Introduction
This is not an advocacy post for anything; it's purely an attempt to understand the current moment. I don't have any positive suggestions on policy, and only one on managing our own place in the context; otherwise just thoughts on the conflict that other people seem very upset about. Several other posts provoked these thoughts, which I will link below.
In his post on Sunday links, AVI posted an article by Rob Henderson called "The Rage of the Failing Elite." I think the piece captures the youth-ish part of the opposition: in other words, the part that isn't captured by the "Whiteness and Oldness" narrative that AVI was interrogating the other day. It's not really a new idea; I've seen versions of it for years. The notion is that we're overproducing 'elites' of various sorts among the young, who are striving for positions that really don't exist; and they are aggrieved about finding that all that effort and expense was based on an illusion.
Part I: The Oldness and Whiteness
However, I think the real rage is on the side of the white and old part of the opposition. Not because, curiously, they are either white or old (except incidentally in the latter part because it is related to the contexts of their lives). It's because they spent their whole lives as devotees of the Liberal concept that dominated politics from FDR's time (and thus was well-settled when they were growing up) through LBJ's time (when they were young and formulating their political identites). They aren't progressives or socialists or Marixsts, they're liberals who are watching this titanic order destroyed in front of their eyes.
Heather Cox Richardson, on that side, frames the issue this way during a long discussion of how much she thinks that the collapse of that state will hurt poor and weak people:
"Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown, but that obscures the actual fight at hand. What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act: the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Today’s fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the 'Department of Government Efficiency,' and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.
"Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans. Trump is determined to resurrect the pre–New Deal system in the United States and refuses to entertain any notion that his vision will not work."
There is some structural truth to that criticism, but such a change -- though titanic -- merely parallels the changes of Woodrow Wilson or FDR or LBJ. They're just in the other direction. Yet it's legally just as permissible to change the one way as the other; and it's not unreasonable to prefer a solution that is closer to what the Constitution actually says. These systems in many ways affront the Constitution's language, passing vast power and control out of the elected government and into the unelected bureaucracy. That's not obviously more legitimate than trying to restore a more strictly constitutional order.
Part II: Kindness, Unkindness, and the Stopping of Thought
In addition to watching the institutions destroyed that they believed in, and considered part of upholding a more just and better social order, they had a general ethic of being "nice" and, even more importantly, of being "kind." All this blatant destruction is being done by people who are willing to not be nice and not be kind. Trump's mockery of them isn't nice and it isn't kind, and it enrages them as much because of that as because they're the targets of it: indeed, they seem angrier when they aren't the targets of it. They were much madder about the Mariachi videos targeting Hispanic politicians than about anything pointed at old and white liberals.
Nor are they entirely wrong about that. I tend to find Trump's antics amusing and buffoonish, meant to mock rather than to harm; and since all of these politicians very much deserve to be mocked, I often even find the mockery healthy. Most of Trump's supporters, especially the red-hat wearing, dancing on truck MAGA crowd, seem to be having a lot of fun rather than being motivated by anger or hatred. Yet some of the most repellent people of the present moment really are those -- coincidentally also usually old and white -- on Trump's side who feel a deep hate for their political opponents. They are in their way just as repellent as the young Marxists who muse about how nice it would be if more Republicans and conservatives were killed.
None of these genuinely repellent types have any real power, though. They're both of them raging away and making life less pleasant for the rest of us, but they don't actually control any levers for either side. The Democratic Party is motivated by the public sector unions and their big corporate and tech donors, to include Bezos' ex-wife who is flooding the zone with donations. They care about the donations, not really about any of the apparent things they are fighting over rhetorically.
The repellent ones on the Republican side are just angry old men whose bitterness instantly causes them to be rejected as serious by anyone at all. The Republicans will take their votes, and may performatively listen to them with social media posts, but won't actually be motivated to follow their ideas -- insofar as they have ideas, which is rare since they're too busy being angry to think. When they say something that sounds like an idea, it usually turns out to be just them applying an old heuristic from their youth to a current problem without further examination; but heuristics are shortcuts to thought, not actual thought; they're 'this usually works' ready-made solutions that can be applied without further thinking about it.
And, in fairness, those old and white liberals are also doing exactly the same thing from their side: they just have different heuristics. When you hear someone on that side saying that something is "apartheid," that's them stopping themselves from having to think further about the problem and applying a ready-made solution. There's no further examination of whether that language is appropriate, or actually a good analogy, or if there's a better analogy, or if there's even a more-generous way of considering the other side's view. Everything stops once the problem is labeled "apartheid" -- we don't need to think any further than that, we just need to oppose it resolutely and consider that side to be moral monsters. They deploy language like that all the time: genocide, apartheid, 'a kind of segregation,' 'MAGA is just like the KKK.'
