A recent security comprimise of the theme we used to style our site has forced us to makes temporary changes that unfortunately left our site unstyled. As there is no regular management of this site, we are currently deciding how to move forward.
James S. Turner, an attorney and consumer advocate who was an original “Nader’s Raider,” passed away suddenly at his Washington, D.C. home on January 25. He was 81.
While working with Ralph Nader, Mr. Turner wrote the 1970 book, The Chemical Feast: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on the Food and Drug Administration.
TimeMagazine commented at the time that Mr. Turner’s book “may well be the most devastating critique of a U.S. Government agency ever issued.”
Believing that private sector attorneys could energize the consumer movement, in 1973 Mr. Turner joined with David Swankin, a former aide to White House Consumer Advisor Esther Peterson, to create the law firm of Swankin & Turner, in which he remained an active principal for nearly five decades until his death.
From representing organizations such as the Consumer Federation of America as well as individual consumers, to consulting for major businesses on consumer policy, the firm of Swankin & Turner has fought for consumer interests and advocated consumer policies across a broad range of issues while influencing regulatory matters concerning food, drugs, health, the environment, and product safety.
Mr. Turner appeared before every major consumer regulatory agency, including the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Agriculture, and National Institutes of Health. Mr. Turner served stints as special counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Food, Nutrition, and Health, and to the Senate Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Research. He was also a policy consultant to major corporations in the food, pharmaceutical and telecommunications industries, including Kraft Foods, The Quaker Oats Company, Hoffmann-LaRoche, and AT&T.
He vigorously advocated for emerging consumer health initiatives. He represented a coalition that successfully opposed an effort by the Federal Trade Commission to ban the words “organic,” “natural,” and “health food” from commerce by arguing that those terms are meaningful to protect consumer choice.
He was instrumental in winning passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which defines and regulates dietary supplements as food rather than drugs, and the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, which established uniform national standards for the production and handling of food labeled as “organic.”
Mr. Turner also represented healthcare professionals fighting anticompetitive federal and state trade rules. He played a key role in mainstreaming the practice of acupuncture and served as lead attorney on a petition to the FDA that resulted in the classification of acupuncture needles as medical devices “safe for general use” by trained acupuncture practitioners, and in legalizing the importation and distribution of acupuncture needles in 1996.
He persuaded the Federal Trade Commission to cease its investigations targeting chiropractic care. He represented dentists ordered by state licensing boards to withhold information from their patients about the effects of mercury in dental amalgam fillings, including risks to patients, dental workers, and the environment. Mr. Turner’s original advocacy was ultimately vindicated by a Food and Drug Administration Safety Communication on dental amalgam in 2020.
In 1978, Mr. Turner founded and became President of the not-for-profit National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy (NISLAPP) in order “to bridge the gap between scientific uncertainties and the need for laws protecting public health and safety.” In 1992 he began to take a leadership role in Citizens for Health, a consumer organization defending individual choice and access in health matters and nutrition and served as Chairman and President for many years until the time of his death.
In 1996, he helped start Consumers for Dental Choice, which in turn led an international coalition of environmental, dental, and consumer groups to gain adoption of an anti-amalgam provision in the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Mr. Turner’s recent advocacy included working with consumer groups advancing preservation of federally recognized homeopathic medicine, opposing dangerous exposure to radio-frequency radiation, and protecting access to innovative healthcare modalities, including energy medicine.
Mr. Turner served as a consumer consultant to and sat on advisory boards and committees of governmental agencies, including the U.S. Department of State, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as business groups such as the Food Safety Council. He was also active on numerous boards of directors, boards of advisors, and legal and policy committees in nonprofit, educational, professional, and activist organizations; examples include Americans for Homeopathy Choice, the National Commission for the Certification of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the American Herbal Products Association, and Voice for HOPE (Healers of Planet Earth).
He was a graduate of The Ohio State University, which he attended on a U.S. Navy scholarship, and served in the OSU Student Senate for three years. He received his law degree from The Ohio State University College of Law (now Moritz College of Law), where he served as Chief Justice of the Moot Court. Between undergraduate school and law school, Mr. Turner was a Lieutenant on active duty in the U.S. Navy, where he graduated with distinction from Naval Justice School and served as a Nuclear Weapons Handling Officer and Gunnery Officer aboard the U.S.S. Purdy and the U.S.S. Austin.
In addition to The Chemical Feast, Mr. Turner was the co-author of Making Your Own Baby Food and produced numerous articles, book chapters, speeches, and lectures. In collaboration with A. Lawrence Chickering, author of Beyond Left and Right: Breaking the Political Stalemate, he co-authored Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life, and co-founded and co-edited The Transpartisan Review, a journal dedicated to demonstrating how politics, culture, and society can be better understood as a matrix than as a continuum. Mr. Turner founded small-press Potomac Valley Press, which published Healthy Harvest: A Directory of Sustainable Agriculture & Horticulture Organizations (1985-1989), and hosted an organic community garden at his Washington, D.C. home for more than 30 years.
Mr. Turner is survived by his law partner and life partner of 45 years, Betsy E. Lehrfeld, Esq., his son Christopher B. Turner, Esq., and his daughter, Victoria M. Turner. The family is asking that in lieu of flowers, those wishing to honor Mr. Turner consider donations to the Citizens for Health Education Foundation, https://citizens.org/donate-citizens-health-education-foundation/.
Today we publish our colleague and advisor Ralph Benko’s current thinking on the Gold Standard as a transpartisan issue. We do so as a conversation starter about how to finance government in a transpartisan society and the implication of government financing choices for society at large.
Ralph explores an important topic when visiting the Gold Standard issue. He points out how Nixon going off the Gold Standard threw everything into a significantly different financial context. According to Ralph we are still sorting out the consequences of this decision.
The existential difficulty comes from assigning a value to gold, any value, to make the system work, such as $2000-an-ounce as Ralph suggests. How the value, currently at $1,775-per-ounce, is determined and maintained are the “devils’ questions in the details”, making Ralph’s overarching view, which is so hopeful, an absolute scare-the-bejesus out of anyone with authority when they hear the word “gold standard”. Especially when combined with the words “lets’ go back to the”. Setting the value of gold is a political task that cannot be sidestepped.
There is a conversation to be held here. The Gold Standard, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Cryptocurrency, and the Automated Payments Transactions Tax (APT) all lie at the heart of the transpartisan – “how-do-we-pay-for-government” – conversation. We have pursued this conversation in the article The Transpartisan Effect, taking to heart John Maynard Keynes observation made during a 1942 BBC address that “anything we can actually do, we can afford”:
“Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?…” (For more on Keynes, see the 09/17/21 NYT op-ed podcast by Ezra Klein.1)
Ralph’s article could give this conversation a boost. We look forward to hearing from and will be sure to respond to those who comment on this article. Let’s talk about money.
“The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford,’” writes Adam Tooze. “Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.”
You Can End Inflation Mr. Biden, by Convening Bretton Woods II
by Ralph Benko
(This article originally appeared 11/23/2021 on Newsmax.)
There is one, unconventional way to quell inflation without recession; it would save Joe Biden’s presidency. Conventional folk think the gold standard an anachronism.
It’s also alarming to me, a paleoconservative Republican. I, the “second most conservative man in the world” (per a Washington Post columnist), fear that a GOP political hegemony will degenerate into the Republicans’ default country-club Republican policies of mercantilist oligarchy in supply-side drag.
The reversion to Republican mean, ThurstonHowellIIIconomics, “freshen Lovey’s martini Gilligan, chop chop!” Pretty mean!
Mr. President? Go for the gold!
It’s curious. Yet political transformation often comes from the unexpected source.
Nixon’s anti-communist credentials from his congressional days persecuting Soviet gentleman-spy Alger Hiss immunized him to claims of softness on Communism.
Nixon to China!
Welcome to the “Twilight Zone” of politics where the right does the left thing, and the left does the right thing. And everybody grumble-cheers.
It goes both ways. From out of left field, wholesale deregulation was pioneered by President Jimmy Carter.
The big push for dropping the top income tax rate, attributed to Reagan, came from top Democrats: Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., and Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., dropping the top rate from 70% to 50% (Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., voted aye).
Then, Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., to 28% (Sen. Joe Biden voting aye). President Bill Clinton gave the capital gains tax rate a whopping cut. (Sen. Joe Biden voted aye.)
Now? Inflation is a dagger at the jugular of the Biden presidency.
What to do that would be safe and effective and dramatic enough to persuade us pesky voters that Biden has a firm grip on ending inflation?
Let’s walk the cat backwards. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shut down the London gold pool, and President Richard M. Nixon, who “temporarily” closed the “gold window,” were the perps letting the inflation genie out of the bottle.
The world monetary order of the prosperous, low inflation, post-war era was constituted by the Bretton Woods Agreement. This was an international gold standard, with a critical flaw.
Making the dollar, as well as gold, the official reserve asset for central banks was a subtle, fatal error. It led to a “melancholy, long, withdrawing” of gold from America’s reserves, plaguing both America and the world.
As foreseen by distinguished French economist Jacques Rueff, mentor of supply-side titan Lewis E. Lehrman (my own mentor), that world monetary order was doomed to a slow death.
On Nixon’s watch, the final nail was driven in.
Nixon, under the insidious influence of his treasury secretary John Connally – a moral bankrupt who died a spectacular literal bankrupt – officially closed the gold window. The pernicious Nixonian system of floating exchange rates today curses us to inequitable economic stagnation.
The fiduciary (paper) dollar is the last remnant of the “Nixon Shock.”
Republicans have proven incapable of unwinding it for very parochial reasons.
The classical gold standard, which had collapsed at the very start of World War I, was falsely indicted for causing the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover a generation later.
It wasn’t the Republicans’ fault.
It was, in the words of Rueff, a grotesque caricature of the gold standard that collapsed, an earlier gold-exchange standard.
Then FDR, under the guidance of the leading commodities economist of his day, George Warren, properly revalued the dollar from $20.67 to $35. The Great Depression lifted immediately and spectacularly. Per Pulitzer Prize-winning Liaquat Ahamed’s definitive account:
“During the following three months, wholesale prices jumped by 45% and stock prices doubled. With prices rising, the real cost of borrowing money plummeted. New orders for heavy machinery soared by 100%, auto sales doubled, and overall industrial production shot up 50%.”
Bad monetary policy by FDR’s Treasury, in which FDR acquiesced, thereafter caused a second dip in the Great Depression. That said, that first prosperity surge points the way out.
Joe Biden has an opportunity to go down in history as equal to or greater than FDR. How?
By convening a new Bretton Woods conference. Just as the late, great Paul Volcker, who quelled inflation in the 1980s, called for.
There, Biden should legally remove the dollar’s (and all currencies) reserve currency status while revaluing the dollar to around $2,000/ounce, or slightly higher, to preempt a worker/debtor damaging deflation such as crushed Britain in 1925.
Thereby, Mr. President, forge a legacy to rival that of FDR’s.
End inflation, restore equitable prosperity; enjoy the popularity and golden age legacy that Bretton Woods II, done right, would bring you.
Ralph Benko, co-author of “The Capitalist Manifesto” and chairman and co-founder of “The Capitalist League,” is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $83T. He served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, has worked closely with the Congress and two cabinet agencies, and has published over a million words on politics and policy in the mainstream media, as a distinguished professional blogger, and as the author of the internationally award-winning cult classic book “The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World.” He has served as senior advisor, economics, to APIA as an advocate of the gold standard, senior counselor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce and serves as general counsel to Frax.finance, a stablecoin venture.
How Saul Alinsky Can Rescue the Biden Administration From Political Annihilation
by Ralph Benko
(This article originally appeared 09/20/2021 on Newsmax.)
Can President Biden avert a crushing legislative defeat that would terminate his honeymoon and effectively paralyze his presidency? It’s a dramatic moment.
The Sunday New York Times lead story on September 19 by Jim Tankersley lays bare the high stakes:
“No president has ever packed as much of his agenda, domestic and foreign, into a single piece of legislation as President Biden has with the $3.5 trillion spending plan that Democrats are trying to wrangle through Congress over the next six weeks.
The bill combines major initiatives on the economy, education, social welfare, climate change and foreign policy, funded in large part by an extensive rewrite of the tax code, which aims to bring in trillions from corporations and the rich.
