Caitlin Flanagan’s acerbic remarks about ‘justice critics’

‘Truth stands independently of social opinion,’ Robert Pirsig wrote: and that’s one reason ‘social justice’ is an oxymoron.

Caitlin Flanagan: 

The justice critics, the ones who want to count up every movie’s sins against approved sensibilities, say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it. Only another artist would understand the way that Tarantino has deployed that potent force. Guillermo del Toro tweeted that the movie was “[chock-full] of yearning,” that it was “a tale of another time that probably never was but feels like a memory.”

The justice critics aren’t interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be. To them, the movie is too white, too violent toward women, and too uninterested in Margot Robbie, whose Sharon Tate has few lines. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody reviled the picture, calling it “ridiculously white.” But Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact that does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie.

The justice critics want to subject art to ‘constraints and considerations extraneous’ to it. [The phrase comes from Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, who once declared, “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.”]

Unaesthetic philistines telling art what to do is nothing new, from the boy-meets-tractor diktat of Soviet Commissars to Plato’s condemnation of Graeco-Roman mythology for showing the gods chasing each other’s wives.

Kudos to Flanagan for daring to critique puritanical dictatorship-of-virtue justice critics and the boring bowdlerized didactic art they would foist on us. Ars grātiā artis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-*—

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

Constitutional Crisis in Three Parts, Nullifying Congress, Acting as judge in his own behalf, and Tanking the Constitution

Part I: “Trump's stonewalling of Congress is a Constitutional crisis”

On April 25, 2019, Julian Zelizer wrote:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is mad as hell. Her spokeswoman released a statement saying: "President Trump and his Administration are engaged in unprecedented stonewalling and once again using the legal system to conceal every area of his life as well as his wrongdoing and improprieties from the American people."

We are getting deeper and deeper into a constitutional crisis.

The president* is “trying to act in imperial fashion”:

Many presidents have attempted to use this power [executive privilege] under specific circumstances with specific hearings. But Trump is making a much bolder claim. The president is being very straightforward. He will defy all subpoenas because he does not believe the investigations are legitimate. His claim has nothing to do with national security. It isn't even being sold as an effort to protect the ability of his advisers to speak freely. He just doesn't agree to participate, claiming that the Democrats are being driven by partisanship. The President will flex his executive muscle because he believes he can. He is daring anyone to stop him.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that has driven much of his presidency, and the guiding philosophy that pops up in the second part of special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Not surprisingly, the way that he is handling the post-report period, with grandiose claims of presidential authority and aggressive postures toward the legislative branches, are confirming the worst impressions to come out of Mueller's investigation. This is the ultimate example of a president trying to act in imperial fashion.

How far will the president* go?: “The President keeps forcing the nation's hand in considering how far it is willing to let a president go before finally saying that enough is enough.”

-*--

Constitutional Crisis, Part II: By Trump’s standard, “Congress could never investigate anything.”

Lee Moran:

Mueller’s report, released with redactions last week, contained a number of damning revelations about the president. Trump has falsely claimed it totally exonerated him.

“If that were the standard, then Congress could never investigate anything,” the Post wrote. “Mr. Trump’s Republican colleagues must remember the battles they fought with President Barack Obama over transparency only a few years ago when they ran the House.

The editorial board also argued that Trump’s “own words” proved he was motivated more “by concealing anything that might land him in political jeopardy” than by “any specific concern about protecting presidential decision-making or some other crucial executive-branch function.”

-*--

Constitutional Crisis, Part III, “Blatant … obstruction of the lawful processes of a coequal branch of government.”

Dylan Scott wrote:

That’s about as blatant an obstruction of the lawful processes of a coequal branch of government as I’ve ever seen,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional scholar, told the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin on Wednesday.

From [Matthew] Yglesias:

Trump’s statements about NATO and the leak of Democratic National Committee emails likely pilfered by Russians have raised questions about Trump’s financial relationships with oligarchs tied to the Russian government. Tax disclosure would let us see how Trump’s businesses work — how successful he really is and how much that success hinges on investments from foreign actors who may have a more nefarious agenda than real estate development.

“Trump has set a culture of secrecy that rivals Richard Nixon. He won’t release his financial records. He has been investigated for obstructing justice by Robert Mueller. Now he doesn’t want administration officials testifying in Congress, one of the most routine and sacrosanct examples of the country’s systems of checks and balances. In court, Trump’s lawyers have made a sweeping case to curtail Congress’s ability to investigate the executive branch.”

In conclusion:
1. Stonewalling Congress

2. “Congress could never investigate anything.”

3. “Blatant … obstruction of the lawful processes of a coequal branch of government.”

4. Trump is 1. Nullifying Congress, 2. Acting as judge in his own behalf, and 3. Tanking the Constitution, violating the oath to “protect and defend” it. He is behaving in a dictatorial fashion.

Americans elected today’s Democratic House to demonstrate their disgust with the most corrupt president* in history. The response of the Pelosi-led House is beginning to look like a profile in cowardice.

Americans elected today’s Democratic House to demonstrate their disgust with the most corrupt president* in history. The response of the Pelosi-led House is beginning to look like a profile in cowardice. 

Brian Beutler, Crooked.com: “Their irresolution has allowed Republicans to drown the public in unanswered lies about what Mueller found and what the response to it should be. … The evasive way House Democrats have responded to the report so far has done Mueller a real disservice.”

The victims of the crimes under investigation, which include the voters Trump defrauded in 2016, have only one backstop offering them any hope that justice will be served, and it is House Democrats, who are determined not to impeach the president under almost any circumstances.

1. “Republicans … drown the public in unanswered lies about what Mueller found”

2. Retaliatory, brazen Republican “counter-investigations”

We are now likelier to witness months of full-throttled counter-investigations—of Mueller himself, and everybody who played a hand in the Russia probe—than we are to get the impeachment inquiry Mueller all but declared we need.

