Social and Political Philosophy – Page 11

Should Felons Have the Right to Vote?

Bernie Sanders thinks that felons should have the right to vote even while incarcerated. That is a foolish and irresponsible view.

1) Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot productively order their own lives. Why then should they have any say in the ordering of society? Why should the thoughtful vote of a decent, law-abiding citizen be canceled out by the vote of an armed robber, a rapist, a drug dealer, a terrorist, or any other miscreant? That could make sense only to someone who substituted feeling for thought.

Criminals have no interest in the common good; their concern is solely with their own gratification. They do not, as a group, contribute to society; they are, as a group, a drag on society. So I ask again: why should they be allowed to vote? And how many of them would even want to vote if they weren't given incentives by leftist activists?

I concede the following. Some 'felons' have been wrongly convicted. Some felonies should be misdemeanors. There are different classes of felonies. Some felons reform themselves and become productive members of society. But none of these concessions affects the main point, namely, that it is foolish and irresponsible to maintain that felons as a group should have the right to vote even while incarcerated.

2) Sanders:

. . . the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period. As American citizens all of us are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.

By this logic, felons have the right to keep and bear arms even while incarcerated. After all, Second Amendment rights are "enshrined in our Bill of Rights." And they are "inalienable and universal." But of course, there are excellent reasons to deny felons the right to buy and own guns, and in particular the 'right' to pack heat while in prison! You would have to be insane to to think that an armed robber's right, qua citizen, to keep and bear arms is in no way affected by his history of armed robbery. Rights can be lost, limited, and forfeited. Rights cannot be coherently thought of as absolute and unexceptionable.

The right to free speech does not give a person the right to say absolutely anything in any context. There is no right to freedom of religion if your 'religion' involves human sacrifice. The right to freedom of assembly is limited by property rights. You have no right to assemble on my property without my permission. There is no right to block public thoroughfares or destroy public property. Individual property rights are limited by legitimate eminent domain considerations. Eminent domain laws have been misused, but that is no argument against them in principle.

But doesn't capital punishment violate the right to life? Capital punishment does not involve a violation of a citizen's right to life: the murderer or anyone who commits a capital crime forfeits his right to life by committing a capital crime. If I use deadly force against you in a self-defense situation in which you threaten my life, and in so doing cause your death, I have done something both morally and legally permissible. It follows that I haven't violated your right to life. Rights violations are by definition impermissible. By your action, you have forfeited your right to life.

Sanders tells us that the right to vote is a "universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older." But if it were truly universal, then children should allowed to vote. Why the restriction to 18 years and older? Nancy Pelosi recently maintained that the voting age should be lowered to 16 so as to involve young people in politics. But why 16 and not 14? Think of how many more young people would be involved in politics if the voting age were reduced to 10. The stupidity of this is obvious and the motive behind it is transparent.

3) Sanders on voter suppression:

Indeed, our present-day crisis of mass incarceration has become a tool of voter suppression. Today, over 4.5 million Americans — disproportionately people of color — have lost their right to vote because they have served time in jail or prison for a felony conviction.It goes without saying that someone who commits a serious crime must pay his or her debt to society. But punishment for a crime, or keeping dangerous people behind bars, does not cause people to lose their rights to citizenship. It should not cause them to lose their right to vote.

It is true that a person who is justly incarcerated does not cease to be a citizen. But it hardly follows that he retains every right of a citizen. To underscore the obvious, the prisoner is not free to come and go as he pleases. He is not immune to searches and seizures. Etc. Limitation and suspension of rights is part of the punishment.

And then we have the obfuscatory leftist talk of 'voter suppression' and 'mass incarceration.' One does not suppress the vote of illegal aliens; they have no right to vote in the first place. Similarly, one does not suppress the vote of felons; they have no right to vote.

Sanders apparently thinks that 'people of color' are the victims of voter suppression because they are disproportionately represented among the prison population. The suggestion is that they are incarcerated to keep them from voting. Nonsense. They are disproportionately incarcerated because they are disproportionately involved in criminal behavior.

