Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

2024

Long War

IF NOT INHERENTLY THEN INEVITABLY:

Are All Ideologies Evil? (Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg, August 15th, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)

According to Merriam Webster ideology is “1: visionary theorizing 2a: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.” If we limit ourselves to the shallow dictionary definition, it may serve our purpose in drawing reasonably sound inferences about the nature of ideology.

But perhaps we can attempt to narrow the definition a little more so that we may end with a foundation of clarity upon which to build a coherent conclusion. George Marlen states that “ideology is an intellectual system of ideas or rigid abstract formulas mixed with scientific jargon and some empirical facts that claims knowledge about reaching perfection in the temporal order.”

If one believes in the perfectability of Man and his institutions, one eventually ends up blaming, and then punishing, people when they fail to live up to the belief. It’s why the Continent’s various Reason based -isms always descend into mass murder.

MORE:

What Can We Learn from Michael Oakeshott’s Effort to Understand Our World? (Timothy Fuller) [PDF]

Ideologies promise thatwe can escape the world we have inherited. Proponents of ideologies can sometimes persuade others thatthey have escaped this limitation. They can rename the Tower of Babel and vary its architectural nuances.They can attempt to pursue perfection as the crow flies. They can also become cynical graspers after powerfor its own sake. What, finally, they cannot do is to fend off the reassertion of the human condition as it hasalways been. 


Fortunately, the death of false ideas is not identical to the death of the human spirit. It arises from its own ashes. Nevertheless, it would be to the good to avoid recipes for the production of ash heaps where possible. Sensible politicians will do so. Philosophers cannot produce sensible politicians, but they can be irritating reminders of the limits of politics. Philosophers might notice sensible politicians and speak their praises simply by describing them. In so doing, they perform a not altogether useless task. Their task is to understand why the world is the way it is, not to postulate a program to liberate us into a world beyond change or to reach the end of history. 


Political philosophers in a special sense are thus of a conservative disposition  

One Economy to Rule Them All

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

The great wealth wave (Daniel Waldenström, 8/16/24, Aeon)


Recent decades have seen private wealth multiply around the Western world, making us richer than ever before. A hasty glance at the soaring number of billionaires – some doubling as international celebrities – prompts the question: are we also living in a time of unparalleled wealth inequality? Influential scholars have argued that indeed we are. Their narrative of a new gilded age paints wealth as an instrument of power and inequality. The 19th-century era with low taxes and minimal market regulation allowed for unchecked capital accumulation and then, in the 20th century, the two world wars and progressive taxation policies diminished the fortunes of the wealthy and reduced wealth gaps. Since 1980, the orthodoxy continues, a wave of market-friendly policies reversed this equalising historical trend, boosting capital values and sending wealth inequality back towards historic highs.

The trouble with the powerful new orthodoxy that tries to explain the history of wealth is that it doesn’t fully square with reality. New research studies, and more careful inspection of the previous historical data, paint a picture where the main catalysts for wealth equalisation are neither the devastations of war nor progressive tax regimes. War and progressive taxation have had influence, but they cannot count as the main forces that led to wealth inequality falling dramatically over the past century. The real influences are instead the expansion from below of asset ownership among everyday citizens, constituted by the rise of homeownership and pension savings. This popular ownership movement was made possible by institutional changes, most important democracy, and followed suit by educational reforms and labour laws, and the technological advancements lifting everyone’s income. As a result, workers became more productive and better paid, which allowed them to get mortgages to purchase their own homes; homeownership rates soared in the West from the middle of the century. As standards of living improved, life spans increased so that people started saving for retirement, accumulating another important popular asset.

Health

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Hard-to-treat traumas and painful memories may be treatable with EMDR – a trauma therapist explains why it is gaining popularity (Laurel Niep, 8/16/24, The Conversation)


Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing was developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro after she discovered that moving her eyes from her left foot to her right as she walked – in other words, tracking her feet with each step – resulted in lower levels of negative emotions connected with difficult memories, both from the more recent frustrations of the day and deeper events from her past.

Conventional treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, rely on extensive verbal processing to address a client’s symptoms and struggles. Such therapy may take months or even years.

Depending on the trauma, EMDR can take months or years too – but generally, it resolves issues much more quickly and effectively. It is effective for both adults and children, and can be done remotely.

Any distracxtion works.

Republican Liberty

MOJO VS ADMINISTRATIVE LAW:

The Original President (Garry Wills, 8/15/24, Mother Jones)

The originators of our government said that “We the People” are our country’s sovereign power. That is why the legislators, as the representatives of the people, are the only ones authorized to make law or make war. As James Madison said in Federalist 51, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” The executive power, as the name indicates, just executes the law—or the war, or the policy—given it by the legislators.

Amen, brother.

