Sovereign exception to Neverending War & people as "Other" [notes on carl schmitt & marx]

Cardozo Law Review ^ | ? | Benedetto Fontana

[Askel5]

NOTES ON
CARL SCHMITT AND MARXISM

Benedetto Fontana^*

Today we live in the age of liberal triumphalism and capitalist globalization. The end of history and the end of politics are everywhere announced and celebrated. Writers from Fukuyama¹ to Huntington,² theorists from Bobbio to Held, have taken up the theme of structural transformation, democratization, the increasing importance of international institutions, and the consequent decline of the state.³

Academics, politicians,⁴ and "public intellectuals" are heralding the advent of a novus ordo seclorum, both national and international, in which traditional notions of politics, conflict, and citizenship will be redefined, and in which new behavioral patterns and habits are being formed. A conference devoted to the thought of Carl Schmitt is therefore a welcome corrective.

It is welcome because the moralism and the resulting depoliticization of state and society are not merely instances of infantile vanity and smug selfcongratulation, but also because they reflect the underlying tendencies and assumptions of liberal capitalism that Schmitt’s thought tried to uncover. Of course, Marx and Engels, in their day, also sought to uncover the material and power structures that underlay the liberal ideology of natural right, constitutionalism, and representative government.

Thus, the papers presented by Jorge Dotti⁵ and Stathis Gourgouris,⁶ exploring the relation, and points of contact, between Marxist and Schmittian thought, are not only interesting and enlightening in their own right, but are also politically and intellectually valuable for engaging and challenging the contemporary Weltanschauung of liberal and capitalist thought.

To Schmitt, Marxism adumbrates two related, sometimes contradictory, tendencies.

On one hand, it suggests a theory of historical development in which the internal contradictions of capitalism lead to its supersession into a superior socio-political order. This is its "scientific," deterministic, and economistic side. Politically, in the West, this view contributed to the integration of the working class into the liberal and parliamentary state. Here Marxism is seen as the mirror image of liberal thought. By its privileging of the private and the economic, and in its concern with wages, workplace conditions, and social welfare policies, reformist socialism is merely the further elaboration of the liberal emphasis on private life, property rights, and ethical and cultural considerations (such as individualistic rationality, natural rights, etc.).

As such, rather than challenging the hegemony of the liberal conception of the world, this type of Marxism may be seen as its natural and logical result.

At the political level, Western socialists accepted and played the liberal parliamentary game. Yet Schmitt realized that Marxism contained elements enabling it to transcend its merely class and economic content -- it contained the germs of what he understood to be a fundamental and radical critique of liberal thought and liberal society.

Both of these papers show that he found these elements in Sorel and in the notions of dictatorship elaborated in the East by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Sorel, in his emphasis on the myth of the general strike, and Lenin, in his coup d’état of October 1917, pointed to an antiliberal understanding of politics.

Liberals saw politics in two contradictory ways: either as the result of rational discussion and open debate, or as the result of competing private interests ultimately leading to bargaining, alliance formation, and coalition building. In either case--whether as a rational and open debate or as the clash of opposing and interfering interests--political liberalism leads to the supremacy of parliament and of its political parties.

Here, too, liberalism presents the state and politics as mere mechanisms, as instruments necessary in maintaining a "neutral" and objective order. For Schmitt, revolutionary Marxism and the Sorellian idea of myth recapture a notion that political liberalism both negates and covers up. In both cases (Sorel and Lenin), the recovery of the political was made possible by moving away from the rationalistic and abstract categories originating in the Enlightenment (humanity, rule of law, rights of man, the proletariat as the universal class). Both exposed the neutral, rational, and universal pretensions not only of liberal thought, but also of reformist socialist ideology.

In this sense, both liberalism and Western (reformist) Marxism are the natural descendants of Enlightenment rationalist thought. Liberalism talks about the "equality of all men" and the natural rights guaranteed to them by natural law. Although Marx attacks these notions as mere ideological mystifications that veil social inequality and economic domination, he nevertheless looks forward to a future communism that inaugurates a classless society of universal emancipation.

At the same time, both liberalism and Western Marxism privilege the social over the political, and the private over the public—indeed, the social is reduced to the economic. The typical liberal distinction between state and society is reproduced in Marxian thought, where the former is seen as the mere outgrowth or epiphenomenon of the latter.

Liberalism, as the ideology of the dominant bourgeois groups and of the established system of state formations, especially evinces the overriding tendency to see politics and the state as the process by which legislation is constitutionally enacted and subsequently administered through elaborate legal-bureaucratic mechanisms. The state is the means by which the multiple groups that together define society--cultural, religious, economic, and educational—can compete and further their particular private interests. In other words, the state enables these social groups to act within the private sphere and, at the same time, to deny the political character of their activities--thus the obvious and intimate connection between liberalism and parliamentarism.⁷

The supremacy of the private sphere leads inevitably to parliamentary deliberation and discussion. Both the private sphere and parliament entail the subordination of politics to the social, economic, and cultural spheres. To the extent that parliamentary representation mirrors the multiplicity of private activities that take place within the overall society, parliamentary government implies the domestication of politics and the state.

Thus, liberalism and Marxism share a concern with the private, economic aspects of life and culture.

They both understand and analyze politics in terms of society and the economy.

Yet, while liberalism sees such a condition as a natural and normal conclusion, Marxism sees it simply as a stage of historical development which must be transcended and overcome.

Schmitt sees the rise of liberalism and parliamentarism as occurring within the transitional stage between the absolutist state of the seventeenth century and the mass or total state of the twentieth century. Such a period is characterized by the emergence of the people or masses as a political force in history.

In the Anglo-American world, the intervention of the masses into the political world, became a matter of finding mechanisms by which to integrate them into an already existing institutional order, while in Europe such mass intervention challenged the very foundations of the various anciens régimes. In the latter circumstances, sovereignty thus becomes problematic. It becomes complicated, and is rendered unstable and unpredictable, by the mass mobilization of people and the concomitant transformation of the power equation and equilibrium in state and society.

