The Little Red Blog

Book Preview: "Conservatism: A Rediscovery"

{A book preview is what you write when you haven’t read the book in question but would like to express an opinion about it anyway. Since I’m not shelling out $14.99 (for the Kindle edition) for Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, I will have to make my best guess, based on a brief excerpt and my powers of deduction, as to what it’s about.}

I have lost track of how many times, just in my own lifetime, American conservatism has been revived, restored, renewed, rediscovered, rehabilitated, and--mainly--relabeled. George W. Bush's ill-fated "compassionate conservatism" was hardly the first attempt to put lipstick on right-wing ideology. Decades before that, we had Frank Meyer's Cold War "Conservative fusionism," which was followed by "Neo-conservatism," the disillusionment with which led to the likes of Rod Dreher's "crunchy cons," which featured granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing conservatives. There was (and is) Patrick Buchanan's holy war "cultural conservatism," with its "America First" motto. There are also post-liberals, integralists, paleoconservatives, constitutional conservatives, religious conservatives, free-market conservatives, traditionalist conservatives, Straussians, followers of Hayek, followers of Voegelin, die-hard fans of Joseph de Maistre, stubborn believers in Carl Schmitt, etc.      

Fortunately, someone has come along to sort out this endless profusion of heterodoxy and heresy, to correct the erring sectarians, and to put true-blue American conservatism back on its feet. Yoram Hazony has written what Rod Dreher calls "an astonishing book," making its author, according to Dreher, “not only [conservatism’s] most important public intellectual, but also its passionate prophet.” Dreher’s fulsome praise comes in response to the publication of   Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and Dreher is by no means alone in being astonished; other conservative thought-leaders have joined in the chorus. Ben Shapiro calls the book “fascinating, erudite, and mind-opening,” and R.R. Reno says that “Hazony’s powerful vision of conservatism for the twenty-first century is capable of steering the ship of state out of our present perils.” Even Peter Thiel, whose opinion counts because he is wealthy, is on board with Hazony’s “lucid exposition of a tradition of conservative nationalism that begins in the Old Testament and [continues] to our own moment.”

That is all, and I do not say this lightly, very exciting; or it would be if it were true. However, from what I can tell, and for all his obvious erudition, Hazony's premise would be at home on Fox News; contemporary America, he writes, is in a state of “permanent revolution and cultural devastation” beset by “an updated Marxism (calling itself ‘Progressivism,’ ‘Anti-Racism,’ or ‘Woke’) which has, in short order, “seized control of the institutions that had been, until only recently, responsible for the development and circulation of liberal ideas in America, Britain, and beyond.” Greg Gutfeld could not say it as well, but he would nod in agreement.

It is difficult to take seriously an author who insists that “By the summer of 2020, most of the important news media, universities and schools, big tech and other major corporations, and even the government bureaucracy and the military had adopted a policy of accommodating the new Marxism and advancing its agenda.”  Apparently, we are all Marxists now, what with our identity politics, our pronouns, our Green New Deal, our deconstructionism, and our hegemonic intersectionality: all of it straight out of the Communist Manifesto/Port Huron Statement/Herbert Marcuse's posterior!

All of which is to say, if Hazony does yeoman work in tracing the lineage, intellectual and historical, of the kind of conservatism of which he approves, he does nothing at all to temper the hyperbolic rhetoric which modern "conservatives" have long been fond of wielding. Nor does he do anything to defuse right-wing tropes about the Sixties; not unlike every pre-1980 issue of National Review, Hazony expressly challenges the post-World War II liberal consensus, which led, by the 1960s, to “a new liberal constitution that guaranteed the civil liberties of blacks and other minorities, but also banned prayer and Bible-reading from the schools and lifted earlier restrictions on divorce, pornography, immigration, and abortion.”

What, Hazony implicitly asks, hath liberalism wrought? Nothing short of “the shocking destruction of the Anglo-American cultural inheritance [and] the suppression or stigmatization of many of the most important ideas and institutions around which life in Britain and America had been built, including God and scripture, nation and congregation, marriage and family, man and woman, honor and loyalty, the sabbath and the sacred, among others.”

Look upon your works, Enlightenment liberals, and despair! At the same time, Hazony says, “In our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.” Conservatives didn’t start the fire, of course; but, according to Hazony, they haven’t done much to stop it, either. How in the world are we to survive this cultural and societal conflagration?

By returning to the past, says Hazony; that is, by “rediscovering the history and philosophy of conservatism, both of which by now have been largely forgotten.” This is in keeping with “an important principle of Anglo-American conservative thought: When faced with the disastrous consequences of a particular course of action, we must retrace our steps and restore, as much as possible, the conditions that existed prior to setting out on this course.” Onward we go to the past, before “the sudden rise of the new Marxists” spoiled everything that was good and decent about America.

I want to be clear: Conservatism: A Rediscovery seems well worth reading. You will learn much about the likes of John Fortescue, the 15^th-century author of In Praise of the Laws of England, and John Selden, a 17^th-century polymath ¹ acclaimed by Hazony as “perhaps the most important figure in Anglo-American conservatism.” You will learn Hazony’s “nine principles” that explain “what government is for and what it should do.” ² You will learn who and what imperils us and what to do about them. And you will learn something about living a "conservative life," as exemplified by Hazony, his wife, and their nine children. ³

You may even learn what all the fuss over the book is about, a fuss comparable to, say, the fuss over Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, or over J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, or over Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed. Conservatives seem to need to give each other pep talks from time to time to face the dreaded nihilistic abyss that is the secular modern West; and each pep talk is delivered by someone who is immediately declared the new spokesperson for conservatism. Today it's Yoram Hazony's turn; I can't wait to see whose turn it will be tomorrow. 

___________________________________________

Yoram Hazony - Wikipedia

John Selden - Wikipedia   

John Fortescue (judge) - Wikipedia

¹ Shame!

² I am pledged to secrecy, having signed an NDA. Also, as I mentioned, my free Kindle preview of Hazony’s book ended abruptly partway through Chapter One.

³ You might then read the essays at the online Law and Liberty symposium devoted to Hazony’s book, essays which take a somewhat more critical view of Conservatism than do Rod Dreher or Ben Shapiro.  Toward a New Traditionalism? – (lawliberty.org)

Saturday Lecture: Government and the Public Good

Sidney Hook, from “A Response to Conservatism” (1978):

In politics and economics today, we are experiencing a reversion from government conceived as an instrument of social progress and justice to government conceived merely as a watchman upholding social order. Recent political developments are being widely interpreted as a repudiation of the philosophy of the welfare state, of the role and rule of Big Government, bureaucratic intervention into the economy, over-regulation, and over-centralization.

The attack on the welfare state is being conducted under the rallying cry of ‘freedom’. Freedom has become the shibboleth of the libertarian movement and all the prophets of the market-enterprise system. We need not defend the whole complex of government supports and subsidies, many of which have been adopted at the bidding of special-interest groups. An intelligent approach requires a case-by-case cost-benefit analysis and decision. The so-called libertarian ideology rejects this, however, because it assumes that the only alternative to existing bad regulation is no regulation at all. The real target of the conservative and libertarian revival is not this or that particular government program or regulation. It is rather the whole policy of government intervention itself they wish to reverse. To the opponents of regulation, the measure and content of freedom is determined not by specific consequences but by the degree to which the economy is free from any kind of direction or control. This in effect is to make a fetish of the free market, whereas for us the economy is a means by which a whole cluster of human freedoms are furthered.