3. “The party leadership’s [cowardly] desperation to avoid a confrontation with Trump has been comically unsubtle”

When Mueller finished his work, House Majority Whip James Clyburn immediately described the Russia investigation as a “closed” chapter, and called on Democrats to turn their attention to “everyday issues.”

4. “Their certainty that holding Trump accountable will backfire politically stems from a combination of bad history and poor reasoning”

Because Democratic candidates campaigned successfully in 2018 on protecting people’s health care, Democrats have convinced themselves that it is Trump’s only vulnerability.

5. We needed “the realization that the Trump presidency is an emergency and that building a check on his power was a matter of historic importance”

6. “Trump has predictably abused his inherent powers to work around the divided government, and Democrats can’t protect people from him by avoiding confrontation”

All they can do is demobilize their supporters by communicating that they don’t actually believe Trump is much of an emergency after all.

7. We act as if the president* is allowed to act as judge in his own behalf by buying into the “view that Trump can end or throttle those investigations if he claims to believe they’re bogus”

8. “The victims of the crimes under investigation … have only one source of hope that the federal law enforcement apparatus won’t ruin their lives to boost Trump’s political prospects, or help him seek revenge, and it is House Democrats, who are determined not to impeach the president under almost any circumstances”

9. The House Democrats “fear that if they do the right thing, they will not do as well in the 2020 elections as they will if they do the wrong thing … we do know that the wrong thing causes real harm to people right now”

10. “Without the threat of penalty, Democrats will proceed under the impression that abdicating their obligations is costless”

11. “We should all demand that they stand and be counted while it’s still an option, and should interpret failure to do so as a profound, collective failure of character”


_*__

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.

“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.

“If the incumbent* wins, there will be four more years of enabled destruction of our political institutions.”

In a democracy, the party out of power is “the loyal opposition.” Under the treason party, election is simply the chance to continue the war of the slave-holding rebels against the United States by other means (as previously argued in “The Enemy Within”). “The upper echelons of the Republican Party in Congress decided to obstruct Barack Obama at a dinner on the night of Obama's inauguration. … [a] Democratic president simply will not be allowed to govern … as a Democrat.”

Charles P. Pierce wrote:
“Nobody who watched William Barr's performance before a Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee this past week can sensibly deny that, as long as the Senate remains in the hands of the Republican Party, it doesn't matter what happens in the 2020 presidential election. If the incumbent* wins, there will be four more years of enabled destruction of our political institutions. If one of the Democrats wins, and the Senate stays Republican, the Democratic president simply will not be allowed to govern. Not as a Democrat, anyway.

And this didn't start with El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, either. The record shows that, upon Bill Clinton's election, good ol' Bob Dole announced that he was there to represent everyone who didn't vote for the winner. The Florida burglary in 2000 was in part a refusal to allow another Democrat to succeed Clinton, and the upper echelons of the Republican Party in Congress decided to obstruct Barack Obama at a dinner on the night of Obama's inauguration.”

Sullivan and Naipaul on the link between Christianity, Enlightenment Liberalism, and modern civilization

Last week Andrew Sullivan responded to the burning of Notre Dame by describing [secularized] Christianity as one of the “metaphysical foundations” of liberalism:

“It remains an open question whether liberalism, broadly understood, can survive the loss of its metaphysical foundations [its defense of the individual soul as inviolate]. And as we see liberal democracy struggle to articulate its truth against the ocean of nihilism, the lure of tribalism, the cult of the strongman, and the left’s contempt for the Enlightenment and religion — the burning of this symbol of Christian devotion [Notre Dame] cut me to the quick.”

The heart of “our universal civilization”(1) is the Christian value Sullivan cites: The individual soul is inviolate. From this value stems that Eighteenth Century rallying cry, The Rights of Man, which even a criminal “president” cannot abrogate.
 
-*--

(1) V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”

Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

The Enemy Within

“You will rule or ruin in all events.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we have lost:

One person, one vote (gerrymandering, voter suppression)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-*--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politicizing independent institutions, such as the Justice Department

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

Executive Power Grabs (False emergencies)

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

Delegitimizing Communities (Hispanic “invasion,” demonizing Muslims)

Corrupting Elections (Voter suppression, Gerrymandering)

Ferlinghetti turns 100

Ferlinghetti turns 100

America was founded by profound people.

Their descendants are incapable of profundity and would not want it if it were in their power to achieve it.

What they want, and what they produce:

Venting

and platitudes.

Shields and Brooks, discussing the social attack on Ralph Northam,(1) noted that it lacked “a path to redemption.”

This is a characteristic of a people who have lost the faculty of empathy and the concept of pluralism.

Martin Luther King appealed to the American mainstream of his time to “rise up and live out the meaning of their creed, that all men are created equal”; and the majority ended Jim Crow for people who did not look like them, in an enormous nationwide effort which required decades.

Contrast: When Hispanics and Native Americans, thinking Ta-Nehisi Coates was leading a civil rights crusade, came to join him, he said they were “disrespectful.” The situation of black people, he said, was unique and deserved its own focused examination.

It’s not that Ta-Nehisi lacked the concept of pluralism — that he might be called on to be his brother’s keeper — it’s that the progressive journalists who adulated him did not notice that this new version of the American crusade for reform wanted no part of empathy and altruism.

It’s all about ego and group aggrandizement. It lacks compassion and the milk of human kindness. It lacks public-spiritedness. The democratic disposition and concern for the public good is alien to it.

I Am Waiting
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe …
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

-*--

(1) Ralph Northam, an exemplary governor in Virginia, under social media attack because of blackface photo in the early eighties.

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.”