: The Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act:

In 1971, barely one million acres of land in Alaska was in private hands. ANCSA together with section 6 of Alaska Statehood Act which the act allowed to come to fruition affected ownership to about 148.5 million acres of land in Alaska once wholly controlled by the federal government. That is larger by 6 million acres than the combined areas of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. When the bill passed in 1971, it included provisions that had never been attempted in United States settlements with Native Americans. The newly passed Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created twelve Native regional economic development corporations. Each corporation was associated with a specific region of Alaska, and the Natives who had traditionally lived there. This innovative approach to native settlements engaged the tribes in corporate capitalism. It was the idea of the AFN [Alaska Federation of Natives], who believed that the Natives would have to become a part of the capitalist system in order to survive. As stockholders in these corporations, the Natives could earn some income and stay in their traditional villages. If the corporations were managed properly, they could make profits that would enable individuals to stay, rather than having to leave Native villages to find better work. This was intended to help preserve Native culture. (Emphasis added)

TNC next critiques a commenter who 'rejects “collective responsibility” because he believes it "implicate(s) an individual’s [responsibility] based not on their actions but on their 'race.'"' One must start, TNC begins, 'by acknowledging that without "collective responsibility" we do not have a country. Perhaps the most significant form of “collective responsibility” is our tax system.'

What TNC is confusing here is legal responsibility and moral guilt. He associated "white supremacy" and guilt in The Case for Reparations:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

This is a long way from the obligation to pay levied taxes, which has nothing to do with moral responsibility for the misdeeds of other people. Martin Luther King rejected the idea of judging people based on the group they supposedly belong to when he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
 
TNC's shift in which he seems to imply that being a citizen of a nation is membership in a collective wrongly places emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity—just what the commenter objected to. This is argument by misnaming.

The measure of TNC's extremism is the way he seizes on the most extreme term in many situations, leaves out authoritative counter-arguments, and ignores middle-ground and practical arguments. The measure of TNC's intellectual dishonesty is that he ignores the most articulate defender of American principles we have had, Abraham Lincoln. The measure of TNC's radicalism is that he ignores the most successful African American civil rights crusader we have, Martin Luther King; and disputes the practical advice of the most successful African American politician we have ever had, Barack Obama.

This is because TNC's case is weak. His real problem isn't white people and their supposed supremacism. His real problem is modernity—what V. S. Naipaul called "Our Universal Civilization"—and its tremendous effectiveness. Success in the United States, as in the rest of the first-world countries, requires what is well-known: Education, and 21st-century skills. The Alaska Federation of Natives, above, opted to "become a part of the capitalist system." Ta-Nehisi, in opting instead for a handout, promotes dependency. That's his best idea.

Recently Barack Obama, asked about Ta-Nehisi's criticism, said:

It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off. (Applause.)
And that is not something that—for me to have that conversation does not negate my conversation about the need for early childhood education, or the need for job training, or the need for greater investment in infrastructure, or jobs in low-income communities.

Ta-Nehisi called this "moral invective."

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple—talk about class and hope no one notices.
This is not a “both/and.” It is a bait and switch. The moral failings of black people are directly addressed. The centuries-old failings of their local, state, and federal government, less so. (Emphasis added)

That's a radical, extremist slanting of what the first black president said, which unmistakably is a "both/and."

Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.

Wikipedia notes:

The phrase "radical chic" originated in a 1970 New York article by Tom Wolfe, titled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", which was later reprinted in his books Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Purple Decades. In the essay, Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle. Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions. (Emphasis added)

Exactly.

The Liberalism of George Orwell

In a preceding post, The Liberalism of Martin Luther King, I opened with

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

MLK's sayings map rather well to “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism.” Orwell was somewhat different. As a member of the academic left remarked, “rationalism is usually in the list.” Orwell, simply by hewing closely to honesty in observation, integrity in thought, and moral courage in presentation, became the Twentieth Century's most representative exemplar of liberal reason: fidelity to reality in service to the public good.

