“William Barr: is his defence of Trump paving the road to tyranny?”

Here’s AG of the United States Barr arguing that if a defendant “believed” he was falsely accused, the law cannot lay a hand on him:

Lauren Gambino:

Barr’s robust defense of a president’s executive authority to end an investigation into himself if he believed the inquiry was “based on false allegations”, alarmed critics of both parties.

“The president does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course,” Barr told senators. “The president could terminate that proceeding and it would not be corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.”

In other words, if someone is hauled into court for shooting a person “in the middle of Fifth Avenue,” he “could terminate that proceeding … because he [“believed” he] was being falsely accused.”

Fascinating. According to Attorney General Barr’s revolutionary new legal theory, America’s courts can no longer convict and punish any defendant who “believes” they are innocent.

Whether Barr’s defense of Trump is “paving the road to tyranny,” he’s emasculating the rule of law.

A high price to pay to exculpate a high official who’s at ten thousand lies and counting.

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)

The values of the state's higher education system cannot be reconciled with the values of its justice system

I have written before that all democracy is liberal, all justice is liberal, all intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.(1) If all justice is liberal, then the political orientation of any judge is the jurisprudential outlook of those who love justice above all else. It follows that there cannot be a "Republican judge" or a "Democratic judge." If a judge's highest loyalty is not to "the known rules of ancient liberty", to eternal justice, they could at best preside over a kangaroo court, at best practice a travesty of justice. (The current practice here in the United States where the Republican Party nominates judges and justices only from a list of candidates provided by the Federalist Society violates the principles of the legal profession, since its intent is to guarantee that only jurists who are activists committed to the doctrines of a partisan ideology rather than universal justice will be appointed. Edmund Burke, in a related case, argued against "instruction" whereby legislators were constrained to proceed only under designated foregone conclusions.)

I know a person who is a dean in the local state higher education system, and is also licensed to practice law in this state. If he were to praise "social justice" as widely understood in the current campus outlook, in writing, he could be in danger of having his law license revoked, since "social justice" lacks the elements of due process.(1) If he were to say, as a practicing legal professional, that "social justice" is, from the standpoint of the legal profession, an oxymoron, the same block of students who prevent speakers with the wrong viewpoint(2) from appearing on campus under the "no platforming" standard would likely hound him from campus (as, below, "a hobgoblin whose career needs to be ended").

Andrew Sullivan describes the illiberal campus intolerance:

And yes, I’m not talking about formal rules — but norms of liberal behavior. One of them is a robust public debate, free from intimidation. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures. Yes, this is not about the First Amendment. The government is not preventing anyone from speaking. But it is about the spirit of the First Amendment. One of the reasons I defended Katie Roiphe against a campaign to preemptively suppress an essay of hers (even to the point of attempting to sabotage an entire issue of Harper’s) is because of this spirit. She may be wrong, but that does not make her a hobgoblin whose career needs to be ended. And the impulse to intimidate, vilify, ruin, and abuse a writer for her opinions chills open debate. This is a real-world echo of the campus habit of disrupting speakers, no-platforming conservatives, and shouting people down.

The tragic aspect of this is that it not only erodes the student's sense of justice, but is deeply and thoroughly anti-intellectual. Higher education is not about teaching only the right things, it is about learning how to determine what the right things are. It is not a platform, it is an arena where competing viewpoints are debated and compared. Anything that "chills open debate" is by definition anti-intellectual.

Why are the state's universities and colleges substituting indoctrination for education? Why are they teaching, and that most stridently, principles of intolerance and censorship which the state's own justice system explicitly forbids?

You can be expelled from one set of state institutions for refusing to endorse unconstitutional practices which another set of state institutions consider worthy of legal sanction. "Brethren, these things ought not to be so."


-*--
 
(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) First Amendment jurisprudence explicitly prohibits viewpoint discrimination and prior restraint.

The "president" as Romantic hero: Anarchic optimistic will to power, unending series of self-affirmations, fighting against insuperable odds

"Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders … 'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues … Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump."

Writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, Ethan Fishman recalled  Richard Hofstadter's article on “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." "A politics," Fishman continued, "that emphasized unarticulated psychological impulses over reasonable analysis—a politics of the gut, in other words, rather than of the mind." Pseudo-Conservatives were "those who discount reason to practice a politics of largely inchoate sentiments."
Fishman added:

Pseudo-conservatives are suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rely on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions.

