The wisdom of the Oath of Office: It places a spotlight on those who swear falsely

Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic recently asked, in LawFareBlog.com, What happens when the judiciary doesn't trust the president's oath?

This weblog, in late February, described the Oath of Office recently taken by the present occupant of the White House as perjurious, The acceptance of the president-elect's supposedly solemn affirmation, the argument asserted, revealed that we have come to regard an important constitutional safeguard as a meaningless ritual:

The oath of office was meant to screen out anyone who had no intention of maintaining the order(1) of a constitutional democracy:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The inadequacy of this provision is that it assumes that the Electoral College would not make an unprincipled scoundrel president of the United States. As Bruce Schneier reported earlier in this post, the honorable Mr. Trump made "purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress." Newsmax noted yesterday, "New York Times Headline Once Again Calls Trump a Liar." Add to this the disrespect for the law involved in denigrating any judge who places the Constitution above the diktat of a government official; and the disrespect for the First Amendment revealed by the practice of declaring the media the enemy of the American people, and it should be clear that the charlatan in the Oval Office swore perjuriously.
The problem isn't that these guardrails failed. The problem is us. If we had believed in the values of liberal democracy, we wouldn't have voted for a known unfit by the millions. If we believed in our values, we would not have treated the oath of office as a meaningless ritual.

Wittes and Jurecic's discussion suggests that the Oath, far from meaningless, is having significant effect down the line. In so doing, they took the question to a deeper level. The Oath of Office is an affirmation of "civic virtue." "We think," they reasoned, "the answer lies in judicial suspicion of Trump’s oath." (Emphasis added) Then the condition of the Republic requires us to:

Imagine a world in which other actors have no expectation of civic virtue from the President and thus no concept of deference to him. Imagine a world in which the words of the President are not presumed to carry any weight.

In this situation, the "legal debate, ... about both the propriety of the President’s [immigration] order and the propriety of the judicial responses to it," reflects the problem of his ethics and his credibility:

It goes, not to put too fine a point on it, to the question of whether the judiciary means to actually treat Trump as a real president or, conversely, as some kind of accident—a person who somehow ended up in the office but is not quite the President of the United States in the sense that we would previously have recognized.

Wittes and Jurecic have thus moved the debate over the crisis of the Presidency from politics to principle. Presidency is a matter of deference; and deference cannot be accorded if the person behind the desk is manifestly lacking in civic virtue.

"What happens when people—including judges—don’t take the President’s oath of office seriously?" The perjurious presidential oath of office may have been recognized as disqualifying the "President." His lack of civic virtue means that there is "thus no concept of deference to him" ... [and] "the words of the President are not presumed to carry any weight." If so, Trump is not the strongest, but the weakest president in history.


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(1) Lincoln believed that he could not allow the South to secede, thus depriving the U.S. citizens living there of the protection of the Constitution, and yet be faithful to the Oath of Office: "You have no oath in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it."

Imagine an uplifting presence in the Oval Office

[Note captured ten years ago]: A passage from Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity illustrates the intellectual sensibility in action. He and his researchers had (because of failure to check the literature) appeared to claim credit for originating methods actually developed by others:

  One of our students, Bernd Bruegmann, had come to my office
  with a very disturbed look on his face. [...] There was no
  avoiding the fact that the method we had developed was quite
  close to the one that Gambini and Trias had already been
  using for several years in their work on QCD. [...]

  With a heavy heart we did the only thing we could, which was
  to sit down and write them a very apologetic letter. We
  heard nothing from them until one afternoon in Trento, when
  Carlo got a phone call from Barcelona. [...] They [...] asked
  if we would still be there tomorrow. The next morning they
  arrived, having driven most of the night across France and
  northern Italy. We spent a wonderful day showing each other
  our work, which was thankfully complementary. [Gambini ...]
  in the next few months [...] invented a new approach to doing
  calculations in loop quantum gravity.

This illustrates the liberal virtues of selflessness, candidness, love of knowledge, and passionate desire for optimum outcomes. This is the idealism implied in George Washington's concern for the "public good" (see his inaugural address and his farewell address).

