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Yarvin on Democracy, Leftism, and Julius Evola

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Blue Pill, Red Pill

In his second blog post, Curtis Yarvin makes what he calls a case against democracy. He begins by pointing out that we are all steeped in democracy and its values from birth, and it’s hard to change. To help see things differently (of course using The Matrix image of the red and blue pills) he offers ten statements about democracy and an alternative view. He doesn’t discuss any, so all discussion is mine. I’ll look at three, the first, and two chosen by the highly Enlightenment method: the 15th decimal digits of pi and e.

First PIll

blue pill:

Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

red pill:

The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

So close. Yarvin doesn’t ask himself where the rule of law comes from, nor why it’s working. I’d say that in a democratic polity  most people think they have a voice in deciding laws, so they are generally willing to obey the laws. That leads to the good stuff, which encourages further acceptance of laws. Of course, there are other reasons  depending on the nature of the individual and their sense of participation in humanity. Some people obey out of fear, or because that was engrained in them from birth. Others think about the alternatives, and agree to be bound. And there are many other possibilities.

Yarvin doesn’t ask himself who are the people who refuse to obey, like the current administration and its leaders. Are they acting like they live in a democracy? No. They act like they’re rulers. And it’s easy to see that a majority of people don’t like it. Of course the current administration goes much farther than others, but Yarvin might have noticed the abuses and corruption of the Bush administration, or that it pushed us into pointless wars and then failed at them. Maybe he suddenly has.

Third pill

blue pill:

The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.

red pill:

Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

Yarvin calls fascism and communism single-party democracies. But they were not democratic at all. They were all managed by a single person whose decisions were his own and were final. How exactly are they different from the monarchy he wants to install?

Fifth pill

blue pill:

Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.

red pill:

Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.

The premise here is that some person or group in each “Western” nation has ultimate power. It’s just as false that “the people” have ultimate power as it is that the civil service has ultimate power. Anyone who watched the Bush Administration run things would know this. The civil service is and always has been reasonably accountable to the political leadership, more in Republican administrations than in Democratic.

Yarvin doesn’t mention the role of the courts in all this. It’s a telling omission.

Leftism

In this post,  Yarvin tells us that the essential idea of leftism is that intellectuals (he prefers the term “scholars”) should run the world. Scholars are indistinguishable from priests.He asks:

Can anyone find an exception to this rule—i.e., a mass movement that is generally described as “leftist,” but which does not in practice imply the rule of scholars, or at least people who think of themselves as scholars?

I’d guess he means that the ideas that justify and organize a leftist mass movement come from intellectuals. For example, Karl Marx justified and motivated the leaders of the Russian Revolution. John Locke justified  the American Revolution and the form of its new government.

But that’s true of any revolution. There may be grievances, but grievances can be solved by negotiation or tweaks to the order of things. Regime change requires a replacement for the ideology that supports the existing regime. Does Yarvin understand that this applies to himself, to Ayn Rand, to all those right-wing jerks he cites?

1. In comments on my last post, people noted that Yarvin was going to debate Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor with a specialty in democracy. Afterwards, someone posted what looked like a transcript of the debate on Blue Sky. It was taken down and the account closed, but I read it before it disappeared. Yarvin’s arguments felt like a ball falling down a Pachinko board, bounding from pin to pin with no clear connection. Or, as the WaPo described his blog posts,  he was “wildly discursive”.

At one point he said that Harvard doesn’t teach conservative thought. For example, no one teaches the thought of Julius Evola. This is from the Wikipedia page on Evola:

He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age ,,,.. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l’uomo differenziato—”the man who has become different”—who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages. Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola’s definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Links and fn. omitted.

Evola was a major factor in Italian fascism, with ties to German fascism. After WWII he was closely involved with far right-wing Italian politics. It gets worse: “Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.”

So, Harvard doesn’t teach a marginal weirdo fascist. That’s what Yarvin thinks is a gotcha.

2. I’m on the road, and my main book for this trip is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s set in Russia between 1805 and 1812, and give a history of the Napoleonic Wars from the perspetive of Russia and five aristocratic families

Here’s how Tolstoy describes the attitude of one of his characters, Nicholas Rostov, towards Tsar Alexander I:

Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov’s army which the Tsar approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this triumph.

He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water, commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word. P. 467, Kindle edition.

Does Yarvin feel that looking at Trump or Musk?

 

 

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Introduction To Yarvin’s Formalism

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The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

The previous post discussed two aspects of Yarvin’s first blog post, his rejection of current ideologies and his loathing of democracy. This post describes the ideology he created, formalism.

The goal of formalism

Yarvin starts with the proposition that the only truly significant problem facing humans is violence. The goal of formalism is to rid the planet of violence. Only then can we focus on other problems.

Next to organized human-on-human violence, a good formalist believes, all other problems—Poverty, Global Warming, Moral Decay, etc., etc., etc.—are basically insignificant. Perhaps once we get rid of violence we can worry a little about Moral Decay ….

He means exactly this: until violence is ended, we must focus on one thing, getting rid of it. It’s an engineering problem, not a moral problem. He sets up pacifism as an alternative, and of course pacifism doesn’t solve violence.

He also dismisses the idea of social justice as a solution. He describes social justice as the idea that we should all have an equal share of the limited resources available to us. He says we don’t know how to equalize things, it won’t last, and it isn’t practical. We’d have to start by setting up rules about equality in things, and then take from some to give to others.

Solving violence with rules

Violence is the result of conflict and uncertainty. People are in constant conflict about stuff, but if everyone knows the result of the conflict in advance, there’s no reason to engage in violence. He seems to think that’s true of state-level conflict too: if we knew how a war would turn out, why wouldn’t the losing side surrender, he says. So, the first step is creating rules of ownership.

Formalism says: let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a fancy little certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.

The starting place is where we are now. We make a list of everything that can be owned, and whoever has it gets to keep it. Then we can define violence:

Violence, then, is anything that breaks the rule, or replaces it with a different rule. If the rule is clear and everyone follows it, there is no violence.

The United States is a corporation

Formalism says that the US government controls what happens inside the boundaries of the US. It has the power to collect taxes and make rules of behavior, and these powers are property, just like any other property right. The government isn’t going to voluntarily surrender them.

Yarvin tells us that the US government is a corporation, meaning “… it is a formal structure by which a group of individuals agree to act collectively to achieve some result.” In this setting citizens are serfs, actually corporate serfs. I think he sees private corporations as no different from the US government. He explains that the purpose of his exemplar, Microsoft, is to make money for shareholders by selling software.

But he doesn’t see the purpose of the US government. He thinks the government isn’t able to control much.

In fact, if anyone can identify one significant event that has occurred in North America because Bush and not Kerry was elected in 2004, I’d be delighted to hear of it. Because my impression is that basically the President has about as much effect on the actions of the US as the Heavenly Sovereign Emperor, the Divine Mikado, has on the actions of Japan. Which is pretty much none.

In his view, the US government is a poorly functioning corporation with no discernible control mechanism, loaded with assets and flailing around trying to do something for opaque reasons.