In “The Prevention of Literature” Orwell wrote, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Orwell represents the aspect of enlightenment liberalism which leverages humanity's working material, objective reality*, through faithful correspondence of language to what the language purports to be about. Christopher Hitchens wrote:

One cannot help but be struck by the degree to which [Orwell] became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. (Emphasis added)

As he observed, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Orwell worked out what this sort of cognitive integrity means (illustrating, along the way, the darker side of collectivist solidarity):

It is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. ... Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Orwell liberalism, which amounts to nothing less than a new way of being, seems deceptively simple. Think about what you see (in front of your nose) until you get past the social tyranny of preconceptions. Have the moral courage to speak plainly about what you saw (because, it being unorthodox, it will be denounced as “anti-social selfishness.” This modern, new human type, is denied the comfort of euphemism. Denied the Noble Lie. Required to forge forward in the face of powerful taboo:

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. ... Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
...
If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. - “The Prevention of Literature”

Historian Fritz Stern: “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.” - The Liberal Founding


-*--

(*) Note two of the Founders' emphasis on evidence and reason: “The Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its errors and vices, has been, of all that are past, the most honorable to human nature. Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused, arts, sciences useful to men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal period. - John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815”

Liberalism in the 21st Century Ctd: The Left

Yesterday's post, Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century,  argued, in effect, that liberalism is The Peaceable Kingdom. As a line which appeared in rec.arts.books (USENET) years ago asserted, “Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.” No one should be subject to the will of another. Liberalism is about efficacy and optimum outcomes* rather than “power.”**

This is in direct contradiction to powerful  “intellectual” themes from the 19th Century Central European intellectual avant-garde—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—which still are surprisingly influential in the academic humanities today. (“A left intellectual ideology which is backwards in respect to liberal modernity is one of the paradoxes of western civilization.”)

The Founders could not have warned against the illiberal mind-set of the left, because the left was a reaction against the Enlightenment which came after them.

Perhaps the most important difference between liberalism and the ideology of the left is that liberalism rejects us-vs-them thinking. The most famous three words of liberalism are those which begin the Constitution: “We the People.” By contrast, for the left there is always an oppressor. The end of the Communist Manifesto issues an implied call to war for an unnamed entity which is responsible for “your chains.” The language is everywhere. For example, Multiculturalism on Campus: Theory, Models, and Practices, states:

The revolution to the left engages people to become part of a utopian vision that is liberating ... one group subjugates and dominates (i.e., the oppressor from the right) and the other group is collaborative and empowering (i.e., the oppressed from the left).

In What's So Bad about Hate? (NYT) blogger Andrew Sullivan notes some of the consequences of this polar thinking:

The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

At its extreme, us-vs-them thinking has an anti-intellectual effect. Ideas are subject to blanket rejection on ad hominem grounds if articulated by the “other.” The tendency is suggested by Stephen Carter: “There is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that all the bad guys are on the other side.”

Eventually it becomes an attempt to limit the range of thought:

Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. - Kurt Andersen

Once again, for liberalism, language is critically important.



(*) It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. - Steven Den Beste, denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Inelegance.shtml (Emphasis added)

(**) “Live dangerously!” Nietzsche taught: “Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners.” Nothing could be further from the liberal spirit.

Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century

The previous post argued the centrality of liberalism in American politics and culture. It cited the work of German-American historian Fritz Stern, one of the few intellectual thinkers who discusses liberalism as liberalism. Such great examinations of liberal political democracy as The Open Society and Its Enemies, I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates, John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the works of George Orwell, are more typical, in that they are essentially about liberal modernity, but seldom, if ever, reference liberalism directly.

The Founders, despite the fact that “the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment,” likewise did not commonly speak of liberalism as the underlying spirit of their work. But examination of their work reveals abstract truths, applicable to all men and all times*, which they implied but did not articulate.

For example, the Founders relegated rulership to the dustbin of history. The title they conferred on the leader of the new nation they created, “president,” was no stronger at the time than “facilitator” is in ours. To this day no one is legitimately called “ruler” in our political hierarchy.

To be specific, what this implies is that liberalism holds that rulership is illegitimate. Rulership is incompatible with liberty. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man's release from his self incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” In liberal societies, each member of the people is a citizen, not a subject. The difference is that the citizen is not under “direction from another.”

