Yves here. This post makes important observations about how the governing order in the US has changed in recent decades. However, yours truly is not wild about framing the major shifts in our governing order as new/different Constitutions. This strikes me as what Lambert would call a category error. The US Constitution is a written document, with some amendments, whose meaning in practical terms has been repeatedly tested in courts, and sometimes revised away from older interpretations. Major shifts in policy aims and new winners and losers among the groups vying for power IMHO is not the same as a change in the Constitution, even if the changes in the ruling order are significant.
I would be happier if the formulation were more along the line of positing that as the US aged, the role of the written Constitution and even court rulings on it were diminishing due to the rise in importance of other vectors of influence. One big one is how “code is law” as in administrative/tech convenience has come to assume an outsized role in relation to law and regulations.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
—Presidential Oath of Office, U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1
“Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”
—Richard Nixon to David Frost, 1977“We are living in a post-Constitutional time”
—Russell Vought
The American Constitution, for all its virtues, is a deeply flawed document. No one disputes that today.
We have, for example, from the start and by design, a mode of government that privileges the privileged. Consider James Madison: “The Senate ought to represent the opulent Minority”, and the fact that, as a result of this manipulation of representative government, less than 5% of the U.S. population controls 30% of the Senate.
Or consider the Electoral College. By my calculation, the 38 least populous states control 280 electoral votes. My energy-hog AI assistant tells me that this represents about 15% of the population. If this AI calculation is off, it’s not by a lot.
And the percentage of votes needed to win the EC is even smaller if each state is won by the least votes needed. In theory, eight percent of the country could control both the Senate and the presidency.
Four Modern Assaults on the FDR Constitution
This flawed Constitution has been under assault for decades. Hard-line conservatives would say, disingenuously in my opinion, that this assault on democratic rule started with the Constitution’s third iteration, that of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
I say “disingenuously” because conservatives, by definition, always promote aristocracy — a landed gentry, a privileged class, a ruling moneyed elite — whether they say so or not, while our written Constitution, through its iterations so far, has always increased the people’s control of government.
The New Deal Constitution is the last one the U.S has agreed on, and it’s been under assault, in more ways than one, by more groups than one, for more than 50 years. I want to enumerate them briefly, these assaults — first, to provide a larger philosophical context for much of the writing here; and second, to provide set-up for expanded discussion.
For a discussion of our three Constitutions to date, see here:
Assault by The Security State
Briefly, a muscular security apparatus is the natural enemy of democratic rule. (If you don’t believe that democratic rule is desirable — for example, that the “ignorant” shouldn’t vote, or that socialists should be deported — feel free to stop right here. This discussion isn’t for you.)
Most would place the security-state assault in 1947, starting with Truman’s desire not to demobilize the World War II military. Gore Vidal, writing in Vanity Fair:
Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only if he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. [emphasis added]
I would argue that it goes back to the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, America’s version of the universal Western panic over the Russian Revolution of 1917 (which parallels, by the way, the similar Western panic over the great revolution in France, which they tried to reverse, unsuccessfully, with armies in the field). The Palmer Raids created the Hoover FBI.
Obviously, the events of 9/11 allowed that now-lovable fascist Dick Cheney to put the country on a military (“anti-terrorist”) footing from which it’s never recovered. In fact, it’s just gotten much worse.
Assault by Neoliberal Economics
The modern assault by neoliberal economics, starting with the Mont Pélerin Society, founded, perhaps not coincidentally, in 1947, the same year as the national security state. The go-to person to read about neoliberalism in Notre Dame professor Philip Mirowski, author of The Road from Mont Pelerin and Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste.
In reviewing the latter book, Paul Heideman correctly writes in Jacobin:
Joining a long line of thinkers, most famously Karl Polanyi, Mirowski insists that a key error of the Left has been its failure to see that markets are always embedded in other social institutions. Neoliberals, by contrast, grasp this point with both hands — and therefore seek to reshape all of the institutions of society, including and especially the state, to promote markets. Neoliberal ascendancy has meant not the retreat of the state so much as its remaking. [emphasis added]
And neoliberals of both parties, Milton Friedman Republicans and Clinton-Obama Democrats, have been remaking the state ever since toward their only real goal, to increase rule by the rich by increasing their wealth.