Yarvin’s solution

To a formalist, the way to fix the US is to dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it. I don’t think it’s too crazy to say that all options—including restructuring and liquidation—should be on the table.

Snip

To reformalize, therefore, we need to figure out who has actual power in the US, and assign shares in such a way as to reproduce this distribution as closely as possible. Links omitted.

He suggests that the current power structures be evaluated and shares in the reformalized US be distributed on the basis of the power of each recipient. Corporations have power, and would be shareholders. He cites the New York Times as an example. Perhaps some citizens have power, and might get shares, but that’s not clear. In any event, having divided up the power, we let the people with power decide what to do with the assets they control. The rest of us just stay out of the way.

The new power structures may not see the use for nation-states. He suggests that cities, but not states, perhaps should be “spun off”; pointing to Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong as positive examples. He points out that there isn’t any political violence in those city-states because there isn’t any politics.

That seems to be Yarvin’s main point. He thinks politics always leads to violence of some kind, whether it’s the violence of taxation or of limits on personal freedom, or physical violence. Somehow that problem is solved by getting rid of politics and replacing it with system of control by those who hold power now.

Discussion

1. I rearranged the order of the arguments hoping to clarify.

2. One obvious thing about this is the reductionism. Violence is a problem, sure, but we can’t wait for that to be solved before dealing with other problems. Those lesser problems, poverty, climate breakdown, moral decay, are at the root of a lot of the violence.

Another is the casual acquaintance with reality. This post was written ten years after Hong Kong was returned to China, and the latter was encroaching on democracy there. Anyone who has seen Crazy Rich Asians will see the outcome of the structure Yarvin imagines: great for the rich sons and daughters of the rich in Singapor.

3. The purpose of the United States government is set out in the Preamble to the Constitution. Yarvin doesn’t address it.

4. Yarvin takes the side of Walter Lippman in his debate with John Dewey over democracy, and goes even farther. Here’s a short paper describing the debate. Very roughly, Lippman thinks that our civilization is too complex for the ordinary citizen, so we should select experts to handle the complexities and advise the government rather than depend on the wisdom of the masses.

Dewey thinks that citizens should be educated in critical thinking, so they could participate in the discussions on issues that affect them. The people most affected by an issue would constitute a “public” in his parlance. This post gives an introduction to his thinking.

But Dewey had a larger reason for supporting democracy. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Dewey views democracy as an ideal of associated life in the sense that as an ideal he thinks that it reconciles the full expression of individual potentialities and the common good. In this sense, democracy sits at the apex of his historicised naturalist account of individuality and community. “From the standpoint of the individual”, as he puts it, democracy “consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain”, while “from the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common”…. Cites omitted.

Yarvin doesn’t address this debate.  He thinks the problems with democrcy, most of which were laid out by Lippman and Dewey, are so great that the solution is to burn it to the ground. So far he hasn’t identified a view of the individual that would enable him to address Dewey’s view of democracy. instead, he consistently ignores individual citiaens as if we were irrelevant to this discussion.

 

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The Beginnings of Curtis Yarvin

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This introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Marcy points out that there is no policy in the Trump administration, only destruction, revenge, and palace intrigue. That’s a great start for Curtis Yarvin and the evil shits surrounding Trump, especially the destruction part. This post introduces Curtis Yarvin’s justification for that nihilistic approach.

The first post at The Substack Gray Mirror

Yarvin explains that the Grey Mirror substack is a sandbox for drafting a book. The book is intended to serve as a public policy manual for the leader of a new regime which will replace the current regime in the United States.

Policy is the art of the possible. Today’s possible is relative to an amorphous network of influential stakeholders. Any new idea must first be measured for relevance by its proximity to this meta-institution. The mirror’s abstract prince had no one to please but himself and God. His policy could and must be absolute.

I think the first three sentences are meant as criticism of democracy on the grounds that it spreads power among too many people, making it easy to block or affect policy. The meaning of the last two is clear: the new regime will be a one-man rule, and I do mean man . There will be be a new regime eventually because all regimes fail. And it will be under the control of a single man, because “if you want a completely different government, submitting to one person is the only way to get it.”

His prince has to start from scratch to build his regime. Most of the existing institutions can’t be remodeled to fit with the new regime. That leads to his idiosyncratic use of the term nihilist. His plan is nihilist because “… it’s a plan for building ex nihilo, from nothing.”

The new leader will emerge from the chaos of the deterioration of the existing regime.

From Rome to France to Rwanda, a monarch who emerges unchallenged from one side of a civic conflict does not enforce the civic dominance of his own side, but the civic unity of both sides. If he did otherwise he would be an idiot — which is statistically unlikely. Freezing the civic conflict, cold or hot, tends to be the biggest, quickest win of the whole transition.

There is no explanation for this statement. He goes on to say that the leader is accountable, but he doesn’t tell us how, except that a monarchy is a republic, and has a constitution.

Discussion

1. I’ve rearranged the order in which Yarvin lays out his ideas.

2. I flatly disagree with his statements about Rome, France and Rwanda producing leaders who enforce civil unity of both sides. Rome fell under the sway of emperors and as they degenerated, Rome slowly collapsed. Is he thinking of Napoleon in France? Has he never heard of the restoration of the aristos, or the Commune, or any of the history of the nation in the 19th Century? And Rwanda? Really?

The First Post in Yarvin’s Blog Unqualified Reservations

The first post in Yarvin’s blog is titled A Formalist Manifesto, dated 4/24/2007. It’s long, so I’ll cover it in two posts. In this post, I take up his objections to existing ideologies and his complaints about democracy. In the next I’ll discuss the content of his newly created ideology, formalism.

Current ideologies suck

He doesn’t like progressivism because he thinks its adherents, “,,, the vast majority of writers and thinkers and smart people in general…” are so steeped in it that they can’t see its problems. He doesn’t like conservatism because “… not all conservatives are cretins, but most cretins are conservatives.” The re-inventors of conservatism (the earlier version was destroyed by the “Roosevelt dictatorship”) have to appeal to the cretins, so conservatism is dumb.

He thinks moderates, centrists, independents, and non-political people are responsible for the death and destruction of the 20th Century, and presumably the early 2000s. They act like there’s a fixed “center” but it’s constantly changing. There’s nothing for them to hold onto, no controlling set of beliefs. It doesn’t even count as an ideology.

He thinks highly of libertarianism, but thinks it’s never been successfully implemented, because it’s impractical.

Yarvin’s problem with democracy

Yarvin says that the most serious problem people face is how to interact without violence against persons or property.

One conclusion of formalism is that democracy is—as most writers before the 19th century agreed—an ineffective and destructive system of government. The concept of democracy without politics makes no sense at all, and as we’ve seen, politics and war are a continuum. Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.

I think what he’s getting at here is that certain political disagreements can’t be resolved by compromise or live and let live policies. Murder is an example. There can’t be any compromise to the no-murder rule. He seems to think that most issues are like that, as if the regulatory preference for LED lighting over incandescent bulbs leads to violence.

