I agree with you on Trump's Schedule F proposal, and its necessarily erosive effect on the civil service. But I think you're reading more into the Supreme Court's Loper Bright decision than is there.
The majority made clear that the proper expertise of the administrative state was not at issue in the case. Experts in the innumerable fields covered by our enormous regulatory bureaucracy are needed and relied on every day. But what they are not expert in is interpreting the law. That is what courts do under the Constitution, and that is what the Supreme Court said.
Deference under Chevron was to agency interpretations of the statutes that govern them, not to their expert opinions about the subject matter they have demonstrated in order to be hired into their positions. Scientists, oceanographers, nuclear physicists, epidemiologists and so many more valuable government employees are not well qualified to do what judges do -- especially appellate court and Supreme Court judges) every day in interpreting complex or ambiguous or poorly drafted laws.
Nevertheless, even under Loper Bright, and agency's considered thoughts about the scope of the law will still be considered -- as they have always been -- as part of the record judges will rely on in interpreting the scope of the law governing the agency. Courts may in fact agree with the agency interpretation if it seems to accord with principles of legal interpretation, something that does tend to get left out of criticisms of Loper Bright.
Chevron deference was both unusual and discordant with the ordinary way courts act in legal interpretation, which is why it has been so roundly ignored in recent years. There are serious doubts about whether Loper Bright will change much of anything in the end. I am a natural born skeptic and doubt all predictions and speculation, which seems to be 80 percent of all public opinion these days. Maybe the doomsayers are right, but time and experience suggest to me that the saying of doom is seldom doom's precursor.
I came here to say something similar, but you put it better than I could. I'll just add that it's telling that the issue in Loper Bright didn't involve any fishery domain expertise rightly left to the experts, but the purely legal question of whether Congress had authorized NMFS to charge fishing companies money under specific circumstances.
One of the concerns of the Founders was that a republic would only work in a relatively small state. And they were dealing with one in which the voting population was far more selective and homogeneous than it is today. There is an argument to be made that we’ve become simply too large and diverse for our blueprint (The Constitution) to function effectively. I would not like to try to make that argument, but the gradual but increasing level of polarization we’ve been experiencing since the fifties, particularly because of the repeated shocks to large segments of the conservative Christian right of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v Board (repealing the obscenity of Plessy v Ferguson), Engel v Vitale (school prayer), Roe v Wade (abortion rights) , Virginia v Loving (interracial marriage), and Obergefell v Hodges (same sex marriage), much of which today’s court seems intent on rolling back really is resulting in at least two very distinct national visions.
To me, an old white guy of 79, a veteran, and one who taught elementary school American history for over 40 years, the major difference emerging in all this is pretty straight forward. One vision seeks to increase human rights and the other seeks to restrict those rights. One vision seeks to enlarge the definition of what it means to be an American and the other seeks to narrow that definition.
I know I seem to have wandered a bit far from the topic of Dr. Fukuyama’s piece, yet I can’t help thinking that the larger question is one of an increasing sense of loss of control on the right. The concept of a bunch of liberals (read socialists, communists, Marxists, etc) taking control of the nation from the hands of those who seek that restriction and that narrowing is not far from a feeling of loss of control over the ‘administrative state'. That is certainly clear in the right’s attempts to trash 'the experts’. One can almost imagine a bunch of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers (one of which he certainly was not!) refusing to take suggestions, advice, or worse yet regulation from some agricultural ‘expert’ come from that den of elitism in the ‘big ciies’ or worse yet, the central government in Washington DC. I mean what the hell do they know?!
But of course, as Dr Fukuyama points out, we are no longer Jefferson’s nation of yeoman farmers, and we haven’t been at least since the latter part of the nineteenth century. I am reminded of Socrates who, perhaps with a bit of disingenuousness remarked in effect, “The wisest among us is the man who knows that he may indeed NOT know everything”. It is a lesson the current right wing expert trashes might remember, but likely will not.
" ... the major difference emerging in all this is pretty straight forward. One vision seeks to increase human rights and the other seeks to restrict those rights. One vision seeks to enlarge the definition of what it means to be an American and the other seeks to narrow that definition."
I couldn't disagree more. Plenty of Libertarians are, by definition, intent on defending expansive understandings of individual liberties. Many would place them as 'conservatives.' Plenty of 'conservatives' wish to 'conserve' rights explicated or implied in our Constitution.
Plenty of Democrats are concerned with expanding some individuals 'rights,' but champion restrictions on all sorts of other individuals and their activities. Many would advocate for drastic reduction of civil rights in the name of some other cause.
A list of rights include those enumerated in the Bill of Rights: speech & press (versus suppression as 'misinformation,' 'disinformation', 'hate' speech, etc.); religion (versus secular standards that go against religious beliefs and practices); right to bear arms (versus various restrictions); due process and compensation (versus extensive powers to zone and confiscate property without compensation); etc.
Other examples of restrictions - the massive shutdowns of everyday activities during COVID, many of which were unnecessary; the major confiscation of property with extensive redistribution; and the curtailment of most economic activity to counter climate change.
