George Rebane
Bit by piece America’s Left is unraveling the role of our Constitution as the foundation of our country's governance. Undoing the legacy of our Founders has now progressed from dancing the progressives' constitutional sidestep to a growing chorus of calls to do away with the Constitution altogether - a document they see filled with “evil provisions” that has long held us in “bondage”. This is the conclusion that constitutional law professor Louis Seidman presented in his 30dec12 NYT op-ed ‘Let’s Give Up on the Constitution’.
And I don’t think that Seidman is the only academic who has been denigrating the Constitution in our halls of ivy. Progressives have correctly concluded that the Constitution does stand squarely in the way of their desire to fundamentally transform America into the next attempt at a socialist paradise. So, as Seidman, they claim that it is the restrictions of our Constitution that have caused everything from our dire fiscal cliffs (yes, plural) to the heartbreak of psoriasis.
While agreeing that certain parts of the Constitution need to be retained, Seidman advises that we can govern ourselves through some TBD ad hoc process that we make up as we go along. He claims that “(our) obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse”, and asks us to “imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country.” Should such judgments and courses of action be then reviewed in light of the Constitution? Absolutely not, according to this prominent maven of constitutional law.
Continue reading "The Great Divide – ‘We don’t need no stinking Constitution’" »
Ideologies and Governance – a structured look
Only in America could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be labeled as "extremists".
Without stopping to quibble about the specifics of what constitutes the ‘center’ or ‘moderate’, the single dimensional spectrum above does have some curious bookends. The leftmost one ends in ‘communism/totalitarianism’, which state of affairs is reached after passing through a region where anarchism rules. And the rightmost ends in ‘fascism/monarchy’ after also passing through anarchism. The better read student here will immediately point out that the Left’s anarchism is not the same as that of the Right’s. This is indeed correct, and I’ll have more to say about that below. However, in this fractured view, regardless of each having traversed the swamp of anarchy, both sides terminate in totalitarian forms of governance under the absolute control of a great leader.
George Rebane
Hereabouts and in more distinguished forums the governance debate continues as to which types belong to the Left or the Right. The confusion from the Left’s academics seems to be with monarchy and fascism, and that stems from their use of the wrong set of coordinates that can productively frame the discussion. In the minds of some pundits, the attributes of a given governance type are totally absent. But when all is said and done, the modern progressives do accept a right/left view that is approximated in the figure below.
A more accurate, useful, and historically exercised representation of ideologies and their supportive types of governance is given in the figure below (click to enlarge). Here we use a representation common in the system sciences wherein one significant dimension/attribute is isolated as being perpendicular (orthogonal) to a plane that contains all the other dimensions/attributes.
For the discussion of ideologies and their supportive forms of governance, the dominant dimension shown in the figure is the level of government control of the land and the affairs of its people. This ranges from a 100%, suffered under the absolute rule of a totalitarian dictator, to 0%, wherein anarchy is the order of the day and there are no visible institutions of state. In the figure the variation in this level of control is shown by the thick red line in the plane (dimension) perpendicular to the field (multiple dimensions) of the types of government control, hence governance.
Understanding this framework immediately clarifies the debate over what labeled ideology belongs where. I have shown the various collectivistic labels distributed on generalized trajectories of governance as they proceed leftward (orange lines) in the direction of greater government control of wealth creation/distribution, property ownership, class memberships, and behaviors (liberties) permitted to the individual.
Continue reading "Ideologies and Governance – a structured look" »
Posted at 12:20 PM in Critical Thinking & Numeracy, Culture Comments, Great Divide, Our Country, The Liberal Mind | Permalink | Comments (50) | TrackBack (0)