Can We Teach the Corporate Elite Before it is Too Late?

I had always assumed that the US corporate elite were apolitical, and the reason that they slewed liberal was just taking care of business. If you are Warren Buffett with your oil trains you chime in with a call for tax increases because that's how you buy protection from the liberal ruling class.

But now comes David French to tell us, in the wake of Paypal deciding not to invest in North Carolina because the state doesn't like men in women's bathrooms, that the corporate elite is not liberal out of prudence but liberal out of conviction. He writes:

The business world’s turn toward progressivism is the result of peer pressure, not market forces. It reflects the personal values and interests of the corporate world’s liberal elite, not the values and interests of the country as a whole. Apple, Disney, and PayPal fish from the same cultural and academic pond as the elite media and elite universities. When I was at Harvard Law School, my classmates were recruited not just by top law firms but also by top consulting firms and multinational corporations. Very few of them were conservative. Barely any of them were social conservatives.

So it's war.

But before we open hostilities, let me tell you corporate barons how insulated and narrow-minded and bigoted you are for falling in with the left's cultural and religious orthodoxies. Maybe some of you will see the light.

Oh, and if you don't understand that leftism, progressivism, whatever, is a religion, and just as bigoted as the bitter clingers of Obama's report, then I have a bridge to sell you, cheap, because you look like an easy mark.

The central idea I want to get across is that enthusiastic Christianity, fundamentalism, the sawdust trail, whatever you want to call it, is the royal road to the middle class from the victim culture of workers and peasants. Hey, I even wrote a book about it, The Road to the Middle Class. You could start at Chapter 1.

What is the point? The point is that, to succeed in the industrial, capitalist age, people need to lose their age-old submission to fate and the local warrior lord, and take responsibility for their lives. Here is what a commentator said during the Great Awakening in the 18th century when a ton of people in the Anglosphere were doing just that.

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

Do you see that progressivism is the opposite of this? It says, oh, you poor victimized dears. There is no hope for you in this cruel and unjust world. Just vote for us, the progressives that care for you, and we will right your wrongs and feed you entitlements forever.

How did that work out for the white working class that got good jobs at good wages thanks to progressive legislation that empowered unions? It ended up with the extinction of the unionized corporations and the good jobs at good wages. And the extinction of the white working class in drink and drugs.

I call this "little darlings" syndrome. If you ever sign up to become the little darling of the ruling class you end up like anyone that cuddles up to a sugar daddy. You end up thrown away for something younger and sexier. How do you think it is working out for African Americans, one of the latest little darlings of the liberals? Even Al Sharpton is discouraged after seven years of a black president.

Hey, CEOs, that you be you! If you get in bed with the government, taking its subsidies and it set-asides, it could all end in tears. Do you ever wonder what will happen when it is politically convenient for the government and the ruling class to dump you and loot you?

Yes, but what about gays and trans and women and minorities?

Well, I have developed a reductive theory to 'splain it all so that Lucille Ball's Lucy character could get it. I call it Three Peoples theory.  Here's how it goes.

Throughout most of history, humans have lived as People of the Subordinate Self. They knew that the world was stacked against them unless they became the client of a powerful patron, such as the village Big Man or the lord of the manor. Even the heroes of The Iliad knew that they were merely the playthings of the gods on Mt. Olympus. But then came the Axial Age religions which advanced the idea that gods were predictable lawgivers. Follow the divine law as a responsible individual and you could go to Heaven. Notice that this applies across Hinduism (get reborn as  Brahmin for good behavior) and Judaism and Christianity. As Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, it is a really powerful idea to say that, even if bad guys get away with it in this world, don't worry. Because there is no escaping divine justice after death in the next world.

So the people that bought into the new Axial Age religions became People of the Responsible Self, and they tended to live in cities and engage in trade. That makes sense, because when you are in business, you are in the responsibility business. But most people still lived out on the farm, subject to the vagaries of the weather and the local lord.

With the growth of capitalism in the last 500 years, almost everyone has had to come in off the farm and live in the city. This movement has been marked by notable religious revivals. The Reformation, that centered in the commercial Low Countries. The Puritans in 16/17th century England. The Great Awakening at the dawn of the industrial age. Did you know that the Second Great Awakening centered in the "burned-over district" of upstate New York where the cheap transportation of the Erie Canal had suddenly awakened the population from the sleep of ages?

