“This was the Madisonian insight,” he contends: “that you can make all sorts of promises on a piece of paper, and call it a ‘bill of rights,’ and it’s not worth the paper it’s written on unless you have some means to enforce it. Like any good contract, it’s only worth the enforcement mechanism it stands on.”
Read MoreHalf of Trump’s supporters like his in your face, hit back twice as hard, refusal to be intimidated, trolling, protocol style. The other half fear the poorly thought, lunatic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideas and behavior of the Democrats much more than the ego and unpredictability of Trump. The Kavanaugh hearing was a live rehearsal of how they handle power, like a self righteous mob.
Read MoreThus 1619 Project from the NYT is the opposite of history; it is anti-history. Instead of studying the past to learn about the present, it projects current passions on the past. Confirming events are generalized to be the sole motivation, non confirming events are ignored or minimized as inconsequential.
Read More“..the desire for popularity is the original sin of the American intellectual: When he subordinates his independent mind to the demands of the herd, he ceases to perform any useful function. He abandons culture for Instant Culture, discourse for antidiscourse, and truth-seeking for status-seeking.”
Read More“The best case for capitalism is a case for markets as one crucial set of institutions in a free society deeply rooted in the West’s liberal and pre-liberal soil. It is crucial because at its best it protects every man’s right to the fruits of his labor, encourages virtues crucial to living free, and has proven unbeatably capable of improving everyone’s living standards. But it must remain rooted, because man does not live by bread alone, and because both the market and the larger society depend upon other formative institutions that help us all become better human beings and citizens.”
Read More“But more importantly, when you promise people something you can’t deliver you make them mad when you don’t deliver it. I’m convinced that one of the reasons the Democrats spend their time calling every inconvenient institution and voter racist is that they are embittered by Barack Obama’s spectacular failure to deliver on the promises he made and the even grander promises his biggest fans projected upon him. “
Read MoreIf it had appeared in Breitbart or a similar political tilt, the airwaves would be jammed with condemnations and no apology would suffice. Its proximity in time to the recent shooting at the Chabad in Poway near San Diego would have made it unforgivable. That is how the New York Times treated far less offensive remarks from Republicans; Sarah Palin’s use of the word ‘cross hairs’ in a political speech was enough to blame her for the Gabby Giffords shooting.
Read More“..unity is the mask power wears to justify itself. What liberals are nostalgic for is not unity but the kind of power they had back in the good old days. They can’t say, “Man, I really miss having the kind of power to do what we wanted,” so they gauze it up with false phantasms of national unity lost.”
Read MoreThis tension between the limited government of the constitution and the reach of the current administrative state is in my opinion the heart of the reason for our congressional disfunction, and our national division. Democracy is frustrated by regulations from an administrative state beyond accountability to the voters.
Read MoreWhile the Progressives imbued the administrative state with moral and political authority they overestimated its competence. The second false assumption was that this uber-qualified elite would be capable of managing a complex society while trying to fulfill and endless list of social objectives.
Read More“I am grateful to the men and women of our military for their service, but armies are only expedients, necessary evils. They should be kept out of sight for the same reason I keep the guns out of sight in my home. A military parade does not display greatness—it displays power. And that may be where I most part company with our new nationalists. “
Read More“The Bill of Rights shelters certain fundamental rights from democratic passion — no matter how terrified, how angry, how sanctimonious, how self-righteous the demos and the demagogues may be.”
Read More“Most voters, admirably or not, do not always believe that their president must be morally perfect to do good, but only that, in practical terms, he must at least appear better than the alternative. “
Read More“Humans make hierarchies of status and privilege for themselves whenever the opportunity avails itself. This is why all socialist systems that do not work within the constraints of a liberal democratic framework of the rule of law inevitably descend into tyrannies. Give the state unbridled power, and the denizens of the state will use that power toward their own ends.”
Read More“When a politician declares a “right” in a scarce good, it indicates either that he is a simpleton or that he believes you to be, and one’s as good as the other, that being another defect in democracy.”
Read More“The purpose of emergencies — and, especially, phony emergencies — is to empower partisans and advocates and people with power to overrule those institutions in the pursuit of their own immediate parochial goals, whether those include a wall along the southern border or a mandatory seminar on “rape culture” at Yale. “
Read More“When you hand power over to planners, technocrats, or commissars to substitute their judgement for the rule of law, you are behaving like an outlaw, because you are literally outside the law.”
Read More“In such a bizarro world, there is nothing wrong with tech employees forced to sleep in their cars near Silicon Valley monopolies -— as long as the owners wear T-shirts and flip-flops and rail at Trump in internal memos.”
Read More“They too often define accuracy as the higher Truth that transcends the fossilized idea of truth predicated on obsolete ideas such as evidence, facts, and empiricism.”
Read More“Ronald Reagan liked to quip that a government department represented the closest thing to eternal life we are likely to see on this earth. In close second is a bad journalist with the right opinions, for he will be treated as if he were the very embodiment of liberty.”
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