The title quote by Harvard professor Jill Lapore during an excellent roundtable discussion on This Week With Christiane Amanpour captures the meta-argument that we all have to divert some small portion of our attention to: The argument between any one faction’s absolutism, on the one hand, and the continued dialectic of competing views reconciled through formal and informal procedural mechanisms on the other.
Each of us will feel a stronger affinity for one or another of the arguments presented in the discussion linked to above, and insist that that argument represents the one absolute truth. But recognizing that the debate itself is the essence of our freedom, and the life blood of our popular sovereignty, is the shared recognition to which we must all return, allowing the tension between foundational principles and our lived history to be played out within the crucible of a vibrant constitutional democracy.
In other words, those who insist that the growth in power of our federal government over the course of American history -starting with the drafting of our Constitution (which strengthened the federal government over the failed Articles of Confederation), and playing out through The Civil War (which ended the disintegrative cesessionist/nullificationist version of States Rights doctrine as a reality of our national existence), continuing with The New Deal, and sailing on into the present- is a betrayal of our Constitution, and those who feel that it is the realization of our national history through the framework of our Constitution, both have to realize that their voice is not the only voice, their view is not the only view, and this dialogue we are having is the hallmark of our success as a nation and a society.
I am more concerned about those on both sides of this and related debates who are adamant that their own dogmatic false certainties are the one and only Truth than I am about those who disagree with me, but have the humility to realize that none of us have the final answers, and that all of us are participating in an on-going endeavor.
As a progressive, I am not determined to force my particular substantive certainties down the throats of others, but to engage both those who agree and those who disagree in a process which favors reason and goodwill, and disfavors blind dogma and angry fanaticism. I have enough faith in what I believe to be true that I am willing to subject it to such a test, and enough humility to know that I prefer the outcome of that test to the blind dominance of what I currently believe to be true.
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The following is an entire (up to the moment of this posting) Facebook comment thread on a Libertarian’s Facebook page. I often infiltrate these echo-chambers, just to emphasize the distinction in how we arrive at and defend our respective conclusions. Many examples are striking, but this one, toward the end (you can skip the first third without missing much), is so perfectly illustrative of the absolute commitment to a blind ideology, a refusal to even admit to the value of being reasonable people of goodwill, or to the possibility that those who disagree could possibly have anything of merit in their perspective, that I wanted to post it here. It serves not only to emphasize the dogmatic belligerence of the modern far-right, but also as a warning to their counterparts on the far-left: All reasonable people of goodwill have to commit to reason and universal goodwill, not by assuming that our own blind ideological certainties are unassailable, but rather by acknowledging that we live in a complex and subtle world, and that we are all challenged to better develop, both individually and collectively, the disciplines and procedures that favor reason and humanity over irrationality and bigotry.
Catherine Keene but when free markets “fail” we need less freedom in the marketplace. The only thing consistent about Keynesians is their ability to defy logic.
Jawaid Bazyar Government now takes 50% of GDP. We still have poverty, drugs, homelessness, and unemployment. Guess we’ll just need 60%! or 70%! What, exactly, will be enough, Krugman et al?
Kori Fisher what was that definition of insanity again??? doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result….yeah, that’s the one.
Steve Harvey Evidence: gdp experienced historically unprecedented growth in 1934-1937 in the wake of New Deal policies (raising tax rate for hightest bracket, deficit spending); Sweden is first country to emerge from Great Depression using Keynesian eco…nomic principles (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm); both the on-set of the Great Depression, and the return of a downward spiral in late 1937, were due to fiscal policies virtually identical to those recommended by conservatives today; massive deficit spending in WWII decisively pulled America and the world out of the Great Depression; the economic outcome of Obama’s stilmulus spending in the wake of the 2008 fiscal sector meltdown exceeded all professional economic predictions of our immediate economic prospects in 2008 (including for the most stubborn lagging indicator, unemployment, which turned from increasing at an accelerating rate to increasing at a decelerating rate a month after the first stimulus package was implemented). Yeah, those crazy Nobel Prize winning economists and their wild ignorance (compared to economic sages such as yourselves) about economics….
Jahfre FireEater The Keynesian view that an economy is a machine that can be tweaked to one’s advantage without negative consequences is refuted in spades by Ludwig von Mises in his magnum opus, Human Action. As Mises says, this idea “is as old as it is bad…”
Jawaid Bazyar Harvey, you’re insane. Of course it’s easy to cherry-pick numbers you like. How about you take a look at the US unemployment rates before, during, and after our Keynesian orgy during the Great Depression.
Amy Chesser Brock Have you seen Keynes vs. Hayek round 2? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc
Steve Harvey @Jawaid: Yes, look at them. I linked to the Great Depression time line in my previous message. Economic contraction follows the policies you recommend, while economic expansion follows the policies I recommend. The sustained explosion of economic growth following WWII was due to the biggest public spending project in American history (WWII armaments). Also, not a single nation on the face of the Earth partook of that post WWII economic expansion without first having a massively expensive administrative infrastructure in place, such as the one we put in place during the New Deal. There is, in fact, an optimum: Too much deficit spending for too prolongued a period causes economic collapse, just as too little for too prolongued a period causes economic contraction. Private businesses run on very much the same model (credit is the life-blood of corporations). We fail for not reducing the deficit in times of economic boon, not for increasing it in times of economic contraction.
David K Williams Jr @Steve Harvey – regarding those Nobel Prize winning economists, I’ll call your Krugman & raise you a Hayek.
Jahfre FireEater LOL
Jahfre FireEater Any scheme that allows the elite to do as they please with easy financing will win an economist or a President a Nobel Prize.
Jahfre FireEater Funding for an ivy league academic economics guild, sure no problem…just keep promising those who write the checks that there will ALWAYS be another check in their checkbook.
Steve Harvey @David: Right. My point is that you’re neither. As someone who has done work in the field of economics, I recognize the legitimate debates, and don’t dismiss Hayek or Friedman the way you folks so blithely dismiss Krugman. It’s pretty clear from the empirical evidence that government spending does indeed stimulate the economy in the short run (I know of no economist who disputes that), but the question -and it remains a question, no matter how brilliant y’all assume yourselves to be- is at what point that short-term stimulus effect is outweighed by long-term drag effects. Most economists recognize that it is a largely context dependent analysis, depending on the current state of the economy, and what, precisely, the government invests in. For instance, if the government invests in public goods that have lots of complementary private goods associated with them (e.g, invests in highways, making cars a more attractive comodity to buy), with lots of forward and backward linkages (e.g., stimulates related industries upstream and downstream from that which the government has invested in), then there is likely to be a very high multiplier effect. Economics, among all of the things that we discuss in public discourse, is the least amenable to oversimplistic platitudes, which is what your ideology pretty much relies on.