Yes, but that was then, this is now. Well, now we have the People of the Creative Self. We creatives don't just want to be responsible, we want to make a mark with original and creative work. So we celebrate the courage of the rebel, in business, in culture, and in sex. We celebrate this, the People of the Creative Self. But not the rest of America.

And this is my point. If you are a truly advanced and evolved and compassionate person you will recognize that the creative life is not for everyone. Most people still want to live responsibly under rules, or subordinately under powerful patrons. And the laws should reflect this.

Back in the day advanced progressives said that it was cruel to chuck the working class into the capitalist crucible. They ought to be allowed to maintain their authentic working-class culture, and the state ought to honor this. In other words, if People of the Subordinate Self were not ready to enter the capitalist world of the People of the Responsible Self they had a right to stay where they were, and the laws should recognize this right.

But now the People of the Creative Self are saying that if you don't bend the knee to our creative culture that celebrates all kinds of genders and life styles then you are a bigot and we will name and shame you back to the stone age.

I don't think so. And you corporate chieftains had better get evolved and compassionate on this and step out of your Creative People bubble. Because the culture of progressives and their political correctness and their social media naming and shaming of anyone that dissents from the liberal line is narrow, and cruel, and unjust, and flat-out bigoted.

Progressivism celebrates the People of the Creative Self; it patronizes and manipulates the People of the Subordinate Self; and it anathematizes the People of the Responsible Self.

And two wrongs out of three don't make a right.

Silencing the Opposition Means Your Side is in Trouble

A defining characteristic of the Obama era is the widespread adoption of the president's advice to argue with your neighbors and "get in their face." And so on.

Actually, that's fine in an election; an election is a show of force, a contest to see who has the biggest army of voters behind him or Herself. The trouble is that the president continued his robust rhetoric into his presidency, and his supporters have followed his lead.

First we had partisan stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank bills. Then we had the IRS harassing Tea Party groups. Now we have Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calling for prosecution of climate change critics using the RICO laws that were designed as a tool to break up organized crime syndicates. And we have state attorneys general going after ExxonMobil for misleading investors and the American people about the dangers of climate change 20 years ago. And they are also going on a fishing expedition after CEI, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And that's not to mention the harassment of social conservatives that don't want to get with the latest gender-bending fad.

See, whatever the actual issue, whether climate change is the defining issue of our time or just a liberal fantasy, or whether gay and transgender rights are a fundamental human right of just liberal folly, liberals are making a fundamental mistake here.

If you decide to resort to intimidation and punishment-by-process in your issue advocacy, then you are conceding that you are not winning in the court of public opinion. You realize at a gut level that you are losing the argument. You have concluded that only the clunking fist will get the job done. In fact, you are starting a war.

Now our liberal friends insist they are all in favor of peace and justice except for the occasional peaceful protest designed merely to raise public awareness about an issue. In this faith they are probably as delusional as the European colonialists that rationalized that their colonies were beneficial to the backward "natives." What a benefit western traditions of public administration and law were to the people of India!

I have argued this week in the American Thinker that liberals are delusional when they think that their activism is merely a helping hand for the traditionally marginalized. No it isn't. Liberal activism is the power play of the scions of the rich and powerful. Liberal activism is a problem. It tries to turn every issue in America into a political issue, and thus into the moral equivalent of war.

Let us ask our liberal friends what might be the problem of turning every problem in America into a moral equivalent of war. Why, our liberal friend's answer would be immediate if we were talking about the Cold War. The problem is Escalation. Yes. Once you set up conflict between two parties there is always the danger of escalation.

There is also the little problem, as Glen Harlan Reynolds points out, that conspiring to deny Americans their constitutional rights is a crime.

The great problem of the modern age, in my view, is that it has reduced the need for warrior monarchs, warrior marcher lords, and warrior dawn raiders. The logic of the post industrial revolution era is that nearly all things can be resolved by market relationships, based on the profoundly social impulse to make yourself useful to your fellow humans by offering products and services on the global market. The fate of the world need not be decided by feats of arms or even entitlement programs. It can be resolved by peaceful cooperation.

But this is too radical for our hunter-gatherer brains to grasp. And there are plenty of people who want the excitement and the danger of moral war that excitingly verges towards actual war. Thus the liberal activism culture.

If that were the end of the story, there would be no hope for us.

But the saving grace is that power makes you stupid. The whole point of power is to be able to ignore feedback, to silence the opposition and respond with a clunking fist. But clunking fists, like incoming mortar rounds, tend to concentrate the minds of the recipients wonderfully. And when you silence the opposition, and force them to keep their heads down with your mortar rounds, you do not know what they are thinking.

