The crisis of democracy we’re now facing was predicted sixteen years ago. We didn’t believe it; and we took inadequate measures to prevent it.

“We’re an empire now”

In 2004 Ron Suskind wrote:

“The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' ... 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.” (Emphasis added)

The aide was predicting RepublicanWorld, which is an emergent effect of the pathological chief executive elected by minority vote in 2016.

1. ‘Empire’ means ‘an undemocratic authoritarian society.’

2. ‘Judicious study of discernible reality’ is the basis of Justice, Democracy, Science, and Scholarship.(1) An ‘empire’ based on their absence is a doomed barbarism whose primary achievement is calamitous human suffering as it collapses under the weight of its internal contradictions.

3. We’ve seen ‘we create our own reality’ before. It’s usually called ‘the triumph of the will.’

4. Democracy is based on the love of knowledge. ‘Empire’ is based on obsession with ‘power.’ The Big Lie is its characteristic mode of discourse.

To quote Andrew Sullivan, This has to end, but we cannot yet see how it will end.

(1) Author’s current working hypothesis: All justice is liberal; all democracy is liberal; all science is liberal; and all genuine intellectuality is liberal.

Liberalism is the methodology of the good life. It is the central idea of what Naipaul called “Our Universal Civilization.”

We have become an uproar society, not a deliberative society. The result is lawless abuse of power.

It's a question of what society has a right to ask us to do.

In an SNL skit years ago, ditzy blonde character Victoria Jackson chirped, “It has to do with the in dih vid you al.” The Ralph Northam brouhaha addresses the matter of the rights of the single person in the context of the tendency of society to gang up on the individual.

The controversy over Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is not about race or racism. It is about whether our society has the right to ruin the life of what appears to be a perfectly decent, capable, well-intentioned Democratic governor because he may have appeared in a possibly satirical picture incorporating blackface and Klan robe thirty-five years ago.

The author of On Liberty explicitly addressed the case where society issues “mandates ... in things with which it ought not to meddle.”(1)

We have the right to throw Virginia Governor Ralph Northam out only if he’s a bad governor, not because of something that has no impact on policy or act, done in another era, under different social standards, for which he has publicly repented and apologized.

The treatment of Northam is a response to symbol, not substance. The howling mob appears to be acting, not because it is right, but because it can.

What is happening is a perfect example of what John Stuart Mill called “social tyranny”: society overstepping its bounds to impose illicit constraints on one of its members, in lawless abuse of power.(1)

A public which too readily goes ballistic over a vivid graphic that lends itself to the term “racist” and can explode into a witch hunt when it smells fresh blood, is in danger of becoming a callout society, a gotcha society, a fear society, where the individual is afraid to think or speak or act fearlessly because the consequences may be all out of proportion to the cause.

The motto is no longer,  “Be kind, decent, ethical, and public-spirited,” but “Whatever you do, never appear in anything that goes viral.” “Social justice” has come to mean, “Be totally, utterly, cravenly conformist at all costs.”

One of the catchphrases of Enlightenment liberalism is “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” We should be willing to fight to the death to thwart “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”(1)

One should regard with utter disgust the manner in which the media are handling this, with headlines such as “Northam in Racist Photo: Refuses to Resign.”


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(1) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

It is time to be clear about the difference between the Democratic Party and the campus left

There’s no overlap.

One is liberal, one is a form of Marxism. And Marxism never cared about equality, about civil rights, about the dignity and privacy of the single person, about the right to the pursuit of happiness.

On NPR a few months ago, Linda Wertheimer responded to a study in which women came off better than men by saying, “Perhaps women are just better people.” Would it have been okay to say, “Perhaps men are just better people?”

We may be used to this sort of implicit sexist, inegalitarian, prejudicial language, but we shouldn’t be.

In “We All Live on Campus Now,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, “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.” He identifies these as effects of “neo-Marxism.”

Democrats hold that such implicit race and gender prejudice is morally wrong, since it is about attacking people because of immutable characteristics, race and gender, which they can’t change, rather than harmful attitudes, habits, and social conventions, which they can.

Sullivan adds, “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.”

The Constitution is a representative Enlightenment document; and the Democratic Party honors “the Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment.” By contrast, the no-platforming of the campus left violates the free speech principle of the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint censorship of prospective campus speakers, sometimes specifically because they endorse liberal values such as the central intellectual concept that competing ideas should be freely debated in the University.(1)

Finally, campus left politics of identity is about approved identity. As Linda Wertheimer inadvertently revealed, this is inseparable from its counterpart, the unacceptable resurrection of such politics of disapproved identity as sexism. The campus left meets a definition which once appeared in the OED: “Not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, and liberties of others: narrow-minded.”