It's related to what Olivia Judson wrote a year later:

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence — or indeed, evidence of any kind — has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.
Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. [...]
But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

"An attitude toward evidence" is liberating and can contain "a profound optimism." There were people in our culture who objected to "The Martian" because it was a narrative of the capacity of human intelligence to master nature through problem solving (much as Robinson Crusoe did). The politics of anti-science, which has antecedents in Plato's rejection of the empirical, and of treating truth as "problematic," is a failure of nerve regarding evidence, and its fruits are pessimism and, carried to an extreme, nihilism. "A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry." A society where the Chief Executive has a snowballing credibility problem can destabilize the public order and delegitimize its own government.

Also ten years ago, Stephen Pinker noted the tendency to regard propositional statements (such as "all people are created equal") as loyalty oaths: "People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved."

Intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning.
Time and again, people have invested factual claims with ethical implications that today look ludicrous. [...] The foisting of "intelligent design" on biology students is a contemporary one. These travesties should lead us to ask whether the contemporary intellectual mainstream might be entertaining similar moral delusions. Are we enraged by our own infidels and heretics whom history may some day vindicate? [...] When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt. [...] the intellectual blinkers that humans tend to don when they split into factions. People have a nasty habit of clustering in coalitions, professing certain beliefs as badges of their commitment to the coalition and treating rival coalitions as intellectually unfit and morally depraved. Debates between members of the coalitions can make things even worse, because when the other side fails to capitulate to one's devastating arguments, it only proves they are immune to reason. In this regard, it's disconcerting to see the two institutions that ought to have the greatest stake in ascertaining the truth -- academia and government -- often blinkered by morally tinged ideologies. [...] It's hard to imagine any aspect of public life where ignorance or delusion is better than an awareness of the truth, even an unpleasant one. Only children and madmen engage in "magical thinking," the fallacy that good things can come true by believing in them or bad things will disappear by ignoring them or wishing them away. (Emphasis added)

When the Oval Office is under the Babylonian captivity of an incompetent pretender obsessively engaged in "magical thinking," where news articles are beginning to use "unhinged" as a reasonable description, the ability to rise to a reasonable response to real crises is increasingly in doubt. Imagine the vulgar disgusting person who now represents our nation to the world driving "most of the night across France and northern Italy" because of idealism and the love of knowledge. Imagine "a wonderful day" devoted to what is inspiring. Imagine that our government once again included someone who could say, "We choose [to do these] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

A Lifetime Underminer of the National Order Is Now Charged with Maintaining It

As Bruce Schneier wrote four years ago, we have a trust-based society. "In today’s society, we need to trust not only people, but institutions and systems. ... All complex ecosystems require cooperation." As illustration of this principle, "When I used an ATM this morning ... I trusted the national banking system to debit the proper amount from my bank account back home." You can put a VISA card from a west coast credit union in a Berlin ATM and extract the expected number of Euros.

Schneier added that societies contain unscrupulous individuals—parasites—who predate on the cooperative structure of our worldwide civilization:

In any cooperative system, there also exists an alternative parasitical strategy. Examples include tapeworms in your digestive tract, thieves in a market, spammers on e-mail, and people who refuse to pay their taxes. These parasites can only survive if they’re not too successful. That is, if their number gets too large or too powerful, the underlying system collapses.

The essential role of the national government, and particularly its presiding official, is to oversee the ethical order delineated in the Constitution, and thus, to administer(1) a rule of law within which we can enjoy “the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”

Donald Trump's lifetime record is that of a con artist who successfully subverted the public order for his own profit. He stiffed employees, subcontractors, minorities, and regulators, and lied about it. His actions were contrary to the public good, and by implication detrimental to our government. He profited from the order by undermining it, and now he has acceded to the office meant to uphold it—a task for which he is calamitously unfit.