And sooner or later the grateful recipients decide to stop thinking about their problem and decide to do something about it.

Here's Why Politicians Always Call for Unity, Dennis Prager

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager is annoyed with politicians that continually call for unity. And then he quotes a bunch of politicians calling for unity, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That's baloney, he writes.

One would be hard-pressed to name a single free society that was ever united outside of wartime. The only truly united countries are totalitarian states.

But that is exactly the point, the point of government. Wartime.

That's why I hammer away at my catchphrases like Government is Force and Politics is Violence.

When politicians are calling for unity they are calling us to war. They are saying, as they sang in Les Mis,

Will you join in our crusade,
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Politicians are always calling us to war. Of course, in the old days governments actually admitted this. But now, in the age of the welfare state, government is said to be all about peace and justice, but this is a lie. It is a lie that today's ruling class tells itself. Nobody here but us bespectacled librarians.

Government is always saying: enough of the namby-pamby stuff, it is time for force. We must gather together, unite, bury our enmities, and go forth to smite the foe. In the case of health care, the foe is insurance companies and their profits. In the case of race, the foe is white privilege. In the case of the Great Recession, the foe is greedy bankers.

The excellent Reverend Al Sharpton understands all this perfectly with his slogan, No Justice, No Peace. He is brilliantly inverting the do-gooder dream of peace and justice and making it into a war cry.

When you look at all this squarely in the face you realize that we humans have a problem. The people that govern us always get into power with a war cry. And yet we humans are supposed to be social animals who get on by peaceful cooperation. How do we get back to peaceful cooperation when our leaders are always rallying us to unify so we can go off to war?

I don't know the answer to this. The partial answer is that instead of unifying to smash an internal enemy -- which must deal with the contradiction that we are unifying in order to divide -- we unify to smash an external enemy.

Notice that this is what Donald Trump is proposing. He wants us to unify against the Mexicans and against the Chinese and teach them a lesson. He is calling for economic war on the foreigners. Of course he is; he has to be calling for war on something. On the other hand Ted Cruz is calling us to arms to battle the Washington cabal. Hillary Clinton is Fighting For Us, and Bernie is fighting for free stuff for college students.

The next thing for which our politicians will unify us will be the War on Islam.

The problem is that there is no mechanism for undoing the precipitate of force in our own society, the programs to force us to pay for retirement, health care, education, and welfare. All these things could be done without force, but who will dare to start the unwinding of our heritage of force?

In today's America there is nothing that will unify the people like a proposal to reduce the amount of government force in America.

The Problem is not "A Drought of Ideas"

Over at the American Interest Walter Russell Mead looks at a failing black college in South Chicago. He blames Democrats for presiding over a corrupt and dysfunctional system, and Republicans for not coming up with alternatives. And then he blames the cognitive elite for "A Drought of Ideas."

Vain and self-aggrandizing politicians deserve a lot of the blame for not trying to tackle the problems sooner, but they are far from being the sole guilty parties. After all, politicians can’t fight for solutions that don’t yet exist. And that there is so little creative thinking about these issues is the fault of think tanks, public intellectuals and academics. It is the cognitive elite that has let the country down.

Well, yes, I suppose. But that ignores the fundamental error of our times that "think tanks, public intellectuals and academics" should be in pole position on the NASCAR Politics 500.

Would we ever worry about the cognitive elite and food, and say that the cognitive elite has let us down on food? Fortunately, think tanks, public intellectuals and academics don't have a lot to say about food production, distribution, and retailing. Otherwise I am sure it would be just as screwed up as health care.

I'd say that the fundamental problem of our times is not the failure of the cognitive elite. The fundamental problem is that something like 35-50 percent of our GDP (used here as a stand-in for the day-to-day activities of Americans) is controlled by government. And government is force. And government cannot learn. And anyone that is getting a government check, from grandma to crony capitalist, will kill rather than give it up.

OK, suppose we throw away all the government programs because government cannot learn, i.e., learn from its mistakes. What then? I think there is still a problem, as was identified by Milton Friedman. He argued that governments always tax up to the limit and spend up to the limit that the society of the time allows. Our 21st century governments have spent the last century and more ramping up spending, on the idea that government can help people. And it has steadily ramped up taxes, on the idea that the rich should pay their fair share.