Fishman saw a resemblance between today's pseudo-conservatives and the ideologues of the French Revolution:

In the context of Iraqi history, therefore, the administration’s vision of a democratic Iraq is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the French revolutionaries. Both acted as if dreams can easily be translated into political reality. Both upheld the ideal of freedom, but neither was able to adapt that ideal to the specific circumstances they encountered. Both were unable to appreciate the staggering costs in human lives and property that are unavoidable when radical change is pursued over a very short period of time.

Donald Trump's politics are those of W. taken to an extreme. He is "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." In a recent article:

Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols.

The pseudo-conservative as the person who is "suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rel[ies] on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions" is exemplified in another recent article:
"Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders."

Pseudo-conservatism is thus a form of romanticism. "Romanticism," as Professor Ian Johnston argued [PDF]:

celebrated, above all, the figure of the heroic visionary artist, struggling over time against a hostile or uncaring world, never giving up until death, living life as an unending series of self-affirmations, moments of collision in which the power of the individual's mind and his or her faith in the imagination, imposed a sense of order and gave value to his or her life against insuperable odds.

Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump. Such icons, symptomatically, are believed to represent "the power of the will."

The attractiveness of such willful political figures as Trump to youth is part of the pattern. The glamor of the romantic, larger-than-life authoritarian politician has an appeal, Johnston continues, to an anarchic youthful spirit:

At this level the Romantic spirit is a relatively uncomplicated celebration of the anarchic, optimistic, youthful spirit of sheer potentiality, an unfocussed affirmation of energy, motion, and good feelings. And if this were all there was to the Romantic ethic, it would never be much more than a pleasant but ultimately rather adolescent yearning for a spirit of total freedom (a good deal of popular Romanticism is little more than that).

"What happens," Johnston asks, "to this youthful creative spirit when it encounters the real world?" As we noted in Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism, it could "result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully":

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. ... Republicans are [at risk of] nominating a child.

Writing during the previous Republican administration, Fishman accurately predicted:

Just as McCarthyism was followed by the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” the Reagan presidency, and the current administration, it is inevitable that another version of pseudo-conservatism will appear on the American political scene.

The current state of the Republican party is a catastrophe decades in the making. Since at least the Goldwater era, Republicans have leveraged cheap, doctrinaire, simplistic politics to distort the deliberative character of American democracy. They sowed the wind, and now reap the whirlwind.

Spiritual Wickedness in High Places

Priest to Oedipus, who sits upon the throne of Thebes having killed his father and married his mother:

For, as thou seest thyself, our ship of State, 
Sore buffeted, can no more lift her head, 
Foundered beneath a weltering surge of blood. 
A blight is on our harvest in the ear, 
A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, 
A blight on wives in travail; and withal 
Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague 
Hath swooped upon our city emptying 
The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm 
Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.

 

Ecclesiastes 12 KJV, freely rendered:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
And the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men bow themselves, and the workers cease because they are few, and the mourners go about the streets.
And they be afraid of that which is high, and desire fail.

Man goeth to his long home.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit return unto God who gave it.

The Defeat of Thought and the Crisis of Democracy

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

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

He adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-*--

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

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad

Earlier this week Josh Vorhees listed Candidate Trump remarks which verge on the insane or lunatic. A day later Greg Sargent published Republicans nominate dangerously insane person to lead America, then panic when he proves he’s dangerously insane. Vorhees noted remarks suggesting paranoia, conspiracy theories, and irrational logic, among others:

• Paranoia: “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” the Republican nominee told supporters at a Monday rally in Columbus, Ohio. Appearing on Fox News later that night, Trump elaborated in his usual evidence-free way: “Nov. 8, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.”
• Lunatic conspiracy theories: "Trump, of course, is no stranger to making fact-free assertions and spreading conspiracy theories for his own political and personal benefit. He laid the groundwork for his current presidential campaign by beating the Birther drum for years, and more recently hinted that President Obama was an ISIS sympathizer and suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the assassination of JFK. Spreading those falsehoods—as well as a whole host of others about Hispanics, blacks, and Muslims—has done an unquantifiable amount of damage to the nation’s political discourse. His suggestion that the 2016 election will be illegitimate, though, could do damage to the republic itself."
• Irrational logic: "He wins the presidency, or he has it stolen from him."
• Insane Branch-Davidian defiance of the American government: [Roger Stone] “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud,’ ” Stone said. “ ‘If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’ ”
• Suicidal attack on the order he proposes to lead: "This is not the first time Team Trump has suggested that violence would occur if a “rigged” system prevented their man from getting his way. Toward the end of the GOP primary when anti-Trump Republicans were plotting a contested convention to deny him the nomination, the candidate himself predicted that there would be “riots” as a result while Stone suggested he’d make public the hotel room numbers of any disloyal RNC delegates so that Trump’s supporters could pay them a “visit.”"
• Heroic futile romantic hero attack on modern civilization itself and the rule of law: [Roger Stone] "If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts. I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it." [Not to mention royally scrambled syntax]

