Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

MAGA, Majority Rule, and Consent of the Governed

Here:

In short, the political battle between the Left and Right is best understood as an existential fight over what America will be. The Left pushes for a metanoic transformation, while the Right tries to catalyze an epistrophic one.

Metanoia is a forward-looking change — a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change — a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity — a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life.

Under the second Trump administration, America will be transformed — and it will be an epistrophic transformation. The citizens of the country have unmistakably rejected the Left’s claim that our traditional identity was morally untenable.

Very good over all, but is the last quoted sentence true? 

The concept democracy includes at least four sub-concepts: majority rule, universal franchise, equality before the law, and consent of the governed.  Consider the first and the fourth.  They are in tension with each other. Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, but he won the latter only by about 2%.  So almost half of the voters did not give their consent to be governed by Trump and his entourage and to be subjected to his and their agenda. 

As a citizen and a patriot, I am very happy with the outcome: I want to see our political enemies soundly defeated and demoralized.  As a philosopher, however, one who values truth above all else, and along with it, the ancillary virtues of  precision in thought and speech,  I must point out that that it is false that the citizens have unmistakably rejected the depredatory Left's signature allegation.

The false claim is being thoughtlessly repeated by too many media pundits on our side. Widely bruited as it is, it may have the negative effect of causing complacency. We are in a war with the Left and it won't be over soon, if ever. The National Sanitation Project, as I have been calling it, may take a generation or more. All of our institutions need the political equivalent of fumigation.  That includes, of course, the RCC which, though not part of the state apparatus, is an institution that affects the course of the ship of state.

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Bill Vallicella

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3 responses to “MAGA, Majority Rule, and Consent of the Governed”

  1. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    “As a philosopher, however, one who values truth above all else, and along with it, the ancillary virtues of precision in thought and speech, I must point out that that it is false that the citizens have unmistakably rejected the depredatory Left’s signature allegation.”
    There is a very good point that you are making here. As you state, we won the popular vote, but barely, since almost half the nation decided to cast its vote for a moronic creature of the very Left that had inflicted on our people the horrendous harms of the last four years. In relation to this fact, we should also contemplate the very worrisome result of the elections for the House of Representatives, where we hold a tiny majority of several seats. I take this as a reflection that millions of citizens rejected the Biden/Harris administration but NOT the political and social ideologies of the Democrat Party itself. One final point: regaining a lasting majority is going to require more than the unravelling of the worst aspects of the administrative state; destroying DEI, both in terms of governmental programs and throughout civil society; restoring law and order, and the lowering of prices for energy and other essential commodities. It will ultimately depend on whether the MAGA movement is serious about arresting the economic decay of our industrial base, which has had a devastating impact on so many communities, undermining traditional modes of life and belief; inversing the marked tendency to the concentration of wealth and income in fewer and fewer households, which has been a precondition for the rise and dominance of the coastal elites and the crushing of the middle class, including the aspirations of so many of the young, who now look forward to bleak futures; curbing the massive economic, social, and cultural power of the tech companies, particularly those who dominate the Internet and who are in control of the development of AI. This list could be made much longer, but my basic point is that we face enemies on two fronts—the Left, on the one hand, and much of American corporate capital, whose global outlook and strategies are often at variance with the good of the American nation and its people. This is a difficult battle to wage, but perhaps MAGA’s popularist nature will strong be enough to stifle whatever neo-liberal illusions still exist within the Republican Party. We are at the beginning of a very long struggle.
    Vito

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  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito,
    You make an excellent point: >> my basic point is that we face enemies on two fronts—the Left, on the one hand, and much of American corporate capital, whose global outlook and strategies are often at variance with the good of the American nation and its people. This is a difficult battle to wage, but perhaps MAGA’s popularist nature will strong be enough to stifle whatever neo-liberal illusions still exist within the Republican Party.<< One of the ironies here is that it takes billionaires to beat billionaires: the 'people' can't do it alone. Although things are looking up, it it worrisome that almost half of electorate vote for an incompetent idiot. I remember the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon contest. Both men were highly qualified and not that different in outlook. Also, worries about the effects of AI and advanced robotic are quite rational. My pal Jode doesn't seem to understand this. What happens when all the longshoremen and truck drivers are out of work? What will they do with themselves? Devote themselves to the life of the mind? Learn to write code? Fat chance!

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  3. EG Avatar
    EG

    Hi Bill,
    Re-reading this, I am coming around to your point, but perhaps it needs to be yet more radical. We will likely inevitably have to have a (hot) civil war of sorts, and perhaps even more certainly a global one that reorders society to properly place the “right” values and institutions in their “right” order. Now, I am not authoritarian or ideological enough to say what that ‘right’ is, since as history teaches us that this is generally qua revolutions fairly arbitrary, but we need to re-create human-sized institutions that support what the classical liberals imagined, and to stop letting the love of money and power corrupt, overtly and covertly, that vision, and it does not have to be utopian or idealist pie in the sky.

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