Now here we are, a century later, and the programs don't really help people. Social Security discourages people from saving; Medicare encourages grandma to make an avocation out of going to the doctor; welfare encourages people to molder away in useless lives instead of getting a job; education is just a jobs program for teachers and administrators that does an OK job educating middle-class students and a dreadful job of educating lower-class students. And as for taxes! Taxeas are a monstrous tangle of subsidies, credits, set-asides and pay-offs. And the taxes on labor make the simple notion of getting a job and getting paid a nightmare for employer and employee.

So I don't think that we can say that the problem is just a drought of ideas. The problem is that the game of taxing and spending has reached its limit. There is no longer any real slack that politicians can use to say: hey kids, how about this free stuff. And the same thing applies to taxes. The obvious new source of taxes is a VAT, but that would go hardest on the middle class and we can't have that.

So nothing will change until things get so bad that people no longer think that they can hold on to their particular government check, and no longer think they can get what they want from government.

It is pretty obvious that things would have to get really bad, as in riots in the streets, before people would agree to giving up their entitlements. The Charlton Heston rule applies. I'll give you my government check when you take it from my cold, dead hands.

But I am still thinking about the bigger question. Is it possible that there could ever be a government that deliberately did not spend everything it could and taxed everything it could? And that means: could there ever be a people that said, I don't want your stinkin' entitlements and I don't want you taxing the stinkin' rich?

Sadly, I don't think that humans are capable of that.

Nevertheless, I do have an idea. My idea is this. Instead of getting entitlements from the government, people would sign up with entitlement patrons. They would pledge themselves to that patron, and the patron would promise to take care of them. But the patron would not have any coercive powers obtained from the government to force the rest of the nation to contribute to the patron and his clients. In other words, people that want it could live under a kind of neo-feudalism, where they shelter under a powerful lord and get his protection. But nobody outside the powerful lord and his patronage network would owe him and his clients a thing.

We already have this, in the the form of big corporations that offer pretty good feudal benefits and protection, and big unions that offer the same. I just want to make sure that these patronage networks cannot plunder the rest of the nation to feed their clients, and right now crony capitalism and labor law allows corporations and unions to plunder the rest of society. But not as much as government.

Obviously, employees of big government could not have any such client rights, because their rights would be supported by state coercion, government force, and that would be wrong.

Could it work? We'll see. All it would take is for government to start failing at delivering its much-loved checks. Then people would have to start finding a new way to shelter under a powerful patron.

Can Ted Cruz Bring US Together?

On the day that my "I Want a President to Teach Liberals a Lesson" got an Instalanche from Ed Driscoll, let's imagine that the opposite is true.

Never mind about teaching lessons: Can Ted Cruz be the candidate to bring us all together?

I think that liberals are going to get a monster lesson in the next decade, like the one they got from Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. It will be for a host of reasons, from the bankruptcy of the blue state to the rage of the excluded -- not the traditionally marginalized of liberal imagination but the real excluded that liberals have ejected from the public square and we know who we are. The point is that the divisive politics that liberals have pursued for the last 50 years is about to bite back.

All that aside, what we really need in a president is someone to bring us all together again after the astonishingly divisive presidency of Barack Obama. I give President Obama the benefit of the doubt. I believe that he really believes he is making the world a better place with his mean divisiveness. That's what a lifelong marination in liberalism will do to you.

Of course, bringing us together is what George W. Bush was trying to do 16 years ago with his kinder, gentler America, but liberals wouldn't let him. They needed him as Bushitler, and Bushitler he was. Liberals needed to rally their troops for the 2006 midterms and the 2008 election and by golly they did it. Because politics is violence, starting with verbal violence, and politics is division, starting with scapegoats. And the liberal religion is politics.

But is Ted Cruz, the scourge of the Washington cabal, the man to bring us all together?

OK, so Ted Cruz is not exactly the life of the party, but he has shown in his campaign thus far an astonishing capacity for sweating the details. So here goes on a three point plan to bring us all together.

• There must be a way to reach out to African American church ladies. Ted Cruz is openly Christian, and the church ladies of Charleston, SC, showed their Christian forgiveness after the monstrous act of Dylan Roof shooting up their church and killing their church members.
  
• There must be a way to reach out to the striver Hispanics. Never mind about building a wall, all I see is Hispanics working as hard as they can to build a life for themselves and their families here in the good old USA. Yes, the liberal policy of non-enforcement of immigration law is a scandal, but legal Hispanics are our people and we must be sure that they know it.
  
