Lest we forget….
Today is Independence Day. The “Fourth of July” is merely a date on the calendar.
We all make that mistake given the vernacular of our time, but it’s an important distinction.
We forget the circumstances surrounding the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The men who signed that document understood that they weren’t just rebels, but now traitors subject to capital punishment. As Benjamin Harrison joked to Elbridge Gerry:
“I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.”
The signers were not desperate men, not Jacobins at the head of ravenous mobs. These were men who largely represented the elite of American society. They didn’t have to do this, they could have turned away and continued to enjoy their lives. Yet, for all that, they decided first as individuals and then collectively to risk it all and to “…pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour.”
They had the most to lose and yet they risked it all with no reasonable prospect of success. This was not merely an abstraction of fighting “the mightiest army in the world.” The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence two days after a massive British invasion force showed up in New York Harbor, and its signing took place in the aftermath of a series of disastrous defeats suffered by the Continental Army. Rather than a step toward a brighter future, the Signers seemed to be stepping off into the abyss.
There has been considerable debate among scholars as to what document best represents the American Founding: is it the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution? I think Lincoln put it best when he called the Declaration an “apple of gold” and the Constitution a “picture of silver.” The latter exists to protect the principles enshrined in the former. He stated the primacy of the Declaration with the opening line of the Gettysburg Address:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
It is that proposition which states the true purpose of the signers, to enshrine the principle of natural rights and consent as the basis for government. That the people are sovereign and that government is a creation of a social contract formed among those people. That for all the liberties enjoyed by Englishmen, England could not legitimately deprive, without their consent, the American colonies of their right to self-government.
We need to remember that now more than ever.
We are engaged in a current struggle, not with a distant tyrannical power but rather with a pernicious disorder held and propagated by many of our fellow citizens. These people do not see the American nation rooted, as the Founders did 249 years ago, in the enduring principles of nature. Rather they see the United States as part of a larger arc of History. That is History with a capital H, moving in Hegelian fashion with its own purpose or Telos.
This philosophy, rooted in historicism, and best expressed in the Progressive ideal, sees the Declaration as something appropriate for the time, but much as with an outdated version of an iPhone or MySpace, something that has been superseded by human progress.
While the values enunciated in the Declaration of Independence are eternal, our adherence to them will be eternally tested. The struggle in its current manifestation has yet remained peaceful and may it forever be.
The Progressives should read what Calvin Coolidge said about the Declaration on July 4, 1926:
“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”
Mitch-
I loved that quote from Coolidge as I think it captures not only the challenge from Progressivism emerging in his time, but frames it for our age.
I don’t think people understand how different historically Progressivism is from the principles of the Founding. These days when we think of the term, we think of the radical Democrats in the “Progressive Caucus” or the fact that since the 1990s the Democrats have run to the term as “liberalism” became an epithet.
The term also has a nice ring to it – who can be against progress after all? However the Progressive project is fundamentally different, not just as a historicist exercise but because of its lack of prudence. Fauci and his ilk down in DC are if not self-identified as Progressives as historically understood then the direct offspring in the movement because they represent a self-aware bureaucratic elite who believe that the social contract isn’t among people with natural rights but between the people and experts who will run for their benefit.
It is in fact historically understood as tyranny only that instead of a divine right of kingship we have one based on knowledge
The COVID area was the the apotheosis of this conflict that Coolidge depicted. The more I think about it the more I think that perhaps game theory can explain 2020
Mike…”The more I think about it the more I think that perhaps game theory can explain 2020″
Could you expand on that thought?
David – I was thinking about making a post about this, but since you asked here’s a (very) rough version…
Over the last few weeks I have been re-reading John Marini’s works re: the Administrative State and it occurs to me the similarities, or at least similar themes, between bureaucratic power and game theory in that both deal with the control of information within the context of decision-making.
Thinking within the context of early 2020 as the American government developed its response to COVID, the two main actors in the process – elected officials and bureaucrats – had different, often diverging interests.
Politicians as a matter of profession seek to avoid accountability, not between themselves and their actions as between themselves and the results of their actions. The old quip that “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan” is a political maxim as old as civilization.