Sargent lamented, "if only Trump were not acting in such a crazy manner right now. ... Republicans ... [have begun to realize that] Trump’s erratic antics are revealing just how reckless their decision to nominate him really was, and how reckless their continued support for him really is."

"Republicans," Sargent continued, "should not have nominated him because he is a unique menace to the American experiment. ... He is indifferent to the inner workings of the American system and instead promises authoritarian glory."

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

Pseudo-Conservatism and Tonight's News

Writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, Ethan Fishman recalled Richard Hofstadter's article on “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." "A politics," Fishman continued, "that emphasized unarticulated psychological impulses over reasonable analysis—a politics of the gut, in other words, rather than of the mind." Pseudo-Conservatives were "those who discount reason to practice a politics of largely inchoate sentiments." 

Fishman added:

Pseudo-conservatives are suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rely on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions.

Fishman saw a resemblance between today's pseudo-conservatives and the ideologues of the French Revolution:

In the context of Iraqi history, therefore, the administration’s vision of a democratic Iraq is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the French revolutionaries. Both acted as if dreams can easily be translated into political reality. Both upheld the ideal of freedom, but neither was able to adapt that ideal to the specific circumstances they encountered. Both were unable to appreciate the staggering costs in human lives and property that are unavoidable when radical change is pursued over a very short period of time.

Donald Trump's politics are those of W. taken to an extreme. He is "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." We gave an example in a recent article:

Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols.

The pseudo-conservative as the person who is "suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rel[ies] on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions" is exemplified in another recent article:

Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders.

Pseudo-conservatism is thus a form of romanticism. "Romanticism," as Professor Ian Johnston argued [PDF]:

celebrated, above all, the figure of the heroic visionary artist, struggling over time against a hostile or uncaring world, never giving up until death, living life as an unending series of self-affirmations, moments of collision in which the power of the individual's mind and his or her faith in the imagination, imposed a sense of order and gave value to his or her life against insuperable odds.

Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump. Such icons, symptomatically, are believed to represent "the power of the will."

The attractiveness of such wilful political figures as Trump to youth is part of the pattern. The glamor of the romantic, larger-than-life authoritarian politician has an appeal, Johnston continues, to an anarchic youthful spirit:

At this level the Romantic spirit is a relatively uncomplicated celebration of the anarchic, optimistic, youthful spirit of sheer potentiality, an unfocussed affirmation of energy, motion, and good feelings. And if this were all there was to the Romantic ethic, it would never be much more than a pleasant but ultimately rather adolescent yearning for a spirit of total freedom (a good deal of popular Romanticism is little more than that).

"What happens," Johnston asks, "to this youthful creative spirit when it encounters the real world?" As we noted in Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism, it could "result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully":

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. ... Republicans are [at risk of] nominating a child.

Writing during the previous Republican administration, Fishman accurately predicted:

Just as McCarthyism was followed by the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” the Reagan presidency, and the current administration, it is inevitable that another version of pseudo-conservatism will appear on the American political scene.

The current state of the Republican party is a catastrophe decades in the making. Since at least the Goldwater era, Republicans have leveraged cheap, doctrinaire, simplistic politics to distort the deliberative character of American democracy. They sowed the wind, and now reap the whirlwind. We are all the losers.

Saletan, Hayek: Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism

Recently William Saletan: wrote, "What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump."

The reason may be found in a fundamental characteristic of conservatism: its tropism toward wholesale obstructionism, derived from a fundamental lack of political ideas and a resulting tendency to define itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas and practices. Half a century ago F. A. Hayek, in his landmark "Why I Am Not a Conservative," [PDF] wrote:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. ... Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them. (Emphasis added)

"Why I Am Not A Conservative" argues that conservatism has no "distinctive principles" of its own, and seems to imply that at any given moment it defines itself by opposition to its opponents' ideas. (Even though this leaves conservatives with an incoherent outlook.)