Donald E. L. Johnson Dems spend to buy votes, build political careers, not fix the economy. Belief is not the issue, imho.
David K Williams Jr Steve – we can all count on death, taxes & your misplaced condescending elitism. Hayek In fact rejects government spending as a means to stimulate the economy and explains why WWII did not end the depression.
Steve Harvey David, I love the way arguments you disagree with are “elitism” (the more informed, the more elitist), but your dismissive certainty in the face of legitimate disagreement is just good ol’ fashioned common sense populism. If there’s any “elitism” to be found, it is to be found in the position that claims that there is no legitimate debate to be had, that the one truth is known, that the speaker’s position is its perfect and final expression, and all others are just wrong and misguided. I’m all for well-informed and well-reasoned debates on the complex and subtle issues that face us as a society. That’s not what you and your friends ever offer, or accept. (There are those on the right who do, but they are becoming increasingly marginalized by those who don’t).
David K Williams Jr There are plenty of arguments with which I disagree that aren’t elitist. Your arguments, however, always revolve around how smart & educated you are & us mere mortals or so silly for not agreeing.
Steve Harvey My arguments are arguments, mobilizing specifically cited information in reasoned form to defend a position arrived at in the same way. That seems to be the problem.
Donald E. L. Johnson Steve, hve you read The Forgotten Man. It shoots down all of your points.
Steve Harvey No, it doesn’t. Here’s my point: I know that I know almost nothing, and I know that the same is true of all of you. I have more than my share of formal degrees and life experience, and a good mind through which to sift it all, and, as a result, I recognize that it is a very complex and subtle world in which we live, and that our certainties about anything but the most trivial and superficial of phenomena is tentative and fallible. The more you know, the more you know that you don’t. On the left and the right, there are those who simply don’t get that, who have a favorite sacred source or secular sage who, despite being contested and him- or her- or itself fallible, is infallible in their eyes. And when people speak from that place, know absolutely and irrefutably that their own contested truth is incontestable, that is blind dogma, and pure folly. What offends David and others more than my perceived arrogance is that I argue my positions, and do so well enough that it challenges those fortified sacred false certainties, not because of any special talent of mine, but because any argument that is a genuine argument does so.
Valarie Murphy @Steve, Krugman has to be dismissed; he’s always wrong.
Steve Harvey Thank you, Valarie, for illustrating my point.
Donald E. L. Johnson Steve, You’re not the only one who has had life experiences, lived through several booms and busts and read numerous books on our and the world’s political and economic history. And you’re not the only one who knows what he doesn’t know and can’t predict. We’ve all been around the track one way or another, and we have our points of view the same as you do. Ours is as valid as yours. Some of us try to be objective in assessing what’s going on, and some of us are constantly trying to learn more so that we have a better feel for what’s happening and likely to happen. Having read numerous well-researched articles and books on economics and written thousands of stories and articles about numerous companies, employers, laws, regulations and economic developments, it is my personal opinion that government spending on the kind of pork that is in Obama’s stimulous bill and in ObamaCare does nothing to stimulate the economy and in the long run kills private sector jobs.
Donald E. L. Johnson Val, Krugman’s not always wrong, but he never can be trusted to be honest. He’s Pinch’s favorite socialist, and he works hard to defend his former colleague, Ben Bernankee, and his favorite politician, Obama. Like too many academic economists, Krugman has convinced his readers that he has no intellectual integrity and that he’s just another partisan hack with a column.
Steve Harvey Yes, Donald, it’s your personal opinion, but you don’t REALLY acknowledge the possibility that you’re wrong. You don’t REALLY acknowledge that professional economists are divided on the subject (with, if anything, the weight of professional opinion against you). You read what reinforces your bias, not what challenges it, and assume that “your opinion” is the end of the story. I don’t often go there with you, but, the fact is, I consider the question of the relationship of deficit spending to economic growth to be extremely complex, and clearly not something that anyone knows the answer to. I sure don’t. There is plenty of empirical evidence which supports the conclusion that it is a short term stimulus, though you all simply define that out of existence, because it doesn’t confirm your bias. The main issue seems to be its indefinite growth, eventually swallowing up the economy. There is also the issue of balancing legitimate considerations, weighing the goal of maximizing GDP growth with the goal of maximizing true equality of opportunity and other issues of human welfare and social justice. These issues are defined out of existence by those who have a false certainty that defines all of their positions with absolute conviction. There is no real openness to a debate, no real contemplation that there might be anything imperfectly understood, no real ability to learn and grow. It’s not your conclusions that are the real problem, but rather the inflexibility with which you cling to them.
Steve Harvey This exchange inspired a little essay, called “Sacred Truths”: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=2075
Steve Harvey Donald, you said ” Dems spend to buy votes, build political careers, not fix the economy.” In a survey of professional economists by The Economist magazine in 2008, 80% favored Democratic over Republican economic policies. The notion that Dems are more corrupt than Republicans is another convenient ideological bulwark, but it has no grounding in realiy. The games and strategies of electoral politics are found across the spectrum, in large part because that which works (for getting elected to office) ends up being that which is best represented. Your assumption that every belief and value those who disagree with you hold must be some nefarious attempt to do evil may serve your false certainties, but it doesn’t serve our civil discourse or our ability to govern ourselves wisely. You also said “Belief is not the issue, imho.” In other words, no criticism of your beliefs can ever be relevant, since their validity is incontravertable; the issue is, as you stated, that those who disagree with you are always wrong, by definition. All people who think this way, from across the political spectrum, do us all a disservice, by reducing our public discourse to a struggle between reason and blind ideology, rather than between competing well-reasoned positions.
Pyro Rob Steve, I think Ronald Reagan was thinking of you when he said this famous like:
“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Steve Harvey A strange response to the assertion that we all need to recognize the limits of our knowledge more, the need to recognize that when complex issues are legitimately contested to pretend to know that one pole in that contest is the indisputable truth is folly, and the need to keep exploring.
Pyro Rob You are mistaken, the issues are not that complex. In fact, the solutions are not that complex either.