The Central Dividing Line in American Politics

The central dividing line, according to Samuel Huntington, is between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The former comes in two unpalatable flavors, neo-conservatism and cultural Marxism.

The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed by force on peoples riven by tribal hatreds who do not share our values and are depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment. Besides, our moral stock is at an all-time low. Given our decadence and immorality how can we presume to teach Muslims how to live?

The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

Along comes Trump. Whatever you think of the man and his ostentation, self-absorption, slovenly speech, occasional feel-ups of members of the distaff contingent, and all the rest, he is a powerful vehicle of a necessary correction away from both forms of cosmopolitanism/globalism toward a saner view, a nationalist view. And, contrary to leftist slanders, there is nothing white or white supremacist about it.

Donald J. Trump is the somewhat unlikely vehicle of a necessary correction. Without course correction the cliff is up ahead to be approached either by Donkey Express (Hillary and her ilk) or more slowly but just as surely by Elephant (Jeb! and colleagues). We should be grateful to Trump for having destroyed both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

So how does the Left respond? In their usual vile and thoughtless way by the hurling of such epithets as sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, fascist . . . you know the litany. According to Chris Mathews of MSNBC, Trump's inaugural speech was "Hitlerian."

The alacrity with which these leftist bums reach for the Hitler comparison shows the poverty of their 'thought.'

What’s Wrong with Economic Inequality?

We are naturally unequal with respect to empirical attributes, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. Is this inequality evil? Why should it be? Is economic inequality as such morally wrong? I have a right to what I have acquired by my honest hard work, deferral of gratification, and practice of the ancient virtues. It is therefore to be expected that I will end up with a higher net worth than that of people who lack my abilities and virtues. It seems to follow that there is nothing morally wrong with economic inequality as such.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I "mix my labour" (Locke) with the soil and grow tomatoes, I have caused new food to come into existence; I haven't taken from an existing stock of tomatoes with the result that others must get fewer. If my lazy neighbor demands some of my tomatoes, I will tell him to go to hell; but if he asks me in a nice way, then I will give him some. In this way, he benefits from my labor without doing anything. Some of my tomatoes 'trickle down' to him. To mix some metaphors, a rising tide lifts all boats. Lefties hate this conservative boilerplate which is why I repeat it. It's true and it works. When was the last time a poor man gave anyone a job? When was the last time a poor man gave anyone a loan? When was the last time a poor man made a contribution to a charity? Who pays taxes?

I deserve what I acquire by the virtuous exercise of my abilities. But do I deserve my abilities? No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to things I don't deserve. Nature gave me binocular vision but only monaural hearing. Do I deserve my two good eyes? No, but I have a right to them. Therefore, I am under no moral obligation to give one of my eyes to a sightless person. (If memory serves, R. Nozick makes a similar point in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)

At this point someone might object that it is just not fair that some of us are better placed and better endowed than others, and that therefore it is a legitimate function of government to redistribute wealth to offset the resultant economic inequality. But never forget that government is coercive by its very nature and run by people who are intellectually and morally no better, and often worse, than the rest of us. Their power corrupts them and you can be sure they will do all they can to preserve their power, pelf, and privileges all the while professing to be democrats and egalitarians.

The levellers are not on the same level as us, and they are often 'not on the level.' You catch my drift, no doubt.

The equalizers have vastly unequal power compared to us. So there is a bit of a paradox here, to put it mildly. One would have to be quite the utopian to imagine that the socialist-communist Leviathan will "wither away" in the fullness of time, as Lenin and Lennon 'imagined.'

And surely it is the silly liberal who imagines that we are the government or that the government is us. That is mendacity that approximates unto the Orwellian.

The evil of massive, omni-intrusive government is far worse than economic equality is good. Besides, lack of money is rooted in lack of virtue, and government cannot teach people to be virtuous. If Bill Gates' billions were stripped from him and given to the the bums of San Francisco, in ten year's time Gates would be back on top and the bums would be back in the gutters.

