ASSANGE CONTINUES

This will be a short Post. I simply want to add this recent article that outlines in more detail the antics and devious doings of the Swedish allegants and the Swedish law enforcement types in regard to the case from the very beginning.

The SO community won’t be surprised by all this hugely dubious maneuvering between allegants, their attorneys, police and prosecutors, and even the media. But it’s interesting to see an example of how this whole frakkulent scheme plays out, especially under the pressure of (multiple instances of) political and electoral maneuvering.

I do, however, want to point out just one quotation in the article. Marianne Ny, the sorta prosecutor of gender-crimes who issued the arrest-warrant says that “it is a good idea to have the man detained, because it is not until he is arrested that the woman has time to think of her life in peace and realize how she has been treated”. [italics mine]

THIS is a prime example of the presumptions – not widely publicized, although I imagine cheeribly received among klatsches of the cadres and true believers and advocates – that underlie the SO Mania Regime. And, by the way, clearly reflect what they are teaching now in law-schools all over the Western world.

Why, especially in a case like this, is it so necessary to have ‘the man’ (i.e. the accused alleged perpetrator) not only arrested (bad enough) but also ‘detained’ (which in Sweden means held incommunicado with no possibility of bail)?

The reason put forth is that somehow the allegant (the woman) won’t be able to think things through until he is locked away. Why would that be? How could it be? The presumption seems to be that in any ‘sex’ matter the female is so fragile in her ability to process thought that she is unable to concentrate or think things through. This is a key and classic trope of victimist thought, but a) I can’t see how it works psychologically; and b) it seems to paint females as rather fragile and emotional creatures who can’t concentrate in a challenging situation; and c) the most relevant immediate challenge in this type of situation is NOT that the female be comfortably situated to undertake a major life-and-self review and analysis, but rather that the female as formal legal allegant be able to come up with the relevant (and theoretically necessary) statements of fact necessary to justify police and criminal-law action against the male whom she has now formally accused and embroiled in the sovereign toils of the Law.

(I won’t even get into the conceptual incoherence that this presumption creates in a comprehensive cultural agenda that more generally insists upon the complete reliability of the female to participate in authoritative positions (executive, professional, political) of great responsibility, requiring clear-headedness and the ability to focus no matter what personal distractions might also press upon her. And of course, if I may, this goes even more so for such positions as military duties, especially in any sort of command position.)

And even if one wishes to point out that in genuine rape cases this just might be applicable, such is not the case here. Although, in its eagerness and calculations to ‘keep up the numbers’ by casting the widest possible net and creating ‘trip-wire’ law enforcement responses, the SO initiative crosses the line into a Mania Regime.

I wonder too just how much such an arrest (with its inevitable detention) simply feeds on revenge of some sort.

And on a more tactical level, as I have pointed out in prior Posts on this subject, how much this gambit pretty much ensures that the now-detained male’s side of the story is greatly and effectively stamped out. Leaving, by amazing coincidence, the public-relations field to the advocates so-called and to the allegant, and their friends and useful idiots or outright collaborators in the media.

Looking back on things over the past few decades, it seems to me that there has been a step-by-step progression.

First there was a certainly legitimate effort to ‘raise public awareness’ about an issue. This is what I call the first level of ‘advocacy’ and it’s a perfectly acceptable one: bring a new point of view to a previously established consensus (or just a habit within the culture that had formed long before and hadn’t been looked at recently). In this vision, the public would now be provided with another point-of-view when it came to forming an opinion about how this type of incident (sexual assaults) should be looked at when they arose. This would then filter along in due course to affect how the tried-and-true public machinery of legislation and law-enforcement and government action would handle such matters.

But this apparently wasn’t enough for the advocates. It was too slow, perhaps, and too unpredictable (public opinion might not widely accept the new point-of-view, at least to the liking of the advocates).

So now instead of merely informing public opinion, advocates tried to manipulate it – and more specifically to stampede it. With help from the media (which might have already felt through its tingling whiskers that some political weight was behind the gambit) instances are selectively reported, given lurid play, perhaps even inaccurate assertions. Simultaneously, ‘friendly scholars’ (perhaps realizing that grant money was going to start flowing in this new channel) and assorted non-accredited ‘authors’ start putting it out there that there is wide ‘proof’, adducing the bottom-line statistics of this or that ‘study’ or –even worse – ‘survey’ (where you simply ask folks and they can pretty much respond with whatever they’d like to say). The media amplifies it relentlessly.

On the basis of the ‘studies’ and all the ‘new knowledge’ the advocates can then move to the next level, and start arm-twisting the politicians (who may have their doubts, or may be perfectly willing to be given a pretext to claim they are merely being ‘responsive’). By this time the politicians’ whiskers are also tingling as they realize there are votes to be won or lost, perhaps in large numbers, depending on how they roll on this thing.

Law-enforcement and prosecutors – also bewhiskered and perhaps ‘educated’ into the new approach – now start coming up with any evidence they can; like bird-dogs that sorta just know in their depths when master wants them to come back out of the swamp tail-wagging and with a bird-body between the eager jaws.

So now at this third level of advocacy, the actual official organs of government in its Branches are starting to become deformed in the service of the agenda.

And as certainly happened here, the public then winds up being side-stepped rather completely, having been a) stampeded by the deformed information, and b) shocked by the media ‘reports’ and all the ‘studies’, and c) increasingly cowed by the draconian application of the police power which – many realize – is either only going to be aimed at somebody else (the targeted males, in this case) or else may somehow be aimed at them if they stand up and say something (e.g., if you don’t agree with us and what we’re doing then you’re obviously in favor of rape and ‘sex offenders’).

And THEN it proceeds to a point where not only is the application of the laws deformed, but the actual structure of the laws is deformed (“victim-friendly courts” being the most pithy official description of it, including as it does all sorts of dismantling of ancient Western protections against the misapplication of the sovereign police power of the state).

AND in support of that – which is necessary in a still-functioning democracy the way it wasn’t in dictatorships and tyrannies of which Stalin’s and Hitler’s are only the most well-known – philosophical assertions are made that have the necessary and intended effect of undermining the entire foundations upon which the already-deforming laws were originally built. Thus: all Law is merely an opportunity for oppression; there is no objective truth that can be claimed to stand in the way of what we want to do; rights don’t apply to ‘evil’ persons even if they are formally Citizens; ‘all men are rapists and all sex is rape’ anyway, so this is just a ‘reform’ to even the score. And etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.

Worse, that this crime is so egregious and constitutes such an ‘emergency’ and outrage that public deliberation can’t be allowed to interfere, nor public opinion if it is against what we want to do; that to provide Constitutional process is to re-victimize the (as yet unproven) victim; that this crime is so outrageous that it doesn’t deserve to be defended in public discourse and our agenda should never be discussed.*

But then came 1970 and it was all about gender, not so much race, and the whole national discussion was faced with a far more subtle and hardly-clear challenge involving gender.