We’re under that assault today. All of the changes modern Democrats and Republicans have made to diminish — or even eliminate — our government’s ability “promotes the general welfare” work to that end. “Let the rich win absolutely” is the neoliberal mantra, whether admitted or not.
That battle is over; a return to FDR economics is, I think, impossible, given where we are now and how many have collaborated to bring us here.
Assault by Executive Rule
Theorists on the right would identify the era of the muscular president as starting with Franklin Roosevelt. In that, they probably aren’t wrong. In a strong-man era responding to near global disruption (the Great Depression and the post-WWI era in Europe), a strongman seemed needed to deal with disruptive times. Even in “democratic” America (an arguable point), “someone to take charge” emerged and was widely welcomed.
But in Roosevelt’s case, the “strongman” favored of the people, and the FDR Constitution dethroned the rich and greatly empowered the rest. The first crack in that consensus came from Richard Nixon, who arguably committed treason to win the White House in 1968, was forgiven his Watergate sins by Gerald Ford, who appears to have traded his own high elevation for Nixon’s exoneration.
Thus begins the era of the always-forgiven president. No president since has been prosecuted for violating his oath, nor for any violation that would put him in legal jeopardy for any act committed in office.
That absolution is absolutely bipartisan. Reagan was forgiven his Iran-Contra crimes, Bush I as well. Reagan and Bush’s likely treasonous intervention in the Iran hostage negotiation was dismissed, both by the government and the public. Bush II and Cheney both should be in prison for torture (for sure) and likely mass murder (their unprovoked assault on Iraq). Obama murdered Americans on executive order. And probably worse, he confirmed George Bush’s crimes by letting them go (“look forward, not back” on torture).
And so it goes. What crimes one of them didn’t commit, he confirmed what others did by non-prosecution. Trump v. United States isn’t an deviation, it’s a confirmation. The “unitary executive” didn’t start last year; we’ve permitted it all along. The only people opposed to it are those out of power, and then only temporarily.
Assault by the Radical Right
This assault is above and beyond neoliberal distortions. While neoliberalism has worked successfully to replace the FDR state with its opposite, all the while keeping its forms, the radical right assault wants to alter those forms, to make them conform to the Real Constitution today, the one we actually use.
The Real Constitution lets the president murder by order. The Real Constitution lets the president go to war for any hand-waving reason he wishes to, against any nation he wishes. The Real Constitution lets the president spy on the people, all of them, all of the time, by any means spying is possible.
The Real Constitution lets the executive branch break any law, whenever, in its wisdom, it thinks it necessary. It doesn’t even have to provide the reason. “National security,” you know.
But changing those forms makes this assault look consequential. An example from The Atlantic (via Tony Wikrent at Ian Welsh’s site):
If a crisis is coming, it’s because [Russ] Vought [OMB director and major right-wing theorist] is courting one.
[Steve] Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”
… Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.
What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.” [emphasis added]
See Wikrent’s piece for more; he includes examples from many sources.
Conforming the Law to What’s Practiced
We’re not breaking the rule of law; we’re starting to change the law to conform to what we do, and building new law upon that. For all these reasons…
- The elevation of the security state to a branch of government
- The neoliberal capture of economic policy
- The rapid transmutation of presidents into kings
- The push by the radical right to enshrine the unspoken, broken Third Constitution as settled law
…America sits at the cusp of radical change. Not as radical, mind you, as what we’ve done. But it will look radical when our past unofficial amendments are made explicit, and those rules are built upon.
I think that this article — and Yves Smith’s comment up top — may benefit from being “re-read” against the idea of party systems. The U.S. of A. has had six — with some political analysts positing the beginning of the seventh party system under Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_system#United_States
Relying on the idea of party system, we see that FDR and the New Deal Coalition arose in the late 1920s / early 1930s to hold on to the branches of government (more or less) till it was broken up by segregationists / movement conservatives / Southerners who had no place to go.