One of the major functions of government, even the major function, is to protect freedom. Unlimited government is evil because it countenances no checks on its power to restrict freedom. These are undeniable truths. But no less undeniable is the truth that the complete absence of government would be even more oppressive because it would produce anarchy—the rule of a thousand despots. Those who speak of government, the agency of organized society, as if it were an inherent foe of human freedom seem to me guilty of a fundamental error. They assume that freedom exists in a state of nature, that it is a natural good that comes with the natural environment, and that it is surrendered when human beings are organized under laws which necessarily limit some freedom of action. This view of freedom is a myth. Freedom is an outcome of a free society; government and society are not artificial accretions to the human estate. A human being, as distinct from a biological organism, could not exist outside of society; in such a situation, he would have to be either something more than man (divine) or less than man (animal).

To be sure, governments can be restrictive and oppressive; but it is just as true to say that governments sometimes can protect and even expand freedoms rather than restrict them. Whatever freedoms or rights we deem desirable, governments and laws are necessary to secure them in a world where others are intent upon violating them. Since there can be no government without law, what is true for government is analytically true for law. In a sense, every law, no matter how wise and enlightened, restricts someone’s freedom; as Bentham put it, ‘every law is contrary to someone’s liberty’. The government or law can only protect our liberty by depriving others of their freedom to act as they please. So long as human beings have conflicting desires, laws and regulations are inescapable. Legislation is or should be the process by which we determine what kind of trade-offs we wish to make in the conflict of freedoms, and which are to be given priority.

We share with conservatives a fear of concentrated government power, but we are also fearful of large concentrations of private property that can also have oppressive effects. Like conservatives, we seek the dispersion of power, but unlike them we seek to avoid those gross inequalities of wealth and power that unduly influence the political process. Even Thomas Jefferson deplored extremes of wealth as subversive of the democratic spirit of a self-governing nation. Some concentrations of economic power can be countered only by the power of government. The only way such extremes can be prevented today is through tax policy, through wiser and better government, not absence of government.  

The concept of the public good is a complex and difficult one, hard to define except in terms of a reflective process in which we balance good against good and right against right. But without the existence and power of government, we cannot peacefully determine or enforce the public good. Even on the premises of the ‘watchman’ theory of government, the public good requires some concern for public welfare. Over and above formal legal equality, the just law must concern itself with the effects of law on human weal and woe. What modern-day conservatism fails to recognize is that the pursuit of justice can be distinguished from, but not ultimately separated from, the pursuit of happiness and human welfare.

No one in the world is really a self-made man or woman. When we consider what we owe to the community—our language, without which there could be no thought; our skills that are dependent upon the cumulative traditions forged by generations of early pioneers; our knowledge, most of which we have inherited; our safety, health, and even our goods possessed not only in virtue of our own efforts but because of the activities and forbearances of others—we become conscious of a debt that cannot be discharged if we are indifferent to the fate of our fellows. Concern for the public welfare does not require self-sacrifice but the wisdom of common sense that recognizes the obligation of unpaid debts and the dictates of enlightened self-interest.

We yield to none in the cause of freedom, whether moral or political; and we repudiate as unfounded, indeed untrue, the conservative view that we need the unconscious help of an Invisible Hand (a pure market economy or a Supreme Being) to realize that freedom in our institutions. It is true that we cannot properly plan for an entire society, nor can we rebuild any aspects of it without regard for human history and the limitations of human nature and power. It is true that human nature is neither all-powerful nor infallible. But these truths are no excuse to forego the use of intelligence and the self-corrective methods of experience in trying to cope with the problems of our society.

_________________

For biographical information: Sidney Hook - Wikipedia

Selected writings at: ETOL Writers: Sidney Hook (marxists.org) or Internet Archive Search: sidney hook

“A Response to Conservatism” appeared in a pamphlet published by Social Democrats, USA. It was accompanied by an essay by Leszek Kolakowski, “The Social Democratic Challenge”.

Saturday PSA: Rough Beast Seen Slouching, Wearing 'MAGA' Hat

{Rather than my usual ‘Saturday Lecture,’ today’s post is a Public Service Announcement: a rough beast is reportedly slouching towards America, a bad moon is on the rise, and the forecast calls for a hard rain to begin falling shortly. I suggest heading for the hills.}  

“There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear…” (Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth)

“Shelter me from the powder and the finger / Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger…” (Neil Young, “Powderfinger”)

Please don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Marine officer, former Congressional page, and spiritual warrior Josiah Lippincott informs his readers at American Greatness:

“The coldest of all cold monsters.” That is what the modern state is. Nietzsche’s devastating analysis in Thus Spoke Zarathustra hit the nail on the head: the state is an engine of death. It wages war on the people, its agents are “annihilators” who seek the destruction of everything vital and potent. All who witnessed the last 18 months of the COVID regime and the biomedical tyranny imposed by Joe Biden and his handlers implicitly understand what Nietzsche meant. The bureaucrats who make up the arm of the state, who serve this cold monster, hate the people. They make their lives miserable. Lockdowns, vax mandates, mask orders, critical race theory in schools, transgender bathrooms . . . the list goes on and on.’

Why, you may wonder, must bureaucrats be so evil? What is the point of making people’s lives miserable?

“Ritual humiliation is the point. The agents of state power see themselves as the rightful masters of the people. To these creatures of the institutions, citizens are nothing but human resources to be bent to their malformed will. This perverse view extends even to the American military. The time is coming, soon, in which the armed forces will be turned openly against the people. The Biden inauguration lockdown in D.C.—replete with checkpoints, thousands of national guardsmen, and the full weight of the nation’s security apparatus—was only a taste of things to come. The Biden administration would not hesitate to turn its full military might, including atomic bombs, against the populace in a war. The state, the coldest of cold monsters, headed by an endless mob of Anthony Faucis would not hesitate to impose its will in the most brutal manner possible.” ¹

Allow me to point out, as politely as I can, that the above (and, in fact, the entirety of Lippincott's article) is sheer lunacy, or, as mental health professionals call it, “freaking loony tunes stuff”.

So, you ask, why waste time on it? Why call attention to it?

Well: Josiah Lippincott, the author of the lunacy under review, is a graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan, a bastion of conservative scholarship. He received a B.A. in Politics and he is currently enrolled in Hillsdale’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship. In addition, Lippincott “is a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps. In 2019 he deployed to Japan as an operations planner for the use of rocket artillery in the Pacific theater. He previously worked as a Congressional Page, an intern for Congressman Devin Nunes, and an intern for the Heritage Foundation's Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics. He was named a “Publius Fellow” at Claremont Institute (California) in 2020.” (2020 Publius Fellows (claremont.org))

The Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, the Marine Corps, and an internship with a leading figure in the Republican Party: Mr. Lippincott’s conservative credentials are exemplary, and his future appears bright—which makes his delusional rhetoric all the more chilling. If Lippincott (along with the likes of J.D. Vance and Senator Josh Hawley) is any indication, today’s political Right is not just (to borrow a phrase from Lippincott’s article) “a bunch of low-IQ rednecks”; its red, white, and blue basket includes academically accredited (albeit reality-challenged) deplorables as well.