Discussion

1. So far we’ve seen two objections to deomcracy. First, the dispersion of power demanded by democracy leads to unspecified bad things, because it slows or preventss technological improvements. That doesn’t  happen under one-man rule. Second democracy inexorably leads to violence. Yarvin doesn’t offer much support for these claims in the two essays I’ve read. Maybe there’s more ahead.

2. Yarvin’s criticism of progressivism, that its adherents can’t see its problems, seems wrong. I think some of Yarvin’s criticisms of our government have merit, and have been raised by progressives repeatedly.

3. Yarvin ignores our experience with one-man rule, going far back into history. People who have experienced democracy don’t want one-man rule. Like the American Revolutionaries, people want to have a say in their governments.

4. Almost all people want to live in a world free from violence. Violence is fairly low by historical standards in most functioning democracies. Even though we don’t have perfect security, our circumstances allow most of us to seek highe-orderr goals. So far, at least, Yarvin hasn’t engaged any of the complexities of humans of today, just as he hasn’t addressed any of the arguments of the proponents of democracy.

5. Here’s a story. My freshman year at Notre Dame, we were required to take a class in writing. My teacher was Mr. Yeltsin, who seemed to think it beneath him to teach writing to guys studying science and engineering. Mr. Yeltsin always wore a black suit, white shirt, black skinny tie, very much not the fashion in those days.

I was very proud of my first essay, about which I remember nothing except that when it came back, Mr. Yeltsin had written one word diagonally at the top: Jejeune. I had to look it up.

I wish Curtis Yarvin had taken writing from Mr. Yeltsin.

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Democracy Is Our Hope For A Better Future

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Index to posts in this series

In The Nation That Never Was, after telling us his version of a better story of America, Kermit Rosevelt writes:

We Americans are not perfect, either. Some of us are bad. Some are indifferent and unwilling to sacrifice for others. Some are easily distracted, misled, manipulated. We go forward and we go back. We elect Reagan, we elect Obama, we elect Trump. But what makes us American—our deepest ideal—is that we keep trying. America is born in an attempt to find a new and better way, to escape the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe. We don’t get it right immediately. Yet we keep going. We’re looking for America, and we know that the America we’re looking for isn’t something that’s given to us by Founding Fathers. It’s something we make, something we find inside ourselves. The true America is not handed down from the past but created anew by each generation, created a little better, and what we can give the future is the opportunity to get just a little closer than we did ourselves. That’s the promise that makes us American. That’s the promise we have to keep. P. 205.

It’s not exactly a reason his better story is better, but Roosevelt thinks the better story supports his theory of democracy. Compare that passage with this from one of my favorite books, Philosophy and Social Hope, by Richard Rorty:

Pragmatists … do not believe that there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearance–reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’. When they are asked, ‘Better by what criterion?’, they have no detailed answer, any more than the first mammals could specify in what respects they were better than the dying dinosaurs. Pragmatists can only say something as vague as: Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. When asked, ‘And what exactly do you consider good?’, pragmatists can only say, with Whitman, ‘variety and freedom’, or, with Dewey, ‘growth’. ‘Growth itself,’ Dewey said, ‘is the only moral end.’

They are limited to such fuzzy and unhelpful answers because what they hope is not that the future will conform to a plan, will fulfil an immanent teleology, but rather that the future will astonish and exhilarate.… Pp. 27-8, fn omitted.

The connection is obvious. Roosevelt says democracy is about the future. He says the better story fits with his view of democracy. Rorty says that Pragmatism is about the future. Later on he says that Pragmatism is well-suited to democracy, because the growth of freedom leads naturally to a democratic form of government. Both think we can have a better future.

The relation between philosophy and forms of government

Rorty calls himself a Pragmatist, after the only truly American philosophy, founded by the Americans C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. Here’s a short series discussing some of the basic elements of Pragmatism: Method, Truth, and Applications.

In Rorty’s first sentence, “a way things really are” is a reference to the traditional philosophical problem called the appearance-reality dualism. It’s based on the fact that we only have the evidence of our senses. Therefore we cannot know the reality of the thing we perceive as it truly is. Pragmatism teaches that all we know is what our senses tell us, and there’s nothing beyond that, no Platonic forms, no hidden reality. For a fuller discussion, see the post on Truth linked above.

The older forms of philosophy searched for universal truths, unchanging verities, the way things really are. The results of that search establish a static universe based on the theory of everything created by one or more human beings. There is one answer to any problem, and it can be found by consulting the fixed principles — or the ruler’s command. As Roosevelt puts it, universal verities lead to “… the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe.”

Pragmatism and democracy are not necessarily connected. As Rorty points out, a Nazi could agree with and apply Pragmatic thinking. But there is a decisive difference between a society living with eternal verities, and one open to change.

A Problem

After reading Roosevelt’s book, I’ve begun to think the the real contest is between Americans dedicated to democracy in the Rorty/Dewey sense, and those committed to the unchanging verities they find in history or their sacred books or handed to them by authoritarian demagogues. The futurists want to make the future better for everyone. The traditionalists think everything is just fine as it is, or as it was at some date in the past, or as it would be in a new society built to effectuate their theory of everything. The futurists, as Rorty says, want the future to be amazing. The traditionalists can’t even handle the latest scientific achievements, like mRNA vaccines. The futurists think the economic status quo must be improved to benefit everyone. The traditionalists think the status quo is the best we can do.

And, not to put too fine a point on this, the people who really want things to remain as they are are the filthy rich; and the people who really want to return to the past are the religious fundamentalists. Both groups are apparently willing to sacrifice democracy to get what they want.

Left Theory

Perhaps you have noted that posts at Emptywheel are categorized. Most of mine are in the category Left Theory. I think the left needs a set of ideas about society and government that can be persuasively explained to non-lefties, and that link all our policy positions into a reasonably coherent whole. I offered a tentative economic theory here. In that post I say that a useful economic theory should be based on observation and experience, not on some grand theory of humanity, or, for that matter any other grand theory. It would serve as a tool for reaching our goals. It would change as we learned more new things. In this sense it would be Pragmatic.

Democracy is a broad theory about how governments should work. It’s a system that works for all people of good faith, giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the process of building the future. In that sense it is Pragmatic.

In the absence of eternal verities, we have to justify all of our beliefs. Why then do I believe democracy is the way forward? First, I believe that the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, is the best guiding principle humans have ever developed. I firmly believe that application of this principle would massively reduce the amount of pain and misery in the world, and that that would be a good thing. To do that, we need to get as many different ideas as we can about our future, both for deciding what we should be as a nation, and for solving problems. Democracy does that.

Also, I want to be part of the decision-making, so I should insure that others can and do participate if they want to.

Second, I agree with Jefferson that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. That desire, that insistence, that we give consent to the government is effectuated by majority rule in a democracy.

And that’s where the conflict lies. In the US the minority party holds power despite the will of the majority. The current system of government makes that easy, especially with the rogue majority on SCOTUS.

Our current challenge is to make our democracy work.

