Motus Mentis

Returning from a month of happy isolation and indifference to the news, I see that we’ve been slipping ever deeper into bitter factional strife, if not yet (quite) outright war. The Kavanaugh hearings, which I had on in the background as I worked these past two days, are an obvious and dispiriting example. A steady stream of obstreperous lunatics rose during the proceedings to holler and disrupt, and to be swiftly arrested, one after another, by the hard-working Capitol police. (An exercise for the reader: why are these brats, whose response to reasoned debate is to bawl like infants, always of the Left?) Meanwhile, from the very first seconds of the hearing, Democrat senators ignored rules of order, spoke out of turn, and tried to shut the whole thing down on the fatuous premise that they hadn’t been given enough information to assess Mr. Kavanaugh’s record — his more than 300 publicly available opinions and scores of published essays notwithstanding. What had been intended by the Framers to be an august proceeding among dignified adults in what has been called “the world’s greatest deliberative body” seemed more like Black Friday at Best Buy.

Why is this?

First and foremost, it is because of the great, century-long movement of power from localities to the Federal government, even as the nation has grown vastly larger and more diverse. It should be obvious to all that the size and diversity of the United States has already pushed it well beyond the point where it can be governed responsively, or flexibly — to put it simply, governed well — by a unitary apparatus in Washington. This accelerating centripetal shift has hoovered up power from state and local systems with increasing thoroughness and granularity, to the point where even the most obviously provincial and personal matters fall under the vigilance and regulation of the Federal panopticon. This is a thing that simply could not have happened, or perhaps even been imagined, in the Founders’ day: given the limitations of communication and transportation in that era, even the most tyrannical despot could not have presumed to manage every detail of a vast and variegated empire the way Washington controls every American’s life and business now. (It has only become possible, to use Churchill’s ominous phrase, “by the lights of perverted science”.) Because of this enormous concentration of power, control of Washington is now of paramount, even existential, importance to both political parties.

Second, while all this has been going on, the Congress — the branch of government that was designed to be the most closely controlled by, and answerable to, the people — has for decades been delegating its law-making power to other, unelected and unaccountable, agencies of government. This is in large part, I think, an inherent liability of the system itself, in that members of Congress, who must stand for election every two or six years, can in this way insulate themselves from responsibility for actually legislating: they can simply outsource the decision-making (and in actual effect, their Constitutional power of law-making) to agencies like the EPA, the ICC, the FCC, OSHA, etc.

Third, in no small part because of increasing demographic diversity, but also because of cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions”, American comity and commonality has diminished sharply (and catastrophically). This loss of commonality, together with increasing secularism and an ascendant philosophy of presentism, materialism and skepticism, has led to a sharp assault on the traditional vertical hierarchies and horizontal ligatures that the Founders understood to be essential for binding a diverse population into a nation.

Once, the idea of rights (and by that I mean what are called “negative” rights, which are simply various natural rights of personal liberty, and were, for the most part, all that the Founders thought necessary to secure) entailed a corresponding sense of civic duty. Now the idea of duties seems quaint — while every imaginable blessing has become a “right”, regardless of whether a newly discovered right (such as healthcare, food, shelter, college education, etc.) imposes a duty upon someone else to provide it. This has led to a widening fissure between those Americans who believe in, and seek to live by, the general principles of the nation’s founding, and those who believe that the nation should be ordered only according to this new and expansive concept of “rights”, with outmoded traditions of family, civic, and religious life stripped away. Moreover, the latter vision isn’t going to come into being all by itself: the coercive nature of positive “rights”, which by definition entail taking the fruits of the labor of others for their provision, necessarily involves the government in confiscation and redistribution — often, if not always, in violation of what the Founders saw as the natural rights of liberty and property. This is not to say that a good-hearted people cannot agree to systems of redistribution, both public and private, for the sake of expansive social services — but such a thing is most easily accomplished in societies that have at least three important, perhaps even necessary qualities: social cohesion, public trust, and industriousness. In the United States the first of these is effectively destroyed, the second is failing rapidly, and the third is far from evenly distributed. This means that the instantiation of the new and expansive notion of “rights” depends, almost exclusively, upon exertions of Federal power. And so control of the Federal apparatus becomes paramount.

Fourth, this increase in factional strife having led to an increasingly divided and feckless Congress, one that tends whenever possible to dodge accountability for promising the impossible by punting its powers to the great Federal bureaucracy, the judiciary has established greater and greater power — both by its own assertion of such supremacy, and by the vacuum created by Congressional lassitude and paralysis. The Supreme Court has, in many recent decisions, effectively written new and supreme law, often of fundamental importance for the social and political structure of the nation. This means that control of the Court is in many ways the most important prize of all; even the Presidency itself is so bitterly contested, in large part, because of the presidential power to appoint Justices.

In short, then: the Federal government — which was originally imagined as a small and lightweight apparatus, with powers few and limited, intended only to arrange matters of common interest to the States, and to present a unitary face to the world at large — has become so overwhelmingly powerful that controlling it is worth fighting to the death, even as the Court has emerged as the reigning authority within the government. All this is happening at a time when the traditions, virtues, mutual loyalties, and cultural commonalities so necessary to the survival of a great nation as a nation are being ground into dust.

How can this end well?