An Alliance with Barbarism

From the blog No Delusions, No Despair (another good blog name), The rise of barbaric progressivism:

Shortly before he died in the late 1930s, Sigmund Freud, by then a refugee from Nazism, wrote, “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.” He was referring to the rise of fascism and communism, and their combination of the most modern forms of science, technology, economic theory, and even aesthetics with the most horrific and savage forms of violence and sadism.

Today, the most fervent believers in the power of progress in the United States are the members and supporters of the eponymous progressive movement. It is a bit difficult to fully define this movement, as it is easily confused with other movements of the left like socialism, communism, and even anarchism. It is possible, however, to say that its view of progress is the polar opposite of Freud’s. By and large, it holds that 1) Humanity can be made better and even perfected. 2) The history of humanity is the history of inexorable progress toward that perfection. 3) It is the duty of the individual and society to be on “the right side” of that history—that is, on the side of progress. 4) Humanity’s ultimate state of perfection will take the form of a blessed society in which suffering, poverty, and oppression have been overcome. 5) Anything that opposes or retards progress is a form of metaphysical evil.

While today’s progressivism maintains its façade of upper-middle class rectitude, it barely conceals a quasi-totalitarian mentality that puts down any dissent or opposition without much compunction. At the same time, many progressives have engaged in considerable violence and allied themselves with forces that are not only violent themselves, but categorically reject the values and mores that progressives themselves claim to hold sacred. Many progressives have gone so far as to adopt ideologies they claim to oppose passionately, such as racial hierarchy and antisemitism. The cost to the moral integrity of the movement has been immense, and there are no signs that the descent is slowing, let alone reversing itself.

It is notable, for example, that the institutions ruled by American progressives, particularly academia, are by and large the least free institutions in American society. They place a great deal of value on ideological conformity and almost none on fundamental liberties like free speech and assembly. Basic legal rights do not exist in the academic disciplinary system. Those who wish to avoid being fired or expelled for alleged transgressions must often submit to humiliating Maoist-style reeducation and struggle sessions during which they are forced to confess and repent their sins in a wretched public spectacle. As a result, progressive rule suffocates independent thought and silences criticism, thus destroying two of freedom’s greatest benefits. Similar circumstances prevail in those areas of corporate culture, the arts, the media, and even sports that are dominated or ruled by progressives.

HKO

Unfortunately Progressivism has become identified with wokism and is very different from the Progressivism of Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt. It is challenging to keep up with these changing definitions, but that is why it is necessary to define them as we use them.

It is also why it is important to remember the principle behind the divided government and intentional firewalls to democracy designed in our constitution: that human nature is permanently flawed and cannot be trusted with concentrated power, whether that power originates in the divine right of kings or the ‘will of the people’. Where our founding came from the thinking of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, Progressivism grew from the historicism of Hegel, Pragmatism (capital ‘P’), and social scientific thinking that thought principles of the physical sciences could be applied to the social realm. Progressivism in the U.S. was tempered by the Constitution, but it traveled in the same boat as political ideologies that considered human nature malleable and capable of improvement, if not perfection, by the state if it is in the right hands.

Accepting human flaws and governing accordingly has proven far less oppressive than those who spoke in the name of ‘the people’ in their grand schemes to improve humanity.

I recommend reading the entire article.

The Great Lie of American Politics

Kevin Williamson writes the lead article in the Saturday WSJ Review Section, Election 2024: You Asked for It America:

For most of my life, the dominant myth that informed American politics was that there was too much “big money” in the system, that Washington lobbyists in Gucci loafers gathered with self-seeking party bosses in smoke-filled rooms to subvert the will of We the People and foist their preferred candidates and policies upon the country. The moral of the story was that the common people do not have enough of a voice.

But that’s the great lie of American politics (and of democracy at large): that the people cannot fail but can only be failed.