That stacking of priorities has raised the stakes for a president resting his ambitions on a bill that could fail over the smallest of intraparty disputes. … But the sheer scope of its contents has opened divisions among Democrats on multiple fronts, when Mr. Biden cannot afford to lose a single vote in the Senate and no more than three votes in the House.”
To compound matters the House progressive caucus has taken Biden’s signature legislative priority, the $1.5 trillion bipartisan “infrastructure” bill, hostage. They are demanding a simultaneous vote on their $3.5 trillion pink pork monstrosity.
If the progressives don’t flinch, their threat is to kill the hostage infrastructure bill if they don’t get what they want. That would effectively end Joe Biden’s presidency, converting him to caregiver in chief.
Meanwhile, if the $3.5 trillion pink pork monster passes it likely will lose him his House and Senate majorities next year. Sacrificed to the Revolution!
Why such an ambitious but fraught gambit? Because Biden can’t afford a revolt by his party’s progressive base.
Biden is not unsympathetic to the progressive agenda. Neither is he dogmatic about it.
Biden’s plan seems to be to pacify his fanatics by supporting their agenda while counting on Sens. Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sinema, D-Ariz., to stop it. That will shield him from the left’s fury while blunting the ire of the voters.
Shrewd. But now his legislative baby has been taken hostage.
What’s a president to do? Saul Alinsky to the rescue!
The House Democrats are blurring the crucial distinction between “radical” (a good thing, meaning “at the root”) and “fanatical,” a bad thing. By walking that back Biden can keep his presidency from going over the cliff.
Time for Joe Biden to consult his base’s holy scripture, “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky. The subtitle? “A practical primer for realistic radicals.”
Alinsky there wrote:
“I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic.
Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous.”
He went on,
“…to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory.
If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead.
A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises — which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum. Control of power is based on compromise in our Congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.
If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be ‘compromise.'”
I wish America well and thus, despite our several disagreements, wish President Biden well.
So, I call upon presidential Senior Adviser Cedric Richmond to remind the president of the radical Saul Alinsky’s counsel of practicality.
I then urge them to invite that great pragmatic radical in House leadership, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to the Oval for a chat with the president to refresh Raskin’s recollection of Alinsky (a worthy posthumous candidate for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, while at it) equipping Raskin to coach Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to abandon fanaticism and embrace radicalism.
Take the 30% win. Pocket the bipartisan “infrastructure” deal which itself holds abundant pink pork.
Heed Alinsky’s “practical primer for realistic radicals.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League , author of The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and Redefining the Future of the Economy. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
The Future of the Second Amendment Under an Originalist Supreme Court Majority
by Anthony P. Picadio
IN SCALIA’S WAKE, PART ONE
ABSTRACT
The landmark Supreme Court Heller case (2008) held (5-4), for the first time, that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected to service in a militia. Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion and considered it his legacy originalist opinion. The holding was narrow – protecting only the right to possess a handgun in the home for self-defense. In the 13 years since Heller was decided, its narrow holding has never been extended by the Supreme Court. With three new avowed originalists on the Court (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett) and with Justice Alito signaling that he will join them in an attempt to shape Scalia’s theory of interpretation, many observers expect the Court to soon expand the scope of Second Amendment protection beyond a handgun in the home. A new Second Amendment case was recently accepted by the Court and will be argued this coming October Term.
This article shows that even among originalists there is disagreement concerning the proper interpretation of legal texts, and, therefore, the result of any new Second Amendment case is not necessarily predictable. However, the three newest justices significantly increase the odds that eventually Second Amendment rights will be extended beyond the narrow holding of Heller. The article goes on to show that the application of three canons of interpretation from a 2012 book co-authored by Justice Scalia leads to the conclusion that Heller was wrongly decided.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony P. Picadio, picadio@icloud.com, is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and an Allegheny County Member of the Pennsylvania Bar. He is a former Assistant Attorney General of Pennsylvania. He is a founder of the Pittsburgh firm Picadio Sneath Miller and Norton which, effective January 2018, was merged into the Pittsburgh firm Houston Harbaugh.
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
In Scalia’s Wake: The Future of the Second Amendment Under an Originalist Supreme Court Majority first appeared the July 2021 edition of The Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly, volume XCII, no. 3, page 145 – 162.
—–
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION
II. THE HELLER CASE
III. SCALIA’S LEGACY
IV. ORIGINALISM
A. Original Intent vs. Original Meaning
B. Textualism v. Originalism
C. “I Am Not a Strict Constructionist”
V. THE SECOND AMENDMENT POSITIONS OF THE THREE NEWEST JUSTICES
VI. THE CASE ON THE DOCKET: N.Y. STATE RIFLE AND PISTOL ASS’N. v. CORLETT
VII. CANONS OF INTERPRETATION
VIII. APPLYING THE CANONS
A. Canon 2: Supremacy of Text
B. Canon 26: Surplusage
C. Canon 34: Prefatory Materials
IX. FINAL THOUGHTS
X. ENDNOTES
—–
I. INTRODUCTION
Thirteen years after its landmark Heller[i] decision and after over 150 denials of petitions for certiorari in Second Amendment cases, the Supreme Court, on April 26, 2021, finally accepted an appeal of a Second Amendment case. The case is New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Corlett,[ii] which involves a Second Amendment challenge to New York’s concealed carry law. The law requires a demonstration of a special need in order to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public. Specifically, the challenged law requires a showing of “proper cause” to carry a concealed firearm. The case will be argued during the Court’s coming October Term.
A lot has happened during the thirteen years since Heller was decided. Most significantly, the makeup of the Court has changed dramatically. Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Scalia, the author of the majority opinion in Heller, are gone, and in their places are three new justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett, all avowed originalists. It is also significant that during the thirteen years since Heller, a substantial body of Second Amendment law has been developed in the lower federal courts, much of it supporting restrictions on the possession and use of guns, and much of it using originalist analysis to do so. Finally, there have been substantial additions to the literature, including a book co-authored by Justice Scalia, which raise legitimate questions about whether Heller was correctly decided.
These developments, and their ramifications, will be discussed in the following sections. But the starting point is Heller and the method of interpretation utilized by Justice Scalia in his majority opinion.
II. THE HELLER CASE
Justice Antonin Scalia
In 2008, the United States Supreme Court held for the first time in the 217 years since the Second Amendment was ratified, that the Amendment created an individual right to keep and bear arms unconnected to service in a militia.[iii] The case was District of Columbia v. Heller,[iv] and Justice Scalia wrote the Opinion for the five-Justice majority. The specific holding of Heller was a narrow one, which Justice Alito, in a subsequent case, stated this way: “In Heller we held that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess a handgun in the house for the purpose of self-defense.”[v]
In a 25,000-word opinion, Justice Scalia surveyed several hundred years of English and American law and concluded that the Second Amendment was understood by the founding generation to have incorporated a pre-existing right to possess a firearm in the home for self- defense.
Scalia considered Heller to be his “legacy opinion.” He said, “it is the best example of the technique of constitutional interpretation, which I favor, that is to say it is a good example of originalism.”[vi] It has been called “originalism’s high-water mark.”[vii]
Justice Scalia made it a point to limit the scope of Heller’s holding:
Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. . . . [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever, in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. . . . For example, the majority of the 19th century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues.[viii]
He went on to say that nothing in the opinion should cast doubt “on longstanding prohibitions on the possessions of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, which in a footnote he said were presumptively valid. Scalia went on to say that “dangerous and unusual weapons,” such as “M-16 rifles and the like,” may be banned. Only those weapons “in common use” for lawful purposes are protected under his interpretation of the Second Amendment.[ix]
III. SCALIA’S LEGACY
Justice Scalia served on the Supreme Court from 1986 until he died in 2016. During this 30-year tenure, he served with 16 other justices. For the entire duration of his tenure, he fought for the recognition of his favored method of constitutional interpretation, originalism. In the halls, conference rooms, chambers, and courtroom of the Court, it proved to be a lonely fight.
In an interview he gave in 2013, he was asked whether he felt he was winning or losing the battle for constitutional interpretation. He answered:
I don’t know how much progress we’ve made on originalism. That’s to be seen. I do think originalism is more respectable than it was. But there’s still only two justices up here who are thorough going originalists.[x]
Justice Clarence Thomas
Of course, the second originalist was Justice Thomas, who seems to have come to his version of originalism on his own. When asked how he would compare his judicial philosophy to that of Justice Thomas, Scalia reportedly answered, “I am an originalist, but I am not a nut.”[xi] So, even in the small group of two originalists, Scalia felt somewhat alone. At the time of the interview, Scalia obviously did not consider the two relatively new conservative justices, Alito and Chief Justice Roberts, to be full-fledged originalists.
For his part, Justice Alito famously made a joke out of Scalia’s originalism when he said during oral argument in a case involving a prohibition of violent content in video games, “Well, I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games? Did he enjoy them?” The courtroom exploded in laughter.[xii] Not only did originalism fail to gain adherents on the Court, but, at least in this example, it became the butt of a joke.
Although Justice Scalia had little success in having originalism accepted among his colleagues on the Court, it was a much different matter in the country at large. Throughout his professional life, Scalia was relentless and passionate in presenting to the public his views on constitutional and statutory interpretation. Through literally hundreds of speeches at law schools, Federalist Society functions, and before a wide range of conservative religious, business and social groups, through his writings and through the publications of his judicial opinions, he became a rock star among conservative Republicans and religious groups. One author put it this way:
The barbed and often amusing nature of many of his public statements and the sheer nastiness that marked many of his judicial opinions made him a compelling public figure, while the political and social appeal of his personal views and judicial opinions made him the beloved judicial spokesman for the Republican Coalition.
As a result, Scalia became a true media celebrity a new kind of popularly known and nationally prominent justice.
* * *
He possessed a magnetic personality, theatrical instincts, a charming manner and quick wit, the poise of an experienced debater, self-assurance . . . and moral righteousness.[xiii]
He became an icon to conservative Republicans, the embodiment of the values that many of them passionately believed should be restored in America. He did not believe that the constitution created a right to an abortion;[xiv] he was opposed to what he called the “homosexual agenda” on the grounds that the founding generations wrote a constitution that did not protect or grant gay and lesbian rights;[xv] he opposed affirmative action on the grounds that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibited discrimination on the basis of race – white or black – and did not permit discrimination against whites in order to remedy the effects of past discrimination against blacks.[xvi]
By the time Donald Trump was elected President in 2016, Scalia had had such an influence on Republicans that only a follower of his could be nominated by a Republican President and confirmed by a Republican senate. Any serious candidate for a Supreme Court appointment had to pay homage to Scalia and originalism to even get on a short list. It was as if Scalia himself were making the nominations and voting for confirmation. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh[xvii] and Amy Coney-Barrett each stated during their confirmation hearings and elsewhere that they were originalists. Kavanaugh had previously given a speech at Notre Dame Law School in which he said, “Justice Scalia was and remains a judicial hero and role model.” Coney-Barrett, a former Scalia law clerk, said during her confirmation hearing, that he formed her views and that she would follow Scalia’s originalism in constitutional interpretation.[xviii] Gorsuch’s embrace of originalism and textualism is well known and explained in his recent book.[xix] So, by taking his originalist cause to a greater audience than his fellow justices, Scalia succeeded in making originalism the dominant mode of constitutional interpretation among Supreme Court justices.
Counting Justice Thomas, there are now four avowed originalists. And most recently, Justice Alito has sent a strong signal that he too will henceforth join the originalists and make an effort to lead the others in shaping and applying Scalia’s thinking.[xx]
In a recent speech to the Federalist Society Alito said:
I will say that we have seen the emergence of what I believe are erroneous elaborations of Justice Scalia’s theories and I look forward to friendly and fruitful debate about where his thinking leads.
He acknowledged that Scalia’s methods of interpretation will now be dominant on the Court:
A lot of the debate about constitutional and statutory interpretation now takes place within the framework of, or at least using, the language of originalism and textualism.[xxi]
Alito has not heretofore been thought to be a convinced originalist, but rather one who considered a number of factors in his analysis. However, it now appears that he will try to be a force in shaping originalism and textualism in future cases. Now that we appear to have a majority of originalists on the Court, it is important to understand just what that means.
[iii] The Second Amendment provides: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” U.S. CONST. amend. 2.
[x] Jennifer Senior, “In Conversation: Antonin Scalia.” New York Magazine, October 4,2013.