• It is time to start making fun of SJWs. Kyle Smith has a piece on retweeting social-media trolls, and he is right. It is time we laughed the SJWs into irrelevancy. The idea is to create the meme that we are all tolerant Americans and that these deadly serious SJW crybullies are nothing but a joke.

But not all of the bring-us-together plan would be sweetness and light.

I think it is time for Americans of good will to wage a war on the left-wing activism culture, because the left-wing activists divide us. Many of our liberal friends think that activism, and its fantasy of speaking truth to power, is the highest that anyone can aspire to. It is, obviously, the liberal equivalent of the Catholic family encouraging a child to find a "vocation" to be a priest or a nun. In other words, liberals see activists as the conscience of the nation. It is time for a president to remind our liberal friends that just as there is a very small divide between madness and genius, so there is very little distance between the conscience of the nation and the scourge of the nation.

Can Ted Cruz do this for America? Nobody knows. But I'll bet a primary victory that he has a team working on something like this. Because if an ordinary mortal like me can think about it, you can be sure that super-genius Ted has been thinking about it for years.

What Makes People Take to the Street

Everybody, by now, realizes that US politics is hitting an inflection point. The Trump phenomenon means that a chunk of GOP voters are saying, Who Cares, let's break the thing. And then on the Democratic side we have Black Lives Matter tearing the place up and the ideological base plumping for Bernie the Socialist over the capa de tutti capi of the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

Well, I've been reading Michael Mann and The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. So there. Now Michael Mann is a Brit and his brain is completely clogged by center-left academic syndrome, a fatal disease. So his narrative is all about those poor exploited workers and peasants and how they struggled for political, social, and economic citizenship. He means that they struggled to be accepted as a partner in political, social, and economic power.

Apart from being annoyed by his smirking leftism, I am trying to get the story behind the story of the glorious rise of the glorious working class in the 19th century. Here are my takeaways.

• When people experience an economic reverse, as artisans impoverished by de-skilling implemented by industrial manufacturing, or peasants ruined by low grain prices, they don't tend to think about what to do to make themselves useful again in the economy, now that the old gig is up. They tend to go to the government for subsidies or credit relief or some such dodge, and if all else fails they take to the streets.
  
• The advantage of giving everyone the vote is that it keeps them all in the system. On Mann's finding, workers didn't go for revolution in the long 19th century unless they were excluded from the political system and didn't have a voice in the councils of power.

Now let's return to the present. We have the white working class kicking up a storm, and we have Black Lives Matter kicking up a storm. What is going on here?

Let's introduce another idea. The final convulsion of young men at the end of the world. There is the Ghost Dance movement of the Plains Indians that erupted in the 19th century, centering on the use of magic Ghost Shirts. La Wik:

[P]roper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits of the dead to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to native peoples throughout the region.

Another 19th century magic cult was the Militia United in Righteousness, known to us as the Boxers, that rose up in China at the turn of the 20th century. The Boxers believed they were invulnerable to western bullets.

Numerous conservative pundits have noted that the white working class has been pushed outside the magic circle of respectability. Their opinions no longer matter in the councils of state. And Barack Obama famously wrote the white working class off in his "bitter clingers" speech to donors in 2008. So the only thing left for the white working class is some kind of a Ghost Dance with Donald Trump, believing that he will make America Great Again. Here is Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television[.]

The point is that when ruling class liberals say that and they believe it then they are writing a whole segment of America out of polite society; they are giving themselves a license to ignore those Americans and their needs and their grievances. And that means, per Michael Mann, that the only way for Middle Americans to get the attention of the ruling class is to start breaking things.

And as for Black Lives Matter, it cannot have escaped anyone's attention that liberals have encouraged blacks in social dysfunction the better to harvest their votes at election time. Camille Paglia:

I have been disturbed and repelled for decades by the way reproductive rights have become an ideological tool ruthlessly exploited by my own party, the Democrats, to inflame passions, raise money, and drive voting.

OK, so she was talking about abortion. But Democrats do that with race too, to "inflame passions, raise money, and drive voting." And it works.

But you'd think that, over the years, as things don't get better that African Americans would begin to get restless. And maybe their restlessness would tear the Democratic Party apart.

But the basic message from Michael Mann echoes in my mind. If you treat everyone as an equal, with a right to be in the room at the negotiating table, then you can usually stitch up some sort of political deal to keep the peace. You may make a nonsense of economics, and justice, but you will keep everyone in the tent.

But that's not what the modern ruling class has done. Just saying.

