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The Anti-Democracy Project Of John Roberts

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Trump v. CASA Inc., decided June 27, continues the personal project of John Roberts to enhance the power of the executive at the expense of the other two branches of government. It continues the work of Trump v. United States,  where Roberts gave Trump almost unlimited power to ignore Congress as he sees fit. It follows his weakening of statutes he doesn’t like, his refusal to allow Biden to exercise the authority given him by Congress, as in the student loan case, Biden v. Nebraska, and many other cases.

This post will show how these cases weaken the legislature and the judiciary while strengthening the President. That is profoundly anti-democratic.

Trump v. United States

Here’s a reasonably fair summary of Trump v. United States, which I offer because I refuse to pretend to be neutral about it and don’t seem to be able to make myself read it again anyway.  Read the real thing if you can; it’s a breath-taking demonstration of judicial hubris, based on the ridiculous idea that these six rogues can create a rule for the ages, and the even dumber idea that what this nation really needs is a “vigorous” president, unafraid to push against the boundaries of the law as set by the legislature and judicial precedent.

Trump v. CASA Inc.

This case is a government request for relief from nationwide injunctions barring enforcement of the obviously unconstitutional Trump executive order denying birthright citizenship to a large number of babies born here, causing untold damage to them and their families and inflicting untold costs on the states.

The Dissent filed by Ketanji Brown Jackson gives a clear picture of the case.

It is important to recognize that the Executive’s bid to vanquish so-called “universal injunctions” is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior. When the Government says “do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct,” what it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution— please allow this.

Snip

To hear the majority tell it, this suit raises a mind-numbingly technical query: Are universal injunctions “sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act’” to fall within the equitable authority Congress granted federal courts in the Judiciary Act of 1789? Ante, at 6. But that legalese is a smokescreen. It obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?

Speaking for the anti-democratic majority, Amy Coney Barrett says no. The courts cannot order the Executive to follow the law unless that is necessary to provide complete relief to the parties to the litigation. Her “reasoning” is that the Judiciary Act doesn’t allow a court to give relief to a non-party. Why? Because such relief would not have been allowed under the English Common Law.

Art. III, §1 of the Constitution provides in part as follows:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Barrett says that the judicial power of the United States is limited to the powers of the English High Court of Chancery in 1789. That’s absurd. In Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court held that it had the final say on Constitutional questions. That is not true under English law, and certainly not for Courts of Chancery.

Barrett cites Marbury once;

See, e.g., Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803) (concluding that James Madison had violated the law but holding that the Court lacked jurisdiction to issue a writ of mandamus ordering him to follow it).

The Wikipedia entry explains that the Court in Marbury first held that the Judiciary Act gave the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in cases of mandamus. That was greater than the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court granted in Article III. Therefore that section of the Judiciary Act was unconstitutional, and was struck down. Marbury specifically holds that mandamus would be appropriate, but that it would have to proceed through a trial court. Does that sound like Barrett’s citation? No it does not.

Under Barrett’s holding, it is not clear exactly how the judicial branch is to act as a check on the executive branch. There is some discussion about class actions and other techniques. But there is no certainty. Perhaps the decisive factor is this:

Finally, the Government must show a likelihood that it will suffer irreparable harm absent a stay. When a federal court enters a universal injunction against the Government, it “improper[ly] intru[des]” on “a coordinate branch of the Government” and prevents the Government from enforcing its policies against nonparties. That is enough to justify interim relief. Cite omitted.

In other words, the only harm that matters on injunctive relief is the government’s. The damage to everyone else, to every person in the same position as the named parties, is irrelevant. The damage done to the rule of law by allowing a patently unconstitutional and immoral harm is irrelevant.

Comparing Trump v. CASA Inc. and Trump v. United States

1. In both cases, SCOTUS ignores the facts of the case. The indictment in Trump v. United States said that Trump conspired to overturn an election, and laid out substantial factual allegations to support the claim. Roberts natters on about core powers and such, ignoring the fact that there are no circumstances in which overturning an election is a core executive anything.

In CASA, Barrett ignores the damage Trump and his henchmen do by imposing a blatantly unconstitutional policy on non-parties.

2 In both cases SCOTUS imposes an outcome that favors one political party. In Trump v. United States the decision favors Trump. There is no reasonable observer who thinks this would have been the outcome if that indictment had been charged against a Democrat.

In CASA, Barrett says that Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh had previously raised questions about nationwide injunctions, including those levied against the Biden administration. Either she or Roberts or both could have joined with those four to deal with the problem in any of the cases raised by Biden. But no. Then, suddenly, a few weeks after Trump’s second term begins, they both decide this is an important Constitutional issue that must be totally resolved in favor of Trump and the Republicans.

3. In both cases, the power of the coordinate branches of government is weakened. In Trump v. United States, Roberts strangled the power of Congress to control the actions of the President. The holding makes it clear that Trump is entitled to do whatever he wants with the powers given him by law, and can only be held accountable under highly limited circumstance, to be determined later by him and his crew.

The decision also weakened the power of the judiciary to check the executive branch. It gave no guidance to lower courts or prosecutors. It sets itself up as the arbiter, a role it can easily duck. It insures vast delays in any effort to enforce the law against a criminal president.

The opinion in In CASA weakens the power of the judiciary to check the actions of a lawless executive branch, this time directly. It also weakened the power of Congress. Existing laws can only be enforced piecemeal against a lawless president.

In both cases, the power of the President is exalted above all other considerations.

The attack on democracy

Both cases should be seen as part of a decades-long attack on democracy. The legislature is the most democratic branch. It is closest to the citizenry, even given the undemocratic makeup of the Senate. Reducing the power of Congress reduces the influence of voters. By weakening the judiciary, the anti-democratic forces insure that the actions of a lawless executive cannot be controlled.

These aren’t the only attacks by SCOTUS though. The Voting Rights Act was expressly intended to improve our democracy. Roberts struck it down, finding that there is an implicit statute of limitations in the Reconstruction Amendments.

The recent invention of the so-called major questions doctrine weakens the power of the legislature to deal with emergencies. The attacks by SCOTUS on the administrative state are designed to increase the power of the president despite the explicit intent of Congress. Does anyone think Congress would have empowered Trump to decide on the toxicity of lead or the value of specific vaccines? Does anyone think letting Trump direct prosecutions and criminal investigations is a reasonable thing to do?

It’s not just that Roberts and his gang refuse to protect our rights. They actively help Trump destroy our rights.

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The Republican Hundred Year War On Democracy

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Our democracy is under attack, in a war planned and carried out by generations of filthy rich tight-wingers working primarily through the Republican Party. The war has come into the open under Trump, funded by the latest group of hideously rich dirtbags, the tech bros, and justified by a cadre of anti-intellectual grifters and yakkers like Curtis Yarvin.

We need to see the battlefield. Only then can we decide on how to act. As Marcy pointed out here, our role is explicitly political, as befits people who believe in democracy to our core.

The Battlefield

Introduction

The filthy rich have always held more power in this country than their numbers would support in a functioning democracy. Their control was somewhat restricted during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th C., but SCOTUS did it’s best to beat back progressive laws. The political power of the filthy rich was sharply decreased during the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said this out loud in a 1936 speech in Madison Square Garden:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

The filthy rich hated FDR, and have spent nearly 100 years trying to destroy his legacy and our way of life. Generations of oligarchs arise over time in different sectors of the economy, and the wealth they control has increased steadily since then. But regardless of background, a significant number have a attacked every institution we have relied on as part of our heritage.