Last August, Kurt Eichenwald wrote:

... Trump was denigrating Native Americans before Congress, ... (In 2000, Trump won a contract to manage the casino for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, but after Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy in 2004, the tribe paid Trump $6 million to go away.) ... His purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress, ... alienated politicians from around the country, ... Lost contracts, bankruptcies, defaults, deceptions and indifference to investors—Trump’s business career is a long, long list of such troubles, according to regulatory, corporate and court records, as well as sworn testimony and government investigative reports. ... Trump is willing to claim success even when it is not there, according to his own statements. “I’m just telling you, you wouldn’t say that you're failing,” he said in a 2007 deposition when asked to explain why he would give an upbeat assessment of his business even if it was in trouble. “If somebody said, ‘How you doing?’ you're going to say you're doing good.” Perhaps such dissembling is fine in polite cocktail party conversation, but in the business world it’s called lying. ... Trump’s many misrepresentations of his successes and his failures matter—a lot. As a man who has never held so much as a city council seat, there is little voters can examine to determine if he is competent to hold office. ... He sells himself as qualified to run the country because he is a businessman who knows how to get things done, ... And while Trump has had a few successes in business, most of his ventures have been disasters. (Emphasis added)

As for the way businessman Trump stiffed the public before he became our so-called president:

USA TODAY exclusive: Hundreds allege Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills—Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job." But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.

At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.

Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.

In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing.

“Let’s say that they do a job that’s not good, or a job that they didn’t finish, or a job that was way late. I’ll deduct from their contract, absolutely. That’s what the country should be doing.”

The Framers of the Constitution instituted measures intended to prevent an unfit person from ascending to the presidency. First, one of the checks and balances was the provision that the Congress could impeach an unfit president. Article II of the United States Constitution states in Section 4 that "The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors." They failed to anticipate that both Houses of Congress should be under the domination of a faction which places party over country.

Second, the oath of office was meant to screen out anyone who had no intention of maintaining the order(2) of a constitutional democracy:

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The inadequacy of this provision is that it assumes that the Electoral College would not make an unprincipled scoundrel president of the United States. As Bruce Schneier reported earlier in this post, the honorable Mr. Trump made "purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress." Newsmax noted yesterday, "New York Times Headline Once Again Calls Trump a Liar." Add to this the disrespect for the law involved in denigrating any judge who places the Constitution above the diktat of a government official; and the disrespect for the First Amendment revealed by the practice of declaring the media the enemy of the American people, and it should be clear that the charlatan in the Oval Office swore perjuriously.

The problem isn't that these guardrails failed. The problem is us. If we had believed in the values of liberal democracy, we wouldn't have voted for a known unfit by the millions. If we believed in our values, we would not have treated the oath of office as a meaningless ritual.

***
(1) Steve Bannon at CPAC: Trump Will Pursue “Deconstruction of the Administrative State”

(2) Lincoln believed that he could not allow the South to secede, thus depriving the U.S. citizens living there of the protection of the Constitution, and yet be faithful to the Oath of Office: "You have no oath in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it."

Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives?

Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom,"(1) in three seasons beginning in 2012, took on reality TV, explicitly denounced the tea party as an enormous danger to American democracy,(2) and argued that the news should be "information that's needed in the voting booth." Episode 3 of the first season in several ways forecast a degeneration of movement conservatism which could lead to a so-called president Trump.

Yet Google search, of "The Newsroom review" and "The Newsroom criticism," finds intense criticism mainly from "progressives," including references to "hate watching." "The Newsroom," by the criteria which separate Enlightenment liberalism from the outlook of the left, is one of the most liberal television presentations in recent memory. It is idealistic, concerned for the public good, supports the humanitarian safety net, exemplifies the long range power of ideas (and love of language), supports the intentional moral order delineated by the Constitution, honors the dignity and privacy of the citizen, and speaks freely and without fear.