Is this honestly what the Republican Party and/or the conservative movement in America has become? What is in the Kool-Aid they’ve been drinking, and is there an antidote in sight? Note that Lippincott’s article contains not a single mention of policy disagreements that he and his readers might have with the Biden administration (or with any Democratic administration). His Hillsdale education notwithstanding, Lippincott offers neither analysis nor argument but an hysterical screed composed entirely of ad hominem invective and paranoid conjectures: “biomedical tyranny,” “bureaucrats hate the people,” “ritual humiliation,” “malformed will,” “mob of Faucis,” etc. And, of course, the piece de resistance: the claim that the full might of the nation’s military, including atomic weapons, will “soon be turned against the people”.

Does Josiah Lippincott believe this? I have no idea, but I guarantee that some of his readers will; describing “the modern state” as nothing but “an engine of death” determined to “impose its will on the populace” should play nicely into militia fantasies of “Second Amendment remedies,” especially given Lippincott’s references to Waco and to Ruby Ridge.

Lippincott’s deranged (but mercifully brief) manifesto ends with a call for “unceasing spiritual warfare against our degenerate and corrupt ruling class within the foreign policy establishment.” Desperate times call for desperate measures; after all, “We live in a regime of edicts and emergency “public health” measures. The Constitution is long dead.” Lippincott spells out his strategy:

“If Americans on the Right are to prevent the use of the military and national security apparatus against the people, we must defang these institutions. ² The most powerful weapon at our disposal right now is mockery. We must strip America’s surveillance state and our bloated military industrial complex of honor and deference. As a practical measure, we need to get public approval for the military to below 40 percent. Without a majority backing its actions, the armed forces cannot be used domestically without significant problems.”

Leading by example, Lippincott has already launched spiritual warfare from his Twitter account, claiming, “I have a mandate from heaven to fight back against this ‘coldest of cold monsters’ using every spiritual weapon at my disposal.” Imagine if Saint Paul had access to Twitter!

I will be honest: this man’s rhetoric frightens me; the fact that he is a product of, and no doubt a rising star in, America’s right-wing intelligentsia, with connections at the highest levels of government, frightens me even more.

I suspect this will not end well.

_____________________

The Biden Regime Will Turn the Military on the People Unless We Push Back › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

¹ As Ronald Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m Doctor Anthony Fauci and I’m here to help.” The Gipper is long gone, but his legacy of mistrust for our own government lives on.

² I don’t know if “defang the military” will catch on like “defund the police,” but it is kind of catchy.

Divided We Stand!

Michael Anton, author of the “Flight 93 election” scenario from 2016, a former member of the Trump administration, and currently employed at Hillsdale College, believes it is time for Americans to redraw the national electoral map. Specifically, he thinks it is time “to allow counties, cities, and towns unhappy with their current state government to join another. This would be a practical, and practicable, way to ease Blue and Red Americans’ present discontent and exasperation with each other.”

Whatever one thinks of either the logic or the logistics of Anton’s suggestion, his argument—at least as presented in his essay “Red Lines” (at American Mind)—is nothing but a hysterical denunciation of an imaginary reign of terror Anton insists “Blue” states and cities are engaged in against their helpless “Red” citizens. “Sure,” says Anton, “all the Red folk get to vote. For the ruling class, this alone satisfies the requirements of justice, of ‘democracy.’” But, he complains, “The Reds are outvoted every time, their preferences never considered, and their interests never respected.”

Thank the Founders for the Electoral College, says Anton, which at least gives “the Reds” a fighting chance. That very institution, however, is currently in jeopardy, being “viciously attacked and despised”. Anton is not referring to the protestors who attempted to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes on January 6, or to the legislators who voted against accepting the state-certified electoral results. For Anton, it is “our overlords” who are doing the attacking and the despising of the Electoral College:

“This is why fundamentally republican but not purely democratic institutions such as the Electoral College are so viciously attacked and despised. They hinder the operation of “democracy.” In this understanding, the 2016 election was illegitimate simply because Hillary won the popular vote. But consider: she won California alone by 4.3 million votes—and lost the other 49 states by 1.4 million. Of course, the founders created the Electoral College specifically to prevent brute-force voting from crushing underfoot all regional, sectional, cultural, religious, economic, and other differences. But that matters not a whit to our overlords—except as proof that the Electoral College is “anti-democratic” and so must go.” ¹

It is just possible—and I am by no means qualified to make this assessment—that Michael Anton suffers from paranoid delusions; for instance, he believes, as mentioned above, that America is controlled by “overlords”. He also believes Americans come in either “Blue” or “Red,” with no other colors, no shades of Grey, and no mixed loyalties; and he makes it clear that one of those two American tribes is being persecuted by the other. Red Americans, he says, find themselves “harassed by a hostile government” and “mocked by the ruling class”. How bad is it? Anton quotes Joel Kotkin, who confides that “the worst thing in the world to be is the Red part of a Blue state.” ² Anton whines, “Not only do [Reds] get nothing but abuse from the political system, increasingly they don’t even get to talk. Any dissent against regime ideology is swiftly and ruthlessly censored on Blue media platforms, which is to say, all of them,” says the man who has consistently found media platforms from which to air his complaints.

Conservative ideologues (that phrase was once an oxymoron; roll over, Russell Kirk, and tell Michael Oakeshott the news) are increasingly high on their own supply. I cannot think of any other explanation for the nonsense they are spewing about “ruling class diktats” and attempts to “overturn the will of unruly voters”. Michael Anton was for democracy, I believe, before he was against it, but it has come to this: “Blues perpetually outvoting Reds and ruling unopposed,” claims Anton: “This, and only this, is what ‘democracy’ means today.”

Yet Michael Anton, Flight 93 hero that he is, does not despair; he believes it is time to take another shot at charging yet another cockpit. “Reds, increasingly, are catching on,” he explains. “They know the game is rigged, that they cannot win, and the veneer of their participation and consent is a sham. This is why the gaslighting is being dialed up to the lumen levels of blue stars. Every objection to Blue despoilation is now openly ascribed to ‘white supremacy’.” ³

That, of course, is patently untrue; some objections to Blue despoilation are ascribed to “white supremacy,” but others are ascribed to homophobia, to toxic masculinity, to general misogyny, to willful ignorance, to the Dunning-Kruger effect, etc.

Eventually Anton arrives at his proposal: a kind of “secession-lite” in which cities, towns, and counties reaffiliate themselves with more hospitable state entities (presumably with some geographic proximity, such as eastern Oregon and western Idaho). As someone who has long thought, and publicly suggested, that eastern Montana should be annexed by North Dakota, I have no immediate objection to Anton’s idea, so long as it does not result in northern Idaho jumping ship to Montana; we in the Treasure State have enough problems of our own already.

In his conclusion, Anton unconvincingly pretends he just wants us all to get along:

Perhaps paradoxically, it is through greater pluralism that Americans can achieve greater comity. Today, every petty disagreement turns into a bitter Red-Blue fight. We could live together better if we could give each other a little more space, become a little more willing to leave one another alone.

Anton’s “secession lite” is the political equivalent of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option”: let the elect separate themselves from the heathens, the better to prepare for the eschaton. Unlike Dreher, however, Anton cannot help issuing a thinly veiled threat: “If the ruling class refuses to allow reorganization to proceed, refuses so much as to give it a fair hearing—then one day in the not-so-distant future we will look back with fondness to a time when “secession” as a future prospect meant only redrawing state lines.”

It is beyond me how Michael Anton restrained himself from closing with “Let’s roll!” I do not know how much longer he can avoid the Blue gulag, but I hope his students at Hillsdale College (itself a Red oasis in the Purple state of Michigan) appreciate his heroism.