At the same time they have ruthlessly pursued their own interests without regard to the national interest.We know some names, like H.L. Hunt and other Texas Oilmen, and the Koch Brothers, and groups like the John Birch Society. We generally know about other threats, like the Christian Dominionists and White Nationalists.

The Republicans took over congress in 1946. One of their first acts was to pass the Taft-Hartley Act which was intended to undercut the power of organized labor. They continued a long tradition of\ anti-communism and anti-socialism. The Democrats responded by kicking out the Communists, many of whom were active in unions, and with the Civil Rights movement. The Democratic Party tradition of punching left has deep roots.

Trump and his henchmen are the culmination of this campaign. They are openly engaged in a war on every institution that wields power in our society and in or through our government. The success of a decades-long assault reveals the effect of that long-term guerrilla war by the Republicans.

Congress

Republican congressionals are weaklings. This has been a fixture of that party since the mid-90s. Newt Gingrich preached lock-step Republican voting, and Denny Hastert created the Hastert Rule, under which no legislation gets to the floor unless it can pass with only Republican votes.

Mitch McConnell made it his job to make sure that Obama couldn’t pass any legislation. He whipped Republican Senators so viciously they did his bidding. In his first term Trump violently assaulted Republicans who defied his orders. The party internalized fear so completely that it attacked its own members who voted to impeach Trump.

Now Trump simply ignores laws he doesn’t like, including spending laws, and arrests Democratic lawmakers on groundless charges.

The Administrative State

Under FDR, Congress began to empower agencies to carry out specific tasks necessary for a modern government. This gave rise to the administrative state. Republicans hate it. Ever since its inception, they and corporate Democrats have worked to hamstring  agencies.

Conservative legal academics expanded the use of originalism, and created a bullshit  originalist rationale explaining why our 250 year old Constitution doesn’t allow any significant power to agencies. This resulted in SCOTUS decisions on purely partisan grounds over the last few decades that protect the filthy rich and harm normal people. The number of delay and choke points is so great that our nation is drenched in chemicals known to be toxic, and thousands of others whose toxicity, especially in combinations, is unknown.

Trump attacked the entire structure with his firings, closures, and illegal withholding of funds. District Courts tried to stop it, but the SCOTUS anti-democracy majority has dithered or rejected their decisions. Republicans refuse to push back, even to support cancer research, surely a non-partisan issue.

Trump put incompetent people in charge of all agencies and departments. They were confirmed by the Senate, often with (unnecessary) Democratic support. RFK, Jr? Whiskey Pete Hegseth? Linda McMahon? Republicans allowed Elon Musk and a small flock of ignorant coders to terminate critical programs. Without agencies, our ability to govern ourselves is wrecked.

The Judiciary

The attacks on the judiciary began after Brown v. Board. Impeach Earl Warren, screamed billboards all over the South. But it took off under Ronald Reagan, who appointed a host of ideologues to the bench, leading to his failed effort to put the loathsome Robert Bork on SCOTUS.

Republicans responded to the rejection of Bork by pushing even harder to put right-wing ideologues on the bench. George Bush the worst stopped listening to the centrist ABA on judicial nominations. Trump handed judicial nominations to the Federalist Society and to Leo Leonard. McConnell made sure Democrats couldn’t appoint people to SCOTUS. Then Trump appointed a crank, a frat boy, and an dithering academic, none of whom have evidenced any core principles other than obeisance to Trump’s dictates.

The Fifth Circuit is full of nutcases and fools, among whom I single out the odious Matthew Kacsmaryk. The Fifth Circuit refused to rid itself of single-judge districts, and ignores judge-shopping, making this lawless nutcase the most powerful judge in the country.

Then in Trump v. US . John Roberts  crowned Trump king of the nation, and implicitly approved everything Trump and his henchmen have done. See, for example, the ridiculous order allowing Stephen Miller to export human beings to terrorist nations, issued without explanation, and without a full hearing. Roberts can only be compared to Roger Taney.

States

The federal system gives states a central role in assuring the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. Historically Republicans used what they called states rights to stop federal efforts to enforce the 14th Amendment. They were generally unwilling to attack state action in significant ways. Trump has started this assault on his own.

He hit states whose policies he doesn’t like by cancelling grants, by senseless litigation, and by sending in the National Guard, the Marines and ICE thugs. One of his earliest acts was to file a lawsuit against Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago, alleging that it’s unconstitutional for us to limit the cooperation of local law enforcement with ICE thugs. In other words, we have to use our own resources to fill Stephen Miller’s gulags.

Trump demanded the Republicans pass laws, including the Big Bill, that will harm Blue states. He helps Red States damaged by his tariffs. He attacks states who don’t force colleges and universities to follow his anti-DEI policies, meaning erasing not-White people from history and higher education.

Private Institutions

The Republican war on higher education began with Ronald Reagan’s attacks on California colleges and universities. The attack was two-pronged. He packed the boards of these institutions with Republican loyalists, a philistine group who demanded focus on job training at the expense of education. Public support was reduced dramatically, forcing the system to increase tuition. This led to a massive increase in student loans, and to debt servitude for millions of people.

This two-pronged attack was immediately followed by other states, partly out of spite (Republicans) and partly on financial grounds (centrist Democrats). Republicans, ever the victims, claimed that universities were liberal and quashed conservative viewpoints, whatever those might be. The screaming got louder, and Trump used it to attack higher education a bit in his first term. All this was fomented and paid for by filthy rich monsters and justified by liars.

In his second term Trump directly attacked Harvard and Columbia on utterly specious grounds. He has made life miserable for foreign students studying here on visas, a deranged policy with no benefits to our nation. He has cut off federal support for basic research, the foundation of US leadership in most sciences and most technologies.

The Republican attack on law firms was focused on trial lawyers, a group that fought to protect working people from the depredations of pig-rich corporations. For the rest, the damage was largely self-inflicted. Firms grew to gargantuan size, taking in tens of millions of dollars. To keep that flow of money they surrendered professionalism and became servants of the filthy rich. When I started practicing law, we were bound by the Model Code of Professional Responsibility. The current weakened version of that ethical code is called the Model Code of Professional Conduct. Lawyers relieved themselves of all responsibility to society and the rule of law.

When Trump attacked, many of these behemoths were unprepared to act responsibly, and cravenly kissed the ring.

The attacks on private enterprise are smaller in scope. Primarily Trump seeks to force corporations to dismantle DEI programs, terminate support for LGBT initiatives and outreach, and similar matters. The media have self-policed rather than confront the craziness, a task made easier by their financial weakness.

What is to be done

The battlefield is enormous. Sometimes it seems overwhelming. None of us can deal with all of it. But each of us can deal with some of it. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. When we mass up on any front, we will have an impact.

I go to #TeslaTakedown. Hurting Musk is an indirect attack on Trump, and serves as a warning to the other Tech Bros. We have to keep that going.

Many of us are alumni of colleges under attack. I don’t give money to Notre Dame, even though my education there was sterling. I should have written a letter explaining why I would never contribute again, and why I removed a bequest from my will.

We can’t avoid all collaborating corporations entirely, but my family stopped using Target and cancelled our New York Times subscription. We can all redirect our spending. And then we can write letters saying we did it because they hurt our fellow citizens. Or even something fiercer.

Given the economic chaos and uncertainty, cutting spending, and front-end loading our spending, seem like sensible plans. We can point this out to others in our families and among our friends. As an example, Trump plans to increase tariffs on computers, or does he? Buy now and prepare to live with it for a few years.