Steve Harvey You see the difference in how we think? I recognize a complex and subtle world, with the human dimension mirroring the natural (indeed, a part of and emanation of the natural), ideas spreading and changing and merging into new ones, forming our technological and social institutional landscape, our laws and economy, our cultures and ideologies and arts and sciences. I come at it with a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, even a sense of reverence, recognizing the miracle of our existence, and the responsibility of having minds with which to engage with the reality of which we are a part, to meet our challenges and grasp our opportunities. How well we understand this dynamo of which we are a part affects how well we engage with it, how well we realize the heights of our humanity. You respond to someone who recognizes this complexity, and our constant challenge to understand it to the best of our limited abilities, never fully grasping it, by simultaneously declaring that there are no subtleties or complexities to be grasped at all, that its all very simple and fits into a few reductionist platitudes, a true hier to the Inquisitioners of old; and, at the same time, launch a quote criticizing those who do not think in that way, who recognize the complexity of the world and do not reduce it to a few simple platitudes, for thinking that they know what isn’t so? You turn reality on its head, in the most obvious of ways, and then pat yourselves on the back for the brilliance of having said something completely meaningless.
Steve Harvey Let’s capture this conversation in its bare form: Steve: None of us knows as much as we either think or pretend we do. Pyro: You’re problem is that you know things that aren’t true. Steve: Strange answer. We live in a complex world with legitimately contested issues. Pyro: You’re wrong. We live in a simple world with simple answers. Steve: So, saying that none of us knows as much as we think we do is the error of knowing things that aren’t so, while claiming that everything reduces to a few simple and indisputable platitudes is the avoidance of that error? Uh-huh. I see….
Buddy Shipley The Cartoon Bears investigate the income multiplier of con-artist, Maynard Keynes, his argument for deficit spending, to see why it doesn’t work. They discover bad assumptions, and that Keynes was contradictory on whether his multiplier would or wouldn’t cure unemployment. They find a couple of interesting clues, and get ready to tackle the math in these videos. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA67E8jMq84 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vnus-Kw5Is
Buddy Shipley Whether one favors the economic theories of Keynes or Hayak, any attempt to implement policy based on either MUST be constrained by the powers and authority granted to the federal government by the Constitution. Therefore most Keynesian ideas can never be permitted because they can only be implemented through tyranny.
Keynes was a conman and The Tree of Liberty is very thirsty…
Buddy Shipley ”For economists the real world is often a special case.” –Edgar R. Fiedler
“Ask five economists and you’ll get five different explanations? six if one went to Harvard.” –Edgar R. Fiedler
…”Give me a one-handed economist! All my economics say, ‘On the one hand? on the other.'” –Harry S. Truman
“In economics the majority is always wrong.” –John Kenneth Galbraith
“In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.” –John Kenneth Galbraith
“An economist is someone who knows more about money than the people who have it.” –Anonymous
“An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anybody else’s.” –Will Rogers
“Economy is too late when you are at the bottom of your purse.” –Seneca
“The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.” –Jean-Paul Kauffmann
“The notion that big business and big labor and big government can sit down around a table somewhere and work out the direction of the American economy is at complete variance with the reality of where the American economy is headed. I mean, it’s like dinosaurs gathering to talk about the evolution of a new generation of mammals.” –Bruce Babbit
“If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.” –Peter Lynch
“If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.” –George Bernard Shaw
“When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul.” –George Bernard Shaw
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” –Mark Twain
Steve Harvey The problem, Buddy, is not the debate, but the unwillingness to have it. I am arguing that it is a complex and subtle world, and that our best understandings are tentative and incomplete, while those arguing against me both insist that it is a simple world amenable to simple answers, that they know what those simple answers are and that all who disagree with them are wrong and dismissible as such, and, in an amazing demonstration of how conveniently constructed their reality is, that the problem with those who disagree with them is that they think they know things that aren’t true! If we have camps in our public discourse in which their absolute certainties are not open to new information or applied reason, then we have no public discourse, but rather a secularized religious war and nothing more. Thanks to folks like you, and your counterparts on the left with the same attitude (against whom I argue just as vociferously), that is exactly the condition of this country right now. As for your dismissal of the opposing side in the current economic debate, while you are right about the fallibility of expert views, you are irrational to assume that your lay views benefit from some superior insight. The problem isn’t that experts don’t know and you do, but rather that none of us does. We are operating in a complex world with imperfect knowledge and understanding. Admitting that is a necessary first step to having any kind of meaningful public discourse. For example, you dismiss the notion that public investment can have any economic stimulus effect, despite fairly overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary (to which I cited above), relying on a string of quotes and one well-worn analysis that criticizes the Keynesian multiplier. But that analysis is the definitive truth, and, even if it were, there are non-Keyneisian arguments for why government stimulus spending works under certain circumstances, such as the one I mentioned above concerning the complementarity to private goods of the public investments, and the robustness of forward and backward linkages. It may be the case that the historical evidence is an artifact of spurious relationships, that all analyses that support the notion that government spending can have a stimulus effect under certain conditions are wrong, that the 80% of economists who think so understand economics less well than you do, and that your platitude-driven conclusion is the one correct one. I’ll admit to that possibility. Let’s put all of the arguments on the table, in a mass public agreement that none of us yet knows all of the answers, and agree to have a civil public debate based on reason applied to evidence, in which all of us are committed to the historically proven processes (e.g., scientific methodology) by which to arrive at our agreed upon truths. Let’s step back from our false certainties, across the ideological spectrum, and agree to be reasonable people of goodwill working together in a complex and subtle world. How can anyone object to such a proposal?
Pyro Rob Steve, the simple problem is that the govt thinks it’s responsible for things it is not. The simple answer is to restrict the govt from doing those things. The really simple answer is to abide by the constitution as it is written.
Steve Harvey Pyro, that’s the simple problem according to one ideology, and one faction of our population, and not the other. Nor is it the unambiguous truth about what our Constitution says and means (a document whose interpretation is subject to judicial review rather than popular referendum). The challenge in a democracy (or republic, if you like), in a popular sovereignty, is to recognize competing views and interpretations, to recognize competing political and economic ideologies, and not to assume that only yours is legitimate, while all others are wrong. I disagree with your political and economic assumptions, but I am very willing to participate with you in a process which subjects all views to reason and evidence, to robust debate, to a process by which reasonable people of goodwill can better arrived at the best reasoned and most useful policies. To get to that place, ideologues have to stop insisting that there is only one truth: Their own.