Chesterton wrote a whole chapter called "The Suicide of Thought" which warns about 'thoughts that stop thoughts.' It only imperfectly applies here, but the general warning about allowing your thinking to be stopped cold with labels and heuristics carries over.
Part III: A Very Limited Sort of Solution
I feel weirdly disconnected from this fight. All of those factions believe in much larger and more powerful government and government programs than I do. Trump might be trying to overturn some of the New Deal constitutional order -- which could be rephrased, 'to restore the actual constitutional function to the Federal government' -- but he wants to replace it with a presidency as powerful as Woodrow Wilson's was, with the support of a Supreme Court and a legislative branch that would pass genuinely unconstitutional laws against freedom of speech and of criticizing the government. Meanwhile, pace Heather Cox Richardson, I still feel like the poor and the weak would be better off without government assistance, which always comes along with government control of the intimate spaces of our lives that they are offering to 'assist' us with; the lives of the poor and weak might not immediately improve by the loss of transfer payments, but eventually they would figure out how to feed and house themselves and be freer for it.
They have a lot more they agree about than any of them agree with me. It's just unpleasant to watch them being so upset all the time, driving these cycles of rhetorical conflict that occasionally -- at the fringes -- result in real but pointless violence. Even the violence isn't really going to change anything because it doesn't touch the actual levers of power.
So I've largely disconnected from politics, but I still have to deal with the older of my relatives (who are, of course, also white) who are very upset and given to explosions of rage about politics for the first time in their lives. I don't want them to win or to get their way, so I won't support their protests or striving; I'll just try to get them to talk about something besides politics while we're together.
Increasingly that's hard. The Big Show is occupying everyone's thoughts; even I'm writing about it this morning, when Aristotle would be a better use of my time. It's hard to let go of the drama thrust constantly before us, but I think it is the wisest course.
21 comments:
Even the violence isn't really going to change anything because it doesn't touch the actual levers of power.
So I've largely disconnected from politics
This, I submit, is part of the purpose of the Left's physical violence--and the vast bulk of the violence is from the Left. Their purpose is precisely to intimidate those of whom they disapprove to leave the political field so they can proceed unopposed, or more weakly opposed.
This is not to suggest that you've been intimidated off the field; you have not. But many, too many IMO, have been intimidated off the field. And you and others like you, although unintimidated, have left the field as well.
And this: the actual levers of power actually reside in us American citizens, in our aggregate as the the sovereign We the People. The persons who proximately work the levers of power are those we choose to work them through our elections. Even the bureaucrats of the Deep State or the Administrative State or the Whatever Label State are the result of our elections: those we elect do the hiring and firing of those bureaucrats or create the mechanisms for those hirings and firings.
Eric Hines
I don't think there is a political field. I think the people actually resorting to violence are too few in number to affect outcomes; and the ones engaged in screaming blue hatred at each other are ineffective. There's really nothing to contest at this time. We may come to a passage when that isn't true, but right now there's nothing any of us can do to solve the various crises, most of which are the result of a recent election with a majority decision that is now working itself out in a broadly constitutional manner (which is the best you ever get; and the whole FDR/LBJ system is mostly extra-constitutional, as has been the various gun control regimes and free-speech suppression through cancel cultures and corporate/university speech codes, etc; mostly the crises are on balance to the good in breaking an older system that really does much harm).
...the actual levers of power actually reside in us American citizens, in our aggregate as the the sovereign We the People. The persons who proximately work the levers of power are those we choose to work them through our elections. Even the bureaucrats of the Deep State or the Administrative State or the Whatever Label State are the result of our elections: those we elect do the hiring....
That's exactly what I was taught in Civics class, as apparently you were too. It just hasn't got the benefit of being at all true of the way things actually work. The only elected official in the whole Executive Branch is the President; the VP's constitutional duties are all in the Senate (of which he is the President). Sometimes he is appointed other responsibilities, and the President appoints a small number of officers at the top of various bureaucracies.
But the hiring and firing is far and away done by the bureaucracy itself. They choose their own people, and are so vast as to be self-insulating from the power of the elected Executive. As for the elected Legislature, since the Supreme Court gave in to FDR's program of letting Congress delegate its functions to the bureaucracy, Congress just grants them broad authorities and funding that it lets them decide how to spend. And the Congress agreed to that, because it let them focus on their real problems of fundraising for the next election and getting elected. They aren't even interested in governance. Almost all federal criminal prosecutions aren't for violations of the law, but of a regulation with the force of law passed by the bureaucracy.
