How Fares The Republic: The Post Truth Candidate

In writing the Declaration and the Constitution the Founders delineated an intentional moral order devoted to liberty and, as Thomas Paine wrote, honesty:

The circle of them is not so great as some imagine; the influence of a few have tainted many who are not naturally corrupt. A continual circulation of lies among those who are not much in the way of hearing them contradicted, will in time pass for truth.

Now consider the candidate selected by movement conservatism. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in Five Lies in 30 Seconds:

Kessler looks at the latest post-modern Romney ad: post-modern because truth is completely immaterial to this propagandist dreck. It's one thing to broadcast untruths, or misleading half-facts as obvious truths; it's another to be called out on them, refuse to change them, and intensify their reach. …

Obama is now fighting for his political life. And right now, to my genuine horror, he's losing to a fraud, a war-monger, a liar and a budget-buster.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in It Was Like a Sucker-Punch: Here are two interesting selections from Jan Crawford's rather amazing autopsy of the Romney campaign. First the expectations:

"There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," said another adviser. "It was like a sucker punch."

Their emotion was visible on their faces when they walked on stage after Romney finished his remarks, which Romney had hastily composed, knowing he had to say something. Both wives looked stricken, and Ryan himself seemed grim. 

They all were thrust on that stage without understanding what had just happened. "He was shellshocked," one adviser said of Romney.

William Saletan wrote in In The Obama-Romney Showdown Truth Beat Lies:

Rejection of external evidence sealed Romney's fate. ...

“There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," a Romney adviser tells Crawford. "It was like a sucker punch." But when the punch comes from ignored reality, you’re not just the sucker. You’re the one who suckered yourself.

Coates continues, "From Adam Serwer":

Ideology can place blinders on everyone, of course--I don't know how many liberal friends I've tried to talk out of their affinity for rent control--but the incentives for misleading one's audience are not evenly distributed across the left-leaning and right-leaning media. The Romney surge after the first debate didn't translate to a widespread liberal belief about systemic bias among polling firms, for example.

Much of the conservative media is simply far more cozy with the Republican Party than its Democratic counterparts. ... Departing from the party line, particularly if one does so in a manner that seems favorable to Obama, would be to reveal one as an apostate, a tool of liberalism. ...

Conservative media lies to its audience because much of its audience wants to be lied to. Those lies actually have far more drastic consequences for governance (think birthers and death panels) than for elections, where the results can't be, for lack of a better word, "skewed."

To sum up:
First, as the Republican Party looked on, its presidential campaign lied wholesale.
Second, that campaign was revealed, after the election, to have had no conception of the truth of its competitive situation (“A continual circulation of lies ... will in time pass for truth.”).
Third, as movement conservatives the campaign had valorized ideology, which may be described as the substitution of belief for evidence and reason.
Fourth, “Lies actually have far more drastic consequences for governance (think birthers and death panels) than for elections.”
Fifth, the campaign was not only duplicitous but bumbling and inept (Google “Romney ORCA”).
Last, to reiterate Item Four, had this functionally insane outfit achieved the Oval Office, the nation would have endured a reign even more strongly defined by deficiency of competence than the late W. Bush regime.

Paine deserves the last word: “My solemn belief of your cause is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

How Fares The Republic: The Liberal View of The Market

First, credit to whom credit is due. In the face of a presidential candidate of the obscenely privileged one percent, and a VP candidate known best for a budget plan to dismantle the humanitarian safety net for the poor, America's minorities, women, and the young rose to the challenge. They marched to the polls in great number to let their choice of a “politics of kindness”* be known.

In the words of Carl Sandburg, “The People, Yes!”
________________________________________________________________

Henry Fairlie was an English journalist and author who chose to become an American. In Bite The Hand That Feeds You,  he argued that the realm of the patriot is the political realm, and that the political realm constitutes the public, not the private, sector. “Is it really necessary to reject civic consciousness, of which compassion for one's less fortunate fellow citizens is the ultimate binding cement,” he asked, “in order to be a conservative or neoconservative?”