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The Better Story

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Index to posts in this series

In the first chapters of The Nation That Never Was, Kermit Roosevelt explains the many problems with the standard story of the US. In the last chapter he offers us a better story. What follows is mostly Roosevelt’s version, but I’ve added more history. Roosevelt’s is at pp. 202-4.

A Version Of The Better Story

During the Revolutionary War, the colonists established a federation of the 13 original colonies. They wanted to keep their existing governments, and feared a strong central government. Their first try, the Articles of Confederation, failed because the central government was too weak and the states frequently ignored it. Then they tore up the Articles and replaced them with the Founders Constitution. In order to gain support for a stronger central government, they put in provisions supporting the continuation of slavery and gave states with smaller white populations greater power in the national government.

From the very beginning Black people resisted slavery by escaping and rebelling in the face of murder and torture. That continued under the Founders Constitution. They and the Abolitionists set up escape routes, and tried every legal route to saving escapees. They rallied, protested, spoke, wrote, appealed to Congress, and demanded freedom and equality. Gradually the movement for freedom became an powerful political force, driven by the principle that all men are created equal. They meant equality in a actual society, not in a hypothetical natural law sense as in the Declaration of Independence, Leaders included Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

Urged on by the Black people and the Abolitionists, the United States government resisted the expansion of slavery into the territories, which the Supreme Court supported in Dred Scott. That led to a war with the Slave States which was won by the United States. A major factor in the victory was the 200,000 Black soldiers who fought and died to end slavery. The victorious United States threw out the governments of the seceding states, forced the enactment of the Reconstruction Amendments, and passed laws to enforce them. This is called the Second Founding.

The Second Founding recreated the United States under the principles laid out by its Leader, Abraham Lincoln. His most famous statement of these principles is in his Gettysburg Address: the United States is “… conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….”

This became our guiding principle. Lincoln told us that we must dedicate ourselves to the principle of equality that the brave men of the United States had died for. He told us we were starting anew with this principle foremost in our minds:

… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

But not everybody agreed that we were starting over. The secessionists never quit. Their first step was to murder Abraham Lincoln. Then they took power in the former slave states. The Supreme Court gutted the Reconstruction Amendments. That enabled the secessionists and White Supremacists to establish legalized segregation, blessed by the Supreme Court in cases like Plessy v. Ferguson.

Black people never quit either. Despite participating in more wars on behalf of a segregated nation and being treated like dirt on their return, through decades of lynching and white race riots, they continued to fight for equality. After the Second World War, they began to achieve success and for once the Supreme Court didn’t block them.

The, beginning in the 1980s, the White Supremacists pushed back against equality, and achieved partial victories, especially in the revanchist Supreme Court. But Black people persevere, and with them all people of conscience, and this time other marginalized groups join the march towards equality, Black, Brown, Asian, LGBT, young people, all of us together.

That’s our nation: always striving for equality, always striving for fairness and equality, always fighting the darkness.

Addendum on Abraham Lincoln

When the Civil War started, Lincoln was willing to accept slavery as the price of unifying the states. That changed during the war. Roosevelt says the Fort Pillow Massacre played a big role in that change. Lincoln had established units of Black Soldiers. They were among the defenders of Fort Pillow, near Memphis in April, 1864. The secessionist troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, later the first head of the KKK, captured a group of US troops trying to surrender, including approximately 300 Black soldiers and their White officers. The Southerners murdered the Black soldiers in cold blood. A few days later Abraham Lincoln gave a speech called the Address At The Sanitary Fair. Here’s a short section.

A painful rumor, true I fear, has reached us of the massacre, by the rebel forces, at Fort Pillow, … of some three hundred colored soldiers and white officers, who had just been overpowered by their assailants. There seems to be some anxiety in the public mind whether the government is doing its duty to the colored soldier, and to the service, at this point. At the beginning of the war, and for some time, the use of colored troops was not contemplated; and how the change of purpose was wrought, I will not now take time to explain. Upon a clear conviction of duty I resolved to turn that element of strength to account; and I am responsible for it to the American people, to the christian world, to history, and on my final account to God. Having determined to use the negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any other soldier.

Why This Is A Better Story

Roosevelt offers several reasons why this is a better story. It has the advantage of being accurate, of course. The standard story ignores the role of Black People in our history. The better story includes Black people and tells us of their valor and perseverance, and the contributions they made to the story of America. In doing so it makes room for the contributions of other groups ignored by the standard story. The better story opens the way to real unity of all of us regardless of all the many ways in which we are different.

The better story gives us a new set of heroes. It valorizes the soldiers who personified the words of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn Of The Republic: “… As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free ….” These regular people, Black and White, are worthy of emulation. That’s not entirely true of the Founders, who fought for their own freedom, and were morally compromised by the denial of freedom to their slaves, their enslaved concubines, and enslaved children.

We can respect the leaders of the Second Founding, Lincoln and the Senators and Representatives who enacted the Reconstruction Amendments and related legislation. We do not have to consider their personal lives, because the better story is about contributions to the future, not an unhealthy fixation on the always problematic past.

Similarly, the better story tells us about the wrong way to be an American. People who oppose these heroes and the values they lived out, and their contributions to our democracy, are not good citizens.

The better story shows us how we can be better citizens: by trying to make America a better place.

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Dewey’s Aspirational View of Democracy

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In the last post we looked at John Dewey’s view of democracy based on The Public And Its Problems, which I called a functional view. He explains the minimum requirements for maintaining a democratic form of government. The text for this post is The Ethics of Democracy, published in 1888, when Dewey was 29 and a professor at the University of Michigan. It offers the uplifting vision of democracy that was missing in the prior post. [1]

This is a philosophy paper. I take it to be a statement of the ideal, grounded in the reality Dewey sees, but laying out his hopes for the future if we pursue this ideal. It’s aspirational, not descriptive.

Dewey doesn’t assert that there a foundational principle from which he can reason his way to his views. His argument responds to the ideas of other writers, using them as a way of demonstrating his own thinking. Dewey takes up the ideas of Sir Henry Maines in his book Popular Government, and Plato’s Republic. Plato and other ancient Greek thinkers took as the highest virtue is excellence, arete, in action and contemplation. I think it helps to keep this in mind as we examine this work.

Maine was a British jurist. Dewey reads his book to say that democracy is fragile, accidental, and bound to failure. Dewey quotes Maine saying democracy will end “… in producing monstrous and morbid forms of monarchy and aristocracy.” In short Maine writes a defense of rule by an aristocracy of the best people, which I assume he derives from Plato’s Republic. Maine says democracy is the rule of the many, by which he means a quantitative, numerical form of government derived from the votes of a horde of isolated atomized individuals, all acting solely in their own interest. Dewey says that for Maine, “Democracy is othing but a numerical aggregate, a conglomeration of units.”

Dewey compares society to an organism whose existence emerges from the actions of the people who make it up. Society exists only through the actions of its members, and we only know society by looking at the actions of the members. The success of the society depends on the success of the individuals and vice versa. Dewey claims that this view arises from the Republic.