You would think that a series which includes a number of devastating indictments of today's Republicans, and exemplifies Jeffersonian democracy, would appeal to the progressive left. Why didn't it? Perhaps some of the progressive critiques provide a clue. Verne Gay says "The Newsroom" "actually cares passionately and deeply," but also critiques it for daring to laud an old fashioned moral order:

It's shot through with a 1930s-'40s screwball love-will-conquer-all zest, with rat-a-tat dialogue that zips along at 75 mph. There are distant echoes of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" ... Frank Capra could've written this, and, in a sense, already has. "The Newsroom" is very old-fashioned -- which may be its chief appeal.
Yet at moments it can also be a proxy for Sorkin's politics. He is the off-screen Lord High executioner, who dispatches his enemies -- like the Koch brothers or the Tea Party -- scene by scene, or speech by windy speech.

Other critiques are often vague. The real issue, which is evaded, is cynical objection to pre-60s American idealism. "The Newsroom" has specific references to Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" liberal idealism and public-spiritedness. The aura of tribute to forgotten grandeur lingers over it, complemented by references to the noble futility of Don Quixote.

"The Newsroom" has the most devastating savaging of the sullenly bigoted idiocies of the Tea Party and movement conservatism to be found on mass media, yet its left derogators focus on silly arguments against presenting the news as it should be rather than as it is. Why the total surrender to conformism?

"The Newsroom" nailed the reactionary nature of the tea party in its discussion of  "The American Taliban." Its discussion of "America is the Greatest Nation" placed the meme in its rightful context: Manifest Destiny; and The White Man's Burden. "The Newsroom" gave MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) an early scene in which she owned Will McAvoy. Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is the smartest person in the organization.
 
The critics went with male dominance. There are far more criticisms, of conduct by male Republicans that is harmful to the public good, than of mean social standards in which women may play a part; but the fact that Sorkin dares to criticize, for example, soap opera gossip, is treated as proof of sexism. Margaret Lyons:

Within the Aaron Sorkin world, there's no insult more grave than being a woman. "I'm concerned about the rest of us being turned into a bunch of old ladies with hair-dryers on our heads," Will snapped at one of his dates on Sunday's episode. That's his nightmare, his fear: that our culture has become too invested in gossip or reality TV, which are feminine concerns. ... [as is] the nightmarish senselessness of a fashion TV show.
... Will's boss and mentor Charlie scolds him in "Fix" for dating women "he'd never want to spend daylight hours with." Because it's degrading? Disrespectful? Objectifying? Because it's patronizing? Cruel? Selfish? No, no: Because Will deserves better. Will can be petty, nasty, and immature, but the show insists that he's still worthy of an enormous amount of respect. But that inherent dignity doesn't extend to any of the female characters.
"Fix" seemed to be about how fashion is dumb and news is smart, how gossip is a social cancer and cable news is noble, ... Will's dates all know about one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, but Will can't be bothered because he's too busy covering stories from many months before. ...

"The Newsroom" took on:

• The entertainment media takedown.
• The immediate appearance of a wrathful self-righteous witch hunt mob at any act or utterance which deviates in the slightest from identity politics/class warfare orthodoxy.
• A media site which prefers rating worst movies to rating best movies.
• News-as-entertainment (lurid hurricane reports; "what's going on with the McRib"; Angelina vows revenge after Brad dalliance; Tot Mom's secret beau; love child dumped on star's mother; you won't believe what child actor looks like now).
• Mean, petty, uncivilized practices.
• Reductivism, as when a gossip columnist tells a journalist, "After all, we're in the same business."
• Disrespect for dignity and privacy, as in the readiness to call out others, particularly if they're guilty of being prominent or wealthy.

It was fashionable to denigrate "The Newsroom" as moralistic and self-righteous. (One is reminded of those whose hopefully inquired, after the cleansing shock of 9/11, "Is this the end of irony?") "The Newsroom" foretold the lizard-brained era of Trump's alternative truth. It's true that truth is disrespectful of the Liar-In-Chief who has usurped the Oval Office; still, truth is the most valuable resource of Homo sapiens ("Thinking human"). (If you think that truth is political, you have greater problems than can be resolved by reading an article that dissents from the Received Wisdom.)