As a general rule, in U.S. history, there has always been a crazy party and a stupid party. The most recent system is remarkable for having two parties of not-all-that-smart thieves.
This doesn’t mean that the U S of A has been through three or four constitutions. Admittedly, the third party system was animated in part by the revolutionary thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the U.S. constitution. Ending the 3/5s clause of the U.S. Constitution was, indeed, revolutionary. Although equality for the people formerly enslaved never was, and won’t be, achieved. Real equality is just so darn difficult, doncha know?
It is also important to consider the role of the U.S. Supreme Court, which famously did nothing about slavery, only to, for all practical purposes, ignite the Civil War with the Dred Scott decision. Then, after the Civil War, the Supreme Court was, errrr, distinguished by protecting property over people. Same pattern, just not protecting the ownership of people. The U.S. Supreme Court, with the exception of the Warren Court and the Burger Court, pretty much interests itself only in property rights. The U.S. Constitution in a nutshell — it’s all property rights, and if you want to have any benefits from the Bill of Rights, you have to be in the streets.
Has Empire damaged the U.S. Constitution? Indeed. The Reign of Bad Emperors from Reagan to Trump is wearing down the country even as it fills the bank accounts of a minority.
What is to be done about the current and future bad emperors? Prostate cancer will have its way with the most recent one.
I’d say the reign of bad emperors began with at least Nixon who WAS a crook, but definitely includes Ford because he never should have pardoned Nixon because it was just such an awful precedent. And Carter formally abandon the full employment doctrine which meant the final nail in the coffin to the New Deal coalition.
aye, DJG…beat me to it.
but to pick a nit, in that schema, reagan ended the fdr system.
and, last i looked, the reagan system was still evolving….clinton finished what reagan started…and then lil george and O tied up the loose ends….but all that doesnt really account for trump/biden/trump.
however:, adjacent to the hyperpolitics thing from yesterday or the day before was this:
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-modern-counterrevolution/
this schema makes even more sense to me….and indeed does account for trump.
been wandering through it all am, in between stacking firewood for the bar(ugh…i can tell that i have already doomed myself for teh rest of the day)
amfortas the hippie: Thanks for the link. The essay is indeed tightly argued, and Harcourt ties together historical events well.
This observation is insightful and witty, but it doesn’t apply only to Trump. Let us recall, brethren, the actions of George W. Bush and the two cooked-up proxy genocides (Ukraine and Palestine) incited and funded by Joe Biden. Nevertheless: ‘I don’t want to minimize the extravagance or the radical nature of President Trump’s daily spectacles—what Marx referred to, speaking of Louis-Napoléon, as his “coups d’état en miniature every day.” ‘
What Harcourt means (going out on a limb here) is the continuing use of the power of the executive as a battering ram against the law.
The theme of counterinsurgency (since late 1940s / early 1950s) as turned against the U.S. populace is worth consideration. Some remarked (likely here at Naked Capitalism in the comments) that Trump is treating USonions as they have treated everyone else through the years. “We came, we saw, he died,” and the wreckage of Libya is now drifting back to the Motherland. Along with Indonesia and its famous massacre, Vietnam, and the death of Lumumba.
As Harcourt puts it, “The counterinsurgency warfare strategies then returned home to roost. An early example was J. Edgar Hoover’s development of the COINTELPRO program on U.S. soil to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived internal threats.”
This is excellent: “I set aside characterizations like “fascist,” “authoritarian,” or “totalitarian” to describe President Trump and this moment. “Fascism” is too closely associated with the fasces of Mussolini, Hitler’s Third Reich, and mid-20th century Europe. Historical precedents can be useful points of contrast and comparison, but lump too many of them together and their essential features get lost; plus, the U.S. has a distinct history with chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racism.”