And eventually, within 15 or 20 years, came the Mania where NO-body dared to ‘speak up’ unless it was to say that the SO Mania was a good idea and – anyway – it wasn’t a Mania, only a little tweaking that was, somehow also, a revolutionary reform (which is almost a contradiction in terms).

So from informing the public, the advocacy mutates into an active force for undermining the very foundations of the national ethos and polity.

Because I would say that you can HAVE they type of government the Mania Regime requires for its agenda to ‘work’, but then you WON’T HAVE a Constitutional, limited democracy such as the Framers envisioned. You will have something else.

Pasternak, in ‘Doctor Zhivago’, described the early revolutionary warlord Strelnikov, bloody and robust dispenser of bullet-ridden revolutionary justice: “Disappointment embittered him; the revolution armed him”. This is a consequence of the American mutation of Victimology that hasn't been sufficiently considered.

Stalin, Pasternak noted, realized that the secret to dispensing revolutionary justice and law was not – as Lenin had imagined – to be predictable (if you oppose us you will surely be shot or sent to Siberia), but rather to be capricious (if you oppose us, no matter how secretly, we may show up on your doorstep any day any night any time and that will be the end of you and maybe your family and your little dog too).

Only a very foolish or courageous citizen would not say: maybe best if I just keep my mouth shut, and even better not to even think about it.

Now, with declining government funds and the public so wrapped up with genuinely monstrous national problems like an economy that is never coming back to pre-2008 levels for most people, the advocacy approach is to hide behind ‘the children’ and what are made out to be little volunteer groups of ‘concerned citizens’ who would like (and are vigorously but surreptitiously angling for) lotsa money and the power to conduct their own law-enforcement, since the official agencies are starting to realize they have more genuinely dangerous threats to deal with in the matter of public order and the commission of crimes.

And politicians who have already gone wayyyyy too far out on the limb to now try to admit it, and anyway figure that they need the support of whatever ‘base’ they can manage to keep happy.

Perhaps the government will quietly walk away – sort of like it did in Vietnam – and declare victory and go home: leaving the wrack and ruin ‘back there’ for ‘them’ to deal with now. To see that happen in the SO Mania might seem at least a better outcome than the still-frakking Mania Regime that’s still in business (with government money).**

But I am worried that the government will back away while leaving the Regime’s enabling legislation still intact. And given the tremendous insult and assault that such legislation presents to Constitutional praxis and ethos, it will remain a submerged or buried mine waiting for another chance to blow a hole in what is left of the America bequeathed to Us in that amazing Moment 235 years ago).

NOTES

*This was Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 assertion, looking back from the vantage point of an American university gig to the Nazi era he had lived through: he reasoned that the ideas Hitler spewed about German race superiority and the evils of weakling democracy and that the foolish limits imposed by constitutions on governments should not be allowed to interfere with what he wanted to do for Germany. Looking back, Marcuse thought that if somehow Hitler had been prevented through government authority from proposing these ideas in public, then Germans might never have supported him and he never would have gotten to power.

Interesting thought. Although how the Weimar government could do that and still remain a constitutionally-limited democratic government is something Marcuse doesn’t care to think about.

Worse, he was wondering if the same type of dynamic wasn’t usefully applicable to the United States of 1965. Suppose, say, that Jim Crow supporters weren’t allowed to spew their noxious race-subjugation or race-separation ideas publicly. And then came the 'culture and gender wars'. Political Correctness as We know it begins here.

**I wonder if it wouldn’t be a sound economic plan, and would also serve to demonstrate just how much public support really exists (or doesn’t), for the assorted Mania-related organizations to rely on private donations? I seem to recall a year or two ago that one of the marquis priest-abuse organizations was thinking of shutting its doors due to lack of funds (after, interestingly enough, the lawsuits had died down).

AMARTYA SEN AND SO MANIA PHILOSOPHY

As often happens in matters of philosophy, you find stuff in places you wouldn’t expect.

The Indian economist Amartya Sen has been developing a philosophy of government that would somehow help the still-developing nation of India address the poverty of its huge population.

You may recall his name; Martha Nussbaum, noted feministical philosopher here in the US, had been trying to use him as a basis for her own recasting of the American Constitutional philosophy of government in such a way as to make things more to the liking of assorted pressure-groups over here.

And in the Nussbaum essays that I have so far managed to Post, I had been making the point that somehow Sen’s economic thoughts had mutated over here into some sort of justification of the SO Mania Regime(s) – plural if you toss in the Domestic Violence Regime.

Which is NOT to say that you will actually find any ‘philosophical’ articles by SO Mania Regime supporters explaining at length how they justify their agenda and demands. As I have often said, the Regime is strangely bereft of several common elements of major, ‘successful’ and ‘progressive’ changes in national policy: legislators crowing to the general public that they supported it, philosophers who are happy to put their creds and status into an article explaining how justifiable and marvelously excellent it is, and public commentators who mention the Regime at all in any context whatsoever.

Nada, zip, zilch, nothing.

Anyhoo, here’s a piece in a recent ‘New York Review of Books’ article discussing Sen (who, to my knowledge, formally does not have and has never had any connection to the SO Mania Regime). The article is actually a review of a recent book by Sen, written by the philosopher Samuel Freeman.

Freeman starts by recalling one of the major recent philosophical positions that Sen disagrees with: John Rawls.

An ominously overnight sensation, John Rawls published his magnum opus “A Theory of Justice” in 1971, the same year that Alinsky published “Rule for Radicals” and the year before the Dems declared themselves the Party of Everything and Everyone (Except – unstated – White Industrial Males, the Women Who Agree With Them, and All Things Adult, Bourgeois, Middle-Class and In Any Way Traditional). 1972 was quite a year; if it slipped by you un-noticed, give some thought now back to “those thrilling days of yesteryear” (as they used to introduce ‘The Lone Ranger’ TV show in the ‘50s).

Rawls starts by imagining Citizens of good-will in “an original position”. This hypothetical Position would be that the Citizens did not have any prior notions of how society should be organized (no such humans exist or could exist beyond the age of 5 or 6, but Rawls is sorta blue-skying here, as the Dems then proceeded to do, and then the entire Beltway).

In this Position, Rawls was sure (no proof, he just reeely reeely felt strongly about this) that everybody would agree that if they were going to have a society, they would want principles of justice. I agree as far as the words go.

But then Rawls starts to blend his own dream in with the imaginary situation and Citizens: he says that the first principle of justice everybody was sure to agree with would be the “guarantee of equal basic liberties for all: freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, equal political rights, and freedom of conduct with a right to personal property”.

Freeman notes that Rawls “crucially omits economic liberties such as the right to own and control the means of production”. There’s a reason for that, as We shall see.

