Social and Political Philosophy – Maverick Philosopher

Is Federalism a Way to Reduce Political Violence?

A while back, in a Substack article, I posed the question: Can Federalism Save Us? I suggested that it might. Now I am wondering whether that piece embodies a tension if not a contradiction. But what is federalism? The term does not wear its meaning on its sleeve. As I wrote in that article:

Federalism is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that both the central and the constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs. Federalism is enshrined in the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Now suppose that in some city or jurisdiction ruled by crime-tolerant leftists, rape, carjacking, murder, and so on are out of control. Chicago is a prime example. We right-thinking people despise crime and the policies of those who allow it and in some cases promote it. The agents of the Trump administration, in conjunction with local law enforcement, could easily clean up Chicago in the way they restored order to Washington, D. C. So most of us Trump-supporting conservatives who hate crime and want to see it reduced, support federal intervention, even when the Feds are uninvited and can be accused of meddling in local affairs.

The tension, then, is between a commitment to the Constitution with its Tenth Amendment, which implies respect for states rights, and a salutary concern for the welfare of the poor souls who must inhabit a city dominated by benighted leftists.

Of course, we’ve been here before. I don’t recall anyone in 1962 calling John F. Kennedy a fascist, though. Standards of civility have deteriorated drastically. The times they have a changed.

Bob Dylan, Oxford Town. Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago.

Is Flag Burning Speech?

In the 1989 case “Texas v. Johnson,” SCOTUS handed down a 5-4 ruling according to which flag burning was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. Now if you read the amendment you will find no reference to flag burning. The subsumption of flag burning under protected speech required interpretation and argument and a vote among the justices. The 5-4 vote could easily have gone the other way, and arguably should have.

President Trump’s recent Executive Order has set things right:

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to “fighting words” is constitutionally protected. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 408-10 (1989).

The bit about ‘fighting words’ invites commentary.

Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech? Logically prior question: Is it speech at all? What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as ‘giving you the finger.’ Is that speech? It is a bit of behavior, no doubt, but there is nothing verbal about it. So consider ‘Fuck you!’ which is verbal. If it counts as speech, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. The content of an assertive utterance is a proposition. Propositions are either true or false. ‘Fuck you!’ is neither true nor false; so it does not express a proposition. It expresses an attitude of disdain, disgust, hatred, contempt, bellicosity. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger. The same goes for the burning of a flag. If someone burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the person is expressing. There isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that transcends the merely biographical. “I hate the nation this symbol stands for!” Say that and you are merely emoting.

The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent about matters of common interest; the typical act of flag burning by the typical flag burner does not rise to that level. To have reasoned dissent there has to be some proposition that one is dissenting from and some counter-proposition that one is advancing, and one’s performance has to make more or less clear what those propositions are. I think one ought to be skeptical of arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech. Actually, I am more than skeptical: I am strongly inclined to deny any such subsumption.

My point, then, is that since flag burning is not speech, it is not protected speech. Of course, it does not follow that it is not in many cases an illegal act.

Am I suggesting that there should be a flag burning amendment to the U. S. constitution? No. Let the states and the localities decide what to do with those who desecrate the flag. Let’s consider some examples.

A man buys an American flag and burns it in his fireplace. Nothing illegal here.. He is simply disposing of a piece of private property in a safe manner. That is his right. The symbol is not the symbolized. Destruction of the former does not affect the latter. The spirit of the nation and its laws is not somehow incarnated in the piece of cloth, any more than the Word of God is incarnated in a copy of the Bible. (The final clause of the preceding sentence might ‘ignite’ some interesting discussions!)
Someone steals or desecrates the flag I am flying on my property. That illegal act comes under local laws.
Someone burns a flag in a tinder-dry wilderness area. That too comes under existing local and federal laws.
Someone steals or desecrates an American flag on display at a state or federal facility. That also comes under existing laws.
Someone burns a flag in the presence of others in a public place in a manner that is likely to incite imminent violence. Here is where Trump’s EO applies. We must not tolerate the incitement of violence by speech — which I have argued flag burning is not — or by such nonverbal behavior as flag burning.