This is tragic: The reputed quote was from a dispute over Cherokee sovereignty, poorly protected by the Supreme Court, with the result that is the Trail of Tears. ‘And Vice President Vance has advised President Trump: “when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” ‘
Good thing that J.D. Vance converted to the nutso rightwing end of Catholicism — or he’d be even more cruel. One hopes that his exposure to rightwing Augustine fanbois will lift him slightly above the banality of evil.
ay. ive long advocated (including on NC) that anyone actually serious about determining the shape of the world, and figuring out some pragmatic method of dealing with it, should consult teh various us army field manuals on counterinsurgency.
its all there….and has been since at least viet nam.
next on the list i plucked from that(rather good) website:
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/reflections-on-an-inverted-revolution/
Dylan being Dylan, he sorta succumbs to the latent TDS for the first 2/3’ds…but still has some compelling ideas about where we’re at…and that gel up nicely with Harcourt.(MAGA as a form of Leninism!!)
but its the last 1/3 that struck me, wherein he says we ought to revive jeffersonianism,lol…reading it, i felt like a light was shining on me(the whole jeffersonian yeoman farmer thing is somewhere near the root of me).
amfortas thank you for this link to the ideasletter. Took me a while to chew on it, thanks to DJG Reality Czar for the book report. Who knew that we’d live to see our own Second Empire. We’ll quickly run through the 18th Brumaire to Sedan to Vichy (wasn’t Biden the first American Pétain? …but not the last).
What a pschitt pshoww.
> However, yours truly is not wild about framing the major shifts in our governing order as new/different Constitutions. This strikes me as what Lambert would call a category error. The US Constitution is a written document, with some amendments, whose meaning in practical terms has been repeatedly tested in courts, and sometimes revised away from older interpretations. Major shifts in policy aims and new winners and losers among the groups vying for power IMHO is not the same as a change in the Constitution, even if the changes in the ruling order are significant.
The issue is that the word “constitution” means both things, but it meant the actual distribution of power and workings of the state first. The written document was first an attempt to prescribe the distribution of power and workings of the state within a framework of the rule of law. However, the immediate appearance of political parties made the written constitution only partially prescriptive as to the true constitution of the state. Over time, the American notion of legal enforceability of the entire written constitution gave rise to a meaning of constitution as the written document governing procedure rather than the actual distribution of power within the state. For example, Aristotle’s Constitutions is not about written documents governing procedure; it is observations about the actual working of power–partly procedural, partly not–in a number of Greek poleis. As another example, the observations that rural states are over-represented in the senate and that they exercise even greater power via the filibuster rule are observations about the operative constitution, but neither of these observations are spelled out verbatim in the written constitution (really, there was no reason to assume the physically smaller states at the time of the constitution would be more or less rural than Virginia or New York on average). Just to be clear, it’s probably not helpful in any kind of popular writing to use the word “constitution” to describe the actual working of the state when its meaning as a written procedural document is foremost in the American context. But it’s not wrong in the sense of being a category error; it’s just unhelpful.
These arguments about the Constitution are always fraught; and based on many unspoken assumptions, and which should trigger the question–immediately–which constitution? If you consider ‘The Constitution’ to the be the document as ratified, then virtually everything after 1800 could be labeled unconstitutional. We held exactly ONE election in accordance with the constitution as ratified = 1796. By the next election, Jefferson claimed a mandate to govern based on winning the popular vote–already presidential populism is emerging. There was no decision in the EC. The House voted I think 36 times. No decision. Governors were mobilizing militia to march on Washington. What saved us was a backroom deal.
What about the 17th Amendment? Direct election of senators? That really threw out the original document as ratified. It was such a fundamental change and a blow against separation of powers, which mainly resided in the states.
Alexander Hamilton intentionally provoked the Whiskey Rebellion to test the limits of central government powers. George Washington led federal troops in an invasion of Pennsylvania. Not permitted under the constitution as ratified.
This precedent was used to justify Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern States in the Civil War. Lincoln was the first great tyrant in US history and he should have been impeached. He used slavery as a battering ram against the constitution and presided over a massive increase in state power. The constitution does not permit the central government to make war on the states.