In addition, while democratization in the Anglo-American states meant the channeling and control of the masses through various institutional devices already established by the prevailing liberal order, in Europe, democratization meant the interpenetration of the political and social elements of state and society. In the latter case, politics was no longer confined and delimited by the structural boundaries of the state, because "state and society penetrate[d] each other."⁸

It is this very interpenetration of the political and the social that Schmitt seeks to address. He shares with nineteenth-century liberals an antipathy toward the people/masses, regarding them as sources of instability, anarchy, and decline.

Technological and industrial innovations have produced new methods of mass mobilization and mass propaganda, which, to Schmitt and liberals, have intensified and accelerated the political and social dangers threatening the viability and durability of the social order.

Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, and his concomitant analysis of the Marxist-Leninist notion of dictatorship, issues directly from these inherently conservative concerns. As he sees it, liberal politics, since it is based on parliamentary government and interest group competition or compromise, is not equipped to deal with the political democratization and the mass politics that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Both communism and Sorel’s vision of proletarian mass action put themselves in stark opposition to what Schmitt called the "liberal illusion" of the reconcilability of interests, compromise, and constitutional and parliamentary democracy. In addition, both see life as an existential struggle with an other. As such, the function of consciousness or knowledge is not to lead to discussion or to debate, but rather to action, and to the overcoming of the class enemy.

It is myth or ideology that galvanizes the consciousness of the masses, organizes their social reality, and moves them to act.

In Schmitt’s thought, the political is understood in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy. Such a notion harks back to the political theory and practice of the ancient world. In the first book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates is trying to arrive at a concept of justice, Polemarchus offers a definition in terms of the friend/enemy dichotomy. Polemarchus says that justice is "doing good to friends and harm to enemies."⁹ Such a notion, moreover, complements and elaborates Thrasymachus’s definition of justice as "the interest of the stronger."¹⁰

Both presuppose a concept of the political defined by opposition and conflict.^askelnote

Political thought in the ancient world was dominated by the problem of the struggle between the masses (the demos) and the rich and powerful (the dynatoi [Dynacorp?] ). In Plato’s Republic, for example, the polis is never seen as a unified totality or unity, but rather is envisioned as torn asunder by the struggle for power between the rich and the poor.¹¹ The polis is, in reality, "two cities," or two factions: democracy and oligarchy.

Moreover, for both Plato and Aristotle, the struggle between these two cities creates the political and social prerequisites for the emergence of tyranny. Variants of such a construction, of course, can be traced from the ancients to Machiavelli, to Montesquieu, to Madison and Hamilton, and up to the Marxists and the theorists of elitism (Mosca, Michels, and Schumpeter).

However, unlike the Marxist and ancient antinomy which assigns the opposing antagonists a class content, Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy does not define what the political "is"--for in itself it has no content or substance. What Schmitt’s dichotomy does is define the "limits" or boundaries of existence or life.¹² As Schmitt notes, "[t]he distinction of friend and enemy signifies the outer limits of an association or dissociation."¹³

In a stable state the political in this sense is latent, unseen, mere potential. But if and when the state monopoly over the means of coercion breaks down, and its authority and legitimacy begin to unravel, the political is realized as civil strife and civil war. According to Schmitt:

"War is just the extreme realization of enmity. It need not be a common occurrence, nor something normal, neither must it be an ideal or something to be longed for; but it must persist as a real possibility, if the concept of an enemy is to retain meaning."¹⁴

Such a statement is strikingly similar to the characterization of proletarian revolution described by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire, where he contrasts the development and direction of the proletarian revolution to those of the bourgeois revolution. Marx writes:

Proletarian revolutions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course . . . seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic before them . . . until the situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!¹⁵

The notion that class struggle is not necessarily open war and violent conflict was stated, of course, in the 1848 Manifesto, where Marx and Engels proclaimed the enmity of successive historical classes, which "stood in constant opposition to one another," and which "carried on [an] uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight."¹⁶

War, whether international or domestic, must be "a real possibility" -- that is, the distinction between friend and enemy creates a permanent state of war in the Hobbesian sense.¹⁷

It is in this sense that, to Schmitt, the political is always the exception: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."¹⁸ Hence, the sovereign is not to be understood as a legitimating formula, but rather as a concrete and determinate actor with the power to make and enforce a political decision.

The sovereign is neither an abstract conception nor a legal/constitutional rule. In fact, it is contingent, dependent upon the vicissitudes of conflict and struggle, and thus is always outside the legal/constitutional order of the state.

In effect, the sovereign creates the very possibility for law and order by determining the conditions that define ordinary and normal politics--that is, he decides what the exception is.

As Schmitt writes: "For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists."¹⁹

The state, therefore, whose essence is the political defined by the friend/enemy antithesis, for both Marx and Schmitt, is characterized as the product of conflict and struggle. It is reduced to the executive--that is, to the executive function of organizing and wielding the coercive power of the community (whether the community is defined in terms of the people/nation, as in Schmitt, or in terms of the proletarian class, as in Marx) against the external enemy.

But if the political is the exception, and if the political also is discovered in the friend/enemy distinction, Schmitt translates the notion of class struggle—which in Marx is the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, condition of historical and social movement— into the defining (and universal) characteristic of the political by stripping it of its class (economic) content.

By discarding the class nature of conflict, Schmitt redirects it toward the international and national levels, and thus goes back to Hegel and to the nineteenth-century theorists of Realpolitik and Machtpolitik. It is now the nation-state, rather than the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, that is both protagonist and antagonist of political conflict. In the words of Benedetto Croce, Hegel and Marx "reasserted the nature of the State and of politics in terms of authority and of a struggle for power (the power of nations or the power classes, as the case may be)."²⁰

Both Schmitt and the Marxists, therefore, seem to have a mirror image of their respective concepts of war between friends and enemies. Paradoxically, however, each is attempting to demystify, and to uncover, what each considers to be ideological and mythological formulations regarding the nature of the state and of political conflict.

Yet, Schmitt’s notion of the political as the exception is precisely the Bolshevik intervention in the historical process. Unlike the views of Kautsky and Bernstein, the revolution is not passively waited upon because it is the product of historical development (either as the result of the Hegelian dialectic, or as the result of the objective laws of economic rationality); rather, it is forced, it is brought into being by will and decision, against the laws of historical development--Gramsci first greeted the Bolshevik revolution as the "revolution against Capital."²¹

It is in this sense that Lenin’s dictatorship of the party may be seen as a sovereign dictatorship that created an entirely new political order.