[xi] Jeffery Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Anchor Books N.Y. (September 2008 ed.) p. 120. This comment was no doubt meant in jest, but it does reflect true differences between these two originalists. For example, Thomas is thought to have less respect for precedent than Scalia.
…and create the conditions necessary for a transpartisan future.
by John T. Kesler
Donald Trump demonstrated a genius for generating an American populist movement by supporting traditional conservative and religious values while also tapping into the fears and frustrations of many Americans together with being pro-business. In the process he transformed the Republican Party into being more populist than it has ever been. This populism emerged through Trump contaminated by a constellation of qualities that undermine a healthy democratic republic.
These virulent qualities are all consistent with contemporary neo-fascism. Common attributes of the highly diverse national manifestations of contemporary neo-fascism are contempt for democratic values and the rule of law, demagoguery, racism, incitements to mob violence, attacks on the press and the establishment, and exploitation of scapegoats1. Following are features of Trumpism which are each consistent with neo-fascism and are antithetical to a constitutional republic and our American traditions.
The Fascist Features of Trumpism
The Big Lie and Violence
President Donald Trump rallying the troops.
A central element of fascism is hostility to the peaceful transfer of power, which has been the hallmark of American democracy since John Adams succeeded George Washington as president. Just as he did when running against Hillary Clinton, during the recent campaign against Joe Biden, Trump repeatedly asserted that the only way he could lose would be if there were overwhelming voter fraud. In the months leading up to the November 2020 presidential election, he escalated claims of such fraud.
Party and elected Republican leaders overwhelmingly echoed this Big Lie, which was amplified by right leaning broadcasters and social media. Endlessly repeating The Big Lie that Germany’s defeat in World War I was falsified and, in any event, caused by the Jews, was famously utilized by Hitler in coming to power under the theme of making Germany great again. When Trump lost the election, he claimed that it was stolen, consistent with the groundwork he had laid so carefully. Once the post-election version of the Big Lie was asserted, Trump tried every means at hand to cement the Lie, including filing over 60 fruitless lawsuits challenging the election as well as making multiple efforts to persuade election officials and state legislators to illegally change election results – all without success.
It speaks to the strength and integrity of America’s leadership and institutions that all these efforts failed, because they were all based on lies. It is the consensus of both Republican and Democrat election officials across the nation and confirmed by the heads of the four US intelligence agencies and the US Department of Justice, that there was no significant corruption or fraud in the presidential election, confirming that Joe Biden won in a free and fair election.
To further assert that he had won, and that the Democrats had committed overwhelming election fraud, and, in an effort, to overturn the certification of Joe Biden as president, Trump marshalled his followers from across the nation to convene in Washington D.C. on January 6 to protest a “stolen election.” Once the crowd was assembled, Trump and his co-instigators incited them to engage in the tragic and seditious attack on the Capitol.
Even after this insurrection, most Republican congressmen challenged Biden’s certification as President, knowing full well that the claim of a fraudulent election was a Big Lie. Immediately following Joe Biden’s inauguration, most Republicans in America still believed the Big Lie. Even after the most bipartisan vote against Trump in the history of presidential Senate impeachment trials, most republicans still support Trump. He continues to assert the Big Lie.
Other Lies, Attacks on the Press and Media Manipulation
Is has been well documented that when he was president, Trump was a serial liar, repeatedly making misleading claims2. He would often assert that any reporting contrary to his own claims was “fake news,” another central Big Lie. Trump disparaged mainstream media and attacked reporters and media outlets who caught him in his lies. He was successful in casting doubt on the mainstream media, with many right leaning media outlets and social media spreading his false claims. He also used Twitter to directly sway millions of people with his lies. In this and so many other ways, he labeled and demonized others for doing what he was actually doing: constantly lying. Frankly, the real enemy was a projection of himself on his enemies. Yet he fooled half the country. Such lying and media manipulation are standard fascist practices.
Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Racial Resentments
Phoenix-resident and QAnon conspiracy theorist Jake Angeli, the “Q Shaman”.
Even before he became president, Trump gained notoriety in his rise to political prominence by repeatedly claiming that President Obama was not born in the United States, contrary to definitive evidence to the contrary. He has continued to promote or not disassociate himself from conspiracy theories that served his interests, such as QAnon, which labels Democrats and those in “the deep state” as evil pedophiles, drinking children’s blood and cannibalizing them. This is a revived version of the myth that the Nazis used about Jews drinking the blood of children.
Trump supports groups which are purveyors of the myths of the far right, particularly including those which reflect racial and cultural prejudice and resentments. For example, rather than condemning the Proud Boys, an all-male neo-fascist group, in a presidential debate with Joe Biden, he told them to “stand back and stand by.” In this and so many other ways, such as his failure to condemn the white supremacists’ role in their Unite the Right rally and riots in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump firmed up his support by far-right extremists. Eventually he called them all and his other supporters to step up and attack the Capitol. Fascism has always been grounded in pre-rational myths, conspiracy theories and racial and cultural resentments.
Dehumanizing, Demeaning and Scapegoating Others
After taking office, Trump called African countries “hell holes”; categorized Muslims as terrorists and banned travel from Muslim countries; labeled people coming across the Mexican border as rapists and murders; and separated immigrant children from their parents and put them in cages. Dehumanizing the “Other” is characteristic of fascist regimes.
As millions of Americans across the country and people globally protested following the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement took hold, Trump alleged that this phenomenon amounted to leftist antifa and black violence from which he was going protect white America. This strategy successfully turned a broad-based call for racial respect and justice into a source of fear and suspicion for millions of people, scapegoating blacks who were leading the call for justice. Trump and many republican leaders were also effective in labeling democrats as anti-democracy socialists and communists. Although a small minority of democratic elected officials are socialists, they are representative of Western European democratic socialism which has for instance resulted in the European Nordic countries becoming some of the most stable and prosperous democracies and flourishing societies in the world. This insidious racist and scapegoating undercurrent of Trumpism is central to fascism.
Threatening Political Opponents
Trump’s behavior toward his political opponents is disrespectful, demeaning, and bullying. His outrageous performance in the first presidential debated against Joe Biden, was a demonstration of this. He labels those he considers political enemies – such as Barak Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton – as criminals who should be imprisoned. Chants of “lock her up” aimed at Hillary Clinton that Trump encouraged at his rallies were not harmless, were not a joke. Just like the Big Lie about any election he might lose would be stolen, this horrendous lie – that his political opponents are, by definition, criminals – is deeply alarming and dangerous. We should realize that Trump means what he says in this regard. Criminalizing political opponents is typical of fascists and other totalitarian leaders.
Undermining the Law and American Institutions and Traditions
Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building
Trump has shown little respect for the law or the traditions and institutions of American governance. For example, he frequently attempted to compromise the long-established independence of the Justice Department, which is intended to be solely in service of the American people. Under attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William Barr, and acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, Trump demanded that his interests contrary to the public interest be pursued including deflecting his own culpability in the Russia/Ukraine investigation and undermining results of the presidential election. If Trump had been re-elected, he certainly would have continued such egregious behavior.
Note how in the last days of his presidency, Trump inserted young incompetent loyalists in key positions in intelligence and defense positions, obviously with the intent of compromising those institutions. Trump’s undermining of the law and our institutions and attacking those he branded as the establishment, is classic behavior of fascist demagogues. Such behavior was a fulfillment of Steve Bannon’s “deconstructing” strategies.
Anti-Science, Anti-Rationality
During the COVID pandemic, public health professionals have been unanimous in urging that we all wear masks in public, socially distance, wash our hands, and avoid large gatherings. President Trump set the opposite example: disparaging the advice of epidemiologists and other health specialists, mocking people who wear masks, and organizing large, packed rallies and other gatherings which were “super spreader” events.
Covid-19 virus
Due in large part to Trump’s refusal to take medical science seriously or to lead on the federal level, the number of U.S. Covid-19 infections and deaths exploded in the United States. Because of his arrogant refusal to lead, he is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths that might have been averted, and he influenced untold numbers of Americans as a matter of political identification to selfishly expose others to the danger of severe illness and perhaps death. This disaster and much of the resulting economic instability were grounded in prejudice and the rejection of rationality, truth, and science – all characteristic of fascism.
All these anti-democracy fascist attributes permeate Trumpism, even as Trump enticed over seventy-four million Americans to vote for him in 2020. There are some excuses for the many millions of Americans who have been seduced by Trump’s gifts of narcissistic manipulation and the complicity of his political and media enablers. However, many Republican leaders, including most Republican members of Congress, with full knowledge of Trump’s lies and insidious fascist tactics, have promoted, or have been complicitly silent regarding these aspects of Trump leadership.
On all points, Trump qualifies as a neo-fascist leader, who has given birth to a massive American neo-fascist movement.
The Great American Regression
From the perspective of human development, these Trumpian fascist characteristics reflect lower cognitive and moral development than those which are consistent with the universal (“Modern”) principles upon which the United States Constitution is based. It is for this reason they are pathological in the public sector and in civil society and why each one of them undermines the American democratic republic (“American Republic”).
Healthy development from infancy to adulthood reflects emerging from being self-centered as a toddler, to group-centric or ethno-centric as a child and then world-centric as an adult. A normal toddler learns to say “No” and “Mine” as he/she is first developing a sense of identity. A self-centered adult narcissist, such as Trump, on the other hand is severely stunted, and is by definition a dangerous leader because every decision of a narcissists tend to be based primarily on what is best for optimizing their power and control. Learning to slowly identify with increasingly larger collectives, for example from families to friend groups to grade schools to middle schools to high schools to racial and ethnic identifications is necessary and healthy, but getting stuck in identifying solely with one’s group, school, race, ethnicity or even nation to the exclusion of the “Other”, is not sufficient for competent citizenship in the United States. The American educational enterprise has been committed to supporting not only academic learning on a Modern level but also supporting our youth in growing into responsible citizens which includes inculcating the Modern universal principles upon which the Constitution is based.
Healthy development from infancy to adulthood reflects emerging from being self-centered as a toddler, to group-centric or ethno-centric as a child and then world-centric as an adult.
A mature American citizen is world-centric in the sense that one feels obligated to support the universal principles of the United States Constitution which holds that all people are created equal and deserve equal access to freedom and justice. We have the duty as citizens to support and sustain these principles within the scope of our national boundaries. In addition, commitment to the universal nature of these principles which arises from this Modern level of maturity naturally prompts us to support freedom and justice for all people in the world. Trump did his best to abandon such global commitments as he also pursued a pathological sub-Modern, ethno-centric agenda at home where the “Other”, that is, those who are not white or Christian, are somehow less human and should be feared.
In this context we can see that America experienced an historic regression by submitting to the sub-Modern pathologies of a leader who systematically debased the American Republic. America almost succumbed a second time in November 2020 when Trump came close to winning the presidential election by utilizing all these neo-fascistic pathologies. If he had been elected president again, he would have undoubtedly further undermined our Republic. This is so historically significant and alarming, that it can appropriately be referred to as “The Great American Regression”.
Trump has led about half the Nation on a regressive trajectory which if successfully pursued over many years by Trump and/or others will likely lead to the American Republic being deeply and perhaps fatally compromised by primitive ethno-centric pathologies.
Why has the Great American Regression occurred?
There are several interconnected developmental factors which have led to America becoming vulnerable to destructive sub-Modern influences. First, American political institutions and political processes grounded in Modernist theory and 18th century realities have been increasingly dysfunctional and failing to meet the complex challenges of twenty first century realities. Most Americans are disappointed in our government institutions, and a significant percentage of the American citizenry feel particularly left behind and underserved. Those in control (i.e., the establishment – sometimes pejoratively referred to as the “deep state”) often appear that they are benefiting themselves at the expense of others. When there is a lack of trust, there is a tendency among those who feel most threatened to pull in the boundaries of their scope of concerns into a more constricted and self-protective mode, less aligned with Modern universal principles and more reflective of pre-Modern ethno-centric commitments.