Among the most abused sections of the original document is the General Welfare clause (Article 6 I think). All the participants in ratification understood what the word ‘general’ meant in that context. Instead it has been used to concoct a smorgasbord of federal programs which are not constitutional. The only powers permitted the central government are those strictly enumerated in the original document.
I could go on.
Before blaming Nixon or the ‘radical right’ for joining the stampede of trampling on the constitution, there must be some agreement as to the baseline conception what the ‘Real Constitution’ says. And it’s not that hard. The document is not some great mystery that requires interpretation by experts. Anyone who has graduated from high-school (well maybe not recent graduates) and has some basic background can read it for themselves. All the issues were discussed in writing, not just by the framers, but by everyone who participated in ratification. Many thoughtful people at the time pointed out the weaknesses of and predicted the threats to the constitutional order that would arise. And have come to pass.
Strictly speaking, the 17th Amendment allowing popular election of senators did not throw out the Constitution. It was ratified within the Constitution’s own guidelines on how to permissibly amend it. This is like saying a club meeting whose outcome is contrary to the founders’ wishes throws out Robert’s Rules of Order.
The adoption of the 17th is an interesting question, as on the surface it seems as though if the power of a legislature to elect senators was so vital, why did legislatures willingly give it up? Because the electorate was clamoring for it (kind of doubt that)?
Seems to be more a matter of self-interest, as national matters came to predominate politics the election of state legislatures came to be viewed as proxy votes for the senate which legislators weren’t happy with. I guess there were also procedural issues, as far as dealing with the manner in which legislatures elected senators (or at times failed to do so).
Of course this was in the context of overall progressive-ism which introduced the “Australian ballot”, giving the state control over who/what party could have access to the ballot, and the introduction of state-controlled party primary elections giving the state power over who a party could run for office.
I have had the thought from time to time of re-writing the US Constitution – but taking into account how things are really done in DC. So full war-making powers would be entirely the job of the President and Congress gets no say but just has to finance it. As you can imagine, the First Amendment would have to be totally written as it has been shredded over the years. Forgotten is the fact that it resulted from what the American colonials experienced at the hands of the British which you can find articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The spooks would become an official fourth estate with the power to vet candidates to political office. As it is the President’s sworn duty to enforce the Constitution, then he would have to be above the legal laws in order to do this. Lobbyists would also become an official part of the government and would receive their own offices, salaries plus health benefits. I could go on but you get the idea. Just re-write the Constitution to reflect modern day reality and be done with it.
It might be time to stop thinking about patching the existing Constitution and start thinking about getting a new one.
Music to the Kochs’ ears. Be careful what you wish for.
An outcome could be dissolution of the union. Might be a good thing, as long as the rump states would give up nukes.
We might also observe the lesson of the failed effort in Chile to reform its constitution, as well as the fact that it was much easier, although still quite a heroic effort, for 55 learned white men to come up with a document that could be ratified by 13 colonies.
Further, how could we reconcile the 2nd amendment with the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson?
In my opinion, the Constitution is a document full of potential interpretations, all useful at one time or another to interest groups that gain advantage, create a ruckus, and push through the programs they feel necessary. The general population goes along as long as they also see (or are fed PR to see) some advantage to them. The piece of paper does not change, but certain sections can be ignored or reinterpreted.
However, the cabal of economic despots who determine policy does change due to internal migration, new sources of industrial and technological development, etc. These characters really run the country in their turn, only presenting favorable light upon policy to drag the population along. Now it is different because the time for finesse is over, patience of the wealthy with the unruly mob is thin if not gone, competitors are gaining on them, the US has become a strip mall begging for your cash, and “victory” is so close…
This is the key, really, the arguement that Woke destroyed Seasame Street. So, sadly, because of Woke, beloved Seasame Street had to go. George Floyd protesters murdered people with axes so we need to arrest college kids protesting genocide, so sad because we love the Constitution. But Woke made them hate Isreal so no more rights.
thats the part of this whole dern mess that irks me the most: the continuing insistence that woke is somehow “of the Left”.
from what i can tell, after studying the matter…as it happened, and morphed and evolved….over the last 35-40 years…it is definitely NOT “of the Left”…but rather a kernal taken from the Left, long ago, and twisted, orc-like, into a weapon to one day destroy the Left.
it has worked far better than anyone imagined,lol.
and now, here we are…with court philosophers everywhere, spouting nonsense about the cultural marxist left ruling as a tyrannical cabal over the hearts and minds, economy and everything else.
its crazy…because at the same time i was studying and watching this thing be born and grow up, I….an actual Lefty…was being steadily pushed out of the “left party”…because i was Too Lefty!