The essential problem with Libertarianism is that it seeks to emphasize the value of individual rights far above the best interests of the community. At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is communism in which everything is subordinated to the State. The best answer IM (not so humble) O lies somewhere in between.
Examples are obvious.
The distortion of the meaning of the Second Amendment to allow any nut who wants a gun to be able to get one, thus further endangering the community.
Claims of suppression of free speech when some forms of that speech clearly endanger the safety of the community. Shouting FIRE in a crowded theater when there is none is not determined to be free speech.
The COVID thing - Faced with an almost unprecedented threat from an often deadly virus which took time to understand and to counter, the government at various levels took the best steps they thought they could in the circumstances to deal with the pandemic and to allay the inchoate fears of the people. Of course they made mistakes, but the circumstances have to taken into account. Or do you think we should just have let it run its course as Trump would have had us do?
The United States does not restrict the individual’s right to the the religions beliefs of his or her choice (excluding of course those which might lead a believer to physically injure another) What we do object to are attempts by religious groups to inflict their beliefs on others. If you are against abortions - by all means don’t have one, but don’t try to force that doctrine on me. If you don’t wish to marry someone of another race, by all means don’t do so, but don’t try to restrict my wish to do so. If you believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, by all means stick to that, but don’t try to restrict my right to marry someone of my own sex. And so on. Religious beliefs in and of themselves are not legal tender. One of the wisest things the Founders did was the inclusion of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
I probably should have been more explicit in making my point about the expansion of rights - I was referring to the attempts by the Republican Party to denigrate some groups of Americans out of misguided forms of ideology and to legislate against them.
The above is a list of restrictions of individual rights for the 'greater good', made by a partisan grouping ('progressives', Democrats, etc.) that one appears to argue is otherwise promoting expansion of individual rights.
There isn't a partisan group generally (other than Libertarians) that doesn't, at some level, promote certain rights for some people, over those of others. Whether the tradeoff is worthwhile is something for debate. But the divide is not between those who want to expand rights, and those who wish to restrict them - most assertions of rights involve some kind of tradeoffs to benefit some at the expense of others.
And, sad to say, it isn't just some in the Republican party who denigrate some groups and try to legislate against them - plenty of partisans of various stripes denigrate other 'deplorables' - e.g., white trash, cisgender, male, 'oppressors', etc. - and seek to suppress them. See, e.g., The ACLU Should Keep Representing Deplorables - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-aclu-should-keep-representing-deplorables/542226/ (noting a tension now between traditional protection of free speech and protecting only that speech with which one agrees - a tension when I represented the ACLU, and one in which I sided with free speech.)
The problem with such generalities as you mention is that they say nothing of note. They do not, for example adequately explain how a 14 year-old-kid was able to kill four people at a local high school with a weapon no 14 year-old-kid should ever have had access to; rather they are in the same league as ‘thoughts and prayers’. And I’m not sure that libertarians have anything better to offer.
Yes, the tension between the individual and the state was built into our DNA in Philadelphia during that long hot summer. In some form or another it has been a part of the human experience since that experience began, But that state was a very different place than the one we’ve created since. There were circumstances and forces in the future which the Founders could not have foreseen or prepared for. Further, they were planning in a world far more homogeneous and far less connected than we live in now, but even so they managed to bequeath us a curse of intolerance and hatred that has blighted our national existence ever since, and which managed to kill over 700,000 of us on one short five year period between 1860 and 1865.
For all that, I’ve been an American for nearly 80 years and I continue to believe that they were on the right track. But the sheer amount of political, religious, and social polarization and conflict we’ve managed to inflict on ourselves and the forces driving it threaten us in a way we cannot seem to allay.
1) James Quinn writes, "We are no longer Jefferson’s nation of yeoman farmers, and we haven’t been at least since the latter part of the nineteenth century. I am reminded of Socrates who, perhaps with a bit of disingenuousness remarked in effect, 'The wisest among us is the man who knows that he may indeed NOT know everything.' It is a lesson the current right wing expert-trashers might remember, but likely will not."
Unfortunately, it's also a lesson that the "experts" themselves (our homegrown nomenklatura) might do well to remember, but likely will not. The problem is that, for all their specialized "expertise," they're reminiscent of the proverbial horde of blind men describing an elephant.
2) Here's what Jefferson had to say: "Corruption of morals… is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.... It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
Translation: A nation of whores can expect to be ruled by a pimp.
3) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oiigarchy.”
Institutions founded upon the epistemic regime of the Enlightenment (i.e., on "expertise") are not immune.
4) Jefferson, to his credit, recognized the problematic (and oppressive) nature of slavery, though he failed to address the crucial need for a solution. We would do well to recognize the problematic nature of advanced capitalism -- which Jefferson also recognized (as per above), and in which (like fish in water) we're similarly trapped.
Fukuyama himself recognizes the problem, in his discussion of "thymos." In calling for pluralism (as a countervailing accommodation), so, too, does Isaiah Berlin. It's a recognition (and a conundrum) that goes all the way back (at least) to the medieval scholar Ibn Khaldun.
