Noble Ends Require Noble Means

I found it harder to have a civil objective conversation on politics in 2020. There seems to be few that are not blinded by hatred for the other side; willing to accept the bad to avoid the worst. Volumes have been written to explain this divide, but it seems to come down to two different views of events. We continue to read for confirmation, not information. We no longer read the same stories, with the same frequencies. The media has found money in clicks and outrage. It is easier to know your audience and deliver them the outrage they crave.

Find the few sources that you can trust and avoid the rest. I would avoid TV news totally.

My political thinking begins with ideology and then progresses to policy then competence and then character. I believe most voters reverse the process and never get to policy or ideology, rationalizing those constructs to fit the character they can relate to. This is a reality that I have come to accept and it makes political conversations difficult.

A competent virtuous candidate that I oppose on ideology and policy will not get my vote. A candidate that fails to articulate an ideology may stumble on some correct policy decisions and may just as easily be pulled in a different direction. It would take an exceptional candidate that can translate ideology into policy that is understood and acceptable to the voters and enables the trust that comes with competence and character.

I wonder how we manage a population that trades benefits for votes. How do we resist leaders who promise benefits without paying for them? Can a leader even win a primary when he or she articulates the necessary limits of government rather than its solution to every conceivable outrage?

In our obsession on issues we have lost the brilliance of the constitutional means to manage our differences. It still asserts itself as it just did in the election, but our commitment to those noble means has certainly been wounded. It seems that when we sacrifice the means to achieve desired ends we will not be happy with the ends we end up achieving.

Each side justifies divisive means to achieve their ends; but even when you win a race to the bottom you end up at the bottom.

Perhaps our problems are not so new, and they were well considered by the framers of our constitution and our founding principles can be clarified by their absence. A limited and divided government devolving power in a federalist system was meant to address many of the problems we now face. We may need to review the owner’s manual.

Addressing Presidential Power

From Kevin Williamson at National Review, Pruning the Presidency:

The Left has aggrandized the presidency because it wishes to rule the country administratively rather than through the clunky process by which lawmakers go about making laws in a thoroughly unscientific and unprofessional fashion. That we might return to such a state of affairs is the dread that currently keeps American progressives up at night: Writing in Vox, that great dispassionate explainer, Ian Millhiser raises the alarm that Brett Kavanaugh seems to be taking a more restrictive view of the nondelegation doctrine, which is to say, that the Supreme Court might be poised to insist that lawmakers go back to writing the laws instead of sending memos over to the White House instructing the bureaucracies to write the laws and call them “regulations.” The headline: “Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion should terrify Democrats.”

Various progressives have argued over the years that we should extend presidential terms and expand presidential powers in order to make governance more effective, which in this case is a near-synonym for unopposable. They look longingly at the parliamentary systems under which prime ministers enjoy both legislative and executive power, and toward nondemocratic bureaucracies in which empowered expert managers rule by technocratic fiat (Thomas Friedman’s “China for a Day” fantasy). This is partly because they are confident that they will get their way more often under such procedures — look at the nation’s universities and corporate human-resources departments if you doubt that progressives know how to work a bureaucracy — and partly because they maintain a delusional faith in what we are expected to call with straight faces “political science.” They adhere to rationalism, in Michael Oakeshott’s sense of that word, and hence must regard democratic compromises (along with checks and balances and formal limits on state power) as deviations from the optimum policy they believe they can deduce logically.

The remedy for this, we are told, is “political,” meaning that misbehaving presidents can be defeated at the polls or, if necessary, impeached and removed from office. But surely these cannot be the only controls on the president. Though norms and traditions are fine, we need some hard-and-fast rules about what presidents can and cannot do and some clarity about our legal and constitutional basis for those rules. And most of all, we need a presidency that is reduced, one that is put back in its constitutional box and limited to its constitutional role: seeing to the faithful execution of the laws.

But to take the presidency down a peg, Congress has to step up and reclaim its institutional self-respect. That is not the same thing as self-importance — the only commodity of which Congress is running a long-term surplus.

HKO
Another excellent piece from Kevin Williamson. The rise of presidential powers tracked the progressive tilt in American politics for the last century. Much of this power was acceptable as long as progressives of either party were in power, but this compromising of constitutional restraints was blind to the possibility of this power being in the hands of their opposition. Means do matter. The tools of defeat are prepared by the shortsighted.

Both sides refuse to re-examine the proper role of the presidency, and focus on the president in power. It may seem unrealistic to return to constitutional norms, but the alternative seems to be an escalation of the bitterness of our politics.

The Progressive Inception

from the notebooks…

You do not truly understand an idea until you can articulate its flaws or its limits. This is particularly true with social, economic and political ideas, but it should apply to any idea you support.

Similarly, you cannot understand any idea you innately oppose unless you can articulate its benefits, at least in the minds of its adherents.

The real and perceived failures of commerce and capitalism in the Gilded Age of the late 19t5h century and again in 1929 drove the public and into the arms of reform. The extremists of socialism and communism (and anarchy) saw capitalism as a failed system. Seduced by reform, they could clearly identify the flaws that surrounded them but could not visualize the shortcomings of the solutions they championed.

Progressive leaders saw the benefits of the economic growth in the expansion of the railroads and the connection of vast new markets in the west and the millions of immigrants that needed the stuff of a new life. Protected by two oceans our growth was relatively protected from the instabilities and wars of Europe.

American Progressives saw the flaws in the socialism sailing to our shores by the disruption they left behind in Europe. Progressives sought many of the objectives of socialism but pursued evolutionary rather than revolutionary means. Progressives also sought social justices and economic equality but retained a respect for the Constitution and its limits of government power.