Political Violence: Issues and Questions, Part II

In Part I, I argued that in the current state of affairs in the USA, our political opponents are not mere opponents, but enemies. Given that this enmity is a contingent state of affairs, one that could have been otherwise, I am not defining political opposition or the political in terms of enmity. This distinguishes my position (in progress, and thus tentatively held) from that of Carl Schmitt’s. For Schmitt, the essence of the political (das Politische) consists in the Freund-Feind (friend-enemy) distinction. (See his The Concept of the Political.) By contrast with Schmitt, I am not trying to isolate the essence or nature of the political; I am merely saying that at the moment, as a matter of contingent fact, our opponents, the Democrats, are our enemies. They are our enemies in that they pose a clear and present threat to us and our way of life. And increasingly this threat is being executed, and in the worst way, by assassination, attempted assassination, calls for assassination, celebrations of assassination, and refusals to condemn assassination. What is the source of this enmity? In Part I a case was made that our political opponents are enemies. In this Part II, I will proffer an explanation of why we are enemies. In a future Part III, I will consider what we can do to ameliorate our nasty and highly dangerous predicament.

With our (mere) opponents we share common ground; with our enemies we do not. The source, then, is the lack of common ground. We do not share ground sufficient to keep enmity at bay if we don’t agree on many things. For now, I will mention just three things we need to agree on, but on which we no longer agree, borders, reality, equality.

BORDERS. Nations need enforceable, and enforced, borders to maintain their cultural identity and their security as sovereign states. There is no right to immigrate. Correlatively, there is no obligation on the part of any state to allow immigration. The granting of asylum is not obligatory but supererogatory. Illegal immigration cannot be tolerated. What’s more, legal immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. For each nation has the right to look to its own interests first. More that that, a properly functioning government has the duty to look first to the interests of the nation of which it is the government.

America first is merely a special case of nation first; it does not imply that America ought to dominate other nations. So only those persons can be allowed into the USA who are likely to assimilate and accept our republican system of government and our culture. This implies that certain groups ought to be favored over others, English speakers, for example, over those who do not know our language, other things being equal. Ought we “welcome the stranger?” Yes, but not unconditionally: only if they satisfy the conditions I have specified and some others I do not have the time to specify. There must not be any blanket “Welcome the stranger.” Squishy Catholic bishops take note.

Immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, leading as it does to Balkanization, ‘no go’ zones, and endless civil contention. Europe and the U. K. are committing cultural suicide by failure to grasp the importance of this principle. Sharia-supporting Muslims must not be allowed to immigrate into the West, and in particular into America, the last hope of the West. If we fall, the West falls. The rest of the Anglosphere has pretty much abdicated. Sharia law is antithetical to our founding values and principles. Only those people from Muslim lands who renounce Sharia are admissible. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

But isn’t diversity good? Diversity of various types is of course good, but diversity as such is precisely not our strength, as foolish and/or deliberately destructive leftists mindlessly repeat. Full-spectrum diversity would be our undoing, and was in process of undoing us until Donald Trump came along. If any one thing is ‘our strength,’ it is unity, not diversity. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” To call a sane immigration policy that benefits the host country ‘xenophobic’ is a typically vicious and typically mendacious leftist smear. And the same goes for ‘Islamophobic’ used to dismiss what I wrote one paragraph up. A phobia is an irrational fear, by definition, but there is nothing irrational about fear of full-strength, Sharia-based Islam, which is not merely a religion, but is also an expansionist political ideology, one that poses an existential threat to us.

REALITY. A second thing we need to agree on, but no longer agree on, is that there is a real world out there independent of our thoughts and dreams, wishes and desires. No doubt there are social constructs, but nature herself in her abiotic and biotic strata are not social constructs. Money, a social construct, does not grow on trees, but leaves do. Foliage, tectonic plates, and animals, including human animals, are quite obviously not social constructs. The world cannot be social construction all the way down. And so you cannot change your sex. Once a biological male, always a biological male. It follows that it is morally outrageous to allow biological males to compete against women in sporting events. Metaphysical nonsense leads to moral nonsense. Nor can you change your race, as I argue rigorously, at Substack. You can change your political affiliation, and you should if you are a Democrat; but membership in a race is not a political form of belonging.

