Posted on 01/01/2017 12:03:01 PM PST by Auntie Mame
This year saw a major, unexpected political upheaval in both the United States and Europe.
...
. . . there are some issues that this year’s events led me to change my mind about. Here are three of the most important.
I. The Perils of Polarization. ... II. Should We Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms? ... III. Rethinking the Unitary Executive.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I found this article hilarious. Thought others might also if they care to slog their way through it.
Turn the ‘rats out to wander the desert.
Of course she wants a more European-style parliamentarian system, like Italy, perhaps. No executive power at all, hardly. Smoke filled rooms? Well, at least there is some precedent for that in our early Constitutional system, but it reminds me today of the British system, where the PM is not popularly selected.
No thanks, I think I’ll stick with our winner-take-all system, with checks and balances.
>>Now that Trump has been elected President, this supposedly libertarian author thinks that perhaps the executive shouldn’t have so much power, and the elites of the parties should have more say so in selecting their party’s representative and maybe polarization which he used to think was good or bad is now not good or bad.
I found this article hilarious. Thought others might also if they care to slog their way through it. <<
Yeah, I read it the same way:
1) The other side won and they are meanies so they should now be really nice and listen to our side even though we spent the last years telling them to f off
2) hiLIARy sucked which is why we lost and if wiser heads would have prevailed we would have had a candidate who would have won
3) I don’t like Trump having power (but I really liked obozo having it) so we should NOW remove power from the POTUS
Trump has opened a fault line in libertarianism, between the cultural liberals and the cultural conservatives.
You can see it in this debate between Nick Gillespie and Walter Block at the Soho Forum in November:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNHcqc6jNrg
TL;DR version: Block won the debate. He took the affirmative, that libertarians should support Trump in the election.
Most libertarians I know supported Trump because he was the least bad feasible choice.
Rather than libertarianism, the basic thrust of the article goes to the heart of progressivism, i.e., that the people cannot govern themselves and require an educated elite to govern.
Unexpected upheaval in the West? Only among the echochamber elites who tuned out criticism of their agenda.
On Terrorism, no clue.
On Radical Environmentalism (like banning coal), no clue.
On Obamacare's devastation of jobs, affordability, and effects on the industry, willful no clue.
On Justice, devistating police deparments in the major city's, no clue.
So hint: The WPEST is good for fishwrap if you didn't pay for it and not worth a Click on its website.
I had the same thoughts when Obama was our dear leader.
good grief, what an idiot. Guess Mr. George Mason Professor of Law never studied Civics 101, you know, how the three branches of the U.S. government are designed so each checks the power of the other two?
Besides, what inane issues to obsess and pontificate about. Why not ponder over much more important issues such as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “Is Heaven really in the sky and Hell underground?” or “When will we all finally be commuting in flying cars?”
The elites at the DNC did, in fact, have a big say in determining their nominee. The primaries/caucuses were mere window dressing. The candidate was pre-determined at the top. As happened in ‘07.
The GOP had planned to nominate another amnesty supporting Designated Loser.
In every election since the last amnesty they had succeeded in preventing the citizens from electing a President who would enforce the laws.
They got Trumped this time. Some of them, McCain, Graham, Bush, are still ticked off about it.
W. is not going to show up for the inauguration because we rejected becoming North Mexico and succeeded in electing a President who will enforce the laws.
Perhaps he even considers us Fly-over States and Rust Belters. After all, SHE said we were deplorables.
I do not disagree with your point.
I do say that most self-described libertarians of today are really leftists.
Supporting open borders without first absolutely eliminating all welfare is not a truly libertarian position (to name just one).
I consider many of today’s so-called libertarians to actually be mere libertines.
That’s for sure. The extremists want to bake in the left-lurches. You can’t have gains becomes gones at the irrational hands of voters, who can only be trusted to vote for leftists.
“I. The Perils of Polarization.”
I don’t know if this is a misperception or deliberate sophistry, but it is a distortion of reality. The left has not changed, has not become more “extreme” than it was in the 1960s—or in 1917 for that matter. The left has always practiced the most extreme partisan bias possible; they have always reflexively supported their own party and ignored its faults, while reflexively demonizing the opposition and dismissing ideas associated with it. This is much less true of Republicans, and almost entirely untrue of conservatives.
It is simply not the case that leftists were less biased or less “polarized” 20 years ago, or 10, or five, than they are now. It is true that they were getting away with *pretending* to be more reasonable, but that was a transparent façade. Transparent except, that is, to those who relied on the evilstream misleadia.
What has happened is not that the two parties are becoming more extreme, as this propagandist would have it. Instead, the left has abandoned a lot of its pretense (Prematurely, Gott sei dank.) and the American people said, “Hell no.” There has been an awakening to the true nature of the demonrats and the rest of the left, which has caused the silent majority to dig in their heels and echo William F. Buckley: Stop!