With the old media gatekeepers gone, right-wing content creators rushed in and filled the world with QAnon kookery on Facebook, conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress, fake news sponsored by Moscow and Beijing and fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orbán and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth he’s built around himself. The prim consensus of 200 Northeastern newspaper editors has been replaced by the sardonic certitude of 100 million underemployed rage-monkeys and ignoramuses on Twitter. The news was democratized, and, as such, it became corrupt, irresponsible and ugly.

Second, the same forces that disintegrated the old media cabal have radically democratized fundraising for political campaigns and committees. Whatever control those smug party bosses once lorded over candidates mostly had resided in the power of the purse. But the Internet made it possible for politicians and hustlers to go straight to the people, who don’t want to hear about the need to raise their Medicare premiums and reduce their Social Security checks to avoid a national fiscal crisis.

No, We the People want to hear more from that Marjorie lady about the Jewish space lasers and how Donald Trump is going to wreak vengeance against the “communists” and “Marxists” who run…Microsoft, and how vaccines are what gave them lumbago. The digital masses may not be dropping bundles of C-notes into the campaign contribution tip jar, but they hit that tip jar pretty often with smaller change, and there are an awful lot of them.Whatever real power big-money donors had to shape the political agenda has been dwarfed by the power—the much more thoroughly corrupting power—of small-dollar donors, who, unlike the National Association of Realtors or the AFL-CIO, do not have a long-term policy agenda or the attention spans to maintain one, because they are in this regard not citizens in a meaningful sense but only content-consumers. Spend a couple of hours reading political posts on Facebook and tell me that the smoke-filled room doesn’t look pretty good by comparison.

The Road to Censorship

In George Will’s excellent essay in National Review, The Consciousness Project, he touches on the importance of three fundamental principles supporting our constitution:

Human nature is both flawed and permanent. It has been interesting to note that governments based on this principle have been the most free, and those who treated human nature as malleable have been the most oppressive.
The centrality of natural rights limits the government to protecting rights; not granting them (or removing them). This was a radical concept at the time often associated with the violent path taken by the French. Our use of it was far more restrained and balanced.
The Constitution by design limited majoritarian democracy.

The Progressive movement while seeking to address the concentration of economic power came into conflict with all three of these principles. The American project is about liberty more than democracy.

excerpt:

But what if there is no such thing as human nature? What if human nature is a fiction, a pre-modern superstition? What if human beings are merely creatures that take whatever shape is imposed on them by the impress and promptings of the culture in which they are situated? If so, then controlling the culture becomes imperative. And politics must saturate every nook and cranny of life. And this saturation will, inevitably, mean controlling what people say and hear and read and think and teach. Shaping the consciousness of the people — purging the people of what Marxists call “false consciousness” — becomes the great, the encompassing political project.

Once curating consciousness becomes a political project, the jurisdiction of politics becomes enormous — indeed, illimitable. And the aspiration for, the very idea of, limited government disappears. The politics of consciousness promises glittering possibilities. Therefore, muscular progressive politics must not be circumscribed by any limits on coercion. Particularly, any speech, any idea that contributes to false consciousness, must not be tolerated, lest progress be delayed. Such delay would be an intolerable harm. So, censorship is, to the censors, strictly speaking, progressive. And censorship becomes a categorical imperative when the duty to control culture is reinforced by a sense of crisis. Or, to use the adjective that nowadays is promiscuously bandied, an “existential crisis.”

The Leninist temptation — the totalitarian temptation — comes in many flavors and intensities. But it always rests on a denial of human nature. If there is no settled, fixed human nature — if human beings are always and only creatures who are created by the marks made on them by the culture in which they are raised and live — then the stakes of politics are, always and everywhere, enormous. The stakes are, literally, everything — including the sort of beings that humans will be. And everything is, inevitably, politicized. Everything: from work to leisure. What we read, what we eat, how we are entertained. And what is allowed to be said and read and thought and taught.Which brings me to my second hypothesis, which is this: People who believe that culture determines the nature of everyone and everything, and who therefore believe that politics must control culture — everything that is said and read and thought and taught — such people will necessarily believe that they are directly harmed by any speech and all ideas that retard progress, as they understand this. So, they will claim what Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School calls a “license to silence.”