I’d add that Rawls, even at this early stage of his scheme, has put some phrases in there that didn’t then and certainly don’t now mean what they appear to mean. Thus, for example, “equal political rights” doesn’t simply mean the right to vote, and ‘personal property’ doesn’t just mean your CD or record collection.

Ditto then as Rawls moves to his second principle: “fair and equal opportunities to develop their capacities and talents”. This sounds very nice but you don’t have to move very far into policy formulation (and the Dems wasted no time after 1972, nor did the groups pressuring them) before you are into deep, dark, and tricky waters indeed: where does ‘opportunity’ end and ‘luck’ begin such that anyone who hasn’t succeeded must merely have been the victim of some ‘bad luck’ or at least that everyone who HAS succeeded to some extent must have done so merely because of ‘good luck’?

AND if government is now going to get into the re-balancing business big time (especially since God was a hypothesis in the process of begin progressively Deconstructed) then just how intrusive was government going to have to get in order to reach down into the national doll-house and re-arrange the furniture – and even the dolls themselves? Just how far could the government go in re-arranging not only the schedules and track layouts but even the towns on the national toy train-table?

Rawls began by saying that “extensive educational and health benefits for all” were absolutely called-for, provided by the government. And who can argue with that thought? But the Devil was – and remains – in the details (where he has taken up a strongly fortified position).

So Rawls’s “difference principle” would demand that wherever there was a difference (in ability or in outcome?) the government would have to re-arrange things to ensure that persons were truly “equal” (in capability or in level of achievement or in worldly goods?), and that the least-‘lucky’ were never to be left unattended at the bottom of the heap. Decent thoughts indeed, although not where the Devil chose to make his stand.

Sen came up with a different approach: “Individual well-being can be objective measured by the access people have not only to goods, income, and liberties, but also by the variety of ‘capabilities’ that enable them to pursue satisfying lives”. Although I can’t see how a researcher – let alone a government – can objectively decide A) who has enough ‘capabilities’, B) what exactly objectively a ‘satisfying’ life is, and C) what has gone wrong if a person is discovered to be (or claims to be) suffering an un-satisfying life?

These are the type of problems you run into – that classical Liberalism has always run into – when you rely solely on purely human (and governmental) reason to figure out the complex mysteries of human existence previously left to ‘God’ or ‘Nature’, and furthermore try to calculate your figurings out to several decimal places.

Government would be into guaranteeing ‘capabilities’ and compensating people for ‘bad luck’ that was verrrrry broadly defined.

So government would have to get verrrry involved in the case. Freeman uses the disabled as an example: it’s not enough for government to provide them with the equal resources because “in order to achieve the same state of well-being” they “require more to perform the same activities”. The ‘more’ – since this is a government-dependent Liberal (I am NOT using this word in the current, immature political name-calling sense) – must come from government’s authority to re-distribute or re-arrange society.

“Living a good and satisfying life, Sen argues, consists of engaging successfully in freely chosen activities against a background of worthwhile options and real opportunities.” (And perhaps you can start to see right here how this seemingly decent idea – although, without God or Nature, a government-heavy one – starts to become attractive to Victimologists and other pressure groups.)

Freeman continues describing Sen’s thought: “… our well-being should be assessed according to the ‘capabilities for functioning’ that enable people to exercise ‘effective freedoms’ to choose and do what they value or have a reason to value”.

Note here that ‘people’ is defined not as a society-of-people but as individuals who are simply all bunched together. Everybody may have a different idea – each guaranteed by government – as to just what it will take to ‘satisfy’ them.

Indeed, almost immediately, Sen lists some of the difficulties that will stand in the way of realizing his vision: “poverty, illness, disability, and the subjection of women, among other restrictions, undermine capabilities and deprive people of their effective freedoms to engage in [what they consider to be] worthwhile activities”. You can see where Victimology, operating in synergy with other pressure groups, quickly saw how to include ‘the consequences of being sexually assaulted or living in fear of sexual assault’ – which are two verrry different matters conceptually – as being the types of ‘restrictions’ that government, in Sen’s theory, must address with the sovereign authority.

Speaking of India as he knows it, Sen asserts that once restrictions (he makes no mention of the Victimology element, which is an American mutation) are ‘addressed’, then economic progress will become more possible for individuals (he doesn’t mention ‘families’ or any traditional groupings of individuals).

Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’, notes Freeman accurately, is currently one of the most influential approaches for “addressing issues of social, political, and global justice and human rights”.

As I had mentioned in several of the Nussbaum essays already Posted, the ‘sexual’ material has gotten into the American variants of this approach. Naturally, once government is required (in terms of this influential theory) to aggressively eradicate the ‘sexual restriction’ (sexual assault or fear of assault, however defined), then there is going to be some serious disconnect between Sen’s theory and American Constitutional principles (which, since he is dealing with India, is not a problem that immediately arises in Sen’s original vision).

Worse, in a very real way, is Sen’s refusal to appeal to “universal principles” that will ‘work’ and are ‘valid’ in any country and any period of history. While it is very understandable that he doesn’t want to limit Indian (and Third World or Developing World) efforts by some appeal to what the Developed World has done, he has effectively eradicated the influence of any Higher Law that could stand in judgment on any particular law or policy.

This may well help him sidestep the complexities of, say, Indian religious life and culture – Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim – but if applied to America such an approach works in synergy with the entire Postmodern thrust to Deconstruct anything that would stand in the way of whatever pressure groups demand in the way of what they see as ‘progress’. And the SO community has seen first-hand where that sort of thing can quickly lead.

Sen – following Rawls – would like to see “objective and impartial reason” replace any appeal to Higher Law or Tradition or Religion. This is classically Liberal. BUT curiously, it runs counter to the American radical-feminist philosophy that such “objective and impartial reason” is a ‘male’ thing and ‘insensitive’ to the ‘stories’ and ‘pain’ experienced by assorted groups.

WORSE, combined over here with Alinsky-ite assertions that the only thing that makes politics move is ‘organizing’ even if you have to take ‘the low road’ to do it, then what happens when Sen is blended into the American bubbling brew pot comes out to something more lethal and toxic than Sen’s decent insights and interesting theoretical formulations would lead you to expect.

And, really, Sen runs into the problem that all Liberalism has run into: among humans there is no purely objective and rational approach. The simplistic solution to THAT had been to make an appeal to Tradition or God, but if you apply that appeal simplistically you wind up with two unpleasant social results: first, every individual claiming to understand clearly what ‘God’s Will’ is and second, groups attacking other groups over what they insist is a misreading of ‘God’s Will’.

And a simplistic solution to THAT problem is simply to say (like the Six Blind Men and the Elephant in the Eastern myth) that there is no God or Higher Anything and that it’s all about who can muster the most political pressure (Marx, Lenin, and Alinsky adopted this ‘solution’).