EQUALITY and EQUITY. The transmogrification of the former into the latter is a third bone of contention between us and our political enemies. An old lie of leftists is compressed into one of their more recent abuses of language: ‘equity.’ So-called ‘equity’ is woke-speak for equality of outcome or result. ‘Equity’ in this obfuscatory sense cannot occur and ought not be pursued. It cannot occur because people are not equal either as individuals or as groups. Leftists won’t face this fact, however, because they confuse the world as they would like it to be with the world as it is. The default setting of the leftist or ‘progressive’ is utopian. Utopia, however, is Nowheresville and he who pursues it is a Nowhere Man.

‘Equity’ ought not be pursued because its implementation is possible only by the violation of the liberty of the individual by a totalitarian state apparatus precisely unequal in power to those it would equalize. Paradoxically, the pursuit of equality of outcome presupposes an inequality of power as between the equalizers and the equalized, which is to say: equality of outcome cannot be achieved. The latter is a form of equality only if it is equal for all. But it cannot be equal for all for the reason given.

Again, people are not equal, by any empirical measure, either as individuals or as groups. That “all men are created equal,” as per the Declaration of Independence, is not to the point. Jefferson & Co. were obviously not making the manifestly false assertion that human beings are equal in point of empirically measurable attributes. As the word ‘created’ indicates, the Founders were maintaining that all human beings are equal in the eyes of God, the Creator. From a God’s eye point of view, all empirical difference vanish and we are equal as persons, as rights-possessors. And so each of us, regardless of race, sex, level of intellectual or physical prowess, etc., has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

CONCLUSION. Our political opponents are not mere opponents but enemies: they pose an existential threat to us. The source of that enmity and this threat is lack of common ground. We lack common ground as regards the three issues mentioned above, and for others as well. We are in dire straits and headed for full-on hot civil war. That is an outcome no sane person could want. How avoid it?

Political Violence: Some Underlying Issues and Questions, Part I

Opponents or Enemies? In response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday (9/10/25), numerous well-meaning individuals such as former president George W. Bush and current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have said that our opponents on the Left are not political enemies, but fellow citizens. Setting aside the question of how many of these ‘citizens’ are illegal aliens, I have serious reservations with respect to the conciliatory remarks of Bush, Johnson, et al. We should of course all calm down and not make things worse with incendiary words and gestures. But more important than reining in emotions is using our intellects to penetrate to the truth of the matter.

A strong case can be made that our political opponents on the Left are indeed enemies. This is because they pose an existential threat to us. An existential threat is not primarily one to our physical lives, but to our way of life which encompasses our beliefs, values, religious and non-religious traditions, in a word: our culture. To live a healthy life in political dhimmitude cuts against the American cultural grain, to put it mildly. “Give me liberty or give me death!” (Patrick Henry) “Better dead than red.” (1950s slogan) Better dead than under Sharia. (So say I.) An American in the normative sense values life, liberty, and property. Not just that, but at least that. And of course the liberty in question is not an untrammeled liberty unrestrained by duties, responsibilities, prudential considerations, and the like. The classical liberalism of the Founders is part of a broader conservatism. Or so say I. A normative American as I am using the term is one who subscribes to the basic positions articulated in the founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the amendments thereto, in particular, the Bill of Rights, which are better described as additions rather than as amendments to the great document. There is a lot to be said here, but brevity, the soul of wit, is also the soul of blog, as some wit lately observed.

Consider our rights. Where do they come from? Not from government. That is the essential point. Call it the negative thesis about the origin of rights. Tim Kaine, HRC’s running mate in 2016, believes otherwise:

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes,” he said. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia (sic) law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. They do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.” (Quoted here.)

Tim Kaine is my political enemy. There is nothing troubling about the statement that our rights do not derive from governments or the positive laws, the laws posited by legislatures. On the contrary, it would be troubling in excelsis were our rights subject to the whims of men. That way lies tyranny. Never forget, the people in government are like the rest of us, finite, fallible, and far from wholly virtuous; indeed many of them are far worse than many of us, both morally and intellectually.

