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.”

Prophet or Fool: An American Journey, Part 1

In 1944, when I was three, I remember my father galloping around the farmyard on a farm horse without a saddle. In certain seasons his routine was, Get up early and milk the cows. Plough rich coastal bottomlands all day behind a team of horses. Milk the cows.

It was an essential civilian occupation, and had exempted him from military service.

The next year, as the war was winding down, he enrolled in a junior college. From then to 1952, he completed college and divinity school.

Having been ordained, a Protestant denomination sent him (and his family) to an American territory as a “home missionary.”

Being a PK (Preacher’s Kid) shaped my outlook.

There is a personage in the New Testament who Low Protestants call the Rich Young Ruler. He is mentioned in the first three Gospels as approaching Jesus of Nazareth to join his movement. One day, reflecting back on this, I realized that no one can be characterized as such in our society. In fact, in the American culture, no one can legitimately be called a ruler. Democracies hold that their citizens enjoy liberty and are not “subjects.” They are not subject to the will of another, as they would be under rulership.

This distinction is found in our common language. The Mayor is never spoken of as our ruler, nor the County Executive, the Governor, or the President. In cartoons where a saucer lands, its strange creatures say, Take me to your leader.

“Rulership is illegitimate in our society.” So far, I haven’t found it stated anywhere else. Prophet? Or fool?

Instead, such language as “the will of the people” appears routinely in our public discourse: “once the legislature, reflecting the will of the people.” Even Federalist 46 appears to err: “But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force.” Federalist 46 should probably have used different language, such as “But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the conclusion of the national deliberation and direct the national force.”

I can live in a liberal democracy because I can live with public policies reflecting the considered deliberation of the people, flawed though it sometimes may be. But neither I, nor anyone else, should ever consent to be subject to the will of another. As Immanuel Kant wrote in “What is Enlightenment?” to enjoy freedom is to enjoy freedom from tutelage. “Dare to know,” and to act on your knowledge without guidance from another.

“I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.”

During the second administration of W. Bush, the late, inimitable Englishman Christopher Hitchens rejected the claim of practitioners of Islam that they had the right to prevent, by violence, the scholarly analysis of Islam, or the creation of any image whatever of the Prophet:

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize … Islam … Islam makes very large claims for itself. …

The prohibition on picturing the prophet … is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. … [He seems to be saying,] For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.

Implicit in American liberal democracy from the Founding is that rulership is forbidden. Our highest official is a “presider,” not a “ruler.” No one anywhere in our society can subject us to their will. And as Kant says below, no one can tell us what to think and say:

In “What is Enlightenment?” the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote,

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] “Have courage to use your own reason!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.

/*****/

That is what bothers me about the way Bernie Sanders speaks to us. He lectures. He harangues. Constantly raises his right arm and points.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.

Judging by the recent election, so do most Democrats.

[Afterword: The Hitchens article cited claims to make a “case for mocking religion.” I do not. I seek to identify and correct the errors of organized religion, which, not honoring the insight of Jesus of Nazareth, that God is to be considered kind, generous, loving, and good, seems to prefer the red meat of the Jealous God; the God of Wrath.

For me, religion is a sensibility, an intuition that reality is deeper, richer, more profound and wondrous than the secular outlook imagines.]

[https://tinyurl.com/I-RefuseToBeLectured]

[http://www.indiana.edu/~cahist/Readings/2010Fall/Islam_and_Modernity/Kant_Enlightenment.pdf]

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.”

At common law, merchants prohibited “from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

NPR: “Business Leaders Oppose 'License To Discriminate' Against LGBT Texans”

How would you feel if you called a plumber because a burst pipe was flooding your house, and he, seeing a cross displayed, turned around and left because he had “a sincere religious belief” that Christians are infidels? A proposed Texas law would legitimize such bigotry to protect “sincerely held” personal “beliefs.”

For centuries, common law has prohibited merchants “from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

Almost a quarter of a century ago, the Supreme Court ruled against Colorado Amendment 2, which forbade local jurisdictions from passing laws protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ people. In Romer v. Evans, the Court said, “A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”

Romer v. Evans also noted: “At common law, innkeepers, smiths, and others who `made profession of a public employment,' were prohibited from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

Nevertheless, here we go again. Austin Chronicle: Texas Senate Bill 17 is “a far-reaching religious liberty bill that would give any professional licensed by the state of Texas – including doctors, lawyers, teachers, real estate agents, and even mold assessors – a license to discriminate under the guise of protecting “freedom of speech” regarding “sincerely held” religious beliefs. If passed into law, SB 17 would protect licensed professionals who wish to deny services to those who defy their religious beliefs.”