A more balanced approach is to presume from the outset that human beings are indeed capable of reason and – if they train themselves and work hard at it – can muster at least enough objective detachment to work out consensually and democratically the social policies and laws that an entire society can live with.

But – most most regrettably, I would say – this option isn’t ‘sexy’ enough, requires too much heavy lifting, and since it relies on ‘mature voters’ usually doesn’t impress legislators and policy-makers as having enough of a constituency.

Oy.

So We wind up with efforts to terraform society (and Citizens) from the top-down, according to the illuminations of whatever elites and pressure-groups can erect into law and policy. America as a large model train layout on a huge table and the elites and pols as the expert hobbyists wearing their little engineer’s hats and making train-whistle noises while moving all the stuff around to their liking.

AND Sen does follow Adam Smith in supporting a sort of political ethics that can be defended “in an open and free framework of public reasoning”. BUT of course, the Alinsky-ite vision utterly rejects such an approach, as have all the pressure-groups that have blossomed like kudzu in this country in the past 40 years. And the Alinsky-ite vision, as you can see in the series of essays I am Posting on Alinsky, contains a profound functional rejection of Constitutional and democratic politics and of The People as the functional Ground of political authority and wisdom.

Gack.

Sen rejects Rawls because Rawls presupposes that there could ever be a society where most people just naturally want to do the right and just thing for everybody (and not just get some for themselves).

But then Sen – relying on Adam Smith – expects the same thing.

And in American society, where Deconstruction has been governmentally-supported and loudly trumpeted by various pressure-groups and their ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘transgressive-progressive’ thinkers for decades, there is now some real question as to whether a majority of Citizens can even grasp the challenges that lethally confront The People in this age of American democracy.

Again, as Sen refuses to accept ‘ideals’ or any ‘ideal theory’ in order to leave himself maximum room for ‘development’ in the Third World, he leaves himself with no judgment-point above the fray by which this or that policy can be evaluated. To use an admittedly extreme example or two: if most Germans agreed with Hitlerian policies in 1937, who then could stand in judgment on them? Or if most Russians by 1940 were so indoctrinated or cowed by Stalinist Terror that they could not speak and did not dare think for themselves, and there was nothing Higher than Stalin’s Will … then how could anybody stand in judgment?

As Freeman notes, it was John Locke’s vision that served as the Ground for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: “the people are sovereign; government originates in their consent; government’s power is fiduciary and exercisable only for the common good; citizens have inalienable rights justifying a right of resistance when violated”.

Alinsky and his pressure-groups cannot accept any of this. And while they claim only to ‘empower’, they introduce a politics of Suspicion and War upon those Citizens whom they have declared their Oppressors and therefore their Enemies (whoever is declared a ‘Have’ by whomever declare themselves somehow to be ‘Have-Nots’) … and you can’t keep a democracy with a politics built on this stuff.

Freeman nicely recalls Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech of August, 1963: his aspirations, presented to all Americans as a common goal, “were grounded in political ideals and ideal principles”. Further, says Freeman (as if, I think, he were specifically thinking of Alinsky!), none of this “could have been conveyed by focusing on practicable alternatives offered up by the status quo”.

But there, too, I think Alinsky fails Us hugely. Because part of the human ‘status quo’ is precisely a capacity to be persuaded or inspired to willingly ‘do the right thing’, as individuals and as a society and a polity and a commonwealth. You cannot – in the Leninist or messianic-Marxist mode – simply presume that ‘the masses’ are lumps who ‘just don’t get it’ and are violent lumpish brutes and on the basis of those huge and monstrous presumptions consider yourself justified in ‘waging war’ by whatever means available in order to bring about your idea of ‘progress’ or Perfection.

And to the extent that even Sen – as respectably alive to human suffering as Marx and Alinsky and King – somehow has to seek to do an end-run around democracy because people cannot be trusted to function as The People then – at least as his theories apply to the US – he must be most judiciously and carefully evaluated for the type of plague that is carried in the nihilism and angry urgencies of old European messianism.

And it is precisely those dangerous and lethal bacilli that underlie the SO Mania Regime – which, as I have said in earlier Posts, is not so much a free-standing if bizarre entity but rather was a first or trial run of a much larger and dangerous Theory of Government and of Democracy that can only serve to undermine the Constitutional polity and the entire American Experiment as it was conceived in 1787.

“Ideal theories” are precisely that, says Sen: un-worldly and un-real. Better to come up with something that will ‘work’. But I would say that nothing grounded purely in this-world can ‘work’ because the human realm, through the complex material-spiritual make-up of the humans who generate it, is itself somewhat ‘ideal’. Humans are capable of responding to ‘ideals’.

So when Sen, in Freeman’s view, considers the Constitution to be “ideal theory” and therefore unworldly and unworkable, then I think We are in a heepa trubble. Especially since I think a very large number of ‘prestigious’ progressive thinkers bombarded the Beltway with this ‘cutting-edge’ thought that the Constitution is nothing but an ‘ideal’ and ‘unworkable’, and that it would be better if the pols simply yielded to Alinsky-ite pressure and came to some sort of ‘deal’ rather than hew to any stupid old ‘ideal’.

The ‘ideal’ has been replaced by the ‘deal’ – and whenever that happens, you have to be verrry careful about the terms of such a ‘deal’.

The SO Mania Regime, I would say, is the result of such a ‘deal’, made by dismissing any ‘ideal’, and it was embraced by the Beltway and by legislators and jurists all around the country.

Freeman insists – against Sen – that “the abstract rights and principles of justice in the Constitution have a fundamental regulative role in American society, and also provide a primary basis for public justification and criticism of government”.

And Freeman gives you a little more philosophical exercise: “The fact that principles of justice are formulated for hypothetical circumstances does not mean that they do not apply to our actual circumstances”.

I’d go even further: the ‘hypothetical’ – meaning the ‘ideal’ – is not merely an exercise in imagination or fantasy. Rather, the ‘ideal’ is a very real dimension of the complex human, though not materially evident to the basic senses of sight or touch. To ignore the ‘ideal’ because you can’t see it or touch it is not being ‘realistic’ but rather being simplistic in the extreme. ‘Reality’, and the humans who inhabit this plane of existence and of spacetime, is only partly evident to material examination. Like an iceberg, an awful lot of it is ‘out of sight’ – but as they found out on the Titanic that night, you can ‘miss’ a berg and still wreck yourself.

Sen doesn’t hold with the High Definition of human institutions: if they don’t contribute to individuals’ satisfaction with the quality of their lives, then they are very dispensable and should be dispensed with.

You can imagine then, what they must have thought inside the Beltway, when Sen’s thought was presented, adapted to the American situation by the claim that a Constitution that somehow protects that ‘sexual restriction’ that keeps folks from fully being satisfied with their life is AND HAS TO BE dispensed with.