Newsroom's Charlie Skinner dares to say, "I'm too old to be governed by fear of dumb people." As Bill Brioux writes:

Sorkin’s complaint about America is that intelligence is in a semi-apologetic retreat, while emotionalism and stupidity are on the rise—in public policy and in the media. He’s setting up an ideal. He is an ethical writer—a moralist, if you like. He’s neither ironic nor self-deprecating; he dislikes that part of our derisive culture which undercuts, as a ritual form of defense, any kind of seriousness. He’s a very witty entertainer who believes that there’s a social value in truth. I don’t think this belief should be confused, as it has been recently, with self-righteousness.

The Writer's Almanac for February 14 reported on something Carl Bernstein, of Woodward and Bernstein, wrote in 1992:

“For, next to race, the story of the contemporary American media is the great uncovered story in America today. We need to start asking the same fundamental questions about the press that we do of the other powerful institutions in this society — about who is served, about standards, about self-interest and its eclipse of the public interest and the interest of truth. For the reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering their power and ignoring their obligation. They — or more precisely, we — have abdicated our responsibility, and the consequence of our abdication is the spectacle, and the triumph, of the idiot culture.” (Emphasis added)

"The Newsroom" promoted Frank Capra/Don Quixote idealism; naive, sentimental public-spiritedness; thinking (and writing) fearlessly; the vital importance of truth and good information to a democracy; respect for dignity, privacy, and autonomy; and indifference to orthodoxy. It criticized gossip columns and TV shows dedicated to gossip; the associated glee for the "takedown" of prominent or successful public figures; news-as-entertainment; and mean, petty, uncivilized social practices.

It is telling that the progressive left responded with indignation. Their blindness to "tectonic shifts" was a large part of changes in American character which made possible the elevation of a totally unfit charlatan to the presidency.


(1) See "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", April 2016
(2) See "The American Taliban"

Gorsuch's shifty, deceptive logic on "cultural" issues

Jeffrey Rosen recently evaluated Neil Gorsuch's qualifications for the Supreme Court.

As discussed in Rosen's article, Attorney Gorsuch's logic about a human taking a human life contradicts itself:

His approach to the issue is ... “premised on the idea that all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

But:

Gorsuch stresses that “my argument, based on secular moral theory, is consistent with the common law and long-standing medical ethics” and he emphasizes that “I do not seek to address publicly authorized forms of killing like capital punishment and war.”

There is a hidden shift in the attorney's reasoning from "private persons" to public agents such as executioners and soldiers. But the physician operating under public physician-assisted suicide laws is no longer acting as a "private person."

Physician-assisted suicide laws "publicly authorize" the physician just as death penalty law publicly authorizes the hangman. Physician-assisted suicide laws are not conceptually different from the "long-standing" laws and ethics the attorney cites. They're just newer. Gorsuch's problem is the familiar conservative "cultural" hang up concerning change and the new.

Attorney Gorsuch's equivocation in secretly shifting between "private persons" and "publicly authorized" acts reveals either deductive incompetence or intentionally deceptive argument. If the constitutional sacredness of human life is not infringed by execution under color of law, it is not infringed by merciful assisted suicide under color of law. In either case, he does not meet the standards expected of a Supreme Court Justice. 

The candidate for Supreme Court Justice engaged in further misleading argument:

Gorsuch emphasizes, however, that “it remains to be seen whether [the Court might] … recognize a constitutional right that trumps at least some state legislation against assisted suicide.” And he suggests that he might be inclined to recognize such a right.

“Oregon’s decision to make a legal discrimination based on physical health (the terminally ill versus everyone else) seems a candidate for heightened review,” he argues, just like distinctions based on race or gender. “This [is] especially so given that Oregon’s law expressly implicates a fundamental right—that is, the scope of the right to life.”

Wouldn't such a constitutional right logically trump the death penalty as well?

 

Moreover, assisted suicide laws don't just "make a legal discrimination based on physical health." They further the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the patient by honoring their choice to end further pointless suffering. Here again, Gorsuch's argument is cleverly misleading. Does he have so little regard for the freedom of American citizens?

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)

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(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."

How Fares the "Republic?"

In Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom," Producer MacKenzie McHale said, A well-informed electorate is essential to the proper functioning of a healthy democracy. Inadequate information, or worse, wrong information, can lead to catastrophic decisions and impede vigorous debate.

