Social and Political Philosophy – Page 8

Is There a Political ‘Use it or Lose it’ Principle?

If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you must exercise regularly. Use it or lose it! Not so long ago I thought that the same principle had a political application: if you want to maintain your freedoms, you must exercise them. Use 'em or lose 'em! But times have changed. And when times change, the wise re-evaluate. I'll give two examples.

In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it. This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right. For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated. Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion. Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list. After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'

So here is my thought: The exercise of a right in a society in which that right is no longer widely recognized but is instead perceived as hurtful, hateful, 'racist,' etc. has no tendency to secure that right; on the contrary, the exercise of the right endangers both the right and the exerciser thereof. The same goes for the mere invocation or mention of the right.

Here we may have the makings of an argument against speaking out. But we will have to think about this some more. Civil courage is a beautiful virtue but it is sometimes trumped by that of prudence.

My second example is the right to keep and bear arms, an individual right, one that is protected and secured, but not conferred, by the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. To exercise this right openly, as by 'open carry,' is inadvisable. You may think that you are standing on your rights, and by exercising them securing them, but in a society dominated by group-thinking leftists, your constitutionally-guaranteed rights are not respected or even acknowledged. You are arguably undermining your rights and their exercise. You are reinforcing their mindless fears and fantasies. After all, prominent progressive politicians view the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization! What then will they think of you if they see you packing heat? It would be best to conceal both your weapons and your views.

The practice of ketman is advisable. Rod Dreher:

Ketman is the strategy that everyone in our society who isn’t a true believer in “social justice” and identity politics has to adopt to stay out of trouble. On Sunday, I heard about a professor in a large state university in a state that yesterday went for Trump, who is filled with constant anxiety. He believes that his interactions with colleagues and students are filled with the potential to destroy his career. Why? Because all it takes is an accusation of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry to wreck a lifetime of work. This is the world that the identity politics left has created for us.

What is Nullification in Political Theory?

Here is one explanation:

Nullification is a fundamental part of the American political system. But what exactly does it mean? There are two definitions. One is legal. When a court strikes down a law, it literally wipes it off the books. But there is also a practical definition – to make something of no value or consequence. When we talk about nullification happening today, we generally mean it in the practical sense – to end the practical effect of a federal act. Here is a succinct definition of nullification as we apply it: Any act or set of acts which has as its result a particular law being rendered legally null and void, or unenforceable in practice.Madison gave us a blueprint on how to do this in Federalist #46.

He suggested four steps to take on counteract and stop federal programs – whether “warrantable” or “unwarrantable,” the most significant being a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union.” The federal government involves itself in almost every aspect of life, but depends on state assistance to do almost everything. If states refuse to help, it becomes nearly impossible for the feds to enforce their laws or implement their programs. We can use this strategy to undermine and nullify all kinds of federal acts in practice – from warrantless spying, to gun control, to plant prohibition and more.

Here is an application of the theory:

The "Second Amendment Preservation Act of Newton County Missouri" reads, in part:

All federal acts, laws, orders, rules, and regulations passed by the federal government and specifically any presidential administration whether past, present, or future, which infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article 1, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution shall be invalid in the county, shall not be recognized by this county, and specifically rejected by this county, and shall be considered null and void and of no effect in this County.

Newton County Commission letter dated 2/3/21

It may well be that the cure for what ails the body politic, if there is a cure, is a combination of voluntary segregation and nullification, not secession.

You Want Anti-Government? I’ll Give You Anti-Government!

Contrary to the willful misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government. To oppose big government is not to oppose government. The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851), conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us. The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse. Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure. That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of ownership of the aforementioned.

An Important Issue in Political Philosophy: Robert Barron versus George Will

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.

