Why are the liberals freaking out about the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court? Why are they freaking out about Donald Trump? Why are they freaking out about any conservative speech as "hate" speech?
Answer: it is because the liberal project is going wrong.
When a political project starts going wrong (and that goes also for religious and military projects too) the leaders of the movement amp it up. That is why you get Reigns of Terror a few years into a successful revolution. Things start going wrong, and the obvious and only reason must be, in the immortal words of the Bolsheviks, "saboteurs and wreckers."
And when the monster that runs the Reign of Terror dies -- as in Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- then you get rhe "Thermidorean Reaction:" the return, or at least the beginning of a return, to normalcy. That is because, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live in the frenzy of an ideological movement forever. Eventually they insist on returning to wiving, thriving, and surviving.
But notice the horrors that all the recipients of modern revolution had to go through. The French had to go through the Reign of Terror and then lose a huge war to the other nations of Europe. The Germans had to suffer through the humiliation of World War II and the guilt of genocide. The Russians had to go through 35 more years of economic stasis after the Death of Stalin. The Chinese finally got to start an economic renaissance after the horrors of Mao.
So I declare that the frenzy of our liberal friends is about the failure of their movement of the last century, in the words of Barack Obama, to effect fundamental transformation, because it was never going to work anyway.
That is because the so-called fundamental transformation has been a Great Reaction trying to resurrect the past, in the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation, and the neo-slavery of the administrative state.
And it was always bound to fail, because the modern industrial era needs less politics and government not more as the left honestly imagines. The reason is that the market economy adjudicates outcomes without the need for force, unlike the hunter-gatherer and agricultural era when a tribe's access to food-yielding land was not just everything but the only thing.
I understand why our liberal friends are beside themselves. Their brand of politics, for the last century, has been based on the educated ruling class having the last word about everything, and it turned out that required the educated ruling class should have the power to resolve all issues at the Supreme Court. So to lose power in the Supreme Court is to lose everything, because everything decided at the Supreme Court is a judicial ukase, not a compromise effected with the consent of the governed.
Instead, conservatives argue, the great questions of politics should be determined by politics, not the judges of the Supreme Court. The "originalist" movement that is associated with the Federalist Society proposes that Supreme Court supremacy is not what the founders intended. Nor, I would argue, is it a solution to any political problem.
Actually, I'd say that the doctrine of the "living constitution" and Supreme Court supremacy is an admission that big government is a bust. On the one hand, the results of elections cannot be guaranteed to yield the results desired by the educated ruling class, and thus the ruling class needs to have a way to annul the decisions of the voters. On the other hand the administrative state is a consequence of the ruling class making government a lot bigger than can possibly be supervised by 535 legislators. With gigantic national political programs from pensions to health care to education and welfare there is no way that mere legislation can resolve all the injustices that are bound to occur under the government's clunking fist.So you end up with adminstrative decrees and administrative courts and the whole unjust apparatus of the modern state.
Notice the hypocrisy. The educated ruling class agitates to make government bigger, because justice. Then it decides that government is now too big and complicated for the little guy to understand and therefore the little guy and his vote and his representative must be kept out of the loop.
Eventually ordinary people start to get pissed off by a government that looks after its own but does not look after the ordinary Joe and Jane. This is not rocket science.
But when the ordinary Joe and Jane start to object the well-born activists, the children of the functionaries of the administrative state, go wild. Because the rebellion of the Joes and Janes threatens their political power -- indeed their privilege -- and their assumed right to make all the decisions for the rest of us.
Now, I suppose it is naive of someone like me to hope that the old ruling class will give up its power and perquisites quietly in response to a couple of election results. After all, the notion of rule by educated and evolved people from the right schools is the very faith and religion of our ruling class. So even if the Trump GOP party should win the midterms, as now seems unlikely, the old ruling class is not likely to go quietly.
And that is a pity, because, as illustrated in my Great Enrichment page, and in Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family, the last two centuries of the market economy have created prosperity and peace for billions of humans, and there has never been anything like it, ever. And, I would argue, this has all been achieved despite the best efforts of the educated ruling class.