In the national election four years ago, this blog posted "How Fares the Republic?" articles. Current answer: We made a catastrophic decision.

Looking for clues, we might first note that in the vast majority of cases in which the word "liberalism" appeared in our public discourse, what followed was utter nonsense, because our assumptions mix the "we're all in this together" outlook of liberalism with the class warfare, oppressor vs. oppressed outlook of the left. America was founded on the liberal ideas of the Declaration and Constitution, and can no more function with the agonistic assumptions of the left (or right) than a gasoline engine can run on diesel oil.

It is impossible to discuss liberalism and leftism as if they were the same without being intellectually incoherent. To do so is to pretend to be two incompatible things at the same time: Seeking win-win situations and having a zero-sum-game outlook; seeking what Washington called "the public good" and taking pride in being "oppositional," "adversarial," and "subversive"; holding slavery's negation of human equality deeply against American principles and "in course of ultimate peaceable extinction," as Lincoln argued, and holding, as Ta-Nehisi does, that "white supremacy" underlies all America does yesterday, today, and forever. ("The certain sins of the future.")

Being unable to discuss the principles of our liberal Founding in any coherent manner, we elected the most illiberal president possible: Authoritarian, bullying, vindictive, narcissistic, and childish. See pre-election posts on president-elect Trump here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Democratic National Convention Speeches which Praise Liberalism

Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.

Cory Booker's speech at the DNC 2016 was a full-throated praise of liberalism. Selections below, with some comparisons to President Clinton's speech to the DNC four years earlier:

• We must empower each other, ... [Clinton: You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."]
• We've watched [Donald Trump] cruelly mock a journalist's disability. ... [Clinton: When you stifle human potential, ... it hurts us all.]
• Americans, at our best, stand up to bullies and fight those who seek to demean and degrade others. ... [Spider Robinson:(1) John Wayne would never beat up a little guy.]
• Long before [Hillary Clinton] ever ran for office, in Massachusetts, she went door-to-door collecting stories of children with disabilities. ...
• We are not a zero-sum nation, it is not you or me, it is not one American against another. It is you and I, together, interdependent, interconnected with one single interwoven American destiny. ... [Clinton: It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.]
• A neighbor with a beautiful special needs child ... [From a disability blog: A reciprocity principle - If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for the disabled. The disabled have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if they do. ]
• Liberty is not secure for some until it's secure for all, ... [MLK: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."]
• Because still the only thing necessary for evil to be triumphant is for good people to do nothing. My fellow Americans, we cannot be seduced into cynicism about our politics, because cynicism is a refuge for cowards and this nation is and must always be the home of the brave. We are the United States of America. We will not falter or fail. We will not retreat or surrender – we will not surrender our values, we will not surrender our ideals, we will not surrender the moral high ground. ... [Clinton: Advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics.]
• Let us declare again that we will be a free people. Free from fear and intimidation. Let us declare that we are a nation of interdependence, and that in America love always trumps hate. ... [Clinton: What works in the real world is cooperation ... it passes the values test.]

Read the whole thing.

So was Bill Clinton's speech at the DNC four years earlier. Highlights:

• You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."
• It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.
• What works in the real world is cooperation.
• In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy: we left him a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.
• In order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they couldn’t because they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place.
• It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.
• I’m not making it up. That’s their position. See me about that after the election.
• Really. Think about this: President Obama's plan cuts the debt, honors our values, brightens the future of our children, our families and our nation. It’s a heck of a lot better. It passes the arithmetic test, and far more important, it passes the values test.

Again, read the whole thing.

See also: andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/the-duty-of-civility.html - "The relevant kind of respect ... has to do with the ways in which we acknowledge our fundamental equality as sharers in self-government".



(1) From Very Hard Choices:
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.

Dissenting from the Critique of "Respectability Politics"

Last year Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, in "Lifting as We Climb," defended "a sensible respectability politics." The rap on "respectability politics" is that it is dysfunctional, meaning that it asks members of minority groups to feign mainstream appearance, manners, speaking habits, boring personalities, etc.

