The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

by Michael Anton

Indeed, that’s the whole point of republican or democratic politics: to make the government responsive to popular will, consistent with respect for minority rights.

Calhoun and his followers sought to do the opposite: to insulate policy—or at least one policy!—from popular will.

Thus he devised a new concept of rights, “concurrent majoritarianism,” more simply understood as “group rights.” Under this understanding, “rights” adhere not in individuals but in groups. Hence collections of persons as a class, based on some shared trait or self-identification, may rightly block majority will for any reason.

We may thus say that all just revolutions are secessions, but not all secessions are just revolutions. The all-important question is the justice of the government being overthrown.

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible “anarchy,” why may not the South secede from the United States?

It’s certainly true that Calhoun had no idea his concept would, beginning a century after his death, be used to justify such radical movements as Black Power, homosexual marriage, fourth-wave feminism, and puberty blockers for fourth-graders. But ideas have consequences. Sometimes those consequences are unforeseen.

John Calhoun lives! BLM

what are sanctuary cities and other efforts to flout federal law and popular will but revivals of “nullification”?

consider the eerie parallels between what Lincoln denounced as “the Slave Power” and today’s globalist oligarchy.

Is not the similarity between slavery and mass immigration obvious? (Note to the hysterical that I said “similarity” and not “identicalness.”) They both serve the same fundamental purpose: to provide cheap labor to squeeze working-class citizens and enrich a few.

“Progressivism” has come to mean any movement or pattern of thought that looks back at the past as backward and benighted and forward to the future as inevitably superior, more moral, more “diverse,” “inclusive,” “equitable,” and “tolerant”—in short, more left-wing. When Barack Obama says this or that person or idea is “on the wrong side of history,” this is what he means.

The thought and practice—especially the morality—of the present is always superior to that of the past, in part because of accumulated knowledge. We know more, therefore we know better. Progressivism takes its name from this alleged insight.

Progressivism insists that it can apply the methodology of the natural sciences to the humanities and come to conclusions superior to those of philosophy and equal in precision to those of natural science.

Of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the first two—freedom of speech and freedom of worship—are negative, while the latter two, freedom from want and freedom from fear, are positive.

Both dynamics work in tandem to reduce the number of issues properly left to political deliberation and to increase the number that should be decided and administered by trained experts: the scope of politics radically constricts. In Engels’s famous formula, “[t]he government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.” Except that Engels expected “the administration of things” to lead to the withering away of the state, whereas the wiser Progressives knew it would require a state larger and more powerful than any hitherto imagined.

Progressivism, by contrast, holds that it has discerned the people’s true interest and redefines democracy as what the people would vote for if only they were smart enough to know their own good.

Progressivism “seeks to substitute the person whom we call ‘the man of the people’ with the men of the schools, the trained, instructed, fitted men, the men who will study their duties and master the principles of their [bureaucratic] departments.”

A Progressive policy, once enacted—however enacted—is sacrosanct. Voting is not done away with, exactly, but its effects are carefully circumscribed.

Progressivism’s concrete manifestation—its enforcement arm—is the administrative state.

Administrative state rule is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-constitutional. Its animating “expert consensus” derives from and carries the authority of science. In practice, this amounts to elevating the research universities into the highest sources of political, moral, and spiritual authority (with a supporting role played by think tanks, NGOs, and small circulation intellectual journals, all of which take their cues from the universities). Their holy writ is the peer-reviewed journal article.

Administrative State

Worst of all, at the theoretical level, Progressivism entirely upended our elite’s understanding of justice, of good and bad. The hidden cause of that upending is the contradiction at the core of Progressivism, which at once denies a fixed human nature and hence a standard of goodness independent of human preference or will but also insists that progress is good. “Historicism”—the belief that values change from era to era—is Progressivism’s indispensable foundation.

the underlying structure of right and wrong, of morality itself, changes over time. But if morality is always changing, then no one morality can be simply true—much less good.

In other words, true morality is letting everyone choose his own morality.

Weimerica 2020.