We should also be clear that even if one were to hold that God is the source of natural rights, that would not commit one to theocracy, Islamic or otherwise. But I won’t waste any more words on the sheer stupidity of Kaine’s outburst. That would be the dialectical equivalent of beating up a cripple or rolling a drunk. It it hard to believe that this guy has a J. D. from Harvard.

Now suppose that Kaine and I both accepted the negative thesis, but differed on the question whether rights come from God or are simply given with (inscribed in) human nature. The question could be put like this: If one accepts that there are natural rights, must one also accept the existence of God as the source of those rights, or could one coherently and reasonably accept that there are natural rights and be an atheist, i.e., one who rejects the existence of God? People might reasonably debate this question while accepting the fundamental negative thesis about the origin of rights. The debaters would then be political opponents, as I am using the term, but not political enemies. If Kaine were merely my opponent in this debate he would not pose an existential threat, a threat to my way of life. As it is, however, he and others of his ilk are such a threat and are therefore my enemies.

Since they are my political enemies, I want to see them politically dead. That is, I want them to have no political power. That is not to say that I want them physically dead. But of course, if an enemy is physically dead, then he is also politically dead.

We now come to a vexing question. Suppose our enemies fail to defeat us politically within the existing constitutional framework as they manifestly did fail in 2024, and this despite all their dirty tricks, e.g. the Russia collusion hoax, etc. Most of our enemies sincerely believe that it is right, proper, noble, and for the ultimate benefit of humanity that they rule. Failing to defeat us within the existing constitutionally-based system, would they not feel justified in resorting to extra-political means to attain their ends? One such extra-political means is assassination.

We don’t yet know, but it is a good bet that Kirk’s assassin was not a lone crazy man but part of a well-orchestrated plot. Suppose that is the case, and that you sincerely believe that Trump is Hitler, MAGA members are maggots, and so on. Suppose further that you are a hard-core secularist who believes that there is only one world, this physical world, no God, no soul, no post-mortem rewards and punishments, none of that religious claptrap. Could you not see your way clear to embracing politics by assassination? Assassination would then be politics by other means. The conceptual distance between the political and the extra-political would then be lessened if not obliterated.

Bear in mind that Kirk was not assassinated because of his opinions, as some have said, but because his opinions have practical consequences, consequences that stand in the way of the Left’s agenda. The glorious end, heaven on earth, the immanentization of the eschaton, justifies any and all means to its realization. People who say that Kirk was assassinated for his opinions, views, beliefs are probably imagining that political discourse is a gentlemanly debate conducted according to the dialectical equivalent of the Queensberry Rules, or that there is this marketplace of ideas in which the better ideas win.

One more vexing question and then I’ll stop for today. Suppose the foregoing is essentially correct. What should we American conservatives do to defend ourselves.? Seek common ground with our enemies? There is no common ground. Give in to them? No way! Accept political dhimmitude? No way! Commit suicide? No. Allow them to put us to the sword? No. Divide the country into Red and Blue halves? That would weaken us vis-à-vis our geopolitical adversaries.

They want us, and we want them, politically dead. If they resort to extra-political means to achieve their end, must we not do the same to achieve ours?

I shudder at the thought.

The Presidential Power of Pardon: A Political-Theological Theme

According to Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.

The presidential power of pardon strikes me as an additional example of this secularization process whereby originally theological concepts are brought down to earth and acquire a political and social meaning. (Does Schmitt discuss the pardon power somewhere? He 'must.' Where?)

The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? (McVeigh, of course, was not pardoned, but executed.) It does so extend, if I understand the matter:

The power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the president in the Constitution. [. . .] The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are that pardons are limited to offenses against the United States (i.e., not civil or state cases) and that they cannot affect an impeachment process.

The theological roots of the pardon power seem obvious: what we have in the presidential case is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy. This is, however, at best a close analogy, not an identity. The theological problem of how God can be both just and merciful is not identical to the problem of how a head of state, a president, for example, can be both just and merciful when he grants a pardon. That should be obvious. If not, I will explain.

