Republican Liberty

SOLA SCRIPTURA:

Reel in the Agencies (Patrick Pullis, Apr 05 2024, City Journal)

The Chevron deference principle implicated in Loper stems from a landmark Supreme Court decision in Chevron USA, Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984). The ruling empowered administrative agencies, absent direct congressional guidance, to interpret federal statutes, provided that courts did not deem their interpretation “unreasonable.” Subsequent decisions narrowed the scope of agencies’ power to interpret federal law, but bureaucrats still wield significant influence in the rulemaking process. […]

If the Court allows the NMFS rule to stand, agencies will be emboldened to interpret statutes without regard for the costs or regulatory burden their rules impose on private businesses. Such overreach typically bothers libertarian-minded conservatives, but should also worry progressives, who typically support the administrative state.

Imagine, for example, that Donald Trump wins the 2024 election and wants to use federal power to crack down on ESG-based investment funds for failing to act in accord with their fiduciary duties. If Loper is not struck down, the Court would effectively give the Securities and Exchange Commission the green light not only to regulate these funds more closely but also to require them to pay for the potentially high costs associated with those regulations. Those progressives who advocate upholding the rule in Loper would be wise to consider how it could be used against them when the executive is controlled by a Republican president.

To avoid such scenarios, the Supreme Court should strike down Loper.

The Executive is not the Legislative.

REPUBLICAN LIBERTY DETERMINES THE COMMON GOOD:

Raymond Aron’s Liberal Virtues (Paul T. Wilford, Ethan Cutler, Mar 01 2024, City Journal)

Liberal democracy stakes its claim to justice on securing individual liberty for each by granting legal and political equality to all. […]

At the heart of Aron’s lecture is a penetrating threefold distinction among kinds of liberties—the personal, the political, and the social—that he employs to correct the abstract thinking that keeps us from recognizing, and thus from making good use of, the rights we already enjoy.

Aron elaborates his typology of liberties beginning with personal liberties, which he defines as the protection of individuals from various forms of coercion. Among them are freedom of movement, choice of employment, and freedom of conscience, which, in increasingly secular societies, has grown from religious liberty to include the freedom to express differing political ideologies—even those that are illiberal or anti-liberal. Such guarantees of personal independence are complemented by the political liberties that assure citizens the possibility of active participation in the political process, which “may be summed up by three words: voting, protesting, and assembling.” Mediating between the personal and the political are the social liberties, which depend immediately on material welfare without directly involving either political participation or freedom from coercion. These include the aims of the welfare state, such as “the liberty of being cared for, or that of being educated,” as well as the freedom of groups (such as unions) to organize for their interests within civil society. This final kind of liberty mitigates the socioeconomic inequalities that are a necessary consequence of equality before the law.

If Aron’s stress on the reality of individual liberty indicates his distance from the Left, his defense of forms of collective liberty distinguishes him from the libertarian Right. But Aron cannot be pinned on such a spectrum––not even in its center—because each position on it prizes a particular kind of liberty above others, which is just what he avoids. When liberal democracies are at their best, Aron observes, personal, political, and social liberties counterbalance rather than subsume one another. Liberal regimes flourish, he maintains, when personal, social, and political liberties check and balance one another; they decay when just one form of liberty is considered the true end of political life, rendering the others mere means.

THE LONG GOODNESS:

Virtue in the Age of Neo-Machiavellianism: a review of Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena by James Hankins (Reviewed by Jesse Russell, 3/10/24, University Bookman)

One of the strongest currents in American literature and film is the interlacement between hard boiled detective novels and film noir. With such literary figures as Raymond Chandler and the more recent (perhaps too risqué) James Ellroy as well as such classic films as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Third Man (1949), the bleak world of noir revealed the allegedly corrupt underbelly of the American century. Noir is, of course, one of Machiavelli’s (and St. Augustine of Hippo’s) misguided offspring. But film noir, like all works in the Machiavellian tradition, does contain an accurate picture of how the world sometimes works. However, rather than giving into the bleakness of how things can be, it is perhaps better to heroically strive for moral goodness and political peace and order, and in Political Meritocracy, James Hankins provides a qualified but much needed road map for human flourishing.

Or, as Chandler put it:

“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. […]

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

ARBITRARY POWER, THAT IS:

Against power: As a republican, Sophie de Grouchy argued that sympathy, not domination, must be the glue that holds society together (Sandrine Bergèsis, Aeon)

The Letters on Sympathy, Grouchy’s only known, and signed, authored work, were published in 1798 as an appendix to her translations of the final edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1792) and of his essay A Dissertation on the Origins of Languages (1792). These remained the standard translations of Smith’s key works for two centuries. Consequently, Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy remained in wide circulation too, and were able to influence the growth of political ideas. […]

But for fuller evidence of her more radical views, we need to turn to the newspaper she founded together with Condorcet, Paine and others: Le Républicain. Published in 1791, the journal included anonymous articles by Grouchy and her translations of some of Paine’s work. She became known as a ‘fierce’ republican, and, not surprisingly, as an anti-monarchist she was mocked and caricatured in royalist journals.