(And at this point, you can perhaps see why an awful lot of legislators would rather not have to discuss and admit that they indeed went along with the SO Mania Regime on the assumption that the Constitution needed to be dispensed with.)

Freeman will give you a chance to think about the classic Western philosophical Question about the relationship between the Right and the Good: can you pursue Right with such violent consequences that you destroy the very fabric of society upon which everybody’s Good life depends?

Let me take a bull by the horns here: this was precisely the problem that faced the Framers in regard to slavery and that faced Lincoln in regard to Abolitionism. Let me just take Lincoln: the Abolitionists said that Slavery was so fundamentally evil (and I don’t disagree) that the country could not exist a single moment longer with it and that to the extent that the Constitution somehow kept it going then the Constitution itself was a pact with Hell.

Even in the 1850s Lincoln (while a politician but not yet President) realized that you would destroy the fabric of the country and wreck the entire institution of American Constitutional Democracy if you simply tried to abolish slavery overnight with a declaration or even a law. (Indeed, it was the simple fact of his election, and no declaration on his part that he intended to abolish slavery, that moved so many of the slave states to secede and start the Civil War.)

Slavery was a Wrong and not a Right, but the commonwealth and the fabric of national society and the institutions holding it up, including the Constitution, were not at that moment Perfect and Right, but they were a Good (however imperfectly realized) and you would cause huge wrack and ruin by trying to quickly Perfect it by declaring Slavery abolished.

To the abolitionists this proved Lincoln was willing to live with Evil and therefore was a partner of Evil himself (he didn’t receive their full support until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863).

You see the problem. How quickly can you institute Perfection if you have to balance the Right and the Good?

I think that it is a species of the Abolitionist mentality that has assaulted the Beltway in the past 40 years, and that was blended – on top of that – with Alinsky’s Marxist-revolutionary stuff about ‘war politics’ and agitating on the basis of unending ‘suspicion’. And I think all of that underlies much of the ‘justification’ for the SO Mania Regime.

Worse, since he is trying to actually influence the shape of a government that is still in its formative stages and a population that is hardly experienced in functioning as The People, Sen is focusing – and not incorrectly – on setting up a society and culture as well as governmental institutions, to replace an ancient and in some ways outmoded Tradition over there in India and much of the Developing World.

So he is not running the risk of hugely undermining an already-functioning polity in the way that is happening – and to great extent has happened – over here.

To assert that the rights of ‘individuals’ don’t count in the face of the great challenges may well be true, at this stage, in India. But to assert such a thing over here is to directly undermine the Constitutional ethos: this country is at a different stage of development and what might not cause so much damage to the established (and vitally humanly necessary) Shape of a Citizenry’s and a population’s lifeways and the Shape of their society over there, would most surely do so – and has done so – over here.

This, as Lincoln saw, is not a project lightly to be undertaken, nor ‘spun’ as purely ‘progress’ – there are huge and dangerous consequences. As We are seeing now.

Freeman gets down to it: he uses the example of Cheney and terrorism and Guantanamo (hardly far removed from the SO Mania dynamics). Surely, Freeman says, Cheney must have realized that “some Guantanamo prisoners were innocent bystanders swept up by a hasty dragnet during the heat of combat”.

And wasn’t the SO Mania Regime – which PRECEDED the Terrorism issue by a decade and more – precisely envisioned as an ‘attack’ by ‘Sex Offenders’ on American society and culture?

“But”, Freeman continues about Cheney, “he argues, in effect, that the abuses of Guantanamo were acceptable because they increased overall security”. Freeman continues: “[Cheney] might concede that there were gross violations of some individuals’ freedom and see this as a cost of the government’s policies; yet he would consider this cost to be outweighed by the greater good”.

This is a type of Utilitarian philosophical calculation: what’s good is what produces some good for the greatest number of persons. On that basis, Hitler in Germany in the mid-1930s and Mussolini since the 1920s, were both doing ‘good’. No Higher Law (‘deontological’ thinking, as it is formally termed in philosophy) existed to stand in judgment over what was being done by the governments’ policies in those countries. It is even conceivable that a strong Utilitarian could have justified the social and political and legal encumbrances laid upon the Jewish citizens of Germany in the 1930s and perhaps even – though it is repugnant to me – the Holocaust itself.

Freeman notes, accurately, that “Sen is sensitive to the criticism that individual rights cannot be sacrificed for gains to the greater good”. Sen tries to solve this profound difficulty (certainly for Western democratic and Constitutional thought) in his system in two ways.

First, Sen tries to say that he is not so much concerned for Utilitarian good but rather for people to have a wider range of ‘capabilities’. But of course, depending on how you define ‘capabilities’ you could wind up quickly with a verrrry intrusive government (exactly the problem Nussbaum runs into when she adds the ‘right’ not to be sexually anxious as part of the American variant of Sen’s Capabilities Approach).

Second, Sen tries to incorporate into his list of ‘goods’ that people should have a healthy experience of democracy. BUT those are just words, given that Sen is precisely trying to set up a government and indeed a culture that must almost by definition be erected over the heads of the Indian citizenry and population that pretty much has no experience of a fully functioning democratic polity and ethos.

So Sen really has no solution to his profound problem: you cannot have a democratic polity while simultaneously establishing by elite and government action – wide and deep – a cultural revolution that your population, by your own criteria and vision, has no experience of.

That’s Nussbaum’s problem over here too. Sen at least isn’t really working with American culture and society and Our Constitutional polity in mind; Nussbaum most certainly is.

Alinsky tried to solve it by reducing politics to ‘the low road’ and asserting cynically and nihilistically that Nothing Is Ever On The Level.

This is not a ‘simple’ problem. But to undermine the Constitution in order to make things more to your conceptual liking is certainly not a prudent let alone an easy solution.

But you see in the SO Mania Regime the product of the Beltway’s attempt to do just that.

As Freeman puts the problem clearly: “How, then, are we to address the inevitable conflicts that arise between maximizing good consequences (economic efficiency, overall happiness, or individuals’ capabilities) on the one hand and respecting individual rights and fair distribution and procedures on the other? Are we allowed to restrict the constitutional rights of a few (denying the rights of ‘enemy combatants to enemy combatants’ to habeas corpus and a fair trial for example, or the interning of Japanese-American citizens during World War II) that effectively guarantees the rights of far greater numbers to personal security and other freedoms?”

Notice how many possible areas of definition that “good consequences” might cover. And can ‘government’ address all of them and remain in its Constitutional bounds? And can ‘government’ effect a revolution of such magnitude without first putting these huge matters clearly and directly to The People?*

Notice also that in the SO Mania Regime (which, I note again, PRECEDED the ‘terrorism’ matter by more than a decade) it can’t so quickly be accepted the governmental ‘solution’ (the SO Mania Regime itself) can at all be accurate described as “effectively” guaranteeing any such security: there is more than enough serious assessment now that indicates that the SO Mania Regime is NOT contributing to ‘safety’.

