Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Et tu, Boehner?

America, Elections, English, Founding Fathers, Multiculturalism, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Did I just hear John Boehner say that America was an idea more than a country? The representative from Ohio took the gavel, today, Wednesday, becoming the 61st speaker of the House of Representatives. Toward the end of his address, Boehner repeated the preposterous notion of America as a propositional nation.

The call to think about the US as an idea—rather than real flesh-and-blood communities animated by shared language, history and heroes—is the call of statism at its purist. For a rootless deracinated people are the most pliable, most miserable, and, thus, easier to control.

Faith in the propositional nation presupposes endless immigration. For, after all, this country is presumed to have had no particular requisite characteristics at its founding. And if early Americans had certain characteristics, these are taken to have played no role in the system of individual liberties America’s apparently amorphous founders established.

The Venerated Vote Discounted

Democracy, Elections, Individual Rights, Political Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans

The other day I said to a (male) friend: “I would give up my vote if I could be assured all women would do the same.” He replied: “In that case, I would consider voting.”

So does the vote count? Or does every vote counts?

Not at all. In “Default and Dynamic Democracy,” Loren E. Lomasky observed that, “As electorates increase in size, the probability that one’s vote will swing the election approaches zero” … “[I]n large-number electorates, there is a vanishingly small probability that an individual’s vote (or voice) will swing an election … [F]or citizens of large-scale democracies, voting is inconsequential.”

The winner in an election is certainly not the fictitious entity referred to as “The People,” but rather the representatives of the majority. While it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is thwarted openly, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?

In reality, the majority, too, has little say in the business of governance – they’ve merely elected politicians who have been awarded carte blanche to do as they please. As Benjamin Barber wrote:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.

In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy E. Barnett further homes in on why genuinely informed individuals have little incentive to exercise their “democratic right”:

If we vote for a candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for, but we have also consented to the laws she has voted against.
If we vote against the candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for or against.
And if we do not vote at all, we have consented to the outcome of the process whatever it may be.

This “rigged contest” Barnett describes as, “‘Heads’ you consent, ‘tails’ you consent, ‘didn’t flip the coin,’ guess what? You consent as well.'”

On a more pragmatic note, here is how my libertarian WND pal, Vox Day, explains why there will be “No Change After Nov. 2”:

“The reason we can be sure that the Republicans are going to betray the tea party once they come to congressional power is that we know that they are not going to even attempt to solve any of the four most pressing problems facing the nation at the moment. In some cases, Republicans are almost certainly going to try to make them worse. Consider:

1) The economy. Republicans have nothing to offer on the subject. They are almost completely silent on the subject of state bankruptcies, pension-fund shortages and the secrecy of the Fed. Trading fiscal policy-oriented Neo-Keynesians for monetary policy-oriented Monetarist Keynesians isn’t going to materially improve anything.

3) Immigration. Republicans are mostly on the wrong side of this as well, being self-destructive fans of unsustainable open borders.

4) The endless wars. Republicans still support invading and occupying other nations despite the overall cost of the Bush/Obama wars now exceeding one trillion dollars.”

(I omitted Vox’s second point, “The massive mortgage fraud.” As you all already know, as much as I abhor the fractional reserve system that embroils banks in fraud, I do not agree that the facts, to which one must cleave religiously, support the case of the deadbeat defaulters. But we’ve both written exhaustively—and respectfully–about our “foreclosure fracas” disagreement.)

To Vox’s list of Republican contributions to the political morass we’re in, Paul Gottfried adds some other intractable accomplishments.

UPDATED: The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture

Britain, China, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

“The French Revolution did not generate only a new politics … Along with the new politics there came a new concept of personhood, a self-caressing egotism … a moral and aesthetic theory based upon sentiment” (p. 122). And relativism too (p. 146). In my experience, this malady affects conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Hierarchy, so essential to ordered liberty, is no longer. Lost is the distinction between men and women of character, and those without it; between adults and youth (the latter are usually elevated and worshiped by ever-errant adults); between experience and a lack of it; between quality in intellectual and cultural products, and its absence. Faction has replaced the fellow-feelings that ought to accompany a shared purpose. Talk to me about what you’ve dubbed the Zeitgeist’s ‘moronizing dialectic.’

This was one of the questions I posed to Prof. Dennis O’Keeffe in the second part of our WND.COM interview, “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.” (Last week’s Part I was entitled “Thomas Paine: 18th–century Che Guevara.”)

Still on the topic of the remarkable “Edmund Burke,” my conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe continues this week on WND.COM. O’Keeffe is Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

The column is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

UPDATE (Oct. 29): Writes Ron S.:

To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: Please, no more tantalizing via..

…Edmund Burke by Dennis O’Keeffe when it costs $130 at Amazon. Best, Ron S.”

This is why I have resisted a request from an academic press to view my completed manuscript, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For The West From Post-Apartheid South Africa. With 800 end-notes, and a considerable level of abstraction and originality that do not compromise its readability—my book more than meets the requirements. However, as Ron has discovered, an academic press prints a few hundred copies and sells them to libraries at prohibitive costs.

I am lucky: the academic friends I approve send me their books; I get them free. I say “approve” because I never bother with boring second-handers, writing unoriginal stuff; with topics I do not care for. Nor do I bore myself with the works of people I have no time for. I have a passion for Burke. I have no time for “clever” smarmy comments about the man—comments which may or may not be correct. Burke is too important and too neglected in American public life to mess with.

Dennis’s little gem of a book conveys just this sentiment.

Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy

My Friday column for October 22 will probably be titled “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara.” The column following it, to be published on Friday October the 29th, is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

You’ll have to read the first to appreciate the second, as they are part of a conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe, Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

Under discussion is the subject of Professor O’Keeffe’s latest book, “Edmund Burke.”

One of the questions I asked Dennis was “Why is it that one rarely hears Edmund Burke mentioned in American public discourse, yet my countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke (‘the greatest Irishman who ever lived’) for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious ‘Revolution in France’?”

Indeed, although neglected, Edmund Burke’s thinking is central to American—and any other—ordered liberty.

Be sure to read the two columns, which you can follow from Barely a Blog to WND.COM.

I am away at the 3rd annual meeting of the HL Mencken Club. Please join me if you are in the vicinity. The details are HERE.