Buddy Shipley No Steve. The problem is blindly assuming the “debate” is even legitimate. Keynes was a conman and the gullible refuse to accept they’ve been had, and no one wants to admit they’ve been scammed on such a scale as this.
Buddy Shipley It’s NOT a F#$%ing “ideology”!!! WTF is the matter with you? It’s the Constitution, stupid! SO many Marxist assholes, so little time.
Steve Harvey You can keep repeating variations of “We are absolutely right and those who disagree with us are absolutely wrong, case closed,” but you are only continuing to prove the depth of your blind ideology. There are legitimate economic debates, some not involving Keynesian economics at all (as I’ve noted twice already, not all analyses which arrive at the conclusion that public spending has an economic stimulus effect do so via a Keynesian analysis). You dismiss the opposing view, and insist on your own infallibility. I say we are all fallible, and the only way to frame that universal fallibility in a manner which best serves reason is to commit to the processes most conducive to the triumpth of reason.
Steve HarveyI’ve studied and taught the Constitution in multiple contexts, in economics, history, and law, and all Constitutional scholars that I know recognize that the document you think is so simple and straightforward isn’t at all. Many of its terms aren’t defined, and have no inherent unambiguous definition (e.g., “due process,” “general welfare,” etc.). The necessary and proper clause, the spending clause, and the commerce clause give Congress potentially expansive powers, depending on interpretation. Insisting that your interpretation is correct, often in contradiction of virtually all constitutional scholars, is indeed ideology, and not the Consitution itself. The underlying purpose of the Constitution was to strengthen, not weaken, the federal government, as its history (replacing the toothless Articles of Confederation) and its in-depth defense by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in The Federalist Papers clearly demonstrate. It may be, in the end, that you are less omniscient that you believe, and that there is indeed room for debate in this great nation of ours.
Buddy Shipley Steve refuses to comprehend. It is not a matter of “right and wrong”! It’s the Constitution, a binding contract between and among all citizens of these United States. Neither Steve nor our Elected Officials have the RIGHT to ignore it and do as they please!! That is tyranny.
What Steve calls “platitudes” I call standing up for the liberty of individuals, upholding and defending the Constitution, which is the sworn duty of EVERY elected official! That they fail to do this makes them criminals, but the judiciary aids and abets them in their tyranny.
And fools like Steve like it that way.
Buddy Shipley Steve, you are part of the pathology that’s killing us. If ANY of the bullshit you think is “Constitutional” was legitimate, why didn’t the framers and founders implement any of it from the outset?
You just make shit up and pervert the language of the Constitution to suit your agenda du jour. YOU are one of the errors in our education system responsible for filling student’s heads with propaganda.
Steve Harvey Buddy, as I said, I’m familiar with, and committed to the Constitution. The problem is that you refer to a caricature of the Constitution rather than to the Constitution itself, and the terms of the binding contract are other than what you insist they are. Again, this is open to debate (though I am convinced, through being well-informed rather than through an arbitrary certainty, that your position is mistaken), and I do not dismiss you as wrong-by-definition the way you dismiss all those who disagree with you. I recognize that I live in a world of differing views, differing interpretations, and that our job is to put into place the most robust and rational systems for arbitrating among those disagreements. Your belief is that as long as you keep shouting more loudly, invoking more epithets and ad hominems directed toward those who disagree with you, labelling away every fact and analysis and all who articulate them that you find inconvenient, you have somehow managed to command an impenetrable fortress. It is only impenetrable in terms of how well it insulates you from contradictory evidence and argumentation; it is non-existent in terms of how well it actually defends your position in public discourse.
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Changes in the social institutional and technological landscape ripple through the system, demanding and facilitating adjustments and modifications throughout, which in turn demand and facilitate adjustments and modifications of their own. Choices we make affecting the framework within which this occurs help determine how robust this process is, what kinds of positive and negative consequences it generates, and in what ways and to what extent it affects the human and natural world.
One recent set of technological innovations has had epoch-making implications. Accelerating developments in Information Technologies (computer and communications technologies combined) have rippled through the economy and culture, changing the way we communicate, seek and disseminate information, access entertainments (and the entertainments available), and even conceptualize the nature of reality (with complex dynamical systems analysis, a child of computerized mathematical modeling techniques, transforming several of our underlying scientific paradigms).
These developments have partially displaced and challenged the viability of newspapers and the postal service, vastly increased the liquidity and volatility of financial markets, vastly increased the robustness and diffusion of both the flow of information and the unreliable “noise” that accompanies it, and has become an indispensable tool in virtually every economic, academic, professional, and technological human endeavor.
Other examples abound. The invention of the internal combustion engine led to an enormous demand for oil, which turned the Middle East into a region of vital geopolitical significance, and led to a vastly increased rate of environmental contamination and destabilizing climate change. The invention of the airplane led to the development of a widespread rapid global transportation system, and transformations in warfare, economics, and epidemiology.
Even slight modifications can have rippling consequences. Improvements in the thrust of jet engines, for instance, have necessitated improvements in the strength and heat resistance of composite materials (both giving rise to a demand for their creation and providing new engineering opportunities elsewhere, which gave rise in turn to other systemic demands and opportunities). These together made larger jet airliners both technologically and economically feasible, resulting in new demands on airport designs, requiring more space and creating new challenges for municipal governments seeking to establish international airports, all in turn merging into a vibrant international air traffic system.
Not only technological, but also social institutional innovations have similar effects. The invention of currency, for instance, freed markets from the necessity of a double coincidence of bilateral wants imposed by a barter system. (In a barter system, two people each must have something that the other wants more than they want what they already have, whereas currency allows an unlimited ongoing multilateral exchange via a medium that stores and transports value in the abstract). The consequences of this social institutional innovation have been enormous.
The establishment of the American Political system, codified in the American Constitution, drawing on and marginally refining existing forms and emerging ideas, is another example of a highly consequential set of social institutional innovations. It has proven to be a highly robust general model, not just in the United States but around the world. And it too unleashed myriad complex, rippling, unforeseen and unforeseeable dynamics.
Governments have always been vital agents in these processes. From the great architectural monuments of ancient history (e.g., the pyramids and the Great Wall of China) to our most robust modern technologies (e.g., computers, and myriad technologies emanating from space exploration), governments have been uniquely situated to mobilize massive resources in concentrated purposive endeavors that could not have otherwise been accomplished.
