In regards to the ongoing government shutdown and the inability of Congress to pass a budget, popular liberal X account “constans” said:
Learn more about the constitution, young man? If only constans knew anything himself. Nowhere in the Constitution is the filibuster found. That’s because it’s not law. It’s a practice permitted by the rules of the Senate. There’s nothing iron-clad about it, and there’s certainly nothing “sacred” about it, either. Seriously, do liberals know anything?
Liberals find nothing sacred, in fact, yet the one thing they consistently sanctify is procedure. Outcomes don’t matter; all that matters is that the correct instruction set was followed. Hence their obsession with things like due process. A policy which leads to the deaths of thousands cannot be considered a failure as long as the correct procedure was followed. I’m not exaggerating. Liberals live and die by The Process.
The fact liberals need to sanctify something, even a procedure, shows that no society is truly atheistic, irreligious, or even secular. Everyone has a sense of what’s holy, sacred, and therefore, untouchable. Liberals have chosen to make the Constitution untouchable. The problem is, they don’t know what it actually says nor what our Founders actually believed. Liberals just latch onto the Constitution so as to subvert America for their ideology. The Founders didn’t want tyranny, no. But at no point did any of them say governance and policy-making should be made impossible over it.
The only democratic way of breaking the impasse is through compromise, but compromise is possible only through philosophical consensus. Everyone has to be talking about the same thing, even if they don’t agree on what it all means. There also cannot exist partisanship, because the point of the exercise isn’t supposed to be for the party to prevail. These conditions cannot exist in today’s America. We like to believe political pluralism is a good thing, and maybe it is. But it quite obviously comes at the cost of making it impossible to govern effectively.
Ironically, political pluralism doesn’t even lead to all views being equally represented. In fact, a strange sort of consensus does exist in U.S. politics, but it’s not borne of any philosophical consistency. It’s instead borne of a desire for greater centralization of power, boosting the influence of the political parties, and lining pockets. I have no clue what the name of this form of politics is, but it’s not democracy, it’s not republicanism, and it’s not American.
“No Kings?” Not The Founders.
Historian H.W. Brands explains what we were supposed to be:
The Constitution of 1787 was written for a republic. It was not written for a democracy. The framers mostly distrusted democracies, the populist form of republics. In the 1780s, ordinary Americans were expected to defer to their betters, whom they would elect and obey. Most did. They continued to do so through the two terms of George Washington. But the deference frayed with the emergence of parties, and after John Adams and Thomas Jefferson slugged it out twice, with Adams winning the first round and Jefferson the second, deference was a dead letter. Ordinary folks—men, that is, and white—demanded their say.
Once you learn this, it’s becomes impossible to un-learn. We just had another round of “No Kings” protests over the weekend, where thousands of liberals came out to tell everyone they’re the real Americans, that their leftist - in some cases extreme leftist - views are more in line with American values. Clearly, they’re not. As Brands explains, the original Americans weren’t democratic and weren’t even anti-monarchy for the most part. They were anti-hereditary monarchy, but they didn’t completely reject the idea of monarchy altogether, either. The Founders weren’t revolutionaries so much as they were reactionaries. The reason why Alexander Hamilton is the contemporary American Left’s favorite Founder is because his views are most consistent with theirs.
This means the “No Kings” protests were hardly American, hardly patriotic, and completely removed from our history and values. Americans are allowed to protest, sure, nobody disputes that. But protest alone doesn’t make a cause legitimate or valid. Just ask liberals when it comes to a far-right protest.
As Brands also implies, the Founders were very much aristocrats. The term has a negative connotation in today’s world, but for much of human history, having a supreme class in charge was not only normal, but seen as a good thing. This isn’t the time nor the place to debate aristocracy versus democracy, though I’ve noted time and again, even in our uber-democratic moment, a select group of people always appear to be in charge. What’s more, liberals, of all people, seem to believe only the smartest, most educated among us should exercise political authority. No matter what system you pick, it always trends toward aristocracy, because politics is ultimately about power, and it’s not a game for the weak to play.
Or it trends toward autocracy or even dictatorship. I mentioned earlier that the only way to break the impasse in a democracy is through compromise, but compromise is only possible when everyone is reading from the same sheet of music, when defending ideology isn’t the top concern. Otherwise, compromise becomes capitulation, because we went from finding a way to make it work to convincing the other side to simply give up.
