Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have live…
Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have lived through a 50 year long period in which we have been seduced by an illusion of Left/Right electoral pluralism; meanwhile - via the agency of our Leftist academia sheep dip - every public and private part our culture has been captured by a bogus but virtually unchallengeable 'social justice' religion with its 90% bogus (and highly selective) victimhood narratives. We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. But maybe the hard truth is that our post-war democratic pluralism has now accumulated problems to which it has no credible solution and so we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Well, I thought I had written a reply about an hour ago. I guess I failed to actually post it, so here is my attempt at repeating it:
From your WND link: "Graham Cunningham is an occasional contributor to several magazines including The American Conservative, The American Mind and City Journal among others."
A very good comment and a good essay. There is a limit to just how many substacks to which I can bother to subscribe, but I will now try to keep an eye out for your work at TAM and the City J, which I do tend to read religiously.
And adding now: "... we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be..." I am still inclined to go with the core of the Founders' ideas concerning separation of powers (including federalism and subsidiarity, and maybe with the media or the Fed or the admin state as a separate but controlled power center?), consent of the governed (but with greater awareness of those limits vis a vis mobocracy), and the need for both public and private virtue to accompany our self governance. I would like to aim for something approaching the level of liberty we had in the 1820's [but absent the slavery, of course!]. Our globalist complexity and technological society make that more difficult, perhaps legitimately requiring greater government involvement in our lives. Our cultural evolution seems to be overwhelming our biological evolution. We now need to trust people and institutions that may not deserve such strong levels of acceptance without other controls? I.e., well beyond the trust needs of hunter gatherers.
However, our past recent experience also suggests a firmer rewriting of the 2nd Amendment to address citizen preparations against tyranny, greater discussion of the roles of the media and education as a pubic good, more considerations of term limits and greater transparency in lobbying (and the revolving doors), automatic sunsetting of laws not renewed after a reasonable period of years, and finally a balance budget amendment to curtail the tendency for our politicians to buy votes with other people's money [including borrowing from future generations.]
Yes, and the last line of your Slouching essay was a link to WND, which provided what I copied and quoted on your background. :-) Based on my quick scan, I gathered the WND content was a repeat of the Slouching content, so if it was subtly different, I missed that. [Or did someone else add the WND link?]
Ah, I see. No the essay was one I originally published at WND some time ago. I then posted it on my Substack (more recently). It's the same essay though. I currently have no plans to publish on TAM or City J. at the moment because I am concentrating on my Substack. You will however find some of my previous contributions on it (eg Life in the Shadows of #MeToo for example) and I hope you will have look at those too on STB (and perhaps make it your Read No. 11?) I only post once a month.
I have subscribed to STB, but to be honest I do not expect to end up being a paying subscriber.
After 50 years of saving and investing, I can now afford it, but my prior more frugal life still demands a value per $ assessment. And now a value per unit of time, too. We shall see.
Substack, as a business of providing a substrate for a variety of writers, really needs to come up with an "or best offer" type of subscription mode, although I can see they need some minimum just to cover the costs of the subscription transaction itself. TANSTAAFL.
Since you mentioned the need for some new ideas, and I provided a response to that, do you have any feedback on that response? Devil is in the details, and all of that, of course!
Thanks for the subscription....it's a free one for the foreseeable. What is TANSTAAFL? I don't understand the last sentence about feedback. Are you talking about my comment on this site? If so any feedback would be on this comment thread.
Hi again; OK, you said "... we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be..."
and then I provided a longish reply. Do you have any feedback about that reply = Founders' core ideas, etc. through to balanced budget amendment... ??
And yes to There ... Free Lunch ... via Lorenzo.
I thought TANSTAAFL was "common knowledge" so now I wonder what you believe that "everyone knows that" and I don't have a clue ?? :-) We don't really know how much we don't know, but we know it is a lot.
Ah MY feedback on your reply: there's a lot to chew on there and to do it justice would take me a while to think about. I will though and reply, for what it's worth, here in a day or so. But meanwhile: really I don't have any clear idea of a way forward for Western liberalism and certainly not a detailed proposal. I am a pessimist really - one who feels that all civilisations have their day and eventually fall apart. Wokeness, narcissistic hyper-individualism is how ours does.