_______________________

Red Lines - The American Mind

¹ It is true that many on the political Left would like to do away with the Electoral College; some have even sought ways to effectively neuter it. Whatever the “Founders’” intentions, and whatever the fairness or unfairness of the Electoral College as it currently stands, substantive criticism of it does not seem ipso facto illegitimate—as opposed to simply claiming that its results are “crooked,” “rigged,” or “the biggest political fraud in the history of this country”.  

² If Joel Kotkin cannot imagine anything worse than "being the Red part of a Blue state," his imagination is tragically limited. What about being a square peg in a world of round holes? What about being the only one in your class to show up naked for the final exam? What about being Sisyphus, except instead of pushing a huge rock up a mountain you are condemned to fact-checking Fox News for eternity?   

³ To be fair (and balanced), some on the Left are also concerned about the future of American democracy, though for very different reasons. See, for instance, Sean Illing’s interview with David Faris: Why Democrats must pass major democratic reforms - Vox Credit where credit is due: neither Illing nor Faris refer to Republicans as “overlords”. On the other hand, former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes writes (American Demons: Ben Rhodes's 'After the Fall' Excerpt - The Atlantic) that Americans “face a battle between people who live in the reality of the world as it is and people who are choosing to live in a false reality made up of base white-supremacist grievances and irrational conspiracy theories—and seeking to impose it on the rest of us,” a comment on which the likes of Michael Anton are sure to capitalize.

        

You Say You Want a Modest Proposal for Election Reform?

I received this submission today from the Department of Modest Proposals:

What this country needs, in addition to a good five-cent cigar, is a Presidential Election Oversight Commission (PEOC). ¹ This non-partisan commission would be established by Congress. Its duties and responsibilities could include the following, along with any others Congress sees fit to authorize:

• Working with the fifty states on issues ranging from ballot design to election security measures (electronic and otherwise). Ballots for presidential contests would be standardized, provided to the states by the Commission, and processed separately from ballots for state and local races, initiatives, referenda, etc. The national presidential ballot should be a "stand alone" document not including any other electoral contests or issues.
• Standardizing voter eligibility requirements, mail-in voting rules, “early voting” periods, rules governing voter registration, "voter ID," “ballot harvesting," late-arriving ballots, post-mortem balloting, etc.
• Certifying the eligibility of all presidential candidates—i.e. documenting candidates’ age, citizenship status, preferred pronouns, and compliance with all established rules for candidacy.
• Arranging for all presidential candidates to undergo a standard background/security check identical to what is required of federal employees with access to national security information. No individual who fails or refuses such a background check will be allowed on the ballot.
• Arranging for candidates to undergo thorough physical, psychological, and cognitive evaluation, the results of which shall be disclosed to the public by the PEOC as warranted.
• Requiring candidates to publicly disclose their federal tax returns for a stated period (five years, perhaps, or even ten). Candidates who refuse to provide tax returns (or related financial information) will not be allowed on the ballot.
• Assessing and approving all campaign ads and granting "The PEOC Seal of Approval" as warranted.
• Scheduling and overseeing presidential debates, including selection of debate moderators and formats.
• Scheduling and overseeing “town hall”-type meetings in which candidates answer questions from voters.
• Scheduling and overseeing “Alex Trebek Presidential Election Jeopardy” contests in which candidates compete in answering questions about a variety of relevant categories (e.g. "The Constitution," "American History," "Commodity Prices," "Public Health Measures," "Ramps, Stairs, and Umbrellas," etc.
• Requiring candidates to sign a pledge that they will abide by PEOC rules and by federal and state election laws; and that they will accept the officially declared results of the election (retaining the right to recounts and challenges as allowed/required by state and/or federal law). Candidates must also pledge to respect the integrity of the electoral process and of the Commission and not to engage in public denigration of either.
• Overseeing and supervising any voting challenges or recounts as allowed by law. Candidates shall keep the PEOC apprised of such challenges and of all election-related legal issues.
• Receiving and verifying voting totals from each state (on and after Election Day) and announcing results only when they are determined. PEOC will not provide partial voting tallies to the campaigns, to the media, or to the public, all of whom shall be enjoined in the interim to wait patiently in silence.
• The commission’s grant of authority will be established by Congress. Nothing in that grant will be contrary to the Constitution or to any state constitutions. Nothing in the Commission’s authority shall be construed as replacing or overriding the electoral authority of state or federal courts or legislatures. Neither Dinesh d' Souza nor Karl Rove shall be allowed to serve on the PEOC, to provide the PEOC with advice, or to concern themselves with PEOC business.

Separately, Congress shall establish “Presidential Election Day” as a national holiday.

You're welcome, America.

____________________________

¹ An astute reader immediately objects: Wait just a second. We already have a Federal Election Commission, do we not? Yes, we do, Mr. or Ms. Smarty-Pants, but the FEC is charged with enforcing campaign finance laws, monitoring and reporting campaign contributions and spending, and keeping an eye on Dinesh d’ Souza. It has neither the time nor the authority to do the many things I am saying need to be done. By the way, our current FEC consists of three members and three vacancies. Also, did you know that you cannot spell “feckless” without FEC?  

Is Our Nation Learning?

{This is my third and final reflection on Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book, Human Scale.}

Re-reading Human Scale, it can be difficult at times to remember that Kirkpatrick Sale was offering a critique of American society, including government and politics, from the political Left. His emphases on localism, on smaller and more cohesive communities, on the importance of civic institutions, and on the need for subsidiarity (the notion that issues of governance ought to be handled by the nearest, smallest, and least centralized competent authority): all of that sounds more like conservatism a la Russell Kirk than it does mainstream liberalism. That fact testifies to how far American liberalism, terrified by George McGovern’s 1972 electoral debacle and desperately trying to disassociate itself from the Sixties’ counterculture and the New Left, fled in panic from the Left and scrambled towards the center.

Here is what Sale had to say in 1980 about what Kevin Phillips called “the Balkanization of American politics”:

There may have been no time within the last century of our history when there has been such a fundamental distension of the bodies politic and social as in our present generation. Other times have seen pressure groups, of course—but today we have special-interest groups on every conceivable matter, in every conceivable enterprise and industry, most of them well organized and well financed, able to influence the course of legislation and elections.

Today there is not one social aspect of our life—birth, sex, death, education, health, environment—and not one biological aspect of our being—age, gender, race, ethnicity, physical handicap—that does not have one group, and usually two or more and often competing, around it. Today there is not a single ethnic group, however marginal, that is not organized and vocal and as often as not directly opposed to the interests or policies of at least one or two of the others.

Sale was in no way delegitimizing advocacy groups, nor was he condemning what we now call “identity politics”. He was simply noting that, given the proliferation of competing interests, the nation seemed to be coming apart:

Laying aside the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, seldom has there been the depth of hostility and fragmentation that we see today, with sectionalism infecting practically every national issue, setting a number of regions against each other and all against the Federal government…at no time since the advent of the national media has there been such a pluralism of tastes and forms and accepted practices, such an acceptance of disparate styles according to age, race, region, or status.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s remedy for this “Balkanization” was not to invoke sunnier times or some hoary myth of national unity, but to suggest that Americans acknowledge our differences and go our separate ways—amicably, of course; to paraphrase John dos Passos, "Alright then we are many nations." Sale proposed that we form regional collectives, revive our small communities, and create urban enclaves of like-minded (or at least open-minded) people; the point of all that being to allow people to design their own human-scale lives without needing permission or blueprints from Washington.