Dewey thinks that our actions are mediated by our socialization (my word), so that in acting we are not isolated atoms. Instead, each of us is different way of expressing that socialization, and thus part of the group. Dewey thinks that the will of society is expressed in this way, through the combined acts of members. The will of society gains some expression through the functional definition of democracy as selecting and overseeing our officials.

The key point of the paper for me is Dewey’s explanation of the value of democracy, the ethical justification for it. [2] In the first part of the paper, Dewey compares and contrasts aristocracy and democracy, as if they were merely two possible forms of government.

Democracy, like any other polity, has been finely termed the memory of a historic past, the consciousness of a living present, the ideal of the coming future. Democracy, in a word, is a social, that is to say, an ethical conception, and upon its ethical significance is based its significance as governmental. Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

Dewey says that aristocracy can make the same claims. But appointing the best and wisest doesn’t work. They become corrupt, or lose sight of the needs and desires of the majority. Every movement to greater democracy increases the number and diversity of the people who operate as the government and who oversee that operation.

Every forward democratic movement is followed by the broadening of the circle of the state, and by more effective oversight that every citizen may be insured the rights belonging to him. P. 21.

The aristocratic ideal is that the wisest force people into the spheres in which they can best serve the state. Dewey is appalled by the idea that the individuals in a society can be pushed around by anyone, let alone a group identifying itself as the best and wisest. He doesn’t say it, but the idea that the wisest know the needs of society is absurdly hubristic. In a democracy, people find their own way into what Dewey calls “their proper positions in the social organism.” P. 21. They take up roles in which they can best carry out the goals of society. They do this as individual persons, each with their own set of attributes.

There is an individualism in democracy which there is not in aristocracy; but it is an ethical, not a numerical individualism; it is an individualism of freedom, of responsibility, of initiative to and for the ethical ideal, not an individualism of lawlessness. In one word, democracy means that personality is the first and final reality. P. 23.

I think we would use personhood instead of personality. I think this means that the full flowering of the individual, with all the influence of society, is the driving force of democracy. It is from this personhood, this ethical individual, that other aspects of democracy emerge: including liberty, equality and fraternity. Dewey gives illustrations of the first two.

Liberty in the dominant view means the freedom to do as one chooses, without regard to any other concern. In this view, the law is meant to punish actions that society deems unacceptable.

Dewey rejects this view. Society creates law, using that term in a broad way to cover statutes and formal rules of the state, moral and cultural demands and taboos, and informal rules of behavior. The law of a society represents its will at any time. The personhood of each individual is formed under the influence of this law. Today we would say that each individual internalizes the law. Thus the exercise of liberty by an individual is controlled by the law as instantiated in that individual. [3]

In this way, liberty is self-restricted, but at the same time, the individual is free to explore the limits imposed by the law, and to seek changes. The individual is required to follow the formal laws and rules, but is free to flout the moral and cultural demands and taboos, and the informal rules, subject, of course, to social sanctions, like shunning and shaming. At bottom, in a democracy, the law is not imposed by an external force. It is shaped by individuals as one of their social roles, and internalized. It’s function is to channel the exercise of liberty.

Turning to equality, the vulgar meaning is numerical equality, equal portions of each desirable good. Dewey says that in a democracy equality has an ethical meaning. It begins with the view that each individual person is equivalent in moral worth to every other individual.

Wherever you have a man, there you have personality, and there is no trace by which one personality may be distinguished from another so as to be set above or below. It means that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility; … . P. 25.

This is the beauty of democracy: every person has the opportunity to become all that they can be, and those possibilities are unlimited. [4]

Discussion

This is a strikingly contemporary vision of democracy. Dewey lays out a set of values associated with democracy that resonate with my own. I wonder how many Republican legislators would support Dewey’s understanding of democracy.
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[1]The views in this paper did not change throughout his life.

At the core of his political thinking are the beliefs that science and democracy are mutually supportive and interdependent enterprises, that they are egalitarian, progressive and rest on habits of open social communication, and that powerful interpretations of liberal individualism and democracy have become ossified and self-defeating.

[2] See pages 19-24. I’m skipping a large part of this paper, There is a lot of it that is obscure. Some of the reasoning feels dated to me. I’m not familiar with the writings of some of the people he quotes. None of that detracts from my admiration for his overall conclusions.

[3] See page 23. I think I have summarized it correctly, but the language is obscure. Comments are welcome.

[4] This conception comports with the views of Elizabeth Anderson, which I discuss in this series. Anderson identifies as a follower of Dewey and a Pragmatist.

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Failing At Democracy

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One of the reasons I read old books is that they help me understand the chaotic events of our current times. In The Public And Its Problems, John Dewey lays out a theory of the democratic state, and as we shall see, we are doing badly at it.

Recall that the public is a group of people who have common interests that need to be addressed, usually arising from the actions of other people. The public empowers certain of its members with the task of representing and protecting those interests. We call the aggregate of those people the state. [1]

The origins of the state.

This description implicitly separates “the state” from specific forms of government. Any reasonably large group of people has some form of government, and the bigger the group the more complex the government. In order for there to be a state, there must be a public.

It may be said that not until recently have publics been conscious that they were publics, so that it is absurd to speak of their organizing themselves to protect and secure their interests. Hence states are a recent development. Chapter 3, The Democratic State, p. 116.

One way to think about this is that the modern self-aware public evolved from prior traditional societies. The serfs in a feudal society generally do not see themselves as participants in government, but as fulfilling pre-ordained social roles.

What is a Democratic State?

Dewey likes this definition:

Democracy is a word of many meanings. … But one of the meanings is distinctly political, for it denotes a mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and regulating their conduct as officials. P. 121.

It’s not a soaring aspiration. It’s a functional description of what has to be done. The democratic state needs two things: 1) a system for the public to select its officials; and 2) a system for regulating the conduct of officials.

Selection of officials.

In the US, we elect a small group of officials, and they in turn select others for subsidiary roles. The public, all of us, are responsible for selecting officials who will represent our interests in conflicts with individuals or groups of people, as corporations and militias. The public may fail at its task by selecting people who use their position to enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of the public or otherwise. Dewey says the crucial step is the selection of the right people. [2]

Regulating the Conduct of Officials.

The US Constitution provides two methods for regulating officials. These are impeachment, in the case of the executive and judicial branches, and expulsion, for the legislative branch. These are supplemented by rules that allow for sanctions short of removal, such as censure, and formal means for investigation through committees. There are statutes and formal regulations that constrain conduct of other officials, and many informal rules, now called norms. These laws and rules provide for sanctions.

The evolution of political democracy.

Political democratic states in Western Europe and North America evolved from older forms of government as the result of many small non-political developments. Dewey emphatically denies that these changes were driven by some overarching cause, such as an innate desire for democracy, or by dramatic changes in philosophical theories.

But theories of the nature of the individual and his rights, of freedom and authority, progress and order, liberty and law, of the common good and a general will, of democracy itself, did not produce the movement. They reflected it in thought; after they emerged, they entered into subsequent strivings and had practical effect. P. 123.