Harvard and other major research universities have enormous endowments. They could open branches in Berlin, Paris, Guangzhou, Mumbai, Accra and anywhere they can find brilliant grad students. They can send their own professors, their own lab teams, and their own know-how out of a nation suddenly devoted to stupidity.

Law firms can announce plans to provide pro bono representation to people kidnapped by ICE thugs. Corporations can browbeat the Republican pols they have put in place, demanding sane economic and immigration policies. We can demand that they do so.

Conclusion

Notes: I wrote this from memory with a minimum of fact-checking. Corrections and additions welcome.

Someone should write a book about this war. Is there one I don’t know about?

Finally: In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy says that Napoleon was successful because he and his subordinates were able to concentrate their forces against the weakest segment of the enemy battle line. He tried to hold a large reserve to send against that weak point. That seems like a good strategy. Trump and the Republicans have spread themselves out over a gigantic battlefield. Let’s try Napoleon’s strategy.
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Featured image is a map of the Battle of Austerlitz won by Napoleon.

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War And Peace And Trump

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While I was on the road, I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a novel about the wars between Russia and Napoleon between 1805 and 1812, told in part through the effect on several wealthy Russian families. Tolstoy himself was an aristocrat, and had served for several years in the Russian Army, as had other members of his family. There is also much discussion of his theories of what he calls the science of history.

War and Peace seems to be broadly accurate historically. However, there are a number of differences between Tolstoy’s accounts and the Wikipedia entry. For purposes of this post, accuracy isn’t the crucial point. Let’s look at two  questions Tolstoy raises.

How do people rise to power

It’s apparent from the first two thousand pages that Tolstoy thinks people and specifically historians place too much emphasis on the role of specific individuals in historic affairs. This is usually called the Great Man Theory. In the last chapter of the Second Epilogue he explains his theory of the science of history.

Tolstoy thinks there are deep forces in society that lead to great events. Let’s start with a simple example, a battle such as Austerlitz. The outnumbered French army defeated a larger Russian army. The battle takes place across a wide front.

Tolstoy says that in some places Russian soldiers march towards enemy lines under heavy fire, one turns and runs to safety, others see that and and also run, and that skirmish is lost. In other places a man shouts Huzzah and rushes on, others follow and the skirmish at that site is won. The battle is decided by the sum of such people, responding to the events in front of them and for their own reasons, not because of the Great Man, whether Napoleon or Tsar Alexander I. I think Tolstoy would say that the commands of the generals are a factor, but they’re just one among many, and are rarely decisive.

Tolstoy admires General Kutusov, the Russian, but not because of his brilliant tactics. Kutusov’s strength is his understanding of the spirit of his troops. He knows how his troops will respond to commands in battle. He knows in his heart that the loss at Austerlitz was due to the lack of spirit for the war, which was fought on foreign soil and only indirectly for the benefit of Russia. He knows that the same men will fight desperately to defend their beloved homeland. I’d guess Tolstoy thinks Kutusov himself is barely aware of this strength.

I think this is the way Tolstoy sees the forces moving in societies. For example, how did Napoleon rise from obscurity to leadership? I think Tolstoy would say that social forces arose in individual citizens of France based on their perception of events. As they interact with others, the perceptions of events harden, and the desires predicated on those perceptions become evident. People demand a leader who will answer to their desires. In the case of Napoleon, they got what they wanted.

These processes are unknowable. But historians always ignore the social forces that permit the rise of the Great Man and carry him forward, says Tolstoy. Instead, they attribute all the great results to to the Great Man and exculpate him from all errors and losses.

First lesson

Social forces arise today in the same way as in Tolstoy’s day. People perceive events, share their perceptions (which aren’t necessarily accurate pictures of reality) and the resultant perceptions harden in contact with their friends and their social circles. Almost everyone has to rely on the perceptions of others to understand much of what’s happening, and the selection of trusted people is the paramount determinant of people’s perceptions.

One difference, I think, is that in Tolstoy’s day, the biggest questions were about war. In a war the strength of one’s convictions is tested by willingness to fight and die. The soldier facing fire doesn’t go forward if there isn’t sufficient reason, and the command of the Emperor, or the preacher, or the internet influencer, is not enough.

It’s tough to whip up the same fervor about culture war issues. Take gender-neutral bathrooms. Who cares enough to die? Anyway, potty parity has been an issue for decades. I have receipts. Sooner or later, the actual problems will overwhelm these fake issues.

The Russian resistance

In Tolstoy’s telling, once the French crossed the border into Russia, the entire nation resisted at enormous personal cost. Kutusov was appointed supreme commander. The Russian forces were split. Kutusov took immediate command of one Army, but the other was distant. The French Forces were much larger than the two Russian armies combined.

He refused to give battle until the two Russian armies were joined. That meant falling back to Smolensk. The second army was delayed by a general who wanted to be the supreme leader, so Kutusov was unable to defend Smolensk, and fell back to Borodino where he tried to set up a defensive line. The second army arrived. The spirit of the Russian army was overwhelmingly in favor of killing the French, and Kutusov knew it.

As the French army advanced to the East from Vilnius, first to Smolensk (about 500 Km) and then to Borodino (about 400 Km), the Russian people left the towns and villages with their livestock and horses, burning everything that could be used by the enemy, homes, barns, silage, and storehouses There’s a scene from Smolensk where a fire is set to a huge barn, and a visitor objects. An onlooker tells him that’s the owner with the torch and laughing hysterically. They did this themselves, Tolstoy says. There was no central command, no order from the Tsar or a general or local leader.

This is repeated all the way to Borodino, about 130 Km from Moscow.

There the outnumbered Russian Army fought the French to a standstill, sustaining heavy losses. They did not have the strength to counter-attack. Kutusov moved his army to Moscow, but immediately realized he couldn’t defend the city with his weakened forces. He moved to  Tautino, in the rich provinces southeast of Moscow, where they recovered their strength and gained new troops, horses, and equipment over the next month.

Napoleon entered Moscow unopposed. The vast bulk of the citizens had left, leaving personal property but little food or forage and no horses or livestock for the French. The nearby peasants also left with their livestock, and burned their provender.

The French army, reduced by losses at Borodino, took to looting and drinking, losing their cohesion. Moscow consisted mostly of wood houses and buildings. It began burning almost immediately, either by arson or by accident, and was mostly rubble after four days.

By mid-October it was bitter cold and snowing. The French army left suddenly and in great haste, taking their heavy plunder and many prisoners. They moved back towards Smolensk to the West over the route where everything was burned and barren. They died in horrific numbers. The Russians gave small battles, but mostly just followed and picked off groups of soldiers using guerrilla tactics. Napoleon fled back to Paris, leaving his army to save itself. It didn’t.

Second lesson

Every Russian left ahead of the French, destroying almost all the food and forage. The peasants and serfs nearby did the same. This is how the Russians won. It was a victory by the entire nation. There weren’t any collaborators. No Quislings. No Vichy Government. No Vichy nobles. They all left, and they destroyed the French Army. The people did it on their own with no leader asking or demanding.

Trump is waging war against our democracy. He is aided by a group of anti-democracy self-proclaimed intellectuals, and a host of PR people, Republican Quislings, and the filthy rich with their pig corporations. They have a phalanx of reporters for major media cheering them on and covering up the reality of the assault.

There are ICE thugs in neck gaiters and balaclavas seizing our neighbors off the streets and assaulting protesters. There are other thugs in expensive clothes gutting our institutions. There are collaborators in huge law firms, universities, and other institutions. There are lawyers willing to sacrifice their self-respect and risk loss of their law licenses.