In Obama Didn't Create Trump, Saletan begins:

Everything that’s wrong with America is Barack Obama’s fault. That’s what Republican politicians have told themselves and the public for eight years. It began before Obama took office, when Republicans blamed him for a recession that started on their watch. Now they’re blaming Obama for the rise of their own presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.

The delusion that Obama caused Trump has been building since last year. This week, it reached the last bastion of rationality on the right: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat has a long track record of fairness and good sense. When the madness infects even him, it’s time to clear the air. No, Obama didn’t cause Trump. What caused Trump was the GOP’s decision to negate Obama in every way, and thereby become the party of Trump.

The result is incoherence and moral bankruptcy:

Nevertheless, Republicans opposed Obama at every turn. Whatever he embraced, they rejected. They refused to compromise on health care or offer a realistic alternative. They staged dozens of votes to repeal the new health-insurance law in its entirety. They forced a federal shutdown to protest the law. They took the nation’s credit rating hostage in a debt-ceiling showdown. They urged Iran to reject a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the United States.

A consequence of knee-jerk oppositionalism is that, where your opponent pursues wise and constructive political positions, you tend to be maneuvered into foolish and destructive positions:

If Obama had been a leftist, the GOP’s policy of negating him on every issue might have positioned Republicans in the mainstream. Instead, because Obama was a moderate, the GOP’s negation strategy pushed it toward the fringe. Obama was for fiscal responsibility and compromise, so Republicans were for absolutism and drama, risking a federal shutdown and a credit default. Obama was for respecting the Supreme Court, so the GOP was for defying judicial orders. Obama was for using sanctions to pressure Iran into a nuclear deal, so Republicans were for scrapping the deal and daring Iran to provoke a war. Obama, like Bush, was for drawing a clear distinction between terrorists and Muslims. So Republicans were for blurring that distinction.

Furthermore, if your opponents' leader is temperate and decent, the blind pursuit of difference may result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully:

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. Trump validates the maxim that in presidential primaries, the opposition party tends to choose a candidate who differs temperamentally from the incumbent. Obama is an adult. Therefore, Republicans are nominating a child.

Saletan adds, "And what Obama wasn’t—insecure, bitter, vindictive, xenophobic, sectarian—is what the GOP, in the era of Trump, has become."

There are disturbing parallels between the rise of Trump and the dissolution of the German democracy in the early thirties of the last century:

• An implied Leader Principle(1) (Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders)
• An emphasis on strength and power (see next item)
• Scorn for "weak" democratic decencies. (A commentator, to Conor Friedersdorf: "It is profoundly ugly when Trump just gleefully says, more or less, I love torture and we’re going to be doing a lot of it.")
• A contempt for civil liberties (Friedersdorf: A pol who seeks to gain power by demonizing ethnic-minority groups and threatening their core rights is engaged in a special category of leadership failure.)
• Expulsion, sometimes violent, of opponents from public meetings
• The belief that Trump is too bombastic, too offensive, too overbearing to survive the electoral process of a modern democracy

(1) Google Führerprinzip

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought

As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.

This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."

Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?

The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"

Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.

That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.

One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.

Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.



(*) as cited in The Liberal Founding

How the United States Has Changed, Ctd

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. - James C. Moore

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done. - David Frum

From Spider Robinson's SF novel Very Hard Choices:

[Spider, born in the US, who now lives in Canada]: I live in a civilized country instead of America. p. 8

The United States of America has the most magnificent of ideals any nation ever failed to live to live up to. p. 125

In this, one of his later novels, Spider Robinson uncharacteristically inserts a discussion of recent developments in American life, viewed from the standpoint of ethics and decency:

"If this account is ... accurate ... then all three of you are unusually ethical people," p. 180 spoken by a character who until then had seemed to be a master criminal. "Ethics of that order [are rare.]" p. 182 “Who's the most ethical human being in the firm? . . . I think they are . . . one hundred percent honest and utterly fearless.” p. 183 “The Constitution and Bill of Rights are among the most enlightened political documents the human race has produced so far, and its people are, so help me, some of the kindest who have yet walked the earth. . . . So far nobody's ever been as ashamed of their own racism as we are.” p. 187 “. . . people of good will and good sense seem helpless to do anything about it.” p. 188 A few pages later he says the U.S. "didn't dismantle its own Constitution and Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention and its own image of itself without help. ... All my life, if there was anything everyone in America knew for sure, without even thinking about it, it was that John Wayne would never beat up a little guy. ... The America he knew is gone." p. 189