(1) “Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline.” — Mary Lefkowitz

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.

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.

On Fresh Air: A founding principle of Enlightenment liberalism

Monday's transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air, interviewing Tom Hicks on his new book Churchill And Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, quoted his conclusion: "The fundamental driver of Western civilization is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." (Emphasis added)

Remember the central problem of our current politics—that conservatism in its current form, in Congress, is driven by a rigid ideology and won't listen to the American majority? Instead of a Republican party which constitutes the loyal opposition characteristic of democracy, we have a totalitarian mindset which is "alien to any dialogue":

The tragedy of Marxist teaching is that it is alien to any dialogue. Marxism only conducted a monologue and never listened. It was always right...always claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything, thus proving its totalitarian essence. - Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 8.

"I alone can fix it," Trump declared in his nomination acceptance speech, "claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything."

"People of goodwill can perceive [reality] ... other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." The foundation of democracy is our common experience of the world. The foundation of democratic prudence is that all citizens, no matter what their "beliefs," will honor evidence by changing their views when those views are shown not to comport with reality.

This is one of Enlightenment liberalism's most fundamental principles. It is echoed when the Declaration (a representative Enlightenment document) proclaims, "let facts be submitted to a candid world." But it is one of the ways the illiberal left disagrees with democratic principle. A tendency toward radical skepticism is shown in a recent post which noted rejection of the rule of law; privileging narratives on ad hominem rather than factual grounds; and claiming there are no neutral, objective claims about the world. On campus, postmodernism denied the relation between reality and language in Derrida's "There is nothing outside the text." (A scholar joked that a postmodernist is someone who spends the day telling students that language cannot refer to reality, then leaves a message on his wife's answering machine asking if he should pick up a pizza on the way home.)

This is not a separate problem of left politics and right politics, but prior. It stems from the ideological cast both have assumed. Ideology privileges belief over reality and, lacking any true principles, will opportunistically assert either omniscient knowledge—Trump claiming to be able to fix everything above—or deny the possibility of knowledge—Trump recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists.

Foundation on cognitive prudence—objective reality exists and tends to make it possible for people of good will to agree and work together—is not just a principle of Enlightenment liberalism. The Enlightenment was the birth of "our universal civilization." Mr. Ricks concludes by arguing that holding that objective reality tops the dogmas of ideology. Right ideology and left ideology have no legitimate claim whatsoever, because ideology is inherently unprincipled:

If there's anything I have to say I learned from this experience of reading and re-reading thousands upon thousands of words by Churchill and Orwell over the last three and half years, it's that. That's my conclusion - that this is the essence of Western society and, at its best, how Western society operates.

And it's - you can really reduce it to a formula. First of all, you need to have principles. You need to stand by those principles and remember them. Second, you need to look at reality to observe facts and not just have opinions and to say, what are the facts of the matter? Third, you need to act upon those facts according to your principles.

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."

How Fares the "Republic?"

In Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom," Producer MacKenzie McHale said, A well-informed electorate is essential to the proper functioning of a healthy democracy. Inadequate information, or worse, wrong information, can lead to catastrophic decisions and impede vigorous debate.

In the national election four years ago, this blog posted "How Fares the Republic?" articles. Current answer: We made a catastrophic decision.

Looking for clues, we might first note that in the vast majority of cases in which the word "liberalism" appeared in our public discourse, what followed was utter nonsense, because our assumptions mix the "we're all in this together" outlook of liberalism with the class warfare, oppressor vs. oppressed outlook of the left. America was founded on the liberal ideas of the Declaration and Constitution, and can no more function with the agonistic assumptions of the left (or right) than a gasoline engine can run on diesel oil.

It is impossible to discuss liberalism and leftism as if they were the same without being intellectually incoherent. To do so is to pretend to be two incompatible things at the same time: Seeking win-win situations and having a zero-sum-game outlook; seeking what Washington called "the public good" and taking pride in being "oppositional," "adversarial," and "subversive"; holding slavery's negation of human equality deeply against American principles and "in course of ultimate peaceable extinction," as Lincoln argued, and holding, as Ta-Nehisi does, that "white supremacy" underlies all America does yesterday, today, and forever. ("The certain sins of the future.")

Being unable to discuss the principles of our liberal Founding in any coherent manner, we elected the most illiberal president possible: Authoritarian, bullying, vindictive, narcissistic, and childish. See pre-election posts on president-elect Trump here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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.