God is absolutely sovereign. In the divine but not the human case, sovereignty implies omnipotence. The absoluteness of divine sovereignty might be taken to imply that God's omnipotence is his ability/power to do anything at all, including what is logically impossible and morally impermissible. If so, divine power would not be limited in any way, and God would be sovereign not only over the natural order, which he obviously is on any account of omnipotence, but also over every order including the logical and moral orders.

Leaving logical order aside, consider the rule of law as it pertains to right and wrong, crime and punishment. The rule of law is not a particular law but a meta-principle pertaining to all laws. The rule of law requires that particular laws be applied equally, and that like cases be judged in a like manner. So if justice demands the death penalty in one case, then likewise in all relevantly similar cases. What room could there then be for an arbitrary (free) exercise of mercy in any given case? To get a fix on the problem, suppose Tom and Tim are morally indiscernible twins: they share every moral attribute. They are both loyal, and to the same degree. They are both courageous and to the same degree. And so on. But they are mafiosi hit men with no qualms about committing murder for money. God consigns Tom to hell for all eternity, but shows mercy to Tim. How could a good God do such a thing? Surely that is offensive to our human sense of justice.

Simply put, the theological problem is: How could a good God be both just and merciful? Justice and mercy are both divine attributes, but they appear to us to be logically incompatible. The theologians have proposed solutions. This is not the place to review them. For present purposes we assume that the problem is soluble in the divine case. In the human case, however, things look very different.

To make the question concrete, compare Bill Clinton's pardoning of Marc Rich with his pardoning of Patty Hearst. Many of us will consider the latter to be a justifiable, and perhaps even an admirable tempering of justice with mercy. (The poor girl, pun intended, was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, etc.) But few will fail to consider the former pardon anything other than a moral outrage. But why an outrage? (If you don't think the Rich pardon an outrage, choose one you think is: the illustrious Joe Biden has given us several to choose from.)

I am assuming that in the divine case, justice and mercy are indissolubly one in such a way as to render impossible any differentiation between justifiable and unjustifiable acts of divine mercy. On this assumption no divine pardon is or could be morally wrong. In the divine case, one could not claim that God was violating the moral law by any act of mercy. It is after all false that "no one is above the law"; God is above both the positive law and the moral law inasmuch as he is the source of both. He is the source of positive law inasmuch as he is the creator of the persons who posit the positive law. He is the source of the moral law inasmuch as he is absolutely sovereign and so cannot be subject to anything external to himself. There is a sense in which God is above the law. But no man is above the law.

Now we come to the problem. When a president pardons a convicted criminal is he not violating the rule of law and putting himself above the law? How can that be justified? Surely not by a secularization process whereby the theological unity of justice and mercy gets transferred from God who truly is the unity of justice and mercy to a mortal man, POTUS say, who is obviously not such a unity.

The point I am making is that the secularization of theological concepts must not be confused with the realization in the State of theological realities. Just as the theory of God is not the same as God, the theory of the state is not the same as the State. So if the concepts ingredient in the theory of God are secularized, which is to say, "transferred from theology to the theory of the state," as Schmitt says above, that is not to say that God is being denied and replaced by the State. It is logically consistent to maintain both of the following: (a) "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (Schmitt) and (b) God exists and is not the State.

The question for me, and not only for me, as to what Schmitt believed in the end about these matters remains open. The above is simply a preliminary exercise in understanding what Schmitt is ultimately driving at. He is undoubtedly one of the great political theorists of the 2oth century. His fateful entanglement with the NSDAP from May of 1933 on is no excuse not to study him in detail and in depth. You study Rawls and Nozick but ignore Schmitt? WTF is wrong with you?

But it would have been nice if in retrospect he had accepted and lived by my masthead motto: "Study everything, join nothing."

Why did Schmitt become a Nazi? Reinhard Mehring in his monumental (748 page!) Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Polity Press, 2014, pb 2022, German original 2009, tr. Daniel Steuer, pp. 282-284) lists 47 possible reasons/motives! I schmitt you not.

Joseph Sobran

Tony Flood asked me if I had read Joseph Sobran. I have. In fact, I have a couple of posts on him. Here's one from 6 October 2010. I've added an update. Comments enabled.

Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran is dead at the age of 64. Beginning as a paleocon, he ended up an anarchist, and apparently something of an anti-Semite. His 1985 Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow, however, contains a wealth of important ideas worth ruminating on. A couple of excerpts, emphasis added:

"The poor" are to liberalism roughly what "the proletariat" is to Communism–a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power. What matters, for practical liberals, is not that (for example) the black illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled since the dawn of the Great Society; it is that a huge new class of beneficiaries has been engendered–beneficiaries who vote, and who feel entitled to money that must be taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised. But such a proposal would now be called inhuman, which helps account for the gargantuan increase in the size and scope of federal spending. Corrupt politicians make headlines; but no honest politician dares to refer to the problem of corrupt voters, who use the state as an instrument of gain.

[. . .]

The enemy, for socialism, is any permanent authority, whether it is a long-standing church or a holy scripture, whose tendency is to put a brake on political power. In fact power and authority are often confused nowadays: the thoroughly politicized man who seeks power can only experience and interpret authority as a rival form of power, because it impedes his ambition for a thoroughly politicized society. But authority is more nearly the opposite of power. It offers a standard of truth or morality that is indifferent and therefore often opposed to current desires and forces, standing in judgment over them. If God has revealed Himself to man, the progressive agenda may find itself seriously inconvenienced.

For this reason, religion is a source of deep anxiety to the liberal. He harps on its historical sins: Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, wars. He never notices that the crimes of atheist regimes, in less than a century, have dwarfed those of all organized religions in recorded history. He sees Christianity's sporadic persecutions as being of its essence; he regards Communism's unbroken persecution as incidental to its potential for good. He warns of the "danger" posed by American fundamentalists (one of the most gentle and law-abiding segments of the population) and is unchastened by the results of "peace" in Vietnam and Cambodia.

2025 comments:

1) Excellent point about power and authority and their difference, one well illustrated by the "thoroughly politicized" men and women who waged lawfare against Donald Trump (who got the last laugh at his astonishingly good and hugely entertaining 100 minute quasi-SOTU speech). It was delightful to watch the merely performative performance of the tribal fem-Dems in their cute red Barbie coats waving their paddles around.

2) Might does not make right. My ability to put a .223 round through your head does not morally justify my doing so. I hope we all agree on that. But there remains the question, the central question of political philosophy: whence the authority of the State? What gives the State apparatus, composed as it is of defective specimens just like the rest of us, with many rogues among them, the right to rule over us? I hope we agree that said apparatus must be coercive to do its job. In other words, the State is coercive by its very nature. If so, how can its coercion be morally justified? Not theocratically, although Sobran appears to be headed in that direction, though I am not sure, not having read enough of his work. Throne-and-altar conservatism is a thing of the past and ought to remain so. Ask yourself: whose throne? Which altar?

3) I agree with the italicized sentence. "It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised."

4) Sobran should use 'leftist,' not 'liberal.' After all, isn't J. S. Mill whom he cites a classical liberal?

5) Sobran is right to point out that religion is a "source of deep anxiety" to leftists, not to mention a source of their animosity and determination to use the awesome power of the State against religion. He is also right to excoriate them for remaining silent about the crimes of atheist regimes. (Cf. The Black Book of Communism) While the horrific deeds of institutionalized religion must be honestly acknowledged — Wasn't John Calvin party to the judicial/ecclesiastical murder of Michael Servetus? — the good that religion has done to enhance human flourishing outweighs the bad.

You should rejoice that Trump has taken a resolute stand for religious liberty.

Is Trump’s Order to End DEI Conservative?

From the Independent Institute:

President Trump signed a flurry of executive orders last week, leaving media pundits breathless in their efforts to cover it all. One of the most controversial orders was titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

Yes, conservatives applauded loudly the government’s suspension of its commitment to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)—but the order wasn’t conservative. The history of colorblind meritocracy is a classical liberal one that originated from neither the Left nor Right.

I beg to differ. Commitment to race-neutral meritocracy is indeed classically liberal, but classical liberalism is an essential ingredient in American conservatism. This is more than a terminological quibble: it is a disagreement over the nature of American conservatism.