Simply put, America was too big and too diverse to be governed effectively from the center; Sale wanted power and responsibility (the two being inseparable) removed from the national government and returned to the states and localities. He was, alas, going against the tide of neo-liberalism, which promoted an alliance of centralized government with Wall Street finance and corporate globalization; and, despite his sympathy for “states’ rights,” he was also fighting the tide of conservatism, which shared his distrust of large central governments but had no interest in the rest of his Left-populist agenda, which seemed suspiciously countercultural.

According to Sale, America had entered an age that sociologist Robert Nisbet called “the twilight of authority,” marked by a loss of faith in all institutions, local as well as national, and a loss of faith in the political process itself and in the very concepts of “community” and “the collective good.” Reaganism, like Thatcherism in England, was premised on the idea that “there is no such thing as society”; and while Sale disagreed with that premise, he insisted, like Reagan and unlike the neo-liberal Democrats, that the federal government was not the solution to our civic woes.  

Sprinkling his text with ominous phrases borrowed from Nisbet—“the decline and erosion of institutions,” “a vacuum in the moral order,” “the crumbling walls of politics,” and “a gathering revolt against the whole structure of wealth, privilege, and power that the contemporary democratic state has come to represent”—Sale portrayed an American polity on the edge of rebellion. The peasants were coming, angry and armed with torches and pitchforks: Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough.

As it turned out, that populist revolt was first disarmed by Reagan’s avuncular charm and then channeled, politically, into Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America”; that is, it was channeled into the Republican Party’s all-out assault on Washington, into its demonization of the federal government, and into its decision to treat politics as warfare by other means and to treat the Democratic Party not as the “loyal opposition” but as the enemy. Then, in 2001, 9/11 gave us another enemy to blame for our dissatisfactions and against whom to target our resentments. The Republicans, elaborating on Gingrich’s “politics as war,” now routinely conflate the enemies of America, foreign and domestic, insisting that Democrats are in league with Islamic terrorists and with criminals, anarchists, communists, Bolsheviks, cultural Marxists, “antifa,” MS 13, and so on.

The Boomers among us should remember from our youth the admonition, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Since we quickly reached the age of “over thirty” ourselves, that admonition was amended to “Never trust anyone.” Mission accomplished, fellow Boomers: according to Kirkpatrick Sale, “The University of Michigan has measured public attitudes toward authority since 1958, at which time it found that 20% of the public expressed distrust of political authority. Every year since then the percentage has risen, and in the latest survey, in 1979, 55 percent, more than half the country, pronounced itself against the institutions of authority in America.” I have no idea what that number is today, but I guarantee it has not gotten better.

Consider this: writing in 1980, Sale noted that “Government recommendations on health and safety, even those with wide support from doctors, are increasingly rejected by the American public, suspicious and distrustful of any proclamation from Washington even when it affects their own lives. A two-to-one majority rejected the idea that saccharin was dangerous and opposed the government ban on it; government recommendations for swine-flu vaccinations were ignored almost totally by the public at large; and more than two-thirds of pre-school children are not immunized by their parents against polio, measles, rubella, mumps, or tetanus, in defiance of years of government exhortations.”

Gee, that sounds familiar. We have met the enemy, and he has been us all along.

Kirkpatrick Sale closed Human Scale by acknowledging the difficulty of reversing the momentum of modernity, with its inexorable drive towards consolidation, centralization, and giantism. The forty years since have given us no reason to think that Sale's “human scale” reforms are likely; unhappy as we are with the status quo, we seem unable to make, or even to imagine, substantive changes. It may take some natural disaster, some cataclysmic event, to force a paradigm shift upon us: a pandemic, perhaps? ¹ "I think the deck chairs would look better if we face them this way; it would give us a better view of that iceberg up ahead."

I am not optimistic. A nation that puts Donald Trump in charge of its affairs is asking for trouble. A Waylon Jennings’ lyric comes to mind: “Ain’t living long like this, can’t live at all like this, can I?” I find it increasingly difficult to see how America and its way of life can be sustained; I find it difficult to see how our republic, our democracy, can avoid collapse or implosion in the near future. In case you have not noticed, Americans increasingly hate each other, and many of them are armed to the teeth.

I fear that Human Scale was already too late forty years ago, and its considerable wisdom remains  lost on us today; Americans, by and large, do not want wisdom, they want blood. All the hate, the rancor, the bitterness, the divisions, and the resentments that have been building up in America, and that have been cynically fueled and stoked for political gain: all that hate is going to explode sooner or later. “Dirty tricks” at the ballot box this November may be the least of our worries.

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¹ Except that the pandemic teaches us, among other things, the limits of localism and the need for competent central authority and a government big enough, and smart enough, to tackle our problems. 

Representation without Participation: Politics as Spectator Sport

{This is the second of my reflections on Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale, published in 1980.}

 "O beautiful for spacious skies, / but now those skies are threatening /they’re beating ploughshares into swords / for this tired old man that we elected king / armchair warriors often fail / and we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales / this is the end / this is the end of the innocence." (Don Henley, “The End of the Innocence”)

"Here I sit so patiently / waiting to find out what price / you have to pay to get out of / going through all these things twice." (Bob Dylan, “Memphis Blues Again”)

The Seventies was America’s Buzzkill Decade; by its end, in the summer of 1979, when Jimmy Carter limned the national malaise, three-quarters of Americans agreed that the future was not what it used to be.

But then came Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan, and happy days were here again, except for midwestern farmers and Rust Belt blue-collar workers. ¹ By the time Reagan left office in 1989, in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal and with several members of his administration in jail or under indictment, there had been a measurable uptick in national optimism—despite which, 54% of Americans still believed the nation was on the “wrong track”. They could not all have been bitter holdouts from the Sixties.

According to Kirkpatrick Sale, in his 1980 book Human Scale, at least since the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 “the American public has become disillusioned with the national government and apathetic or cynical about its efficacy.” On the one hand, the government in those years had consistently underperformed and disappointed, promising more than it could deliver, misleading the nation into a pointless and protracted war, and supporting the struggle for civil rights just as long as it remained south of the Mason-Dixon line. Just as the smoke began to clear from the riotous Sixties, the Nixon/Watergate scandal (1972-74) did to government and politics what Upton Sinclair had done to the meatpacking industry: it revealed the tawdriness, the corruption, and the venality beneath the surface. The Seventies saw devastating inflation, the OPEC oil shock, long lines at the gas pumps, and American citizens taken hostage in Iran. In short, from 1963 to 1980, Americans had no shortage of reasons to be “apathetic or cynical” about Washington.  

On the other hand, we had (and have) no one but ourselves to blame for the sorry state of government: Americans, to put it bluntly, did not and do not vote, at least not in the numbers necessary for a functioning democracy. In 1960, 62.8% of eligible voters weighed in at the polls on Kennedy vs. Nixon; in the sixty years since, despite voting rights legislation and voter registration reforms, we have not approached that highwater mark. The closest we have come in the past fifty years to the 1960 benchmark was in 2008, when just over 58% of eligible voters made it to the polls to deliver a verdict that many of them would inexplicably repudiate just eight years later.