On the other hand, the very existence of conditions making possible the coming of dictatorship indicates that the state and society are riven by factional strife and class conflict, such that normal politics, conducted within the normal constitutional order, are breaking down. This, of course, describes the situation obtained in the late republic of ancient Rome. And this also describes the political trajectory of the Weimar Republic.

In both cases, the civitas and the state, capable of maintaining and guaranteeing peace, security, and predictability, ceased to exist, and the political condition of the anarchic war of all against all that characterized the external international order was introduced inside state and society.²² As a solution, therefore, Schmitt proposed to oppose the red dictatorship of the left with the black dictatorship of the right.

Schmitt understood, along with the communists, that we are dealing here with two kinds of "exception": the commissarial and the sovereign. The first was used in the first years of the Weimar Republic against the communists by the Social Democratic Party leadership to preserve the constitutional order. One is commissioned to use extralegal and extraconstitutional methods to restore legality and the constitutional order. The other, on its own initiative, breaks the legal order in order to create a new one. The first is grounded in the constitution; the other is groundless and emerges ex nihilo (legally and morally speaking) because it wills the new order.²³

In Weimar Germany, the commissarial or constitutional dictatorship exercised by the Reich president was transformed, in the very attempt to preserve the system, into the sovereign dictatorship of the Nazis, which ultimately destroyed the system and established a new order.

In Marxism, moreover, the original vision of the Marxian dictatorship as a temporary and transient device subordinated to the will of the proletariat was transmogrified by Leninism into a permanent dictatorship of the party.

For Schmitt, the political as the exception, and the political as adumbrating the friend/enemy dichotomy, are brought together in the notion of the sovereign dictatorship. While dictatorship relates to the breakdown of order, or to the lack of order altogether (that is, the exception), sovereignty for Schmitt is related to democracy and to the people.

Modernity signals not merely the movement of sovereign power away from the monarch to the people, but also the constitution of the people as historical agent, as the constituent power that establishes the social order. The sovereign, Hobbes says, is the mortal god.²⁴

But since the people constitute themselves as sovereign in opposition to an other, equally sovereign people, and notwithstanding the emphasis on unity and solidarity, Schmitt’s political theology ultimately evinces features that are fundamentally polytheistic. For the people as a political unity can only exist in opposition to another political entity: indeed, the unity of both is established through this very opposition.

In effect, the people as sovereign can only be maintained as such through the constitution of the people as other, and thus through the potential or the possibility of war.

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^* Benedetto Fontana teaches Political Philosophy and American Political Thought at Baruch College, City University of New York. I would like to thank Doris L. Suarez and Dante Germino for their kind and helpful comments.

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^askelnote    [The link chosen for "opposition and conflict" was simply the first up at Google. I blame Serendipity as is my usual practice.]

¹ Francis Fukuyama, THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN (1992).
² Samuel P. Huntington, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER (1996).
³ See COSMOPOLITAN DEMOCRACY: A NEW AGENDA FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER (Daniele Archibugi & David Held eds., 1995).
⁴ See, e.g., Slavoj Zizek, Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism, LONDON REV. OF BOOKS 3, 5-7 (1999) (reviewing JOHN KEANE, VACLAV HAVEL: A POLITICAL TRAGEDY IN SIX ACTS (1999)).
⁵ Jorge Dotti, Schmitt Reads Marx, 21 CARDOZO L. REV. 1473 (2000).
⁶ Stathis Gourgouris, The Concept of the Mythical (Schmitt and Sorel), 21 CARDOZO L. REV. 1487 (2000).
⁷ See Paul Hirst, Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism, 72 TELOS 15-16 (1987); Mark Lilla, The Enemy of Liberalism, N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS, May 15, 1997.
⁸ CARL SCHMITT, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL 22 (George Schwab trans., 1996).
⁹ PLATO, REPUBLIC 331 E-336 A (Conford trans., 1948).
¹⁰ Id. at 336 B-347 E.
¹¹ Id. at 550 C.
¹² See Ellen Kennedy, Hostis Not Inimicus: Toward a Theory of the Public in the Work of Carl Schmitt, in LAW AS POLITICS 92, 92-108 (David Dyzenhaus ed., 1998).
¹³ Id. at 100.
¹⁴ Id. at 101.
¹⁵ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in THE MARX-ENGELS READER 594, 597-98 (Robert C. Tucker ed., 1978).
¹⁶ Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in THE MARX-ENGELS READER, supra note 15, at 473-74.
¹⁷ It is instructive to compare these statements from Schmitt and Marx to those of Hobbes, in which he identifies the state of nature with the state of war: For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or in the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known . . . . So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. THOMAS HOBBES, LEVIATHAN pt. I, ch. 13 (1996).
¹⁸ CARL SCHMITT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY 5 (1985) (George Schwab trans., 1985). 19 Id. at 13.
²⁰ BENEDETTO CROCE, ETICA E POLITICA 181 (1931). Croce, like Schmitt, sees Marx as the theorist of power and of political realism. He sees Marx as returning to the "best traditions of Italian political science, thanks to the firm assertion of the principle of force, of struggle, of power, and of satirical and biting opposition to the anti-historical and democratic insipidity of natural law doctrine--the so-called ideals of 1789." BENEDETTO CROCE, MATERIALISMO STORICO ED ECONOMIA MARXISTICA xii-xiii (1918).
²¹ Antonio Gramsci, La Rivoluzione contro il Capitale, in SCRITTI GIOVANILI 1914- 1918, at 149-53 (Giulio Einaudi ed., 1975).
²² For a discussion of the relation between the normal or ordinary politics obtaining inside or within the political order and that obtaining outside its limits or boundaries, see Benedetto Fontana, Tacitus on Empire and Republic, in XIV HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT 1, 27-40 (1993). See also the analysis in NORBERTO BOBBIO, DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP 158-61 (Peter Kennealy trans., 1989).
²³ For an incisive analysis, see John P. McCormick, The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers, 10 CANADIAN J. LAW & JURISPRUDENCE 1, 163-87 (1997).