Not all such endeavors have necessarily served human welfare, and not all government functions that do are necessarily massive in scale. But the vital role of governments as concentrations of human organizational action for purposes other than profit or cultural expression is undeniable. The challenge is to free ourselves from the stiflingly non-productive debate over whether government has a vital role to play in the human endeavor, and focus our energies instead on the meaningful and multi-faceted question of what precisely that role is.
The answer lies, of course, in understanding the nature of the social systems within which it is embedded, and how the tandem processes of social institutional and technological evolution can most effectively be simultaneously invigorated and channeled by collective decision-making via the instrument of government. To do so, we face several interrelated challenges, some in tension with one another. At a bare minimum, we must liberate and lubricate the processes by which innovation and its rippling effects occur, while catching and mitigating negative effects (i.e., effects ultimately destructive to human welfare).
Despite the conservative myth that government is in general an impediment to economic growth, the exact opposite is true (and has been proven true repeatedly by historical experience). The obsessive ideological commitment to starve and shrink government is the true impediment to economic growth. This is so because it creates a bottleneck in the system, decreasing the fluidity with which innovations ripple through the social institutional field by eliminating our ability consciously to adapt to them, to facilitate and channel them. It impedes the development of human and material infrastructure which has played such a vital role in the astronomical acceleration in the production of wealth that characterizes the modern era.
Moreover, it forces an unconsciousness onto these robust, highly consequential, constant and constantly accelerating transformations rippling through our social institutional landscape. It relies on an empirically discredited certainty that these transformations automatically always serve human welfare as long as we close our collective eyes tightly enough. It relies on a set of idolatries (see “Political Fundamentalism”, “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, Small Government Idolatry) rather than on living minds taking on living responsibilities, within a legal and political framework that has developed from the Constitution, and faithful to the Constitution. It eschews the responsibility that comes with freedom and self-governance, the responsibility of thinking, and understanding, and acting in a world that poses constant challenges to those who exist within it, and cannot simply be relegated to blind ideologies and false certainties posing as patriotism.
Social institutional and technological evolution occurs not only through chain reactions of adaptations and innovations rippling through our social system, but also through our own collective adaptations to it. Coordination of efforts and imposition of consciousness and foresight upon them have always been vital, if insufficiently employed, ingredients. Government is nothing more or less than one such organizational overlay of human consciousness on these processes, providing one more vehicle to harness and channel the dynamo that we have created, and that has created us.
As I’ve often said, the agency problems involved, that form the basis of the ideological rejection of government, are both real and normal, common to all principal-agent relationships, though such relationships are a vital and robust aspect of modern social organization. The principal-agent relationtionship between a polity and their government, along with the diverse interests and beliefs of the principal, and the uneven distribution of resources with which factions within the principal can influence the agent, form part of the complexity of the challenge of using government to maximum advantage. They do not mean that government is any more problematic than any other social insitutional arrangement, however, since all such arrangements have similar or analogous problems embedded in them.
It’s time to stop wasting our human cognitive resources on the enervating debate over whether this organizational overlay called “government” is “good” or “bad,” and instead focus on the more meaningful question of how best to use it.
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(Opening scene: Angels, represented by twinkling stars, are talking about a troubled soul on Earth. They review this soul’s life, and the circumstances that led to its present attempt to kill itself….)
It was conceived with great hopes in a simpler time, by a variety of generous parents, and a few original sins. England (via the British Empire), in which modern democracy developed; The Enlightenment, characterized by a fluorescence of rationalistic philosophy; a wide-open new land, with an easily displaced indigenous population; abundant imported and domestically bred slave labor. It developed a grandiose vision for itself, one comprised of the somewhat incompatible memes of ‘manifest destiny’ and champion of liberty, and an exaggerated faith in its own exceptionalism.
But, as often happens, life presented unforeseen challenges which diverted this soul, the sovereign American People, from its youthful dreams. It gradually was forced to confront its original sins, brutally divided by one of them. Innovations complicated the landscape in which its dreams had been formed. It had to cope with a world comprised of other people with interests of their own, people less convinced of the benevolence of this powerful and self-interested nation than its own populace persistently was (rather too conveniently).
But despite this diversion from its original dreams, it was the same soul, peforming many good deeds, more often born of pragmatism than idealism, that were not always part of the original plan. It grew to address a changing world, doing what needed to be done to increase the welfare of those who depended on it. It intervened in its parent-continent when brutality racked the latter’s fields and towns, and then watched that continent, unencumbered by youthful dreams, combine the best fruits of their child’s aspirations with the reduced purism that comes from maturity.
But something in the people clung to the purity of youthful dreams, sulking with resistance to adulthood’s demands, an error that sometimes characterizes idealistic youth. Just at the point when both the people and their government were on the verge of following the mature wisdom of moderation and adaptation, the oversimplistic idolater within, childish and narcissistic rather than noble and generous, rebelled, and rent this national soul in an internal conflict over whether mature moderation would prevail, or childish purism.
It rebelled in a moment of crisis, a large faction of the people chanting the mindless refrain, “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem! The world would be better off without this government we’ve allowed to grow and grow, displacing the purity we had believed in and tried to implement in our youth! We would be better off if we had not allowed the lessons of life to adapt those youthful dreams to the demands of reality!”
And so this soul’s guardian angel decided to show it what the world would have been like without that modern government it now wished dead….
“First,” the angel said, “let’s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not further amended the Constitution after the Bill of Rights.
“Slavery would not have been legally abolished by the 13th Amendment, nor Congress empowered to enforce its prohibition.
“The 14th Amendment’s transformation of the legal framework of the country would never have occurred. The Dred Scott Decision, which held that no African American, whether free or slave, was an American citizen, would have remained the law of the land. The states’ exemption from the Bill of Rights, a document originally interpreted to limit only the federal government’s intrusion on state and individual rights, would have persisted, and the protections of the Constitution would have continued not to apply to or restrain state and local governments in any way. African American slaves would have continued to be counted, legally, as 3/5 of a human being.
“The 15th Amendment’s legal guarantee, not to be effectively enforced for a century more, that all citizens, regardless of race, have the right to vote, would not have come into existence.
“The 17th Amendment’s increase in direct democracy, by shifting elections for U.S. Senators from the state legislatures to the people of the state, would not have happened.
“Women might still be denied the vote in some states.