Perhaps we can say that economic inequality, though axiologically suboptimal, is nonetheless not morally evil given the way the world actually works with people having the sorts of incentives that they actually have, etc. There is nothing wrong with economic inequality as long as every citizen has the bare minimum. But illegal aliens have no right to any government handouts.

Capitalism, Competition, and Cooperation

One reason capitalism is superior to socialism is because competition is good and breeds excellence. It also fits with human nature. People are justifiably concerned with their own well-being first of all and will strive mightily to enhance it. They are much less motivated to work for 'the common good,' especially if what that is is decided by an omni-intrusive state apparatus vastly unequal in power to the people, an apparatus that violates their liberty and removes their incentives to work.

But my main point is that competition is good.

Liberals tend to oppose cooperation to competition, and vice versa, as if they excluded each other. "We need more cooperation and less competition." One frequently hears that from liberals. But competition is a form of cooperation. As such, it cannot be opposed to cooperation. One cannot oppose a species to its genus.

Consider competitive games and sports. The chess player aims to beat his opponent, and he expects his opponent to share this aim: No serious player enjoys beating someone who is not doing his best to beat him. But the competition is predicated upon cooperation and is impossible without it. There are the rules of the game and the various protocols governing behavior at the board. These are agreed upon and respected by the players and they form the cooperative context in which the competition unfolds. We must work together (co-operate) for one of us to emerge the victor. And in this competitive cooperation both of us are benefited.

Is there any competitive game or sport for which this does not hold? At the Boston Marathon in 1980, a meshuggeneh lady by the name of Rosie Ruiz jumped into the race ahead of the female leaders and before the finish line. She seemed to many to have won the race in the female category. But she was soon disqualified. She wasn't competing because she wasn't cooperating. Cooperation is a necessary condition of competition.

In the business world, competition is fierce indeed. But even here it presupposes cooperation. Fed Ex aims to cut into UPS' business – but not by assassinating their drivers. If Fed Ex did this, it would be out of business. It would lose favor with the public, and the police and regulatory agencies would be on its case. The refusal to cooperate would make it uncompetitive. 'Cut throat' competition does not pay in the long run and makes the 'cut throat' uncompetitive.

If you and I are competing for the same job, are we cooperating with each other? Yes, in the sense that our behavior is rule-governed. We agree to accept the rules and we work together so that the better of us gets the appointment. The prosecution and the defense, though in opposition to each other, must cooperate if the trial is to proceed. And similarly in other cases.

Competition, then, contrary to liberal dogma, is not opposed to cooperation. Moreover, competition is good in that it breeds excellence, a point unappreciated, or insufficiently appreciated, by liberals. This marvellous technology we bloggers use every day — how do our liberal friends think it arose? Do they have any idea why it is so inexpensive? Competition!

Not only does competition make you better than you would have been without it, it humbles you. It puts you in your place. It assigns you your rightful position in life's hierarchy. And life is hierarchical. The levellers may not like it but hierarchies have a way of reestablishing themselves.

A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt. Excerpt:

Political existentialism?

Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from Schmitt’s point of view a fact of human psychology. We are naturally hostile not only to strangers, but to others. In this regard, his position is close to Thomas Hobbes. [Walter] Benjamin subverts this idea by adding a perspective of compassion: We may be hostile to strangers, but most of us are also strangers, aliens, immigrants, or refugees. We live in times of global migration, and nation states have lost their importance for the definition of political identity. But Schmitt would counter that any call for an inclusion of the “tradition of the oppressed” never brought us closer to a humanitarian turn in history. Instead, Marxist, anarchist, or liberal progress thinkers have several traits in common: they dream of a better future, but by doing so they instrumentalize the present. In reality, they attempt to overcome the political dimension, because for them the struggle for political power is dirty, and fundamentally, they want to abolish political power altogether. But politics with utopian aims often culminates in the creation of a Leviathan – an uncontrollable and powerful sovereign entity that forces us to abandon our humanity in exchange for the membership in a system that tends to become totalitarian.