The sad part is that such malevolent religious right foolishness is bad for Texas commerce. Wade Goodwyn:

The convention and travel industries in particular tend to be the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to these types of bills. Phillip Jones, president and CEO of VisitDallas, says they'd be the first to keel over if the controversial 'religious refusal' legislation passes.

"One in ten trade shows held in America are held in Texas. I've got a hundred million dollar's worth of business that's currently at risk, if this legislation were to pass," says Jones. "Based on our experience with the bathroom bill they have a provision in their contracts that spells out that, should Texas pass any form of discriminatory legislation, then they can cancel their meeting in Texas or in Dallas without any penalties."

The irrationality underlying all this is the implied argument that, (at least for people you approve of) “sincerely held personal beliefs” must be true and just. People are often most convinced where they are most wrong. The Inquisition, the Holocaust, and Jim Crow are all examples of how intensely emotional beliefs can have consequences which shock the conscience. They can lead to conduct not bounded by ethics, by the laws, or by the least vestige of humane sympathy. Sincerely held, but wrong, personal beliefs can lack the constraints of justice, resulting in extrajudicial determination of guilt and kangaroo court justice.

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.”

Hayek on The Liberal Founding

What in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. — Hayek

The term “liberal” in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today. (1) — Hayek

F. A. Hayek, “Why I am Not a Conservative” 1960:

Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. ... Some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.” I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold ... I shall later have to consider what would be the appropriate name for the party of liberty. The reason for this is ... that the term “liberal” in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today, ... (Emphasis added)

“Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change.”

This is why English conservative Andrew Sullivan, now an American citizen, believes that American conservatives are not at all conservative. Mocking “presidential,” as our current president* does; doing whatever he can to violate the Constitutional separation of powers, particularly with respect to the independence of the judiciary; doing the best he can to undermine and sabotage the guardrails of liberal democracy; and abrogating the faith and credit of the United States by subverting international treaty obligations, is not “opposition to drastic change”: It is a most un-conservative disruption of constituted authority and public order. More anarchy than prudence.

It resembles the childish narcissism described by Stu Rothenberg on a recent PBS broadcast:

Do Democrats want to feel good, or do they want to win? … Many Democrats just can't resist themselves. … Many of the younger Democrats, insurgents, anti-establishment ...

Trump's fawning prostrate “conservative” sycophants practice an insurgent, anti-establishment anarchy not remotely conservative. They didn't drain the swamp, they wallow in it. They didn't balance the budget, they instituted a burn-the-candle-at-both-ends era of heedless borrow-and-spend regime involving unprecedented budgetary stimulus during a fevered prosperity: The consequence will likely recapitulate W Bush's world-wide recession. They didn't Make America Great Again; they put a compulsive liar at the helm of the free world, who “immediately set about dismantling it.” America First has the same paradoxical flaw as Deutschland über alles: proclaiming “I am the greatest” is a clue that you're not.

The cultural Marxist left ideology of today is as dysfunctional, as illiberal, as anti-democratic, as the neo-Confederate Trump right ideology.

-*--

(1) “The term “liberal” in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today.” — The more extreme, radical, Marxist the left is today, the more the news media tend to characterize it as “liberal.” (Hayek: American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.”) 

As Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

“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.

-*--

(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.

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

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 battle-cry, “social justice,” is an oxymoron

“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.” — John Stuart Mill, opposing the extrajudicial determination of guilt; and extrajudicial punishment

Andrew Sullivan: “Social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself.”

“Social justice,” from the Roman lawyer Cicero’s appeal to “right reason” to the present, has lacked the fundamentals of actual justice:

1. Presumption of innocence
2. Notification
3. Rules of evidence
4. The right to confront witnesses  
5. The right of appeal 
6. Most important, constraint by the existing body of law
   

In short, due process.

If the judgment of “the community,” the collective, the mob, anyone who wants to gang up on someone who is different, was sufficient, the justice system would not be needed. “The madness of crowds” determines your fate.

In On Liberty, about page 3, the author questions the valorization of “social” implied by such terms as “social justice.”

“Society can and does execute its own mandates,” wrote Mill, “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.”

Mill continued, “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.”