As an example, the ideas of John Locke were one of the theoretical sources for the Founding Fathers. His ideas are grounded in the rising economics of mercantilism, the attenuation of religious hegemony, and rising scientific understanding. He seems to be arguing against earlier thinkers grounded in earlier social, cultural, and intellectual structures. [3] Democracy was not the driving force of any of these changes. It emerged as a solution to the societal problems these non-political changes created.

Dewey doesn’t try to explain the entire evolution. He points to just two factors. First, the changes that led to democracy were driven by a fear of government and a desire to keep it to a minimum. This seems like a plausible reaction to an all-powerful monarchy, as existed in England and France, for example. Earlier governments were tied into other institutions, like the Church, and these too were feared or loathed. These institutions came to be seen as oppressive, not to groups of people but to individuals. There was already a growing tendency to think of the individual as the atomic unit. [4[ For Dewey, individualism was the result. [5]

The second important factor is the rise of science and technology. Over time it created changes in the nature of productive work and increased the range of consumer goods. People of all classes wanted more. The old rules became obstacles, and people began to question these rules and the system that produced them.

The old conception of Natural Law as the source of morality merged with the new idea that laissez-faire economics was a natural law in a synthesis that opposed artificial political laws. This led to the conclusion that government interference in property was bad, if not a moral evil, and the role of government should be little more than to protect property rights and personal integrity.

This is an overly simplified history, even more simplified by me, but it gives an idea of the genesis democracy as Dewey defines it. It leads to the conclusion that government officials are likely to be bad, so we should have short terms and serious control.

Problems arising from large organizations.

In earlier times, people’s primary relationships were face-to-face, family, friends, co-workers, church members, local people. The government was hardly relevant in day-to-day life. Its primary impact was taxes, the occasional war, and a few laws. By the time Dewey is writing, the primary relationships were impersonal, the individual was facing large corporate organizations in many aspects of life, including productive work. The state acted directly acted on individuals, touching their lives in many ways.

Group, or conjoint, action through business entities rivals the government in impact on individuals. Businesses “reach out to grasp the agencies of government;” not out of evil intent necessarily, but because they are the best organized groups of people. Even so, the power of these organizations has been controlled and directed by the state to some extent, and more is possible.

Discussion.

The second impeachment of Trump shows us that as a nation we have done badly at democracy. We elected unfit officials, people who are stupid, venal, conspiracy-ridden, power-maddened or a combination. Unfit legislators have for decades let the executive branch do monstrous things and refused to hold any of them accountable. The unfit people who staff our courts at all levels, but especially the unconstrained ideologues of SCOTUS have stymied legislative power, and have limited accountability of government and business elites with their pronouncements. Prosecutors are at fault as well, because they refuse even to investigate powerful private entities and their executives.

We fail democracy if we do not carry out our responsibility to regulate the conduct of our officials, and continue to select unfit people as our officials.

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[1] I discuss these matter in detail in earlier posts, especially … and ….

[2] Dewey discusses different ways in which leaders were selected in earlier times, which I skip. It’s worth noting that we still elect people who met those irrelevant criteria: military and religious leaders, children of officials, charismatic people, and old white men. Pp. 117-9.

[3] I agree with Dewey about this, but it’s very far afield.

[4] Think of Descartes, sunk in self-contemplation. We also see it in Locke.

[5] Individualism lies at the heart of social contract theory and neoliberalism. Dewey rejects social contract theory.

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We’re So Not Through Here

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This is emptywheel, where we have frequently posted work contrary to conventional wisdom, or dissented from political leadership with indifference to party.

Each contributor here has their own voice though we’re sometimes confused for each other.

Today is one of those days when you will see a wide gap between emptywheel contributors.

Specifically, I do not personally subscribe at all to Quinn Norton’s belief that the Union is done.

I have written before, however, on numerous occasions, that the United States has not lived up to its ideals.

The concept of this union was flawed from the beginning, having launched as it did with a concession to slaveowners. That original sin dogs this nation to this day; slavery still exists in the form of a carceral state which is heavily weighted against minorities.

The concept of this union was also predicated upon the occupation of lands belonging to pre-existing nations. I’m a product of one of those occupied nations, whose people were nearly wiped out by disease and greed white American occupiers brought to their land.

But I am also an example of what happens when disparate people come together under a singular proposition: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”

I am the product of people from Nordic and middle European countries, the product of trips around the Pacific and East Asia. All my forebears came here because they perceived a freedom to pursue lives and opportunity they did not have in their home nation-states.

They found an appeal in this premise worth risking their persons as well as their fortune, meager as it was: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

My forebears stayed in spite of being erased in a number of ways — like the records of my French-Canadian family members’ existence in Michigan being repeatedly obscured or deleted by majority English- and German-speaking occupants, or my Asian family losing its true name when recorded by customs, and then stranded by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Or my Hawaiian family losing the right to its own land because whites deposed its monarchy and seized the islands, in addition to spreading deadly disease.

In spite of being marginalized then and now, my forebears and family made a comfortable life and felt it was their honor, privilege, and duty to contribute to these United States. Among my family members is a Medal of Honor winner — a second generation American who served in the Navy until he retired. My father and brother both served in the armed forces as well.

This isn’t an easy country. If you don’t speak English and especially if you’re not white, it can really demand a steep price. Try taking the citizenship test.

Witness the harassment Ilhan Omar has faced for her race, ethnic heritage, and religion, in spite of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, yet she continues to serve her constituents as their representatives in our democratic republic system of government.

It’s because of the price many Americans have faced to become and remain Americans that I’m put out at Norton’s “the Union is done” essay.

I don’t think she truly has a clue what it’s taken for a sizable percentage of this country to hold this union together, such as it is. She may have faced misogyny but really, in which countries does misogyny not exist?

She can play with sentiment and co-opt others’ pain in her argument that the Union is done, but she hasn’t faced the existential threat one’s skin can pose in a land founded by slaveowners and their sympathizers.

She has the unacknowledged privilege of associating with people who’d rather see people like my family dead, and yet she thinks she can declare “the Union is done.”

Take a hard look at what the Black Americans of this country have been doing since voting began last month as a commitment to form a more perfect Union. Ask them if the Union is done.

Take a hard look at what Native Americans have had to do — forced to change their lifestyle, assigning addresses to places which to them are simply Home — in order to vote, otherwise invalidated and erased if they don’t. Ask them, too, if the Union is done.

And take note of the naturalized immigrants who are worried they and their kin will be harassed by ICE and potentially incarcerated or deported while trying to vote simply because they aren’t white and have come to this country too recently. Ask them if the Union to which they emigrated, many as refugees, is done.

My Chinese family members weren’t permitted to emigrate here or own land until 1943, when it suddenly became convenient to have China side with the U.S. against Japan. I tell you this Union is not done, from the house I own under a hyphenated Chinese name.