That's a good insight on the part of Schmitt. Anarchists and 'progressives' try to "instrumentalize the present," that is, to make of it a means to achieve a utopian state (condition) that will justify the violent and by bourgeois standards immoral means necessary in the present to reach the political eschaton in which the political as such will be aufgehoben. But the quest for 'pie in the future' reliably results in the creation of a totalizing monster state complete with gulag and Vernichtungslager in which our humanity is extinguished.

Carl Schmitt is eerily relevant at the present moment in American politics. And the unlikely Donald J. Trump has unwittingly made political philosophy come alive like never before. Read this:

The sovereign and the state of emergency

In his book “Political Theology” (1922), Schmitt famously declares that the sovereign is he who determines the state of emergency, and thus has the political power to act outside the boundaries of the law in times of crisis. With this definition of the sovereign, Schmitt distinguishes between the rule of the law, and the rule of people. Should we allow society to be ruled only by a system of by laws, which means that the actions of rulers also have to be law-abiding? Or should we accept that we need people to be in control of the system, who can at times override or disable the law in order to deal with an emergency, or with a situation for which the law has no provision? According to Schmitt, the essence of political power is the ability to suspend normal law and assume special powers, just like the ancient dictators did. In his definition, the exception defines the limit, and this boundary constitutes what politics is. The answer to “Who decides the exception?” is the precondition of the law being obligatory and being, in fact, obeyed. Even proto-liberals such as John Locke, admitted that the executive must be permitted the power to suspend the laws if necessary for the good of society. The conflict between executive and legislative branches of the government plays itself out in US constitutional law in the different interpretations of the power of the President, or in cases where the President overrides or evades congressional authority.

I am not suggesting that President Trump, in declaring a national emergency anent the southern border, is operating outside the law. But some whom I respect are claiming just that. I am simply drawing attention to Schmitt's relevance to the question.

We are living in exciting times, philosophical times! If I were a young man I would be worried, but I am not, and "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk."

Addendum. Heather MacDonald needs to read Schmitt. Here is how her A Threat to the Constitutional Order ends:

For centuries, Western political theory has struggled with the problem of how to free individuals from the yoke of capricious power. Humanity’s greatest minds conceived of a government constrained by neutral principles. The ground rules in a constitutional polity are set in advance; they cannot be gamed to give one side of a political struggle an unfair and possibly insuperable advantage. The United States does need a wall on its southern border, accompanied by a radical revision of the legal-immigration system to prioritize skills, language, and assimilability. But if we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump’s emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world. The Supreme Court, when the inevitable legal challenges reach it, should strike Trump’s declaration down.

Heather Mac is telling us that the ground rules cannot be gamed to give one side an advantage. Well, if she means that they ought not be gamed, then she is right. But they are gamed, and so they can be. If SCOTUS is dominated by leftists who think of the Constitution as a 'living document,' then their rulings will constitute serious 'gaming' in the form of legislating from the bench. How is that for a removal of constitutional boundaries between branches of government? Besides, the law has to be enforced to count as law in any serious sense. If the Congress does not provide the funding necessary for proper enforcement of the immigration laws, then that too is a serious 'gaming' of the system. If the Left does not respect the rule of law, then why is the chief executive not justified in declaring a national emergency?

It is all very well to speak of "the rule of law not of men," but when Congress refuses to uphold the rule of law then we may have a Schmittian state of exception wherein the chief executive may and perhaps must override the Congress. I say "may have" because it is not clear to me that Trump's declaration of a state of emergency is illegal or extralegal.

Populism and Comity

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be comity without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. This is why unrestricted and unregulated immigration of any and all, no matter what their beliefs and values, can be expected to lead to an increases in social and political disorder. But what is comity?