Ken Burns, in his address to the graduates of Brandeis this past June spoke of an interview he had with James Baldwin in which Baldwin noted that no man freely chose to be a slave. Then, pausing, Baldwin added that still we are all prone to enslaving ourselves within our own biases. It reminded me of one of my favorite adages - “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
Experts can indeed be misled, and they certainly can be wrong. But the world of Jefferson’s farmers on their land was a relatively simple and very parochial one, close to the tail end of a world in which many could still be relatively independent for most if not all of what they needed, compared to the complex interconnected and dependent world we have since created for ourselves. An eighteenth century American farmer had to know a great deal within a relatively small and specialized area of knowledge, but he could survive quite well largely ignorant of much large issues. Those he chose to represent him within his local governments were often well known to him, and the issues he and they needed to deal with were almost all equally parochial. They are still echoes of those times in many current New England town meetings.
The greatest kind of slavery in force today, to my way of thinking, is ignorance; not because people necessarily choose to be so (although I have certainly met a few who do) but rather because there is simply too much to know in fields which impact us every day; too much being thrown at us via our ubiquitous media and seldom enough of a filter to know how valid it all is; too many competing narratives, and we often without sufficient time or means or even the urge to distinguish among them. But because our world is so interconnected and so complex, the leaders we choose to believe and the experts we choose to listen to can be critical in a far wider sphere than our own individual lives. Indeed, since August 6th, 1945, the survival of our entire world is dependent in some very important ways upon those leaders and those experts, many of whom we had no say in electing or choosing, and about whose level of morality or areas of concern we can know little.
So how do we proceed? How do we choose those we listen to and those we ignore or disdain? How do we measure the level of morality, venality, or knowledge of our distant leaders and arcane experts? After all, when even the Supreme Court cannot unanimously decide what legal constraints surround a President of the United States, what are we to believe? When our two major political parties have such different visions of this one country, how are we to choose?
A friend of mine, speaking of his version of our present dilemma put it this way concerning our civilization, which he imagined as a great bridge spanning the globe: 'Here at the limit of progress, a number of architects, Immortal, living, and dead, all speaking different languages and grasping plans based on differing ideas of structure and stability wrangle ceaselessly while a greater number of engineers try to match the blueprints together so that the bridge can stand and carry traffic. Under their determined eyes, we hammer and weld and cut and bolt, now and again peering nervously into the abyss and trying to remember that our job here is to make the bridge safe for our children and the directions to them clear enough so that they may do the same for theirs. But it is difficult to concentrate amid the arguments of the architects, all of whom seem so certain, and the orders of the engineers whose recourse from misalignments is often to enforce uncertain dogma with armed bands that we support at the expense of our already limited construction resources. At moments we look to the earth below and conjure a memory of a time when we knew we were a part of it. But even as we glance down, we see with intermittent terror that our only supports have been mined by the engineers who wave their detonators as they argue, simultaneously builders and destroyers.
Yet we can also see the extraordinary beauty of some portions of the bridge - ramshackle as other portions may appear - the genius of some of its designers and the immensity of the dreams that fired them. For single instants within our dusty cacophony we lift our inner eye to catch glimpses of how our next span might look, and we renew our hammering and our hope.
The Founders, for all their flaws dreamed of a nation in which We the People could together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. I measure my experts as I do my leaders by the level of those traits I see in them. I think I could do worse.
Thank you for taking the time and trouble to respond!
Not sure what to make of your (friend's) "bridge" metaphor. While reading, I kept thinking of the magnificent Millau viaduct in France, designed (far from haphazardly) by the British architect Norman Foster. In terms of the issues you raise, the design process (and controversies surrounding the viaduct itself) are well worth a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct (If you ever visit, check out the rest area at the north end of the bridge: the blue cheese at the salad bar comes from the nearby town of Roquefort!)
I find it interesting that you (legitimately) evaluate your "experts" by some rather subjective criteria -- for their courage, honesty, understanding, tolerance, compassion, wisdom, humor, hope, and sheer common sense -- and not merely for their technical expertise. So far, so good -- though not as eloquently put as (much to my pleasant surprise) by Kamala.
Then again, I was also a great admirer of Obama, but that comes with two significant reservations: 1) His bailout that benefited the bankers while millions lost their homes, and 2) His winning invocation of "No Black America, no White America" that now appears to have been (recast as merely "aspirational" in the context of "Black Lives") a duplicitous bait-and-switch. Taken together (along with Hillary's "Nurse Ratched" persona), that's how we (unfortunately) ended up with the embitterment of Obama/Trump voters. (FWIW, in 2016 I cast a "no-harm" write-in vote [in California] for Bernie.)
More seriously, now... I wish you'd addressed my point #3 above, regarding the development of a self-serving nomenklatura. Schumpeter makes a similar observation on the entrepreneurial spirit devolving into managerial bureaucracy. (So, too, did Ibn Khaldun, regarding the loss of "asabiyah.") The problem might be cyclical, implicit in the development of entrenched institutions, no matter how well-designed.
If you can truly resolve that conundrum, you might be ready to take on your more formidable adversaries, who operate in the style of the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka! ;-)
"3) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oiigarchy.”