Lincoln’s ascent to greatness began with his instant, implacable, and canny opposition to such thinking. America, he said, is not about a process, majority rule. Rather, America is about a condition, liberty. Lincoln did not say, but could have said, that a written constitution is a counter-majoritarian instrument. It circumscribes the power — the sweep — of majorities. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. No law. No matter how many people might want one.

We The People

from Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch, Curb Your Enthusiasm:

(Likely firewalled if you are not a subscriber, and I encourage you to subscribe. Jonah Goldberg has created a wonderful new resource. Both Goldberg and Williamson used to be must reads at National Review , and I have probably quoted Kevin Williamson more often than any other single writer in this blog.)

Americans get a little psychic jolt out of writing, with capitalization, “We the People,” but political philosophy has recognized that we the people are the main problem going all the way back to the beginning. It is scandalous to frankly admit this in our times: The prehistoric truth is forbidden by postmodern manners. But Plato understood it, Hobbes understood it, Confucius understood it—and our Founding Fathers understood it, too. Plato, Hobbes, Confucius, and many of the other giants of political philosophy understood, each in his own way, that there is no such thing as We the People, that there are groups and factions and classes and interests, with desires and priorities that are, at least at the margins, mutually exclusive, and that the role of the state is to seek harmony and balance among these rivals not by arriving at a state of perfect mutual satisfaction but by convincing (or, more often, forcing) the parties to accept imperfect, second-best, compromise settlements that satisfy no one entirely but provide for the best opportunity of overall flourishing. At one point, that was elementary stuff, Statesmanship 101, as obvious to John Adams as it would have been to Cosimo de’ Medici or to Marcus Aurelius. Adams was obliged to take his Congress more seriously than Cosimo did his signoria or Marcus his senate, but all of them understood that there was more to good governance than deferring to the tribunes of the plebs or treating the state and/or its chief executive as the embodiment of the will of the people as a whole. Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, but he was less of an imperialist than some of our democrats in good standing.

Liberty under a constitutional order is an idea that was born in England and grew up in the United States. In a recent conversation with our friend Dan Hannan (who sits in the House of Lords as Lord Hannan of Kingsclere), Jonah describes democracy not as some sanctifying romantic principle that will necessarily lead to a noble society in which the state is an authentic representative of the people but simply as a “hedge”—a hedge against all of the horrifying things that people do when you give them political power without checks and accountability. That’s the real conservative sensibility at work: If progressivism is about making incremental improvements in the direction of utopia, conservatism is about avoiding catastrophe. And if democracy is a hedge against Caesarism, constitutionalism is a hedge against democracy—against the horrifying things that the people will do when you give them political power without checks and accountability. The loyalist clergyman Mather Byles put the question to his fellow Americans on the eve of the revolution: “Which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?” That is a fair question. Adams himself was skeptical about independence in the years leading up to the revolution. The American constitutional order is an attempt to provide an option other than the choice between one tyrant and 3,000—or, in our time, 320 million—of them.

The peculiar and narrow effects of small-dollar donations and social media are very much of our time and place, but the underlying issue isn’t—and the solution, to the extent that there is one, isn’t something we have to dream up de novo. We have been here before—that is how we got here in the first place. A liberal constitutional order works by dividing up power among competing factions and institutions, setting them against one another and, when necessary, frustrating the will of We the People when it congeals into a temporary majority in support of some destructive policy or project. What will save our system is . . . everything populists left and right are working against, everything a good populist hates with all his heart and both his lungs: not the destruction of the power of political parties and their leaders, but the reinvigoration of those parties and the restoration of their traditional role as gatekeepers; fewer open primaries and more smoke-filled rooms; not the democratizing of anti-democratic institutions such as the Electoral College and the Bill of Rights, but the fortification of these institutions and an unembarrassed emphasis on their countermajoritarian character; more federalism rather than more nationalism; better and more effective news media gatekeeping rather than the ever-finer subdivision of the national conversation; more independent power exercised by interest groups rather than less; less regulating and more legislating, meaning a constrained executive branch and a more active legislative branch; more textualism and less opportunism in constitutional disputes; less crusading and more compromising; government and elections that are boring rather than a national pastime.