There are too many Vichy Democratic consultants and politicians ready to work with Trump and his voters. There are six anti-democracy members of the Supreme Court, and more in the lower courts.

But there are more of us who are ready to defend our democracy. I am inspired by Tolstoy’s tale of the heroic Russian people.

 

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Yarvin on Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Blue Pill, Red Pill

In his second blog post, Curtis Yarvin makes what he calls a case against democracy. He begins by pointing out that we are all steeped in democracy and its values from birth, and it’s hard to change. To help see things differently (of course using The Matrix image of the red and blue pills) he offers ten statements about democracy and an alternative view. He doesn’t discuss any, so all discussion is mine. I’ll look at three, the first, and two chosen by the highly Enlightenment method: the 15th decimal digits of pi and e.

First PIll

blue pill:

Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

red pill:

The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

So close. Yarvin doesn’t ask himself where the rule of law comes from, nor why it’s working. I’d say that in a democratic polity  most people think they have a voice in deciding laws, so they are generally willing to obey the laws. That leads to the good stuff, which encourages further acceptance of laws. Of course, there are other reasons  depending on the nature of the individual and their sense of participation in humanity. Some people obey out of fear, or because that was engrained in them from birth. Others think about the alternatives, and agree to be bound. And there are many other possibilities.

Yarvin doesn’t ask himself who are the people who refuse to obey, like the current administration and its leaders. Are they acting like they live in a democracy? No. They act like they’re rulers. And it’s easy to see that a majority of people don’t like it. Of course the current administration goes much farther than others, but Yarvin might have noticed the abuses and corruption of the Bush administration, or that it pushed us into pointless wars and then failed at them. Maybe he suddenly has.

Third pill

blue pill:

The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.

red pill:

Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

Yarvin calls fascism and communism single-party democracies. But they were not democratic at all. They were all managed by a single person whose decisions were his own and were final. How exactly are they different from the monarchy he wants to install?

Fifth pill

blue pill:

Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.

red pill:

Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.

The premise here is that some person or group in each “Western” nation has ultimate power. It’s just as false that “the people” have ultimate power as it is that the civil service has ultimate power. Anyone who watched the Bush Administration run things would know this. The civil service is and always has been reasonably accountable to the political leadership, more in Republican administrations than in Democratic.

Yarvin doesn’t mention the role of the courts in all this. It’s a telling omission.

Leftism

In this post,  Yarvin tells us that the essential idea of leftism is that intellectuals (he prefers the term “scholars”) should run the world. Scholars are indistinguishable from priests.He asks:

Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?

I’d guess he means that the ideas that justify and organize a leftist mass movement come from intellectuals. For example, Karl Marx justified and motivated the leaders of the Russian Revolution. John Locke justified  the American Revolution and the form of its new government.

But that’s true of any revolution. There may be grievances, but grievances can be solved by negotiation or tweaks to the order of things. Regime change requires a replacement for the ideology that supports the existing regime. Does Yarvin understand that this applies to himself, to Ayn Rand, to all those right-wing jerks he cites?

1. In comments on my last post, people noted that Yarvin was going to debate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor with a specialty in democracy. Afterwards, someone posted what looked like a transcript of the debate on Blue Sky. It was taken down and the account closed, but I read it before it disappeared. Yarvin’s arguments felt like a ball falling down a Pachinko board, bounding from pin to pin with no clear connection. Or, as the WaPo described his blog posts,  he was “wildly discursive”.

At one point he said that Harvard doesn’t teach conservative thought. For example, no one teaches the thought of Julius Evola. This is from the Wikipedia page on Evola:

He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age ,,,.. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l’uomo differenziato—”the man who has become different”—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola’s definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Links and fn. omitted.

Evola was a major factor in Italian fascism, with ties to German fascism. After WWII he was closely involved with far right-wing Italian politics. It gets worse: “Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.”

So, Harvard doesn’t teach a marginal weirdo fascist. That’s what Yarvin thinks is a gotcha.

2. I’m on the road, and my main book for this trip is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s set in Russia between 1805 and 1812, and give a history of the Napoleonic Wars from the perspetive of Russia and five aristocratic families

Here’s how Tolstoy describes the attitude of one of his characters, Nicholas Rostov, towards Tsar Alexander I:

Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov’s army which the Tsar approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.

He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word. P. 467, Kindle edition.

Does Yarvin feel that looking at Trump or Musk?

 

 

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Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

The previous post discussed two aspects of Yarvin’s first blog post, his rejection of current ideologies and his loathing of democracy. This post describes the ideology he created, formalism.

The goal of formalism

Yarvin starts with the proposition that the only truly significant problem facing humans is violence. The goal of formalism is to rid the planet of violence. Only then can we focus on other problems.

Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems—Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc., etc., etc.—are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay ….

He means exactly this: until violence is ended, we must focus on one thing, getting rid of it. It’s an engineering problem, not a moral problem. He sets up pacifism as an alternative, and of course pacifism doesn’t solve violence.

He also dismisses the idea of social justice as a solution. He describes social justice as the idea that we should all have an equal share of the limited resources available to us. He says we don’t know how to equalize things, it won’t last, and it isn’t practical. We’d have to start by setting up rules about equality in things, and then take from some to give to others.

Solving violence with rules

Violence is the result of conflict and uncertainty. People are in constant conflict about stuff, but if everyone knows the result of the conflict in advance, there’s no reason to engage in violence. He seems to think that’s true of state-level conflict too: if we knew how a war would turn out, why wouldn’t the losing side surrender, he says. So, the first step is creating rules of ownership.

Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.

The starting place is where we are now. We make a list of everything that can be owned, and whoever has it gets to keep it. Then we can define violence:

Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

The United States is a corporation

Formalism says that the US government controls what happens inside the boundaries of the US. It has the power to collect taxes and make rules of behavior, and these powers are property, just like any other property right. The government isn’t going to voluntarily surrender them.

Yarvin tells us that the US government is a corporation, meaning “… it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.” In this setting citizens are serfs, actually corporate serfs. I think he sees private corporations as no different from the US government. He explains that the purpose of his exemplar, Microsoft, is to make money for shareholders by selling software.

But he doesn’t see the purpose of the US government. He thinks the government isn’t able to control much.

In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I’d be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

In his view, the US government is a poorly functioning corporation with no discernible control mechanism, loaded with assets and flailing around trying to do something for opaque reasons.

Yarvin’s solution

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

Snip

To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible. Links omitted.

He suggests that the current power structures be evaluated and shares in the reformalized US be distributed on the basis of the power of each recipient. Corporations have power, and would be shareholders. He cites the New York Times as an example. Perhaps some citizens have power, and might get shares, but that’s not clear. In any event, having divided up the power, we let the people with power decide what to do with the assets they control. The rest of us just stay out of the way.

The new power structures may not see the use for nation-states. He suggests that cities, but not states, perhaps should be “spun off”; pointing to Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong as positive examples. He points out that there isn’t any political violence in those city-states because there isn’t any politics.

That seems to be Yarvin’s main point. He thinks politics always leads to violence of some kind, whether it’s the violence of taxation or of limits on personal freedom, or physical violence. Somehow that problem is solved by getting rid of politics and replacing it with system of control by those who hold power now.

Discussion

1. I rearranged the order of the arguments hoping to clarify.

2. One obvious thing about this is the reductionism. Violence is a problem, sure, but we can’t wait for that to be solved before dealing with other problems. Those lesser problems, poverty, climate breakdown, moral decay, are at the root of a lot of the violence.