Imagine That You Head a University Without a Mises Library

Jay Nordlinger is doing a series of Impromptus here, here, and here, on the classical liberal university in Guatemala City, Francisco Marroquin University. The university has things like the Ludwig von Mises library. The university has also had an effect on the state of Guatemala. Guatemala now is #33 on the Freedom Index.

At the other end of the scale is the modern American safe-space university where student activists are outraged by the Chalkening of Trump 2016 slogans on campus. They feel that the Chalkening is a form of political violence.

(Of course, they are right. On my view politics is violence and so when Trump supporters chalk the campus with Trump slogans they are in fact making a show of force. Just like lefty peaceful protesters.)

The natural reaction of conservatives is to brand the administrators of these special snowflake universities as spineless. So they are, no doubt.

But I think that they are rather trapped by their liberal ideology. If you believe in the current mainstream identity politics then you believe, on principle, that activists organizing peaceful protests on anything must be given the benefit of the doubt as to their sincerity and as the the justice of their cause. After all, nobody with white privilege can really know what it is like to be marginalized and oppressed.

And anyway, I suspect that most academic careerists are rather narrow and limited people. They are good at what they do, attaching to a mentor, getting through a PhD, getting tenure track and impressing the right people on the way to tenure. I doubt if a person with those kind of skills is going to end up as a great academic leader with the chops to defend the principle of open debate and freedom and lead a university through tough times.

I don’t think that your average academic really can see around the corner to the end game of the activist culture. I don’t think they really understands how it leads to SJW mobs, to the bad science of climate change, to the subvention of the university to the power of government and its agenda of force, and ultimately to rebellion and conflict.

We have seen the Trump phenomenon, and how the Trump supporters can explain away anything. You think that campus lefties are any different? Call it group think, or peer pressure, or witch hunt: all humans are social animals and they don’t like to stick out as different. We all, almost all, go along to get along.

Of course, our liberal friends in the ruling class, who never hear a discouraging word about their follies and their corruption, imagine themselves a cut above the average Trumpster. They are educated, you see. Not only that, they have graduated summa cum laude from liberal confirmation preparation classes, and know the liberal catechism by heart.

The problem for liberals is that, educated as they may be in liberal pieties and the rituals of peaceful protest, they do not understand the larger processes of power. That has been the lesson of the Obama administration, which has recklessly pushed the limits of its power and provoked a head of rebellion that has resulted in the most Republican Congress in 70 years and now provoked the Trump phenomenon.

Here is what the Obamis don't understand.

The reason for the rule of law is not to protect private property. It is to provide a process for adjudicating disputes in a way that both sides to the dispute can respect.

The reason for a legislature is to require that changes in government force have a majority support. And according to Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent the way that legislative voting systems work is that, to get a majority, the supporters of a legislative proposal have to buy the support of people nominally opposed to the measure.

The reason to have a Supreme Court that does not find rights in the penumbras of the Constitution is that decisions that find new rights in dark corners set up conflict and disunion. As in Roe v. Wade, and maybe in the gay marriage case.

The reason to limit the president’s power to take unilateral executive actions is that unilateral executive actions really make the people on the receiving end angry, because, after all, an executive action is the unilateral power play of the sovereign, done without consultation and compromise.

The reason to limit the scope of government regulation and to maintain a small and limited government is that the regulatory state ends up being springtime for special interests that can influence and corrupt government in a thousand ways without showing up on the media radar.

Notice that I am not talking here about deliberate attempts to nobble the opposition with malice aforethought, like Lois Lerner and the IRS attempt to hinder the operations of Tea Party groups. And I am not talking about the liberal attack on “dark money” or the liberal proposal to criminalize the opposition to their climate-change agenda. And I am not talking about the fact that settled science says that big government cannot work because it cannot compute prices and it does not have the bandwidth of the market and the price system. I am just talking about the divisive effects of unilateral executive actions and the inevitable corruptions of big government regulation.

The reason for all these checks and balances on the use of political power is to soften the clunking fist of government power. It is to present government action as a kind of consensus rather than a brutal cram-down. It is to pretend that everyone is included in the political community and has a right to be consulted and to be heard. It is, in many ways, pure illusion, because force is force, and power is power, but it softens the hard edges of political conflict.

In my view, today’s liberals have forgotten all these timeless nuggets of political wisdom in the rush to implement any and all items of the liberal agenda during the blessed hour of power during the Obama years. But I think that this reckless program of power is a gigantic mistake, and liberals will pay for this mistake big time in the years ahead.