Just remind me...where did I say "everyone knows that"?
You did not say that specifically. Perhaps I was too clever by half, but since I thought everyone knew what TANSTAAFL meant, and you did not, I have to presume turn about would also occur and there are things you know and believe are common knowledge, and I won't happen to be aware of them myself. We all end up using jargon and short cut abbreviations/ acronyms in our work lives, and the internet and social media have introduced several dozen more (LOL, IIRC, etc.), many of which I fail to recognize or understand, or remember even when explained.
Please reply as you have time, but don't over think it on my behalf, as my suggestions were also pretty top of the head and might not withstand deeper review.
But I do remain optimistic, even if naively so, that we will work through to a more promising political environment, possibly with more equitable economic results as well. Helen and Lorenzo are and will be helpful in that endeavor. I now contribute to the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, other groups pursuing free speech and conservative values, etc., which I can only recently really afford to do. I have not yet donated to a political campaign, partly because my wife and I disagree on the deserving candidates. Plus, how do I know it is not money down a rat hole? [A candidate who obtains $500 from a million contributors would be more credible than one who receives $1M from 500 wealthy donors.]
However, it just so happens I also have on my desk a hard copy of the 24 page essay by Sir John Glubb on The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. This somewhat more pessimistic take examines 4000 years of history and asserts empires rise and fall within repeating categories of behavior or experience. I don't have a link handy but it should be fairly easy to find, if by chance you were not already familiar with it.
As a Brit, my familiarity with the details of the American constitution is sketchy. I think the separation-of-powers concept was a wise (and inspired) one in the 18th century....probably the Amendments too. As you know, I am a pessimist about the long-term viability of our Western democratic pluralism. Although we in the UK famously have an 'unwritten constitution', a separation of powers is implicit in it. The problem now - at least in my UK - is that we no longer really HAVE a separation of powers. The legislature swings Left to Right but the executive and the judiciary are permanently Left (thanks to the Gramscian 'Long March' mentioned previously). America is perhaps more hopeful I guess....the lucky Trump re-jig of SCOTUS has been a tonic for beleaguered conservatism in your country.
Well, the American colonists considered themselves people with the rights of Englishmen, which the Parliment (and perhaps King George III?) were restricting. The snobs in England were treating their "fellows" in America as lower class rubes. George Washington and others of the American gentry were seeking through commercial accomplishment to show they were the equal of any English aristocrat in ability and wisdom. I recently read that Washington was particularly incensed that Parliment was reducing his ability to be a successful innovative gentleman farmer and small time manufacturer.
On separation of powers: my understanding is that idea actually came from England's government, as described by Montesquieu in 1748. Similarly, the right to bear arms had a long history in England (see Joyce Lee Malcom: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right [1994]), although this right was largely given up by the end of WWII (need to recheck the details). The right to free speech was explained by John Milton in 1644, in his essay Areopagitica
[ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Areopagitica ]. From what I read, besides whatever back sliding on free speech that we are seeing in America, it is much worse in the rest of the Anglosphere (and the EU, et al.). [Maybe I am mistaken about that? But Helen did say both she and Lorenzo were "cancelled" a while back.]
I believe the rights of habeas corpus and to a trial with a jury of your peers was well established common law (perhaps via Roman law?).
I gather that our "Federalism" and state vs. national divide was mainly a result of multiple state charters from the crown*, as luck would have it. But such breakdown of jurisdictional control, and subsidiarity, is a vey good idea, at least when implemented properly [see Catholic Church for both good and bad examples across history].
Thus, in many ways your constitution is really very much a "written" one, just not collected into a single legal document as your foundational law. I am sure Helen or Lorenzo can amplify or correct what I have said here, should it be necessary.
*Is this use of the word "crown", referring to the institution or to the respective monarch, supposed to be capitalized?
Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have lived through a 50 year long period in which we have been seduced by an illusion of Left/Right electoral pluralism; meanwhile - via the agency of our Leftist academia sheep dip - every public and private part our culture has been captured by a bogus but virtually unchallengeable 'social justice' religion with its 90% bogus (and highly selective) victimhood narratives. We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. But maybe the hard truth is that our post-war democratic pluralism has now accumulated problems to which it has no credible solution and so we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Well, I thought I had written a reply about an hour ago. I guess I failed to actually post it, so here is my attempt at repeating it:
From your WND link: "Graham Cunningham is an occasional contributor to several magazines including The American Conservative, The American Mind and City Journal among others."
A very good comment and a good essay. There is a limit to just how many substacks to which I can bother to subscribe, but I will now try to keep an eye out for your work at TAM and the City J, which I do tend to read religiously.
And adding now: "... we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be..." I am still inclined to go with the core of the Founders' ideas concerning separation of powers (including federalism and subsidiarity, and maybe with the media or the Fed or the admin state as a separate but controlled power center?), consent of the governed (but with greater awareness of those limits vis a vis mobocracy), and the need for both public and private virtue to accompany our self governance. I would like to aim for something approaching the level of liberty we had in the 1820's [but absent the slavery, of course!]. Our globalist complexity and technological society make that more difficult, perhaps legitimately requiring greater government involvement in our lives. Our cultural evolution seems to be overwhelming our biological evolution. We now need to trust people and institutions that may not deserve such strong levels of acceptance without other controls? I.e., well beyond the trust needs of hunter gatherers.
However, our past recent experience also suggests a firmer rewriting of the 2nd Amendment to address citizen preparations against tyranny, greater discussion of the roles of the media and education as a pubic good, more considerations of term limits and greater transparency in lobbying (and the revolving doors), automatic sunsetting of laws not renewed after a reasonable period of years, and finally a balance budget amendment to curtail the tendency for our politicians to buy votes with other people's money [including borrowing from future generations.]
Thanks ssri. I am a bit confused about the bit you say about an WND link?? You don't need a WND link to access this essay. It is on my Substack (Slouching Towards Bethlehem) and to access it you just click on this : https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Yes, and the last line of your Slouching essay was a link to WND, which provided what I copied and quoted on your background. :-) Based on my quick scan, I gathered the WND content was a repeat of the Slouching content, so if it was subtly different, I missed that. [Or did someone else add the WND link?]
Ah, I see. No the essay was one I originally published at WND some time ago. I then posted it on my Substack (more recently). It's the same essay though. I currently have no plans to publish on TAM or City J. at the moment because I am concentrating on my Substack. You will however find some of my previous contributions on it (eg Life in the Shadows of #MeToo for example) and I hope you will have look at those too on STB (and perhaps make it your Read No. 11?) I only post once a month.
OK, Graham, sounds good at once per month :-).
I have subscribed to STB, but to be honest I do not expect to end up being a paying subscriber.
After 50 years of saving and investing, I can now afford it, but my prior more frugal life still demands a value per $ assessment. And now a value per unit of time, too. We shall see.
Substack, as a business of providing a substrate for a variety of writers, really needs to come up with an "or best offer" type of subscription mode, although I can see they need some minimum just to cover the costs of the subscription transaction itself. TANSTAAFL.
Since you mentioned the need for some new ideas, and I provided a response to that, do you have any feedback on that response? Devil is in the details, and all of that, of course!
O should I copy and paste my response from the Helen Dale substack to the STB one?
Thanks for the subscription....it's a free one for the foreseeable. What is TANSTAAFL? I don't understand the last sentence about feedback. Are you talking about my comment on this site? If so any feedback would be on this comment thread.
There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL
Hi again; OK, you said "... we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be..."
and then I provided a longish reply. Do you have any feedback about that reply = Founders' core ideas, etc. through to balanced budget amendment... ??
And yes to There ... Free Lunch ... via Lorenzo.
I thought TANSTAAFL was "common knowledge" so now I wonder what you believe that "everyone knows that" and I don't have a clue ?? :-) We don't really know how much we don't know, but we know it is a lot.
Ah MY feedback on your reply: there's a lot to chew on there and to do it justice would take me a while to think about. I will though and reply, for what it's worth, here in a day or so. But meanwhile: really I don't have any clear idea of a way forward for Western liberalism and certainly not a detailed proposal. I am a pessimist really - one who feels that all civilisations have their day and eventually fall apart. Wokeness, narcissistic hyper-individualism is how ours does.