“The increased tardiness and unevenness with which the United States would have dealt with these morally enervating issues would have reduced the human capital of the nation, delaying its fuller liberation and development longer, if not, in some places, indefinitely. It would have been a less innovative country, and a less inspiring one to other nations. Resentments would have grown even stronger, divisions even deeper, the problems bred by these defects even more inextricably embedded in the fabric of your society. Those who later depended on the United States as a beacon of liberty would see only a quagmire of exploitation and oppression, either lagging even farther behind the finally pacified continent across the Atlantic it continually claimed superiority to, or, by not being a strong enough nation to lead, leaving the world into a downward spiral from which it couldn’t escape.
“The world would have been a very different place indeed had the United States not become what it became. And while there are those in the world who think that would have been a good thing, sometimes with considerable justification, it most certainly wouldn’t have been a good thing for America, nor, all things considered, for global peace and prosperity.”
“Oh, Angel,” the suicidal faction groaned condescendingly. “First of all, most of us don’t object to Constitutional Amendments, but rather to other increased exercises of federal power without recourse to such amendments. And second of all, many of these things would have come to pass by the choice of individual states, without the federal government imposing them on the states.”
“Slavery wasn’t going anywhere, anytime in the foreseeable future, without the legal and military coercion of the federal government,” replied the angel. “The gradual incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment by successive Supreme Court decisions, which continued into very recent times (because state and local governments were not universally committed to protecting those rights), would not have occurred, and those states would remain free to disregard those protections. We see even today how fragile those protections are, at the hands of those who claim most respect for them, in the repetition of the refrain that granting due process to those suspected of certain crimes (e.g., terrorism) reduces the rule of law, a chant that is phenomenally ignorant of what the term ‘rule of law’ means in a Constitutional republic (hint: ignoring it out of convenience, in order to increase conviction rates, no matter how heinous the crime, is the exact opposite of what it means).
“As for your other concerns, about increased exercises of federal power not granted by Constitutional amendments, follow me….”
The angel then said, “let’s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not had a strong federal government to hold the country together, pursue its collective interests, and impose its core values on its constituent parts (leaving aside for the moment the issues of so-called ‘activist courts’ and of the rise of the ‘administrative state’).
“It took a strong federal government to end slavery and hold the union together during and after the Civil War. A century later, it took a strong federal government, complete with National Guard, to enforce court-ordered desegregation. And it took a strong federal government to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which utilized attenuated Commerce Clause power to prohibit racial discrimination by private owners of commercial institutions.
“It took a strong federal government, captured by the will of the people in a series of populist and progressive movements in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, to rein in ‘the robber barons,’ and redress the biggest disparity of wealth in this country ever…, until today, when we have finally exceeded it. It took a strong federal government to give the country hope during The Great Depression, and, despite the revisionism popular with the far-right today, launch record-setting economic growth in its midst (from 1933-1937), until budget hawks managed to convince to FDR to compromise his policies to their concerns.
“It took a strong federal government to mobilize the country and lead the allies during World War II, and to lead NATO during the Cold War.
“Without these efforts, slavery might still be extant, and, certainly, Jim Crow (American ‘Apartheid’) would still be extant in some regions. The country would have fractured not just into two as a result of the southern cessation, but into multiple tiny republics, neither viable on their own nor of any import on the world stage.
“Mexico and Canada, our more politically, economically and militarily successful neighbors to the north and south (in this alternate reality), probably would have annexed large chunks of what would otherwise have been The United States. European and World History would have been different, possibly with fascism prevailing in Europe and, eventually, threatening the tiny, weak republics across the Atlantic, in what would otherwise have been The United States of America.
“There would have been nothing other than fascist Europe to check Soviet and Chinese expansion, and, it is more probable, given the lack of moral compass of both fascism and Sino-Soviet Communism, that they simply would have arrived at a mutually agreeable division of the world into competing but mutually accommodating and reinforcing tyrannies.
“Without a federal government as strong as this one has been, there would be no ‘United States’ today, certainly no liberties in some regions for those who were deprived them historically, and quite probably a more tyrannical world in general.”
“Next,” the angel said, “let’s look at what your country and world would look like if you had not had an ‘activist’ judiciary interpreting the Constitution in ways relevant to, and adapting to, changing circumstances.” (See http://www.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/elj/58/58.5/Green.pdf for a comprehensive exploration of the concept, including a discussion of why it, appropriately applied, has nothing to do with boosting individual liberty or governmental power, but rather refers to whether the judiciary adheres to the norms of judicial conduct which are its only real restraint.)
“In the conventional, ideologically charged use of the term, all Supreme Court decisions involve ‘judicial activism,’ because those cases that the Supreme Court chooses to hear are precisely those cases that involve unresolved ambiguities, and require judicial interpretation. Therefore, a complete history of the evolution of Constitutional Law, as defined by Supreme Court decisions, is, in a sense, one important slice of the history of ‘judicial activism,’ as the term is commonly used. And without that fully institutionalized form of ‘judicial activism,’ which is coextensive with the doctrine of ‘judicial review’ established by Justice Marshall described below, there would be no enforceable Constitution, no established and coherent rule of law to the extent that there is today in the United States. But rather than write a Constitutional Law synopsis, I’ll just mention a few of the most important cases, that involved perhaps the greatest liberty of Constitutional interpretation on the Court’s part, but without which we would be a nation with far weaker protections of individual liberties and rights than we have today.
“Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle of ‘judicial review’ in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the first and greatest act of judicial activism in U.S. History, without which there would have been no final authority on what was and was not Constitutional. the lack of such judicial authority would have inevitably undermined the rule of law that, more than anything else, has distinguished the United States. Without the judicially determined Constitutional last word that Marshall successfully instituted, questions of Constitutionality, and thus ultimate legality, would be political footballs to a far greater extent than they already are, overwhelmed by the bickering whims of conflicting ideologies and interests that characterize the rest of political discourse and decision-making. In other words, without this bold initial act of judicial activism, the Constitution would have been an empty promise, and would be referenced today for strictly rhetorical rather than legal support, a non-binding tool for political argumentation. Uninformed lay opinions about what does and does not constitute Constitutionality would be raised to a par with legal analyses and Supreme Court holdings, reducing the Constitution to a meaningless blank slate on which each interest group and ideological camp could impress its own preferred interpretation.
“In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Supreme Court held that a facially neutral law that has the effect of discriminating (a selectively enforced San Francisco code restricting licensing for laundries to brick or stone buildings in order to target Chinese laundries which were built of wood) violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This decision was not a foregone conclusion: The letter of the law itself didn’t violate the Equal Protection clause, and so the decision can be said to be one of ‘an activist judiciary.’ But had it been more literal in its Constitutional interpretation, the Court would have set the precedent that discrimination is Constitutionally permissible as long as it is done implicitly rather than explicitly.