David Gordon Reviews Michael Anton’s America at the Point of No Return

Excerpts:

Anton notes that the founders believed that the American Revolution was grounded in universal truths, “but they did not expect their declaration to revolutionize the world—nor were they under any illusion that it, or they, had the power to do so….America is—in the words of John Quincy Adams—‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all’ but also ‘the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”

Those who wish to restore these principles face a challenge of unprecedented severity. Anton argues that an elite based in certain blue states disdains ordinary Americans. “The core message of the meta-Narrative is that America is fundamentally and inherently racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so on. The flaws and sins of America derive directly from those of its founding stock, who are natural predators, inherently racist, and malevolent.”

Elite policy is at its worst in California, now under the near-total domination of the left wing of the Democratic Party. “In modern California, hypocrisy and double-standardism aren’t merely part of the business climate; they’re endemic to the whole society….Sam Francis dubbed this system ‘anarcho-tyranny’: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions on the disfavored.” Anton fears that if President Trump isn’t reelected, the Democrats will seek actively to suppress whomever in the red states challenges them, and they will prove very difficult to dislodge from power.

Who are the ordinary Americans the elite disdains, and who are the elite? The ordinary Americans are those whom Hillary Clinton called “deplorables,” i.e., white males who value their family, their religion, and their property, including their guns. “Funny thing, too: a core tenet of modern liberalism is supposed to be the sanctity of ‘one man, one vote.’ Except, you know, not really. The barely concealed presupposition of denouncing Republicans as ‘racists’ simply because whites vote for them is that all votes are not created equal. Votes of color are morally superior to white votes, which are inherently tainted. Which is why the left holds any election won by a Republican to be morally if not (yet) politically illegitimate.”

The elite consists at its core of wealthy financiers and business interests allied with government. It is buttressed by professionals who have attended top universities, especially those of the Ivy League. In a way that readers of Hunter Lewis on “crony capitalism” will recognize, Anton writes: “So-called ‘public-private cooperation’ will increase. This benign-sounding phrase—who could object to ‘cooperation,’ to government and business ‘solving problems together’? —masks a darker reality. What it really describes is the use of state power to serve private ends, at private direction. Hence foreign policy…will be further reoriented around securing trade, tax, and labor ‘migration’ patterns and paradigms that benefit finance and big business.”

If elite dominance continues, Anton predicts that those of us who dissent will be rigidly restricted. “Free speech as we have known it—as our founders insisted was the bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule. The playbook is already being expanded to include banking and credit. Getting on the wrong side of elite-woke opinion is increasingly to find oneself locked out of the financial system: no bank account, no credit card, no ability to get a loan or pay a mortgage. Pay cash? The move to a ‘cashless society’…will obviate that option right quick.”

Anton cites an especially chilling instance of the policy of suppression. “A new regulation in the United Kingdom—which we must assume will be proposed here sooner or later—would allow Britain’s National Health Service to deny non-emergency care to those deemed ‘racist, sexist, or homophobic.’ Government bureaucrats, naturally, will be the ones doing the deeming.” Small wonder that Anton has had enough.

The author seems to me misguided in what he says about “industrial policy,” but I’ll pass over that in silence. He criticizes Murray Rothbard who suggested that the principle of secession has no logical stopping point, down to the level of each person. Anton says, “Every-man-a-government-unto himself is literally Hobbes’s ‘state of nature,’ yet Rothbard appears to approve.” This rests on a misunderstanding: it hardly follows that if you have a right to secede that you will in fact do so, and Rothbard did not favor a world of one-person “nations.” Also, Anton doesn’t understand John Rawls very well.

But enough of criticism. Anton’s rhetorical talents are remarkable, and I urge everyone to read his book.

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bi-cultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages. My mother was both bilingual and bi-cultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not to me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn't your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.' The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values. Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African? Does he enjoy dual citizenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead. There is no 'institutional racism.' There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals. Man up and move forward. Don't blame others for your problems. That's the mark of a loser. Take responsibility. We honkies want you to do well. The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

It must also be said that the alt-Right identity-political counter to POC tribalism is just as bad, although it may be excusable as a pro tem tactic on some occasions.

The Main Threat of the Left to the Right

The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement:

. . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.