The old Civics lesson doesn't apply to our system except as a critique of how it hasn't functioned since before either of us was born. That was how it was supposed to be; but it bears no relation to how it is. Neither of us nor anyone here, nor all of us put together, has the power to change or even affect that titanic structure.
So I regard the crises as the best part of the whole thing. I don't want either side to win, because both of them want a bigger Leviathan than I deem tolerable to say nothing of desirable. But they could both lose, which is to be devoutly hoped. Hoped, since there's nothing I can do to effect it, nor even affect it.
he wants to replace it with a presidency as powerful as Woodrow Wilson's was
Or perhaps the Presidency defined in Article Two, Sentence One. There is, after all, a reason for elections and as someone said, "Elections have consequences."
Most of us are aware that the FedGov is spying on us continually--or could be, whether directly or through its cat's paws of Google (et.al )
It's about time that the FedGov goes back to providing good mail service and a national defense against enemies foreign, rather than making up BoogeyMen enemies domestic.
E Hines..."This, I submit, is part of the purpose of the Left's physical violence--and the vast bulk of the violence is from the Left. Their purpose is precisely to intimidate those of whom they disapprove to leave the political field so they can proceed unopposed, or more weakly opposed"
Not only physical violence, though, also, a very hostile verbal style rather than one intended to persuade. See Intimidation vs Persuasion:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/63567.html
I think Trump and many of his supporters think of themselves as restoring some pre-Roosevelt America and Heather Cox Richardson is right insofar as she understands that. But they aren't really. It is only arresting the growth of the New-Deal inspired ideal of government. It will be at most a dip in the growth, more likely a pause or even only a slowing of its growth. I think you are right that the rage comes from the 55+ group who feels as if their moral foundations are being attacked, and the attack is succeeding. I remember so many conversations over the last thirty years that it's these conservatives who are afraid of change. That's a projection, and some of us have known it for years but been unpersuasive
D29:
Or perhaps the Presidency defined in Article Two, Sentence One. There is, after all, a reason for elections and as someone said, "Elections have consequences."
That's part of what I meant by the first paragraph of my response to Mr. Hines. A lot of this fierce rhetoric and hardball -- Senate filibusters, keeping the House out of session, refusal to back down -- is really just the playing out of the clear election result. People are screaming about it, but the fact that they are screaming doesn't mean there's a battlefield to fight on. Maybe they're just screaming as part of the disruptive process of working out that result.
AVI, there are superannuated conservatives who are actually Conservative. I'm one, and therefore a genuine minority. Please treat me with reverence and/or send money. Thank you for your attention to this matter. "PJBuchanan Forever!!"
I think the people actually resorting to violence are too few in number to affect outcomes....
How many would it take to satisfy you that there are more than a few? In the last Presidential campaign, one wannabe murderer came within a deuce of drastically altering that campaign's outcome. Another came nearly as close. And Trump wouldn't have been (and still might not be, if the Left gets its way) President to be murdered.
Before that, a single wannabe mass murderer came within a deuce of significantly altering the makeup of a sitting House of Representatives. He did nearly succeed in murdering one of the Congressmen who was high up in his party's hierarchy.
Today we have Antifa, et al. openly and violently resisting ICE and CBO efforts, and they're ramping up, actively aided and abetted by West Coast governors and city mayors and by judges favoring illegal aliens over actual law.
We have folks offering bounties on ICE agents and at least one put out a hit offer on a currently sitting Federal AG. What happens when those go underground and so harder to detect?
It's also not new, though not as common. In the ante bellum years, one Congressman attacked and nearly beat to death an opposing Congressman, on the House floor.
There's no political field? Certainly there is, even a violent one. It's just that, until the current viscerally violent Left, too used to getting their own way, stepped up their openly violent "resistance," the pace of battle was episodic in two-year and larger four-year cycles.
You're concerned that our Constitution and our political system isn't working as designed. That's on us citizens, who do indeed have the wherewithal to restore Constitutional government. All we have to do is do it, with our voting--all of us, not just a bare 60-ish percent of the electorate.
And yes, all those bureaucrats who are hired and not fired by their fellow bureaucrats can be done away with. That's another thing elections are for: the ultimate bosses there are the politicians we choose to elect.