[ From his resume:

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS
Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1997) 352 + xii. [Chinese edition forthcoming from Hua Xia Publishing].
Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (monograph in progress; contracted with Cambridge University Press).
Machiavellian Democracy: Popular Control of Contingency and Elites (monograph in progress).]

²⁴ HOBBES, supra note 17, at pt. II, ch. 17.

[Askel5]

A little Schmitt bibliography

[Askel5]

Dampersands ...

[Askel5]

So, I'm thinking to myself -- "gee, I hate to bug them but what if I said I'd drop $25 bucks in the mail TODAY as a "gift in kind" to the forum if they'd PLEASE clean up the ands."

(Caps were sorta purposefully screwy, of course. It's the tinfoil tagger in me ... )

Check's in the mail, memo reads: "Moderators Can be Cool!" =)

[Sidebar Moderator]

It's a slow day, pleased to be of assistance....

[Askel5]

Thanks again.

I expect this thread to get ALL KINDS of traffic and am pleased I'll not be making us look like morons by having my slips showing every third or fourth entry in "Latest Posts" ... =)

[Askel5]

I could have given one more example which is perhaps still more striking: Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.

Just a little teaser from the Sorel link within.

[Askel5]

Political thought in the ancient world was dominated by the problem of the struggle between the masses (the demos) and the rich and powerful (the dynatoi [Dynacorp?] ).

I couldn't help myself ... =)

I guess this is why the "former communists" every overture in favor of Capitalism and Privatization must needs be met by the West's support of Democracy (in lieu of constitutional republics).

Momma always told me to pay close attention to the pre- and suf-FIX'is IN the words folks use.

[Uncle Bill]

"On the other hand, the very existence of conditions making possible the coming of dictatorship indicates that the state and society are riven by factional strife and class conflict, such that normal politics, conducted within the normal constitutional order, are breaking down. This, of course, describes the situation obtained in the late republic of ancient Rome. And this also describes the political trajectory of the Weimar Republic.

In both cases, the civitas and the state, capable of maintaining and guaranteeing peace, security, and predictability, ceased to exist, and the political condition of the anarchic war of all against all that characterized the external international order was introduced inside state and society."

Republics and Democracies
"By the time of the American Revolution and Constitution, the meanings of the words “republic” and “democracy” had been well established and were readily understood. And most of this accepted meaning derived from the Roman and Greek experiences. The two words are not, as most of today’s Liberals would have you believe -- and as most of them probably believe themselves -- parallels in etymology, or history, or meaning. The word Democracy (in a political rather than a social sense, of course) had always referred to a type of government, as distinguished from monarchy, or autocracy, or oligarchy, or principate. The word Republic, before 1789, had designated the quality and nature of a government, rather than its structure. When Tacitus complained that “it is easier for a republican form of government to be applauded than realized,” he was living in an empire under the Caesars and knew it. But he was bemoaning the loss of that adherence to the laws and to the protections of the constitution which made the nation no longer a republic; and not to the f act that it was headed by an emperor.

The word democracy comes from the Greek and means, literally, government by the people. The word “republic” comes from the Latin, res publica, and means literally “the public affairs.” The word “commonwealth,” as once widely used, and as still used in the official title of my state, “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” is almost an exact translation and continuation of the original meaning of res publica. And it was only in this sense that the Greeks, such as Plato, used the term that has been translated as “republic.” Plato was writing about an imaginary “commonwealth”; and while he certainly had strong ideas about the kind of government this Utopia should have, those ideas were not conveyed nor foreshadowed by his title.

The historical development of the meaning of the word republic might be summarized as follows. The Greeks learned that, as Dr. Durant puts it, “man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.” The Romans applied the formerly general term “republic” specifically to that system of government in which both the people and their rulers were subject to law. That meaning was recognized throughout all later history, as when the term was applied, however inappropriately in fact and optimistically in self-deception, to the “Republic of Venice” or to the “Dutch Republic.” The meaning was thoroughly understood by our Founding Fathers. As early as 1775 John Adams had pointed out that Aristotle (representing Greek thought), Livy (whom he chose to represent Roman thought), and Harington (a British statesman), all “define a republic to be a government of laws and not of men.” And it was with this full understanding that our constitution-makers proceeded to establish a government which, by its very structure, would require that both the people and their rulers obey certain basic laws -- laws which could not be changed without laborious and deliberate changes in the very structure of that government. When our Founding Fathers established a “republic,” in the hope, as Benjamin Franklin said, that we could keep it, and when they guaranteed to every state within that “republic” a “republican form” of government, they well knew the significance of the terms they were using. And were doing all in their power to make the features of government signified by those terms as permanent as possible. They also knew very well indeed the meaning of the word democracy, and the history of democracies; and they were deliberately doing everything in their power to avoid for their own times, and to prevent for the future, the evils of a democracy.

Let's look at some of the things they said to support and clarify this purpose. On May 31, 1787, Edmund Randolph told his fellow members of the newly assembled Constitutional Con vention that the object for which the delegates had met was “to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy....”

The delegates to the Convention were clearly in accord with this statement. At about the same time another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, said: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want (that is, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” And on June 21, 1788, Alexander Hamilton made a speech in which he stated: "It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."

At another time Hamilton said: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” And Samuel Adams warned: “Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself! There never was a democracy that ‘did not commit suicide.’”

James Madison, one of, the members of the Convention who was charged with drawing up our Constitution, wrote as follows: “...democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Madison and Hamilton and Jay and their compatriots of the Convention prepared and adopted a Constitution in which they nowhere even mentioned the word democracy, not because they were not familiar with such a form of government, but because they were. The word democracy had not occurred in the Declaration of Independence, and does not appear in the constitution of a single one of our fifty states-which constitutions are derived mainly from the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Republic - for the same reason. They knew all about Democracies, and if they had wanted one for themselves and their posterity, they would have founded one. Look at all the elaborate system of checks and balances which they established; at the carefully worked-out protective clauses of the Constitution itself, and especially of the first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights; at the effort, as Jefferson put it, to “bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” and thus to solidify the rule not of men but of laws. All of these steps were taken, deliberately, to avoid and to prevent a Democracy, or any of the worst features of a Democracy, in the United States of America.

And so our republic was started on its way. And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction. Again, let's look briefly at some of the evidence.