So again: Sen’s ideas – put forward constructively to help Shape the economics of a still under-Shaped and still-developing polity in India and the Developing World – have profoundly destructive effects when translated into a civil/criminal legal forum in an already-established and fundamentally Constitutional culture and polity here in the US.

The trick was that the assorted pressure-groups here in the US went to the Beltway and cast their Identities as being pretty much ‘oppressed peoples’ as if they were Third World natives, and thus claimed that since Sen was doing such an impressive job with the oppressed peoples ‘over there’ then he could ‘simply’ be adopted whole-hog over here and the US would then also quickly and easily achieve ‘justice’ for the ‘oppressed’ over here.

And THAT gambit was hugely wrong-headed, both in its Content and in the Method (imposition and ‘spin’) by which the whole scheme would be foisted on The People without ‘wasting time’ for public deliberation and consensus-building. (After all, why bother trying to explain things to the masses who by definition ‘just don’t get it’?)

Freeman quickly notes that “in the event of extreme emergencies we must sacrifice some innocent persons’ rights to save the multitudes”. Yes, and those are difficult decisions and – you would think – thankfully rare.

BUT OF COURSE part of the ‘spin’ gambit was precisely to create an ‘emergency’ (think of all those Victimology ‘studies’ and claims and assertions and ‘statistics’) that actually didn’t exist, in order to create a public stampede and the conceptual ‘dust’ that a stampede raises, clouding everyone’s vision of what’s actually going on.

AND OF COURSE, it wasn’t just one such manufactured ‘emergency’ but an endless wave of them, as more and more pressure-groups saw that the Beltway had cut itself loose from the Reality Principle (or the Truth Principle) and would say Yes to just about any demand made upon it.

And the SO Mania Regime was one of those ‘manufactured emergencies’.

Because, as Freeman soberly reminds readers, “it’s important to maintain a distinction between extreme emergencies and the ordinary circumstances of social life”.

But that ‘distinction’ was and is exactly the speed-bump and firewall that the pressure-groups wanted to break down, and had to break down if they were to succeed in their Alinsky-ite project of bringing about the ‘change’ that they were so sure was a Good Thing.

And the Beltway went along with it.

BUT, Freeman continues soberly, “Sen raises the possibility of abandoning this distinction”. After all, Sen says, who’s to draw the line between “catastrophic moral horrors” and “bad social consequences that are not absolutely catastrophic but still quite nasty”?

Well, of course, in a functioning and long-established representative democracy the answer to Sen’s own question is that the elected representatives of The People – working on the authority of The People but thereby required in prudence to confer with The People – would be the ones to “say”, the ones to draw those distinctions between “catastrophic” emergencies and merely “bad” arrangements.

BUT that’s not how it has worked out over here, where the Beltway quietly decided on its own that it would be in its own interests to merely accept the distinction insisted upon by the pressure groups and then ‘spin’ the consequent policies as merely ‘changes’ and ‘reform’ and ‘progress’ and – anyway – that is was ‘merely’ a ‘response’ to an ‘emergency’.

And the SO Mania Regime is a result of that treacherous and hugely deceitful decision by the Beltway.

Because let’s face it: the ideas underlying the SO Mania Regime are wrong-headed and the policies those ideas would call for were wrong-headed and hugely imprudent … but they would have remained just that – odd and dangerously unripe ‘ideas’ – except that the Beltway embraced them and erected them into national policy and law.

Freeman concludes his thoughts and his review with a philosopher’s observation: that it seems to many folks as if ‘philosophy’ was nothing more than a “luxury” since the effects of this ‘idea’ as opposed to that ‘idea’ take “generations” to become clear. Since the consequences of ideas take so long to clearly manifest, many people – Americans especially, given the impatient and youthy make-up of Our culture – figure that things can be ‘speeded up’ efficiently and without ill consequence.

And surely the Alinsky-ite approach, following the revolutionary approach in which it is rooted, not only has no patience with long stretches of ripening time, but actually considers that such ‘delay’ is merely a failure of nerve and determination to create the revolution’s vision of a Good Thing.

And so We got the Stampede that created the SO Mania Regime.

I took this much time (mine and yours) to note all this in order to give you a wider and deeper awareness of how – as best I can make out – some perfectly respectable (if not totally accurate) ideas of Amartya Sen could wind up being ‘adapted’ in this country with such immediate and lethal consequences as the SO Mania Regime.

Ideas are funny things: if embraced by Authority, they can have huge consequences.

Which is why, as the world and societies become more complex, it is necessary for a People – especially The People of the American Constitutional polity – to become MORE informed and aware, rather than less. It’s not enough to figure that you’ve done your job by electing somebody to the legislature and letting them confer with ‘elites’ and do the things that have to be done.

As the SO community knows full well, and the Framers before them, human beings aren’t suddenly rendered wise and prudent by the mere fact of ‘election’ to office. They can make huge mistakes if not well-grounded and guided by The People upon whose authority they act.

So much remains to be done.

NOTES

*I repeat here what I have mentioned before: in 1972, the year that the Democratic Party declared itself to be the Party of Everthing 'new', it lost the Presidential election 49 states to 1. So if I sometimes sound hard about the responsiblity of The People in this country, I recall here that in the one opportunity The People had to voice their opinion of where things were going, The People rejected it by the largest margin in American electoral history.

I think that one of the great hidden dynamics driving American politics in the past 40 years has precisely been to distract The People so that nobody would remember exactly what The People said so clearly in the election of 1972.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 1

As I have been saying, I have finally gotten around in my life to reading Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rule for Radicals”. (He was born in 1909 and died in 1972.)

I have to tell you now: it’s been a huge revelation. I say this especially with reference to my abiding interest in connecting-dots in American affairs.

It’s a shortish-book (196 pages in my copy)*, but well-worth the read.

I am doing the master-Posts on my other site, and for each of those Posts I will put up an SO-specific Post on this site. If you wish you can read, for example, the first Master Post (of which this is an SO-specific distillation) here.

Let me preface all this by saying that it has always been my thought that the SO Mania regime was never simply an honest-response to an accurately-perceived emergency. Rather, I have always felt that it was fueled by deep streams and truly toxic as well as highly flammable fuels. I recall Alinsky’s book from back in the day – and he had been working his Technique in the 1960s, before he wrote the book in 1971 (dying then in 1972). But I never read it back then; it seemed just one more in a great moosh of ‘ideas’ that were floating around back then.

I see now that I was mistaken. If you read Alinsky, and reflect simultaneously on what was happening to politics in the country, and especially if you recall the massive significance of the sudden and deep changes made by the Democratic Party, brought to first full light in the 1972 Convention**, you may suddenly realize that – alongside French Deconstruction theory imported from French university humanities classrooms – Alinsky was available to ‘creative’ and ‘cutting edge’ elite thinkers, offering a ‘home-grown’ American theory of ‘revolution’, drawn from his own experience as a Marxist-trained labor organizer and then general community ‘organizer’ in the Old Left era of his youth, the 1920s and early 1930s.