In one of these articles, Grouchy attacked monarchy as an economic extravagance, and at the same time showed that it served no purpose beyond a ceremonial one by proposing that the king and his entourage be replaced by automata. Given the cost of the real ‘moving sculptures’ and the difficulty of producing and maintaining them in good working order, the claim that automata would represent a significant cost-saving was a direct attack on royal extravagance. But more than an economic cost, it was the psychological cost of monarchy that Grouchy was most worried about. In the second article (which she may have redrafted from an earlier one by her friend Dumont), Grouchy took on a theme she developed in her Letters on Sympathy: the moral and psychological cost of domination, the kind of domination characteristic of monarchy.

Being dominated is the chief and most pervasive political harm for republicans, because, Grouchy argues, it removes our liberty. In this, republicans differ somewhat from liberals, who see liberty threatened by interference. To be dominated is not necessarily the same thing as being interfered with. Being dominated means being subject to an arbitrary power that has the potential to interfere at any point in time. Grouchy argues that a king who is unconstrained by the law always dominates. Even a benign king who does not wish to interfere with his subjects’ personal lives dominates. Louis XVI insisted that he cared above all about the happiness of his subjects, yet his power over them was unregulated by law, and therefore arbitrary and dominating in this sense. And, given that a king’s attitude may change over the course of his reign, and that he will, one day, be replaced by his heir, his benevolence cannot be relied on to prevent future harms from interference. So, the king’s character does not make a difference to whether we should accept rule by monarchs: they still dominate, no matter how well meaning.

THE LAWS WE AGREE TO BIND OURSELVES BY ARE THE COMMON GOOD:

Recovering the Republican Sensibility (Andy Smarick, Winter 2024, National Affairs)

There is not an agreed-upon definition of “republicanism.” Indeed, views on republicanism have evolved over two millennia. It can, however, be generally understood to begin with a sensibility, a way of seeing citizens and public life. Five principles outline this sensibility.

First, citizens of a republic are self-ruling and equal. In a republic, the government’s legitimacy flows from its citizens. Republican citizens are on equal footing before the law; they have equal duties and powers to shape the state.

Second, citizens of a republic should demonstrate “republican virtue.” When rulers have near-total power, individuals are expected to be passive while their rulers govern; when the people have power, they have a duty to be engaged in matters affecting the community. Active, constructive participation in public life is thus essential to republican government. Citizens must behave in ways that help the community succeed, including acting with honesty and civility, avoiding corruption and self-dealing, and putting public benefit ahead of private gain.

Third, democracy is the primary means of reaching decisions in a republic. Citizens may vote directly on public matters, or they may vote for representatives who in turn vote on such matters. Republicanism allows for non-elected administrators and judges, but these officials exercise the authority delegated to them by the people, and must operate within the rules the people establish.

Fourth, citizens of a republic must advance the common good. Issues affecting the community are public, not private matters. Republicanism does not tolerate nepotism or cronyism; a citizen should never see a community issue as an opportunity to advance his personal interest or the cause of his family or friends. Similarly, community decisions are not the concern of just the elite; all citizens contribute to the community’s good. This work is the substance of citizenship and the glue that bonds a community together.

Fifth, republicanism requires an active but limited government. Republicanism intends for the state to play a role in advancing the common good, but the state isn’t authorized to do anything and everything. The state can be limited via enumerated powers, individual liberties, and rights to procedures like due process. Republicanism does not emphasize expansive negative rights, but the state cannot rule arbitrarily and cannot dominate individuals or society.

These five pillars do not amount to a formula, or even quite a formal definition. But they describe the contours of republicanism as the founders of the American system of government understood it, and as we might understand it now.

REPUBLICAN rEPUBLICAN:

No Slaves, No Masters: What Democracy Meant to Abraham Lincoln (Allen C. Guelzo, February 8, 2024, LitHub)

[L]incoln’s only attempt at actually defining democracy occurred, almost in passing, in a note he jotted on the eve of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and at that moment, it was more of an effort to set democracy apart from slavery:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

This is a peculiar definition, since Lincoln makes no formal attempt in it at specifying the components of democracy (like the location of sovereignty), and makes no allusion to elections, or even to majority rule. What Lincoln did instead was to draw a contrast between slavery and democracy, so as to illustrate what democracy was not, and that contrast hinged on the point of consent. A slave is someone who has no autonomy, no say in their status, whose consent is unsolicited and undesired, and with no prospect of being delivered from that status.

Consent was a key concept for Lincoln in considering both democracy and slavery. Consent was how sovereignty was exercised: his objection, in 1848, to war with Mexico over the disputed region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande was based on whether the people in that region had ever “submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, or of the United States, by consent.” And consent was what drew a line of separation between freedom and enslavement. “This is a world of compensations,” Lincoln concluded, “and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave.”

“According to our ancient faith,” Lincoln said in 1854, “the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.” It was one of the Declaration’s foundational arguments that Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and Lincoln translated that “axiom” to mean “that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.

I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” Slavery might have some justification if the slave is not a human being, and is incapable of consent. “If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him.” But a slave, plainly, is “a man.” So, Lincoln reasoned, “is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself ?” When one man “governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man” without that vital element of consent, “that is more than self-government that is despotism.”

Participatory lawmaking in universally applicable laws is the whole magilla.