I keep coming to this particular text from Lapham Quarterly:
“On the morning of May 29, 1787, in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, opened the meeting that would become known as the Constitutional Convention by identifying the underlying cause of various problems that the delegates of thirteen states had assembled to solve. “Our chief danger,” Randolph declared, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” None of the separate states’ constitutions, he said, had established “sufficient checks against the democracy.””
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger
What the framers tried to establish, inspired by the English Revolution, was a full fledged aristocracy. It wasn’t entirely possible because it was hoi polloi who mostly died during the Revolutionary War. And the framers were also a bit paranoid about tyrants, especially tyrants that could align themselves with the masses. This is why FDR is sooo loathed in certain circles.
Andrew Jackson not so much.
Trump is just an accelerator for turning the US to the gilded age when the big plutocrats were running the place and trobelsome ant workers were machined gunned. But God forbid another FDR. You can bet your house the bullet would not miss…
I think I made an error from an aristotelian perspective by using the word “aristocracy”, which has a positive conotation. I should have used the term “oligarchy”, which is the flip side and has a negative quality (aristocracy- a minority of betters that govern for the benefit of all; oligarchy- a minority that govern for their own benefit).
Too much of the governance is concentrated in federal hands, went into higher gear right before / during / after WWI.
The French Algerians forced the end of the 4th republic and the creation of the 5th with a new constitution.
I think Israeli control of the US will lead to something similar. A 2nd US republic, with a brand new 21st century special interest focused constitution. I wouldn’t give the resulting country 2 decades before its implosion.
I have only worries now, my own theoretical perspective appears more and more inadequate to grasping what actually may be emerging in the U.S.
The historical assault of the security state has long been a reality.
The historical assault of neoliberal economics has long been a reality.
The historical assault of executive rule has long been quite commonplace for both political parties.
However, I am quite sympathetic to that portion on the populist right that recognizes, along with a few left populists, that an insistence on the primacy of popular self-determination is foundational– because the alternative is an endorsement of a type of accelerating managerial ideology which sees people as too crude, too emotional, too barbaric, and too childlike to ever exercise any rationality.
And beyond this present managerial ideology may be something far worse. The emergence of a new class of designers, engineers, and mental cyborgs whose real task will not be persuasion but enforcing submission.
The people, as the highest political authority, will then be replaced by a supposedly more functional architecture that abandons goodness and freedom for the colder morality of artificial intelligence and the structural necessity of individual surrender.
No more dreams of more representation but only the nightmares of non-representational algorithms.
one more from that site, that i linked to twice up there^^^
” The property-loving, order-keeping Mr. Burke would have prevailed—as liberalism did, in England, in America, in the places where it had already flowered. Or, as some might quibble, where it had already seized control.
It would have prevailed, because unlike its Romantic, idealistic, tragically self-immolating offspring, liberalism knows how to survive. It is a master of self-preservation—through moderation: careful concession, tempered adjustment, elegant retreat. Once or twice, in the ruins of Depression and War, it summoned its bolder self. But even this liberalism was, at heart, still cautious—moderately regulating the unregulated, carefully excluding the already excluded. It watched its revolutionary shadow soar too high, too close to the sun, and it quietly clipped its own wings.
It decided: In order not to fall, one must not fly at all.
Slowly but surely, it traded ideals for ideology, beliefs for bureaucracy, vision for administration. Change, yes. But curated, limited, defanged. What couldn’t be stopped would be softened. What couldn’t be softened would be postponed. What couldn’t be postponed would be quietly buried, under procedures, subcommittees, sub-subcommittees.