I’ve pointed to the words of former escaped slave Frederick Douglass before, with regard to the shortcomings of this nation:

… Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. …

The work is slow, so often grinding. It is like farming on a’a and pahoehoe lava, which my family knows well. The biases which are foundational to the problems this country faces are older than this country. We are kidding ourselves if they won’t take at least a half-life to fully end, during which time the demographics of this country will force change. Look at what has transpired, the push and pull in the dozen-plus years this site has tackled the nature of security in an open society.

But this union is by no means done and over. It’s there in the lines we have seen in the streets for weeks, snaking out the doors of polling places across this country. It’s in the cars lined up in a drive-through campaign rally, queued hopefully, trustingly in a drive-through foodbank.

It was there in the streets after George Floyd was murdered.

From goose quill pen’s first ink on parchment 244 years ago, this union has always been aspirational, a nation in a state of becoming, a people who must occasionally check themselves and listen to their better angels.

From the speech before a battlefield of nearly 50,000 American dead 157 years ago, we re-consecrated ourselves,

that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The union is not over. The dream still lives, its work goes on; we will not yield.

It’s simply time once again to rededicate ourselves to forming a more perfect union.

We can begin this day of all days by exercising and protecting our right to vote.

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What Comes After America

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Whatever happens today, the Union is done.

It has been for a long time, maybe even from the start. But we have reached the point where the longer it goes on, the more harm it will inexorably do. It’s time, past time, to admit it didn’t work, it never worked, and that the Constitution and its institutions have ossified. There is no reforming the United States of America, there is no more perfect union to chase after. That turned out to be a lie — a lie woven into the legal fabric of this nation-state from the start. The United States of America, as defined by its constitution, can only get worse because of how irreparably broken both that document and the system it created are. This isn’t a Trump or GOP thing. They are symptoms, but they are only symptoms. As angry as you may be at Trump, voting him out, driving him from the country, jailing him, whatever, none of that will fix the great flaw that created his presidency. It does no more than shoe a fly away from an open wound and call it fixed.

The flaw is our Constitution. As there is no politically possible path to rewriting the it, the Constitution can only fall further into entropy and catastrophe.

The longer this goes on, the worse the end will be. This is why it’s the duty of people who are in and of, or love, America the culture, Americans the people, the land it spans and the diversity it holds, to imagine what comes next and the easiest way to get there. We’ve been running what was essentially the broken beta of the first representative democracy for almost 250 years, and it was built to not be upgradable. It doesn’t work right, it never did, and it is awful. It was a compromise of rich and frightened men whose imaginations (understandably) didn’t reach far beyond the 18th century.

The nightmares we live with, and their disconnect from the values we hold now are impossible to count. I was researching children in ICE detention living in cages, and their families being held in unsafe conditions and coerced into forced labor — back in the Obama days. The exploitation of forms of unfree labor continues to this day, as does the rise of oligarchy and political corruption.

Police have killed almost 900 people this year, despite a mismanaged pandemic presumably making it somewhat harder. The Flint water crisis is six years old this year, and still going. One person has been found guilty and sentenced to probation. I could go on, but you know this song: opioid crisis, inequality, lobbying, campaign finance, the two party system, gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, and of course, the damn virus. And still, all these problems are just symptoms of a deeper disease, a broken political basis for our society. Our laws have lead to an irreparable failure of the American system when it comes to the basic task of keeping the people who constitute it alive and functional and with some kind of path to a sustainable, if not improving, existence. Medical care, housing, and education are all contingent. These are the most fundamental parts of having this thing called government and ours failed these tasks aggressively, despite the brilliance and determination of even its most oppressed people pushing forward our culture to greater things.

It’s impossible to change any of this at a fundamental level, because it is impossible to re-write or even amend the superstructure of our laws and our government. Even if the GOP lost everything, and the Democrats suddenly became a party of reform (which they won’t), nothing could meet the global problems we face because the judiciary will destroy efforts to reform and remake ourselves at every turn. But even before we get to the problem of the judiciary, the two party system is disconnected from the world as it is now: facing the end of the Holocene and with that, a planet that is gentle to humans. What was the most democratic system of the 18th century is a travesty of permitted corruption, unrepresentative elites, and openly bought-and-paid-for influence. It’s over, it’s done, it’s time to let it go before it kills us all.

The successes of America, and there have been many, came not because of our form of governance but despite it. The culture – for good and ill – isn’t the constitution or the legal regime or the nation-state as recognized by other nation-states. It’s the people. It’s what we choose, believe, and imagine. Right now we choose to be constrained by a document that has manifestly failed us.

And yes, there have been efforts at positive movement using our constitutional framework, like the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. But they have been undermined and destroyed almost at birth by the perniciousness of the very flaws amendments were meant to fix. And thusly, because of the 14th, we live in a world were Exxon holds the rights meant for black folk who still struggle to vote.

After spending much of my adult life feeling alone in my views, it has surprised me how many people have said to me over the last years, and especially this year, that there’s no redeeming this union, that it’s not worth preserving. But this is not an ending thought that drops into a void.

The end of the Union isn’t a hopeless position, but the only hopeful one we have. The alternative isn’t chaos and dystopia, just as the alternative to monarchy in the 17th and 18th century wasn’t chaos and dystopia. It was us.

Right now is when we start imagining and working on the most peaceful and productive transition to a post-USian world we can manage. That may seem impossible, but that’s also what we thought about the Soviet Union in 1987. It’s what we thought about the end of European hegemony at the end of the colonial ages. It’s what we thought right before parliamentary reform swept Europe after 1848. Right now we’re settling for Churchill‘s worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…, in this world of sin and woe. Why does humanity think it needs to stop there? We invented everything we have now politically, technologically, culturally, and in ways of coordinating and governing.

Why on earth are so many people convinced that we don’t have anything more to invent?

The founders imagined a new thing, but they chickened out and didn’t do it. They half-assed it, retreated from their own notions. When they were done with the thing, it was born almost a ghost and tied down to the old hierarchies. The framers of the constitution were afraid of their own notions of self-determination and equality. They pulled back and tried to not make it too democratic a nation for three million people, and now it fails more than three hundred million. In fact, it fails more than seven billion.

In 2020, this structure has been constraining the political imagination for centuries, stunting our growth, and stunting the world.

My allegiance is not to America, and it hasn’t been for many years. My allegiance is to my family — my family of all the strange living things, unique in a seemingly endless void of rock and chemistry filling the universe, but not life, not as far as we know. I do love America — the land, the people, the crazy, loud, funny and emotional culture. I will always love America, but like all real love, it will be complicated. I don’t have to love its flaws, its racism, its cowardly cruelty, or its legal institutions in order to love its soul.

My allegiance isn’t to a bastard compromise of frightened men in 1776, or 1648, or even 1555. It’s to the world now, in 2020. Those men are long dead, and they do not get to describe the limits of political imagination in the 21st century. But right now, we are trapped in the infinitesimal space these old men described for us, surrounded on all sides by the high cliffs of doubt and familiarity. We need to succeed where they failed — humanity is counting on it.