Nothing’s really changed in that regard since our earliest experimentation with any kind of social organization above that of who was the best hunter in the group or who seemed to have the spiritual power to comprehend and control nature. It gained impetus with the need to direct and oversee building such things as large scale irrigation systems. It came to its first real fruitions with the pyramid building in Egypt, the ziggurats in Sumer, and those mysterious, marvelous (and somewhat obsessive) models of structure and design, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro on the Indus.
And, of course, those in such leadership positions have always been interested in keeping them. Like the poor, they will always be with us. In fact, we could not exist without them.
There’s only one possible answer to ‘the iron law of oligarchy’ - the motives of the oligarchs. This was the problem that the Founders attempted to solve by making the ‘oligarchy’ (the executive and the congress) responsible to the people, by creating them from within the body of the people (voting), and by constructing a blueprint (the Constitution) which would make the organization permanent outside of any human agency while curbing the potential excesses of the oligarchs themselves. The relatively small nature of the original United States made any sizable ‘administrative state’ unnecessary, although the Founders did worry that any increase in our geographical size might require changes in that which would overwhelm their construct, as indeed to some extent it has.
As a long time teacher of American history, I’ve struggled with our evolution and how to teach it. One is always tempted to be a cheerleader, as many now engaged in rewriting American history for the public school classroom would have it, but no honest American with any understanding of our journey can overlook the real thing, which, while full of potential, is hardly as pretty as one might like.
I can only imagine one possible answer, which is to use the last two years of high school to give every American kid a thorough grounding in our Constitution. If enough of us, both as voters and as members of the ‘oligarchy’ understand what we were designed to be, perhaps the motivation to maintain it would prove out. It’s the best I have, because in the end it is the only answer that aligns with who we were meant to be.
You write, "An eighteenth century American farmer had to know a great deal within a relatively small and specialized area of knowledge, but he could survive quite well largely ignorant of much large issues."
I think you have it precisely backward. That yeoman was a generalist, and the Founders (at their best) were attempting to create a system that would facilitate his ability (and his right) to make decisions on those large issues.
Each of our "experts," conversely, is operating "within a relatively small and specialized area of knowledge": to return to my earlier metaphor, like a bunch of blind men, each trying to describe (his assigned piece of) an elephant.
The problem is implicit in the over-complexity itself. Our nomenklatura can include specialists (especially lawyers) deeply schooled in the minutiae of Constitutional law, just as the Soviet nomenklatura had its savants steeped in the vast corpus of Marxian doctrine, with its own convoluted, Talmudic investigations of alienation and class conflict, and its own "blueprint" for social justice. Some were (and are) undoubtedly sincere -- but in the end, a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy.
And when the elephant decides to move, all those "experts" will be rudely reminded of the simple truth that they've been struggling to reach with all the claptrap of their fragmentary "expertise"...
Where does an elephant sleep? Wherever it wants to! And plenty of those self-important "experts" are likely to get crushed in the process.
"I think you have it precisely backward. That yeoman was a generalist, and the Founders (at their best) were attempting to create a system that would facilitate his ability (and his right) to make decisions on those large issues.”
And yet the Founders created a hierarchy of legislative groups to deal with those larger issues. Individual voters chose the members of their state legislators and members of the House (A throwback to the ‘lower house’ of colonial legislators since that’s where decisions were made concerning the use of public money). But it was the state legislators who chose the members of the US Senate; the presumption being that the Senate would be ‘the adults’ in the legislative room (one of the reason they have three times the term period of Representatives). They made most of the larger decisions so that the farmer could concentrate as the expert on his vine and fig tree.
You say, “in the end a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy” which statement my father would have called a ‘tautological, paraphrastic,redundency’.
As to the parable of the blind men and the elephant, (and it was one of my favorite poems as a kid) it was a parody after all, the reason why the men were defined as blind. There certainly are nomenklatura who do operate in that fashion, a system symbolized in a way by our insistence on structuring our educational system as a separation subjects as if the world were actually broken into discrete areas of math, languages, science, etc. Actually, of course, each ’subject’ represents not an entirely separate field, but rather a differing perspective of the whole.
But there are also those who transcend that kind of parochialism. Indeed, there too is a hierarchy made up of those specialists who concentrate in one area, and whose data is then transmitted to planning groups who integrate the results of he specialists’ work. They are the ones who, when necessary, ‘move the elephant’. But their decisions must rest on the work of the specialists. It is said that Leonardo de Vinci was the last man who could be said to have known everything there was to know at the time. But I suspect that even he would be overwhelmed today.
There remain those who believe they have a handle on it all. Hitler was one along with Stalin. Donald Trump is another, albeit a junior member. Such men did and do often disdain the ‘experts’. Sometimes they are right about certain areas, but generally they are wrong about the Big Picture, often to everyone’s detriment.
Wiser men and women in positions of great responsibility for and to others know they have to depend to a certain extent on the experts, even if they sometimes get it wrong. Without them, we’d have to start from scratch every time. It is an imperfect system, but right now it is all we have.
I agree with you on Trump's Schedule F proposal, and its necessarily erosive effect on the civil service. But I think you're reading more into the Supreme Court's Loper Bright decision than is there.