This is complicated in less-than-perfect information environments, which is why politicians don’t like to vote for bills that don’t have very concrete, specific deliverable. They are even more reluctant to vote on large bills like Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” because it is impossible to map the law’s effects into the future. Essentially the Republicans in Congress have placed their fates in the hands of Chance, to which Trump probably replied better that than to go against him which would mean that person’s fate would be sealed come primary time.
Politics is a very risk-averse business
Going back to COVID, I see at least two games.
The first deals with the development of the initial government response in February/Match 2000. We can think of T(1) as Trump’s first move in the game. He needs to develop a response to a virus of which still little was known, but within an overall context of fear that this was something uncontrollable and deadly as the Spanish Flu from a hundred years ago.
He has a matrix of choices organized by interests and information which in Boydsian terms represents his external frame of reference. It is a weak external framework as there is little known and he would have a hard time calculating risk.
Theoretically he had a full matrix of possible courses of actions that he could choose from; however, there was little information, especially in terms of political safety, for him to analyze those options. Even though COVID had been running through China for the previous several months, the Chinese (against all international convention) weren’t talking and nobody had linked it yet to Fauci’s funding of the Wuhan lab.
The second problem that Trump faced was that he probably did not understand the game he was playing. He thought he was dealing with epidemiological and political risk factors, but in reality at T(1) the initial game he was involved with was against the public health bureaucracy (Fauci, Collins, Birx…) which wanted a maximalist approach of shutting everything down.
Once Fauci and crew’s recommendation regarding that approach occurred the full panoply of choices was reduced to one, whether Trump would adopt their recommendation or not.
In a way the game theory matrix of bureaucratic influence on politics is similar to that of WW II carrier warfare. The aim is to strike first, with carriers it’s to get your planes on target first, with bureaucratic politics it’s to get your recommendation out there first
In considering whether to adopt Fauci’s recommendation, Trump’s information environment was clarified because if he didn’t choose the recommended course of action he would essentially own the entire pandemic outcome – every death and disruption in the economic and social fabric. There was simply no other viable course of action defined because as of yet there was no experential information. Trump also knew that given Fauci’s recommendation as a bureaucratic player and the hostile world of DC and the media, all blame for the biggest domestic emergency in a century would fall on him during an election year.
Choosing Fauci’s course of action was the safer course. Of course once Trump selected that option there was no going back. Once you shut everything down, you’ve got to go where this headed… there are no (or very rarely) “backsies” in politics.
Once Fauci got Trump to commit ton the first move the latter was stuck in a suboptimal series of choices.
This all was pretty clear five years ago. Trump was stuck with whatever Fauci and company recommended and Fauci knew it. COVID was a unique game, a once in a century pandemic where there was little information on how to proceed. If the public health bureaucracy, considered elite experts, wanted to change the public health response there was little Trump could do.
At each step of the way, Trump was faced with the decision whether to follow Fauci’s recommendations or not. If he didn’t, Fauci would make sure everyone knew that he didn’t, and Trump would own the outcome. There simply wasn’t any other information out there to disrupt that decision-matrix. Also as time progressed Trump would be also be further boxed in by his past decisions.
Btw… if this makes Fauci out to be some 21st Century Machiavellian figure, that is the intention. The man is one of the most fascinating figures in DC history because he operated at its highest bureaucratic levels for 40 years. He was still running his agency at 80 years old and was the most highly paid bureaucrat in the government. He was the Robert Moses of the public health system though it will have to be somebody else besides Robert Caro who writes his biography.
Then there is the second game which dealt with the continuance of the maximalist strategy forced down the throats of government and the people by Fauci.
The basic framework of the game was played in much the same way as the one between Trump and the Fauci crew in that the two sets of actors involved were initially divided by expertise. Unlike the Trump-Fauci game which would essentially be played once (because Trump would be committed in the future by his prior actions), this game would be played repeatedly over many months since it involved many different actors.