I know it’s unthinkable that any of this could change, just as it was unthinkable that Rome could fall, that Carthage would be wiped from the map, that the Russian Empire could cease to be, that the Dynasties of China would come to an end, that the Toltecs would collapse, that the eternal Pharaohs of Egypt would pass from the world, and any more of the dozens of political systems that have come and gone. We are still here, waiting on something worthy of our brilliance and creativity.

One of our greatest poets, a man treated like shit for the color of his skin, wrote

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

If you want to call that thing Hughes sang for America, sure, why not. But don’t mistake it for the quicksand of desires we inhabit now. Don’t mistake it for this most failed of hoped-for states. Don’t even mistake it for a Westphalian state.

It all stops the day we decide it stops. None of these documents, forms, systems, or laws have any existence beyond our imaginations, and they never did. It is 2020, and we face a pandemic (with undoubtedly more to come), the end of our own Holocene, environmental destruction, and the task of meeting the needs of eight billion people in this world. It’s time to abandon the best systems men could think of in the late 1700s and figure out one that works now. We could even lead the world in figuring out what comes after the Westphalian nation-state, hopefully before that legal and cultural construct kills us all.

This too shall pass. How it passes, whether it’s the end of the world, or the birth of a better one, is up to our imaginations, which we need to put to work in a hurry.

And so, on this most strange of days, I put the question to you – What comes after America?

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A Primer On Pragmatism: Applications

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Posts in this series. This post is updated from time to time with additional resources.

This introduction to pragmatism was motivated in part by the fact that the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson identifies herself as in the pragmatist tradition, but there are other reasons. Our political environment is toxic. It’s hard to maintain our sense of self, of our values, our hopes, and our sense of security. Philosophy offers us reminders of the existence of our values, and the role they play in holding us together as individuals and in our relations with others. It takes us away from the noise and the turmoil and puts us in a quiet atmosphere where we can nurse our wholeness. It can provide us with armor against the forces that are ripping at us.

With that in mind, I’ll close with a brief discussion of democracy and Modern Money Theory. Both begin with the key idea of pragmatism, that all our ideas, no matter how old, were formed for human reasons, and to meet human needs. All of them, no matter how old, are subject to rethinking in light of new conditions.

Democracy

Pragmatism is particularly well-suited to democracy. The most striking justification for democracy is found in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I’m not so sure these truths are self-evident. Prior to that time, the dominant view was that some people are born to lead, and others are only fit to follow. As Peirce and James point out, philosophical systems then were grounded in the idea that there is a universal truth outside human experience, but one that the best of us can comprehend somehow. Those lucky people can construct a social system that accords with the will of the universe, or the Almighty. Many of them argued for centuries that the King ruled with the blessing of the Almighty, and everyone else was inferior, fit only to follow.

At the time Jefferson wrote, the French and the English were directly contesting the divine right of kings, and there was discontent with the idea of hereditary authority. But the US was the first country to adopt Thomas Jefferson’s formulation as a founding idea. It’s a revolutionary statement, and one we are still trying to reify, not just in our government but in our social lives, our work, and other institutions.

The Declaration was a break with what seemed like a firts principle. And that is fundamentally a pragmatist act: rejecting a first principle because it isn’t working to create the kind of lives people wanted. Jefferson’s formulation wasn’t totally original. It derives from prior thinkers, but instead of laying out a rule, it articulates a value, a value that should guide our efforts to create a decent society. The system of government created by the Constitution was supposed to be one that would enable the creation of a new kind of society, one informed not by rules thought to be eternal, but by values that are thought to be best for human beings.

There have always been people insisting that there are eternal rules, and that deviation from those rules would bring disaster. They settle all doubt by tenacity, as Peirce would say.

Pragmatists say that we have to justify our choices on the basis of what works. But the first step is to decide what our priorities are. We do that by defining our values and our goals, and then by working out the best way to reach them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness my not be the best goals for today, but they’re a start. Our task is to decide what that means in today’s society. Anderson says we don’t want to be humiliated or dominated. That’s a good way of talking about what liberty and the pursuit of happiness might mean today. We won’t the answers by looking outside our human experience.

Modern Money Theory

Much of neoclassical economics is grounded in normative concepts. One of these is Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, discussed in §2.1 of this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The economist and mathemetician William Stanley Jevons used this normative concept to create the economic idea of marginal utility, one of the foundations of neoclassical economics. See pp 9-10 here.

Utilitarianism is a normative idea. This is from the Stanford link:

… [Bentham] promulgated the principle of utility as the standard of right action on the part of governments and individuals. Actions are approved when they are such as to promote happiness, or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to cause unhappiness, or pain. Combine this criterion of rightness with a view that we should be actively trying to promote overall happiness, and one has a serious incompatibility with psychological egoism. Cites omitted.

Jevons explicitly sets out to mathematize Bentham’s utilitarianism. Marginal utility is therefore grounded in a normative idea. It incorporates a specific value, but the value is hidden and ignored when it comes to putting marginal utility into practice. It is only loosely, if at all, based on practical experience of human behavior. Nevertheless, it is the foundation of large parts of neoclassical economics and of its modern version, neoliberalism.

Pragmatism rejects the idea of starting from normative theories. I don’t know how to deal with marginal utility from a pragmatic point of view, so I turn to another fundamental idea of economics, the creation of money. As best I can tell, mainstream economists say that banks create money. There’s a story about bank multipliers you can google. Governments get money by taxation or borrowing. In this story, the private sector is responsible for money creation subject only to some loose guidance from the Federal Reserve Board. This protects us by making sure Congress can’t ruin the financial sector with profligate spending and borrowing which would automatically happen, and which would be an inflationary disaster.

Modern Money Theory starts with a question: how is money created? It looks at the things that are done as a result of which there is money. Governments create money by spending it. They reduce the amount of money by taxation. They may or may not issue bonds. MMT is based on observable facts. The description of the creation of money leads to other testable ideas and to a completely different concept of the role of government in money creation and society.

Money creation is a governmental action, and thus is subject to politics. Congress decides how much money is created, and how the new money is used. The old story tries to deny this reality with cloudy abstractions and claims that it’s all the working of some invisible hand. Pragmatists don’t believe in invisible hands. They say that politics is the arena in which we decide about how to use the power to create money.

MMT isn’t just for progressives. Deficit hawks and small government supporters get to argue their opinions, and to assert their values. This is a quote from Modern Money Theory by Randy Wray:

However, I also believe that most of the tenets of MMT can be adopted by anyone. It does not bother me if some simply want to use the descriptive part of MMT without agreeing with the policy prescriptions. The description provides a framework for policymaking. But there is room for disagreement over what government should do. Once we understand that affordability is not an issue for a sovereign currency-issuing government, then questions about what government should do become paramount. And we can disagree on those. (Emphasis in original.)

The fact that MMT is value-neutral, that it can be used by people of every political persuasion is a powerful point in its favor. I don’t think we can say the same thing about neoliberalism.

Conclusion

There is much more to be said about pragmatism. It is a powerful tool we can use to cut through old ideas and useless distinctions. But perhaps its most important contribution is that it is an open-ended theory. It makes room for the endless possibilities of human beings. I think that is a powerful value.

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