The Romans insisted, he noted, “on the three great civic virtues: dignitas, gravitas, pietas.” … Otherwise “the idea of citizenship** [is] all but submerged in appeals to private pursuits, private satisfactions, the private sector.”
 
For those who glorify “the market,” he continued, “the purpose is always the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process, in terms of nothing more than the ‘acquisitive instinct.’ ... they are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of the political realm has been surrendered.”

As for the Romney candidacy, his gracious concession speech deserves tribute in the spirit of Shakespeare’s “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” Nevertheless, I fear that his ascension to the presidency would have represented the triumph of the “economic view,” of the valorization of private gain at the expense of the public good, over the political realm. There is the sense of a narrow escape from a crisis of the republic.
______________________________________________________________

Best line of the day: 
Atlantic columnist Molly Ball cites “a smart [GOP] party strategist” who wrote, “Bain was a critical part of the Romney image that just couldn't sell to enough voters in Ohio. He came off as the guy who got rich by buying your Dad's employer, firing your Dad, stripping down the business, and making hundreds of millions and buying jet-skis and houses with car elevators and dancing horses while your Dad visits the food bank and is forced onto unemployment. The Romney team should have known this was going to be a problem.” [Emphasis added.]
 
(*) “Democratic politics is the politics of kindness”: Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat
(**) For the power of citizenship in Roman justice, note how Paul (born Saul of Tarsus), as recounted in the King James Bible, responds to a provincial ecclesiastical court in Acts 25:11 - 12: “For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal unto Caesar.
Then Festus, when he had conferred with the council, answered, Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? unto Caesar shalt thou go.” [Emphasis added. In Acts 22, Paul is recorded as stating that, in contrast to those who paid a large sum of money to acquire citizenship, he was a Roman by birth.]

Mitt's Father Articulates Republican Principles Before Goldwater

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When it started:
In Thursday's Andrew Sullivan post Dear Barry Goldwater, from George Romney, Mitt Romney's father articulates a passionate plea to Goldwater to disassociate himself, and his party, from the extremism with which the 1964 presidential campaign was beginning to become identified. Sullivan describes its “warnings about the Southern strategy just emerging in Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

As to Goldwater's apparent approval of the possible realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties into “conservative” and “liberal” parties, Romney senior wrote:

We need only look at the experience of some ideologically oriented parties in Europe to realize that chaos can result. Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlock, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress. A broad based two party structure produces a degree of political stability and viability not otherwise attainable.

Romney continues:

You were just about to take a position the 1964 Civil Rights Act contrary to that of most elected Republicans in and out of Congress, and there were disturbing indications that your strategists proposed to make an all-out push for the Southern white segregationist vote and to attempt to exploit the so-called "white backlash" in the North. ...

 
With extremists of the right and left preaching and practicing hate, and bearing false witness on the basis of guilt by association and circumstantial rationalization and with such extremists rising to official positions of leadership in the Republican party, we cannot recapture the respect of the nation and lead it to its necessary spiritual, moral, and political rebirth if we hide our heads in the sand and decline to even recognize in our platform that the nation is again beset by modern ‘know nothings.’ ...

The real challenge for us lies in the expansion of voter support for the Republican party in all parts of the country, urban or rural, North or South, colored or white.

The liberal principle is that no party is, or should want to be, a permanent majority; and that a party not in the majority takes a principled stance as the “loyal opposition.” Anything less would fail the Founders' concept of government by consent of the governed.

It seems clear what George Romney would think of his son's tacit, if not explicit, complicity in modern Republicans' practice of a cynical politics of obstruction, and their habit, from President Clinton onward, of treating any Democratic president as illegitimate. As a usurper.

Sullivan's post contains the senior Romney's complete plea to Goldwater. The whole thing is worth reading.

The Liberal Founding (Repost)

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012.

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights”

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead.

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

 

The Third Debate: Mendacious Candidate Disgraces Self Redux

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From andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com [By Andrew Sullivan and others]:

Romney will say things that are completely incompatible with each other.
 
Romney keeps saying that sequestration was Obama's policy. That's an obvious lie.
 