So I have been going through Alinsky’s book now not simply as a historical artifact but rather looking at it as a Shaper of events, and on the deepest and widest levels. This is also true of reading the book with an eye to the SO Mania Regime. Although that didn’t really get started until the early or mid-1980s, a decade after Alinsky’s death, his ideas by that time had quietly been embraced by all manner of elites – especially on the putatively ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ Left (which had never been popularly imagined as the direction from which great threats to the Constitutional ethos would ever come; Identity Politics had matured and pride of place given to its mutant or perhaps quintessential variant, Gender Politics. The National Nanny Regulatory State was now assuming proportions as ominous as the traditionally-feared National Security State of the post-1945 era.

Well, let’s get to it. I will be distilling Alinsky’s ideas; if there aren’t as many page-references as you usually find in my Posts, that’s simply because everything is up with references in the Master Post on the other site.

This Post will cover Alinsky’s ‘Prologue’, the first 30 or so pages of his book (200 pages long at most).

All of history and politics, he says, can be reduced to one eternal element: the extortion by the Haves of the Have-Nots, and consequently the eternal need for the Have-Nots to be organized to wrest Power from the Haves.

You can see in this Alinsky’s Marxist-Leninist vision, born in contemplation of both an Industrial Capitalism that was growing in an unregulated way and creating tremendous damage to human lives (while also providing increased material benefit and resource) and – especially in the Leninist aspect – the frustration of a working-class who saw their economic status remain stifled not only by Wealth but by the inherited political power and authority of Aristocracy and one of the last Divine Right Monarchies among the great powers of the West.

You can also see in this Alinsky’s Marxist-Leninist training: the presumption that so large a human phenomenon can be ‘reduced to’ one core element; the presumptiveness that one’s own group (the Marxist-Leninists) can accurately do the ‘reducing’; and the actual assertion – offered as a belief rather than as a proven fact – that ‘war’ is the primary and most basic dynamic of politics.

And then, of course, ‘war’ brings in its train all sorts of awful sub-dynamics: the absolute primacy of Outcome over Process; the absolute primacy of Ends over Means; the absolute primacy of Winning over any question as to what Higher Law or Principle might limit the options you may exercise in order to achieve your victory; and in that case the functional rejection of any Higher Law that might limit your options at all – so that, when the flag is unfurled and the trumpet sounds, it’s merely a matter of ‘doing whatever it takes’ (and after you Win you can write the History so as to take the dark edges away).

You can see immediately why the Framers were verrrrry nervous about War: when you turn all this stuff loose in a democratic constitutional republic, then all of the dynamics of a deliberative politics, anchored in a laboriously-achieved majority consensus bounded but not minutely determined by the general vision of the Constitution, fueled by accurate information provided by an objective and detached ‘free press’ … all of these and more are swept away, subordinated to the overriding Necessity for Victory.

Worse, as the Framers saw, you never come back to your original Constitutional ethos after a war, especially a big one or a long one: like growing bones or trees, your conception of the Constitutional ethos and its principles and its vision will have been bent into such shapes for so long that they don’t ever spring back precisely into the pre-war position and with the same suppleness and vitality.

So to introduce ‘War’ as the governing dynamic of politics, especially in the American setting, is a recipe for possible ‘political’ catastrophe in the most profound and serious sense of that term.

If for no other reason, such a vision – as it did for the Russian people – called for what had to be not just an ongoing ‘war’ but indeed an ongoing ‘civil war’, Citizens against Citizens. Of course the Soviet revolutionaries did not look upon their fellow Russians who had doubts about the ‘revolution’ as ‘fellow citizens’: they were, in war-thinking, ‘the enemy’ and had to be ‘defeated’. For this purpose Lenin was perfectly prepared to use Terror, and there exist written directives he sent out to judges insisting that “Our revolutionary courts must shoot!” (exclamation point Lenin’s). For the same reason, the Cheka, great-grand-daddy of the KGB, “does not investigate – it strikes”; meaning that the police power existed not so much to investigate whether a crime was committed but rather merely to strike-down the perceived ‘enemies of the revolution’. (And in this comment of the 1920s Soviet leadership, you can get an inkling of the SO Mania Regime.)

In its Identity Politics setting, embraced for 1970s America as noted above, this Marxist economic division of the entire population into Haves and Have-Nots is expanded along fresh axes of division: race, immigrant status, and – under the aegis of the most ‘organized’ of the Identities – gender.

And in the feminist and Victimist variants of Identity Politics, both of which interacted in a lethal synergy, this Haves/Have-Nots conception became blended with the anti-colonialist thought of such French thinkers as Franz Fanon to produce Oppressors/Oppressed. And then the particular radical-feminist twist was to further specifiy that a major component of that ‘oppression’ was Male Sexual Violence, exercised – as I’ve noted in other Posts on this site – in both the public and the private/family/home venues, as well as in ANY interpersonal relationship interactions.

So if you roll that around in your mind for a bit you can start to get a sense of what sort of Imperfect Storm was being brewed up here. An Alinskyite vision in this setting would therefore not only describe but insist upon a permanent ‘civil war’ between genders, reaching into the most private elements of the Citizens’ lives.

And, in good Alinskyite fashion, ‘governance feminism’ took the route not of violent demonstrations (such as burning down the college ROTC building to protest the Vietnam War) but rather of “wresting political power” from the Haves and taking what Power it could get for the Have-Nots.Alinsky was not a ‘revolutionary’ in the usual sense of relying on physical violence; he did not approve of the Weathermen faction’s reliance on bombs and so forth. Rather, his ‘violence’ was his eternal political ‘war’, the struggle to “wrest Power” by one group (of Citizens) against another group (of Citizens).

And all of this, of course, made much easier by the Democrats’ formal and sweeping and urgent embrace of Identity Politics in the very early 1970s. The outcome of which was an increasingly Regulatory State that was passing laws specifically to redistribute Power and ALSO to broadly and deeply re-Shape – on the level of Star-Trek type ‘terraforming’ – the entire world-and-life conception of the Citizenry, and quickly.

This being the America, of course, the whole thing was spun largely as Constitutional ‘reform’ and ‘progress’, although it was not until – from the Right – Alberto Gonzalez publicly let the cat out of the bag in 2005 or 2006 by claiming that the Constitution was “quaint”. Although even Thurgood Marshall had long before opined that the Constitution of 1787 was “defective”, referring to matters of race, and his idea was simply taken-over by another Identity as well, such that the ‘defects’ of the Constitution were extended to include the category of gender as well.