Just remind me...where did I say "everyone knows that"?
You did not say that specifically. Perhaps I was too clever by half, but since I thought everyone knew what TANSTAAFL meant, and you did not, I have to presume turn about would also occur and there are things you know and believe are common knowledge, and I won't happen to be aware of them myself. We all end up using jargon and short cut abbreviations/ acronyms in our work lives, and the internet and social media have introduced several dozen more (LOL, IIRC, etc.), many of which I fail to recognize or understand, or remember even when explained.
Please reply as you have time, but don't over think it on my behalf, as my suggestions were also pretty top of the head and might not withstand deeper review.
But I do remain optimistic, even if naively so, that we will work through to a more promising political environment, possibly with more equitable economic results as well. Helen and Lorenzo are and will be helpful in that endeavor. I now contribute to the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, other groups pursuing free speech and conservative values, etc., which I can only recently really afford to do. I have not yet donated to a political campaign, partly because my wife and I disagree on the deserving candidates. Plus, how do I know it is not money down a rat hole? [A candidate who obtains $500 from a million contributors would be more credible than one who receives $1M from 500 wealthy donors.]
However, it just so happens I also have on my desk a hard copy of the 24 page essay by Sir John Glubb on The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. This somewhat more pessimistic take examines 4000 years of history and asserts empires rise and fall within repeating categories of behavior or experience. I don't have a link handy but it should be fairly easy to find, if by chance you were not already familiar with it.
As a Brit, my familiarity with the details of the American constitution is sketchy. I think the separation-of-powers concept was a wise (and inspired) one in the 18th century....probably the Amendments too. As you know, I am a pessimist about the long-term viability of our Western democratic pluralism. Although we in the UK famously have an 'unwritten constitution', a separation of powers is implicit in it. The problem now - at least in my UK - is that we no longer really HAVE a separation of powers. The legislature swings Left to Right but the executive and the judiciary are permanently Left (thanks to the Gramscian 'Long March' mentioned previously). America is perhaps more hopeful I guess....the lucky Trump re-jig of SCOTUS has been a tonic for beleaguered conservatism in your country.
Well, the American colonists considered themselves people with the rights of Englishmen, which the Parliment (and perhaps King George III?) were restricting. The snobs in England were treating their "fellows" in America as lower class rubes. George Washington and others of the American gentry were seeking through commercial accomplishment to show they were the equal of any English aristocrat in ability and wisdom. I recently read that Washington was particularly incensed that Parliment was reducing his ability to be a successful innovative gentleman farmer and small time manufacturer.
On separation of powers: my understanding is that idea actually came from England's government, as described by Montesquieu in 1748. Similarly, the right to bear arms had a long history in England (see Joyce Lee Malcom: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right [1994]), although this right was largely given up by the end of WWII (need to recheck the details). The right to free speech was explained by John Milton in 1644, in his essay Areopagitica
[ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Areopagitica ]. From what I read, besides whatever back sliding on free speech that we are seeing in America, it is much worse in the rest of the Anglosphere (and the EU, et al.). [Maybe I am mistaken about that? But Helen did say both she and Lorenzo were "cancelled" a while back.]
I believe the rights of habeas corpus and to a trial with a jury of your peers was well established common law (perhaps via Roman law?).
I gather that our "Federalism" and state vs. national divide was mainly a result of multiple state charters from the crown*, as luck would have it. But such breakdown of jurisdictional control, and subsidiarity, is a vey good idea, at least when implemented properly [see Catholic Church for both good and bad examples across history].
Thus, in many ways your constitution is really very much a "written" one, just not collected into a single legal document as your foundational law. I am sure Helen or Lorenzo can amplify or correct what I have said here, should it be necessary.
*Is this use of the word "crown", referring to the institution or to the respective monarch, supposed to be capitalized?
PS: I liked this phrasing: "... the lucky Trump re-jig of SCOTUS has been a tonic for beleaguered conservatism in your country."