I've never seen any human being up close like this - a mechanical, unstoppable machine of say anything, forget everything in the past, refuse to take any responsibility for anything he has said in the past, and just smile and golly-gee smile his way along.
 
In a sane world, Obama would count as the clear winner.
 
Romney ... just lashed away at Obama without regard to subject or logic.
 
Chris Matthews says Romney should "apologize to America for being a complete cynic."

What does it say about the state of democracy in the United States that the race is considered a tie?

Mendacious Debater Disgraces Self: Media Call Him Victor

JohnMH127@gmail.com

A late comment on the first Obama-Romney debate:

Adam Serwer noted: "Important question about post debate coverage is whether media focuses more on Mitt's superior performance or his dishonesty."

 

An Atlantic Magazine reader from Canada:

 

This election should not be close, Romney and Ryan should not be even in the running to run your great country, a finger on the trigger, the power to start another war, strip millions of their safety net, their rights, their American Dream.

 

Andrew Sullivan: "Romney came across ... as insufferably smug."

Other comments from the web:

He also came off as testy and officious at times, especially when dealing with Lehrer. Rude, like a guy who cuts you online at the DMV and acts like you're out of order for being bothered.

Romney pulls his entitled douchebag crap. Scolds Jim Lehrer, demands last word.

Romney went all out to ‘win’ this round, madly shifting policy positions, making dodgy assertions and committing to specifics that his base abhors. Romney dodged and weaved impressively. But Obama forced him to take stances and policy positions. All these will be fact-checked to death and Romney will have to clarify, rationalize and reverse many of the things he said on stage with millions watching.

What will emerge: a man willing to say anything to get elected.

Romney was smiling that terribly insincere smile of his. ... Shameless liars are more resourceful and bouncy because they have no moral code constraining them.

The underpinnings and foundations of that performance were fundamentally dishonest. ... But don't let that silly problem detract from the performance as a whole.

The Canadian reader ("This election should not be close, Romney and Ryan should not be even in the running") articulated a terrible premonition many of us have had for months. Our media, and possibly a majority of the electorate, are judging an election, in which the fate of the experiment in government "for the people" (in Lincoln's words) may be decided, by the debased mob rule psychology of "Survivor."

The Condition of Equality Today

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .

- Declaration of Independence   

A distinguished senior professor, in a class on Plato's Republic, spoke at length on the foolishness of egalitarianism. A student said, “You've just described equality of results. Don't you think the situation would be different in the case of equality of opportunity?”

The professor replied, “No, I don't think so.”

There is detectable within [Elaine Showalter’s] literary criticism a strong, unquestioned belief in the values...of traditional bourgeois humanism of a liberal-individualist kind.... Showalter in her own criticism takes no interest in the necessity of combating capitalism and fascism. Her insistence on the need for political art is limited to the struggle against sexism.... What feminists such as Showalter...fail to grasp is that the traditional humanism they represent is in effect part of patriarchal ideology. At its centre is the seamlessly unified self–either individual or collective–which is commonly called “Man.”

- Toril Moi, linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9809/showalter.html

Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” - Plato

5. [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” [Emphasis added]

“We are not egalitarians, and justice doesn’t require economic leveling.”

- Rod Dreher, 1/12/12 - www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/romney-the-42-million-man/

The preceding five selections represent criticisms of the liberal principle of human equality, two from what would probably be called the academic left, two from avowed conservatives, and one from Plato himself. Is there a creeping anti-egalitarianism?*

If it should be the case that not only the right but also the left have abandoned the Founders’ stirring declaration of human equality, what happens to a closely related principle, human rights? Ta-Nehisi Coates, an editor at The Atlantic, notes the connection between the rejection of equality and one of the greatest violations of human rights, slavery:

If black people were part of "man," and all "men" were created equal, how could one justify slavery? Well, one could completely ignore the discrepancy, which is exactly what a lot of Confederates did. But a more radical proposal, one I find interesting, is the assertion that Thomas Jefferson was quite wrong.

On the eve of War, Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy explicitly dismissed [the] Jeffersonian view of slavery: ...

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.

It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.  ...

Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. …  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/05/in-defense-of-slavery/239719/

It is not difficult to see why the Plato specialist, above, would critique equality. Plato did so, and that was very powerful with him. What would he do if he realized that the concept of human equality is the great principle upon which human rights and unalterable opposition to slavery stand?

As for the right, there seems to be, lurking beneath everything that today’s American conservatives say—the tropism toward “heroes,” the affluent bias toward an oligarchy of the obscenely rich—what Mark Lilla called “the aristocratic prejudice that ‘some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.’” It is not difficult in this context to understand a rejection of “all men are created equal,” assuming that those who do so are able to deny the inconsistency between this and any posture of patriotic loyalty to the Founders.

The liberal Founding declared that all possess “unalienable rights.” Its three most famous words are “We the People.” When this is contrasted with phrases such as “group rights,” “oppressor groups,” or “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” a profound difference is apparent. The liberal outlook posits no Other, no enemy, because it doesn’t need one to function. Liberalism is a philosophy of harmony, cooperation and altruism—of the phrase Washington used in his inaugural address: “The public good.”
 

Contrast the ending of the Communist Manifesto, above, which implies an enemy and issues a call to war; and contrast the “group” discourse which was bequeathed to the modern left which, to use the left’s own terms, “privileges” group members and “marginalizes” or “disenfranchises” those it excludes. Inequality—discriminatory inequality—is the modus operandi of the left.


(*) This is particularly curious in the case of patriotic conservatives. What does this imply about reverence for the moral values of the Founders?

This is the Son of Kings

                                                                   JohnMH127@gmail.com
The dramatic irony of Oedipus is that he doesn't know who he is. The reason receives somewhat less attention than expected: Oedipus' parents tried to have him murdered as a baby:

This is the Son of Kings

"Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet . . ."

- Sir Francis Bacon

It was night in Thebes and the cry of a newborn echoed in the halls of the king. He waited, as custom prescribed, for the midwife's announcement. But when she arrived, she stared boldly at him for awhile. Finally she said, "Somethin's wrong with 'is foot."

The king hastened to the royal bed, where he found the queen lying with her back to the naked infant. "Do what you have to do," she murmured.

"I'll have Shepherd take it to the Grove," he said.

It was not yet dawn when Shepherd arrived at the Grove of the Lost. Unseen predators coughed beyond the lamp as he laid the tiny bundle on the bloodstained rock.

The story would have ended there, but as Shepherd made to depart he heard the infant sobbing quietly, hopelessly to itself. He took the child forthwith to his parents' home in a mountain village.

"Take care," he told them. "This is the son of kings."

"What shall we call him?" his father asked. But just then Shepherd's mother, having unwrapped the child, exclaimed, "Oh, the poor baby, his poor foot's all swollen."

"Very well," his father decided, "we'll call him Haltfoot."

When he was become a man, Haltfoot set off for Thebes with his most trusted companions, for he would look upon the faces of his parents. As they entered a crossroads, with the towers of the city gleaming in the distance, a mounted nobleman ordered them to step aside. But Haltfoot, having recognized the king from his likeness on a coin, said "It is written, A commoner shall pass, and none shall deny him."

At this the king made to run him through with his spear. But Haltfoot, stepping aside, seized the spear as it passed and threw the king into the road.

"Take him home," he instructed his companions. "Let him know the village where a prince spent his youth."

Whereupon the king asked, "Who are you?"

"I am your son, whom you sent to the Grove."

In the cool of the evening Haltfoot passed through the gates of Thebes and found the restless queen pacing the byways of the market.

Dawn was brightening the eastern horizon when Haltfoot rose from the royal bed. But the queen detained him, asking "Why did old Shepherd start when he saw you last night?" Haltfoot instead replied, "Do you know where the king is?"

"He rides to the royal estates.

"You are very like him in form," she added. "Who are you?"

But Haltfoot commanded, "Look upon me."

Now it was full day, and an unpitying sun blazed on the cold stones.

"I too am of royal blood," said Haltfoot. "Look upon me and know who I am."

The queen stared wildly at him. "Say no more," she cried. "By the Merciless, say no more."