Ele-dodo
Contributing to the dysfunctionality of Governmental institutions has been the phenomenon over the past few decades of Americans electing representatives who align with these more constricted concerns of their constituents. Such representatives tend to be fairly black and white in how they see the world and are not very inclined to work out solutions with those across the aisle. Those leaders have in turn controlled the narrative and amplified the polarization. Those who feel that there is something wrong with those who hold views other than their own and are unwilling to compromise to get things done are less cognitively and morally mature that than those who can see both sides of an issue, can stand in other’s shoes, and work out ways to get something accomplished. That is the essence of what leaders do in a successful democratic republic. In other words, Americans have increasingly been electing some of the least mature among us to be our leaders with both major political parties becoming even more ideological and polarized than the American citizenry which elected them. As dysfunctionality has increased and the nation has become even more polarized, a candidate such as Trump with exceptional manipulative skills and fascistic tendencies had an opportunity to exploit the situation and lead us into The Great American Regression.
As Trump intuitively understood, when people regress into an ethno-centric protective mode, this paradoxically creates a greater vulnerability to their being manipulated by those who play on their fears. They also tend to be more open to those influencers who traffic in sub-Modern conspiracies and racist narratives. In the process extremists, who have a more permanently ethno-centric center of gravity and who have previously been marginalized, become more acceptable and integrated into association with the more mainstream people and groups who have regressed to or otherwise support sub-Modern sensibilities. The certainty of the extremists and the simplicity of their cultic, mythic, racist, and conspiratorial worldviews are temping to those who are afraid and have a need for greater certainty in their lives. They are also susceptible to the purported strongman leader (a hallmark of sub-Modern societies) who will take charge on their behalf. Many others who may not have regressed in this way but nevertheless benefited from Trump’s policies, such as many who are culturally and religiously conservative, the wealthy, and/or in the business community have been willing to look the other way. Many of them have underestimated or simply do not care about the destructive impact of an unprincipled leader who would stop at nothing to gain power, stay in power, and regain power as long as he supports some of their key policy issues.
Most people who have developed beyond Modernism are in the first immature sub-stage of the next full stage of human development, which will be referred to as “Integral.3” Many of these early stage Integral individuals who are often referred to as pluralists or post-modernists (“Pluralists”) are progressives. Pluralists tend to lack the higher level integrating capacities, which manifest more fully in people who have developed into the full maturity of the Integral stage of development. As such they often sow distrust and even chaos. In contradiction to their own inclusive narrative, Pluralists are often patronizing and sometimes even hostile towards those who are Modern or traditional in orientation, which adds to the polarization and conflict.
In summary, from a developmental perspective America is in the middle of a perfect storm of disarray, disorientation, and vulnerability.
What can we do to overcome The Great American Regression?
It is important to remember that our American institutions and culture are grounded in Modernism and that most American adults have a Modern developmental center of gravity or higher. As such, a reasonably rapid recovery from this regressive sub-Modern moment is possible, and in the coming years we can move on to greater heights of national and global resilience and flourishing than we have ever attained. Following are five categories of proposals grounded in developmental perspectives, which could be pursued to help overcome the Great American Regression and lay the groundwork for such further transformation.
These proposals are by no means definitive or exhaustive, but from a developmental perspective, they are representative of what must be done to create and maintain the minimal conditions whereby a transpartisan future might even be possible.
First, we should bring greater clarity and coherence to how we describe sub-Modern political pathologies.
Clarifying such sub-Modern political pathologies from a developmental perspective and how they are undermining the American Republic could go a long way towards helping many people wake up and pull back from devastating pathological political commitments.
It would be advisable not to overuse the term “neo-fascism” in describing these Trumpist political pathologies even though they are collectively the essence of neo-fascism. The term “fascism” with its many sub-variations – such as neofascism – creates confusion and carries so much controversial baggage related to its ultra-violent mid-twentieth century origins. The worst actors in the political arena will endlessly whip up their supporters to deny that they are fascists and in Trumpian fashion label their opponents as fascists. In any event the point is not to count how many pathological sub-Modern qualities it takes to call people fascists. Rather it is critical for every American to appreciate that each one of these pathologies manifesting in the public square and the public sector is destructive to any constitutional democratic republic and should be called out and condemned.
It is critical for every American to appreciate that each one of these pathologies manifesting in the public square and the public sector is destructive to any constitutional democratic republic.
Each of them could be referred to as an “Anti-Republic Pathology.” (“ARP”). These ARPs can be grouped in four general categories: cognitive, cultural, institutional, and behavioral. Each of these four categories is set forth below together with three specific ARPs in each category. The categories and each of these ARPs are framed in a developmental context for better clarity, coherence, and interconnection.
Cognitive ARP
Underlying assumptions of our Modern constitutional republic are that citizens have the cognitive and moral maturity to govern themselves through fact based reason in the context of universal constitutional principles, and that they and their representatives can and should agree upon basic facts as a foundation for their deliberations on important societal matters. When these assumptions are systematically compromised by Anti-Republic Pathologies, a democratic republic is seriously compromised
At an ethno-centric level of development or state of regression, people will tend to accept as true what an authority figure tells them or what the mythical simplicity of a conspiracy theory suggests. Any adult who exhibits an even more primal self-centric orientation will promote any position as true which will serve their interests. Trump is clearly a self-centric narcissist leading a pathological ethno-centric political movement posturing as a world centric democratic alternative.
Lies
Constitutional democracies are not viable if most of us cannot agree on what the facts are on important issues due to ARP manipulations. One can only wonder how many people would have voted for Trump for President in 2020 if they had realized that the allegation of massive voter fraud was a Big Trump Lie and that overwhelmingly “fake news” was coming from mainstream media was for the most part another Big Trump Lie. It is nothing short of terrifying that tens of millions of Americans with Modern cognitive and moral capacities have been manipulated with lies and other ARP tactics into supporting the undermining of their own cherished republic.
Sub-Modern Narratives
Sub-Modern rationality is the source of mythical narratives and conspiracy theories, often racist in nature, which simply do not reflect reality. We need to realize that facts hardly ever matter to the relatively small percentage of adults who are deeply sub-Modern in their cognitive capacities and/or moral commitments. We just must accept that factor and do better at meeting their needs in the democratic process without allowing their ARP perspectives to dominate the public discourse as it did during the Trump presidency. It is important to remember how vulnerable many people are in a time of crisis and resulting personal regression to be seduced by sub-Modern narratives.
Anti-Science
Huge numbers of people being opposed to consensus conclusions of mainstream science such as the seriousness of the COVID pandemic and the personal behavior and strategies necessary to best combat it as well as denying the need for urgent action on climate change have enormous implications. An ARP strategy is to question and politicize the consensus conclusions of science rather than accepting them as a shared foundation for determining a way forward. Again, you already start with a small minority of adults who because of developmental challenges tend never to be persuaded by rational arguments, and a better job must be done of educating and persuading the rest. The repercussions of ARPs politicizing the pandemic so that millions of people have ignored the dangers have likely cost many tens of thousands of lives. The politicization of climate change through ARP strategies has put the future of mankind and life on earth at much greater risk.
Cultural ADP
Modernism represented a universalization of the Golden Rule where everyone should be treated as oneself through the exercise of Conscience, Civility, Care and Compassion – the universalization of the ultimate worth of each man, woman, and child. This generates the constitutional framing of the universalization of Freedom and Justice for all grounded in this dignity of all human beings. Less developed societies have always been grounded in the perspective of “Us” versus “Them” – the tribal or cultural or even national “in group” versus the “Other”. Constitutional republics like the United States endlessly struggle to move closer to the ideals of this universalization of the Golden Rule. The sub-Modern cultural outlook results in the dehumanization of the “Other” in the following three cultural Pathologies:
Racial and Cultural Discrimination
One might say that the “original sin” of America is that in a country grounded in Modern universal principles, it also accommodated the genocide of Native Americans and the slavery of Blacks. Even after the abolition of slavery, America has continued to allow systemic racial and cultural discrimination in all its forms. Fortunately, with the universal principles of the Constitution as an attractor, the “arc of justice” has moved ever so slowly in a very uneven trajectory toward the realization of the universal application of the Golden Rule as Martin Luther King taught. The pre-Modern ethno-centric core of Trumpism represents a powerful pushback against that trajectory.
Scapegoating
If we can dehumanize people who do not look like ourselves or perhaps do not have the same cultural background or faith, we can more easily blame them for our problems. It is the simple, pathological solution. In Nazi Germany, they scapegoated the Jews in this regard. Trump blamed for instance the “rapist” Latins trying to get into our country whom we needed to build a wall against and the Muslims that we should ban from traveling to our country. Trump has demanded that three Congresswomen of color should “go back to where they came from”. Trump and his ilk use the moniker of “AOC” (for congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) as a rallying cry to oppose imagined communist conspiracies, putting her safety as risk. The ARP strategy of scapegoating amounts to taking the ethos of the school yard bully into the adult public arena, which will inevitably lead to tragic consequences if not stopped.
Other Dehumanization
Variations of dehumanizing others are endless, from mocking people with disabilities to men treating women as objects. It is critical to appreciate that the proper patriotism in the United States of America is the patriotism grounded in our Universal principles and sharing those principles with the world. The patriotism of a pathological ethno-centric culture is grounded in “us versus them”. Beware of Trump’s proposed Patriot Party or anything like it which would be based on an “us versus them” patriotism, which is a defilement of principled American patriotism. Beware of the aggressive “flag waivers,” who stand for us versus them. That is why the confederate flag fits so naturally in crowds of aggressive flag waivers including the mob that attacked the Capitol using flag poles as weapons and violently brought the Confederate flag into the Capitol building for the first time in our Nation’s history.
Institutional ARP
The Institutions and processes and traditions of the America republic are all dedicated to honoring and sustaining the universal principles of the American constitutional Republic, that is, designed to promote freedom and justice for all. Anything which undermines these institutions is an institutional Anti-Republic Pathology
Institutions
It is essential to an ARP movement to undermine the institutions which support universal and impartial principles. When government institutions are compromised, the survival of a constitutional democracy is in grave danger. In addition to Trump’s active campaign to undermine the integrity of the Justice Department mentioned above, among other things he made efforts to compromise the scientific independence and integrity of the CDC and any institution that oversaw the COVID pandemic; he hollowed out the State Department leadership; and he did seemingly everything in his power to compromise the intelligence agencies of the United States Government, which he subordinated to input and opinions from the Vladimir Putin.
Law
It was foundational to the framers of the United States Constitution that America must move beyond the ethno-centric monarchial traditions of the Old World where rulers and many in the ruling class acted at will above the law and imposed law on others without their consent. The United States Constitution stands perhaps first and foremost for the rule of law and due process in American society.
Gavel
Trump went out of his way to claim that the President is essentially monarchial and dictatorial; that he was above the law; and that there was nothing he could do for which he would be held accountable. He threatened and even attempted to get his political opponents incarcerated, acting as though they were outside the protection of the law. This is ARP at its most threatening which does not recognize that all of us are under the law and that the laws are continually tested in the courts to determine if they are constitutionally aligned. In this moment of The Great American Regression, the judicial branch has been the only branch of government that has not yet become deeply compromised. Even his own judicial appointments in the federal courts and the Supreme Court held firm to the rule of law. This speaks so profoundly to the integrity of the American legal system.
Traditions of American Democracy
There are mores and traditions which support the American Democratic Republic, often without the force of law, but they strengthen the cultural fabric of our republic. It is tragic when they are intentionally undermined and debased. There are so many examples of where Trump trampled on cherished American traditions. It was so dismal for instance to see him avoid visiting those severely injured in combat and not attending ceremonies honoring deceased soldiers, which he considered “suckers” for their sacrifices. The failure of Trump and his family to graciously welcome his presidential successor and his family to the White House or to attend the inauguration of President Biden because of his refusal to accept defeat or allow the peaceful transfer of power is a cause for profound sadness.
Behavioral ARP
The Founders were deeply concerned about unscrupulous, power hungry leaders. For instance, in first Federalist Paper Alexander Hamilton warned that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants”. Authoritarian tyrants use all means including threats of violence and violence itself to achieve their ends. This is the history of pre-modern societies and failed republics. George Washington stunned the world and even many of his countrymen when he stepped away from personal aggrandizement at the end of his second term as president in honor of the principles of the Constitution as did every other president of the United States until Trump.