Four decades after Human Scale, most telling is the ongoing discrepancy between voting numbers and expressed levels of dissatisfaction with the state of the nation. In 1979, 75% of Americans agreed that something was seriously wrong with American life; a year later, only 53% of voters showed up for the presidential contest. In 2008, 76% of Americans believed that the country was on the “wrong track,” but only 58% of voters, as mentioned above, cast ballots. We seem to be substantially better at griping than we are at voting.

It doesn’t help, of course, that one of our two national political parties openly admits that, for its own electoral purposes, less is more when it comes to voting; the GOP would rather not have voters meddling in the business of politics. For decades, Republicans have opposed every effort to make voting easier, denouncing such efforts as nothing more than “power grabs” by Democrats. And why bother voting, anyway, when a major party candidate—indeed, when the incumbent President himself—says that our electoral system is rigged, that ballots will be stolen and/or fabricated, that non-citizens are swarming the polls at the behest of crooked politicians, and that dark forces are at work undermining the integrity of our elections?

Rather than blame the electorate, Kirkpatrick Sale quoted Arthur Hadley: “Voters voluntarily avoid the booth because they see no connection between politics and their lives.” Even worse, as Sale himself added, “I suspect that a lot of the people who do go into the voting booths have no great faith that what they are doing touches their lives in any important way.” America, as of 1980, was experiencing “a decline in the credibility of legislative bodies,” according to one source; “a loss of confidence in the nation’s leaders and institutions,” according to a second, and “mutual distrust between government and citizens,” according to a third. If anything, the levels of public faith, credibility, confidence, and trust have all declined since 1980 and have plummeted since 2016.

The problem was and is bigger than voting. Sale observed that “Citizenship has simply evaporated in American life, leaving a residue of felt powerlessness.” He detailed the numerous decisions which presidents and legislatures routinely make, regardless of political affiliation,  issues ranging from war and taxation to the environment and workplace health and safety, all made without directly consulting citizens and “without any participation from the people who are to be affected other than their having pulled a lever in a polling booth two years before.” He shared this analysis from Robert Paul Wolff of Columbia University:

“Since World War II, governments have increasingly divorced themselves from anything which could be called the will of the people. The complexity of the issues, the necessity of technical knowledge, and most important, the secrecy of everything having to do with national security, have conspired to attenuate the representative function of elected officials until a point has been reached which might be called political stewardship, or, after Plato, ‘elective guardianship’. People cannot meaningfully be called free if their representatives vote independently of their wishes, or when laws are passed concerning issues which they are not able to understand. Nor can people be called free who are subject to secret decisions, based on secret data, having unannounced consequences for their well-being and their very lives.”

For a multitude of reasons, Sale lamented, “We do not have authentic political selves, we do not act politically, we do not know what is happening in and cannot much change the affairs of the nation, so the meager act of voting hardly carries much weight. We do not understand ourselves publicly, as public beings; we do not have public duties and public rights and public responsibilities of any meaning; there is nothing in our extended system that binds us as individuals to the public weal…”

We are not a “nation of sheep,” as some have said; we are a nation of lone wolves, resistant to being herded together and resistant to acting collectively. That, at least, is the American mythos, and our politics—a profession where image is almost everything—reflects the mythos as much as it does reality. “When the facts contradict the legend, print the legend.” ²

In 1980, Kirkpatrick Sale wrote:

We have sacrificed our citizenship slowly over the decades, slowly enough so that we have hardly been aware that it is gone—so it is not surprising that we do not have the interests, the attitudes, of citizens. We do not vote. We do not pay taxes voluntarily—at least five million adults are reckoned to be tax avoiders, and virtually everyone else trims and cheats. We do not support our government in time of war. We do not obey its laws by habit but by force, and a great many of the most highly placed people both in government and business, including even our Presidents and our representatives and the executives at the largest firms, are regularly and increasingly seen to be disobeying these laws.

It’s enough to make you question the viability of the system itself—which is precisely what Kirkpatrick Sale was doing. Politics is how we order our lives together, and Sale recognized that a “human scale” existence requires a “human scale” politics, and vice-versa. However, rather than undertaking the paradigm shift required, America in 1980 installed in the White House a genial, flag-waving corporate shill (before entering politics, Reagan had parlayed his acting career into a job as pitchman for General Electric), slapped a new paint job and some smiley-face stickers on the rusting American chassis, rolled back the national odometer, and hoped to god that no one would kick the tires or read the fine print in the contract. Ronald Reagan was the anti-Nixon of American politics: people would, and did, buy a used car from him, and they refused to hold it against him when the car turned out to be a lemon.

And all of that, mind you, was before Donald Trump's entrance into politics.   

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¹ John Mellencamp’s 1985 album Scarecrow, with its stark evocation of “Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough,” expressed the discontent seething beneath Reaganite boosterism. That same year, a band called The Long Ryders released State of Our Union, with songs like “You Just Can’t Ride the Boxcars Anymore” conjuring populist rage from Dust Bowl, Depression-era days: “Now everybody's feeling all confused / They went to get their money and they got refused / Somebody burned 1st National down last night / Smashed and looted daddy's shop downtown / And grandpa said it'd never happen again / The lesson it was learned real good before / Now everybody's leaving town / Sell the house and sell the farm / But you just can't ride the boxcars anymore.”

² A classic quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Re: Distribution

{This is another longer-than-usual post. Look, I’m stuck at home and the bars are closed; what would you expect?}

While we remain in coronavirus lockdown, with 20% or so of Americans now out of work, this is probably as good a time as any to consider a wholesale overhaul of both America’s economic model and its political organization. Who better to guide us in such an undertaking than a man who is a self-confessed monarchist? ¹

John Medaille teaches at the University of Dallas. In addition to longing for a king, he is an advocate of something called “Distributism,” which is both a prescription for a new economic system and a vision for a new political structure. ² Medaille is also a member of a recently formed political party, the American Solidarity Party, which might be described as somewhat to the right of Francisco Franco but to the left of Joseph d’Maistre.

 In an article titled “Distributism and the Polity of Political Economy,” Medaille set out the fundamental problem facing us (the article was written before the ascent of Trump): unequitable distribution of (a) wealth, (b) property, and (c) political power. Redressing those inequities will require not simply tinkering around the edges of the status quo, not just “nudges” or “incentives,” but a comprehensive, systemic change: a revolution of sorts, in fact.

Allow me to quote from Medaille at some length:

Distributism is a system of political economy ³ which lays great stress on the practical need for distributive justice and the wide distribution of productive property. Hence the name. It is distinguished, on the one hand, from economics, which attempts to view the economy as a science separate from politics, and on the other from…capitalism and socialism, both [of which] tend to aggregate production and distribution in vast collectives which are owned either by the state or by largely anonymous groups of shareholders, in whose behalf the collective is presumed to work.

Discussions of distributism usually center on the cultural or economic aspects of the theory. But there is another aspect that is at least as important: the politics of distributism. And by “politics” I do not mean something like “parties” and “platforms” and all the electoral paraphernalia that determine the democratic state. Rather I mean a distributive polity, the organization and constitution of the state and the relationship of the state to the nation.

Distributism, as a system of political economy, requires not only a distribution of property, but a distribution of political authority. As Daniel Webster pointed out, “Power follows property”; that is, as property aggregates in fewer and fewer hands, so does political power. But the reverse is also true: Property follows power; as political power concentrates, those with greater access to that power end up with more property. The two reinforce and reflect each other, and distributism cannot be long maintained in a system of unitary, concentrated and centralized power.