In spite of heated debate, we have retained a theological kind of respect for the Constitution, and like the bible we debate its true meaning while retaining deep respect for its words and the ideas behind them.

Clarity in words and thoughts decay over time. When opposing views retain respect for the same words and principles, those ideas become ripe for interpretation, transposed to meet our current personal and political objectives as much as we may profess fidelity to its conception.

Progressivism can be seen as an American restraint on socialist impulses. Conservatives may see it as a socialist contamination of our republic. Progressives saw equality before the law inadequate in a society of growing economic inequality. They feared the excesses of democracy less than the founders and assumed a general will or a will of the people that proved to be a myth. The factions noted by the founders and framers of the constitution did not dissolve, they multiplied.

Some early Progressive thinkers contested Constitutional principles of individualism and natural and individual rights, but the durability of the movement came from making peace with the constraints of the constitution; working within its structure and finding new meanings in its words while adapting them to a world the framers could never have foreseen.

The Role of the Ruling Class

We will always have a ruling class. Our economy and nation are just too large to manage without delegated authority. Our great experiment with democracy is about whether the people can be trusted to select their leaders wisely.

The aristocracy of Europe ruled based on class and heredity, but usually understood the needs of the lower classes. Inequality was accepted; the rich were entitled, and the poor accepted their position.

The equality in the United States created a permanent state of agitation. Anyone could get rich and everybody tried. The ability to create a heaven on earth led us to impatience and materialism. Religion became more powerful by its separation from the state.

In America the rich and the poor worked alongside each other and knew each other. Social barriers between the classes disappeared. But Alexis de Tocqueville observed that when the rich of the United States visited Europe, they sought the company of Europe’s wealthiest.

De Tocqueville also thought that equality made us equally weak and drew us to a strong leader. John Adams, derided as a monarchist by Jefferson, thought a strong president was required to protect the people from the aristocracy. Jefferson as an aristocrat himself did not acknowledge the threat. John Adams felt personally slighted by the aristocrats of Boston. The Constitution recognized the role to be played by the executive, the aristocracy and the people. It balanced restraint of concentrated central power with the restraint of the passions of unfettered democracy.

Congress was a place where issues were debated and compromised, buffered from the passions of democratic majoritarianism. The Supreme Court was even further removed from the passions of the majority. The Courts were to protect the individual rights from the tyranny of the majority. As the Progressive Era sought greater democracy, the Supreme Court was pressured more to uphold the majority than the rights of the individual.

Individualism was demonized in the Progressive Era. Self-interest properly understood lost its qualifier. In an egalitarian democracy we are all the same because we are all unique.

The progressive effort to remove the obstacles to democracy exposed the its faults . The administrative state moved law making power away from the accountability of an electorate. Deliberation and debate were replaced by referendums and mobs. In frustration the voters sought their objectives from the courts and the executive. It should be no surprise that those contests have become so hostile.

Greater democracy gave us a stronger executive and a weaker aristocracy or elite. Trump’s rise was a victory over the elite. This was the wish of the early Progressives, a strong executive protecting the will of the people from the elite. This was how John Adams envisioned the executive role. What has changed is that after a century of progressivism the progressives have become the elite.

We debate which features and principles of the Constitution still apply, and which ones should be modified and how best they should be changed. While the requirements a modern society places on any system of government may evolve, human nature remains subject to the same faults since man appeared, and these faults exist in our commercial institutions as well as the government institutions that regulate them. This was the central truth that guided the construction of our Constitution. As noted by Madison in Federal #51. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Resistance is the Establishment

It is counterintuitive to the political neophyte that democracy leads to tyranny, but the framers of the constitution understood this clearly. They understood the positive contribution that came from the aristocracy and monarchy as well as the negative. They also understood that a democracy had great downside risks. Their structure balanced the interests and benefits of the aristocracy (elite), the executive and the common voters. The constitution was designed to limit the ability of any two to counter the third.

Momentary passions can rule for a short time and create demagogues to deliver political salvation. The staggering of terms was designed to mute temporary passions. The House runs every two years, the senate every six, and the president every four. And the Senates terms are further staggered so avoid a wholesale route. Supreme Court justices are completely removed from the electoral process.

When the ruling elite ignore the populace, they rise up as they have in Britain and in the U.S., but the constitution allows this to function stably. John Adams saw a strong executive as a counter weight to the elite or the aristocracy that is an inevitable arm of government and social order.

In other words, Trump is not a threat to the Constitutional order; it is functioning as it should.

The resistance is the establishment. As the comedian said on Gutfeld’s show, they are on the same health care plan as the evil empire.

The belief in a ‘general will’ or the ‘people’s will’ is a myth. It is the calling card of the progressives as well as the socialists and Mussolini’s brand of fascism. We are a collection of interests and factions and the constitution is a system to balance those interests, not to ignore them or oppress them.

Frederick von Hayek saw the myth of the general will. The general will is not deduced from polling and research, it is often dictated by a demagogue. The general will is just a faction that pretends to represent more than the power of the group that it represents. By claiming to be the people’s will it serves to demonize any opposition as being an enemy of the people.

The left is in shock that they do not represent the will of the people. They must seek excuses and conspiracy theories to explain their loss. Russian collusion, gerrymandering, and fake news are all excuses for the failure of democracy to enforce their will on others. Populism is just democracy that rejects the left. They had no problem with the Chinese collusion with Bill Clinton, gerrymandering that calcified their control, or fake news that supports their myths.

Their problem is not Democracy in Chains, but democracy in action. They would be better served to return to the constitution and the republic it was designed for.