HKO

The founders often referred to ‘The People’ as the ultimate source of government power, but between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution they learned the importance of limiting the power of the majority. They sought the benefits of an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a democracy without the faults. They were able to see the faults of an unrestrained democracy in France as soon as our Constitution was ratified. The most violent despots of the 20th century claimed to speak for the people.

The Old New Deal

From Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch (subscription highly recommended) The Old Deal:

It’s also deeply and richly ironic that the new pro-life New Dealers are constantly parroting left-wing radical talking points about “empire” and the “military industrial complex” while at the same time yearning for a new New Deal with them at the helm. The New Deal was wildly militaristic—philosophically, politically, and rhetorically. From the consciously paramilitary Civilian Conservation Corps to the “industrial armies” that marched in military-style parades under the banner of the Blue Eagle and the watchful eye of General Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson. And it all stood on the foundation of Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism” that fueled his “war for democracy” and, ultimately, the American liberal “empire” that the “new right” despises. They’re all gorging themselves on the poisoned fruit of war and liberal empire and they think it’s delicious.

I should back up. There are few topics I’ve written more about than the cargo cult idolatry progressives have for the New Deal. I’ll very briefly summarize my view. During World War I, big business and the federal government got in bed together to mobilize a war economy and enforce compliance to Woodrow Wilson’s political aims. It was a time of outrageous violations of civil liberties and economic command-and-control. When the war ended, Republicans vowed a “return to normalcy,” released the political prisoners, and dismantled the political controls of the economy. And progressives hated it. They spent the 1920s pounding the table that “we planned in war” and we should plan the peacetime economy, too. Seizing the political opportunity of a depression—which was not yet “Great”—FDR, a Wilson administration retread, vowed to use Wilson’s wartime techniques to fight the economic crisis. And he did. Nearly all of the early New Deal/NRA agencies were modeled on WWI precursors. Broadly speaking, the New Deal itself was conceived, framed, and defended as the ultimate expression of William James’ idea of reorienting American politics and life as a “moral equivalent of war” and the fulfillment of John Dewey’s “social possibilities of war.”

Some New Deal policies were good, or at least defensible, and others were outrageously stupid, economically counterproductive, and despotic. That’s in part because there was no ideologically and politically coherent thing called the New Deal. It was a mishmash of policies, some considered entirely ad hoc. All of which were justified by the idea that the government should have a free hand to preempt a free economy. That’s what FDR meant by “bold, persistent, experimentation.”

But one thing is generally agreed-upon by most economic historians—none of these policies actually ended the Great Depression. Even Paul Krugman eventually had to concede that World War II is what did it. In other words, only when FDR abandoned the New Deal did the Depression end (or as FDR put it, when he stopped being “Dr. New Deal” and became “Dr. Win-the-War”). But even here, Krugman’s analysis is … debatable. He argues WWII was just another giant government program and that the deficit spending of the war pulled America out. But the more plausible argument was that the aforementioned conditions in the global economy after the war—combined with the massive pent-up demand of millions of soldiers and families after the war—is what ushered in the long American boom.

Regardless, measured against the intended point of the New Deal—getting us out of the Great Depression—the New Deal was a failure. Indeed, many people—I’m one of them—would argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. But while the New Deal was a policy failure, it was a huge political success. It made FDR president-for-life (a fact that generated a bipartisan consensus to amend the Constitution to keep that from happening again). It made the Democrats the majority party for generations. And the Democratic Party has been obsessed with getting the New Deal band back together ever since. Liberal intellectuals, likewise, have been convinced that re-creating the New Deal is the best way to achieve the kind of socialist or social democratic system they’ve always dreamed of. “There seems no inherent obstacle,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1947, “to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

HKO

Still seems ironic to me that Progressives keep returning to policies that are 90 years old.