The modern nation-state is a unitary, centralized state. That is, all political power is vested in a sovereign authority, and all other authorities tend to be subordinate to and dependent upon this authority…In America, we tend to think of power as “divided” between the federal, state, and local levels; however, the “supremacy clause” of the Constitution means that power passes to the center whenever and wherever the central state cares to exercise its inherent authority.

Political debates today take place entirely within the bounds created by the nation-state and global capitalism. But they have curious outcome: the debates center on the size and cost of government, but no matter who is elected, the power, reach, and debts of government seem to rise. Conservatives lament that conservative administrations don’t seem to conserve anything, while liberals lament that liberal administrations don’t actually liberate anyone. Indeed, both sides confront the paradox that government and government debt grew faster under Reagan and both Bushes then it did under Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

There is a reason for this: the nation-state is always going to follow its own nature, no matter who is in charge; the nation-state does what it does because it is what it is. There are no alternative sovereignties, no competing sources of authority to check its power. Hence the debates are grounded only in competing ideologies, none of which can escape the logic of the nation-state.

That logic, according to Medaille, has brought us to a crisis point:

We find ourselves in a world with debts we cannot pay, obligations we cannot meet, wars we cannot win, and all dependent on an infrastructure we cannot maintain. The nation-state has over-reached itself and can no longer be sustained. No debates about fiddling with the marginal tax rates for business or about the minimum wage, worthy as those debates might be, will get to the root of our problems.

Medaille dismissed the boilerplate conservative talking point about “Big Government”:

I believe that the argument about the size of government is misplaced. ⁴ Government has always been about as big as it is, about as expensive as it is, and about as intrusive as it is; there is no golden age of “small government”, certainly not where the nation-state is concerned, and likely at no time in history. The amount of goods, cash, and labor that a peasant had to give to the lord of the manor was certainly no less in value than that which a modern worker pays in taxes, especially when combined with the mandatory tithe. The rules imposed by the guild and the city authorities were likely no less [onerous] than those imposed today by federal, state and local authorities.

Size might matter, but it isn’t everything, as Medaille explained:

What is [crucial] is not so much size and cost as the location and rights of participation. The central authorities are always remote and impersonal; the distributed authorities tend to be more local and participatory. But “local” does not mean “smaller” or “less intrusive,” and anybody who thinks otherwise has never had to submit a landscaping plan to his homeowners’ association. The [medieval] craftsman was bound by strong rules, no less than the modern electrician, but he had a say in those rules, and his fees were usually spent in a way that benefited him and his profession, or even (and more importantly) in a way that made him a public benefactor along with the honors that accrued to that title.

I believe that this ancient debate between competing authorities will reemerge as the nation-state succumbs to its own overreach, while the corporations can no longer supply our needs, not only our need for goods but our needs for useful and meaningful work. The economy and the political order will have to be rebuilt, and rebuilt not from the top-down, but from the bottom up. As conditions deteriorate nationally and internationally, the world will be rebuilt locally. Cities and neighborhoods will have to learn to solve their own problems with the resources that come to hand. And as these localities solve their own problems, they will insist on their own sovereignty; the old debates will emerge in new forms.

What is certain is that the system will evolve…largely driven by events on the ground, but [also] affected by our knowledge of the alternatives. And it is important to know that there are alternatives outside the unitary nation-state. With this knowledge, the range of the moral imagination and practical intelligence is extended beyond the cramped quarters of the current debate.

What we are living with today may not be the failure of our “unitary nation-state” per se; it may only be the failure of this abysmal president and his abysmal presidency. ⁵ Even so, no one can pretend that all was well, before Trump came along, with either the American economy or the American polity. Pace John Medaille, I doubt that monarchism is in our future; but authoritarian impulses, especially on the Right, are increasingly hiding in plain sight. As an alternative to that, “Distributism” has much in common with Kirkpatrick Sale’s emphasis on “human scale,” with E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, and with the sort of generous, humane localism promoted by folks at the Front Porch Republic.

The nice thing about thinking small and acting local is that it doesn’t require anyone’s permission—only that of your neighbors: assuming, of course, that neither they nor you are under epidemiological house arrest.

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¹ See:  https://distributistreview.com/archive/why-i-am-a-monarchist

² “Distributism” is not a new idea, nor is it John Medaille’s brainchild. An offshoot of Roman Catholic “social justice” teaching, Distributism had its heyday, such as it was, between 1920 and 1940; it was espoused, in various forms, by the likes of G.K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and Dorothy Day.

³ In his essay, Medaille provided a brief explanation of the difference between what used to be called “political economy” and what it became, i.e. the “science” of economics. The former was an interdisciplinary field which concerned itself with laws, customs, social mores, and ethics; while the latter, in Medaille’s opinion, amounts to no more than “a calculation of return on investment to the capital fund”. The human element of political economy, including concepts like “justice” and “fairness,” was all but removed from consideration so that an amoral market could be governed by impersonal economic “laws” (supply and demand, profit and loss, diminishing returns, etc.) impartially enforced by the Invisible Hand.

⁴ Conservatives who rail against “Big Government” never specify what the proper size and reach of government ought to be, with the notable exception of Grover Norquist, who forthrightly acknowledge wanting the federal government reduced until it was small enough that he could drown it in a bathtub.

⁵ To update Ronald Reagan: The ten most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m Donald Trump, and I’m in charge of the country.”

Today's Modest Proposal

While waiting to find out if Robert Mueller’s report reveals our President to be criminal or merely grossly corrupt, astonishingly venal, and utterly unsuited for his office: let’s talk about something else.

Pace Elizabeth Warren, we are not going to abolish the Electoral College anytime soon. However, it would be easy enough for the states, acting on their own, to remedy the main problem with the College, which is its “winner take all” nature.

As things currently stand, a candidate who wins a state by a single vote is awarded all of that state’s electors; the losing candidate gets no electoral votes at all, whether in Montana (with three electoral votes at stake) or in California (with fifty-five).

The simple solution is to require each state to award its electoral votes in proportion to the outcome of its popular vote—e.g. if candidate A receives 52% of the vote in California, then she will receive 28.6 of California’s fifty-five electoral votes; candidate B, having received 48% of the popular vote, will receive 26.4 electoral votes. (In Montana, those same percentages would translate into 1.56 and 1.44 electoral votes, respectively.)

There will be some math involved, but it won’t rise to the level of rocket science; electoral shares could be rounded to either one or two decimal places (as above). Third-party candidates will shave off fractions of the vote total—again, based on the percentage of actual votes they receive: if candidate C receives 1% of the vote in, say, Montana, then he will be awarded .03 (1%) of Montana’s three electoral votes. If candidate D manages to get 5% of the popular vote in Texas, then she receives 1.9 of the state’s 38 electoral votes.

Rather than turning narrow popular majorities (or pluralities) into electoral landslides, electoral votes need to reflect the popular vote. There is no reasonable justification for the current system in which a candidate who wins 49.9 of the votes cast in any given state receives no votes at all from that state in the Electoral College; awarding each state’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote will more accurately express the (divided) will of the voters.

I leave it to astute political scientists (and math wizards) to calculate what affect this will have on campaigning patterns, on campaign spending, and on the importance of “battleground” states that currently alchemize (as they did, notoriously, in the 2016 election) relatively thin margins of victory into electoral gold. There is simply no scenario in which candidates will (or should) devote a great deal of time or money to sparsely populated states like Montana or Wyoming; those of us who live in such places might well be grateful for the lack of attention.