Authoritarianism
The sub-Modern leader tends to be authoritarian in his orientation. He wants to rule and control without limit, and in turn to the extent possible repress constitutionally proscribed checks and balances, which would restrain his lawlessness. People who have regressed into a self-protective mode often look for a strongman leader to defend their most precious ethno-centric concerns. Trump was as authoritarian as he could get away with, and clearly aspired to be like the authoritarian leaders he was so drawn to such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Those who have regressed to wanting a strongman leader, often do not perceive that a dominating leader who shows up, may be completely self-centric – such as Trump – who do not care much for the values of the ethno-centric constituency, manipulating them as needed by parroting their values.
Demagoguery
Demagoguery is defined as activities or practices of a leader which seek support by appealing to the emotions, passions, and prejudices of people rather than using rational argument4. That without question is the essence of Trumpism. Trump is particularly brilliant at compromising the Modern reasoning and moral capacities of people, who fall prey to his manipulation of their passions and prejudices.
Inciting and Using Violence
Inciting violence and using violence is a primal expression of ethnocentrism and the antithesis of the dynamics of a healthy democratic republic, which is governed by the rule of law, due process, and institutionalized procedures. A common theme for Trump was suggesting acts of violence against those he disliked such as members of the press or protestors against his ARP approaches. Using violence against peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors nearby the White House so that he could walk across a square with an entourage including the top American military leader and hold up a bible in front of a Church is a perfect example of how utterly wrong this is, not to speak of the historic January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol.
Second, promote, and use an Anti-Republic Pathology scale (“ARP Scale”)
We can assess the minimum worthiness of a political candidate or leader or group by informally adding up the number of Anti-Republic Pathologies which are reflected in their narratives, policies, and actions. This would be somewhat subjective, but it should be fairly evident which individuals, groups, and movements have a high score (“Political Pathology Score”) on the ARP Scale comprised of the 12 ARPs listed above. The higher the Political Pathology Score (“PPS”) the more dangerous the leader or group. For instance, Donald Trump scores 12 out of 12. The point is that any candidate or leader who scores significantly at all on the ARP Scale should be rejected out of hand.
Spencer Cox
In Utah where I reside, our Republican US Senator, Mitt Romney, and our newly elected Republican Governor, Spencer Cox, have probably close to a zero PPS. On the other hand, the newly elected Republican Utah Congressman for Utah’s 4th Congressional district, Burgess Owens, has supported and promoted many ARPs, while the PPS of the Democratic incumbent whom he defeated in the 2020 congressional election, Ben McAdams, would score close to 0. The Political Pathology Score of public leaders matters much more than if they are left or right leaning politically, because a person with a high PPS is fundamentally hostile to the very principles upon which the American Republic is based and should never be supported in holding an office of public trust.
Third, take dramatic steps to better ensure that there can be general agreement on the facts relating to important issues.
The threshold element in having a functioning democratic republic at all, is having general agreement on what the facts are. Trump proved that through constantly telling lies supported by political allies together with media organizations and social media enablers, tens of millions of people with a Modern or higher developmental center of gravity can be deceived as to the facts and manipulated into supporting Anti-Republic Pathologies which damage our American Republic. Following are two proposals
Establish permanent consensus fact commissions (CFCs) – one or more for national issues and one or more for state and local issues in each state. These CFCs would be comprised of respected and trusted people representing the political spectrum from the public sector and trusted diverse individuals from the non-profit, and private sectors. People who support Anti-Republic Pathologies would not be invited to be on a CFC. These CFCs should be well funded with competent support staff and full access to needed technical resources and expertise. The task of the CFCs would be to achieve a consensus statement of the relevant facts on important selected public policy issues. For instance, the consensus of mainstream scientists and/or competent researchers on a relevant issue would be accepted by a CFC. Consensus facts would then be the foundation for relevant public policy debate. CFCs could be supplemental bodies to already existing institutions such as the Center for Disease Control. The Trump administration did its best to undermine, corrupt and discredit the CDC because scientific truth and the CDC’s commitment to the protection of human lives were inconsistent with Trump’s political agenda of denying the massive proportions and danger of the COVID pandemic crisis.
Establish a high-level national commission to address how to prohibit media outlets and social media platforms from undermining truth in the public square on important public issues and to generate public policy recommendations and other consistent proposals. We should never forget that multiple media sources continually amplified lies and specious conspiracies that almost resulted in the toppling of the American Republic, and they are still at it. There is no area of public policy that has any greater urgency than getting our arms around the unrestricted deluge of disinformation on important matters. Even though there are sensitive First Amendment and other important legal considerations that must be addressed, America’s very survival as a constitutional republic may very well depend on prompt and successful action in this area.
Fourth, Education
There should be well-funded efforts to provide education as to the insidious nature of all the Anti-Republic Pathologies and their devastating impact on the American Republic. Each one of them undermines our American Republic, and the more of them that are at play, the more destructive the impact. Following are two proposals.
Educate the public. Most citizens who voted for Trump are thoughtful, principled people, as are most Americans. One must assume that the large majority of Trump voters would view Trump and his enablers very differently if they had a clearer sense of the insidious nature of the Anti-Republic Pathologies and that all the ARPs were and are being practiced by Trump and his political and media allies to deceive and manipulate millions of people. There should be educational programs to clarify the danger of ARPs promoted through public, private, and non-profit organizations, particularly including educational institutions and responsible media organizations.
Most citizens who voted for Trump are thoughtful, principled people, as are most Americans.
Educate our youth and young adults. One of the main reasons for establishing public education at the inception of the American Republic was that our children should be trained to become competent and responsible citizens. That element of public education has too often become minimized or eliminated in recent decades. It is time once again to raise up a new generation of competent and committed citizens with a significant part of that education highlighting the danger of the Anti-Republic Pathologies to the very survival of the American Republic. We should also include the importance of ethics across all educational disciplines to emphasize that all our personal, professional, and political activities have ethical implications for which each of us should be responsible5. In the context of character education and service learning we should also teach and inculcate consensus principles of virtuous behavior, especially the Golden Rule and the related qualities of Conscience, Civility, Care, and Compassion, which underlie the universal reciprocity principles of Freedom and Justice for all, as reflected in the United States Constitution and all state constitutions.
Fifth, support leaders who have positive attributes from a developmental perspective
Whether a candidate is left or the right leaning we should give priority to electing and supporting leaders for public office who are wise and mature in terms of virtuous character and leadership capacity. As James Madison noted in Federalist No. 57: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men [and of course now also women] who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society.” Following are two proposals.
Support leaders with mature virtuous character. Perhaps virtuous character – a traditionally conservative priority value – should be valued more than anything else in a public leader. There are many virtuous traits that could be highlighted but perhaps the most important is that a leader’s scope of loving care and concern extends to all people. Beyond that, in terms of moral maturity a profoundly morally mature person has a sense of care beyond all people to care and have a sense of stewardship for all living things. The most mature people will therefore be environmentalists as well as agents of universal compassion. It is critical to understand in a developmental sense that some people are profoundly virtuous, but their scope of care and concern is ethno-centric, limited to “Us” and not to the “Other” – hence not virtuous in a mature sense. Such pre-Modern virtue is not adequate for a leader who has a public stewardship. The disaster of Trumpism could have been predicted solely from the fact that Donald Trump is a person who has very few of what could be called virtuous character traits.
Whether a candidate is left or the right leaning we should give priority to electing and supporting leaders for public office who are wise and mature in terms of virtuous character and leadership capacity.
Support leaders with mature leadership capacity. From a developmental perspective, Modern leadership approaches and capacities reflect one stage of human development. Each higher stage of development among other things increases a person’s capacities to handle greater complexity and to deal well with greater diversity. For most public leadership positions, a person with mature Modern leadership qualities and capacities is ideal. However, the twenty first century world is extraordinarily complex and has moved beyond Modern capacities to handle it well, which is reflected in the dysfunctionality of American political and governmental systems. For public positions which have major responsibilities, such as state and federal executive and legislative positions, we should gravitate toward leaders with mature Integral capacities as they become increasingly present and available in the coming years.
Mature Integral capacities and resulting Mature Integral leadership are essentially the qualities of transpartisanship and transpartisan leadership, which reflect that the transpartisan movement developmentally represent the next step in the evolution of American and world civilization.
Transpartisan leaders have the capacity to work with complex systems, and to weave back together in a higher synthesis those things that Pluralists sometimes tend to deconstruct and frequently disparage. Perhaps even more important, the transpartisan leader not only sees the ultimate value of each human being but also connects with everyone where they are culturally and developmentally better than people at any prior stage of development. The transpartisan leader can weave together superior solutions in our highly diverse society that address the concerns of virtually everyone.
Transpartisan leaders can design processes and institutions which generate inclusive, collaborative, and higher quality approaches to policies and solutions. The evidence of their impact is becoming pervasive in the developed world. In every state in the Union there are new and creative, transpartisan informed approaches to democratic cultural, institutional and process transformation, which have been emerging over the past few decades6. The transpartisan seeds are planted, and amazing things will unfold in the coming years which reflect such transpartisan informed influences – if the American Republic does not collapse in the meantime.
Transpartisan leaders may be right or left leaning in terms of general emphasis, but they are deeply perceptive regarding the importance of all well held points of view across the political spectrum. They can see that some circumstances call for instance for greater conservative discipline and responsibility, and others call for more fully embracing liberal justice and compassion for the marginalized, or textured combinations of all sorts of variations of these orientations.
Transpartisan leaders who are using their skills in the political arena are still rare but are increasingly emerging in all dimensions of public service. One national liberal leader who manifests such capacities is US Transportation Secretary Peter Buttagieg. For instance, he has frequently appeared on Fox News with a disarming ability to communicate effectively and empathetically with conservatives. A new republican governor who shows similar qualities is Spencer Cox in Utah. He made national and international news during the 2020 campaign when he and his democratic rival for the governorship of Utah, did a joint announcement about the importance of being civil and mutually respectful when vigorously debating their policy differences. When Cox was Utah Lieutenant Governor, he and similarly transpartisan informed Democratic Mayor and later Utah Congressman, Ben McAdams, would engage and together model how to be inclusive, collaborative, synergistic and effective in getting things done for the public good and had fun doing it. Each of these Transpartisan Leaders is younger than 50, which is symptomatic of more people with these mature capacities arising in each new generation.
Sixth, let us begin with ourselves
To move forward in a healthy and productive way, each of us should begin by looking at ourselves and working to further develop the characteristics of mature, responsible citizenship, including a commitment to our own highest values and the nation’s universal principles and highest ideals. We should make this same commitment in all groups and communities of which we are a part. This includes each of us opposing all Anti-Republic Pathologies in civic and public arenas. We should all take advantage of the many programs and initiatives that are available to help us learn how to reach out to connect more meaningfully with those who are different than ourselves and in the process bridge and heal divides7. Many of us could learn and grow into integral or transpartisan capacities and leadership8, and all of us should support mature and virtuous leaders.
In Conclusion
George Floyd
It may seem to many that America is on the cusp of moving beyond its prime as a Nation and losing any semblance of American exceptionalism. However, America may be just broken open enough from the political and health crises of the past few years to allow new possibilities to emerge that might have otherwise been repressed. For instance, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 triggered a response among millions of people, particularly in the younger generations, that had not happened before on this scale, calling for greater commitment to overcoming systemic racism in America.
It may take a decade or more to sort out what might unfold from this moment of extraordinary national regression. Much long term damage has already been done. Trump and his ilk are moving ahead through utilizing all the dangerous Anti-Republic Pathologies with millions of Americans pledging their allegiance.
Paying attention to developmental considerations including the types of proposals set forth in this article will be critical to overcoming The Great American Regression and to achieving a next stage emergence of American transpartisan exceptionalism.
3In ego development theory there are two sub-stages in an integral “fourth person perspective” – 4.0 and 4.5 – and many fewer people who have achieved the latter sub-stage than the former. For instance, see the work of leading adult development researchers and scholars, Susanne Cooke Greuter, PhD through the Vertical Development Academy, www.verticledevelopment.com and Terri O’Fallon PhD through Stages International, www.stagesinternational.com. The qualities of the mature integral stage are consistent with transpartisan orientations, attitudes and capacities as further described in this article.
4Dictionary.com
5The importance of this perspective is reflected through the work of The Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum, www.seac-online.org
7There are a multitude of effective organizations that support people in learning how to communicate civilly and effectively across their differences, such as Living Room Conversations, www.livingroomconversations.org and networks of bridging organizations such as the Bridge Alliance, www.bridgealliance.us.