The Laudator Temporis Acti quotes (HT: Bill Keezer) Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970), The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), page number unknown:

Finally, there is a subtler, more intangible, but vital kind of moral consensus that I would call comity. Comity exists in a society to the degree that those enlisted in its contending interests have a basic minimal regard for each other: one party or interest seeks the defeat of an opposing interest on matters of policy, but at the same time seeks to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme and gratuitous humiliations beyond the substance of the gains that are being sought. The basic humanity of the opposition is not forgotten; civility is not abandoned; the sense that a community life must be carried on after the acerbic issues of the moment have been fought over and won is seldom very far out of mind; an awareness that the opposition will someday be the government is always present.

The present political climate is not one of comity but one of contention and cold war, one that threatens to become 'hot.' Although war is irrational and often pointlessly destructive, there is a logic to it. How can one tolerate and show "a basic minimal regard" for people who represent an existential threat, where such a threat is not primarily to one's life, but to one's way of life and the liberties without which life is not worth living, religious liberty for example, not to mention the liberty to speak one's mind without fear and the rest of the rights and freedoms enshrined in the first ten amendments to the U. S. Constitution?

Patriotism and Nationalism: Dispelling Some Confusions

Robert F. Gorman:

St. John Paul II, addressing the themes of nation, nationality, and patriotism, stated: “It seems that nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities. In this regard, Catholic social doctrine speaks of ‘natural’ societies, indicating that both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension.” Contrasting patriotism to nationalism, he noted that the former “is a love for one’s native land that accords rights to all other nations equal to those claimed for one’s own. Patriotism, in other words, leads to a properly ordered social love.” Nationalism, on the other hand, privileges one’s own country and thus can be a disordered and unhealthy form of idolatry.

There is a sense in which nationalism privileges one's own country, but it is a perfectly innocuous privileging. That one's country comes first is as sound an idea as that one's family comes first: each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families. If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare. If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

The details are disputable, but not the general principle. The general principle is that we are justified in looking to our own first.

The main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries. That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned. I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief. But such efforts are supererogatory.

Can nationalism "be a disordered and unhealthy form of idolatry"? As opposed to what? An ordinate and healthy form of idolatry? Idolatry is bad as such. And I am sure the author would agree, and that if he had been more careful he wouldn't have written such a bad sentence.

Why should nationalism lead to idolatry? Does putting one's family first over other human groups lead to the idolatry of one's own family? No.

"America first!" is a special case of 'Country first!" But there is nothing idolatrous about the former or the latter. Every country or nation is justified in preferring its interest over those of other countries. The reference class is countries, not everything. An enlightened nationalism does not place country over God, thereby making an idol of country.

Note the order of the words in pro deo et patria.

The opposite of nationalism is globalism or internationalism whose main inspiration in the last couple of centuries has been godless communism which better earns the epithet 'idolatrous.'

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purpose of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. The Democrats, however, are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat. The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. And they are becoming less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one, has recently located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. So the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.

I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property.

Anti-Life. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They wrongly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. To make matters worse, they violate the beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of tax-payer funding for Planned Parenthood which is an abortion provider.

Anti-Liberty. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and gun rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.' And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.

Anti-Property. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.

But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, government is not us, as some idiots such as Thom Hartman say. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian? Both are Pelosi-stupid, which is the ne plus ultra of stupidity.

Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

On Voting, Discrimination, and My Type of Conservatism

My brand of conservatism includes an admixture of classical liberalism. Thus my conservatism is neither of the 'throne and altar' nor of the 'alternative right' variety. But I am open to challenge from intelligent and good-natured critics to my right. Among the intelligent and civil alt-right critics I include Jacques who writes:

In your recent post on abortion, you quote yourself saying there is "no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting". I think that's too strong. I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by "defensible". But there are certainly some seemingly good reasons for that kind of discrimination.

1) Back in the day, almost all of the people paying taxes and working outside the home and fighting in wars were men. So it wasn't arbitrary or unfair, arguably, that only men were granted the right to have a say in matters of public policy. If you are going to be conscripted to fight and possibly die in a war, but your wife isn't, maybe it's reasonable that you play a role in deciding whether to go to war and she doesn't.