The majority made clear that the proper expertise of the administrative state was not at issue in the case. Experts in the innumerable fields covered by our enormous regulatory bureaucracy are needed and relied on every day. But what they are not expert in is interpreting the law. That is what courts do under the Constitution, and that is what the Supreme Court said.
Deference under Chevron was to agency interpretations of the statutes that govern them, not to their expert opinions about the subject matter they have demonstrated in order to be hired into their positions. Scientists, oceanographers, nuclear physicists, epidemiologists and so many more valuable government employees are not well qualified to do what judges do -- especially appellate court and Supreme Court judges) every day in interpreting complex or ambiguous or poorly drafted laws.
Nevertheless, even under Loper Bright, and agency's considered thoughts about the scope of the law will still be considered -- as they have always been -- as part of the record judges will rely on in interpreting the scope of the law governing the agency. Courts may in fact agree with the agency interpretation if it seems to accord with principles of legal interpretation, something that does tend to get left out of criticisms of Loper Bright.
Chevron deference was both unusual and discordant with the ordinary way courts act in legal interpretation, which is why it has been so roundly ignored in recent years. There are serious doubts about whether Loper Bright will change much of anything in the end. I am a natural born skeptic and doubt all predictions and speculation, which seems to be 80 percent of all public opinion these days. Maybe the doomsayers are right, but time and experience suggest to me that the saying of doom is seldom doom's precursor.
I came here to say something similar, but you put it better than I could. I'll just add that it's telling that the issue in Loper Bright didn't involve any fishery domain expertise rightly left to the experts, but the purely legal question of whether Congress had authorized NMFS to charge fishing companies money under specific circumstances.
One of the concerns of the Founders was that a republic would only work in a relatively small state. And they were dealing with one in which the voting population was far more selective and homogeneous than it is today. There is an argument to be made that we’ve become simply too large and diverse for our blueprint (The Constitution) to function effectively. I would not like to try to make that argument, but the gradual but increasing level of polarization we’ve been experiencing since the fifties, particularly because of the repeated shocks to large segments of the conservative Christian right of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v Board (repealing the obscenity of Plessy v Ferguson), Engel v Vitale (school prayer), Roe v Wade (abortion rights) , Virginia v Loving (interracial marriage), and Obergefell v Hodges (same sex marriage), much of which today’s court seems intent on rolling back really is resulting in at least two very distinct national visions.
To me, an old white guy of 79, a veteran, and one who taught elementary school American history for over 40 years, the major difference emerging in all this is pretty straight forward. One vision seeks to increase human rights and the other seeks to restrict those rights. One vision seeks to enlarge the definition of what it means to be an American and the other seeks to narrow that definition.
I know I seem to have wandered a bit far from the topic of Dr. Fukuyama’s piece, yet I can’t help thinking that the larger question is one of an increasing sense of loss of control on the right. The concept of a bunch of liberals (read socialists, communists, Marxists, etc) taking control of the nation from the hands of those who seek that restriction and that narrowing is not far from a feeling of loss of control over the ‘administrative state'. That is certainly clear in the right’s attempts to trash 'the experts’. One can almost imagine a bunch of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers (one of which he certainly was not!) refusing to take suggestions, advice, or worse yet regulation from some agricultural ‘expert’ come from that den of elitism in the ‘big ciies’ or worse yet, the central government in Washington DC. I mean what the hell do they know?!
But of course, as Dr Fukuyama points out, we are no longer Jefferson’s nation of yeoman farmers, and we haven’t been at least since the latter part of the nineteenth century. I am reminded of Socrates who, perhaps with a bit of disingenuousness remarked in effect, “The wisest among us is the man who knows that he may indeed NOT know everything”. It is a lesson the current right wing expert trashes might remember, but likely will not.
" ... the major difference emerging in all this is pretty straight forward. One vision seeks to increase human rights and the other seeks to restrict those rights. One vision seeks to enlarge the definition of what it means to be an American and the other seeks to narrow that definition."
I couldn't disagree more. Plenty of Libertarians are, by definition, intent on defending expansive understandings of individual liberties. Many would place them as 'conservatives.' Plenty of 'conservatives' wish to 'conserve' rights explicated or implied in our Constitution.
Plenty of Democrats are concerned with expanding some individuals 'rights,' but champion restrictions on all sorts of other individuals and their activities. Many would advocate for drastic reduction of civil rights in the name of some other cause.
A list of rights include those enumerated in the Bill of Rights: speech & press (versus suppression as 'misinformation,' 'disinformation', 'hate' speech, etc.); religion (versus secular standards that go against religious beliefs and practices); right to bear arms (versus various restrictions); due process and compensation (versus extensive powers to zone and confiscate property without compensation); etc.
Other examples of restrictions - the massive shutdowns of everyday activities during COVID, many of which were unnecessary; the major confiscation of property with extensive redistribution; and the curtailment of most economic activity to counter climate change.
The essential problem with Libertarianism is that it seeks to emphasize the value of individual rights far above the best interests of the community. At the other end of the spectrum, of course, is communism in which everything is subordinated to the State. The best answer IM (not so humble) O lies somewhere in between.
Examples are obvious.
