Political Philosophy

Four Views of Government

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1–If the king did not, without tiring, inflict punishment on those worthy to be punished, the stronger would roast the weaker, like fish on a spit.

–the laws of Manu, 1500 BC

2–Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

–Often attributed to George Washington, although there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he actually ever said it.

3–The speaker at a meeting, Grant, asks: “What is the prime knowledge acquired by our race? That without the rest is useless? What flame must we guard like vestal virgins?”

Members of the group give various answers: fire, writing, the decimal system, the wheel.

“No,” says Grant, “none of those. They are all important, but they are not the keystone. The greatest invention of mankind is government. It is also the hardest of all. More individualistic than cats, nevertheless we have learned to cooperate more efficiently than ants or bees or termites. Wilder, bloodier, and more deadly than sharks, we have learned to live together as peacefully as lambs. But these things are not easy..”

–from Robert Heinlein’s novel Tunnel in the Sky, in which a group of high school kids are stranded on a planet galaxies away, and have come to accept the idea that they are probably never going to be rescued. After a period of choosing their leader by acclamation, they have now decided to hold a formal election for that purpose.

4–Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.

–Congressman Barney Frank, also Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, and (in somewhat different form) Barack Obama.

My Assertion: The first three quotes all have elements of truth and provide useful perspectives on the problem of government; the fourth one has no such redeeming value.

(I’ve been thinking about a post along these lines for a while, finally motivated to do it by a discussion at Sarah Hoyt’s blog.)

Your thoughts?

 

 

America’s Civil War 2.0: It’s Deja Vu All Over Again

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 It’s official: The Biden “return to normalcy” is more divisive than Trump’s tweets. America is now arguably more polarized than any time since the Civil War because of wide and deep disagreements over all three of the major sources of civil strife: ideology, race and religion. A large minority, more than prior to the Civil War, believe this will result in bloodshed. Tribal conflicts have been the order of the day since the beginning of recorded civilization. The development of nation states in Europe during the second half of the last millennium sometimes suppressed, other times magnified such strife.

Democratic politicians caused the first race war and are on the cusp of starting the second to overturn the existing political order of limited government, minority protection and opportunity based on individual merit that for over a century has defined America’s Exceptionalism and been a deterrent to the growth of their progressive administrative state.

The Cause of America’s First Civil War: A Disease of the Public Mind

The US has generally succeeded in uniting diverse populations because its Founding Documents protect individual rights regardless of race or religion, and the minority from majoritarian control. The majority of the original 13 colonies in the US were founded on the principles of religious freedom for various Christian sects. (By 2050 the number of Muslims is projected to double to about 8 million, a potentially politically divisive issue only if they reject America’s Founding principles and laws.) The US has assimilated virtually all races.

But it took a bloody Civil War to initiate the extension of Constitutional rights to slaves and their descendants. Battlefield deaths were at least one hundred times greater in America’s Civil War than the 7000 battlefield deaths in the Revolutionary War. Initially inclined to accept secession as the South’s Constitution emulated the libertarian US constitution but for the exclusion of slaves, the Northern Republicans formed a constitutionally dubious “nationalist” campaign to “save the union.” General Sherman’s “Total War” to impress and terrorize the civilian population with the moral superiority of the North created enmities that persist to the present. Both Northern policies set a precedent for subsequent inter and intra national wars around the globe.

Why did it take a Civil War? Less than 4% of slaves imported to the Americas ended up in what became the United States, the only country that fought a war (losing about 10% of its population) to end the practice. The War wasn’t fought over the issue of the abolition: only about 5% of Northerners were abolitionists, the same as in the South. Although most people North and South now recognized slavery as morally wrong, disagreements arose over the viability of various exit strategies (Lincoln’s plan to return slaves to African Liberia would have resulted in much higher mortality than slavery. Parenthetically, mortality rates were lower in the South than in African generally, much lower than in South America, and lower than for Northern slaves.) More free blacks owned slaves (7.5%) than did Southern whites (6%). Historian Thomas Fleming concluded that a Disease of the Public Mind, deep hatred caused by Southern Democratic segregationist politicians’ steadfast refusal to negotiate a future extension of rights to what they claimed were “racially inferior” African Americans made war inevitable.

What do Democrats Mean Today by “Our Democracy”?

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“Believing Untrue Things”

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AVI:

Believing Untrue Things

More Motives on Untrue Things

Summary: People believe in the truth of ideas that don’t withstand even casual empirical scrutiny, e.g., that American police kill more black people than white people every year. Why do so many of us believe in and even defend vehemently the validity of bogus ideas when contrary evidence is easily found?

