The third aristocracy identified by McLaughlin is a cultural aristocracy embedded in media, entertainment, higher education, and increasingly in corporations and public school. 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 the reaction to the previous political and economic aristocracies.
Read MoreWe will always have elites in a technical world and we are free to choose the elites we respect. What has happened is a segment of elites does not return the respect, inviting contempt. When these elites lose respect and this leadership becomes entrenched and unaccountable, the people or the new republicanism seek clumsy tools to influence these institutions. This is a sound warning from the author.
Read More“I care less about whether the top personal income-tax rate is 39 percent or 36 percent than I do about whether we can pick one and stick to it for a few decades at least, and, more generally, about ensuring that we do not undertake big and disruptive changes to the policy environment without real consensus and careful deliberation. But instead of that conservative approach, every time a party achieves a temporary majority in Congress or control of the White House, its leaders promise revolution and a radical reordering of taxes, regulations, incentives, terms of trade, and everything else they can think of. “
Read More“Subsidized credit is the coward’s way of spending money on friends and cronies, because spending-by-lending allows you to list these subsidies as “assets” on your books rather than characterizing them as spending.”
Read More“Strongman democracy is in practice very much like ordinary monarchy or dictatorship, and the strongman usually outlasts the democracy. It is democracy without liberalism.”
Read More“The problem with America isn’t that it is full of guns — the problem with America is that it is full of Americans.”
Read More“Because the hatred of adjacent heretics is more intimate and more intense than the hatred of distant infidels, these rightists end up doing things that would be otherwise inexplicable,”
Read More“What liberal societies have is not better men — it is independent courts, a free press, the rule of law, checks and balances, democratic accountability, competitive elections, powerful private institutions, and vibrant civic life. There have been some men of remarkably low character elected to the American presidency, but the American system has limited the damage they could do.”
Read More“Free speech and freedom of mind, if we understand them properly, should be rooted in intellectual humility. It is possible — it is certain — that some of the things we believe are wrong, be those matters of fact, matters of moral judgment, or estimates of the dangers posed by words and ideas that offend us. “
Read More“As every good utopian knows, The Plan cannot fail — The Plan can only be failed. And that is how the people-over-profits socialist humanitarians of the 20th century ended up murdering more than 100 million people in the pursuit of fairness and social justice.”
Read More“One could charge the white upper middle class of America as committed to a form of ruthless meritocracy in some areas of life and to ruthless egalitarianism in all the others. Debt relief and minimum-lot-size regulations for the households in their neighborhoods. Lawlessness in the name of advancing equality for your neighborhoods.”
Read MoreRhetoric may not stop extremism, but it will direct and influence it. If Trump is deemed responsible for Charlottesville then Omar and her gang are responsible for Colleyville.
Read MoreThere is the unplanned and unintended benefit of making luxuries into ordinary items. Such spending primes the pump on some items, but it is not an essential element for progress. When wealth is generated to provide consumers with products and services they want we all benefit; when wealth is generated by rent seeking behavior most of us lose.
Read MoreProgressives think the Constitution is organic and the economy is mechanical; in reality it is the reverse. Thinking you can tax an isolated segment without affecting others ignores the dispersed nature of knowledge that no central authority can emulate.
Read More“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power”
Read MoreWe need to realize that crisis are inevitable. Ideologues will debate causes long after they pass, but it does not matter if the cause is excessive individualism, unfettered free markets, limited government, excessive government, globalism, the administrative state, or utopian socialism. Any theory of human action in a complex interrelated world will fail occasionally; but we fail a critical test when we equate the ‘failings’ of an ideology with the ‘failure’ of an ideology. To understand our beliefs we need to know their limits.
Read More“If you are not used to the intellectual compartmentalization required of an American politician, it can be jarring to hear, e.g., Senator Sanders demanding “revolution” at 10 a.m. and denouncing “insurrection” at 10:15 a.m”
Read MoreThe critical point is not that we are simply a republic and not a democracy, but that we are a very carefully constructed republic, reflecting an understanding of human nature, with numerous firewalls that are designed to prevent the democracy from degenerating into anarchy and tyranny.
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. “
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