“In Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon (1922), the Supreme Court held that a government regulation that essentially deprives a property owner of the value of its property is an unconstitutional ‘taking’ (violating the Fifth Amendment protection of property), and the government must compensate the owner for that loss of value. Again, this is not an automatic ‘strict constructionist’ interpretation of the Constitution, since there is no language in the Constitution which addresses loss of value due to government regulation. However, those most adamant about the ills of ‘judicial activism’ are generally also those most likely to concur with this holding. In the absence of the judicial activism of the Court in this case, private property rights would have been more, rather than less, vulnerable to government intrusion.
“Brown v. Board of Education (1954) would certainly rate as an act of judicial activism by the ideological definition of that term currently in vogue. It overturned the Stare Decisis of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregation was Constitutional (instituting the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine), holding that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’ Brown essentially launched the Civil Rights Movement as we know it today (it gave it its first major victory), a movement whose progress would have been at least slower, and possibly undermined altogether, in the absence of this Court decision.
“The Court also declined to limit Congress’ power to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which used the Commerce Clause to prohibit private owners of commercial establishments from discriminating against potential customers, employees, renters, and buyers on the basis of race. This could easily be considered ‘judicial activism by omission,’ without which we would not have Civil Rights laws protecting minorities against the entire range of private discrimination, such as employment discrimination and housing discrimination.
“In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court established that the state’s failure to provide counsel to an indigent defendant essentially deprived that defendant of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The literal Constitutional right to counsel is not necessarily a right to be provided with counsel, at the people’s expense, but without interpreting it as such, this fundamental right would be accorded only to those who could afford it, and denied to those who cannot, reducing an essential protection of individual liberty to a commodity for sale rather than a guarantee to all citizens. In a world without this protection, the poor would receive even less justice than they do today.
“It’s worth noting here, again, that a series of Supreme Court decisions over the last century and a half have incorporated the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause, allowing those core protections to be applied to state and local governments as well as to the federal government, an act of ‘judicial activism’ without which states and counties and municipalities and school districts would be largely free to violate the Bill of Rights to whatever extent and in whatever ways they see fit. Hardly a boon to the protection individual liberty.
“Many other decisions could be included in this list, many other basic liberties that depended on an ‘activist judiciary.’ But the sampling above illustrates some of the ways in which our nation would be a very different, and in many ways far poorer place were it not for the role that the so-called ‘activist judiciary’ has played in our march toward increased equality of opportunity and rights, and increased protection of individual liberties.
“Finally,” said the angel, “let’s look at what your country and world would look like without the rise in America of the ‘Administrative State,’ through which to regulate the complex modern economy.
“Without the regulatory agencies that promulgate regulations, conduct hearings and inspections, license facilities, and engage in a complex web of tasks necessary to implement the laws passed by Congress, we would live in a far more insecure and unhealthy environment. Incidents such as the infamous ‘Love Canal’ toxic waste dump beneath a housing developing, causing an astronomical rise in cancer rates, would be the norm rather than the exception. The manipulation of markets, such as those by Enron which caused the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, would be constant and economically devastating. Confidence in investments would plummet, the economy would contract dramatically, and the financial system near-collapse of 2008 (resulting from underregulated financial markets) would be a constant and continuous event rather than a once-in-a-century crisis.
“The absence of the regulatory structure that has developed since the 1930s, and under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, would be akin to removing the mortar from between the bricks of the modern economy. The entire edifice would be less securely bound together, more unstable, and more likely to collapse. Those sheltered within it would feel every cold wind that blows through, and storms would whip through it with discomfiting regularity. Market failures would dominate the economy, and health and safety violations would be constant and ubiquitous. Commercial enterprises would know that they could sell toxic and dangerous substances with impunity, recognizing that there is more profit in not paying the costs of avoiding doing so. A major, perhaps completely dominant, economic niche would emerge for those that compete by avoiding such costs, simply changing names and products whenever the slow dissemination of information of the health and safety risks make the old product unprofitable to produce and sell.
“The already underfunded Food and Drug Administration would leave even more food and drug safety responsibility to the companies that have a vested interest in overlooking foreseeable dangers. The New York Times reported (September 28, 2007) that due to defunding, the FDA audits less than 1% of clinical drug trials in the United States. As a direct result we have increasing known cases of pharmeceutical companies fudging results of drug trials, leading to waves of preventable deaths, such as occurred with Propulsid (Johnson and Johnson), Bextra and Celbrex (Pfizer), and Vioxx (Merck).
“Similar stories of the consequences of deregulation and defunding of regulatory agencies can be found in food safety (increasing salmonella and E. coli contamination, even after companies had been asked to address discovered dangers but simply chose not to, a luxury afforded by underregulation), and product safety (such as children’s toys, imported from China, containing lead in seriously toxic quantities, undetected due to underregulation of imports). The more we ‘shrink government’ by reducing regulatory oversight even more than we have already done, the greater the frequency of such incidents will become. In the unregulated paradise that some in America are striving for, life would be, literally, ‘nastier, more brutish, and shorter,’ for thousands if not millions of children, and families, and innocent people just going about their lives.
“While there are some dysfunctional dynamics that lead to the production of laws that are thousands of pages long (e.g., earmarks, and other porkbarrel spending provisions; and controversial riders designed to piggyback on necessary legislation), the main reason is the complexity of the social institutional landscape that those laws are addressing. And those laws, even with their tens of thousands of pages of qualifications and provisions, don’t even begin to anticipate all contingencies, all unexpected consequences, all complexities that will emerge as the law is implemented. For that reason, regulatory agencies are necessary to implement the laws, to address those complexities, to adapt the execution of the law passed in Congress to the realities of the world to which it will apply.
“It is a very information-intensive enterprise, with an amazing amount of very precise expertise embedded in these organizations, able, for instance, to research the precise cancer rates associated with each commercial chemical substance on the market, or incorporated into items on the market; the ways in which these substances move through the environment and contaminate human beings; the probabilities of contamination and of contracting associated diseases from contamination; the fatality rates of doing so; the costs of regulation at each level; the balancing of legitimate economic concerns with legitimate health and safety concerns. It is not a process which leaves the public out, but rather one which, by law, includes the public, and invites public input.