Identitarianism Republican Liberty

IT IS THE “ALL MEN” THAT THE rIGHT FINDS INTOLERABLE:

A Constitutional Republic, If You Can Keep It (Michael Liss, 8/13/24, 3Quarks)

The principles of Jefferson are the definition and axioms of free society…. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. —Abraham Lincoln, April 6, 1859 Letter to Henry L. Pierce and others. […]

Just exactly what is the “U.S. Democracy” that may not prevail? Before we go further, we ought to get some nomenclature misunderstandings out of the way. Let’s introduce Democracy’s cousin, the “Constitutional Republic.” Yes, we live in a Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy. No, that’s not a concluding and conclusive argument any time someone wants to make government more representative, more answerable to the voters, or less beholden to privilege. Opponents of change who invoke the phrase “mob rule” just highlight the fact that what’s at stake isn’t high principle, but rather a desire to “supplant[] the principles of free government, and restor[e] those of classification, caste and legitimacy.”

Identitarianism Long War

MAGA IS CONTINENTAL, NOT ANGLOSPHERIC:

Is the Far Right Channeling German Theorist Carl Schmitt’s Divisive Script?: The pro-Nazi political philosopher predicted the crisis of liberal democracy and would have enjoyed watching it struggle (Zack Beauchamp, Aug 13, 2024, The UnPopulist)

A government is “democratic,” Schmitt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people’s will. But this depends on how you define the “people” and choose to assess their “will.” Every democracy depends on excluding some people, most notably foreigners, from participating in the selection of its leaders; that means, by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before the law. Instead, the idea of “equality” in democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements.

“There has never been a democracy that did not recognize the concept ‘foreign’ and that could have realized the equality of all men,” he wrote in a 1926 preface to the second edition of Crisis. “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”

The false notion of universal equality, Schmitt argues, is a liberal concept rather than a democratic one—and “modern mass democracy rests on the confused combination of both.” Politics, for Schmitt, is primarily and essentially about defining who is a “friend” (inside the political community) and who is an “enemy” (outside of it and, thus, a potential target for violence). Democracy is no exception to this general rule, meaning that in practice it will necessarily come into conflict with liberalism—which seeks to supplant conflict and exclusion, the true essences of politics, with impossible attempts at universality. This tension is the source of the “crisis” in his book’s title: though democracy was ideologically triumphant in the interwar period, its ascendancy is forcing its leaders and citizens to grapple with the ways in which actual political life is at odds with its liberal ideals.

People get awfully worked up when conservatives differentiate a republic from a democracy, but you can see here why we valorize the former and abhor the latter. Republican liberty requires equal treatment under law.

Film/TV

WON’T COP OUT:

Shaft: Power Moves (Amy Abugo Ongiri, Jun 21, 2022, Criterion)

Shaft would be a different and more confrontational kind of project than Parks’s earlier work. He had been hired by MGM to bring Ernest Tidyman’s 1970 detective novel of the same name to the screen. Tidyman, who was white, himself had been commissioned to write the novel by Ronald Hobbs, one of very few African American literary agents working at the time, and the book contains many of the elements of Parks’s film in its commitment to the urban milieu of New York City and to creating the character of John Shaft as a strong, independent African American man. The studio had originally wanted to revise Tidyman’s novel to make the characters white, but Parks insisted on not only casting the character of Shaft as African American but also emphasizing and enhancing the Black cultural aspects of the novel.

Parks famously wanted to create a film that would allow audiences “to see the Black guy winning.” As modest an ambition as this may seem by today’s standards, it was shockingly bold in 1971, when positive images of African Americans in visual culture were virtually nonexistent. Hollywood had gently stepped into the terrain of Black representation with stars like Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, but the roles that they were offered were constrained at best and insulting at worst. With Shaft, Parks would deliver something unlike anything that Hollywood had seen before: a Black superhero.

Law/Crime

BREAK THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE:

How Many Laws Did You Break Today?: REVIEW: ‘Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law’ by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze (Ilya Shapiro, August 11, 2024, Free Beacon)

Over Ruled pithily describes true rule of law as requiring “laws that are publicly declared, knowable to ordinary people, and stable.” To flesh this out a bit, the rule of law is a principle of governance whereby all people and institutions—including the government—are accountable to laws, not personal authority. These laws have to be publicly passed by a representative body; enforced equally through robust legal processes by enforcement organs that themselves follow the law; and reviewed, interpreted, and applied by an independent judiciary.

In other words, the rule of law exists when people are secure in their persons and property; the state is itself bound by the law and doesn’t act arbitrarily; and everyone can rely on legal institutions and the content of the law to plan their personal and business affairs.