Another is the casual acquaintance with reality. This post was written ten years after Hong Kong was returned to China, and the latter was encroaching on democracy there. Anyone who has seen Crazy Rich Asians will see the outcome of the structure Yarvin imagines: great for the rich sons and daughters of the rich in Singapor.

3. The purpose of the United States government is set out in the Preamble to the Constitution. Yarvin doesn’t address it.

4. Yarvin takes the side of Walter Lippman in his debate with John Dewey over democracy, and goes even farther. Here’s a short paper describing the debate. Very roughly, Lippman thinks that our civilization is too complex for the ordinary citizen, so we should select experts to handle the complexities and advise the government rather than depend on the wisdom of the masses.

Dewey thinks that citizens should be educated in critical thinking, so they could participate in the discussions on issues that affect them. The people most affected by an issue would constitute a “public” in his parlance. This post gives an introduction to his thinking.

But Dewey had a larger reason for supporting democracy. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Dewey views democracy as an ideal of associated life in the sense that as an ideal he thinks that it reconciles the full expression of individual potentialities and the common good. In this sense, democracy sits at the apex of his historicised naturalist account of individuality and community. “From the standpoint of the individual”, as he puts it, democracy “consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain”, while “from the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common”…. Cites omitted.

Yarvin doesn’t address this debate.  He thinks the problems with democrcy, most of which were laid out by Lippman and Dewey, are so great that the solution is to burn it to the ground. So far he hasn’t identified a view of the individual that would enable him to address Dewey’s view of democracy. instead, he consistently ignores individual citiaens as if we were irrelevant to this discussion.

 

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The Beginnings of Curtis Yarvin

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This introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Marcy points out that there is no policy in the Trump administration, only destruction, revenge, and palace intrigue. That’s a great start for Curtis Yarvin and the evil shits surrounding Trump, especially the destruction part. This post introduces Curtis Yarvin’s justification for that nihilistic approach.

The first post at The Substack Gray Mirror

Yarvin explains that the Grey Mirror substack is a sandbox for drafting a book. The book is intended to serve as a public policy manual for the leader of a new regime which will replace the current regime in the United States.

Policy is the art of the possible. Today’s possible is relative to an amorphous network of influential stakeholders. Any new idea must first be measured for relevance by its proximity to this meta-institution. The mirror’s abstract prince had no one to please but himself and God. His policy could and must be absolute.

I think the first three sentences are meant as criticism of democracy on the grounds that it spreads power among too many people, making it easy to block or affect policy. The meaning of the last two is clear: the new regime will be a one-man rule, and I do mean man . There will be be a new regime eventually because all regimes fail. And it will be under the control of a single man, because “if you want a completely different government, submitting to one person is the only way to get it.”

His prince has to start from scratch to build his regime. Most of the existing institutions can’t be remodeled to fit with the new regime. That leads to his idiosyncratic use of the term nihilist. His plan is nihilist because “… it’s a plan for building ex nihilo, from nothing.”

The new leader will emerge from the chaos of the deterioration of the existing regime.

From Rome to France to Rwanda, a monarch who emerges unchallenged from one side of a civic conflict does not enforce the civic dominance of his own side, but the civic unity of both sides. If he did otherwise he would be an idiot — which is statistically unlikely. Freezing the civic conflict, cold or hot, tends to be the biggest, quickest win of the whole transition.

There is no explanation for this statement. He goes on to say that the leader is accountable, but he doesn’t tell us how, except that a monarchy is a republic, and has a constitution.

Discussion

1. I’ve rearranged the order in which Yarvin lays out his ideas.

2. I flatly disagree with his statements about Rome, France and Rwanda producing leaders who enforce civil unity of both sides. Rome fell under the sway of emperors and as they degenerated, Rome slowly collapsed. Is he thinking of Napoleon in France? Has he never heard of the restoration of the aristos, or the Commune, or any of the history of the nation in the 19th Century? And Rwanda? Really?

The First Post in Yarvin’s Blog Unqualified Reservations

The first post in Yarvin’s blog is titled A Formalist Manifesto, dated 4/24/2007. It’s long, so I’ll cover it in two posts. In this post, I take up his objections to existing ideologies and his complaints about democracy. In the next I’ll discuss the content of his newly created ideology, formalism.

Current ideologies suck

He doesn’t like progressivism because he thinks its adherents, “,,, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general…” are so steeped in it that they can’t see its problems. He doesn’t like conservatism because “… not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives.” The re-inventors of conservatism (the earlier version was destroyed by the “Roosevelt dictatorship”) have to appeal to the cretins, so conservatism is dumb.

He thinks moderates, centrists, independents, and non-political people are responsible for the death and destruction of the 20th Century, and presumably the early 2000s. They act like there’s a fixed “center” but it’s constantly changing. There’s nothing for them to hold onto, no controlling set of beliefs. It doesn’t even count as an ideology.

He thinks highly of libertarianism, but thinks it’s never been successfully implemented, because it’s impractical.

Yarvin’s problem with democracy

Yarvin says that the most serious problem people face is how to interact without violence against persons or property.

One conclusion of formalism is that democracy is—as most writers before the 19th century agreed—an ineffective and destructive system of government. The concept of democracy without politics makes no sense at all, and as we’ve seen, politics and war are a continuum. Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.

I think what he’s getting at here is that certain political disagreements can’t be resolved by compromise or live and let live policies. Murder is an example. There can’t be any compromise to the no-murder rule. He seems to think that most issues are like that, as if the regulatory preference for LED lighting over incandescent bulbs leads to violence.

Discussion

1. So far we’ve seen two objections to deomcracy. First, the dispersion of power demanded by democracy leads to unspecified bad things, because it slows or preventss technological improvements. That doesn’t  happen under one-man rule. Second democracy inexorably leads to violence. Yarvin doesn’t offer much support for these claims in the two essays I’ve read. Maybe there’s more ahead.

2. Yarvin’s criticism of progressivism, that its adherents can’t see its problems, seems wrong. I think some of Yarvin’s criticisms of our government have merit, and have been raised by progressives repeatedly.

3. Yarvin ignores our experience with one-man rule, going far back into history. People who have experienced democracy don’t want one-man rule. Like the American Revolutionaries, people want to have a say in their governments.

4. Almost all people want to live in a world free from violence. Violence is fairly low by historical standards in most functioning democracies. Even though we don’t have perfect security, our circumstances allow most of us to seek highe-orderr goals. So far, at least, Yarvin hasn’t engaged any of the complexities of humans of today, just as he hasn’t addressed any of the arguments of the proponents of democracy.

5. Here’s a story. My freshman year at Notre Dame, we were required to take a class in writing. My teacher was Mr. Yeltsin, who seemed to think it beneath him to teach writing to guys studying science and engineering. Mr. Yeltsin always wore a black suit, white shirt, black skinny tie, very much not the fashion in those days.

I was very proud of my first essay, about which I remember nothing except that when it came back, Mr. Yeltsin had written one word diagonally at the top: Jejeune. I had to look it up.

I wish Curtis Yarvin had taken writing from Mr. Yeltsin.