You can find many examples of this kind of thing in Amazon reviews of controversial books such as Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean:

5-Star Reviews

1-Star Reviews

The respective authors of the five-star and one-star reviews appear to inhabit separate factual universes. In one universe James Buchanan was a distinguished laissez-faire economist and originator of public-choice theory. In the other universe Buchanan, the Koch brothers and other prominent libertarians were members of a racist conspiracy. How can people on one side of a controversy remain ignorant about the other side’s arguments and even basic facts?

AVI suggests possible explanations that are worth reading, as always. I think the main problem is the poor quality of our primary and secondary educational systems, particularly in the teaching of history, math and basic statistics. Another big problem is the ignorance of journalists who were educated in our lousy schools, and modern journalism’s clickbait business model that incentivizes the promotion of controversy and conflict even more than was the case back in Front Page days.

Discuss.

“You Play with My World Like it’s Your Little Toy”

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Watching a series of European bureaucrats…pompous, arrogant, and extremely unattractive European bureaucrats…asserting the need for a global ‘great reset’, I was reminded of the above line from Bob Dylan’s song.

In America, too, of course, we have politicians and bureaucrats demanding a Great Reset.  And Dylan’s song, of course, was directed at armaments manufacturers, not at world-resetting politicians and their operatives. Nevertheless, I think the phrase captures well the arrogance of those who believe they have the knowledge, insight, and authority to reorganize the lives of everyone on the planet.  And in their view of things, there isn’t any ‘my world’ for the individual; there is no sphere of individual autonomy and agency which is not to be made available for their interference.  It’s all their world.

In 1931, a book titled The Conscription of a People was published by Katherine, Duchess of Atholl.  It was “a blistering, well-documented indictment of the savage collectivization of life in the Soviet Union.”

The title of the book provides a perfect description of the worldview of the Resetters.  The entire population is to be drafted into an army, assigned to whatever battles and tasks their rulers..far beyond their ability to influence..think most fitting.

 

An Amateur Observer Sums Up

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Pundits describe a fractured Republican party: the cult of Trump versus policy conservatives. This narrative compounds wishful thinking with ignorance of life outside the beltway, but has some truth. Trump, some say, is considering nurturing a third party.

The Republican establishment thinks they are more Republican than the Trumpists and have decades of battle scars to prove it. But they need him – whether he runs again or campaigns for others or is a strong voice. But for him the structural support of a party with a century and a half’s institutional memory can be helpful; most voted consistently with him. When Biden swears in 1000 appointees before his first full day in office, I worry that any Republican splits weaken a future Republican president’s hand. It is true that some of Trump’s best bets were ones the establishment would never have considered, but it is also true minor posts took a long time to fill.

The Trumpists need to accept that all of the people pulling back are not the sorry excuses for Republicans of the Lincoln Project, though they may not want to share a foxhole with them. Trump could have handled the last two months better and in not doing so, he irritated some, like McConnell, left to pick up the pieces. McConnell may be a Rino but he got those appointments through because he knew what he was doing. However, the establishment needs to remember, Trump nominated and backed them, their strengths came from their abilities rather than political resumes.

The establishment needs to be honest with itself. For decades the party promised and didn’t deliver, risks weren’t taken. They must acknowledge where Trump’s strength lay – at least in terms of the people I read, the people I know. It was policies. His actions – and boy did he act – in a Republican tradition. A good many people first voted for Trump as the better of two bad choices and came to see him as a transformative president. Some that hadn’t in 2016 said they’d crawl over broken glass to vote for him in 2020. Sure, some found him offensive, some had buyer’s remorse. He engendered turmoil and tension, though often in response to the wolves that circled him. (A baying that hasn’t stilled as he leaves the White House.) A resonant fact, however, is that many more voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. And the reason for most was, I suspect, what he’d done. Whether or why he lost, with 74 million votes he’s a force.

He was volatile and transparent. He wounded and was wounded. We winced at ad hominem attacks on his staff. He entertained. We were used to laconic heroes, but here was a man of action but also of emotional responses. But the four years – how and what he accomplished, the assumptions that made of his tenure a coherent whole – embodied instincts true to human nature and its potential. And that whole was conservative, American conservative.

He seemed to possess endless energy to push back while striding forward, he persevered. And his focus was on what counted: internationally, improving the United States’ ability to respond quickly and forcefully, to expand its frontiers; domestically, reducing the government’s (especially the national government’s) impositions and cleansing the unAmerican doctrines of tribalism parading as political correctness. In doing so, he implicitly respected his constituents. Are these not what they wanted, had wanted?

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