The distortion of the meaning of the Second Amendment to allow any nut who wants a gun to be able to get one, thus further endangering the community.
Claims of suppression of free speech when some forms of that speech clearly endanger the safety of the community. Shouting FIRE in a crowded theater when there is none is not determined to be free speech.
The COVID thing - Faced with an almost unprecedented threat from an often deadly virus which took time to understand and to counter, the government at various levels took the best steps they thought they could in the circumstances to deal with the pandemic and to allay the inchoate fears of the people. Of course they made mistakes, but the circumstances have to taken into account. Or do you think we should just have let it run its course as Trump would have had us do?
The United States does not restrict the individual’s right to the the religions beliefs of his or her choice (excluding of course those which might lead a believer to physically injure another) What we do object to are attempts by religious groups to inflict their beliefs on others. If you are against abortions - by all means don’t have one, but don’t try to force that doctrine on me. If you don’t wish to marry someone of another race, by all means don’t do so, but don’t try to restrict my wish to do so. If you believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, by all means stick to that, but don’t try to restrict my right to marry someone of my own sex. And so on. Religious beliefs in and of themselves are not legal tender. One of the wisest things the Founders did was the inclusion of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
I probably should have been more explicit in making my point about the expansion of rights - I was referring to the attempts by the Republican Party to denigrate some groups of Americans out of misguided forms of ideology and to legislate against them.
The above is a list of restrictions of individual rights for the 'greater good', made by a partisan grouping ('progressives', Democrats, etc.) that one appears to argue is otherwise promoting expansion of individual rights.
There isn't a partisan group generally (other than Libertarians) that doesn't, at some level, promote certain rights for some people, over those of others. Whether the tradeoff is worthwhile is something for debate. But the divide is not between those who want to expand rights, and those who wish to restrict them - most assertions of rights involve some kind of tradeoffs to benefit some at the expense of others.
And, sad to say, it isn't just some in the Republican party who denigrate some groups and try to legislate against them - plenty of partisans of various stripes denigrate other 'deplorables' - e.g., white trash, cisgender, male, 'oppressors', etc. - and seek to suppress them. See, e.g., The ACLU Should Keep Representing Deplorables - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-aclu-should-keep-representing-deplorables/542226/ (noting a tension now between traditional protection of free speech and protecting only that speech with which one agrees - a tension when I represented the ACLU, and one in which I sided with free speech.)
Just a fine point of law - there is an erroneous view that shouting fire isn't protected - it generally is. See, e.g., America’s Favorite Flimsy Pretext for Limiting Free Speech - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/shouting-fire-crowded-theater-speech-regulation/621151/
The problem with such generalities as you mention is that they say nothing of note. They do not, for example adequately explain how a 14 year-old-kid was able to kill four people at a local high school with a weapon no 14 year-old-kid should ever have had access to; rather they are in the same league as ‘thoughts and prayers’. And I’m not sure that libertarians have anything better to offer.
Yes, the tension between the individual and the state was built into our DNA in Philadelphia during that long hot summer. In some form or another it has been a part of the human experience since that experience began, But that state was a very different place than the one we’ve created since. There were circumstances and forces in the future which the Founders could not have foreseen or prepared for. Further, they were planning in a world far more homogeneous and far less connected than we live in now, but even so they managed to bequeath us a curse of intolerance and hatred that has blighted our national existence ever since, and which managed to kill over 700,000 of us on one short five year period between 1860 and 1865.
For all that, I’ve been an American for nearly 80 years and I continue to believe that they were on the right track. But the sheer amount of political, religious, and social polarization and conflict we’ve managed to inflict on ourselves and the forces driving it threaten us in a way we cannot seem to allay.
Generalizations don’t cut it anymore.
1) James Quinn writes, "We are no longer Jefferson’s nation of yeoman farmers, and we haven’t been at least since the latter part of the nineteenth century. I am reminded of Socrates who, perhaps with a bit of disingenuousness remarked in effect, 'The wisest among us is the man who knows that he may indeed NOT know everything.' It is a lesson the current right wing expert-trashers might remember, but likely will not."
Unfortunately, it's also a lesson that the "experts" themselves (our homegrown nomenklatura) might do well to remember, but likely will not. The problem is that, for all their specialized "expertise," they're reminiscent of the proverbial horde of blind men describing an elephant.
2) Here's what Jefferson had to say: "Corruption of morals… is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.... It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution."
Translation: A nation of whores can expect to be ruled by a pimp.
3) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oiigarchy.”
Institutions founded upon the epistemic regime of the Enlightenment (i.e., on "expertise") are not immune.
4) Jefferson, to his credit, recognized the problematic (and oppressive) nature of slavery, though he failed to address the crucial need for a solution. We would do well to recognize the problematic nature of advanced capitalism -- which Jefferson also recognized (as per above), and in which (like fish in water) we're similarly trapped.
Fukuyama himself recognizes the problem, in his discussion of "thymos." In calling for pluralism (as a countervailing accommodation), so, too, does Isaiah Berlin. It's a recognition (and a conundrum) that goes all the way back (at least) to the medieval scholar Ibn Khaldun.