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Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future

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Index to posts in this series

In The Nation That Never Was, after telling us his version of a better story of America, Kermit Rosevelt writes:

We Americans are not perfect, either. Some of us are bad. Some are indifferent and unwilling to sacrifice for others. Some are easily distracted, misled, manipulated. We go forward and we go back. We elect Reagan, we elect Obama, we elect Trump. But what makes us American—our deepest ideal—is that we keep trying. America is born in an attempt to find a new and better way, to escape the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe. We don’t get it right immediately. Yet we keep going. We’re looking for America, and we know that the America we’re looking for isn’t something that’s given to us by Founding Fathers. It’s something we make, something we find inside ourselves. The true America is not handed down from the past but created anew by each generation, created a little better, and what we can give the future is the opportunity to get just a little closer than we did ourselves. That’s the promise that makes us American. That’s the promise we have to keep. P. 205.

It’s not exactly a reason his better story is better, but Roosevelt thinks the better story supports his theory of democracy. Compare that passage with this from one of my favorite books, Philosophy and Social Hope, by Richard Rorty:

Pragmatists … do not believe that there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearance–reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’. When they are asked, ‘Better by what criterion?’, they have no detailed answer, any more than the first mammals could specify in what respects they were better than the dying dinosaurs. Pragmatists can only say something as vague as: Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. When asked, ‘And what exactly do you consider good?’, pragmatists can only say, with Whitman, ‘variety and freedom’, or, with Dewey, ‘growth’. ‘Growth itself,’ Dewey said, ‘is the only moral end.’

They are limited to such fuzzy and unhelpful answers because what they hope is not that the future will conform to a plan, will fulfil an immanent teleology, but rather that the future will astonish and exhilarate.… Pp. 27-8, fn omitted.

The connection is obvious. Roosevelt says democracy is about the future. He says the better story fits with his view of democracy. Rorty says that Pragmatism is about the future. Later on he says that Pragmatism is well-suited to democracy, because the growth of freedom leads naturally to a democratic form of government. Both think we can have a better future.

The relation between philosophy and forms of government

Rorty calls himself a Pragmatist, after the only truly American philosophy, founded by the Americans C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Here’s a short series discussing some of the basic elements of Pragmatism: Method, Truth, and Applications.

In Rorty’s first sentence, “a way things really are” is a reference to the traditional philosophical problem called the appearance-reality dualism. It’s based on the fact that we only have the evidence of our senses. Therefore we cannot know the reality of the thing we perceive as it truly is. Pragmatism teaches that all we know is what our senses tell us, and there’s nothing beyond that, no Platonic forms, no hidden reality. For a fuller discussion, see the post on Truth linked above.

The older forms of philosophy searched for universal truths, unchanging verities, the way things really are. The results of that search establish a static universe based on the theory of everything created by one or more human beings. There is one answer to any problem, and it can be found by consulting the fixed principles — or the ruler’s command. As Roosevelt puts it, universal verities lead to “… the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe.”

Pragmatism and democracy are not necessarily connected. As Rorty points out, a Nazi could agree with and apply Pragmatic thinking. But there is a decisive difference between a society living with eternal verities, and one open to change.

A Problem

After reading Roosevelt’s book, I’ve begun to think the the real contest is between Americans dedicated to democracy in the Rorty/Dewey sense, and those committed to the unchanging verities they find in history or their sacred books or handed to them by authoritarian demagogues. The futurists want to make the future better for everyone. The traditionalists think everything is just fine as it is, or as it was at some date in the past, or as it would be in a new society built to effectuate their theory of everything. The futurists, as Rorty says, want the future to be amazing. The traditionalists can’t even handle the latest scientific achievements, like mRNA vaccines. The futurists think the economic status quo must be improved to benefit everyone. The traditionalists think the status quo is the best we can do.

And, not to put too fine a point on this, the people who really want things to remain as they are are the filthy rich; and the people who really want to return to the past are the religious fundamentalists. Both groups are apparently willing to sacrifice democracy to get what they want.

Left Theory

Perhaps you have noted that posts at Emptywheel are categorized. Most of mine are in the category Left Theory. I think the left needs a set of ideas about society and government that can be persuasively explained to non-lefties, and that link all our policy positions into a reasonably coherent whole. I offered a tentative economic theory here. In that post I say that a useful economic theory should be based on observation and experience, not on some grand theory of humanity, or, for that matter any other grand theory. It would serve as a tool for reaching our goals. It would change as we learned more new things. In this sense it would be Pragmatic.

Democracy is a broad theory about how governments should work. It’s a system that works for all people of good faith, giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the process of building the future. In that sense it is Pragmatic.

In the absence of eternal verities, we have to justify all of our beliefs. Why then do I believe democracy is the way forward? First, I believe that the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, is the best guiding principle humans have ever developed. I firmly believe that application of this principle would massively reduce the amount of pain and misery in the world, and that that would be a good thing. To do that, we need to get as many different ideas as we can about our future, both for deciding what we should be as a nation, and for solving problems. Democracy does that.

Also, I want to be part of the decision-making, so I should insure that others can and do participate if they want to.

Second, I agree with Jefferson that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That desire, that insistence, that we give consent to the government is effectuated by majority rule in a democracy.

And that’s where the conflict lies. In the US the minority party holds power despite the will of the majority. The current system of government makes that easy, especially with the rogue majority on SCOTUS.

Our current challenge is to make our democracy work.

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The Better Story

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Index to posts in this series

In the first chapters of The Nation That Never Was, Kermit Roosevelt explains the many problems with the standard story of the US. In the last chapter he offers us a better story. What follows is mostly Roosevelt’s version, but I’ve added more history. Roosevelt’s is at pp. 202-4.

A Version Of The Better Story

During the Revolutionary War, the colonists established a federation of the 13 original colonies. They wanted to keep their existing governments, and feared a strong central government. Their first try, the Articles of Confederation, failed because the central government was too weak and the states frequently ignored it. Then they tore up the Articles and replaced them with the Founders Constitution. In order to gain support for a stronger central government, they put in provisions supporting the continuation of slavery and gave states with smaller white populations greater power in the national government.

From the very beginning Black people resisted slavery by escaping and rebelling in the face of murder and torture. That continued under the Founders Constitution. They and the Abolitionists set up escape routes, and tried every legal route to saving escapees. They rallied, protested, spoke, wrote, appealed to Congress, and demanded freedom and equality. Gradually the movement for freedom became an powerful political force, driven by the principle that all men are created equal. They meant equality in a actual society, not in a hypothetical natural law sense as in the Declaration of Independence, Leaders included Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

Urged on by the Black people and the Abolitionists, the United States government resisted the expansion of slavery into the territories, which the Supreme Court supported in Dred Scott. That led to a war with the Slave States which was won by the United States. A major factor in the victory was the 200,000 Black soldiers who fought and died to end slavery. The victorious United States threw out the governments of the seceding states, forced the enactment of the Reconstruction Amendments, and passed laws to enforce them. This is called the Second Founding.

The Second Founding recreated the United States under the principles laid out by its Leader, Abraham Lincoln. His most famous statement of these principles is in his Gettysburg Address: the United States is “… conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….”

This became our guiding principle. Lincoln told us that we must dedicate ourselves to the principle of equality that the brave men of the United States had died for. He told us we were starting anew with this principle foremost in our minds:

… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

But not everybody agreed that we were starting over. The secessionists never quit. Their first step was to murder Abraham Lincoln. Then they took power in the former slave states. The Supreme Court gutted the Reconstruction Amendments. That enabled the secessionists and White Supremacists to establish legalized segregation, blessed by the Supreme Court in cases like Plessy v. Ferguson.

Black people never quit either. Despite participating in more wars on behalf of a segregated nation and being treated like dirt on their return, through decades of lynching and white race riots, they continued to fight for equality. After the Second World War, they began to achieve success and for once the Supreme Court didn’t block them.