It was at least a couple of decades ago that some pundit pointed out that when the left says “far-right,” this says nothing about the political stance of the individual slurred, but is solely a measure of the strength and determination with which he opposes the left. The stronger his opposition to evil, the further to the right the left says him to be. This author is mistaking or misrepresenting the renewal of our contempt for the lunatic left as movement toward right-wing extremism.
Neither has the left become worse. They were already as bad as it is possible to be. No, what this author sees is their unrestrained infantile fury at their own rejection and defeat.
The American people haven’t suddenly lurched toward the right. They’re just tired of being dragged to the left. Nor has the left ever hated us less than they do now.
If we are “polarized” in the sense that we are implacably opposed to the other side, that doesn’t mean that we have gone further to the left or right. It just means that more people are better informed on the nature of the left. That is the only change that has occurred in this regard.
In any case, “polarization” is less harmful than our inexorable march to the left.
“The more polarized we are, the greater the partisan bias, and the greater the tendency to reject anything associated with the opposition.”
Perhaps this reflects the propagandist’s true motivation: to persuade non-leftists to be more accepting of leftist crap in the name of eschewing “partisan bias.” The problem with that, of course, is that the left has always rejected “anything associated with the opposition.” The right has been much weaker in this regard, but the only sane course of action is to be implacably opposed to every tiniest detail of leftist thought.
“Polarization also makes voters and political activists more willing to tolerate bad behavior by their own party and its leaders.”
The left has always been absolutely willing to tolerate bad behavior by its own people. Republicans have been less so, and conservatives intolerant of bad behavior. There have been no recent changes to this. The propagandist merely follows the communist diktat, “Accuse others of what you do.”
“When your opponent wins in a highly polarized environment, policy will turn against your values in a big way, not just a small one.”
The left has evil values. We need to turn against them in a big way.
“For that reason, among others, partisans become even more willing than usual to turn a blind eye to the flaws of their own leaders, and tolerate behavior they would never accept if the other side did it.”
Leftist partisans do and always have. Conservative partisans don’t and never have.
“This sort of dynamic is one key reason why the vast majority of Republican voters ultimately “came home” to Trump, despite the fact that many had severe reservations about him.”
I really thought some of them might start to understand if enough time passed. Guess not.
“But while the Trump phenomenon helped catalyze my rethinking on this issue”
Having delusions of adequacy again? Your “rethinking” is as pathetically dysfunctional as I’m sure your original “thinking” was.
“II. Should We Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms?”
The great unwashed cannot be trusted to vote correctly, right? We need smarter people, people like you, to force a communist tyranny on us. For our own good, of course.
“As a libertarian”
I wonder if this drooling moron really thinks he’s a libertarian, or if he just thinks we’re stupid enough to believe it.
“We need to give party elites a greater say in the process”
I’ll bet you think you should be among that elite too, don’t you, dimwit?
“but to reduce the danger of ending up with horrendously awful ones.”
That would be FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama. Ponder what could have been if good Americans had beaten those evil swine, oh America, and weep.
“III. Rethinking the Unitary Executive.”
AKA fundamentally transforming our system of government.
“Like many constitutional originalists”
Good grief. Really? Mark Twain noted that mankind’s chiefest talent was self-deception, but I wonder if even he could have expected this extreme an example.
“so long as he does not order them to do anything specifically banned by law our outside the scope of executive authority altogether.”
Does this guy even understand what a constitution is?
“it is dangerous to concentrate it in the hands of any one person”
Not “any” one person, but certainly in the hands of any leftist.
“If it cannot be pared back”
Who says it can’t? If the government is exercising unconstitutional powers, and it is, then it *must* be pared back.
“The prospect of Trump wielding such power has helped lead me to rethink this issue.”
This statement shows that the propagandist believes many things that are false.
“Had Hillary Clinton won the election, it would not have been desirable to let her control a fully unitary executive either.”
But he probably thinks she’d have made a fine president.
“But unless and until we can substantially reduce the overall extent of executive power, Congress should have the option of at least partially insulating many executive branch agencies from complete presidential control.”
Yeah, that’s original intent. I can just hear Alexander Hamilton saying the same thing.
“Before we can restore the unitariness of the executive”
We? No leftist should have a voice in anything, ever.
That fault line has always been there to some degree. Something most people don’t get is that libertarianism has left and right wings. When I was dabbling in libertarianism fifteen or so years ago there two magazines I liked to read — Reason and Liberty, with Reason on the left and Liberty on the right, more or less. I always liked Liberty better.
“Now that Trump has been elected President, this supposedly libertarian author thinks that perhaps the executive shouldn’t have so much power, and the elites of the parties should have more say so in selecting their party’s representative and maybe polarization which he used to think was good or bad is now not good or bad.”
Exactly. Now that the term of the Left’s unqualified, America-hating, divisive, extremist, hyper-partisan ideologue, dictator is almost over, NOW we need to change all the rules. GFY.
>>I consider many of today’s so-called libertarians to actually be mere libertines.
I agree, and the prima facie evidence of this is that such libertarians fly into hysterics when this is pointed out to them.
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