The Left Itself Does Not Actually Consider Itself Liberal

"Liberal" has often been equated with "left." Thus it is a significant change in our political rhetoric that the left itself has begun to impugn liberalism. Last August this blog noted that the radical protesters who disrupted a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle condemned liberalism as such:

Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” (Emphasis added) - Seattle Times

Likewise some members of the mainstream media have begin to speak of "the illiberal left." That's Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine. Chait describes the left as assailing liberalism, and implies that this radical movement prefers a destructive revolution to democratic gradualism:(1)

It is the expression of a backlash on the left against liberalism — with all its maddening compromises and deference to the rights of the enemy — which fetishizes success as the by-product of cataclysmic struggle.

Chait rejects class warfare's assumption that citizens in "oppressed groups" have greater civil rights than citizens who are not, for example, minorities:(2)(3)

Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.

Chait exposes the left's implicit justification of undemocratic violence. His article supports the conjecture that illiberal "progressive" class warfare leftism, despite its shrill proclamations, is a marginal movement existing mainly on some campuses and in the writings of the misguided "progressive" journalists who failed to notice that Ta-Nehisi Coates White Supremacist series constituted a wholesale condemnation of the liberal democratic principles of the Founding. Chait:(4)

Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting. ...
But the campus was merely the staging ground for most displays of left-wing ideological repression because it is one of the few places the illiberal left has the power to block speakers and writers deemed oppressive.

Another fundamental difference: "A liberal sees Trump’s ability to deliver a speech before supporters as a fundamental political right worth defending. A radical sees this “right” as coming at the expense of subordinate classes, and thus not worth protecting."(5)

The conclusion to be drawn from Chait's article is, Always remind yourself, when you hear someone using the term "liberal" or the term "left," that you need to determine which is being referred to. They have nothing in common. There is, Chait argues, an "irreparable contradiction between two styles of politics. Does the future of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement lie in building a revolution, or in the continued work of (small-d) democratic liberalism?"

Finally, as argued in our article The Atlantic Revives Radical Chic: Ta-Nehisi Coates and the English Language, and several months later in Carlos Lozada's The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, leftism, in contrast to liberalism, is essentially radical chic. It is not practiced by working politicians of either American political party (with the exception of a vanishingly small fringe). How often do you hear a Democratic politician, let alone a Republican, advocate public policy in terms of protecting the oppressed from the oppressor? As radical chic, class warfare leftism is about pretense. A privileged elite pretends solidarity with people they don't socialize with in order to grant themselves absolution for benefiting from conditions whose solution is liberal democracy, not double standards, the denial of civil rights to people you don't approve of, violent censorship of opinions you're afraid to debate, an end run around the rule of law, and mob rule.

Michelle Goldberg notes the phenomenon of Leftists for Trump. "Increasingly, a vocal part of the left is marked by its contempt for liberalism."

This romantic-fantasy left functions mainly as a remedy for its practitioners' own psychological problems:

I recoil from a personality type—not uncommon in radical movements—that treats politics as a realm in which to enact revenge on society for its own alienation and to claim a starring role in history. (Emphasis added)

Because demolitionist left pretense has lost its earthly moorings, its wilful ignorance of its harmful effect is hardhearted:

There’s not a word in [Christopher Ketcham's] piece about the immigrants who would be rounded up and put into detention camps under Trump’s plan, or the people of color who would be terrorized by a total breakdown in the norms that make even an imperfect multiethnic democracy possible. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that Ketcham, as well as the likeminded people he quotes, are so forthright about seeing politics purely in terms of personal catharsis. (Emphasis added)

As we noted in You Say You Want a Revolution, 

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

Such magical thinking is scary. The actual result of totalist revolution is, typically, real social harm. The revolution Burke meditated on eventuated in the Terror.

-*--

(1) Point 9: Can only achieve its objective through revolution, not by leveraging the structures (elected representatives, the justice system) of the existing oppressive society. - Ten Points Against the Class Warfare Ideology

(2) See Point 1: Against political democracy, which by definition includes all the people. Proposes rule by the oppressed rather than government (not rule) by the people.

(3) See Point 6: [Class warfare] employs a double standard in many areas. For example, members of oppressor groups do not have the same rights as the oppressed. Discrimination by the oppressed against oppressors is approved, but oppressors are accused of discriminatory attitude and conduct.

(4) See Point 4: [Class warfare] arrogates to itself two things belonging to the justice system in civilized societies: Determination of guilt; and administration of punishment (Example: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”).

Re Ta-Nehisi Coates on "white supremacy":

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. - in Chris Bodenner's In the Wake of Baltimore: Your Thoughts

(5) See Point 3: [Class warfare] rejects the rule of law. Class warfare regards the supposed protections and rights of the existing body of law as hypocritical, benefiting only members of the oppressor class.