Three trends have threatened the rule of law in America: (1) the growth of government—the authors note that the Eisenhower Executive Office Building once housed the State, Navy, and War departments but now can’t even hold all the White House staff, and that three million civilians work for the federal government; (2) the growth of federal laws—such that lobbying the federal government has grown from $40 million to $4 billion in the last half-century; and (3) a bureaucratic explosion—such that in 2015, for example, Congress adopted 100 laws but federal agencies issued 3,242 final rules and 2,285 proposed rules. On the latter point, Gorsuch and Nitze describe a Pacific Legal Foundation report finding that “71 percent of the nearly 3,000 rules issued by the Department of Health and Human Services between 2001 and 2017 were issued by lower-level officials rather than Senate-confirmed agency leaders; at the Food and Drug Administration the figure was 98 percent.”

People’s lives have been turned upside down by a centralization and expansion of government that ultimately can’t keep track of what it’s doing across its range of regulatory machinery. Over Ruled presents detail upon detail of ordinary citizens ensnared in nonsensical regulatory webs that in practice are little different from capriciously applied secret laws, just without the late-night knock on the door leading to a basement torture chamber. Not because the regulators and their enforcement agents are sadistic or power-hungry—though public choice theory makes clear the incentives to increase authority and budgets—but because the governing apparatus has grown too unwieldy. The deep state doesn’t know what the deeper state is doing!

And that’s before we even get to criminal law. As civil libertarian lawyer Harvey Silverglate famously posited, the average American commits three felonies a day. Gorsuch and Nitze have a chapter on such overcriminalization.

Republican Liberty

THE PEOPLE OF HUME:

My Liberal Faith: The beginning of wisdom is neither the sum nor the end of it (Bret Stephens, August 12, 2024, Sapir)

What is a liberal faith? There are specifically political ways of addressing that question — that is, faith in a liberal order that puts the protection of individual liberty, conscience, and initiative at the center of its concerns. That’s a faith I share, even if I don’t subscribe to the more common understanding of “liberalism” as a program of big-government responses to economic and social problems.

But what I’m writing about here is something more personal: liberal without the “ism.” This is liberal as an attitude toward life; an openness to new ideas and different ways of being; a readiness to accept doubt, ambiguity, uncertainty, and contradiction; an ability to hold a conviction while occasionally allowing it to be shaken; a right to change your mind and reinvent yourself. It is the belief that, at its best, a liberal faith can be a more honest, interesting, and rewarding approach to life than alternatives based in tradition, dogma, or ideology.

Conservative Thought

THEY’RE STUCK ON REASON:

The Trust Trap: Greater public faith in elite institutions requires evidence of restraint, not just of competence (Yuval Levin, August 11, 2024, Sapir)

In 1970, in what may well have been the best of his many landmark essays, Irving Kristol took up this peculiar challenge of legitimacy. “The results of the political process and of the exercise of individual freedom — the distribution of power, privilege, and property — must also be seen as in some profound sense expressive of the values that govern the lives of individuals,” Kristol wrote. If elites hold power or privilege for reasons that most of their fellow citizens don’t consider adequate, the entire society will lose respect for the rules by which it says it lives.

Not many would enjoy living in such a society. It would feel not only unequal but also unfree. “People feel free when they subscribe to a prevailing social philosophy; they feel unfree when the prevailing social philosophy is unpersuasive; and the existence of constitutions or laws or judiciaries have precious little to do with these basic feelings,” Kristol concluded. The principles according to which our elites exercise power must somehow be, as he put it, persuasive.

So how do our own elites now justify their status and that of the institutions they lead? Implicitly, without ever quite articulating it, they tend to fall upon a mix of technocratic credentials and progressive high-mindedness. This broadly describes the self-image of the unusually cohesive elite class that now runs most of our major institutions. Its members (at least most of them) earned their places by demonstrating a peculiar sort of merit — through admission to a selective university, followed by various honors, certifications, rites of passage, jobs, and stamps of approval that signify competence.

This is a cold and almost clinical standard of worth, but the nagging guilty feeling that it may not be a sufficient rationale for status and authority is then allayed by a kind of secondhand atonement — a ritual acknowledgement of the sins of others that played a part in creating today’s conditions of inequality. This might entail, for instance, naming the privilege that results from the inegalitarianism of prior generations or naming the Native American tribes that once occupied the lands we now possess.

The bizarre intensity with which such rituals are enforced sometimes feels like the working out of an authoritarian instinct, but it is at least as much a function of the depth of the guilt they are meant to placate. And if, after all that proof of formal qualifications and moral purity, the public is still skeptical of elites, then their skepticism is presumed to result from the failure of ordinary people to value rational competence, or from their bigotry or small mindedness. What else could explain it?

Their failure to ever reckon with the dubious foundation of their belief system leaves them overconfident in an ideology most in the Anglosphere have long rejected.

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