8The YOUnify initiative, which the author co-founded and chairs, includes both working on reducing polarization of all kinds as well as accelerating progress on solution to the key challenges to our time utilizing transpartisan informed strategies and leadership training, www.YOUnify.org. One of many “solutions labs” which YOUnify sponsors is dedicated to networking among and highlighting the work of individuals and organizations which are pursuing integral/transpartisan approaches to leadership, politics, and societal flourishing. Other organizations work with cohorts of people in supporting them in growing into integral/ transpartisan and beyond personal and leadership capacities such as, Pacific Integral, www.pacificintegral.com and Lower Lights School of Wisdom, www.lowerlightswisdom.org or support more generally the science based evolution of consciousness and society such as Integral Life, https://integrallife.com and the Institute for Cultural Evolution, www.culturalevolution.org.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Kesler is a practicing attorney who received his law degree from Columbia University Law School. He is trained and certified in the Stages Model of human development, which builds on the theory of ego development first developed by Jane Loevinger. He is certified to evaluate the developmental center of gravity of adults and mentor them with regard to higher stages of adult development.
John has worked in the area of applying developmental consideration to societal issues for over 20 years and stresses the importance of integral and transpartisan approaches. He was a founding member of the politics section of the Integral Institute. John co-founded and currently chairs the YOUnify initiative, grounded in transpartisan perspective, which works on overcoming polarization of all sorts and making progress on the pressing issues of our time www.younify.org.
John also developed and teaches a meditation and life practice called integral polarity practice. IPP supports people in becoming more centered, fully integrated and prepared to continue to grow developmentally throughout their adult life and in applying their capacities and gifts in service of the greater good www.theippinstitute.com.
As a friend of the site and contributor, John has shared other pieces with us. The latest, Transpartisan Maturity In Utah, was a feature article in The Transpartisan Review, Issue #3.
From Out of Left Field Comes the Cancellation of Cancel Culture, and a call for Republicans to Rediscover Original Republicanism
by Ralph Benko
A powerful counterforce to “cancel culture” is rising. Too few of cancel culture’s most vociferous critics, conservatives, have noticed. Why not?
The counterforce is coming right out of left field.
We of the radical (“from the root”, not “hooligan”) right, while correctly anathematizing progressives, have more in common with the labor-and-ethnic rank-and-file left than we do with the bosses of what William F. Buckley once called “the well-fed right.” Let’s join ranks with members of the rank-and-file America-loving left, many of whom are more conservative than most professional conservatives can understand.
Consider the largely forgotten original Mission Statement of the National Review. There, in founding the foundational conservative magazine, Buckley tartly observed:
“Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals [what the progressives then were called], they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity. ”
The “well-fed Right” consistently mistreats radical conservatives, then and now. And the leaders of the well-fed Right inevitably, although incorrectly, view the left as a unified bloc. Big mistake. Let us of the radical right not blithely follow those whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated.
Radical conservatives, those in the spirit of William F. Buckley, rather than heavy-with-emoluments conservatives, have common interests and values with much of the labor-and-ethnic left. We would do well, and do well by our cause, to do well by our best prospective allies.
Exemplary of the kind of radical conservative Buckley extolled was the “America is Good” meme propagated by one shy thought leader of the right in the last election. My colleague, and sometime business associate, William R. Collier put the simple but powerful message that America is Good (and variations of that message by columnists like me) in front of the eyeballs of tens of millions of voters, unassumingly yet effectively at scale via social media at the peak of the recent election cycle. It flew largely under the political elite’s radar screen. Yet may have mattered a great deal.
Did the chivalrous “America is Good” effort play a significant role in thwarting the left’s plans to dominate many state legislatures (in preparation for gerrymandering the House to the left)? Did it thwart the anticipated grand expansion of Speaker Pelosi’s House majority, as a predicate to force the House to tack much harder left? Did this crusade keep progressives from winning a decisive majority in the US Senate to allow the crypto-socialist Senators to stack the legal deck in innumerable and insidious ways, as shamelessly advertised by Sens. Baldwin, Carper, Warner and Warren?
We’re still waiting for a meta-analysis on that campaign to be published in a future issue of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. We’ll probably never know. And yet…
Key proponents of the goodness of America were disappointed that Donald Trump narrowly bucked the winning center-right tide. Irrespective of this, the American people—the actual voters—dealt a body blow to the “Cancel America” crew. The rank-and-file believers in America-the-good rose up politically to cancel the cancellers. It was an across-the-spectrum, left and right, civic movement of America-lovers. Not a partisan thing.
Fellow members of the radical right? Look askance at “the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.” Rather, let’s take a closer look at our natural allies, hidden in plain sight.
No, not the Proud Boys and other hooligans stoked by demagogues. These do not rightly belong to the right any more than the Antifa anarchists belong to the left. These are provocateurs and to be abjured.
The natural allies of the radical right are those of the left who, just like us, hold America good. If radical conservatives will stand united with the labor-and-ethnic left, united we stand. If not, divided we fall.
I’ve repeatedly observed that the left is not monolithic and that the labor left and ethnic left have more in common with us conservatives than they do with progressives. I’ve advocated this proposition over many years, here, as well as (partial list) at such center-right venues as Forbes.com, The Economic Standard, at Townhall, Western Journal, and The American Spectator, and my weekly column at Newsmax. Trump’s electoral inroads with workers and people of color evidences its veracity.
And yet the conservative movement, and the GOP, remain slow to grasp the implications. Not for nothing is the GOP called, as a widespread in-joke among conservatives, the Stupid Party.
The labor-and-ethnic left is conservative in most of what matters most to most conservatives: law-abiding, hard-working, traditional values, religiously observant, patriotic. Most of the labor-and-ethnic left holds America to be good. Not perfect, but good. The rank-and-file left doesn’t fancy the wokester jokesters and their cancel culture any more than we do.
They care about jobs, economic security and earned upward mobility. So should we.
It’s challenging for innocent readers, working-and-middle-class political outsiders, to detect the chasm between the labor-and-ethnic left and the progressives, between the proletariat and the commentariat. That chasm is real. It’s important.
The commentariat, the progressives, are the loudest, yet perhaps the smallest, faction of the Democratic Party. The media paints progressives as the leaders of the left, blinding innocent civilians to the human terrain. Meanwhile, the right tends to be blind to our natural allies and tone deaf to their legitimate concerns, concerns which are very much in accord with the philosophy of most conservatives.
The evidence that the left is not monolithic, philosophically or politically, is vivid. Many, prominent, “well-fed-Left”, presidential aspirants in the recent Democratic primaries, including some billionaires and political celebrities glorified by a progressive media, went down to stunning defeat in the Democratic presidential primaries.
These formidable figures lost by catering to the Democrats’ progressive faction (as overrepresented in the elite media). Sayonara, Beto!
Articulate progressives, with their passions about anthropogenic climate change, obsession with intersectionality, and criticism of America as irredeemably racist, sexist and misogynistic, dominate the elite bastions of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the white-collar professions, academia (the left’s version of the Republican country clubs), and, most perniciously, the elite media.
The progs hog the spotlight.
And yet, notwithstanding the myriad puff pieces devoted to the progressive doyennes, and some monstrously lavish spending, the outspent, unassuming, down-to-earth labor-left-leaning Joe Biden handily routed all the elite left’s political darlings. Biden spoke to the aspirations of workers to earn middle class economic security and creature comforts.
For all the sound and fury signifying nothing generated by the media, paid and earned, the actual voters nominated, then elected, Joe Biden. Not his progressive rivals.
The progressives have an Achilles heel. Their claim to legitimacy is based on the false narrative that progressives are the legitimate representatives of working people. This is obviously untrue. That is, it is self-evidently untrue to everyone except the progressive faction (including the media elite) itself.
Yes, progressives duly pay lip service to the interests of workers. Yet in practice progressives prioritize obscure issues in preference to the ones real workers care about. Progressives talk the proletariat talk. Then walk the commentariat walk.
Furthermore, progressives rarely advance flesh-and-blood blue-collars into positions of elite leadership. They typically assign their sinecures to members of their own in-crowd.
There’s a word for this: cronyism. That does not go unnoticed. Except, of course, by the elite progressives.
Now, (per their own Daily Kos) with the progressives’ “unmitigated catastrophe” at the ballot box last November, a Rebel Alliance of the rank-and-file labor-and-ethnic left is striking back. How did I discover this hidden-in-plain-sight fact?
I, a hardened guerrilla leader of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, am also a proud dues-paying, card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO. Comes now our ever-feisty friendly rival, the Teamsters. Teamsters’ Local 623 director of operations Dustin Guastella (writing for himself, not the union) at Jacobin Magazine, recently nails it in Everybody Hates the Democrats.
“Consider Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, which even the ultraliberal magazine the Atlantic chided for its “Excessive Wokeness.” Warren combined a popular economic agenda with an often-awkward attempt at courting Teen Vogue-reading radicals. This approach was admired among activists, media commentators, and some professional-class voters, but almost no one else — especially not the oppressed groups she aimed to attract. Warren came in fourth among black voters in her home state.
…
“Even the political style of the Left seems designed to turn away potential new recruits. Far from signaling a commitment to vital social causes, being “woke” has become synonymous with an embrace of niche cultural attitudes found only in highly educated urban districts and among Twitter users — 80 percent of whom are affluent millennials.
…
“After all, professional-class progressives only make up about 13 percent of the electorate, and they almost never vote for anyone other than Democrats. Alternatively, as Peter Hall and Georgina Evans show, about 22 percent of voters’ dislike cosmopolitan and increasingly out-of-touch liberal cultural appeals but believe in a progressive economic agenda — and these voters are largely working class. Winning the loyalty of the majority of working people in this country will require breaking out of the existing liberal fortresses and appealing to workers across our massive continental democracy. But pairing a popular economic program with alienating rhetoric, chic activist demands, and identity-based group appeals only weakens the possibility of doing so.”
So, says Guastella, one of the most discerning thought leaders of the labor left today.
Then … here comes the ethnic left. Typically, I employ “ethnic left” to allude to People of Color. And yet the French have an undeniable, sometimes infuriating, sometimes beguiling, ethnicity.
At the height of the #MeToo movement there came an open letter signed by a hundred courageous French women (the most celebrated of whom, Catherine Deneuve). Per The Irish Times:
“’Rape is a crime,’ the text signed by Deneuve begins. ‘But heavy-handed or clumsy come-ons are not an offence. Nor is gallantry a macho attack.’
“The letter goes on to denounce the ‘puritanism’ which seeks to ‘eternally confine women to the status of victims, of poor little things under the yoke of phallocratic demons, like in the good old days of witchcraft.’
…
“’This summary justice has already claimed victims: men punished professionally, forced to resign, when they had done nothing more than touch a knee, try to steal a kiss, spoken of ‘intimate’ things during a professional dinner or sent a sexually connoted message to a woman who was not attracted to them.’”
Fast forward three years. The semi-woke (and perpetually conflicted) New York Timessuddenly reveals how the community of French intellectuals — a formidable cultural force—have gone on the attack against cancel culture, with real impact:
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
Conrad Black, at American Greatness, says of this fresh torch of enlightenment raised beside America’s golden door against out-of-control woke leftism:
“France has shaken the world many times in its history and is frequently insouciant about the consequences of its political actions. Some of its security measures and intellectual attitudes may be too authoritarian for the advanced English-speaking countries, but the bold self-confidence of its rulers and always influential and prestigious cultural and media leaders are a model that should be useful in conducting the West out of its present profound torpor of self-doubt and self-dislike.”
The progressives are alienating their purported base, their source of pretension to legitimacy. There are ample people on the left as well as the right who love their country. In America, there are Democrats as well as Republicans who hold America to be good.
There is a natural transpartisan alliance to be forged against the axis of the nihilistic cancel culture. Now is the time for real, i.e. radical, conservatives to rise to the occasion.
Here beckons an opportunity for solidarity, for unity in putting an end to pernicious wage stagnation, the root inequity strangling the American dream for too many American workers. Wokeism is but a symptom, although an especially obnoxious one. Wage stagnation is at the root of the presenting civic toxicity that now manifests as cancel culture.
Radical? “From the root.” It is high time to root out the economic stagnation at the root of the civic, cultural, and political woe that now besets America and the world. The workers of the world are the natural leaders of the challenge to out-of-control woke leftism. Let’s welcome the leadership of the labor-and-ethnic left in the cause of cancelling cancel culture.