Washington, in his first inaugural address, dedicated himself to “the preservation of the republican model of government.” Thomas Jefferson, our third president, was the founder of the Democratic Party; but in his first inaugural address, although he referred several times to the Republic or the republican form of government, he did not use the word “democracy” a single time. And John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, said: “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

Throughout all of the Nineteenth Century and the very early part of the Twentieth, while America as a republic was growing great and becoming the envy of the whole world, there were plenty of wise men, both in our country and outside of it, who pointed to the advantages of a republic, which we were enjoying, and warned against the horrors of a democracy, into which we might fall. Around the middle of that century, Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, wrote, in an article on The Americans: “The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature -- a type nowhere at present existing.” And in truth we have not been a high enough type to preserve the republic we then had, which is exactly what he was prophesying.

Thomas Babington Macaulay said: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.” And we certainly seem to be in a fair way today to fulfill his dire prophecy. Nor was Macaulay’s contention a mere personal opinion without intellectual roots and substance in the thought of his times. Nearly two centuries before, Dryden had already lamented that “no government had ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be uppermost.” And as a result, he had spoken of nations being “drawn to the dregs of a democracy.” While in 1795 Immanuel Kant had written: “Democracy is necessarily despotism.”

In 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, worried as was Herbert Spencer at what was already being foreshadowed in England, made a speech to the British House of Commons in which he said: “If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditures You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.” Disraeli could have made that speech with even more appropriateness before a joint session of the American Congress in 1935. And in 1870 he had already come up with an epigram which is strikingly true for the United States today. “The world is weary,” he said, “of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.”

But even in Disraeli’s day there were similarly prophetic voices on this side of the Atlantic. In our own country James Russell Lowell showed that he recognized the danger of unlimited majority rule by writing:

“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.”

W. H. Seward pointed out that “Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.” This is an observation certainly borne out during the past fifty years exactly to the extent that we have been becoming a democracy and fighting wars, with each trend as both a cause and an effect of the other one. And Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a most prophetic warning when he said: “Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” If Emerson could have looked ahead to the time when so many of the editors would themselves be a part of, or sympathetic to, the gang of bullies, as they are today, lie would have been even more disturbed. And in the 1880's Governor Seymour of New York said that the merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.

Across the Atlantic again, a little later, Oscar Wilde once contributed this epigram to the discussion: “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.” While on this side, and after the first World War had made the degenerative trend in our government so visible to any penetrating observer, H. L. Mencken wrote: “The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goosestep.” While Ludwig Lewisohn observed: “Democracy, which began by liberating men politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.”

But it was a great Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our republic into a democracy. “You can never have a revolution,” he said, “in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”

And in 1931 the Duke of Northumberland, in his booklet, The History of World Revolution, stated: “The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise.” While an even more recent analyst, Archibald E. Stevenson, summarized the situation as follows: “De Tocqueville once warned us,” he wrote, “that: ‘If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the unlimited tyranny of the majority.’ But a majority will never be permitted to exercise such ‘unlimited tyranny’ so long as we cling to the American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system -- a philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it for democracy.”

And there have been plenty of other voices to warn us."

Robert Welch - September 17, 1961

Congressman Ron Paul's Resolution 443 Supports the Constitution - December 6, 2000
"Well, leave it to Ron Paul, Congressional Representative from Texas, and the most Constitutional of all Congressmen, to come forward in defense of the Electoral College. Here is the text of the House Concurrent Resolution he has JUST put forward to remind everyone that this is a REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY, and to re-affirm our Constitutional Presidential electoral process. I whole-heartedly support this Res. and urge all of you to call your Congressmen now and get them to co-sponsor it, or at least support it. Way to go Rep. Paul!"

Stop the LIE~~We are a REPUBLIC not a Democracy: Support Res. 443

AMERICA IS NOT A DEMOCRACY

U.S. War Department
CITIZENSHIP
Prepared under the direction of the Chief of Staff
This Manual Supersedes Manual of Citizenship Training

Training Manual
No. 20000-25
War Department
Washington, November 30, 1928

DEMOCRACY:

• A government of the masses.
  
• Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of "direct" expression.
  
• Results in mobocracy.
• Attitude toward property is communistic-negating property rights.
• Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.
  
• Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.

  REPUBLIC:

• Authority is derived through the election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them.
  
• Attitude toward property is respect for laws and individual rights, and a sensible economic procedure.
  
• Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accordance with fixed principles and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences.
  
• A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may br brought within its compass.
  
• Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy.
  
• Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment and progress.
  
• Is the "standard form" of government throughout the world.

  A Republic is a form of government under a constitution which provides for the election of (1) an executive and (2) a legislative body, who working together in a representative capacity, have all the power of appointment, all power of legislation, all power to raise revenue and appropriate expenditures, and are required to create (3) a judiciary to pass upon the justice and legality of their governmental acts and to recognize (4) certain inherent individual rights. Take away any one or more of those four elements and you are drifting into autocracy. Add one or more to those four elements and you are drifting into democracy.

  Superior to all others. : Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority can not be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered.

  Democracy is the "direct" rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success.

  Which one most closely resembles what our constitution says? A republic.

  Which one most closely mirrors the Communist Manifesto? A democracy.

  Our Constitutional fathers in their divine wisdom, knew the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy and with fixed principles definitely in mind, they defined a representative republican form of government. These leaders who were so far ahead of their time made a very clear and concise distinction between a republic and a democracy and they are recorded throughout the history of their time stating over and over and over so no one would get it wrong, that they had founded a republic.

  James Madison Explains the Constitution to Thomas Jefferson

  Republic to Democracy
  The United States and it’s Regressive Governmental Evolution

  From Here: Republic To Democracy

  Democracy and Mobocracy are synonyms for a form of government in which the majority (mob) rules, and which by definition, guarantees the absence of minority rights. In a true democracy the only law is that of the majority. Each level of government would have to have the people vote on every decision, no matter how trivial. The democratic form of governing is only functional when all the people in a region can be assembled for the purpose of deciding on the issues at hand, thus it can only function properly in very small applications, such as townships.

  In a republic elections are held in order for the people to elect representatives and the people entrust their representatives to administer the functions of government in their behalf. This form of government can function in vast arenas and assures each person of representation. This is the form of government our founding fathers selected for this country.