At bottom: no field of battle for politics? Somebody once said that we may have no interest in politics, but politics has an interest in us. Another pointed out that those who are too smart to take part in politics are doomed to be ruled by those who are dumber. The same holds for those too lazy or too intimidated or too... will be ruled by those who are not.
Eric Hines
I’m trying to imagine what sort of political engagement on my part, or any of our parts, or all of us collectively, could stop a lone assassin on the other side of the country.
Or even if we’d been there. All those people physically present, excepting the police, were there precisely to engage politically. He was surrounded by engaged political support, but it happened anyway.
For that matter, he was protected by police snipers and the Secret Service, as well as political supporters. It happened anyway.
You have to be realistic about this. We’re not facing the kind of political violence that would be helped by popular mobilization, and ordinary political engagement can’t address certain problems. Right now I can’t think of any engagement strategies that would improve things nor make it more likely that my preferred policies were considered by the powerful. The occasional successful assassin does alter history through his actions, but he has no influence over what comes of it; none of the assassins attacking Presidents got any policy preference out of it.
We’re not facing the kind of political violence that would be helped by popular mobilization....
We are, though, in the cities where violent mob action is attempting to stop Federal law enforcement from functioning and where city governments are ordering the police force to not support Federal law enforcement. Those confrontations are a stone's drop from killing ICE and CBO officers. Honest Americans can mass and confront that. If they--we--don't, that mob action will spread to other cities and ultimately into open rebellion.
Details on that needed response I won't say in a public forum.
The lone assassin most assuredly got the policy he was looking for with his murder: the elimination of the politician he wanted gone. You may think that's not a valid policy, but the murderer is satisfied that it is. It's his mindset, not yours or mine, that matters in that. We can't stop the assassin acting alone, but we can limit the violence to them. It takes those in the area to be willing to get physical themselves.
Finally--and again--we are the powerful if we're willing to act. The politicians will consider our preferred policies, and enact them, if we vote and keep firing politicians who do not follow our instructions and replacing them with those who do, save only if we're outvoted by others with other preferred policies. The violence in those voting contests will abate a whole lot if the ones perpetrating it are roundly crushed, or if the rest of us allow them to win decisively.
It's only idealism if we just sit around and idealize instead of acting.
Eric Hines
Mr. Hines:
"We are [facing the need for popular mobilization], though, in the cities where violent mob action is attempting to stop Federal law enforcement... Those confrontations are a stone's drop from killing ICE and CBO officers. Honest Americans can mass and confront that. If they--we--don't, that mob action will spread to other cities and ultimately into open rebellion.... Details on that needed response I won't say in a public forum.... We can't stop the assassin acting alone, but we can limit the violence to them. It takes those in the area to be willing to get physical themselves."
Clearly we have a very different view of all of this. I saw that the Portland Police eliminated the ANTIFA encampment by the Federal building in Portland yesterday. The Portland Police, not the Feds or the National Guard; which demonstrates that the mobs were just an arm of the local government, which the government was allowing and encouraging to provide pressure on the Feds. A citizen militia wasn't needed in addition to Federal pressure; in fact, with just a little Federal pressure, the city packed it in and called off its dogs.
(The irony of the young ANTIFA 'communists' and 'anarchists(!)' proving to be nothing more than an arm of the local government ought not to be lost on them, but it probably is.)
"if we vote and keep firing politicians who do not follow our instructions and replacing them with those who do, save only if we're outvoted by others with other preferred policies. The violence in those voting contests will abate a whole lot if the ones perpetrating it are roundly crushed,"
There are no elections in North Carolina this year except municipal ones; and I don't live in a municipality. For the same reason "mobs in cities" are not readily apparent to me. I see them reported occasionally on Twitter, but not the news; unlike in 2020, when BLM 'peaceful protests' were burning up the cities nationwide and even the news couldn't ignore them (though they tried to put a happy face on it).
I just don't think there's any need for that kind of mobilization to support the Federal government at this time; not even in Portland, and if not there, not anywhere at all. Yet if it were needed, it would be in cities in California and New York and Chicago where the local government would arrest you for attempting it. California especially, but New York is about to elect a socialist to head the NYPD. It's for the citizens of those places to 'vote them out,' and instead they seem very inclined to do the opposite.