For us to meaningfully participate, however, we radical conservatives must get over our tone-deafness. Conservatives, to be truly conservative, must extirpate our odd hostility toward labor. Hostility toward the proletariat is not an authentic conservative stance. It perpetuates a “country club”, well-fed-Right snobbery that is profoundly anti-conservative.
And it is politically suicidal.
Two of the greatest conservative figures of the modern era, Rep. Jack Kemp and President Ronald Reagan, were union presidents. Kemp led the AFL (American Football League, not American Federation of Labor) Players association. Reagan masterfully led the Screen Actors Guild. Both fought for workers’ rights.
And one of the most iconic of union presidents, John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, founding president of the CIO, was a Republican. He was something of a supply-sider, cooperating with mine owners at adopting labor-saving technologies so long as the miners themselves meaningfully shared the ensuing profits.
If the right will follow the example of Kemp, Reagan and Lewis, repenting of its hostility to organized labor and championing the interests of workers, unionized or not, a powerful new coalition can be forged. A coalition between the labor-and-ethnic left and the radical (not hooligan) right could decisively put an end to “out of control woke leftism.”
That coalition can powerfully cancel “cancel culture”. It can also become a force to be reckoned with in restoring the founding republican ethos of the common good and neutralizing the excesses of neoliberalism.
What role could Republicans play? The New Republic editor and owner Win McCormack, in an important recent essay Meritocracy on Trial, calls for a revival of “the republican tradition in Western political thought, which stresses the common good, (counterpoised) to liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy.”
America and much of the West are in a state of civic near-paralysis and social toxicity. Nihilistic cancel culture is one pernicious symptom. The labor-and-ethnic left are now leading the way back toward civic and cultural health. They are doing so by reviving calls for the common good.
To meaningfully participate in and advance the great work Republicans now have a profound opportunity to follow the lead of the labor-and-ethnic left, rediscovering and reclaiming radical republicanism. Let us members of the radical right seize the opportunity to guide the Republicans back to real republicanism and help bend the arc of history toward justice.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
It was shamelessly ‘out there’: a celebration of impossible aspirations and dreams. It was a “virtual coming together”, as one of the organizers put it, “of the Cultural Left.” The Impossible Summit: A Global Change Agent Event, an online gathering of ‘over 50 Visionaries and Activists Reinventing our World’ – including several conservatives, such as the co-author of this article, Lawry Chickering – took place from May 20th – 25th, 2020. A second, 3-day, pre-election event streamed from October 30th to November 1st and focused on Impossible Relationships: Waking up from Being Woke and Bridging Difference to Build a Better World.
The homepage for the first gathering began with this:
Calling All Dreamers and Doers! Where do radical solutions come from? What transforms resistance into possibility? How have impossible dreams been achieved in the past? Who is achieving them today? Do you have an impossible dream of your own?
The activities brought together more than fifty visionaries, activists, and change agents; featuring keynotes, workshops, discussions, wellness activities, sharing & healing circles, and more. The objectives included articulating a core set of emergent ideas around love, responsibility, and contribution; increasing support both within and between change agent communities and the world at large; and creating new models of living, working, learning, and social engagement.
A Transpartisan Initiative
The program featured a wildly diverse collection of activists and dreamers. The list of participants said everything about the organizers’ intentions: a ‘Zoom Happening’ of radical change-makers, meeting online at the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic. A phenomenon forcing institutional change in every section and aspect of every country including the United States.
Surveying a list of participants impressionistically suggested a cross-section of the Freedom / Left: agnostic about, if not antagonistic to, rational individualism (agnostic about religious absolutes, antagonistic to industrial certainty in both industrial capitalism and industrial socialism), celebrating THE HEART in balance with if not over THE MIND. They are exuberantly DIVERSE and connected by their shared humanity, and joined in commitment to inner development as the central mechanism to check the overreach of grand, mechanistic social engineering projects aimed at changing other people.
The closing session tried to find threads connecting the Impossible Vision. The tone was of poetic dreams – ‘leading from the heart’ and ‘letting the mind follow’ – but with one theme constantly recurring: the illusion of our separation.
The challenge, hinted at but unfortunately unrealized in the discussion, is to describe a path that shows these concepts are true. They are true in avoiding political assaults on ‘the power structure’ as their primary expression. They are true, putting the point another way, for attempts to avoid changing other people, while promoting the power of changing oneself. Most participants at The Summit aimed at changing themselves – toward inner development – which sees the path to social change running through the connection of empowered, engaged people.
Success Story: Educate Girls Globally
In his presentation about Educate Girls Globally, which he founded, Lawry Chickering described EGG’s process, empowering girls oppressed by traditional male cultures to become powerful leaders, role models, and advocates for change. While the concept is impossible to achieve in mechanistic, industrial terms, EGG shows how, with inner development, empowered girls can become powerful change-makers in very difficult environments.
Girls’, themselves, make EGG’s extraordinary success possible by engaging with village elders and other traditional leaders who support them. Fathers who saw girls as weak, vulnerable, and needing masculine protection, discovered, in the equivalent of an instant, that their daughters could actually be powerful, individual forces. When empowered, these girls became a valuable asset to family, community, and nation.
Personal Experience and Engagement
The Summit explored the impact of social contact in promoting the trust that is essential for all forms of connection, powerfully showing how separation is illusory and can be overcome. Such contact shows how the heart can lead, allowing the mind to describe and validate connections in terms that describe mind-validation of visions needing proof.
In their path-breaking 2013 book Our Towns, James and Deborah Fallows share how they traveled in their private plane 100,000 miles around the U.S. and described two very different countries and political systems. In our terms set out above, one system is the connected life of local communities, featuring united cultures of people working together in common purpose, finding heart-described pathways to mind-organized programs. The other is the highly polarized culture of our national political system, which is consumed with conflict – rooted in political planning, budget, and enforcement battles – about almost everything.
These cultures display an extraordinary aspect of contemporary life; they represent more than different people fighting each other (a small part of the politics). Instead, they consist of many of the same people found in both the national and local political cultures. Why the difference?
The answer may be fairly simple: national politics has been reduced to dealing with the grand, mechanistic visions of politicians. As people, national politicians tend to be pushed away from personal contact and trusting relationships, with egos that call for accomplishing heroic things – for better or worse. Local political cultures, on the other hand, feature intense personal contact and trust, which bring people together from every walk of life and diverse cultures in common purpose, showing how people can live happily together without friction.
A second difference is that local people receive information about national politics almost entirely from national media, while information about local politics comes primarily from personal experience and engagement. While minds dominate debates on national politics, hearts are the principal actors in local venues.
The Fallowses try to imagine how the behaviors and trust governing local cultures might be imported into the toxic environment of our national politics. To use our language, the question is how transpartisan, local-cultural practices can be transferred to national politics. The answer may be suggested by this question: if girls can be empowered to play strong leadership roles in traditional parts of rural India, why can’t personally-engaged, American citizens be empowered to play strong roles in national politics? Why can we not learn from successful experiences like EGG?
“Let’s complete one another instead of compete with each other.” What if we all could just get along despite our differences? What if we could agree to disagree but still find enough common ground to be innovative and pioneering? Even be forgiving so that we could heal and move forward?
One panel on this theme focused on ‘Unpacking the Cult of Righteousness: Claiming Our Own Sovereignty and Recognizing Our Roles in Perpetuating Polarity, Dominance, and Hierarchy’. Another looked at ‘Bridging Political Differences: Turning an Adversary into an Ally’, examining especially constructive engagement and solution-oriented politics.
From our Transpartisan observation point we would edit these titles by underscoring and emphasizing ‘ … Our Roles in Perpetuating Polarity, Dominance, and Hierarchy’ and ‘… Recognizing an Adversary as an Ally’. Transpartisan rests on the observation that the social and political currents of our culture flow beneath our institutions. Where our institutions lack congruence with our social and political currents, they fray and begin to disintegrate. How we respond, and with what intensity, determines how well these institutions are able to reorganize toward renewal and revival.
We see the contemporary social and political currents swirling around us as a massive surge of individual empowerment, driven by new information technologies and advancing demands for individual empowerment and self-expression. This trend toward individualism is straining the consensus and cohesion reinforcing every social institution. Another panel looked at ‘Bridging Political Differences: Turning an Adversary into an Ally’ or, as we would say, recognizing an apparent adversary as an actual ally focused on valuing viewpoint diversity, constructive engagement, and solution-oriented politics.
Reality of Connection vs. Illusion of Separation
We believe that everyone interested in particular issues has something to contribute to the resolution of those issues. Such recognition was important for the final panel at the conference which explored how people can develop new and empowered relationships with issues or people that scare them. People become frightened, we believe, in different ways, and each individual experience can contribute to taming the fear.
The final session struggled with the issue of emphasizing the heart over the mind – overcoming the ‘illusion of separation’ – because it failed to successfully address the issue of promoting the personal engagement that brings people together in trust. We believe the Transpartisan process, grounded in the Transpartisan Political Matrix – order right and left; freedom right and left – provides important initial steps toward building that trust.
The crucial element the Matrix addresses is in relationships that combine collective purpose and shared ownership. One can see how these elements are strongly present in schools; in shared community / police responsibility for law enforcement; in community health centers (including drug and alcohol rehab); in public housing projects; and in similar areas applied in other, hostile countries on behalf of foreign and security policy.
In this case, we would advocate heart and mind together rather than choosing a hierarchical relationship between them. We are comfortable avoiding the ‘illusion of separation’ by highlighting the reality of connection.
We believe the vast majority of the voting eligible public – 70% of which do not formally align with either of our major political parties – know that heart and mind interact with each other and the reality of connection overrides the ‘illusion of separation’ without necessarily articulating that knowledge, just as they know the force of gravity even if they cannot explain the laws of thermodynamics.
The objectives of building trust, integrating heart and mind, and welcoming the reality of connection in place of the ‘illusion of separation’ depend on empowering citizens locally, nationally, and globally around institutions that intimately affect their lives: in shared ownership of public schools; in shared responsibility for law enforcement between individuals, communities and the police; and in community-based initiatives promoting health, housing, food, and all other essentials of happy, humane living.
In foreign and security policy; shared community drug programs; and race, gender, and ethnic integration, examples exist of empowering citizens in self-governing initiatives building freedoms and liberty in democratic institutions across partisan political orthodoxies. While the general belief that most ordinary people don’t want to participate in civil programs often persist, real experiences in many countries, including dramatic examples in the United States, suggest otherwise when programs focus on issues of intense interest (see EGG example above).
We think that, if presented in a transpartisan way, appealing across the orthodox political spectrum within the Transpartisan Matrix, a radical movement coming from the Freedom / Left quadrant of the Matrix could play a strong leadership role. Furthermore, it could help empower citizens, formal and de facto, from the Freedom / Left and act as a model of integration with people occupying positions in the other three quadrants. On many issues, integration of the four quadrants can play, and is playing, a role that would not only bring diverse people together, but would also contribute to solving many problems that central governments have shown consistently they cannot solve.
The 70% of the voting-eligible, American public struggling to be heard recognizes that intense emotional fights between partisan Republicans and Democrats does little to better the lives of individuals living in the United Sates. The transpartisan impulse animating the Freedom / Left Impossible Summit offers one path to better living through empowered citizens.
Billionaire donors and political adversaries are laying down arms and joining forces
by A. Lawrence Chickering & James S. Turner
On April 24, the day the U.S. death toll from coronavirus topped 50,000, a dozen billionaire political donors gathered by video with business leaders, foundation chiefs, scientists, advocates, and political strategists, and laid out a bold plan called IN THIS TOGETHER, to transform the business of politics in post-COVID America.
The group was convened by Dallas real estate scion Trammell S. Crow to bring together major donors to both parties, in a rare effort to reduce political polarization and work across partisan lines to solve problems like climate change. These donors and their peers are expected to contribute $30 billion to presidential campaigns this year, often against each other, in a political arms race that shows no signs of abating. Crow’s objective: to reduce the spend on political warfare, and redirect billions toward solutions that can unite a governing majority of Americans from the left to right.
“We can’t meet this crisis or any future one as a divided nation,” Crow reminded his guests. “We’re not enemies. We’re a family with differences to work through. Polarization is our real enemy.”