More generally, it seems like the natural order in human life is that men are the leaders and women are the followers. Obviously that's a very rough approximation of how things naturally work. But isn't it at least a rough approximation? Most women don't want to lead their families. They want to find a man who is a good leader and submit to his authority. When it comes to public affairs, men have always been the ones who were on the whole the most capable and motivated. Women on the whole have always been more capable and motivated with respect to personal, domestic and small-scale communal life. Again, I realize there are many individual exceptions and complications and qualifications; but isn't this basically how things have always worked, and doesn't it seem likely that these patterns are rooted in human nature? If this is even a rough approximation of the natural order, we have a second reason for allowing only (some) men to vote. And, of course, everyone accepts that rough approximations can be an adequate basis for social order. There are some children who are better equipped to participate in politics or drive a car than some adults, but those are rare exceptions, so it's reasonable to deny voting rights to children. (Mainly because we need general rules and social norms, and we don't have the time or resources to evaluate every single case in great depth.)

The Issue

The issue is whether every adult citizen who satisfies certain minimal requirements, e.g., not being a felon, should be allowed to vote regardless of race, sex, religion, property ownership, etc. I incline to a classically liberal view. Nota bene: classically liberal, not leftist. I'm for 'universal' suffrage. But of course the suffrage cannot be strictly universal. Thus I deny that children should have a right to vote (say, via proxy votes given to their parents). If you think children should have the right to vote, then why not pre-natal children? They too live within our borders and are affected, often drastically, by social policies. And, pace the benighted Jesse Jackson, I deny that felons should be allowed to vote. Felons have shown by their destructive behavior that they cannot order their own lives; why then should they be given any say in how society should be ordered?

What about cats and dogs? They have interests and needs. They are affected by public policies. But that does not ground a right to vote via proxies. (The idea would be that if Tom has two cats, a dog, and a baby daughter, then he gets five, count 'em five, votes, one for humself and four proxies.) And of course I am opposed to lowering the voting age, as some cynical Democrats want to do, so that under-18 teenagers can vote. And this despite the fact that some 14-year-olds are better equipped to vote that some 40-year-olds. The law cannot cater to exceptional cases.

Skin-in-the-Game

Jacques is mounting what I will call a 'skin-in-the-game' argument. I am sympathetic to it.

Those who do not face conscription have no 'skin in the game' with respect to fighting in wars and possibly coming home dead or injured. So why should those who do not face conscription have any say in the matter? Those who own no real property have no skin in the game when it comes to being liable for taxes on real estate. So why should they have a say on what tax rates should be? Some 45% of Americans pay no individual federal income tax. Why should they have a say in the determination of federal income tax rates?

Why should college students in Berkeley, California or Madison, Wisconsin be allowed to vote on local matters given that they will be there for only four years and thus lack a long-term stake in those communities, pay no taxes to speak of, and lack the life experience to make wise decisions?

Jacques continues:

(2) All historical experience suggests that blacks and whites behave very differently when it comes to voting. Blacks vote as a tribal block. They vote for the person they think will benefit blacks. Again, there are exceptions, but this is true as a rough approximation. Whites may have done this to some extent in the past, but now almost none of them do. Huge numbers of whites will knowingly vote for policies that benefit non-whites at the expense of whites. Whites generally seem to have a much deeper interest in principles and justice. They are highly individualistic and low in tribalism compared to blacks. Does it really make sense to extend equal voting rights to groups that have such different and incompatible understandings of the political process? Arguably, a healthy democracy requires a very broad basic agreement on principles and aims, a shared culture and historical understanding, etc. But then it would be reasonable to think that blacks should not vote in white societies. (Maybe they should have their own societies where they can vote and whites can't.)

The Tribalism Question

I agree that blacks as a group are more tribal than whites as a group at the present time. Their political behavior is driven by their self-identification as blacks. This is a fact, but is it the nature of blacks to be tribal? Or could blacks eventually become less tribal, and perhaps as anti-tribal and individualistic as whites? It cannot be denied that black tribalism is largely a response to various contingent circumstances such as their ancestors having been brought to North America as slaves, and their being a minority. Minority status is surely a driver of tribal identification among all racial, ethnic, and social groups. As the contingent circumstances change, one can reasonably expect blacks to become less tribal.