This leaves only one other way to break the impasse: authoritarianism. If democratic institutions cannot fix a problem, someone else must. “Nobody” isn’t an answer. Liberals are of the mind that if democracy can’t fix a problem, it’s better off not being solved, and nobody else has any right to do it in the government’s stead. Obviously, we’re seeing how well that policy works out.
If legislators can’t figure out if having crazy, murderous people on the streets instead of incarceration is a bad thing, then they stay on the streets. If they end up murdering an innocent person like Iryna Zarutska, hey, that’s better than a dictator who might, but probably won’t, become Hitler. If legislators can’t decide if violent protesters holding motorists and pedestrians hostage or terrorizing them is permissible or not, guess what? You better stay in your car and not move a muscle, unless you want to get hurt. The irony of democracy is that it ends up like a tyranny. The tyrant in a democracy, however, isn’t a Hitler-esque figure. It’s the institutions. It’s the mob.
Democracy For Its Own Sake Is Useless
The thing those running Our Democracy as well as liberals don’t seem to get is that failing to resolve problems institutionally actually undermines the case for them. Democracy isn’t made stronger by the fact nothing gets fixed in the name of making sure a dictator doesn’t come to power. If anything, it strengthens the case for one. We saw a mild demonstration of that dynamic earlier this week when President Donald Trump issued an executive order for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents to be paid amid the ongoing government shutdown. Increasingly, it’s taking a lone executive to do things Congress is supposed to be able to do.
Congress not being able to do its job is never a good thing and is absolutely not worth the benefit of Hitler not coming to power:
As of this writing, the ongoing government shutdown is now the longest ever. The one before it was the longest ever. Not only are government shutdowns happening more frequently, they’re happening because Congress constantly must resort to temporary measures to fund government. Each shutdown becomes longer than the next, and legislators pay no price for it. That’s because they don’t answer to the people. If this is democracy, I shudder to think what authoritarianism looks like.
Once again, the system today has no roots in the American tradition:
Charles Haywood often goes too far with the tough-talk, but I don’t think he’s wrong here [bold mine]:
It is no surprise our legislature has permanently failed. This is the inevitable end of all legislatures, regardless of the breadth of the franchise. It is merely part of the cycle of regimes, identified by Polybius. As a society decays, the vision of the common good dies. As divisions widen, the legislature becomes sclerotic and ineffective. The inevitable next step is authoritarianism, because it is the only cure, and when a crisis comes, some man will seize his chance and destroy the combination of mob rule (ochlocracy) and oligarchy we live under. True, modern ideological anarcho-tyranny is in some ways a new thing (among other new things), but the end result will be the same, perhaps faster than would happen otherwise. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
The thing about authoritarianism is that’s it’s not so much a choice, but an imposition. When your options are anarchy or order, what do you think most people in their right mind will choose? As longtime readers ought to know by now, I don’t see authoritarianism as a bad thing either, not inherently. Abuses of power happen under both authoritarianism and democracy, clearly. More importantly, someone’s always in charge, even in a democracy. They need to be. Eschewing authority and responsibility isn’t any kind of virtue. This is the fundamental distinction, if not difference, between authoritarianism and tyranny; in the latter, the despot abuses power but takes no responsibility for anything.
I’ve come to suspect that the collapse of our reigning political order will stem from Congress continuously failing to pass budgets and each government shutdown lasting longer than the one preceding it. One day, we’ll have a government shutdown that lasts indefinitely, maybe even a year, creating a crisis so massive, a Caesar-like figures emerges out of sheer necessity. Seriously, are you expecting Congress to be maintained while it accomplishes absolutely nothing? It’s a preposterous notion, one only a highly-educated liberal could believe. Democracy for the sake of democracy is no democracy at all.
Courting Anarchy To Avoid Hitler
Times are still good enough that Americans can side-step the question. Eventually, however, we’ll have to decide whether chaos and disorder is a price worth paying in hopes of averting dictatorship. The problem is that the question really has one answer: no, because chaos and disorder eventually leads to oppressive forms of governance. Liberal democracy has become less about maintaining a balance of power and more about maintaining power vacuums, which is impossible. Not only is it contradictory, power vacuums get filled, always. If a power vacuum persists, it’s because someone is using… wait for it… power to do so. If allowed to persist for too long, however, anarchy eventually comes, and someone eventually fills the vacuum.