For ten years, Crow and other high net worth donors in the virtual room had independently invested well over $100 million to help reunite Americans on issues like the environment, education, and democracy reform. Most of the time, they failed – polarization and gridlock are built too deep in today’s politics and media. Sometimes they succeed – spectacularly.
But at this April 24 meeting, two sets of donors reported on successful models they had separately developed to win elections and advance causes, not by dividing Americans into polarized silos on the far left and right, but by helping them unite across the broad mainstream where 70%+ of the Constitutionally defined American electorate resides.
Their strategies mark a departure from politics-as-usual, where strategists target easy-to-trigger voters at the extreme ends of the spectrum, then add on less strident supporters who are more repelled by the other side’s extremists than their own.
Digital media and big data have intensified the divide. By identifying the biggest fears and deepest prejudices of specific voter segments, strategists can trigger such repulsion at one candidate that voters will readily support the lesser of two evils. That drives turnout among hardened ideologues. But it divides and marginalizes the 70% broad middle – the 7 in 10 voters who are partisan but pragmatic. Most strategists discount them because they are less dogmatic and harder to trigger than those with fixed opinions. It’s simply more cost-effective to motivate the hard-core left to vote down the hard-core right, and vice-versa. Even if they’re frustrated with their own standard-bearers, there’s no question which party’s candidate they’ll vote for.
That strategy drives revenue for pollsters, messagers, and strategists on both sides. But it accelerates a political arms race that is driving campaign costs to astronomical heights.
More worrisome, it undermines those who would rather solve problems than sow discord. It elects candidates beholden to vested interests for dollars and true-believers for votes. Constrained by these two forces, it’s practically impossible for them to legislate. Bipartisan agreements are mostly off the table. Politicians must speak to a base that demands change, while they act to protect a status quo that likes things much as they are.
That makes genuine problem-solving difficult. Evidence-based reform – say, protecting climate, improving schools, or preventing pandemics – requires massive investments by foundations and individual donors willing to outbid the interest groups and offset the ideologues just to get a fair hearing.
But in California, one set of donors has taken a different approach. In campaigns for candidates and ballot measures, they don’t use trigger language or fear tactics to activate a narrow ideological base. Instead, they reach out to eight definable voter segments they call Solution Voters and focus on linking them together on common ground. In highly competitive races, the approach consistently draws at least 15% of once-partisan voters across party lines to elect problem-solvers over polarizers – an almost unheard-of shift.
The strategy helped pass ballot measures to end gerrymandering and open primaries in California, and was essential to the bipartisan agreement that renewed the state’s cap-and-trade climate law, despite intense opposition from ideologues on both sides.
At more than twice the cost of triggering ideologues, Solution Voters used to be expensive to identify and mobilize. But “big data” is changing that. With sophisticated predictive modeling, strategists can identify Solution Voters with 87% accuracy. By reaching a few thousand in a competitive district, they have defeated better-funded but more polarizing candidates.
To take that capacity national, a second set of donors have built a database platform to mobilize voters they call “bridge-builders” and “problem-solvers.” Called Citizen, the database platform includes 270 million Americans, including all 240 million eligible voters, plus 30 million additional influencers. Citizen’s funders plan to mobilize Solution Voters to swing primaries away from polarizers so that when voters mark their ballots in the general election they have at least two problem-solving candidates to choose from.
At the April 24 roundtable, these two donor communities and others joined forces to take their approach national. This Fourth of July, they will launch a cross-partisan recruitment campaign called In This Together. Their audience includes 98 million voters dissatisfied with both parties – especially 45 million bridge-builders and 14 million problem-solvers. By growing a new base of Solution Citizens resistant to ideological litmus tests and interest group manipulation, they hope this new business model will elevate politics and shift influence to the broad 70% base of voters ready to get things done.
Crow doesn’t fit the stereotype for a wealthy Texas political donor. He calls himself an “endangered species:” a Republican environmentalist. His biggest passion is EarthX. Now the world’s largest environmental exhibition on the planet, EarthX is held each Earth Day in Dallas. Crow had planned his biggest EarthX yet this year for the fiftieth Earth Day. He wanted to prove that conservative middle Americans love the planet just as much as coastal progressives.
Then came COVID-19.
Crow sees the pandemic through an ecological lens, as a warning sign of what happens when the planet’s life support systems are strained by the global economy that is too uniform, tightly-connected, and consumptive. Without the diversity to stop global contagions – biological, environmental, and digital – humanity can’t last long.
“The virus is a lesson from nature,” Crow and his coauthor, Bill Shireman, write in their book, In This Together. “If we ignore the lesson and double-down on mass global consumerism, we will lose our prosperity and miss our chance to step forward into a richer, more diverse, resilient, and lasting civilization.”
In This Together launches on Independence Day July 4, with the book, online videos, social media campaign, and a Declaration of Interdependence that recognizes the importance of combining the best qualities of the political right and left to tackle causes ranging from COVID and climate change, to education and justice reform, to prosperity and job creation.
The 70% that do not register as either Democrats or Republicans make their political statement in a voice so scattered that political leaders do not, or pretend to not, hear it. In This Together offers an opportunity for that voice to be focused and heard.
We see In This Together as a powerful transpartisan initiative with a significant possibility to influence events. We plan to watch it carefully and report on its progress between now and inauguration day 2021.
Godzilla vs King Kong, Trump vs. the Left’s Leviathan?
by Ralph Benko
Hollywood is remaking King Kong vs Godzilla. It’s scheduled for release soon after election day. Per the studios’ breathless teaser:
In a time when monsters walk the Earth, humanity’s fight for its future sets Godzilla and Kong on a collision course that will see the two most powerful forces of nature on the planet collide in a spectacular battle for the ages.
Could there be a better metaphor for Politics 2020?
There’s a rich antecedent to Godzilla. The Bible names the Sea Monster Leviathan.
There’s a political history as well. Thomas Hobbes gave us Leviathan.
We also find Leviathan rhapsodized at the heart of Herman Melville’sMoby Dick, the great American novel. Melville:
Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?
Leviathan.
Breathless then.
Breathless now.
Our politicos and pundits now set their phasers to “kill” rather than “stun.” Why? Because the stakes are high.
Yet our pundits are failing to convincingly elucidate why.
Let’s help them out.
Michael Bloomberg justified his entry into the 2020 presidential race by calling Donald Trump an “existential threat.”
Trump indeed is just that!
But for which of two diametrically opposed reasons?
From the day that America declared itself independent it embraced one political philosophy. It rejected another.
Is Trump an existential threat to our charter of liberty?
Or is he an existential threat to the enemies of liberty?
Jefferson, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, held among the self-evident truths, “that … Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
“The consent of the governed.”
This holds that we have rights derived from Nature (or Nature’s God).
Not privileges bestowed (or withheld) by a ruler.
The “consent of the governed” alludes to the philosophy of John Locke, the founding father of the philosophy of classical liberal (as in liberty) republicanism. America’s founders uniformly embraced the kind of liberal republicanism pioneered by Locke.
Among Locke’s political works he is most famous for The Second Treatise of Government in which he argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights.
So. What was the other, the spurned, path?
Absolutism.
The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes … is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.
The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse.
In Leviathan, Hobbes declaimed nature to be “no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s dyspeptic view called for absolute obedience to a supreme ruler to avoid dystopia.
President Trump seems to cheerfully assume his political supremacy is right and natural. He reacts as if any show of independence from his will or whim is an act of lèse-majesté.
Trump thus presents as a manifestation of a Hobbesian absolutism.
If so, yes, that could be an existential threat to the country.
But there’s a twist.
Trump presents not as an existential threat to liberty. (Serious absolutism requires a greater attention span than is in evidence.) Trump presents as, more likely, an antidote to the challenge to liberal republicanism by the older, sinister, Leviathanic force:
Leninism now d/b/a “progressives.”
We observe a battle for existential legitimacy between two implacably opposed political philosophies. One is small government liberal republicanism. The other is Big Government absolutism.
Legitimacy is the strongest force in politics. The Democrats sensing an existential threat to their own political legitimacy have been determined to delegitimize Trump by any means possible.
The fight now under way – in the capital and the media – as a battle for legitimacy trumps the otherwise trivial wrangle over the president’s disposition, competence, and overblown charges of misbehavior and collusion. And better explains the intensity.
The existential battle appears to be between liberal republicanism and absolutism. The highest of stakes. The prevailing erudite hypothesis, that it’s about the Outsiders vs. the Insiders, populism vs. elitism, is penny ante by comparison.
How could it be that Trump could be a force for liberty? Isn’t Trump’s attitude of personal supremacy antithetical to the ideal of a liberal republic? Classical liberal republicanism had a great, vast, worldwide run especially from 1945 until fairly recently. It worked brilliantly as a force for human flourishing.
Is there a resurgence of Hobbesian absolutism from both left and right? (Hobbes portrait by J.M. Wright.)
Is it over? Is there a resurgence of Hobbesian absolutism from both left and right? Is this a pause in the course of America’s exporting the “Empire of Liberty”? Or are we encountering a secular reversal of the liberal republicanism tide and an incoming tide of absolutism?
I believe that the rise of absolutist forces is a reaction to the coy totalitarianism of the left. The left’s relentless push for the primacy of “government at every level” has grown more virulent since the days of the dreadful Woodrow Wilson or the rascally FDR.
Add to the forces of Big Government social media thought-policing, cancel culture, and the bigotry that is leading to the persecution of bakers and florists for their religious creed. The left was out to stamp out liberal republicanism and replace it with a strange new, totalitarian, cultural hegemony. Trump confounded them.
Progressives have carried on a sustained and alarmingly successful “long march through the institutions.” The left’s purpose is to impose its brave new, totalitarian cultural hegemony on us.
The left desires to replace the extant Judeo-Christian classical liberal republicanism cultural hegemony. It made big gains.
Then the electorate fielded a wildly improbable Leviathan of its own, Donald Trump, to fight fire with fire.
Trump proved improbably effective, if not consistently dignified, in thwarting the left’s grab for absolute power. As TIME covered him, “a wrecking ball.” Trump taking down the monstrous state.
This seems to me analogous to how the United States of America grew its tiny federal government to gargantuan proportions a century ago. Big Government was not as an end unto itself. Our citizens conjured a Leviathan to fight even more gargantuan, grotesque, regimes: imperialistic, fascist, communist. We won.
Upon winning, Hobbes’s sly apostles, who had taken up residence in government agencies — Democrats on the civilian side, Republicans on the military side — kept this new Leviathan central government well fed. And then….
How will this epic epoch end?
The emergence of a seemingly Hobbesian force in the cradle of classical liberty seems a paradoxical counterpunch to the left’s relentless, veiled, quest for absolute power. And a good strong counterpunch it proved although esthetically marred by irritability and dodgy etiquette.
Trump’s Hobbesian quality thus presents as neither interregnum nor trend. It is, rather, a political counterfire set by a determined electorate to cancel out the political forest fire threatening to burn liberal republicanism to the ground.
So. Which of the two existential threats is Donald Trump?
Must we send a scout to check St. John the Baptist cemetery in Derbyshire, England where Hobbes’s remains are interred. Spinning in his grave? That would augur that Trump is an anti-absolutist force.
To save plane fare we could instead judge Trump by his enemies.
Once Trump-as-Leviathan has served the electorate’s purpose — countering the left’s far more pernicious Leviathan — politics will settle down. The American electorate remains classical liberal republican.
Absolutists of various stripes, left and right, are always with us. They are a malcontent minority. Not a dominant faction.
Thus, I predict that America will return to its vital liberal republican roots.
On November 3rd we will be shown a spectacle “that will see the two most powerful forces of nature on the planet collide in a spectacular battle for the ages.” Pass the popcorn!
Then, a little over two weeks later, we’ll go out to watch Godzilla vs.King Kong.
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
(Featured Image (CC BY-SA 2.0) – Wikimedia Commons. Other images sourced from the public domain.)
Anthony P. Picadio, picadio@icloud.com, is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and an Allegheny County Member of the Pennsylvania Bar. He is a former Assistant Attorney General of Pennsylvania. He is a founder of the Pittsburgh firm Picadio Sneath Miller and Norton which, effective January 2018, was merged into the Pittsburgh firm Houston Harbaugh.
“The virus is a lesson from nature,” Crow and his coauthor, Bill Shireman, write in their book, 
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