For many of us who reject leftism, and embrace a version of conservatism, there remains a choice between what I call American conservatism, which accepts key tenets of classical liberalism, and a more robust conservatism. This more robust conservatism inclines toward the reactionary and anti-liberal. The difference emerges in an essay by Bishop Robert Barron entitled One Cheer for George Will's The Conservative Sensibility. The bolded passages below throw the difference into relief.

And so it was with great interest that I turned to Will’s latest offering, a massive volume called The Conservative Sensibility, a book that both in size and scope certainly qualifies as the author’s opus magnum. Will’s central argument is crucially important. The American experiment in democracy rests, he says, upon the epistemological [sic] conviction that there are political rights, grounded in a relatively stable human nature, that precede the actions and decisions of government. These rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not the gifts of the state; rather, the state exists to guarantee them, or to use the word that Will considers the most important in the entire prologue to the Declaration of Independence, to “secure” them. Thus is government properly and severely limited and tyranny kept, at least in principle, at bay. In accord with both Hobbes and Locke, Will holds that the purpose of the government finally is to provide an arena for the fullest possible expression of individual freedom. [. . .]

With much of this I found myself in profound agreement. It is indeed a pivotal feature of Catholic social teaching that an objective human nature exists and that the rights associated with it are inherent and not artificial constructs of the culture or the state. Accordingly, it is certainly good that government’s tendency toward imperial expansion be constrained. But as George Will’s presentation unfolded, I found myself far less sympathetic with his vision. What becomes clear is that Will shares, with Hobbes and Locke and their disciple Thomas Jefferson, a morally minimalistic understanding of the arena of freedom that government exists to protect. All three of those modern political theorists denied that we can know with certitude the true nature of human happiness or the proper goal of the moral life—and hence they left the determination of those matters up to the individual. Jefferson expressed this famously as the right to pursue happiness as one sees fit. The government’s role, on this interpretation, is to assure the least conflict among the myriad individuals seeking their particular version of fulfillment. The only moral bedrock in this scenario is the life and freedom of each actor.

Catholic social teaching has long been suspicious of just this sort of morally minimalist individualism. Central to the Church’s thinking on politics is the conviction that ethical principles, available to the searching intellect of any person of good will, ought to govern the moves [sic] of individuals within the society, and moreover, that the nation as a whole ought to be informed by a clear sense of the common good—that is to say, some shared social value that goes beyond simply what individuals might seek for themselves. Pace Will, the government itself plays a role in the application of this moral framework precisely in the measure that law has both a protective and directive function. It both holds off threats to human flourishing and, since it is, to a degree, a teacher of what the society morally approves and disapproves, also actively guides the desires of citizens.

I applaud the idea that the law have both a protective and a directive function. But to what should the law direct us?

On a purely procedural liberalism, "the purpose of the government finally is to provide an arena for the fullest possible expression of individual freedom. " This won't do, obviously. If people are allowed the fullest possible expression of individual freedom, then anything goes: looting, arson, bestiality, paedophilia, voter fraud, lying under oath, destruction of public and private property, etc. Liberty is a high value but not when it becomes license. Indisputably, ethical principles ought to govern the behavior of individuals. But which principles exactly? Therein lies the rub. We will presumably agree that there must be some, but this agreement gets us nowhere unless we can specify the principles.

If we knew "with certitude the true nature of human happiness or the proper goal of the moral life" then we could derive the principles. Now there are those who are subjectively certain about the nature of happiness and the goal of life. But this merely subjective certainty is worth little or nothing given that different people and groups are 'certain' about different things. Subjective certainty is no guarantee of objective certainty, which is what knowledge requires. This is especially so if the putative knowledge will be used to justify ethical prescriptions and proscriptions that will be imposed upon people by law.

For example, there are atheists and there are theists in almost every society. No atheist could possibly believe that the purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy with him in the next. From this Catechism answer one can derive very specific ethical prescriptions and proscriptions, some of which will be rejected by atheists as a violation of their liberty. Now if one could KNOW that the Catechism answer is true, then those specific ethical principles would be objectively grounded in a manner that would justify imposing them on all members of a society for their own good whether they like it or not.