A corollary is that liberalism holds that no one should be subject to the will of another. If we achieve a truly liberal outlook, we do not even want to take advantage of anyone else, to “rule” or dominate or “get over on” or coerce. We should be past such behavior by the time we get out of high school.

This is a high standard. It means that we should not speak of election results as reflecting “the will of the people.” (Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”) Rather, elections reflect the people's choice, arrived at by deliberation in which personal desire is mediated by reflection on the public good.

But isn't democracy that situation where the people rule? No. They govern. The Declaration does not say, “consent of the ruled,” it says “consent of the governed.”

Have you ever heard someone argue, “that's just semantics”? For liberalism, language is critically important. (Orwell, again, “the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”) For instance, one can argue that the French Revolution segued into the Terror because of a flawed vision of liberalism. The agents of the revolution misunderstood progress as a movement from the will of the King to Rousseau's “general will,” a version of “the will of the people.” (It is also significant that of the formula “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” only the first two terms made it into the Declaration. Fraternity, or brotherhood, involves obligations “antecedent to choice,” as a passage cited by Randall Kennedy notes. The abrogation of moral choice facilitated the emergence of the Terror's murderous violence. We are constituted by the terms we use, and liberalism asks us to choose carefully. Or, as a previous post implied, Fraternity points to group identity and its vested interests.)
 (*) Lincoln, of course.

Reparations: Americans Still Don't Recognize Attacks on Liberal Values Phrased as Left Ideology

Political articles in the United States are generally written from the perspective of the left, or of conservatism, or of liberalism. Left and conservative are belief systems or ideologies; that is, positions are often held because of values other than truth or correspondence-to-reality (such as conventional wisdom, orthodoxy, or political correctness). Liberalism, our earlier article The Liberal Founding posits, is an information system, somewhat in the model of its immediate predecessor, the scientific revolution of the latter half of the Seventeenth Century.

A defining characteristic of left thought is its groupy outlook. Politics is a matter of an oppressed group, seen as virtuous; and an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil. Thus what any given left attempts to do is to battle, punish, or eliminate an evil group. The Marxism-Leninism of the late Soviet Union, having complete control, exiled, imprisoned, or executed virtually the entire middle class in its territory within a few years of the revolution. Similarly, Maoist communism, in a bloodbath, eliminated the Chinese middle class.

This personalistic approach contrasts with the methodology of modern liberal societies, which seek to build good institutions, enact good laws, secure the civil liberties of the citizen, and discover policies which advance the public good.

From earlier post Liberal, Left:

1. The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
2. The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
3. The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
4. This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
5. “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
6. In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group. 
7. This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
8. The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
9. This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
10. The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.    

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations is in many ways a classic example of anti-liberal, anti middle class left argument. The preceding article describes the groupy quality (3) of Coates' thinking:

An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)

There is also the simplistic thinking of (6) above, which attributes to everyone considered to be a member of the oppressor group the supposed characteristics of the group:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Coates gives us an example of the left theme, "an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates appears to be more interested in punishing the guilty (7) than in constructive reform:

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. [J. D. Vance]: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

In a 2008 autopsy of the last campaign for reparations (roughly fifteen years ago), Walter Olson wrote:

To the extent the reparations movement had used its brief time on stage to encourage national introspection, Americans had reached a different conclusion from the one that the activists had hoped for—a rough consensus, in fact, that whatever the right approach to the nation’s perennial problem of race relations might be, ventures into anger-mongering and random expropriation weren’t it. (Emphasis added)

The final problem with Coates' modeling his argument on left ideology is that it is in the nature of ideology to be misleading or flat-out wrong, because ideology inherently rejects feedback from reality. Daphne Patai once said, "The whole point of being an ideologue is that new information doesn't disturb your worldview." In Coates' "white supremacy"/reparations articles there is a characteristic mixture of ad hominem, false equivalency, fallacies of distribution, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and vagueness:

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable . . .

It appears that Coates' articles concerning "white supremacy" and reparations are meant to appear to be in the great tradition of American reform, like Martin Luther King's successful civil rights campaign. But as noted in these posts, Coates' language is strikingly different from that of MLK and other reformers. Liberal campaigns appeal to "the better angels of our nature." Coates, victim of the left theme of incorrigible evil groups, can't pull that off. "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory."

(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’

What Will Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations Articles Accomplish?

The realities of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations are beginning to sink in.

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable and would take an inquiry into reparations spearheaded by someone with Conyers’ politics as seriously as Coates would take a tea party investigation into Benghazi.

Coates repeatedly fails to make the argument for reparations. Vance:

After considering the victims of predatory lending (people who, by the way, later won a lawsuit), Coates notes that of all the recently vacant houses in Baltimore, 71 percent are in majority-black neighborhoods. The implication here is that banks unfairly targeted black people for foreclosure. Baltimore is 63 percent black, though. So this is largely demographics, not racism, at work. Coates again scores an emotional point. But if his goal is to show America owes reparations, then barely disproportionate vacancy statistics and a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit by black homeowners don’t support his argument.

Coates fails to clarify what reparations would accomplish, or show how a reparations policy would be workable. Antle again:

When it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

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The people of a country ought to fight to defend their laws as they would fight for their city's walls. - Heraclitus

There is another, more fundamental problem. Two types of Europeans came to America and settled there: The idealists and the adventurers. A previous post, The Liberal Founding, argues that the idealists were the ones who “transformed the world.” Coates doesn't seem to understand either the idealists or their principles. In Black Pathology Crowdsourced, he quotes a passage from Yoni Applebaum to the effect that the principles and values of a street subculture are equivalent to the principles and values of the American idea:

Culture of Poverty is a label attached to a wide array of behaviors. There are behaviors—physical assertiveness—well-suited to that environment that may tend to inhibit success elsewhere.

The problem is that such a culture is dysfunctional, not that civil society frowns on it. Where "physical assertiveness" prevails, the young and strong push everybody else around. Women, children, the elderly and the disabled are marginalized. Because social capital requires an atmosphere of cooperation and trust—so that people can work together—social capital itself never develops. "Physical assertiveness" is a major cause of poverty, but Coates clearly appears not to understand this. He thinks that when his fellow citizens celebrate the American Revolution on the Fourth of July, it is about national chauvinism (or as he sometimes calls it, "white supremacy"). Thus, in The Case for Reparations, Coates asserts: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Martin Luther King appealed to the principles of American ideals when he said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" Coates dismisses the principles and rejects the idea that his fellow citizens might be deeply moved by the thought of liberty and equality and justice. To Coates this is just hypocritical, "denying the facts of our heritage." 

An earlier post argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress."

If the mind behind "The Case for Reparations" is one which cannot be moved by ideals which have inspired the rest of the world, that may be a cause, more for pity, than exasperation.

Reparations: The Worst Fallacies are those that Trash Liberal Principles

In his essay "Dragon Slayers,"* Jerald Walker recounts a conversation with "a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites, he felt. ... 'How about slavery,' he asked. I explained, as politely as I could, that I had not been a slave. 'But you feel its effects,' he snapped. 'Racism, discrimination, and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people,' he insisted, 'are your oppressors.' ... 'After all,' I continued, 'slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn't be standing here.'The man was outraged. 'You're absolving them of responsibility, of the obligation to atone for past and present wrongs.'"

When I saw this passage yesterday, I realized that Ta-Nehisi Coates is presenting a concealed demand for atonement in The Case for Reparations:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is making essentially religious accusations and demands—"guilt," and atonement—which have no place in politics. Here is an outline of the arguments against Mr. Coates' fallacies:

• Courts determine guilt and punish the guilty. The political process does not.
• A reformer may ask fellow citizens to right wrongs, but not to atone for them.
• There is no political process which demands atonement or which enacts laws having to do with atonement.
• If there are laws inferring guilt from benefit, cite them. Absent evidence, have no doubt: Benefit is not guilt.
• One cannot otherwise be guilty for what someone else has done. Just as (Randall Kennedy notes) "I cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that is independent of my contribution to it," one likewise cannot be guilty for some past state of affairs that is independent of one's contribution to it. Therefore guilt does not inherit. There is no guilt—"white" or otherwise—for ancestors who owned slaves. There is regret. And sorrow.