The kind of people I'm talking about [...are] just very rich. ... They're not impressed by political power, popularity, or viciousness. They use people like those as chess-pieces--pawns. They've got handles on them all. They themselves are off the radar. They don't think of themselves as Americans. They don't even think in terms of nations or ideologies or the improvement of mankind; they are fundamentally indifferent to all suffering and death except insofar as it affects their game. ... The tools they have now are finally good enough to completely subvert democracy. ... Vandals ... absolutely selfish, utterly contemptuous of all morality and ethics. pp. 189-190

[They're] capable of anything. p. 191

All they were doing was treating each other with courtesy and common sense. ... What made me mad was, people used to treat each other that way in America when I was a boy. p. 197

. . . the hijacking and corruption of the United States. p. 200

Knowledge and reason and kindness and personal liberty really are worth all the dreadful effort they cost. p. 205

In "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed, we recounted Daniel Ellsberg's reflection on his part in the Pentagon Papers exposure of concealed information. The justice system of that time took a lenient, freedom-of-speech approach to what he had done. A public-spirited citizen described today's changed situation:

John Cusack at The Guardian isn't sure Eric Holder will protect journalists. Cusack (yes, the actor from Say Anything) argues that David Miranda's recent detainment in the U.K. "was an assault on press freedom that should make every reporter shudder no matter their opinion on the NSA." He asks, will the U.S. act similarly when NSA journalists try to enter the States? He wonders if Americans should now "conclude that the U.S. is willing to create a generation of exiled watchdogs, who are trying to hold their government accountable from afar." Glenn Greenwald recommended the piece, as did Jason Leopold, an Al Jazeera reporter who covers civil liberties.

James C. Moore described an underlying degradation of decency in those who govern:

We had a process. Congress proposed, and the president disposed with his signature. A law then went on the books. Courts might be asked to test its constitutionality, but by surviving legal challenges, a measure became the settled law of the land, which was the case with Obamacare. The American legislative system was, in spite of the disturbing influence of big money, actually quite elegant. But now it is broken.

We have entered into an era of gunpoint government.

Americans have discovered that a tiny, radical minority can immobilize their entire country and hold it as still as a robbery victim staring at the barrel of a pointed gun. And regardless of how this might anger the majority, they must live with the fact that it can happen again. ...

Political accommodation for the common good is not even a consideration. Shutting the country down is the only objective, with no purpose beyond political destruction and personal ambition. ...

[Cruz's] ideological strain thrives on the notion that government should do little more than protect the borders, pave the roads and then get the hell out of our way. ...

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. ...

He was willing to jeopardize the lives and incomes of millions of Americans, along with global economies. ...

Our deliberative government was not designed to be hijacked by a few dissidents. But fanatics have found a way to pry open the cockpit door and demand course corrections that put everyone on board at risk.

Aphorisms and observations which may apply:

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

"You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment"

A pair of recent articles have suggested that the United States has become a harsher nation with less tolerance for dissent, whistle-blowing, constructive protest, or civil disobedience. Jathan Sadowski wrote, of Edward Snowden's exposé of massive NSA surveillance:

If Snowden were sure to receive a fair, just trial, he might not have chosen to embark on his journey around the world, from hideout to hideout, potentially sharing more valuable secrets with countries that America isn’t on the best of terms with. The way whistle-blowers are persecuted now, though, leaves little reason to believe Snowden would enjoy such treatment.
Yes, Snowden could walk with head held high into federal custody. But it’s not clear that this would do much of anything besides ensure that the rest of his life is hell.

Later in another magazine, Eric Levenson wrote:

Unlike Snowden, after leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971 [Daniel] Ellsberg did not flee the U.S. and faced trial for his leak, but "the country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago," Ellsberg writes in a column that The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald calls a "must-read." Ellsberg's trial was thrown out due to "the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal," including denied bail and post-arrest isolation for Bradley Manning that would be applied to Snowden, too.

The erosion of liberty, and the transformation of the open society intended by the Founders into a fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment, has proceeded by slow, steady increments in the last half century. The incarceration society,  the prosecutorial society, the society in which Bradley Manning is casually abused in an overlong wait for his day in court—a court whose impartiality and equity we have reason to doubt—these are the symptoms of the transformation of a free country into a regime which no longer appears to be any such thing.