The caveat in all this is that no individual state is likely to enact such electoral reform on its own; doing so would be a form of unilateral electoral disarmament. Therefore, a constitutional amendment will almost certainly be required, which puts this idea pretty much in the same boat as Senator Warren’s call to abolish the Electoral College completely.

Back, I suppose, to the drawing board…hey, has anyone leaked anything at all yet about the Mueller report? What’s this I hear about federal troops being in place around Mar-a-Lago? Is it true that Trump is on the run in a white Bronco with Al Cowlings at the wheel? If the report is exculpatory, will Trump take back all his anti-Mueller “witch hunt” tweets? Will the Deep State be rehabilitated? 

To paraphrase a Chinese slogan: Let a thousand pardons bloom...

A Better Measure

James C. Scott, in his TWO CHEERS FOR ANARCHY, makes a modest proposal: why don’t we judge our institutions—schools, workplaces, governing bodies of all kinds—by an entirely different metric than the ones we commonly use (productivity, profit, and efficiency)? Instead of measuring our country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product), if we replace quantitative standards with qualitative ones and make the human person the measure, we might arrive at what Scott calls our “GHP" (for Gross Human Product):

What if we were to ask a different question of institutions and activities than the narrow neoclassical question of how efficient they are in terms of costs (e.g., resources, labor, capital) per unit of a given, specified product? What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people. What if we were to bracket the manifest purpose of an institution and the efficiency with which it is achieved and ask what the human product was?

Scott acknowledges that such a concept might defy our ability to measure it (“It is unlikely that we could devise a convincing comprehensive measure of, say, GHP, for gross human product, that would be comparable to the economists' GDP, gross domestic product, measured in monetary units”), but he believes it would be worth the effort:

If, undaunted by these difficulties, we decided to make a stab at it, we could, I think, identify two plausible approaches: one that would gauge how a work process enlarged human capacities and skills and one that took its bearings from the judgments of the workers themselves about their satisfaction. The former is, at least in principle, measurable, in ordinal terms of "more or less."

Factory work, for example, would be judged on its overall impact on the human persons doing the work. Does it improve their quality of life (apart from their income)? Does it add to their skills or to their overall knowledge? Does it make them better human beings, better citizens, or better neighbors? As Scott describes:

What if we were to apply the standard of human capacities and skills to the industrial assembly line? After five or ten years on the assembly line at Lordsville or River Rouge, what are the odds that the capacities and skills of a worker would have been substantially enlarged? Vanishingly small, I would suspect. In fact, the whole point of the time-and-motion analysis behind the division of labor on the line was to break down the work process into thousands of minute steps that could easily be learned. It was deliberately designed to eliminate the artisanal-craft knowledge, and the power this knowledge conferred on workers, that characterized the carriage-making era. The line was premised on a deskilled, standardized workforce in which one "hand" could be easily substituted for another. It depended, in other words, on what we might legitimately call the "stupidification" of the workforce…

Scott has no doubt what the outcome of such an evaluation would be:

Were we scoring assembly-line work by the degree to which it served to enlarge human capacities and skills, it would receive failing grades, no matter how efficient it was at producing cars. More than a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor, asked the essential question: "What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life making heads for pins?"

The very nature of assembly-line labor, claims Scott, works against developing capacities necessary for citizenship: judgment, decision-making, mental flexibility, independence of mind, etc. Again, Scott explains:

If we were to apply the test of an enlarged capacity for democratic citizenship, it is obvious that the assembly line itself is a profoundly authoritarian environment where decisions are in the hands of the engineers and the substitutable units of the workforce are expected to do the work assigned them more or less mechanically. It never quite works out that way, but that's the imminent logic of the line. The line as a work process would have a negative "net democratic product."

Scott extends his thought experiment to another vital social institution, which itself bears some resemblance to a factory:

What if we asked the same questions of the school, the major public institution of socialization for the young in much of the world? Universal public education is, of course, designed to do far more than merely turn out the labor force required by industry. It is as much a political as an economic institution...the great tragedy of the public school system, however, is that it is, by and large, a one-product factory. 

What is this product? It is a certain form of analytical intelligence, narrowly conceived, which can, it is assumed, be measured by tests. We know, of course, that there are many, many skills that are valuable and important for a successful society that are not even remotely related to analytical intelligence, among them, artistic talent, imaginative intelligence, mechanical intelligence (the kind that [Henry] Ford's early workers brought with them from the farm), musical and dance skills, creative intelligence, emotional intelligence, social skills, and ethical intelligence. Some of these aptitudes find a place in extracurricular activities, especially sports, but not in the measured and graded activities on which so much now depends for students, teachers, and schools.

Characterizing our educational system as an academic “rat race,” Scott notes the discrepancy between those who excel at “a certain form of analytic intelligence” and those who do not (regardless of what other capacities they may have):

Those of us who [win] this race are the lifetime beneficiaries of opportunities and privileges that would not likely otherwise have come our way. We are also are likely to carry a lifetime sense of entitlement, superiority, accomplishment, and self-esteem that comes from this victory. Let us bracket, for the moment, the question of whether this dividend is justified and what it actually means in terms of our value to ourselves and others, and merely note that it represents a fund of social capital that adjusts the odds of financial and status mobility radically in our favor. This is a lifetime privilege extended to perhaps one-fifth at most of those the system turns out.

And what of the rest? What of the, say, 80 percent who in effect lose the race? They carry less social capital; the odds are adjusted against them. Perhaps as important is the fact that they are likely to carry a lifelong sense of having been defeated, of being less valued, of thinking that they are inferior and slow-witted. This system effect further adjusts the odds against them. And yet, have we any rational reason to credit the judgments of a system that values such a narrow band-width of human talents and measures achievement within this band by the ability to sit successfully for an exam?  

Those who do poorly on tests of analytical intelligence may be incredibly talented at one or more of the many forms of intelligence that are neither taught nor valued by the school system. What sort of a system is it that wastes these talents, that sends four-fifths of its students away with a permanent stigma in the eyes of society's gatekeepers, and perhaps in their own eyes as well? Are the dubious benefits of the privileges and opportunities accorded a presumed "analytical intelligence elite" by this pedagogical tunnel vision worth so much social damage and waste?

As presently constituted, schools, factories, and conventional top-down managerial regimes may well undermine our capacity for self-government:

Political philosophers as varied as Etienne de La Boetie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were deeply concerned about the political consequences of hierarchy and autocracy. They believed that such settings created the personalities of subjects rather than citizens. Subjects learned the habits of deference. They were apt to fawn on superiors and put on an air of servility, dissembling when necessary and rarely venturing an independent opinion, let alone a controversial one. Their general demeanor was one of caution. While they may have had views of their own, even subversive ones, they kept such views to themselves, avoiding public acts of independent judgment and moral direction.

James Scott poses the question: “Do the cumulative effects of life within [a variety of] hierarchical institutions produce a more passive subject who lacks the spontaneous capacity for mutuality so praised by both anarchist and liberal democratic theorists?

Clearly, says Scott, we need to insist on public policies which “foster institutions that expand the independence, autonomy, and capacities of the citizenry.”  Instead of worrying about growing the economy, why don’t we focus on growing, and sustaining, human beings?

https://www.axelarnbak.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/James-C.-Scott-Two-Cheers-for-Anarchism_-Six-Easy-Pieces-on-Autonomy-Dignity-and-Meaningful-Work-and-Play-Princeton-University-Press-2012.pdf