For a while, this worked. For a time, liberalism offered a plausible compromise between what is right and what is possible. Its metaphysical commitment to moderation, to slowness, to clumsiness—to the messy and the mundane—proved functional enough to endure. Until it didn’t. Until it mistook survival for success, inertia for stability, silence for support, and partial gains for final victory. End of history. Case closed.
But history never ends. It festers. History reminds you, in your dreams, of old accounts unsettled, of debts underpaid, of promises unkept, of wounds never healed.
And one day, you wake up with phantom pain of your clipped wings. You realize you have no future left to chase, only errors to correct. You hear yourself speaking no longer of what you hope for, but only of what you must avoid. And the more you speak of the avoidable, the more strength it seems to gather. So you wrap yourself tighter in what you know best—procedure, forbearance, restraint, delay—until procedure feels like pretext, forbearance like fear, restraint like paralysis, and delay like decay.
Outside, the roses are blooming again. The city gathers heat. You feel its pulse, the vibration beneath the cobblestones. A flush of impatience. A surge of steps.
You wonder if you’ve been here before.”
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-sorrows-of-burkean-liberals/
this woman is awesome.
Iza Ding.
(amfortas swoons)
tangentially germane to the thread.
brief postcard:
so i lurked and piddled around with details out at the wilderness bar.
ups chick usually comes down this dead end dirt road between 11am and 12:30pm.
neighbor, in collusion with me, expects a package tuesday…so i got my last hand pie/pastie/roadfood thang…deer sausage in a shiner gravy with a coldwater crust wrapped around it, with gorgonzola, fresh sage, parsley and green onion embedded…
and waited.
and who came down the road?
surly and old and scowling fedex guy,lol.
he was right on time, at least…something to do with the distance to all their hubs in brownwood, texas.
I disagree. The “bolder” side of “liberalism” is fascism, not more democracy.
And the story as told by Clara Mattei makes perfect sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o0pQiGqerU
There is a difference between what was done in the US and what was done in the UK with the depression and after WWII. It could have gone differently in the US as well if Gen Smedley would have accepted to fight for the monied class on the home front…
and i just watched this,lol…and howled and bitched at rufo, throughout:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWOf-2ntJBQ
this is orwellian, or worse.
but this guy is listened to by millions, and beyond MAGA, proper….a lot like that jordan peterson guy.
demparty has shuffling of feet while gazing at their feet.
what can we do?……
uttering platitudes and aporia to cover their cowardice and collusion with the whole frelling project.
when theyre not pretending to be the carpet.
the remnants of the Actual Left are either yelling at each other, or searching out the woke torquemadas in their midst.
or getting screwed by the demparty…in courts.
we’re well and truly fucked.
get thee ready for the burning times…because they are upon us.
The fifth modern assault on the FDR Constitution is the abject corruption of the judicial branch. They are with few exceptions traitors, waging lawfare war against the U.S., with direct violations of the Constitution.
We no longer have a Constitution: we are ruled by primitive tyrants of the political parties that span the branches of federal government and have discarded the Constitution and all principles of democracy, which they invoke only to conceal political gang control of the US government.
The reforms needed include:
1. Constitutional amendments prohibiting election or media funding beyond limited registered Individual donations;
2. Checks and Balance Within each functional branch, because they do not have powers to balance each other;
3. Public and mass media education to identify and avoid dangerous social dependency upon tribal groups.
The problem in passing such reforms is convincing politicians that they will be re-elected with limited individual donations, because every candidate must use them.
The western nations failed to regulate economic or information power, because they never had a moral foundation, only the pretense of patriotism and religion as a mask for selfish goals, to motivate others to abide by laws to protect their own interests. They wave their flags and thump their scriptures solely as a PR mask for selfishness, and violate all claimed principles wherever they can gain with impunity.
The necessary moral foundation cannot be based upon myths and mystical threats. It must be based upon sympathy, education, cooperation, and public information about policies, viewpoints, and government actions.