Reform was seductive when we could not see the results but thanks to history we can see the results of excessive faith in government to solve all the tears in our social fabric; based on reason misapplied to social and economic problems. We have replaced a philosophical understanding of risk with a delusional mathematical certainty.

The genius of the founders was the understanding that all of the human shortcomings in social and market settings also exist in political and government settings. (Federalist #51). Dispersed political power works because all knowledge is also dispersed. Capitalism works when power and knowledge converge. Some one may know more than any of us, but they NEVER know more than all of us.

A few quotes:

“Conservatism” as a conscious political doctrine emerged after Burke. Yet the core tenets of his criticism of the French Revolution — the dangers of abstract reason, the fallible nature of man, the distilled wisdom of the ages, the perils of leveling society, the menace of social engineering, the virtue of prudence, the complexity of circumstance, the sanctity of property, the hazards of fiat money, the balance between conservation and reform, the limits of voluntary contracts, and the intergenerational responsibilities of civil society — have all settled as guiding principles of conservative thought in its various intellectual strands. While conservatism in the 20th century splintered into factions representing, for example, traditional conservatism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, national conservatism, and southern agrarianism, it is difficult to pinpoint one such contingent that would repudiate most of these precepts.”

-Gregory Collins, Bipartisan Burke, National Review, December 3, 2020

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

― Louis D. Brandeis
[Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]”

Republicanism and Aristocracy

Dan McLaughlin expresses a perspective of cultural ‘wokeness’ and its counter reaction in The New Republicanism in National Review.

Republicanism in America was represented as an alternative to monarchy, but the role of monarchy in its relation to aristocracy varied. In British history the role of the monarch transitioned from one of an absolute ruler to one subject to the restraints of a constitution, determined by the Parliament. A representative republic inherently included an elite that would rule. The American republic assumed a virtuous elite that would subdue their personal interest, but it also assumed a virtuousness of the voters that would select leaders for more than the self interest of individual voters.

James Madison serving in the Virginia House of Delegates saw that a dependence on virtue for the success of the republic was wishful thinking and that a divided government was necessary to avoid any concentration of political power. Government was to be divided vertically through federalism and horizontally through checks and balances augmented by carefully and deliberately staggered terms.

Madison redefined a republic from a form suitable only to a small geography and a homogeneous population to a large and extended republic that would function through multiple factions offsetting each other. When there were only two religious groups there would be constant hostility, but when there were several they tended to live in peace. Whether the same could be said of economic interests or political interests remained to be seen. The formation of a two party system allowed for coalitions of factions to achieve common ends. Reducing a diversity of special interests to two coalitions undermined Madison’s concept of the extended republic.

As the English form of rule evolved the role of the monarch was seen in some views to protect the larger population from the aristocracy.

At our founding the republic was not just an alternative to a monarchy, it was a means of controlling a political aristocracy. As the economy grew urban and industrial and as the railroads connected the oceans, removing geographical limits to wealth and commerce, we developed a new economic aristocracy that was addressed by the Progressive movement. The Progressive movement sought to bring the same limits to concentrations of economic power that the Constitution brought to concentrations of political power. This created a friction that has defined our political discourse because the political power to address economic concentrations required removing limits on central political power hard wired in the written constitution of the founding.

The third aristocracy identified by McLaughlin is a cultural aristocracy embedded in media, entertainment, higher education, and increasingly in corporations and public schools. To the extent that this aristocracy projects values and rules that are in conflict with a large portion of the population, there is a reaction similar to that of the previous political and economic aristocracies.

Political control of school curricula and the media should be avoided whether it is from performative politics or an unelected cultural aristocracy. To a large extent the former has been a reaction to the latter.

The reaction to the new cultural aristocracy is similar to the progressive reaction to the economic aristocracy and the two overlap greatly, but just as the political and economic originally overlapped and pulled apart as the economy developed, the same is happening with the political and the cultural. Where they once overlapped the cultural is pulling apart from the political, and we seek political power to hold the cultural aristocracy accountable.