In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.

This is why sane and decent Americans absolutely must vote for Donald J. Trump. Dreher doesn't draw this conclusion due to his irrational Trump hatred, but indications are that he too will vote for Trump come November.

Addendum (9/7). Dr. Vito Caiati comments:

Thank you for posting that long quotation from Rod Dreher, which well sums up the principal threat of the social, cultural, and intellectual threat of the Left.

Today, Malcolm Pollack calls attention to the coming post-election mayhem that the Left will unleash given a Trump victory in November He links to Michael Anton's "alarming" essay on the form this "coup" will take (https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/). Anton may well be right, and if so, the threat that we are facing goes far beyond that of the "soft-totalitarianism" so often discussed by Dreher. Very dark times have arrived if even a fraction of Anton's prognostication occurs.

I am increasingly convinced that this federal republic of ours, the product of early capitalist and pre-capitalist social forces, that is, of a particular historical conjuncture in the history of early modern Europe and its colonial offshoots, is at odds with the underlying interests of contemporary corporate capital,whose ruling class and the myriad of minions who either serve it directly or are sustained and tolerated by it–all anti-national, globalist, technocratic, anti-democratic, and anti-(classical) liberal to one degree of another–and that they are determined to sweep it away. The Left today is bizarrely made up of the most disparate and far-flung social elements, from the anarchist or pseudo-Marxist Antifa shock troops in the streets; the apparatchiks of the federal, state, and local governments; the swarms of ill-educated "intellectuals" in and out of the universities; the leftist heretical or cowed"Christian" leaders of the Catholic and other churches; and of course the hacks of the media and the culture industries. Whether this coalition, wielded together only partially by ideology, can withstand the inevitable leftward track that would come with full power is unlikely, but in the meantime it will have reduced what remains of the Old Republic and its traditions to ruins.

PS. In my quick list of the Left's "disparate" elements, I forgot to include the significant portion of very rich corporate elite, the core of the ruling class, which have become the key funders and advocates of its ideology and policies, whether through conviction or convenience. Here, one can speak of a strange compromesso storico, one based on continued corporate dominance (for example, silence on real economic and social problems), and hence the interests of the ruling class, in return for the advancement of the tribalist, racist, anti-American, anti-Western ideology and policies of the Left. This is not the first time that capitalists and corporate elites have coalesced with anti-democratic and anti-liberal political formations; one only has to consider the accommodations of German big capital with the Nazi regime or that of Japanese zaibatu with Japanese militarism. This time, however, the dance is with the Left.

Vito Caiati on the Tension between Corporate Capitalism and Conservatism

Dr. Vito Caiati by e-mail (emphasis added):

I am increasingly convinced that we on the Right are caught up in a set of contradictions of our own making, in that we wish to uphold, on the one hand, a particular political, social, and cultural inheritance and, on the other, an economic system, which in the past was largely supportive of or at least conducive to the former but which now, that is, in the form that it has attained in the last century, its principal solvent. The capitalism of which we often so glowingly speak on the Right is long-gone, along with the social classes and modes of life tied to it. How do we not fall into the trap of denouncing the latter while upholding the former? I see this as the hardest of puzzles to solve, and it may well mean that something is at work deep in the American social formation that deprives us on the Right of a firm footing in existing reality, which would explain why the Left has succeeded in conquering one political and cultural institution after another: The nature of contemporary capital, not merely its economic nature but the ways of life and cultural norms that arise from it, is inherently antagonistic to the nation state, classical liberal polities and rights, and traditional forms of civic society and belief systems. If this is so, then the Right has the unenviable task of opposing all forms of collectivist organization and control, public and private (that is, corporate), the latter of which is the inevitable form of corporate capitalist development today, while proposing some viable alternative, one that would inevitably result in a direct challenge to the dominance of the present ruling class. This is a very contradictory situation for the defenders of order, since we ordinarily do not seek to undermine the leading institutions of society. At best, we on the Right have so far only snipped at this dominance, speaking of outsourcing of manufacturing or corporate censorship, but all of these efforts leave the beast intact. What would a real assault from the Right look like, and how could it be mounted without giving up basic philosophical commitments to private property and initiative? For me, this is a real dilemma, but perhaps you disagree?