I'm not entirely sure where you are getting this supposition about Trump recreating a pre-FDR America. Trump hasn't said word one about ending Social Security which even GWB was interested in partially privatizing. If anything the changes he has proposed would make it more permanent as a source of retirement income. I believe he has proposed changes to various non-retirement disability programs and some eligibility rules that enable non-citizens to obtain benefits but there's no rollback of the program planned that I can see. His plans for other government spending and activities are similar in that he's largely talking about shifting to more direct public financing of various business projects from large grants to service organizations but that's more about the direction than the amount. The only thing that I've heard he's definitely working on cutting is Federal regulations. As Dad29 relates, anybody with a libertarian or old-school conservative bent in the GOP is likely to be largely upset at the direction Trump is moving. This is one of the reasons that I say the Democrats made a huge mistake (which likely will almost kill their party) in 2016 by not treating Trump as a normal politician. He does not have 'small government' convictions and would likely have been easily co-opted into approving grandiose projects.
I don't think it's a supposition, exactly; the administration has declared its intention to undo the independent bureaucracy that FDR largely created, LBJ expanded, and that Carter added to on the margins (as D29 points out, all these 'independent' agencies are strictly speaking unconstitutional -- or at least extra-constitutional).
Likewise there has been some movement to rescind the National Firearms Act and restore the 2nd Amendment.
For now Trump's deregulation agenda -- one of the genuine bright spots -- has not gone as far as rejecting the delegation of legislative authority to the bureaucracy. That was FDR's biggest single achievement from his perspective; it was what the court-packing fight was all about, forcing the SCOTUS to accept legislative delegation to the executive bureaucracy. I don't know if we'll get anywhere near there -- nor to some of the other things you mention.
But I agree that Trump is no small-government guy. That was my point sort of at the end of the OP.
Thank you as always, Mr. Foster. I don't always get around to thanking you for each of these references, but I always appreciate your input.
He's looking pretty good at the moment, isn't he?
I almost met him once. When he ran for President in 1992, me and several of my friends went down to see him speak at the Varsity restaurant in Atlanta. (If you don't know about the Varsity, it's a landmark that sells hot dogs and hamburgers originally across from Georgia Tech.)
We got there early enough that we beat his security team, and ended up sitting in the back room where he was supposed to speak. When they realized that we were behind their lines, so to speak, they threw us out because we were young enough to look like trouble.
He didn't quite make their picture page, along with the Presidents, Governors, and Secretaries of State (as well as what I suppose are celebrities).
https://thevarsity.com/pages/our-story
I would argue the purpose of the mobilizations is to prove that the local governments haven't been doing their job, and had they, peace and order could have been had long ago- but they chose not to do that. I think it's pretty effective at that too. The Democrats in those states and cities can't claim there is nothing they could do, or increased policing wouldn't make a difference, or what have you. Those excuses get left naked. Maybe that's reason enough.
After reading all the comments, I also think about VonClauswitz's quote being inverted by Foucoult- Politics is warfare by other means- and how that really is the core mantra of the socialist left, and that is the Democrat party now. If they're fighting a cloaked war, you can expect that things will become warlike- with all the confusion and messiness that entails. I think the ensuing unkindness and stopping of thought is largely a product of that. So what's the solution? If it's a "war" in their minds, the only solution is to defeat them, or make them so powerless they 'sue for peace', I suppose. As in war, that may mean having to put niceties aside, as it were.
I was speaking of 'popular mobilization,' not the mobilizations of the Guard. I meant that ordinary citizens should take up arms and form militia units to go on patrol with the police; such a thing does not seem warranted to me at this time (nor has it been requested by the police, nor even by Trump).
Although some people (incorrectly) argue that the Guard replaced the militia in the United States -- and thus that a mobilization of the Guard might constitute a 'popular mobilization' -- this is not true in fact or in law. Title 10 of the US Code includes language defining the unorganized militia, and allowing the President to call it into service; and even outside of that, the militia cannot be abolished under the Second Amendment. If the government passed a law forbidding the people from ever rising up and ordering themselves into militia, such a law would be unconstitutional and therefore void (as well as, if a government tried to enforce it, a very good reason for a popular mobilization against the government).
Although some people (incorrectly) argue that the Guard replaced the militia in the United States....
To pursue this, briefly, in a somewhat different direction, some (many?) States have a sort-of popular militia in the form of State Guards, loose analogs to the National Guard. The State Guards are solely under the control of the Governor, mobilizable by the Governor, and cannot be Federalized by the central government.
In Texas' case, though, the State Guard would be useful in supporting police (or national guard) during mostly peaceful riots and other periods of unrest only via doing the paperwork and other limited ways. The Texas State Guard is, by design, unarmed, and it's tailored to disaster handling--traffic and shelter control, transporting food and water for resupply, and the like.
Eric Hines
"popular mobilizations" staring me right in the face. This is what I get for commenting when reading right before bedtime with tired eyes and mind.
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