The, beginning in the 1980s, the White Supremacists pushed back against equality, and achieved partial victories, especially in the revanchist Supreme Court. But Black people persevere, and with them all people of conscience, and this time other marginalized groups join the march towards equality, Black, Brown, Asian, LGBT, young people, all of us together.

That’s our nation: always striving for equality, always striving for fairness and equality, always fighting the darkness.

Addendum on Abraham Lincoln

When the Civil War started, Lincoln was willing to accept slavery as the price of unifying the states. That changed during the war. Roosevelt says the Fort Pillow Massacre played a big role in that change. Lincoln had established units of Black Soldiers. They were among the defenders of Fort Pillow, near Memphis in April, 1864. The secessionist troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, later the first head of the KKK, captured a group of US troops trying to surrender, including approximately 300 Black soldiers and their White officers. The Southerners murdered the Black soldiers in cold blood. A few days later Abraham Lincoln gave a speech called the Address At The Sanitary Fair. Here’s a short section.

A painful rumor, true I fear, has reached us of the massacre, by the rebel forces, at Fort Pillow, … of some three hundred colored soldiers and white officers, who had just been overpowered by their assailants. There seems to be some anxiety in the public mind whether the government is doing its duty to the colored soldier, and to the service, at this point. At the beginning of the war, and for some time, the use of colored troops was not contemplated; and how the change of purpose was wrought, I will not now take time to explain. Upon a clear conviction of duty I resolved to turn that element of strength to account; and I am responsible for it to the American people, to the christian world, to history, and on my final account to God. Having determined to use the negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any other soldier.

Why This Is A Better Story

Roosevelt offers several reasons why this is a better story. It has the advantage of being accurate, of course. The standard story ignores the role of Black People in our history. The better story includes Black people and tells us of their valor and perseverance, and the contributions they made to the story of America. In doing so it makes room for the contributions of other groups ignored by the standard story. The better story opens the way to real unity of all of us regardless of all the many ways in which we are different.

The better story gives us a new set of heroes. It valorizes the soldiers who personified the words of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn Of The Republic: “… As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free ….” These regular people, Black and White, are worthy of emulation. That’s not entirely true of the Founders, who fought for their own freedom, and were morally compromised by the denial of freedom to their slaves, their enslaved concubines, and enslaved children.

We can respect the leaders of the Second Founding, Lincoln and the Senators and Representatives who enacted the Reconstruction Amendments and related legislation. We do not have to consider their personal lives, because the better story is about contributions to the future, not an unhealthy fixation on the always problematic past.

Similarly, the better story tells us about the wrong way to be an American. People who oppose these heroes and the values they lived out, and their contributions to our democracy, are not good citizens.

The better story shows us how we can be better citizens: by trying to make America a better place.

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Dewey’s Aspirational View of Democracy

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Posts in this series

In the last post we looked at John Dewey’s view of democracy based on The Public And Its Problems, which I called a functional view. He explains the minimum requirements for maintaining a democratic form of government. The text for this post is The Ethics of Democracy, published in 1888, when Dewey was 29 and a professor at the University of Michigan. It offers the uplifting vision of democracy that was missing in the prior post. [1]

This is a philosophy paper. I take it to be a statement of the ideal, grounded in the reality Dewey sees, but laying out his hopes for the future if we pursue this ideal. It’s aspirational, not descriptive.

Dewey doesn’t assert that there a foundational principle from which he can reason his way to his views. His argument responds to the ideas of other writers, using them as a way of demonstrating his own thinking. Dewey takes up the ideas of Sir Henry Maines in his book Popular Government, and Plato’s Republic. Plato and other ancient Greek thinkers took as the highest virtue is excellence, arete, in action and contemplation. I think it helps to keep this in mind as we examine this work.

Maine was a British jurist. Dewey reads his book to say that democracy is fragile, accidental, and bound to failure. Dewey quotes Maine saying democracy will end “… in producing monstrous and morbid forms of monarchy and aristocracy.” In short Maine writes a defense of rule by an aristocracy of the best people, which I assume he derives from Plato’s Republic. Maine says democracy is the rule of the many, by which he means a quantitative, numerical form of government derived from the votes of a horde of isolated atomized individuals, all acting solely in their own interest. Dewey says that for Maine, “Democracy is othing but a numerical aggregate, a conglomeration of units.”

Dewey compares society to an organism whose existence emerges from the actions of the people who make it up. Society exists only through the actions of its members, and we only know society by looking at the actions of the members. The success of the society depends on the success of the individuals and vice versa. Dewey claims that this view arises from the Republic.

Dewey thinks that our actions are mediated by our socialization (my word), so that in acting we are not isolated atoms. Instead, each of us is different way of expressing that socialization, and thus part of the group. Dewey thinks that the will of society is expressed in this way, through the combined acts of members. The will of society gains some expression through the functional definition of democracy as selecting and overseeing our officials.

The key point of the paper for me is Dewey’s explanation of the value of democracy, the ethical justification for it. [2] In the first part of the paper, Dewey compares and contrasts aristocracy and democracy, as if they were merely two possible forms of government.

Democracy, like any other polity, has been finely termed the memory of a historic past, the consciousness of a living present, the ideal of the coming future. Democracy, in a word, is a social, that is to say, an ethical conception, and upon its ethical significance is based its significance as governmental. Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

Dewey says that aristocracy can make the same claims. But appointing the best and wisest doesn’t work. They become corrupt, or lose sight of the needs and desires of the majority. Every movement to greater democracy increases the number and diversity of the people who operate as the government and who oversee that operation.

Every forward democratic movement is followed by the broadening of the circle of the state, and by more effective oversight that every citizen may be insured the rights belonging to him. P. 21.

The aristocratic ideal is that the wisest force people into the spheres in which they can best serve the state. Dewey is appalled by the idea that the individuals in a society can be pushed around by anyone, let alone a group identifying itself as the best and wisest. He doesn’t say it, but the idea that the wisest know the needs of society is absurdly hubristic. In a democracy, people find their own way into what Dewey calls “their proper positions in the social organism.” P. 21. They take up roles in which they can best carry out the goals of society. They do this as individual persons, each with their own set of attributes.

There is an individualism in democracy which there is not in aristocracy; but it is an ethical, not a numerical individualism; it is an individualism of freedom, of responsibility, of initiative to and for the ethical ideal, not an individualism of lawlessness. In one word, democracy means that personality is the first and final reality. P. 23.

I think we would use personhood instead of personality. I think this means that the full flowering of the individual, with all the influence of society, is the driving force of democracy. It is from this personhood, this ethical individual, that other aspects of democracy emerge: including liberty, equality and fraternity. Dewey gives illustrations of the first two.

Liberty in the dominant view means the freedom to do as one chooses, without regard to any other concern. In this view, the law is meant to punish actions that society deems unacceptable.

Dewey rejects this view. Society creates law, using that term in a broad way to cover statutes and formal rules of the state, moral and cultural demands and taboos, and informal rules of behavior. The law of a society represents its will at any time. The personhood of each individual is formed under the influence of this law. Today we would say that each individual internalizes the law. Thus the exercise of liberty by an individual is controlled by the law as instantiated in that individual. [3]

In this way, liberty is self-restricted, but at the same time, the individual is free to explore the limits imposed by the law, and to seek changes. The individual is required to follow the formal laws and rules, but is free to flout the moral and cultural demands and taboos, and the informal rules, subject, of course, to social sanctions, like shunning and shaming. At bottom, in a democracy, the law is not imposed by an external force. It is shaped by individuals as one of their social roles, and internalized. It’s function is to channel the exercise of liberty.

