Civil Society and Culture
13. The Language Vandals
Language is a critical tool for communication among humans; we cry “watch out” when a speeding car hurtles toward a pedestrian. We also think of language as a cognitive tool for society at large, since all human learning is closely tied to how we learn and process language.
Intellectuals and politicians often try to verbally summarize or justify conventional thinking in pithy ways. Milton Friedman (in 1965) and Richard Nixon (in 1971) both said different versions of the phrase “we are all Keynesians now.” . . . Friedman and Nixon were describing the thoughts behind the implementation of Great Society redistribution programs and an inflationary monetary policy designed to offset the cost of those programs.
The history of transatlantic slavery is riddled with fables and errors. Erroneous claims have been propagated in the media because history is currently perceived as a political project that must justify present sensibilities. History has become so politicized that rigorous research is unable to disabuse activists of inaccuracies. Due to the rampant politicization of academia, noted scholars are usually cajoled into apologizing for defending historical standards.
11. All Crises Are Local
“South Dakota is not New York City.”
A seemingly innocuous statement, made by Governor Kristi Noem in response to calls for her to issue a coronavirus shutdown across a state with the motto “Under God the People Rule.”
South Dakota, after all, is one of the least densely populated states in the vast American West. Surely local circumstances should inform local responses to a communicable disease?
12. What Will It Take for Americans to Consider Breaking Up?
It’s one thing for mass democracy to produce bad results, in the form of elected politicians or enacted policies. It’s another when the democratic process itself breaks down because nobody trusts the vote or the people who count it. But that’s precisely where we are.
9. Democracy, the God That’s Failing
When Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe made his famous argument against democracy back in 2001, the notion that voting was a lousy way to organize society was still radical even among many libertarians. Virtually everyone raised in a Western country over the past century grew up hearing “democracy” used as a synonym for wonderful, good, just, and valid. It takes a great deal of unlearning to overcome this as an adult, and to question the wisdom of representative government installed via democratic mechanisms.
10. The Subsidiarity Principle
Leftwing vox.com has published a welcome and thoughtful piece on the virtues of devolving political and legal power away from the federal government toward states and localities. This is exactly the kind of conversation honest Americans need to have if we are serious about preventing the kind of political violence witnessed recently in Charlottesville and Berkeley. One overriding feature of the culture wars is that each side justifiably fears the other will impose its way of living through a winner takes all political system.
5. The Wrong Elites
To mount an effective response to the reigning egalitarianism of our age, therefore, it is necessary but scarcely sufficient to demonstrate the absurdity, the anti-scientific nature, the self-contradictory nature, of the egalitarian doctrine, as well as the disastrous consequences of the egalitarian program. All this is well and good. But it misses the essential nature of, as well as the most effective rebuttal to, the egalitarian program: to expose it as a mask for the drive to power of the now ruling left-liberal intellectual and media elites.
6. We Don’t Believe You
David French, maybe National Review’s most reliably wrong scribe, issued this gem in response to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence in Florida:
