Prophet or fool; “All democracy, science, justice, and genuine intellectuality are liberal”

Are you left/progressive? Or are you liberal?

I've already written that all democracy, science, justice, and genuine intellectuality are liberal.
That liberalism is the central theme of first-world modernity.
And that liberalism is the methodology of the good life. [These assertions haven’t been challenged yet. Feel free.]

Left/progressivism conflicts with or violates many of the values, methodologies, ethical principles, and standards of liberalism, as will be discussed below. Yet on our campuses, and in the news, left/progressivism seems to predominate over liberalism. [Former President Obama criticizes two aspects of progressivism, the desire for a revolution; and “cancel culture.” (When Virginia Governor Northam continued to serve after a youthful picture of him in blackface emerged, the media kept asking why he didn’t resign.) These two topics don’t appear in this post. Perhaps in a later post.]

First example. In a widely hailed article in The Atlantic a few years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates said that the policy he was advocating would end "white guilt." Liberalism holds that statements such as race [derogatory characteristic] or gender [derogatory characteristic] are prejudicial, and as such, not allowable. Andrew Sullivan, in "We all live on campus now," suggested that important decisions should not be "based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation."

There is a tendency, with left/progressivism, to treat certain identities as "oppressor groups." It is acceptable to attribute derogatory characteristics to these groups, or to their members. This violates an important principle of liberalism: All people are created equal. Egalitarianism is the principle which made first-world modernity the first era in history to condemn slavery unequivocally.

Sullivan adds,

This is compounded by the idea that only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make. And that campus orthodoxy is now the culture’s as a whole.

Second example. The left/progressive belief that identity is important, as seen in the two preceding paragraphs. This, too, conflicts with the values of liberalism. If all are created equal, then the only identity that matters is "human being," and all possess it.

Someone recently tossed off a remark about "the patriarchy." Apart from the problem that its vagueness makes it difficult to construct a refutation, it treats a particular identity, possessing the immutable characteristic, male, as having a derogatory nature, "oppressor." For left/progressivism, "patriarchy" is a term thought to resist evil. It is a logical consequence of progressivism's implicit decision to abandon egalitarianism, to divide humankind into a good group, the oppressed, and a bad group, the oppressor, and to support prejudicial language against those who are born into the bad group.

Liberalism opposes progressivism here because to abandon human equality invites the us-against-them conflict which has always beset us; because it initiates a slippery slope whose terminus is the reintroduction of slavery;(1) and because liberalism considers such remarks to be bigotry.

/*****/

Where to find out about liberalism? The inspiring passages of the Declaration and Constitution are liberal. President Kennedy’s presentation to the Houston Ministerial Association is a stirring liberal argument for separation of church and state. Naipaul’s presentation, “Our Universal Civilization” is liberal. The concept of the Rights of Man is liberal, plus the meta-right to the pursuit of happiness.(2)

(1) Slavery is justified because the slave has a “slave nature,” said one Greek thinker.

(2) Andrew Sullivan: “ … The most radical statement of the Enlightenment, which is why it is indeed of such world-historical importance. As I write I have no idea as to the conclusion of this new drama in world history, except that it will have ramifications as large and as lasting as the end of the Cold War. 

What power four little words—the pursuit of happiness—still have.”

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/]

Many American Bernie Sanders supporters seem to believe the sacrifice of civil liberties is a small price to pay for guaranteed social welfare

Jonathan Zimmerman recently explained in USA Today why Bernie Sanders would be an inappropriate Democratic nominee for the presidency. The Latin American regimes he praises, ramming that upraised right arm at you, aren’t even remotely democratic socialism, as he seems to imply. They are Marxist, “dedicated to destroying freedom.” … “Yes, we learned, socialist economies provided health care, education and other state services to their citizens. But if you dared to criticize the state itself, it could remove your services — and, of course, your freedom — at any time.”

Zimmerman wrote that he and a young Barack Obama “took a class about socialism's dark side … entitled “The Sociology of Socialist Societies.” … A few students in the course gamely tried to defend these systems, arguing that the sacrifice of civil liberties was a small price to pay for guaranteed social welfare.”

As we’ve been reminded over the past few weeks, the Democratic presidential candidate is stuck in a Cold War time warp. Like the students in my class in 1983, Sanders continues to congratulate Cuba and other socialist regimes for improving the lives of their people. … The course did not romanticize socialism in any way. If Obama did the reading, he discovered that socialist societies oppressed their citizens in the name of a revolution that never delivered on its promise of human dignity and liberation.

Zimmerman added, “Imagine if Sanders praised Hitler for reducing cigarette smoking or Mussolini for making the trains run on time.”

/*****/

When I brought Zimmerman’s article to some American readers’ attention, some of them still defended Bernie Sanders and his persistent tendency to romanticize Latin American dictatorships.

One said, “ I don't think you understood what Bernie said. He never praised or ignored the governmental failings. What he DID do is recognize that even the worst people can do some good things -- like education and food for the people. Cubans are well-educated today, despite the Castro dictatorship. We can never have a good government if we throw every baby out with the bathwater.”

Another said, “ I’m not convinced that electing Bernie Sanders would lead to a fascist government. I do want all Americans to have access to affordable healthcare and post secondary education. Is there another candidate that advocates for that?”

I answered this last, “Nominating Bernie Sanders would lose a lot of moderates and people in swing states, increasing the likelihood that the current wretched situation would continue.

The recent surprise swing toward Biden suggests that the American people have begun to realize this.”

Worldwide pandemics and the culinary customs of Communist China

Perhaps the world’s nations should have a word with China concerning culinary customs which appear to repeatedly result in deadly worldwide pandemics.

1. “The Covid-19 outbreak, which has now led to 2,666 deaths and over 77,700 known infections, is thought to have originated in wildlife sold at a market in Wuhan.”

2. “At least two flu pandemics in the past century—in 1957 and 1968—originated … [from] millions of live birds … still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets.”

3. “In late May 2003, [SARS] studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. … high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.”

/*****/

‘The Guardian’: “Peacocks, porcupines and pangolins among species bred on 20,000 farms closed in wake of virus. Freshly-slaughtered meat from wildlife and farm animals is preferred over meat that has been slaughtered before being shipped. Nearly 20,000 wildlife farms raising species including peacocks, civet cats, porcupines, ostriches, wild geese and boar have been shut down across China in the wake of the coronavirus, in a move that has exposed the hitherto unknown size of the industry.

Until a few weeks ago wildlife farming was still being promoted by government agencies as an easy way for rural Chinese people to get rich.

But the Covid-19 outbreak, which has now led to 2,666 deaths and over 77,700 known infections, is thought to have originated in wildlife sold at a market in Wuhan in early December, prompting a massive rethink by authorities on how to manage the trade.” — Michael Standaert in Shenzhen

/*****/

Melinda Liu in ’The Smithsonian’: “At least two flu pandemics in the past century—in 1957 and 1968—originated in the Middle Kingdom and were triggered by avian viruses that evolved to become easily transmissible between humans. Although health authorities have increasingly tried to ban the practice, millions of live birds are still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets each year. In a study published in January, researchers in China concluded that these markets were a “main source of H7N9 transmission by way of human-poultry contact and avian-related environmental exposures.””

/*****/

Wikipedia: “In late May 2003, [SARS] studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from asian palm civet to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.

Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.”

The Enemy Within

The Enemy Within (Posted elsewhere a few months ago)

“You will rule or ruin in all events.”

This “enemy” first prevented the Founders from including an anti-slavery plank in the Constitution. Lincoln:

“I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more …” — Lincoln-Douglas Debates http://www.bartleby.com/251/pages/page44.html

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

The Southern Democrats refused to take no for an answer. Lincoln charged:

“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union_speech#Summary

Beginning April 12, 1861, the plantation states of the Confederacy committed an act of war. Near Charleston, South Carolina, they fired on Fort Sumter, a military installation of their own country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we have lost:

One person, one vote (gerrymandering, voter suppression)
Impartial justice (McConnell’s theft of the Garland Supreme Court seat; a minority president* who has already made two lifetime Court appointments)
The ability to pass laws restoring democratic principles without a corrupt Court striking them down using crazy constitutional interpretations.
The power to expel a president* who is tanking democracy.
Capacity to remedy policy risks like climate change and health care, currently blocked by spiritual wickedness in high places.

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

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

/*****/

Notes I’ve transcribed approximately from what Belkin said:

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

/*****/

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-*—

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

The Enemy Within

“You will rule or ruin in all events.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we have lost:

One person, one vote (gerrymandering, voter suppression)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-*--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politicizing independent institutions, such as the Justice Department

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

Executive Power Grabs (False emergencies)

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

Delegitimizing Communities (Hispanic “invasion,” demonizing Muslims)

Corrupting Elections (Voter suppression, Gerrymandering)

“Good” discrimination?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling" on late night TV

Protection ... 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. — John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Social-media frenzies carelessly destroy the lives and careers of individuals who transgress orthodoxies.” — Andrew Sullivan

A few nights ago Stephen Colbert opened his show with two cheap shots at Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. Despite a substantial majority of the African American voters in his state encouraging him not to resign, and liberal Mark Shields on PBS delineating Northam’s good works for minorities and the poor in his state, Colbert mocked him as a scoundrel to the applause of his worshipful audience.

Colbert went on to put Northam down for reporting that the American slave situation began with the euphemism “indentured servants,” scolding him for the insufficient wokeness of his language. Again the crowd cheered. As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently, “Social-media frenzies carelessly destroy the lives and careers of individuals who transgress orthodoxies.”

A couple of points here. This faux “social” justice is intended to impede the free thought and free speaking out which is particularly needed now if we are to counter the deluge of lies our current government is dumping into public discourse.

Second, Colbert, his conformist(1) audience, and the communitarian cadre itself need emphatic reminding that not all social disapproval is justified. His audience should be ashamed of itself for cheering these Colbertian cheap shots. Wrongful social disapproval is the essence of prejudicial discrimination.

Here you have an entire audience (apparently), before the whole television world, gleefully attempting to destroy the life and career of someone who demonstrably is one of the better public servants out there. This is exactly the “social tyranny” whose denunciation in On Liberty was documented a few posts back.(2)

Before you participate in a “community” which is denouncing someone who has got on the wrong side of public opinion, remember: there isn’t always safety in numbers; and it is always disgraceful to gang up on someone simply because they are at a disadvantage.


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(1) Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. Norms are ... forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics, which ignores realistic appraisal of other courses of action. (Emphasis added) Wikipedia

(2) 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.

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.