Ken Burns, in his address to the graduates of Brandeis this past June spoke of an interview he had with James Baldwin in which Baldwin noted that no man freely chose to be a slave. Then, pausing, Baldwin added that still we are all prone to enslaving ourselves within our own biases. It reminded me of one of my favorite adages - “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
Experts can indeed be misled, and they certainly can be wrong. But the world of Jefferson’s farmers on their land was a relatively simple and very parochial one, close to the tail end of a world in which many could still be relatively independent for most if not all of what they needed, compared to the complex interconnected and dependent world we have since created for ourselves. An eighteenth century American farmer had to know a great deal within a relatively small and specialized area of knowledge, but he could survive quite well largely ignorant of much large issues. Those he chose to represent him within his local governments were often well known to him, and the issues he and they needed to deal with were almost all equally parochial. They are still echoes of those times in many current New England town meetings.
The greatest kind of slavery in force today, to my way of thinking, is ignorance; not because people necessarily choose to be so (although I have certainly met a few who do) but rather because there is simply too much to know in fields which impact us every day; too much being thrown at us via our ubiquitous media and seldom enough of a filter to know how valid it all is; too many competing narratives, and we often without sufficient time or means or even the urge to distinguish among them. But because our world is so interconnected and so complex, the leaders we choose to believe and the experts we choose to listen to can be critical in a far wider sphere than our own individual lives. Indeed, since August 6th, 1945, the survival of our entire world is dependent in some very important ways upon those leaders and those experts, many of whom we had no say in electing or choosing, and about whose level of morality or areas of concern we can know little.
So how do we proceed? How do we choose those we listen to and those we ignore or disdain? How do we measure the level of morality, venality, or knowledge of our distant leaders and arcane experts? After all, when even the Supreme Court cannot unanimously decide what legal constraints surround a President of the United States, what are we to believe? When our two major political parties have such different visions of this one country, how are we to choose?
A friend of mine, speaking of his version of our present dilemma put it this way concerning our civilization, which he imagined as a great bridge spanning the globe: 'Here at the limit of progress, a number of architects, Immortal, living, and dead, all speaking different languages and grasping plans based on differing ideas of structure and stability wrangle ceaselessly while a greater number of engineers try to match the blueprints together so that the bridge can stand and carry traffic. Under their determined eyes, we hammer and weld and cut and bolt, now and again peering nervously into the abyss and trying to remember that our job here is to make the bridge safe for our children and the directions to them clear enough so that they may do the same for theirs. But it is difficult to concentrate amid the arguments of the architects, all of whom seem so certain, and the orders of the engineers whose recourse from misalignments is often to enforce uncertain dogma with armed bands that we support at the expense of our already limited construction resources. At moments we look to the earth below and conjure a memory of a time when we knew we were a part of it. But even as we glance down, we see with intermittent terror that our only supports have been mined by the engineers who wave their detonators as they argue, simultaneously builders and destroyers.
Yet we can also see the extraordinary beauty of some portions of the bridge - ramshackle as other portions may appear - the genius of some of its designers and the immensity of the dreams that fired them. For single instants within our dusty cacophony we lift our inner eye to catch glimpses of how our next span might look, and we renew our hammering and our hope.
The Founders, for all their flaws dreamed of a nation in which We the People could together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. I measure my experts as I do my leaders by the level of those traits I see in them. I think I could do worse.
Thank you for taking the time and trouble to respond!
Not sure what to make of your (friend's) "bridge" metaphor. While reading, I kept thinking of the magnificent Millau viaduct in France, designed (far from haphazardly) by the British architect Norman Foster. In terms of the issues you raise, the design process (and controversies surrounding the viaduct itself) are well worth a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct (If you ever visit, check out the rest area at the north end of the bridge: the blue cheese at the salad bar comes from the nearby town of Roquefort!)
I find it interesting that you (legitimately) evaluate your "experts" by some rather subjective criteria -- for their courage, honesty, understanding, tolerance, compassion, wisdom, humor, hope, and sheer common sense -- and not merely for their technical expertise. So far, so good -- though not as eloquently put as (much to my pleasant surprise) by Kamala.
Then again, I was also a great admirer of Obama, but that comes with two significant reservations: 1) His bailout that benefited the bankers while millions lost their homes, and 2) His winning invocation of "No Black America, no White America" that now appears to have been (recast as merely "aspirational" in the context of "Black Lives") a duplicitous bait-and-switch. Taken together (along with Hillary's "Nurse Ratched" persona), that's how we (unfortunately) ended up with the embitterment of Obama/Trump voters. (FWIW, in 2016 I cast a "no-harm" write-in vote [in California] for Bernie.)
More seriously, now... I wish you'd addressed my point #3 above, regarding the development of a self-serving nomenklatura. Schumpeter makes a similar observation on the entrepreneurial spirit devolving into managerial bureaucracy. (So, too, did Ibn Khaldun, regarding the loss of "asabiyah.") The problem might be cyclical, implicit in the development of entrenched institutions, no matter how well-designed.
If you can truly resolve that conundrum, you might be ready to take on your more formidable adversaries, who operate in the style of the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka! ;-)
"3) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr wrote: "The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel wrote long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file…. No loopholes have yet been discovered in the iron law of oiigarchy.”