Bosnian War survivor Selco Begovic explains this dynamic:
WROL [Without Rule Of Law] is a word that most people imagine describes something like complete anarchy, absence of rules, law, and everything that makes up a society. Does this mean a society where human rights are absent, dictatorship rules, no freedom at all. Is that WROL?
No. It is not.
They still have laws, rules, police, and maybe courts. But their “rule of law” is not anything that you understand it to be. For example, they may have a law written where you could be jailed and detained without proper court case for months or years, simply because you criticized the government. Or, even because you wear something “improper”.
So basically it is still a world with society and order and laws. Everything is governed by the law. However, this law is absolutely different from any law that most of you imagined. You may call it lawlessness, but it is not. It is not WROL.
It is a Different Rule of Law (DROL)
In essence, for you, it might feel the same though. It will feel like hell because it is so far from what you thought it would be.
This is a warning for those on the Right who wants a civil war or collapse so the Regime can be overthrown. But it’s also a warning for the Left who thinks the absence of authority is a good thing, that preventing dictatorships at all costs is worth all the sacrifices that come with it. Once again, the purpose of government isn’t to stop authoritarianism. At most, it’s purpose is to stop tyranny, the abuse of power. But fear of tyranny can never become an excuse for abdicating responsibility, for violating the social contract, as U.S. and Western governments are doing now.
All the institutions and processes liberals worship aren’t there for show - they’re there to provide tangible results. If they fail to deliver, they don’t deserve to exist. It’s that simple. Americans are stuck in a doom-loop cycle of wanting better while demanding nothing be done about it out of fear of Hitler. And look, they have a small point: better can no longer be achieved in America through incremental fixes. Wholesale renovation is needed because the property has been allowed to fall into complete disarray.
The example of Nayib Bukele and El Salvador is instructive:
Bukele, in order to be successful (while gaining the support of over 90% of the population), had no choice but to suspend some constitutional rights and limit due process. He had no choice but to declare a "state of emergency" multiple times, curtailing the right to legal counsel, freedom of association, and privacy in communications.
His government had to conduct mass detentions of over 85,000 on the basis of "uncorroborated allegations," going against the "presumption of innocence and due process." It had to restrict ability of judges to offer alternatives like bail or house arrest and impose virtual hearings often involving hundreds of defendants at once, with little opportunity for effective defense.
As liberal Western journalists (same ones responsible for unlivable American cities) have pointed out, detainees are frequently unaware of charges and lack access to legal representation.
I’m not saying we should go as far as Bukele did in El Salvador. There are limits to his way, not of all it transferable to the U.S., either. Things are getting bad here, but not so bad that effectively declaring martial law is justifiable. The point is that you can only hide behind the fear of tyranny for so long before your sole purpose in government becomes to create anarchy, at which point your legitimacy vanishes.
In practice, what authoritarianism means to the contemporary West is a government which actually does things, with limited checks and balances. Again, the Left justifies the paranoia on the basis of every authoritarian state becoming like Nazi Germany, but crimes against humanity occur under anarchy, too. The worst genocide in Europe post-World War II happened in the Balkans and not under an authoritarian or even totalitarian state, but in a WROL situation, a state of effective anarchy. Life isn’t a binary choice between 1990s Bosnia and 1930s Germany, no. If you want to avoid either endgame, however, you can’t do so without order. You cannot do so with the state abdicating responsibility, violating the social contract.
The Process Is King
Coming full circle, why do liberals sanctify The Process so much? As I explained earlier, it’s because everyone, even educated liberals, need to believe in something greater than themselves. It’s also because that’s all they’ve ever known, thanks to a lifetime of indoctrination in both education and media. Because The Process is a religion, an ideology, and a way of life, it’s impossible for Americans to deviate from it. Hence, their addiction to disorder. When disorder isn’t just the norm, but a culture, a way of life, order feels invasive.
Liberalism and disorder don’t go hand-in-hand, not exactly. But liberalism, when left unchecked, when taken to its logical extreme, will result in exactly that. It’s unfortunate, but liberalism does entail accepting a certain level of crime and disorder in exchange for liberty. Liberalism allows us all to be our imperfect selves, to make mistakes, and not get punished for it, the logic being that maximizing liberty leads to flourishing, and flourishing creates a “natural” order, better than an artificial one imposed by kings and states. If only it were so simple.