Weimerica

Progressivism never managed to square this circle. It instead was pulled in one direction by its moralistic, busybody practical streak, and in the opposite by its theological hostility to every religious, philosophic, or traditional conception of morality. It was left to Progressivism’s heirs to combine these two contradictory impulses into a new morality, a new idea of the good.

Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties,

Age of Entitlement

Rawls helpfully sums up his 560-page tome A Theory of Justice in one sentence: “All social primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored.”

Rawls

Privilege, by contrast, is much easier to connote—and condemn—as inherent, undeserved, unearned, even somehow unnatural.

its core can be summarized in six words: Whites bad, people of color good.

The ideology of “the Sixties” at its most distilled—liberation from all restraints, sneering disdain for tradition and Christianity, contempt and hatred for America and its history, recasting of whites as the archvillains of their country’s story—would have been destructive enough on its own. But when combined with Calhounite “group rights” and Progressive rule-by-experts via leviathan fiat, it has proved deadly.

The way they are enforced, however, is entirely coherent: one group—and only one group—does not qualify as a “protected class”: straight, white, Christian males under a certain age (old enough, they may qualify for protection against age discrimination).

They fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.

Once the meaning of equality is transformed from equality before the law or equality of opportunity into equality of result—and specifically equality of result across groups—then achieving equality paradoxically requires unequal treatment before the law.

Inequality before the law—based on race, but also on sex and sexual orientation—is the true animating principle of the American regime as it exists and operates now.

Nearly all of America’s most powerful institutions—big corporations, finance firms, foundations, and above all the universities—don’t need to be prodded to discriminate; they do it willingly, even eagerly.

The logical outcome of the above understanding is that not taking race into account is now insisted to be “racist.” To be sanctified as “not racist” in Bizarro America requires being “racist” in the dictionary sense. The key—and only—questions are: which races do you favor and which do you target?

Their largest reason for hesitation arises from the question: how does all this get paid for? The initial answer in the 1960s was: out of rising economic growth. When that gave way, the answer became: debt. But even before the coronavirus shutdown, the American economy wasn’t growing nearly fast enough to finance all the commitments the country has taken on;

“neoliberalism.” A more precise name might be “managerial leftist-libertarianism,” for this movement is top-down, bureaucratic, and anti-democratic, committed to social engineering and grievance politics, and undermines virtue while promoting vice.

In practice, this amounts to widespread, close-knit cooperation between business and government—or what neoliberals euphemistically refer to as “public–private partnership.”

The real power in the neoliberal order resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. True power resides with their donors: the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do.

Modern America is thus no longer a “democracy” (if it ever was) or a republic (which it certainly once was) but an oligarchy whose real rulers project an illusion of “democracy” to mask the essentially undemocratic character of their rule.

Consent is granted initially by the social compact and then continually granted and regranted via elections. Do we still have government by consent? I here submit that the answer to this question is, more or less, no.

Needless to say, voters did not “consent” to the last fifty years of mass immigration, which has entirely transformed the electorate of the country. It was foisted on them by the ruling class in order to squash consent by effectively voiding their votes.

Every word of the above is false; everything Kennedy assured Americans would not happen has in fact happened. One result is that, in today’s America, for every Wyoming senator casting a vote on behalf of a mere 578,000 people, there are millions of red Americans living in blue states who may as well not even bother to vote, ever. Their voices are never heard.

Five cities and counties—three adjacent to Washington, D.C.—essentially dictate to the other 128. This is the sort of brute-force majoritarianism that our founders warned against and took pains to prevent.

To be smart and educated is to hold the correct opinions; to hold the correct opinions is evidence of intelligence and education.

The administrative state takes elite expertise and moral consensus and channels them into policy, which it then enforces.

We see here the first and fundamental breach of the separation of powers: Congress neither legislates nor oversees.

“Kritarchy” is a Greek neologism that means “rule of judges.”

Kritarchy

The beginning of this trend is most often identified as the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, which invalidated a state anti-contraception law on the ground that it violated a non-enumerated yet somehow inherent constitutional “right to privacy.”

So, for instance, when the people of California voted 60–40 to deny welfare benefits to illegal aliens, a federal judge blocked the measure on the ground that it violates the new, de facto constitution under which illegal aliens have not merely natural rights, but also American constitutional and civil rights.