I haven’t written much lately — I’ve been too busy with work and with personal matters, and frankly I haven’t had much to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about where matters stand, here in the senescent West, as this pivotal year winds down, and have been doing a lot of interesting reading — but there are times when one must pause for digestion and reflection, and to reassess what one knows and understands and believes, and this is, for me, one of those moments. At times like that it’s good to try to relax, and to let the mind’s “background threads” do their work in peace, and so I’ve been glad to concentrate on musical work for a while instead. I feel I can occupy myself far more productively at the mixing console than the writing desk just now, until some things are clearer in my mind.
I must, however, note with sadness the passing of the great conservative economist Walter Williams, who died Wednesday at the age of 84. He saw through many of the sacred delusions of our age with piercing insight, and wasn’t afraid to say so. (Here he is, for example, taking on one of the most persistent of these “progressive” pipe-dreams: minimum-wage laws as a solution for poverty.)
We will miss him.
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May his memory be eternal!
After reading about Williams’ death, it occurred to me that his weekly column that one of our local papers carried may have been my introduction to politics as a child. I made sure to read him every week, and he undoubtedly had a significant influence on my development. He enlightened millions of minds. A good man, indeed.
https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-mccarthy-report/episode-108-a-post-election-litigation-update/
Not being an attorney I still wonder about something a judge once informed me of/about
McCarthy begins addressing that stuff about twenty minutes in. Wisconsin specifically.
Seems problematic to me – thoughts?
If you get a chance Malcolm Patrick Deneen”s Why Liberalism Failed might be worth your time. In this slim volume the Notre dame political scientist argues that Lockean liberalism has led the West to the fractalist mileau it resides in now. Although perhaps this argument is already familiar enough and you have better tomes to peruse.
Jason,
This debate — did the Founding contain a “poison pill” that doomed it from the start, or are things falling apart because we have drifted away from the “form” and “matter” the Republic required? — is one that I’ve been thinking about, and writing about, for years now.
The question leads deeply into the ancient philosophical struggle between the rationalist religious tradition flowing from Aristotle, though Aquinas, to Hooker, Suarez and Bellarmine, versus the nominalist/voluntarist tradition that began in the West with Ockham (though it was put forward my Islamic thinker such as Ghazali as well), and found powerful expression in Filmer and Hobbes.
Where it gets complicated is with Locke, who seemed to have a foot in both camps, and so can be read by people such as Deneen as having favored radical individualism over a transcendent basis for civic and personal virtues – while others, such as Robert Reilly, argue that the Founders drew from Locke a philosophy of comprehensible natural law (including the moral law that seems so absent today).
My own feeling is that the problem is, above all, that secularism has eroded the belief in any transcendent order, and so the compulsion of natural law — which the Founders saw as essential for the life of the Republic — no longer gets any traction.
@Malcolm, et al…
If we won’t for instance defend our children from sexual grooming in the schools, aka sex education then perhaps we need to grow a pair, and worry about natural law later.
The list of depredations is endless, we can talk about anything and the predation is full frontal and open.
The same response and soul searching occurs every time: is it our laws?
Is it that we’ve drifted from the Constitution?
What are the legal and above all peaceful remedies?
The answer perhaps is to locate the location of a man’s soul directly between his legs and give ourselves …or our faltering fellows…a good whack there…so we remember at least where our B@lls are…
Yes, I think that’s it…
We don’t have a systems problem.
We have a personnel problem.
50% of our personnel problem is ourselves.
There isn’t any system our vicious elites could be contained by, certainly not now.
Nor are there any remedies that would have any effect along the lines we’ve been pursuing, and of course we’re now openly disenfranchised.
Find our balls, and act like men.
It’s not as if these are fearsome opponents.
They simply parasite off us by ‘manipulating procedural outcomes’ a phrase all should google. They have now alienated all, and have the loyalty of none…including themselves. They themselves are not impressive, they’re just world class thieves, pimps, pornographers and embezzlers. And Lawyers, but I repeat myself (with lawyers you can add ‘bagmen’).
BTW the disenfranchisement has only begun.
The enemy must, must now consolidate power and really take power from the lower houses, the State governments, which have been going Republican for 10 years.
They will, as long as there is peaceful and law abiding people in their way and nothing more.
But we all know all this, I am simply saying it aloud.
Happy Holidays, and the sun will yet shine again on America.