“The same kinds of calculations and processes are required to oversee the use of public lands, the mining of water from aquifers and of minerals from the Earth, the emissions and dumping of toxic substances into the air and water and land; the determination of where to build roads and interstates and how to balance all of the concerns and interests involved; the determination of where to allow coal plants and nuclear plants and other installations to be built; the determination of what kinds of safety devices and scrubbers they require; the oversight of all of these protections and provisions without which we would all be dramatically worse off.
“Our economy has been growing (and continues to grow) in complexity at an accelerating rate. For example, the use of supercomputers programmed with complex algorithms to buy and sell stocks in order to reap gains made in fractions of a second distort the market, caused a freefall several months ago that rattled investors and required shutting the stock market down, and creates a competition for locating the computers as close as possible to the stock market servers in order to receive the information milliseconds before competitors. The market collapse caused by a malfunctioning algorithm resulted in an enduring loss of perhaps billions of dollars to investors, as the market had to creep back up, in a context of diminished investor confidence, from the depths to which it had plummeted. We need regulatory agencies equipped with human and material resources capable of keeping up with the tens of thousands of similar demands on them, if we want our market economy to continue to function, and to do so in the interests of all rather than at the long-term expense of the many in the short-term interests of the few.
“Here’s one very compelling objective piece of evidence about the value of that administrative state you are so eager to dismantle: Its emergence immediately preceded the most dramatic rise in wealth production in the history of the world. That very expensive “big government” administrative state has existed in every single nation on Earth that has ever experienced that dramatic rise in wealth production, both immediately prior to experiencing it and from then on, without exception, and every single prosperous developed modern nation is still characterized by the presence of that very expensive “big government” administrative state today, again, without exception. There is not one single exception, and never has been. While it’s true that you can’t prove a counterfactual (we don’t know what would have happened in its absence), there is not one shred of evidence that any other governmental form is able to facilitate this feat and accommodate its end result. By all available evidence, our wealth, the wealth of each and every one of us, is completely dependent on the existence of the administrative state.
“Yes, many of the problems that would occur in the absence of such a regulatory structure still occur within it; the poor are still burdened more than the rich by undesirable facilities in their neighborhoods; acquiescence to economic necessity still often triumphs over public health and safety; the interests of corporations still work their way through the system, in a variety of manners, at the expense of the public without always being off-set by a commensurate economic benefit; ‘industry capture’ of regulatory agencies to some extent ‘puts the foxes in charge of the henhouse.’ All of these problems diminish the degree to which our regulatory infrastructure efficiently and effectively does what almost all of us implicitly recognize to be necessary and desirable. But the absence of our regulatory infrastructure would erase the performance of that function altogether. The significant shrinkage of it that periodically occurs under Republican administrations almost always results in catastrophic effects, with a regularity that is matched only by the public disregard of the repeated lesson.
“To be sure, throughout this tour of what ‘small government’ would really mean, I have ignored the ways in which a strong centralized federal government, an ‘activist judiciary,’ and the rise of the administrative state have led to negative rather than positive outcomes for both Americans and the rest of the world (perhaps more the latter than the former, since a strong America has been strong to its own citizens’ advantage; for the most part, only when it incidentally served the interests of American citizens have others in the world benefited from American power. See “Democracy IN America,” But Not BY America). But the danger in America today, the one that most needs remedy, is not an exaggerated belief in the virtues of centralization of governmental power and effective political coherence, but rather an exaggerated belief in something that does not and cannot exist in the oversimplistic form imagined, a Liberty Idolatry that counsels the destruction of the very social foundation which liberty requires for its existence. And so that is the imbalance that I have addressed.
“Those poetic aspirations of America’s national youth were what defined its spirit and channeled its energies. They still guide and inspire its people today. But meeting real responsibilities as they arose is what carved that spirit into the more-often-than-not admirable world citizen and leader, and reliable agent of its own people’s interests, that it has become. The world, and the people at home who give the federal government life and whose lives that government in turn embues with expanded opportunities, would be poorer for the partial death that some would now impose on this vital vehicle of the American spirit. The demands that the federal government has risen to meet were not optional, could not have been disregarded. And idolizing rather than respecting the guidance given by America’s founding leaders and documents is an insult to them, and a disservice to those alive today, as well as those who will be alive tomorrow.”
The United States of America was founded to be a progressive nation. As Thomas Jefferson himself wrote:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Those who would strait-jacket us as a people with the ideological raiment that exists only in their own shrunken imaginations stand in opposition to this ideal, and to the very spirit of this nation. It’s time for George Bailey to come home, and bask in the fellowship of a society of people who strive to lift one another up, and help bear one another’s burdens.
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Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
(This is the first in a series of four posts which discuss Tea Party “Political Fundamentalism”, comprised of the unholy trinity of “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, and Small Government Idolatry.)
Every now and then, you encounter an argument you’ve been making for years, made far better than you’ve ever made it. And such was my pleasure a few moments ago, when I read this week’s “Lexington” column in The Economist (Lexington is the weekly column about America), titled “The Perils of Constitution Worship: One of the Guiding Principles of the Tea-Party Movement is Based on a Myth” (http://www.economist.com/node/17103701?story_id=17103701).
Among the many sage observations made by the author, was one I’ve repeated in at least a dozen “debates” with tea-partiers: The Constitution was not drafted to check central government and preserve state or individual rights, but rather to do the exact opposite, to create a central government with teeth. And, of course, the Constitution doesn’t actually contain all the answers to all of the challenges we face as a society, nor all of the information necessary to define the scope and range of our federal government. The notion, as the author notes, is simply infantile.
George Lakoff, in The Political Mind, notes that while both conservatives and progressives rely on a metaphorical narrative of “family” to understand government, what distinguishes them is that conservatives rely on a metaphor of the authoritarian, patriarchal family, while progressives rely on the metaphor of an empathetic and nurturing family (thus “the nanny state”). Ironically, the claim to be rooted in a commitment to individual liberty is belied by the deference to some ultimate authority that deprives us of responsibility to meet the challenges of our own day as free individuals. Like the fundamentalist religious zealots that so many of them are, thumping the Constitution with the same blindly dogmatic fanaticism that they thump the Bible, they are relieved of their responsibility to know or understand anything by the presence of an infinitely wise and infallible final authority, one in print, one that answers all questions and resolves all disputes, the final word from on-high.
Of course, the Constitution is a brilliant document, made more brilliant by what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t address the minutia of how we must govern ourselves, but rather sets out the general principles. And, as is so often the case, those principles are rarely more egregiously violated than by those who most zealously claim to be the defenders of the faith.
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