In some cases skepticism about lack of respectability reflects warranted distrust of those manifesting dysfunctional cultural traits.

Critiquing a cultural trait which attacks those who pursue an education for "acting white" isn't about respectability politics, it is legitimate distrust of behavior which impedes becoming a functional member of modern society.

Randall Kennedy does not discuss the relationship of the Marxist objection to "bourgeois morality" to respectability politics discourse. This objection was part of Marx's wholesale opposition to the norms, ethics, and manners of liberal democracy. In this context the objection to respectability is the objection to the 21st century skills, education, standards, and deportment needed to prosper in and enjoy the resources of a wealthy first world nation.

Below, selections from Kennedy's long article. He emphasizes Martin Luther King's and Thurgood Marshall's use of respectability in the civil rights campaign. He notes Ta-Nehisi Coates' flawed logic in rejecting Obama's advocacy of good behavior (Coates tends to argue(1) that all problems of marginalized groups are the result of racism). Kennedy concludes that respectability's appeal to young black men and women to invest in themselves "will pay dividends in the future."

Randall Kennedy:

Defenders of a sensible black respectability politics — I am one of them — do face real challenges. “Respectability” has served at times as a harbor for bigotry or for the complacent acceptance of racism. Moreover, what should count as disreputable conduct has been subject to serious debate.

Then Kennedy argues that the appearance of respectability is an important civil rights tool (just as looking well is important in an employment interview):

Any marginalized group should be attentive to how it is perceived. The politics of respectability is a tactic of public relations that is, per se, neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad. A sound assessment of its deployment in a given instance depends on its goals, the manner in which it is practiced, and the context within which a given struggle is being waged. Its association with esteemed figures and episodes in African-American history suggests that the politics of respectability warrants a more respectful hearing than it has recently received.

Recall the dignified black teenagers who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, while bands of snarling, foulmouthed white hooligans sought to torment them. Remember the determined activists who demanded service at segregated lunch counters while screaming white thugs doused them with ketchup and mustard. ... James J. Kilpatrick, the racist journalist who fiercely opposed the civil-rights movement ... expressed grudging admiration for the youngsters who carried off the sit-ins with such splendid tact. In some circumstances it is effective and praiseworthy to scandalize the arbiters of established opinion, to give the finger to the powers that be. No movement in American history practiced a more honorable politics than the abolitionists, even though they often luxuriated in incivility. I am not defending observance of conventional propriety as a timeless principle. I am simply saying that there are occasions when deploying respectability can be useful and ought to be done.

Dr. Kennedy continues to the next item in his argument: "failings by blacks" (whose importance, as we shall see, Ta-Nehisi Coates rejects):

[Barack Obama] criticizes the constraints that blacks encounter because of past and ongoing racism, and, to the extent that it is feasible, he supports policies that he believes will provide relief. But he also openly identifies failings by blacks — parental absence, negligent nutrition, destructive criminality, inadequate civic engagement. And he demands that African Americans, individually and collectively, do more for themselves.

Randall Kennedy cites Coates' objection:

Critics of black respectability politics objected to this speech vociferously. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:

Taking the full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict black people — and particularly black youth — and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that “there’s no longer room for any excuses” — as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of “all America,” but he is also singularly the scold of “black America.”

Charging that the Morehouse graduation speech fit into a pattern of “convenient race-talk,” Coates asserted that surely black Americans “have earned something more than targeted scorn.”

This response [by Ta-Nehisi Coates] is strikingly tendentious. It implies that any criticism of blacks by Obama nullified every other feature of the president’s address. His speech was primarily celebratory, as one would expect and hope for at a graduation. Obama congratulated Morehouse for “the unique sense of purpose [it] has always infused — the conviction that [it] is a training ground not only for individual success but for leadership that can change the world.”

Dr. Kennedy concludes by noting that “respectability” is about such functional matters as education, skill, competence, and work ethic. These are not political. Only practical:

As brutal and frustrating as our era can be, however, day by day it offers more racial decency than any previous era. At no point in American history has there been more overall freedom from antiblack racial impediments. At no point has there been more reason for young black men and women to be hopeful that investing in themselves will pay dividends in the future.