At the same time the liberal democratic principle that the party out of power is, ethically, the loyal opposition ("a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests"), has been obliterated by movement conservatism's unbelievable betrayal of what the Founders stood for. In The Guardian, Michael Cohen writes that the GOP has become the heartless party of cutting food aid to the poor, abortion bans and denying people health coverage:

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. ...
In the narrow pursuit of political gain, Republicans have adopted an agenda that is quite simply, inhumane and cruel. Even if one is charitable and defends it on the ground of adherence to an ideological agenda of smaller, less intrusive government (except in the case of lady parts) it can't be defended. If one's ideological predisposition means denying food assistance to people who are laid off from their job or forcing a woman to carry a dead fetus to term or preventing individuals from getting health care coverage, then you have a monstrous ideology.

In the past such "crises of the Republic" been met with a fervent, often religiously based revival movement by the people. The last such was perhaps Martin Luther King's civil rights crusade—don't forget, he was a Baptist minister who spoke in a southern preacher's stirring sonorous crescendo—but is any such voice on the horizon? Would it be heard in the present absorption with the relentless trivia of social media?

First Quarter 2013 Wrap

The year began with the lengthy Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, which noted the fashionable nonsense peddled by many humanities academics. It accused today's humanities departments of

• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Two articles on "passing" defended the right to personal independence, the first of which noted, as differences between liberalism and the assumptions of the left:

It's a free country, and this means that Barry Goldwater gets to be an Episcopalian and Madeleine Albright gets to live as a gentile (when a media discussion arose concerning the fact that Albright is of Jewish descent, someone remarked, "She doesn't want to know from Jewish"). People of African-American descent who don't look black are free to just live as a person and need not deal every day with the identity issues which would arise if they did not pass as white. ...

Privacy is a freedom of enormous value. Privacy means that one is free from being arbitrarily identified with some group, supposed to be in dire plight. It means that one is free from being saddled by others, or by what John Stuart Mill called "social tyranny," with an involuntary obligation to alleviate that plight. As Jim Sleeper observed in Liberal Racism, the assumption that each person of color is to be treated as a "racial delegate" is just wrong. ...

A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity. As mentioned in these pages before, liberalism is public and civil. One's subculture, race, gender, religion or irreligion, esthetic taste, etc., may be freely enjoyed or ignored under the aegis of the liberal society, but are not otherwise of public concern. "We live . . . free," as Pericles said.

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics developed a proposition from MetaIntellectual Analysis, above:

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience. ...

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable. ...

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

Executive Power and Imminent Threat argued that administration drone policy looked suspiciously like outmoded notions of the Benevolent Despot:

Non-imminent imminence, extra-judicial capital punishment by the chief executive of people who have not been charged with a crime, are part of a lack of transparency concealing arbitrary exercise of power solely on the basis of the presumed decency, trustworthiness, and inerrant ability to detect guilt, of the person in power. ...
This is not a new theory. It was in vogue for centuries before the rise of modern liberal democracies, before the American colonies rose up against similar presumption of the English King. It is the theory of the Benevolent Despot—the fond hope that a wise and good absolute ruler might be the best form of government of all. ...
It should not be difficult to see what is wrong with this. The question is whether this is a free country. The question is whether we are a free people, with our freedom protected by the indispensable concomitant of freedom, the rule of law.   

"Be proud, do not apologize" noted dissenters to politicized Islam such as Ibn Warraq, who declared:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. ... Do not apologize. This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. ... The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. ... By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values. [Original link no longer functional: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html]

Wafa Sultan drew attention to a barbarism which cannot be excused under the rubric of "faith":

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values? expanded on another theme of MetaIntellectual Analysis, citing an intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews:

The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds.

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, in the spirit of John Adams' "Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition," discussed some of the signs and wonders of science, including Euler's intriguing equation, e^(πι) = -1, and rejected the claim of runaway scientism that science disproves free will, noting "science is [not] an a priori discipline."

A reprise of the discussion of movement conservatism cruelty argued:

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor. 

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will? argues that there is a Platonist source for this anti-humanist position:

The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science. ...

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

In The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is a certain kind of high-flown anti-intellectualism reminded the Dissenter:

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

(See The First Six Months' Wrap for earlier posts.)