I solicit comments on the following excerpts (bolding added):
The greatest factor in hastening the end of American-style democracy over the past 125 years (at least) has been increasing government centralization and administrative rule. To answer the question posed by Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein’s edited volume, Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America: it already did happen here! The project all along has been, and still is, to end politics. That is, to foreclose as illegitimate public debate and disagreement on issues allegedly settled by science and administered via expertise. As our personal freedom to abuse our bodies, sate our appetites, and neglect our duties ever expands, our actual freedom to govern ourselves and determine our collective future radically contracts. The people writing these ostensible democratic laments are all in the intellectual lineage of those who brought us to this point. Their aim is to complete the project. Trump’s aim—however inchoate or implicit—is to reverse it. Who’s the real anti-democrat?
Earlier in the piece we read:
In any event, it’s rich to read the Left fret about the end of “democracy” when they have spent so much conscious effort undermining its necessary preconditions. They have done so, I think, for two reasons. First, they long ago came to equate liberty with license. Philosophically, once nature was discarded as the standard by which to guide and judge human life, the satisfaction of appetites became the only conceivable end. Hence in matters of personal morality, the contemporary Left is a curious combination of libertine and censor. Any physical—especially sexual or pharmaceutical—act that does not draw blood or pick a pocket is permitted. There are no mores that are simply necessary to society or to personal well-being. If you’re not directly harming someone else, then no one has any business even passing judgment on what you do. But you deserve to be crushed for thinking or saying the wrong thing—especially for passing judgment! Witness the recent massive freak-out over Penn Law professor Amy Wax’s praise of the once-commonplace concept of “bourgeois norms.” How dare she!
My take on Amy Wax:
Amy Wax on Free Speech
I am afraid Professor Wax does not appreciate what she is up against. She writes,
It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate — to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life — something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.
Of course I agree with this brave little sermon. But it is naive to think that it will have any effect on the leftist termites that have infested the universities. They don't give a rat's ass about the values Wax so ably champions. Wax doesn't seem to realize that civil discourse is impossible with people with whom one is at war.
Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice
Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.
They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending. If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'
It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.
It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.
Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.
Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?
But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?
Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.
Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson.
Higher Education or Higher Enstupidation?
In case you haven't yet had your fill of academic insanity, take a gander at Heather MacDonald's Higher Ed's Latest Taboo is 'Bourgeois Norms.'
Apparently, such norms are white-supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic. And what norms might these be? Why, "hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority."
Apparently you are a 'racist' if you advise blacks to "Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime."
As stupid as this is, it perhaps gives us a clue as to the 'liberal' criterion of racism: Something is racist if it is something blacks can't do. So deferring gratification, working hard, saving and investing, refraining from looting, showing respect for legitimate authority are all racist because blacks as a group have a hard time doing these things.
To promote and recommend these life-enhancing values and norms is to 'dis' their 'culture.' After all, all cultures are equally good, equally conducive to human flourishing, right?
Are these the implications here? I'm just asking. I am trying to understand. I am trying to get into the liberal head. So far it seems like diving into a bucket of shit. Or am I being unfair? Am I missing something?
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