(1) Coates, 2014, Charles Barkley and the Plague of Unintelligent Blacks:

The notion that black irresponsibility is at least part of the "race problem" is widely shared among black America's most prominent figures, beginning—but not ending—with the president of the United States. ...

Respectability politics is, at its root, the inability to look into the cold dark void of history. For if black people are—as I maintain—no part of the problem, if the problem truly is 100 percent explained by white supremacy, then we are presented with a set of unfortunate facts about our home.

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.

The Class Warfare Logic of a Baltimore Protester

In June Steve Inskeep recorded an interview with Kwame Rose, who was one of the protesters against the death of Freddie Gray, a black man being transported in a police van. Excerpts:

KWAME ROSE: He called us thugs and criminals. And you don't know the story behind each one of those individuals. I was one of the people he called a thug and a criminal because I was out there. ...
ROSE: Yeah, but even in a notion to differentiate peaceful - when I was there, firsthand experiences, watching people run in the stores, I didn't interpret it as violence. I interpreted it as a survival skills - as a survival tactic. ...
ROSE: No. I've - I don't think the president has done enough for black people.

This shows some of the Baltimore street hustler logic also found in Ta-Nehisi Coates' white supremacy articles. For example, skid logic: "I was ... called a thug and a criminal because I was out there." (Below, there will be excerpts from Inskeep's interview in which President Obama responds to Rose's accusations.)

Kwame Rose's argument has the class warfare characteristics of:

1. Justified by an overriding emergency
2. Rejection of the rule of law
3. Double standard — the plight of the oppressed trumps the principle of equality — see "moral primitivism" (1)
4. Specific rejection of pluralism (that is, unconcern for anyone not like us)
5. Disregard for the public good (those who loot and destroy a drug store in the name of racial affirmation force sick people of that same race to travel farther for medicine they need to survive)
6. Rejection of the powerful just tools of liberal democracy (Obama: "You have situations in which, suddenly, friends of mine in Baltimore - their mothers, who are elderly, have to now travel across town to get their medicines because the local drug store got torn up. And making excuses for them, I think, is a mistake. There are ways of bringing about social change that are powerful and that have the ability to pull the country together and maintain the moral high ground. And there are approaches where I may understand the frustrations, but they're counterproductive. And tearing up your own neighborhood and stealing is counterproductive." (Emphasis added.)
7. Specious justification of violence ("survival skills")
8. Rejection of universalism ("I don't think the president has done enough for black people"; that is, a black president should show favoritism toward black people in preference to serving all equally.)
9. Implied the-end-justifies-the-means logic

Steve Inskeep's follow up interview with Obama ("What I would also say, though, is that if somebody is looting, they're looting."):

Let me ask about a passionate young person that we met along the way. His name is Kwame Rose.

Yeah.

He is an activist now in Baltimore. He was active in the protests after the death of Freddie Gray ...

Right.

... who was in a police van, and died later, as you know.

And he was unhappy with a statement that you made at the time, when you were supportive of peaceful protests but also criticized what you called criminals and thugs who had looted stores.

He felt that you were being too harsh and went on to say in our interview that you were speaking from a position of privilege, his suggestion being that maybe you didn't quite get what was going on in the streets.

What would you say to him?

[Obama] Well, obviously, I don't know him personally, so we would have to have a longer conversation.

What I would say is that the Black Lives Matter movement has been hugely important in getting all of America to — to see the challenges in the criminal justice system differently. And I could not be prouder of the activism that has been involved. And it's making a difference.

You're seeing it at state and local levels, and the task force that we pulled together in the wake of Ferguson has put forward recommendations that were shaped both by the people who organized the Ferguson protests as well as police officers. And it turns out that there's common ground there, in terms of how we can be smart about crime, smart about policing, respectful to all communities and try to wring some of the racial bias that exists in the criminal justice system out of it.

What I would also say, though, is that if somebody is looting, they're looting.

-*--
 
(1) Moral Primitivism: An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)