  While a republic practices a form of democracy via the elections of representatives and the representatives pass laws and amendments according to the rules of majority voting, the existence of representatives (Congressmen and Senators) and the establishment of our Constitution differentiate our Republic from a democracy.

  The Constitution, and especially of the first ten amendments we call "The Bill of Rights"; were written to assure the rule of law and not of men, and as Jefferson put it, to "bind men down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution".

  In other words; If you personally voted on the budget, the current tax codes, whether our military should bomb The Sudan, and how much money should go to Alabama for welfare, social services, child care, etc., which street in Yahoo County should be paved next, then you would be living in a democracy. Unfortunately it is not feasible for all 250,000,000 US citizens to gather and vote on every little issue, so in their infinite wisdom our founding fathers selected to establish a republican form of government...

  In recent history, it seems that for some reason, the people and or the government have somehow decided that "Republic" is not politically desirable, so self appointed political scholars have "invented" the terms "direct democracy", "indirect democracy" and "representative democracy" with the direct democracy being a democracy as defined above and an indirect democracy or representative democracy being a "Republic".

  WHY???, Neither our vocabulary nor our dictionary required these updates. A republic is a republic and a democracy is a democracy. For some reason, someone decided to take great strides to keep from using the historically and grammatically correct term for our republican form of government, so they seem to have just pulled "indirect", "direct", and "representative" democracy out of thin air. What gave them the right??? How long will it take to correct this blunder? Did the democrats in power at the time, just have a terrible dislike and inability to say "republic", so they decided to change our language and confuse the issue? If anyone out there knows and especially if you have any documentation, please advise the Webmaster because I would sincerely like to know the reason(s)...

  The use of the term "Democracy" when related to The United States form of government offends me, especially when the term is used by our representatives, who are supposed to be educated and aware of our Constitution and the intentions and desires of our founding fathers. They, after all, take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of this nation. Sometimes, I wonder if they have ever even read, much less understood, the document this nation was founded upon.

  The following are definitions, notables, and quotes, many of which show just how little our founding fathers and other well known scholars and statesmen thought of the democratic form of government.

  DEFINITIONS:

• Democracy from the Greek and means "government by the people".

• Republic from the Latin, res publica, "the public affairs."

• Republic: Roman Definition, "a system of government in which both the people and their rulers are subject to law".

• Republic: as defined by Aristotle (The Greek), Livy (Roman), and Harington (British Statesman), "a government of laws and not of men."

• Democracy, 1927, The U. S. Army Training Manual: “A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic, negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.”

• Democracy, 1952, Department of the Army Field Manual: “Meaning of democracy. Because the United States is a democracy," HUH??? " the majority of the people decide how our government will be organized and run and that includes the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The people do this by electing representatives, and these men and women then carry out the wishes of the people.”

  *** Comment: Between 1927 and 1952 our military apparently succumbed to left wing propaganda!!! ***

  QUOTES:

• Dr. Will Durant, referencing a Republic: "man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law."

• May 31, 1787, while addressing members of the Constitutional Convention Edmund Randolph said, "We meet here today to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy...."

• 1787, Elbridge Gerry, said: "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want (that is, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots."

• June 21, 1788, Alexander Hamilton: "It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."

• Alexander Hamilton: "We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy."

• Samuel Adams: "Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself! There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."

• James Madison: "... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

• John Marshall (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835): "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."

• Herbert Spencer, English philosopher: "The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature -- a type nowhere at present existing."

• Thomas Babington Macaulay: "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both."

• Dryden: "no government had ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be uppermost."

• 1795 Immanuel Kant: "Democracy is necessarily despotism."

• 1850, Benjamin Disraeli, (British House of Commons): "If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditures You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete."

• Disraeli 1870: "The world is weary, of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians."

• James Russell Lowell: "Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."

• W. H. Seward: "Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them."

• Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors."

• Governor Seymour of New York: "The merit of our Constitution is not that it promotes democracy, but checks it".

• Oscar Wilde: "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."

• H. L. Mencken: "The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exaction's of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goosestep."

• Ludwig Lewisohn: "Democracy, which began by liberating men politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."

• Englishman, G. K. Chesterton: "You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution."

• 1931, The Duke of Northumberland: "The adoption of Democracy as a form of Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government, to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a new world tyranny will arise."

• Archibald E. Stevenson: "De Tocqueville once warned us," he wrote, "that: ‘If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the unlimited tyranny of the majority.’ But a majority will never be permitted to exercise such ‘unlimited tyranny’ so long as we cling to the American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system -- a philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it for democracy."

• November 28, 1998, webmaster@indixie.com: "Democracy and Mobocracy are synonyms for a form of government in which the majority (mob) rules, and which by definition, guarantees the absence of minority rights."

  NOTABLES:

• The word democracy is not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.

• I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

  The Most Important Notable!!!

• U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 4 ~ The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.

  SUMMATION:

  The continuing degradation of our form of government from a republic to a democracy is just another example of the regressive tendencies invading this country. We must all attempt to correct these tendencies, before our Nation loses it’s greatness and it’s standing in the global community of the new millennium. We must strive to resurrect and maintain those wonderful ideals that our founding fathers so graciously and thoughtfully bestowed upon us...

  "Some words can make a man's heart warm. Republic is one of them."
  John Wayne - The Alamo

  LAND OF THE FREE

  Text of Bush's victory speech
  "After six days of voting, and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States. That election brought the first transfer of power from one party to another in our new democracy."

  Text of Vice President Al Gore's concession speech
  "Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy."

  "Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

  "And I say to our fellow members of the world community, let no one see this contest as a sign of American weakness. The strength of American democracy is shown most clearly through the difficulties it can overcome."

  Ramadan Turkey, Wearing rags on your head and being home in time for Christmas. Allahmas.

[independentmind]

I read about 2/3's of this and decided I need to read it when I am less tired. I do not understand the distinction the author is trying to make here:

Thus, liberalism and Marxism share a concern with the private, economic aspects of life and culture.

They both understand and analyze politics in terms of society and the economy.

Isn't an emphasis on the private and the social somewhat contradictory? Same goes for society and the economy.