Also to consider is the fact that there is plenty of tribalism among whites as well, for example, white females, white law professors and trial lawyers who vote as a bloc, white union members who vote as their union bosses tell them, and so on.

In an ideal democracy only some people would be allowed to vote. But there is no practical way to determine all and only those who should be allowed to vote beyond the minimal requirements of citizenship, adulthood, etc. There is no going back, obviously: the franchise cannot be removed from blacks and females, for example. And in any case there are plenty of blacks and females who are more qualified to cast an intelligent, well-informed, and wise vote than many whites and males.

So I would say that justice demands universal suffrage in the qualified sense I explained above. I stick to my classically liberal line that "there is no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting."

Habermas on the Judeo-Christian Origin of Equal Rights

Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. (Jürgen Habermas – "Time of Transitions", Polity Press, 2006, pp. 150-151, translation of an interview from 1999).

Source

Addendum (10/18)

Kai Frederik Lorentzen usefully contributes the following contextualization of the above Habermas quotation:

It strikes me as strange to see – he of all people! – Jürgen Habermas presented on your blog as a defender of the West's Judeo-Christian roots. Not that he didn't say that in 1999, but the utterance is not representative for his thinking. Habermas is not only an elitist proponent of a quick EU unification (—> United States of Europe) crashing the sovereignty of the European peoples (his idea is to legitimate that later by a referendum), he's also absolutely pro migration and does not want to know about the dangers of Islamization. In fact he's an enemy of enlightened patriotism & the idea of an Europe of nations. I've read "Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit", "Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns", "Moralbewußtsein und kommunikatives Handeln", "Nachmetaphysisches Denken", "Faktizität und Geltung" and others. I know the theory of Habermas, and I know his political agenda. I don't think it's an agenda you would like to support.

Quite right. That is not an agenda I would like to support. The quotation intrigued me, though, and I wanted to capture it for my files. I should add that I was intensely interested in Habermas in the early 'seventies around the time I began graduate studies (1973). I read Erkenntnis und Interesse and some other things by him. But then my interests shifted to Husserl and Heidegger und die Seinsfrage and from there to classical metaphysics of Being and then to the analytic approach to existence in Frege and Russell and Quine and so I became more and more analytic and less and less Continental. My youthful interest in the Frankfurter Schule has pretty much petered out, except for a residual fascination with Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialektik. Also gone is my enthusiasm for Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics whose lectures I attended when he visited Boston College in the 'seventies. My copy of Wahrheit und Methode bears his autograph. Mesmerized by Heidegger as he was, he didn't know Husserl very well. He was surprised when I pointed out a passage in Cartesiansiche Meditationen in which Husserl speaks of a transzendental-faktisches ego. "Wooden iron!" the last student of the neo-Kantians said to me.

Here's what Habermas wrote in 2006 and in terms of religious & migration policies this still is - „Keine Muslima darf dazu genötigt werden, beispielsweise Herrn de Maiziere die Hand zu geben“ (2017) - his position today.

> … The fourth pressing problem is the fundamentalist challenge to cultural pluralism in our societies. We have approached this problem from the perspective of immigration policy for far too long. In times of terrorism, there is a threat that it will only be dealt with under the heading of domestic security. Yet the burning cars in the banlieues of Paris, the local terror of inconspicuous youths in English immigrant neighbourhoods and the violence at the Rütli School (more) in Berlin have taught us that simply policing the Fortress of Europe is no real answer to these problems. The children of former immigrants, and their children's children, have long been part of our society. But since they are simultaneously not a part of it, they pose a challenge to civil society, not the Minister of the Interior. And the challenge we face is to respect the different nature of foreign cultures and religious communities while including them in national civil solidarity.