The following may serve as an illustration of Vito's dilemma. Consider Amazon.com.

I love it and its fabulously efficient services. I fund it to the tune of about $100 per month buying books and other merchandise. The company is a perfect example of how a man with an idea can make it big in America and enrich the lives of millions with his products. This is made possible by capitalism and the rule of law, not one or the other, but both in synergy. An enterprise like Amazon is unthinkable under socialism. The man in question, Jeff Bezos, is now the Croesus of the modern world. I have argued many times that there is nothing wrong with economic inequality as such. But money is translatable into power including the power to shape attitudes and work cultural changes. Bezos' vast resources translate into formidable political and cultural clout. As you know, Bezos owns the left-leaning Washington Post.

By buying from Amazon, I support the Left nolens volens and its censoring of conservative books, not all of course, but many that only a hard-core leftist would think of censoring. I also aid and abet the hollowing out of that buffer zone between the individual and the state apparatus that is called civil society. Amazon puts small book stores out of business which are not merely places of business but meeting places for citizens. But haven't I called repeatedly for the defunding of the Left? I have. Ought I not use Amazon? But that would be an impotent protest on my part. The company is a juggernaut that won't be stopped by any boycott or influenced in its corporate policies by any boycott.

There is a tension between advanced corporate capitalism and conservative values. The question I would have for Dr. Caiati, however, would be whether advanced corporate capitalism is inherently or essentially antagonistic to conservative values as he maintains. (See bolded sentence above) Perhaps there is no necessity to this antagonism and that a sufficiently strong state headed by a nationalist such as DJT could rein in such corporate behemoths as Amazon.

Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup. For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me. If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything. I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind. Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'?

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood. I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics. Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics. And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor. I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry. He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all. And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number? Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber) I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race. This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification. A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is. After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being.

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes. It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type. The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics? Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it. An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did. Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black. Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties. No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism. (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages, I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.') You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on. You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach. Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political.

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist. One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics. And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes,

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today.

Democrat Extremism Has Deep Roots

Issues and Insights:

While the Democrats’ lurch to port looks like a recent event, it’s been decades in the making. The party has been a comfortable home to closeted authoritarians for decades. Its big government agenda is a safe harbor for socialists, statists, coercionists, and sworn enemies of liberty.

Democrats have a history of rejecting civil society in favor of political society. They have long believed all ills, both the real and imagined, can and should be resolved by government intervention. The party has rejected freedom and individualism and adopted a collectivist mindset that needs a fortune (always someone else’s) in tax revenues to function.

A man is known by the company he keeps and this is true of political parties. Long before anyone was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, Democrats were supporting some of history’s worst tyrants. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is a Sandinista devotee, as is Sanders, who made a “sympathizer” trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, and believed that Fidel Castro was just a prince of a fellow who generously kept “his” people fed, housed, and schooled.

[. . .]

The roots of today’s Democratic Party reach deep into the red soil of socialism and anchor the real and implied violence of extremism. The dense and twisted forest is nearly grown now, with more than three-fourths of Democrats saying they would vote for a socialist presidential candidate, according to a Gallup poll taken earlier this year. Anyone wondering why many of our big cities are under siege from rioters can quickly figure out why just by looking at that poll.

Civil society and its institutions form the buffer zone between the individual and the State. As the Democrats lurch ever leftward, they hollow out ever more of the buffer zone with the goal of eliminating it entirely. The Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule is a prime example. Fortunately, President Trump put a stop to it. But the Left never rests in its quest to quash liberty and empower an omni-invasive State apparatus. It is undeniable that the Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party. This is not the party of your father or even of your older brother. If you are still a Democrat, I ask that you make sure you understand what this party now stands for.