[Askel5]

Contradictory? A bit muddled. You bet.

We're reading upside down, of course, but still ... you can hear the Truth ringing throughout.

Even if it's just telltale "turn of phrase" thing.

(That's one reason it was important to link the Sources which produce such strange fruit.)

For clarity's sake:

--- ** "The Combined Effect of Proletariat and Banker will be Formidable"** -- (Belloc, 1924)

--- (The Western Energy That Dethrones Tyrants)

[nunya bidness]

I'll not be making us look like morons by having my slips showing every third or fourth entry in "Latest Posts

You wear slips? I'm crushed. I was certain you were a thong gal.

Oh well, have a great Thanksgiving!

[Askel5]

You do never disappoint.

Republic...

I like the sound of the word.

Means people can live free,
      ... talk free
    Go or come, buy or sell,
      ... be drunk or sober,
however they choose.

Some words give you a feeling.

Republic is one of those words that ...
        ... makes you tight in the throat.

Same tightness a man gets when his baby takes his first step ... or his first baby shaves
and makes his first sound like a man

Some words can give you a feeling that ...
        ... make your heart warm.

Republic is one of those words.

"Well whadaya think, Jim?"
"... I hate to say anything good about that longwinded jack-a-napes but he does know the short way to start a war."

Did you know I come from Texas? A seven-dollar baby from Brook Army ('bout four miles from the Alamo, I hear). Probably one reason I practically know the album by heart.

In the southern part of Texas Near the town of San Antone Stands a fortress all in ruins That the weeds have overgrown You may look in vain for crosses And you'll never see a one But sometimes between the setting and the rising of the sun You can hear a ghostly bugle As the men go marching by You can hear them as they answer to that roll call in the sky ... Let the old men tell the story Let the legend grow and grow of the 13 days of glory at the siege of Alamo

Bear the tattered banners proudly while the eyes of Texas shine Let fort that was a mission Be an everlasting shrine Once they fought to give us freedom That is all we need to know of the 13 days of glory At the siege of Alamo. Every musket is ready Every man holds a sword And this small band of soldiers Standing tall in the eyes of the Lord

I suppose -- among other things that upset me enough to start posting in 1999 -- I didn't care to have the talking heads explain again and again the reason we had to show the Serbians a lesson with our Clean Hands is that they felt "like Texans do about the Alamo".

Guess it seemed an odd analogy to use ... assuming we were intervening on behalf of folks we found simpatico in a Global Code of Conduct sort of fashion and -- along with a coalition of the usual suspects -- routing the Greater danger -- as far as Humans were concerned -- to the Planet ... as far as Humans were concerned.

A time to be reaping, A time to be sowing The green leaves of summer are calling me home It was good to be young then in the season of plenty when the catfish were jumping as high the sky A time to be laughing, A time to be living A time to be courting a girl of your own T'was so good to be young then, to be close to the earth and to stand by your wife at the moment of birth

A time to be reaping, A time to be sowin' the green leaves of summer are calling me home It was good to be young then, with the sweet smell of apples and the owl in the pine tree, a wink in his eye A time just for planting, A time just for plowing A time just for living, A place for to die T'was so good to be young then, to be close to the earth Now the green leaves of summer are calling me home.

---

I'm gonna tell you something, Flacka, and I want you to listen tight.
May sound like I'm talking about me. But I'm not, I'm talking bout you. As a matter of fact, I'm talking about all people everywhere.

When I come down here to Texas I was looking for something. I didn't know what. Seems like you add up my life and I spent it all stompin' other men or, in some cases, getting' stomped. Had me some money and had me some medals. But none of it seemed a lifetime worth the pain of the mother that bore me. It's like I was empty.

Well, I'm not empty anymore. That's what's important. To feel useful in this old world. To hit a lick in against what's wrong or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word.

Now I may sound like a Bible-beater yelling up a revival at a river-crossing camp meeting. But that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around but you're dead as a beaver hat.

---

The eyes of Texas are upon you ... you cannot get away.

[Askel5]

---

... It is no exaggeration to say we are moving toward a police state. In this atmosphere, we should take nothing for granted. We will not be protected, nor will the courts, the congress, or the many liberals who are gleefully jumping on the bandwagon of repression guarantee our rights. We have no choice but too make our voices be heard; it is time to stand and be counted on the side of justice and against the antediluvian forces that have much of our country in a stranglehold.

...

It is common for governments to reach for draconian law enforcement solutions in times of war or national crisis. It has happened often in the United States and elsewhere. We should learn from historical example: times of hysteria, of war, and of instability are not the times to rush to enact new laws that curtail our freedoms and grant more authority to the government and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The US government has conceptualized the war against terrorism as a permanent war, a war without boundaries. Terrorism is frightening to all of us, but it's equally chilling to think that in the name of antiterrorism our government is willing to suspend constitutional freedoms permanently as well.

Moving Toward the Police State
(or Have We Arrived?)
Secret Military Tribunals, Mass Arrests and Disappearances, Wiretapping & Torture
(Michael Ratner, via Cipherwar)

There's really only the one Just War without boundaries or end (in time). That's the one where it's truly Good against Evil.

I still don't get the part where (if you're on the side of the Good) you have the option always of choosing evil, any evil ... even the lesser evil ... to Win. If all that's necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do Nothing, where does that put us when Good Men consciously act or are conditioned to do evil?

How do you spell Zeno's Paradox? I know I always get it wrong.

I think there's something to that math by which the hare always will lose if he must break his stride down to little bits of both the drag of evil and the aerodynamic of good whilst the turtle plods along propelled by pure, unbroken evil.

[Askel5]

But it was a great Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our republic into a democracy. “You can never have a revolution,” he said, “in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”

I loved this, of course.

As with much of the War on a Noun Series, we seem to have things back to front, top to bottom, upside down as usual.

It's like the War on Drugs which operates on the popular misconception that Demand drives the Supply of drugs when, in fact, the opposite is true.

Or the War on Poverty that sought to eradicate the poor and Unwanted by plying them with contraception and legal abortion.

Big Lies go down best as slogans ... with plenty of circular reasoning, bent logic, buzzwords and statistics galore giving the intellectuals the impression they're riding something other than the metal rails of a thrill ride in Utopia and actually are moving somewhere.