But is it known, as opposed to reasonably believed, that there is a God, etc.? Most atheists would deny that the proposition in question is even reasonably believed. Bishop Barron's Catholicism is to their minds just so much medieval superstition. Suppose, however, that the good bishop's worldview is simply true. That does us no good unless we can know that it is true. Suppose some know (with objective certainty) that it is true. That also does us no good, politically speaking, unless a large majority in a society can agree that we know that it is true.

So while it cannot be denied that the law must have some directive, as opposed to merely protective, function, the question remains as to what precisely it ought to direct us to. The directions cannot come from any religion, but neither can they come from any ersatz religion such as leftism. No theocracy, but also no 'leftocracy'! Separation of church and state, but also separation of leftism and state.

This leaves us with the problem of finding the via media between a purely procedural liberalism and the tyrannical imposition of prescriptions and proscriptions that derive from some dogmatically held, but strictly unknowable, set of metaphysical assumptions about man and world. It is a dilemma inasmuch as both options are unacceptable.

I'll end by noting that the main threats to our liberty at the present time do not emanate from a Roman Catholicism that has become a shell of its former self bereft of the cultural relevance it enjoyed for millennia until losing it in the mid-1960s; they proceed from leftism and Islam, and the Unholy Alliance of the two.

And so while the dilemma lately noted remains in force, a partial solution must take the form of retaining elements of the Judeo-Christian worldview, the Ten Commandments chiefly, and by a restoration of the values of the American founding. Practically, this will require vigorous opposition to the parties of the unholy alliance.

Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly on FAFO

Here.

Megyn Kelly, being relatively young, may be forgiven for referring to Elliot Ness as Elliot Nest (ouch!), but Steve Bannon, whose superannuation shows, and who ought to know better, either missed her mistake or let it pass, being the gentleman that he is.

In all other particulars, however, the short video is delightfully on target.

As for the man himself, what Kennedy said about Nixon could also be said about Trump: "The man has no class."

But what is more important, both domestically and internationally, class or the ability to kick ass?* We conservative quill-drivers do some good, I suppose, but none of us are positioned to bring about decisive, world-shaking, change. While we sit at our ink wells and drive our quills, great men stand at the ramparts and drive history.

But we the people must keep an eye on them. It is not that power corrupts; it does not. It is that we who are all morally defective and susceptible to the blandishments of power, abuse it. Power itself, however, is good. If it were not, why would all-power count among the omni-attributes of deity?

The Founders understood how easily fallen natures are suborned by the possession of power. So they designed a constitution-based republic with built-in safeguards to check and balance the executive's power lest it issue in tyranny.

Long live the Republic, the republic our political enemies aim to tear down. They will not succeed. The right man came along at the right time, whether or not by divine design.

But one thing troubles me. Government by executive orders cannot be what the Founders had in mind. Given our current predicament, however, such orders are a necessary evil. If Congress did its job, they would not be necessary.

An executive order is an edict. 'Edict' and 'dictator' share the PIE root, deik-. And so, true to his word, Donald Trump was a dictator on Day One, reversing the pernicious edicts of his corrupt predecessor, Joseph Biden who on his first day, playing the dictator, viciously and stupidly reversed Trump's wise 2017 border policies. Biden ought to have been impeached and removed from office on the grounds of dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect. But so divided have we become, that Biden's removal could not be brought about.

And so here we are. If in the unlikely event that the Dems take back the White House in 2028, the cycle of reversing and promulgating edicts will begin again. A suboptimal outcome, that.

One more thing. We need an opposition party as part of the system of checks and balances. The Dems would do just fine if they could be restored to sanity, the Camelot sanity of the early 'sixties, say. But that is a big 'if.' Kamalot would be a disaster. If the Dems persist in their subversive ways, however, serious thought will have to be given to the question whether their party should be outlawed.

I'm serious. The CPUSA was never outlawed, as far as I know.** There was no need to, because of their relative lack of political clout. Outlawing them would only have given them attention and brought them supporters. But the transmogrification over the last decades of the Dems into a hard-Left subversive outfit with real chances of winning puts a different complexion on the matter.

Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism. But toleration has limits: it negates itself when extended unto political suicide.

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*To put it politely and allusively, 'kick donkey.'

**I'm not an historian, so correct me if I am wrong or omitting pertinent facts.