At first glance the integration problem has nothing to do with the future of the European Union, since every national society must deal with it in its own way. And yet it could also hold the solution to a further difficulty. The second objection of Euro-sceptics is that there could never be a United States of Europe, because the necessary underpinnings are lacking. In truth the key question is whether it is possible to expand civil solidarity trans-nationally, across Europe. At the same time, a common European identity will develop all the quicker, the better the dense fabric of national culture in the respective states can integrate citizens of other ethnic or religious origins. Integration is not a one-way street. When it is successful, it can inspire strong national cultures to become more porous, more sensitive and more receptive both domestically and abroad. In Germany, for example, the more a harmonious coexistence with citizens of Turkish origin becomes a matter of course, the better we will be able to understand other European citizens – from the Portuguese winegrower to the Polish plumber. In opening up domestically, self-contained cultures can also open up to each other.

The integration problem hits a raw nerve in European nation-states. These developed into democratic constitutional states through the forced creation of a romantically inspired national consciousness that absorbed other loyalties. Without the moving force of nationalism, the Bavarians and the Rhinelanders, the Bretons and Occitanians, the Scots and the Welsh, the Sicilians and the Calabrians, the Catalans and the Andalusians would never have merged to become citizens of democratic nations. Because of this tightly-knit and easily combustible social fabric, the oldest national states react far more sensitively to the integration problem than immigration societies like the USA or Australia, from whom we can learn a great deal.

Whether we're dealing with the integration of gastarbeiter families or citizens from the former colonies, the lesson is the same. There can be no integration without a broadening of our own horizons, and without a readiness to tolerate a broader spectrum of odours, thoughts and what can be painful cognitive dissonances. In addition, Western and Northern European secular societies are faced with the vitality of foreign religions, which in turn lend local confession new significance. Immigrants of other faiths are as much a stimulus for believers as for non-believers.

The Muslim across the way, if I can take the current situation as an example, confronts Christian citizens with competing religious truths. And he makes secular citizens conscious of the phenomenon of public religion. Provided they react sensibly, believers will be reminded of the ideas, practices and attitudes in their Church that fell afoul of democracy and human rights well into the 20th century. Secular citizens, for their part, will recognise that they have taken matters too lightly by seeing their religious counterparts as an endangered species, and by viewing the freedom of religious practice as a kind of conservation principle.

Successful integration is a reciprocal learning process. Here in Germany, Muslims are under great time and adaptation pressure. The liberal state demands of all religious communities without exception that they recognise religious pluralism, the competence of institutionalised sciences in questions of secular knowledge and the universal principles of modern law. And it guarantees basic rights within the family. It avenges violence, including the coercion of the consciences of its own members. But the transformation of consciousness that will enable these norms to be internalised requires a self-reflexive opening of our national ways of living.

Those who denounce this assertion as "the capitulation of the West" are taken in by the silly war cry of liberal hawks. "Islamofascism" is no more a palpable opponent than the war on terrorism is a "war". Here in Europe, the assertion of constitutional norms is such an uncontested premise of cohabitation that the hysterical cry for the protection of our "values" comes across like semantic armament against an unspecified domestic enemy. Punishing violence and combating hatred require calm self-consciousness, not rabble-rousing. People who proclaim against their better knowledge that the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Orhan Pamuk is proof of an unavoidable clash of civilizations are themselves propagating such a clash. We should not follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush in militarising the Western spirit as well.

In Germany, the tensions between Christianity and Islam that have been mounting since 2001 recently set off an exciting, high-level competition among confessions. The subject at issue is the compatibility of faith and knowledge. For Pope Benedict XVI, the reasonableness of belief results from the Hellenisation of Christianity, while for Bishop Huber it results from the post-Reformation meeting of the Gospel with the post-metaphysical thinking of Kant and Kierkegaard. Both sides however betrayed a bit too much intellectual pride. The liberal state, for its part, must demand that the compatibility of faith and reason be imposed on all religious confessions. This quality must not be claimed as the exclusive domain of a specifically Western religious tradition. <

With best wishes! Kai Frederik Lorentzen

https://www.signandsight.com/features/1048.html
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2018/10/habermas.html