So expect the liberal freakouts to continue, and expect things to get worse before they get better.
Answer: it is because the liberal project is going wrong.
When a political project starts going wrong (and that goes also for religious and military projects too) the leaders of the movement amp it up. That is why you get Reigns of Terror a few years into a successful revolution. Things start going wrong, and the obvious and only reason must be, in the immortal words of the Bolsheviks, "saboteurs and wreckers."
And when the monster that runs the Reign of Terror dies -- as in Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- then you get rhe "Thermidorean Reaction:" the return, or at least the beginning of a return, to normalcy. That is because, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live in the frenzy of an ideological movement forever. Eventually they insist on returning to wiving, thriving, and surviving.
But notice the horrors that all the recipients of modern revolution had to go through. The French had to go through the Reign of Terror and then lose a huge war to the other nations of Europe. The Germans had to suffer through the humiliation of World War II and the guilt of genocide. The Russians had to go through 35 more years of economic stasis after the Death of Stalin. The Chinese finally got to start an economic renaissance after the horrors of Mao.
So I declare that the frenzy of our liberal friends is about the failure of their movement of the last century, in the words of Barack Obama, to effect fundamental transformation, because it was never going to work anyway.
That is because the so-called fundamental transformation has been a Great Reaction trying to resurrect the past, in the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation, and the neo-slavery of the administrative state.
And it was always bound to fail, because the modern industrial era needs less politics and government not more as the left honestly imagines. The reason is that the market economy adjudicates outcomes without the need for force, unlike the hunter-gatherer and agricultural era when a tribe's access to food-yielding land was not just everything but the only thing.
I understand why our liberal friends are beside themselves. Their brand of politics, for the last century, has been based on the educated ruling class having the last word about everything, and it turned out that required the educated ruling class should have the power to resolve all issues at the Supreme Court. So to lose power in the Supreme Court is to lose everything, because everything decided at the Supreme Court is a judicial ukase, not a compromise effected with the consent of the governed.
Instead, conservatives argue, the great questions of politics should be determined by politics, not the judges of the Supreme Court. The "originalist" movement that is associated with the Federalist Society proposes that Supreme Court supremacy is not what the founders intended. Nor, I would argue, is it a solution to any political problem.
Actually, I'd say that the doctrine of the "living constitution" and Supreme Court supremacy is an admission that big government is a bust. On the one hand, the results of elections cannot be guaranteed to yield the results desired by the educated ruling class, and thus the ruling class needs to have a way to annul the decisions of the voters. On the other hand the administrative state is a consequence of the ruling class making government a lot bigger than can possibly be supervised by 535 legislators. With gigantic national political programs from pensions to health care to education and welfare there is no way that mere legislation can resolve all the injustices that are bound to occur under the government's clunking fist.So you end up with adminstrative decrees and administrative courts and the whole unjust apparatus of the modern state.
Notice the hypocrisy. The educated ruling class agitates to make government bigger, because justice. Then it decides that government is now too big and complicated for the little guy to understand and therefore the little guy and his vote and his representative must be kept out of the loop.
Eventually ordinary people start to get pissed off by a government that looks after its own but does not look after the ordinary Joe and Jane. This is not rocket science.
But when the ordinary Joe and Jane start to object the well-born activists, the children of the functionaries of the administrative state, go wild. Because the rebellion of the Joes and Janes threatens their political power -- indeed their privilege -- and their assumed right to make all the decisions for the rest of us.
Now, I suppose it is naive of someone like me to hope that the old ruling class will give up its power and perquisites quietly in response to a couple of election results. After all, the notion of rule by educated and evolved people from the right schools is the very faith and religion of our ruling class. So even if the Trump GOP party should win the midterms, as now seems unlikely, the old ruling class is not likely to go quietly.
And that is a pity, because, as illustrated in my Great Enrichment page, and in Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family, the last two centuries of the market economy have created prosperity and peace for billions of humans, and there has never been anything like it, ever. And, I would argue, this has all been achieved despite the best efforts of the educated ruling class.
So expect the liberal freakouts to continue, and expect things to get worse before they get better.
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