Fauci (and his crew) faced several, fairly severe, problems as time went on and the game was repeatedly played
First is that what gave them their ultimate power, expertise or rather the public perception of it, was by its very nature a wasting asset. Fauci’s power came not because he had the better advice but because he had the best of all possible advice, he was as he liked to point out “Science.” However the notion that he would pick the very best strategy in the first move of the game is infinitesimally small and that would be noticeable as the game was repeatedly played. Much as Trump was boxed in by his initial move during the first game, so would Fauci by his initial move in the second game.
Second, the more the game was repeated, the less power Fauci had because each round itself injected more information into the system. Fauci and his cronies were no longer playing against Trump, in this game they were playing against the field. Other actors with different societal approaches (Sweden, Florida..) were injecting new information, Palliatives such as Invermectin, immunity from prior infection, different vulnerabilities based on factors such as age and comorbidity. All of this new information flooded the system and undermined the one, right approach of lockdowns.
Third, Fauci was essentially playing the leverage in the system. He sold himself, in true Hegelian fashion, as the best of all possible experts who must be obeyed because he was an acolyte of “Science”, but science by its very nature is an experiential, iterative process that improves over time which injects information into the system and undermines existing authority.
That’s why you got censorship.
The issue with vaccines was obvious at the start (assuming you take it all face value), The idea that the vaccines were fool-proof on Day One was ridiculous. Yet Fauci and the public health establishment was already committed to an image of omniscience and decided to commit to vaccines.
Ideally (for their interests), Fauci and company would have recognized their degrading ability to keep playing and declared victory in late 2000 or early 2021
In both games, what was key to the players was the ability to control the external framework, which in turn controls the payout. In the first game, Trump lost because he allowed Fauci and the public health bureaucracy to control the fraemwork. In the second game dealing with maintenance of the emergency, Fauci and crew saw their ability to control that framework degrade over time through each iteration of the game due to the injection of new information.
Trump learned one lesson from this which was in Trump’47 he appointed an outsider (Bhattacharya) to run NIH. What would be even better would be to have people in public health with some cross-training in economics so they would have an intuitive understanding of tradeoffs
thats the most charitable view, as michael senger has spelled out, they had decided the lockdown protocols, at a wargame sponsored by the WEF, the previous fall, they had decided on the unsustainable bat stew narrative, to hide the part of the research lab in Wuhan, then they further spun the notion that the epidemic tracking taskforce had been disbanded and that was the way, they could hide the vector, of course the WHO and their Xi indebted Tigray chairman, helped the process along,
If Fauci had a conscience, sarc, he might have had regrets, but he never evinced any notion of this, how he fumbled the treatment protocols of the AIDs epidemic, the vaccine trials in the third world, the west nile virus, et al,
Yes I simply assumed Fauci and crew decision for lockdown without going into the motivations of why.
A basic game theory modeling does show the critical points of the COVID episode where behaviors are shaped by controlling information and therefore choices.
It’s not clear by the Fall of 2020 what Fauci and crew hoped to further achieve but they were riding the tiger and probably didn’t know how to get off. Game theory would only point to the inevitable end of their position, essentially their advance halted with an undefendable salient. It cannot explain the larger motives behind it
Fauci’s information shaping exercise should be familiar with anyone who has engaged in staff support or watched “Yes, Minister.” Trump’s instincts have been findd ways of traditional decision shaping. No doubt he learned some very important lessons in dealing with Fauci which helps to explain his approach in Trump’47
Interesting — but to throw in another wrinkle, what if Fauci et al were being manipulated by China’s rulers?
As we now know, Covid itself (ignoring the effects of the instant “vaccines”) was effectively just another round of flu — the kind of thing the world has seen & survived many times. But what the world saw initially from China was photos of well-dressed working-age men dropped dead on the streets, surrounded by responders in full biocontamination suits. Scary! Fauci et al responded to the actions of China, which may have been an accidental or a deliberate massive over-reaction.
The CovidScam certainly gave China lots of real-world information on the dependence of Western economies on imports from China.
But it wasnt just fauci it was imperial college john hopkins the national health trust the cdc all in on it