Nothing’s really changed in that regard since our earliest experimentation with any kind of social organization above that of who was the best hunter in the group or who seemed to have the spiritual power to comprehend and control nature. It gained impetus with the need to direct and oversee building such things as large scale irrigation systems. It came to its first real fruitions with the pyramid building in Egypt, the ziggurats in Sumer, and those mysterious, marvelous (and somewhat obsessive) models of structure and design, the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro on the Indus.
And, of course, those in such leadership positions have always been interested in keeping them. Like the poor, they will always be with us. In fact, we could not exist without them.
There’s only one possible answer to ‘the iron law of oligarchy’ - the motives of the oligarchs. This was the problem that the Founders attempted to solve by making the ‘oligarchy’ (the executive and the congress) responsible to the people, by creating them from within the body of the people (voting), and by constructing a blueprint (the Constitution) which would make the organization permanent outside of any human agency while curbing the potential excesses of the oligarchs themselves. The relatively small nature of the original United States made any sizable ‘administrative state’ unnecessary, although the Founders did worry that any increase in our geographical size might require changes in that which would overwhelm their construct, as indeed to some extent it has.
As a long time teacher of American history, I’ve struggled with our evolution and how to teach it. One is always tempted to be a cheerleader, as many now engaged in rewriting American history for the public school classroom would have it, but no honest American with any understanding of our journey can overlook the real thing, which, while full of potential, is hardly as pretty as one might like.
I can only imagine one possible answer, which is to use the last two years of high school to give every American kid a thorough grounding in our Constitution. If enough of us, both as voters and as members of the ‘oligarchy’ understand what we were designed to be, perhaps the motivation to maintain it would prove out. It’s the best I have, because in the end it is the only answer that aligns with who we were meant to be.
You write, "An eighteenth century American farmer had to know a great deal within a relatively small and specialized area of knowledge, but he could survive quite well largely ignorant of much large issues."
I think you have it precisely backward. That yeoman was a generalist, and the Founders (at their best) were attempting to create a system that would facilitate his ability (and his right) to make decisions on those large issues.
Each of our "experts," conversely, is operating "within a relatively small and specialized area of knowledge": to return to my earlier metaphor, like a bunch of blind men, each trying to describe (his assigned piece of) an elephant.
The problem is implicit in the over-complexity itself. Our nomenklatura can include specialists (especially lawyers) deeply schooled in the minutiae of Constitutional law, just as the Soviet nomenklatura had its savants steeped in the vast corpus of Marxian doctrine, with its own convoluted, Talmudic investigations of alienation and class conflict, and its own "blueprint" for social justice. Some were (and are) undoubtedly sincere -- but in the end, a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy.
And when the elephant decides to move, all those "experts" will be rudely reminded of the simple truth that they've been struggling to reach with all the claptrap of their fragmentary "expertise"...
Where does an elephant sleep? Wherever it wants to! And plenty of those self-important "experts" are likely to get crushed in the process.
"I think you have it precisely backward. That yeoman was a generalist, and the Founders (at their best) were attempting to create a system that would facilitate his ability (and his right) to make decisions on those large issues.”
And yet the Founders created a hierarchy of legislative groups to deal with those larger issues. Individual voters chose the members of their state legislators and members of the House (A throwback to the ‘lower house’ of colonial legislators since that’s where decisions were made concerning the use of public money). But it was the state legislators who chose the members of the US Senate; the presumption being that the Senate would be ‘the adults’ in the legislative room (one of the reason they have three times the term period of Representatives). They made most of the larger decisions so that the farmer could concentrate as the expert on his vine and fig tree.
You say, “in the end a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy” which statement my father would have called a ‘tautological, paraphrastic,redundency’.
As to the parable of the blind men and the elephant, (and it was one of my favorite poems as a kid) it was a parody after all, the reason why the men were defined as blind. There certainly are nomenklatura who do operate in that fashion, a system symbolized in a way by our insistence on structuring our educational system as a separation subjects as if the world were actually broken into discrete areas of math, languages, science, etc. Actually, of course, each ’subject’ represents not an entirely separate field, but rather a differing perspective of the whole.
But there are also those who transcend that kind of parochialism. Indeed, there too is a hierarchy made up of those specialists who concentrate in one area, and whose data is then transmitted to planning groups who integrate the results of he specialists’ work. They are the ones who, when necessary, ‘move the elephant’. But their decisions must rest on the work of the specialists. It is said that Leonardo de Vinci was the last man who could be said to have known everything there was to know at the time. But I suspect that even he would be overwhelmed today.
There remain those who believe they have a handle on it all. Hitler was one along with Stalin. Donald Trump is another, albeit a junior member. Such men did and do often disdain the ‘experts’. Sometimes they are right about certain areas, but generally they are wrong about the Big Picture, often to everyone’s detriment.
Wiser men and women in positions of great responsibility for and to others know they have to depend to a certain extent on the experts, even if they sometimes get it wrong. Without them, we’d have to start from scratch every time. It is an imperfect system, but right now it is all we have.
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