Turning to equality, the vulgar meaning is numerical equality, equal portions of each desirable good. Dewey says that in a democracy equality has an ethical meaning. It begins with the view that each individual person is equivalent in moral worth to every other individual.

Wherever you have a man, there you have personality, and there is no trace by which one personality may be distinguished from another so as to be set above or below. It means that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility; … . P. 25.

This is the beauty of democracy: every person has the opportunity to become all that they can be, and those possibilities are unlimited. [4]

Discussion

This is a strikingly contemporary vision of democracy. Dewey lays out a set of values associated with democracy that resonate with my own. I wonder how many Republican legislators would support Dewey’s understanding of democracy.
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[1]The views in this paper did not change throughout his life.

At the core of his political thinking are the beliefs that science and democracy are mutually supportive and interdependent enterprises, that they are egalitarian, progressive and rest on habits of open social communication, and that powerful interpretations of liberal individualism and democracy have become ossified and self-defeating.

[2] See pages 19-24. I’m skipping a large part of this paper, There is a lot of it that is obscure. Some of the reasoning feels dated to me. I’m not familiar with the writings of some of the people he quotes. None of that detracts from my admiration for his overall conclusions.

[3] See page 23. I think I have summarized it correctly, but the language is obscure. Comments are welcome.

[4] This conception comports with the views of Elizabeth Anderson, which I discuss in this series. Anderson identifies as a follower of Dewey and a Pragmatist.

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Failing At Democracy

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Posts in this series.

One of the reasons I read old books is that they help me understand the chaotic events of our current times. In The Public And Its Problems, John Dewey lays out a theory of the democratic state, and as we shall see, we are doing badly at it.

Recall that the public is a group of people who have common interests that need to be addressed, usually arising from the actions of other people. The public empowers certain of its members with the task of representing and protecting those interests. We call the aggregate of those people the state. [1]

The origins of the state.

This description implicitly separates “the state” from specific forms of government. Any reasonably large group of people has some form of government, and the bigger the group the more complex the government. In order for there to be a state, there must be a public.

It may be said that not until recently have publics been conscious that they were publics, so that it is absurd to speak of their organizing themselves to protect and secure their interests. Hence states are a recent development. Chapter 3, The Democratic State, p. 116.

One way to think about this is that the modern self-aware public evolved from prior traditional societies. The serfs in a feudal society generally do not see themselves as participants in government, but as fulfilling pre-ordained social roles.

What is a Democratic State?

Dewey likes this definition:

Democracy is a word of many meanings. … But one of the meanings is distinctly political, for it denotes a mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials. P. 121.

It’s not a soaring aspiration. It’s a functional description of what has to be done. The democratic state needs two things: 1) a system for the public to select its officials; and 2) a system for regulating the conduct of officials.

Selection of officials.

In the US, we elect a small group of officials, and they in turn select others for subsidiary roles. The public, all of us, are responsible for selecting officials who will represent our interests in conflicts with individuals or groups of people, as corporations and militias. The public may fail at its task by selecting people who use their position to enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of the public or otherwise. Dewey says the crucial step is the selection of the right people. [2]

Regulating the Conduct of Officials.

The US Constitution provides two methods for regulating officials. These are impeachment, in the case of the executive and judicial branches, and expulsion, for the legislative branch. These are supplemented by rules that allow for sanctions short of removal, such as censure, and formal means for investigation through committees. There are statutes and formal regulations that constrain conduct of other officials, and many informal rules, now called norms. These laws and rules provide for sanctions.

The evolution of political democracy.

Political democratic states in Western Europe and North America evolved from older forms of government as the result of many small non-political developments. Dewey emphatically denies that these changes were driven by some overarching cause, such as an innate desire for democracy, or by dramatic changes in philosophical theories.

But theories of the nature of the individual and his rights, of freedom and authority, progress and order, liberty and law, of the common good and a general will, of democracy itself, did not produce the movement. They reflected it in thought; after they emerged, they entered into subsequent strivings and had practical effect. P. 123.

As an example, the ideas of John Locke were one of the theoretical sources for the Founding Fathers. His ideas are grounded in the rising economics of mercantilism, the attenuation of religious hegemony, and rising scientific understanding. He seems to be arguing against earlier thinkers grounded in earlier social, cultural, and intellectual structures. [3] Democracy was not the driving force of any of these changes. It emerged as a solution to the societal problems these non-political changes created.

Dewey doesn’t try to explain the entire evolution. He points to just two factors. First, the changes that led to democracy were driven by a fear of government and a desire to keep it to a minimum. This seems like a plausible reaction to an all-powerful monarchy, as existed in England and France, for example. Earlier governments were tied into other institutions, like the Church, and these too were feared or loathed. These institutions came to be seen as oppressive, not to groups of people but to individuals. There was already a growing tendency to think of the individual as the atomic unit. [4[ For Dewey, individualism was the result. [5]

The second important factor is the rise of science and technology. Over time it created changes in the nature of productive work and increased the range of consumer goods. People of all classes wanted more. The old rules became obstacles, and people began to question these rules and the system that produced them.

The old conception of Natural Law as the source of morality merged with the new idea that laissez-faire economics was a natural law in a synthesis that opposed artificial political laws. This led to the conclusion that government interference in property was bad, if not a moral evil, and the role of government should be little more than to protect property rights and personal integrity.

This is an overly simplified history, even more simplified by me, but it gives an idea of the genesis democracy as Dewey defines it. It leads to the conclusion that government officials are likely to be bad, so we should have short terms and serious control.

Problems arising from large organizations.

In earlier times, people’s primary relationships were face-to-face, family, friends, co-workers, church members, local people. The government was hardly relevant in day-to-day life. Its primary impact was taxes, the occasional war, and a few laws. By the time Dewey is writing, the primary relationships were impersonal, the individual was facing large corporate organizations in many aspects of life, including productive work. The state acted directly acted on individuals, touching their lives in many ways.

Group, or conjoint, action through business entities rivals the government in impact on individuals. Businesses “reach out to grasp the agencies of government;” not out of evil intent necessarily, but because they are the best organized groups of people. Even so, the power of these organizations has been controlled and directed by the state to some extent, and more is possible.

Discussion.

The second impeachment of Trump shows us that as a nation we have done badly at democracy. We elected unfit officials, people who are stupid, venal, conspiracy-ridden, power-maddened or a combination. Unfit legislators have for decades let the executive branch do monstrous things and refused to hold any of them accountable. The unfit people who staff our courts at all levels, but especially the unconstrained ideologues of SCOTUS have stymied legislative power, and have limited accountability of government and business elites with their pronouncements. Prosecutors are at fault as well, because they refuse even to investigate powerful private entities and their executives.

We fail democracy if we do not carry out our responsibility to regulate the conduct of our officials, and continue to select unfit people as our officials.

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[1] I discuss these matter in detail in earlier posts, especially … and ….

[2] Dewey discusses different ways in which leaders were selected in earlier times, which I skip. It’s worth noting that we still elect people who met those irrelevant criteria: military and religious leaders, children of officials, charismatic people, and old white men. Pp. 117-9.

[3] I agree with Dewey about this, but it’s very far afield.

[4] Think of Descartes, sunk in self-contemplation. We also see it in Locke.

[5] Individualism lies at the heart of social contract theory and neoliberalism. Dewey rejects social contract theory.

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