Social and Political Philosophy – Page 2

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.

____________

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

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

MAGA, Majority Rule, and Consent of the Governed

Here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Goldman on Anarchism

The topic of anarchism surfaced in an earlier thread. Dmitri and Hector introduced us to David Graeber. But let's go back a century or so for a bit of historical perspective. Herewith, a brief examination of Emma Goldman's definition of anarchism.

ANARCHISM: the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. ("Anarchism: What it Really Stands For" in Anarchism and Other Essays, Dover, 1969. p. 50. The Dover edition is a republication of the third revised edition originally published in 1917)

Goldman is advancing five claims, either explicitly or tacitly. By 'government' she means "the State." (p. 52) That's what I mean by it too. She does not mean a mutually beneficial form of social order that arises spontaneously and thus without coercion or authoritarian regulation. One could mean that by 'government.' The word is ambiguous as between those two meanings. (See Richard Sylvan, "Anarchism" in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell 1993, pp. 216-217.)

I will now state and comment on five assertions I extract from the passage quoted:

1) Anarchism aspires to promotes the liberty of the individual.

So far, so good. I'm all in! Liberty is a very high value. "Give me liberty, or give me death!" (Patrick Henry)

2) Liberty is unrestricted by man-made law.

Our anarchist is telling us that liberty cannot exist under man-made law, that liberty and law are mutually exclusive. Here is where she begins to go off the rails. What she is saying would be true only in an ideal world, which is to say, a world that does not actually exist. In the world that actually exists, with human being as they actually are, (2) is false. It is blindingly evident that her ideal world does not exist, which is not to say that it cannot exist. But if her ideal world cannot exist, then her (2) is impossible. Now I cannot prove (demonstrate, conclusively establish) that her ideal world is impossible, but there is nothing in our past experience to show that it is possible. In fact, all of our past experience suggests the opposite.

I say that liberty, to be liberty, must be (i) attainable, and (ii) attainable for all. Attainable liberty is possible society-wide, or for all, only under man-made laws. This is because people inevitably come into conflict, for all sorts of reasons (scarcity of resources, innate bellicosity, etc.) and there can be no conflict resolution without laws. Now laws are laws only if they are enforceable and enforced. (The mere possibility of enforcement is insufficient.) There is therefore need for agents of enforcement. The practical necessity of the state follows from the need for agents of enforcement who will equitably enforce the laws.

3) All forms of government rest on violence.

This is in the vicinity of a truth, but one better expressed as follows: there cannot be government without coercion. What this means is that to countenance government is to countenance situations in which some people will be compelled to do things they don't want to do, and compelled to desist from doing things that they want to do. This coercion, without which there cannot be government (a state), will involve either violence or the credible threat of violence, violence which in many if not most cases will be physical, e.g., throwing a man to the ground and handcuffing him.

In sum: No attainable liberty for the greatest number without man-made (positive) laws that are both enforceable and enforced. No enforcement without enforcers. No enforcers without a state apparatus. No state apparatus without allowance of the possibility of coercion. No possibility of coercion without the credible threat of violence, which, given the stupidity, ignorance, selfishness, and bellicosity of human beings in the state of nature, will inevitable result in the actual use of violence against malefactors.

4) Governments, since they "rest on violence" are "wrong and harmful."

Goldman thinks they are "wrong and harmful" presumably because governments cannot exist without coercion, and thus cannot exist without the threat if not the execution of violence, where all violence, whether threatened or actual, is deemed morally wrong.

To my way of thinking, however, (4) is obviously false. While is is true that governments "rest on violence," the violence that they sometimes mete out is not "wrong and harmful," but right and helpful. The state is a 'necessary evil.' A necessary (needed) evil is not something evil, full stop, but something that it would be better not to need, but something we do need given the actual state of things. For example, a cancer treatment consisting of chemotherapy and radiation that partially destroys one's salivary glands and taste buds is a necessary evil. That partial destruction is evil, but it is necessary (needed) to prevent a worse evil, namely, death. A rational man, such as your humble correspondent, will in such a predicament choose to undergo the nasty protocol despite its being nasty. He is rational in the means-ends sense: he chooses means conducive to his end in view, namely, to live a few more years. This is all predicated upon the actual state of things which a rational man takes into account.

5) Government is unnecessary, which is to say, not needed for human flourishing.

This too is plainly false. It would be true if men were angels. But men are not angels. They are not demons either. They are beings capable of great good and of great evil. And some are better than others, both intellectually and morally (and in other ways too). And the same goes for governments: some are better than others, both in their form and in their matter (the people who wield power). Formally, the U.S. system of government is the best the mind of man has yet devised, but materially, the current regime, headed by Biden and Harris and their appointees and hidden puppet-masters is arguably the worst in the history of our great republic. But the times they are a'changin.

So we need the state. We need government, limited government. For we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable, who love liberty and hate tyranny, want only as much government as is necessary to secure ordered liberty, domestic tranquillity, and international peace. And note: we need government whether or not we can solve the problem of its moral justifiability. The state is practically necessary whether or not anyone can show on the theoretical plane that it is morally justifiable.

To understand the justifiability question, see my Substack articles on Robert Paul Wolff:

Notes on Anarchism I

Notes on Anarchism II

Notes on Anarchism III

Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

We Have a Problem . . .

. . . and according to Malcolm Pollack, there's no fixing it:

We have a problem, and as far as I can see, it isn’t going away; indeed, I expect it will get sharply worse in the wake of next month’s election. The problem, simply put, is that although the bedrock principle of the American political formula is “consent of the governed”, we have now reached the point where whichever faction comes to power will govern entirely without the consent of half the population.

This was not always the case. Once upon a time — within my own memory — there was enough commonality on social, political, and moral axioms that those out of power would subordinate their dissatisfaction to the importance of playing the game, and would look at political setbacks as little more than a bad year for the home team. “Next season” was never too far off, and meanwhile we could live with the opposition temporarily in power because we knew that, despite some differences about policy, we more or less agreed on the fundamental axioms of American life.

Now, things are different. For the losers in the next election (whichever side that is), being governed by the victors isn’t going to feel like like losing a round; it will feel like being subjugated. It’s going to be like having their homeland pillaged and their altars desecrated by a despised and unholy enemy before whom they will be made to kneel. And that is going to get worse, not better, as time goes by.

The two factions, the Cloud People and the Dirt People, each have power, but very different kinds of power (the power of the latter is still mostly latent and unorganized, but it is real). Clearly, we can’t live together, and neither is willing to be ruled by the other — but we can’t get away from each other, either.

The problem is summed up perfectly in the final sentence. I don't have a real solution but a return to federalism may help mitigate tensions, as I suggest in my latest Substack upload.