“Now if I have set this idea before you with any distinctness and success, you see that civil liberty consists of a set of civil institutions and laws which are arranged to act as impersonally as possible. It does not consist in majority rule or in universal suffrage or in elective systems at all. These are devices which are good or better just in the degree in which they secure liberty.”
Read More“That is, the experts are not always disinterested, and they sometimes use their powerful positions to find ways to avoid the consequences of their own innovations. Court-ordered busing to achieve school integration, for example, involved many children, but few whose parents were the judges, lawyers, and activists who promoted this remedy.”
Read MoreThe evolution of philosophy document so well in The Tyranny of Reason by Yuval Levin brought the dream of scientific reason to the social realm, expressed by Hegel that influenced Marx, the communists, and the fascists and to a much lesser extent, the progressives. It is expressed innocently as the arc of history or the right side of history. Darwin provided the link from science to society, though he should not be held accountable for those who so bastardized his work. The ‘inevitability’ of history provided cover for the most brutal regimes of the last century.
Read More“Neither the inflation of the 1970s nor the transformation of America’s industrial heartland into its Rust Belt was inevitable, she argues. Both were direct, foreseeable consequences of short-sighted choices: demanding that monetary policy accommodate irresponsible fiscal policy, and labor and management agreeing to enrich one another by fleecing customers and shareholders ever more brazenly.”
Read More“Hopkins much preferred giving straight cash, even if the reliefer used it for tobacco or liquor; on the whole, he felt, more damage was done to the human spirit by loss of choice than by loss of vitamins.”
Read MoreFor FDR the ‘Forgotten Man’ was the victim of an unfair society left behind in the capitalist economy. Only a robust central government had the power to right this wrong. For William Sumner the ‘Forgotten Man’ was one who would be required to ultimately pay for it.
Read More“A note to our progressive friends: This is your version of Q-Anon — falling for obvious, ridiculous lies because you want to believe the worst about people you hate.”
Read More“Progressives have long struggled with the tension between their desire, often genuine, to be democratizers and their desire to give experts (however unreliably identified) a larger role in the administration of public affairs. “
Read More“In its Wilsonian form, progressivism is a system in which the elected branches attempt to permanently outsource many of the country’s key political decisions to an ostensibly disinterested technocracy. When that technocracy is trusted, as it was for a while in the early 20th century and again in the 1950s and early to mid 1960s, those attempts enjoy a sufficient degree of support. When that technocracy is not trusted, as was the case after the fall of Robert McNamara and during the malaise-ridden 1970s, those attempts create a mighty backlash.”
Read More“So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution.”
Read More“One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.”
Read More“Why wait until one can build popular majorities and win elections on your policy platform when unelected judges could give you the results now? Why should judges rely on broadly accepted principles of limited government when they could instead enforce polarizing but substantively rich principles of the public good? “
Read More“So critical race theory, protesting the old injustice, embraces its lie. This is not progress but revenge. The motive is not justice but payback, lex talionis—an understandable, if Balkan, impulse. Beware a hedgehog claiming the immunities of an innocent victim. Beware when victimhood is his One Big Thing.”
Read More“Hiring practices and workplaces should be fair and welcoming to all, employees say, but mandatory diversity training premised on the ubiquity of “unconscious racism” and “white fragility” is coercive and insulting.”
Read More” If critical race theory were critical in any meaningful sense (a more descriptive name might be self-satisfied race theory), it would critically explain why those politicians most answerable to black voters seem to do so little to improve their lot.”
Read MoreAndrew shuns the authoritarianism of the GOP’s cult of personality and the illiberal squelching of opinion and commentary of the ‘woke’ left. If the Democrats do not wrestle control from its illiberal woke element it only feeds the reactionary right. It is more important to stand for clearly articulated liberal principles than to define yourself by what you stand against.
Read More“There is no shortage of books about slavery or America’s founding, and none of them have been written by Ms. Hannah-Jones. To what, other than her race and politics, does she owe all this deference?”
Read MoreThey are not blind to the shortcomings of those ideals, nor are they willing to ignore the value of those ideals. Only by demonizing Enlightenment values can we find racism in math and science. In reacting to CRT as they are they are fighting to retain Enlightenment values.
Read MoreBecause socialism always begins with a man in a workshirt and ends with a guy dressed up as Cap’n Crunch,
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