Guilt does not inherit. Otherwise our attitude toward each other would be rife with baseless accusations. The law of averages being what it is, we all have ancestors, in many cases more recent than Washington and Jefferson, who were murderers. We hold ourselves entirely innocent of our ancestors' heinous felonies, and rightly so. Reality does not work that way.

Benefit is not guilt. Everyday life confers a tangled web of thousands of benefits—and burdens—relative to other individuals, groups, and nations. In most cases these benefits are independent of our wishes or our actions; we did not seek them nor can we avoid them. One could prove any sort of obligation by pointing to the correctly selected benefit. But an argument which can prove anything in actuality proves nothing. For example, it is practically impossible to live in a modern nation without making purchases of food or clothes sold by employees who are not making a living wage. To condemn ourselves for this does not make things better for anyone. Better the quest to right wrongs.

Abby Ohlheiser, in You Should Read the Case for Reparations, cites Ta-Nehisi Coates' assertion of "the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy." But discrimination is not supremacy. (Nor is advantage. Or benefit.) For example, a passage at Time.com documents society-wide discrimination by Temporarily Able Bodied people: "Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor." Would anyone take this as "proving" that "normal supremacy" is, as Mr. Coates claims concerning "white supremacy," "a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it?" If, as is likely, this form of disability discrimination was as widespread in Washington and Jefferson's time as slavery, could one conclude, following Mr. Coates' pattern, that the nation was "erected on a foundation of [able] supremacy"? In both cases, the conclusion exceeds the reach of the argument.

For that matter, what of Ta-Nehisi Coates' insistence that the Framers, and the principles of their Constitution, were hypocritical? He repeatedly charges that the fact that some of the Founders had slaves excludes the possibility that America was the first, and perhaps only, nation founded upon ideas rather than ethnicity. To claim that the character of the person who presents a principled argument, refutes the argument and denies the principle, is classic ad hominem.

According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who rejects celebrating America as "the great democratizer," the eminent Historian Fritz Stern was wrong to hail the creation of his nation as an inspiration to the world:

“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.”

The perfidy of  Ta-Nehisi Coates' mode of slanted example shows most clearly in the way he neglected to research The Great Emancipator. Lincoln thoroughly and devastatingly refutes Mr. Coates' claim that the intent of the Founders was to create "an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy." Lincoln used textual analysis to demonstrate that the Founders were confronted by "the necessities arising from [slavery's] existence." He goes on to show that they carefully crafted the Constitution, therefore, to accommodate slavery (for the time being) without legitimizing it:

It is easy to demonstrate that "our fathers, who framed this Government under which we live," looked on slavery as wrong, and so framed it and everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far as the necessities arising from its existence permitted.  ... If additional proof is wanted it can be found in the phraseology of the Constitution.  When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning  In all matters but this of slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language.  But the Constitution alludes to slavery three times without mentioning it once  The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical.  They speak of the "immigration of persons," and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so.  In establishing a basis of representation they say "all other persons," when they mean to say slaves--why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say "persons held to service or labor." If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction.  Why didn't they do it? We cannot doubt that it was done on purpose.  Only one reason is possible, and that is supplied us by one of the framers of the Constitution--and it is not possible for man to conceive of any other--they expected and desired that the system would come to an end, and meant that when it did, the Constitution should not show that there ever had been a slave in this good free country of ours. (Emphasis added)

The Crafters of Ta-Nehisi Coates' nation, and the Framers of his Constitution, "expected and desired that the system [of slavery] would come to an end." Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts the contrary over and over again in the two "reparations" articles. His total silence concerning the way Lincoln obliterates this libel is a fatal omission. It calls in doubt Ta-Nehisi Coates' competence as a writer, and his intellectual probity.


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(*) In The Best American Essays 2007, p. 281 - 82