[nunya bidness]

No offense but you didn't answer my question.

But then again if it's too personal I understand.

It just seems kind of weird that you would include Uncle Bill in your answer.

I'm just going to have to go see my friend Captain Morgan, he always knows the answers.

[SierraWasp]

"Contradictory? A bit muddled. You bet."

Sorry to come off as the recovering shallow politician that I am, but I swear the writer of that first thing came off to me as Professor Irwin Corey! Tennis shoes and all!!!

[kristinn]

Bumping for a later read. It's a long weekend :-)

[monkey]

adumbrating the friend/enemy dichotomy

He keeps using that word. I don't think it means what he thinks it means.

His description of government enforcing the "neutrality" of society in a democracy is interesting. Neutrality, here, means a point of equilibrium for a system always under tension.

It's interesting to relate the "neutrality" of modern art with politics. Cubism is often described as presenting different views at the same time, and Mondrian, later, balanced primary colors and rectangular shapes to achieve nonrepresentational harmony. What then, I wonder, do the large, single band of color paintings by Rothko portend?

[Askel5]

Lol ...

Given the fact most of us can no longer speak our minds, even, I think the tension's a done deal.

It's not the writer so much as his spilling the beans in some respects.

You don't mind if I drop a bit more clarity into the thread, do you?

The Transition Period According to Marx

.... Between capitalist and Communist societies, he said, lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other and, corresponding to this, there is also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Regardless of what various disciples of Marx may have added to or taken away from his system, they all agree on the necessity both of class struggle and of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As late as September 28, 1962, the Tenth Plenary Session of the Chinese Communist Central Committee emphasized in its communique that class struggle marks the period of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship and will continue throughout the historial period of transition from capitalism to communism -- a transition that will last scores of years or even longer.

[Follows with the Pre-Gramscian quaint notion of Marx that the proletariat actually would remained armed, revolt, tear down the bourgeoisie State and police and, as the new functionaries, would never think to constitute themselves a separate class of privileged bureaucrats. I think we also can exchange class struggle with that of sex, skin, intelligence, as well -- better to breed you, my dear.]

Decades later -- in the current era of Communist compromises at least in practice if not in doctrine -- the transition is described in less brutal terms, and the main instrument of transisition is conceived as cooperation with all revolutionary, democratic and progressive elements in any given situation. [...]

Welfare State as Transition to Utopia

This dilution of the properly revolutionary element of the passage to socialism ... was made possible by the intervening evolution of the centralized Welfare State designed to take the wind out of the sails of the revolution.

The question is: Does the Welfare State tame and organize the revolutionary idea, or does it merely serve the ultimate objectives of the revolution by adjusting people's attitudes to the post-revolutionary world?

The fact is that the concept of the State (or the community) completing dominating and regulating the lives of its citizens, had been, by and large, accepted in the second half of the 20th century. Although there is still considerable discussion, largely theoretical and irrelevant, about what Lefebvre calls the "rhythm and modalities" of the transistion, the debate of the past several decades has been merely whether the State, the race, the ideological Empire or World Government will stage-manage the last accts of the passage to coalescing mankind. Whichever prevails, the tend has been unmistakable for a long time now: the mechanism is in place; small concrete decisions are made daily; only the theoretical measures are still discussed.

As early as 1891, Chauncy Thomas outlined the general process in his utopian novel The Crystal Button. The community is described as living in the Year Of Peace 4872 (1372 years after 3,500 years spent under the calendar of Anno Domini). The novel's character refers to the end of the nineteenth century as almost a prehistoric date when certain signs already indicated the shape of things to come. The Professors tells Paul Prognosis, the Bostonian who dreams of the future.

Even in your day it was one of the signs of the times that small interests were beginning to be absorbed by corporations, and those by giant monopolies. By slow and peaceful steps, the same movement progressed until the government itself came into possession of such industries as were of peculiarly public interest, including all means of communication and transportation, and life and fire insurance; and the land question was settled in the same manner.

Ever since Chauncey Thomas wrote these lines, the trends he detected have become immeasureably stronger. The Welfare State is an accepted fact; two ideological empires exist; and both the Welfare State and the ideological empries resemble each other increasingly in the techniques they utilize and even in some fundamental thinking.

The world government is still only a distant image [c. 1967], but many highly regarded statesmen speak about it as a distinct possibility. (13) In his own way, Adolf Hitler also believed that larger units than states were emerging and that the transition needed the skill of political minds of his own cast. This is what he told Herman Rauschning:

The conception of the nation has become meaningless. We have to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race. The New Order cannot be conceived in terms of the national boundaries of the peoples with an historic past, but in terms of race that transcend these boundaries ...

I know perfectly well that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer, cannot get your breeding right without the conception of race. And I, as a politician, need a conception which enables the order that has hitherto existed on an historical basis to be abolished, and an entirely new and anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis. (14)

Less nebulous and romantic, and still influenced by the concept of the Roman State, Mussolini wrote that people should be viewed qualitatively and, therefore, they may be represented in the will of a few or even one. In this respect, judgment belongs not to the individual but to the State, because the State is all citizens, and its formation is the formation of a consciousness of its individuals in the masses. [Mussolini's untrained mind, inspired as it was by only a few of the writings of prominent socialist doctrinaires, struggled with incompatible concepts such as "masses" and "individuals rights"] but the twentieth-century utopian leitmotiv is present:

Individuals have value only when coalesced into the Whole.

"For the Fascist," writes Mussolini, "all is comprised in the State and nothing spiritual or human exists -- much less has any value -- outside the State ... The Fascist State -- the unification and synthesis of every value -- interprets, develops and potentiates the whole life of the people."

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(13) --- When India suffered under the invasion by the Red Chinese in 1962, Indian politicians consulted Nehru regarding his intentions. He simply told them that by the year 2000, border conflicts would be a thing of the past since all countries would be provinces of a one-world organization.
(14) --- Quoted in A. Bullock, Hitler, Harper & Row, New York, 1952, pp. 363-364.

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As linked from the "Hear No Evil" thread in The First Duty of Citizenship: Enthusiasm

Or, as the United Way likes to say: "we don't care how much you give, all we really want is 100% participation."