As Dominic Adler remarks in the context of state emergency powers [bold mine]:
I say this not as an advocate of rolling martial law. In fact, the more I think about it, I wonder if a degree of unpreparedness is part of the Faustian pact we make as part of living in a reasonably free society. After all, after Chernobyl, the Soviet state’s emergency response was disciplined and vigorous. Yet wasn’t Soviet corruption partly-responsible for the accident in the first place?
Where’s the balance between nanny-state preparedness and free-wheeling freedom? The answer to that, I would suggest, is competence. Competence is the faithful hound, scaring the wolves of crises away. The real crisis, then, is perhaps one of ability, quality and character. And the fish, remember, rots from the head.
This is a case for honesty and skepticism towards democracy and liberalism. It’s not about opposing it, not about finding excuses for authoritarianism. This is also precisely why treating liberalism and democracy as sacrosanct is so dangerous. If the upside of liberal democracy is its freedom and openness, then nothing, not even liberal democracy itself, can be considered off-limits for critique. We need to be able to honestly assess its strengths and weaknesses. Instead, in current times, we make it impossible to discuss its weaknesses lest we be labeled Nazis, because apparently liberal democracy doesn’t work unless all questions begin and answers end with it as the best, highest form of government. It’s almost like liberal democracy cannot tolerate dissent any more than other forms of government.
Maybe We Need A King, After All
In closing, if the Founders saw that Congress couldn’t pass a budget, political leaders were allowing crime and disorder to fester out of fear of violating civil rights or racism, responsibilities were being abdicated and the social contract violated because of an irrational fear of becoming like Nazi Germany, do you really think they’d go, This is how it was supposed to be!? Do you think any of them would be proud? Or, do you think they’d be appalled, as any reasonable, non-ideological person would be? Do you think they’d ask, What have you done with our country? And wouldn’t they ask, Who’s in charge here?
The thing is, I’m not sure any American is sufficiently non-ideological nor honest enough to be able provide the answer we all know to be true. That’s because The Process has become king. It seems Americans will submit to tyrants as long as it doesn’t come in the form of a single person.
So, what do you think? Why’s it that liberals know so little about anything, including the country they profess to love more than the rest of us? Do you think America as it is today is in any way grounded in our true history, identity, and traditions? If not, where did all this come from? How do we get out of this binary mode of thinking where we must tolerate anarchy or else Hitler? Finally, do you think a king is inevitable, that maybe a king is exactly what we need?
Let’s discuss it all in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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I wonder if first we might not see state kings (isn't Federalism great?!) California, let's say, continues it's descent into craziness and something big and really bad happens (major earthquake). The current state government is then overwhelmed, a Katrina writ large. The federal government then has no choice but to send somebody to sort out the mess under martial law - and maybe that person does such a good job (sorry about all those dead looters) that the people want him to stick around. Possible?
Who's my king? Christ. That's easy.
"why do liberals sanctify The Process so much? Because everyone, even educated liberals, need to believe in something greater than themselves."
The effect here does not derive from the cause you've stated. "They consistently sanctify is procedure. Outcomes don’t matter." This tendency long predates modern liberalism.
I've mentioned before that Locke's liberal theory ended fights over the common good (the sacred) by focusing on procedure over outcomes. It was intentional, a way out of the European wars of religion. That was the "chaos and disorder" he was trying to avoid. I summarize Locke with my students as: "let's stop arguing about rival views of God and focus on making money."
And it worked! Modern states don't go to war over infant baptism or doctrines of the Trinity. Exchanging meaning (telos) for material prosperity (mammon) bought us a couple of centuries of good times. But as you say, every society needs something sacred, a "common good" of some kind. "Philosophical compromise" is impossible without it. (You already you know this, but a great many seem not to.)
BTW: Thank you very much for pointing out our oligarchic roots. The founders were wary of mass democracy. It has an even worse track record today.
I suspect our options at this point are a woke tyranny, a non-ideological Caesar who will keep the peace and the lights on (think Franco or Bukele), or a renewed oligarchy. I hope for the third. I expect the second. I would fight the first, precisely because it stands diametrically opposed to my true King.
"the Founders were very much aristocrats."
John Stuart Mill was also classist and aristocratic: "despotism is appropriate when dealing with barbarians." Modern liberals tend to ignore everything about Mill except his Harm Principle though.
"The irony of democracy is that it ends up like a tyranny." Ohhh, Max. Shivers up my spine. I'm stealing that one! :-)