Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
bttt
This is the most thoughtful and philosophically sound article Greenfield has written. It must be read and reread. Its conclusions lead to its premises. While it is not cyclical, it is foundational.
I sent this article to a witless family member who is a mind number leftist, with the notation that it will help her understand our society. I will be amazed if she is able to get past the second sentence.
This is a tough read but it will refine your thought process.
Perhaps Legal Perfection” is a much more succinct description of what Greedfield so accurately descrides in the article under discussion.
The Ancient Greeks discussed what ideal law would be and agreed that it would treat all citizens equally in all circumstances.
Then one pointed out that the City State was so large(40,000 ‘voting citizens’) that such legal perfection would have to encompass so many variables as to be impossible. They concluded that they would have to rely on human judgement, instead of attempting to write perfect laws.
Now, think about the sheer hubris of attempting to create laws and regulations in the numbers America has done.
Shut down whole agencies. Florida’s Governor Scott campaigned promising to shut down the Florida Department of Community Affairs(A hotbed of collectivists/regulators).
He won the election and did shut down the entire agency. Florida did better without it.
Shut down all agencies not justifiable from a Strict Constitution perspective!
There are several ways this piece could be organized into an essay that makes its points clearly and memorably, emphasizing them with relevant examples.
....” the decadent civilization must ‘undo’ the damage that is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. ...the decadent civilization has most of ‘the same infrastructure’, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only its ideas have become corrupted.
And even this deeper corruption is largely limited to the ‘elites and the professional classes’, while the rest of the civilization has experienced only a surface corruption that is easily wiped away.
The difficulty is however structural. A decadent civilization becomes more top-down with each year. And the source of the corruption is at the top. ‘Removing the source of the corruption requires either removing all or almost all of the elites, and sizable sections of the professional classes as well’.... Or a campaign of ideas that transforms them as fundamentally as they were transformed.”......
This is why the ground swell for Trump who seems to want to lead this. But is he really any different?
bkmk