Naturally then, the good Alinskyite – like the good Marxist and Leninist – must eternally ‘suspect’ the existence the Haves’ trying to extort (and oppress) the Have-Nots. This is not only a ‘war politics’ and a ‘civil-war politics’ but also a ‘politics of suspicion’. And THIS is what was embraced, whether the pols and political ‘strategists’ had realized it or not, in 1972.

Alinksy claims that he is merely offering a Techinique here, and not a ‘dogma’. But he has already asserted what he believes to be the core dynamics of how life, and the world, and history, and societies works: Nothing Is On The Level; the Haves will always be trying to extort (and oppress) the Have-Nots; and there is no more primary motive for retaining political Power than the motive of Greed. And from all this flows the fact that the ‘status quo’ (if you are of a certain age, you may well recall this mantra-phrase of the day) is nothing more than ‘hypocrisy’ and so there must also be an eternal ‘war’ by ‘organizers’ against the ‘status quo’.

And in light of all that, the Alinskite vision holds, there are no ‘Ideals’ in politics; Ideals (called ‘abstractions’ in current Correct dogma) are merely sheeps-clothing and hypocritical covers to lull the Have-Nots into passive acceptance of their being extorted (and ‘oppressed’) by the Haves.

There is in politics, he says, only “the low-road”; there is no high-road because Ideals are nothing more than hypocritical illusions deployed like an “opiate” (recalling the Marxist assertion that ‘religion is merely an ‘opium of the people’) to lull the Have-Nots into a passively accepting stupor.

And since folks won’t even realize that they have been ‘drugged’, then the first job of an organizer (having schooled him/herself in the Stance of Eternal Suspicion) is to raise the consciousness of the Have-Nots to the reality that they are being Extorted and don’t even realize it.

If that last sentence rings some vague bell with you, recall the Father-Daughter Incest phase of the Mania (about which I Posted recently as one such ‘Daughter’ admitted she was all wrong): numerous writers, ‘experts’, and just plain folks who were ‘concerned’ began writing all sorts of self-help books that were actually a form of Alinsky-ite ‘consciousness-raising’ books: their ‘revelation’ was that You, daughter, have been being ‘abused’ by your Father all these years and you never even knew it!


The term ‘abused’ could be substituted with any number of equally vague or far more lurid terms – feel free. The last phrase of the sentence could be done up more vividly (‘AND YOU NEVER EVEN KNEW IT!!!!’).

All of which were elements of necessary ‘consciousness-raising’: after all, you can’t ‘organize’ people if they don’t even know what’s being done to them that requires them to get organized. Although one would have to be careful: Alinsky’s point seem uncomfortably close to A) professional advertising’s objective of ‘creating a need’ and ‘creating a desire’ and B) the Goebbelsian gambit of ‘creating an emergency’ (‘to which the Regime must and will respond!’, and so forth).

In addition to which Alinsky added in 1971 a thought to which every Boomer adolescent could relate, BUT which also ominously mirrored revolutionary impatience with opposition or even simply doubt, hesitation, and further questioning: “The older generation doesn’t understand and, worse, doesn’t want to”. Now in the revolutionary scenario, as it played out in Russia and in Fascist Germany, no ‘opposition’ could be entertained or tolerated since the Revolution (Russia) or the Reich (Germany) already was in full possession of all the truth that the country and the people needed to know. Thus anybody who objected or even doubted was an ‘enemy’ of the Revolution or the Reich (or both) and, come to think of it, of the Leader too (Lenin or Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini).

While you couldn’t say that adolescent authority issues with parents is at core a political issue (more of a human psychology and family dynamics issue), yet it is the genius (so to speak) of Alinsky that he ties the two in together for the Boomer generation: the grownups don’t know and they don’t want to know. At which point – almost in a whackulous imitation of a John Wayne character – the Boomer must say ‘Well, then, it’s up to me’ (or, more accurately, the Boomers as a group must say ‘Well, then, it’s up to us’).

Now put this dynamic into the ‘gender revolution’ and ‘gender war’ context and you’re calling for all ‘women’ to tolerate absolutely NONE of whatever the Male says because it’s just a form of Have/Patriarchy extortion hiding under the sleazy illusions of Tradition, Common-good, Prudence, or whatever.

Now refine that tactically into some ‘issue’ which you can make a sure-fire ‘emergency’ and you will soon realize that a problem that Males can be plausibly claimed to create that Females are always ‘the victim of’ is Sex. Or – more usefully – Sexual Violence (which to some radical-feminists meant any sexual contact or relationship whatsoever, anywhere, anytime).

Now put ‘pressure’ on the politicians (already desperately eager to please) to DO SOMETHING and you quickly get to the Mania Regimes (Domestic Violence and Sex Offense) and all the stunningly frakkulent laws passed to ‘control’ the out-of-control Males.

Alinsky will also say that a good organizer “must always keep the pressure on” (since Haves of any sort will always try to take back whatever Power has been taken from them by the former Have-Nots). And you get ‘emergency’ and ‘outrage’ in steady and apparently endless succession, each requiring a ratcheting up of the applicable laws and regulations, law upon law, ‘emergency’ upon ‘emergency’, phase after phase.

And here you are.***

Also, naturally, Alinskyite thought holds that “all values and factors are relative, fluid, ever-changing”. And, consequently, that everything is “fluid” and ‘totally changeable’ (as is said nowadays). So good ‘organizing’ must not allow itself to be limited – let alone ‘judged’ – by any appeals to an illusory Higher Law: what the revolution imposes is its own Law and cannot be judged by any ‘status quo’ authority because such authority is illegitimate and hypocritical in the first place. The revolution justifies itself and needs no further ‘validation’ by illusions such as Tradition or Higher Law or Prudence or anything else.

Which dovetails nicely with the 19th-century European development of the theory of Legal Positivism: that whatever laws are made by a government in power are in and of themselves justified merely by virtue of having been enacted. There is no appeal from them, there is no Authority to whom appeal can be made, and – in the Revolutionary scheme – there is no other earthly Authority that is not ‘hypocritical’, is not merely a tool of the Haves in the ongoing extortion of the Have-Nots, and therefore has no legitimacy anyway in the first place.

All very nice and neat: caught up in the toils of such ‘revolutionary law’ you are indeed stuck between a rock and a hard place. So very similar, you might already be thinking, to the situation purposely built into the SO Mania Regime laws: once targeted, there is almost no defense and precious little appeal, especially since American courts and the legal system are now staffed by generations of law-students raised not only in this ‘theory’ of Law but also in the shrewdly spun illusion that such thinking is ‘reform’ and ‘progressive’ and that there can be no Bad Consequences when you are busily doing whatever it takes to Achieve A Good Thing (and can you say ‘Iraq War’?).

And - if you recall the megafilm ‘Waterworld’ of some years ago – it becomes clear just how impossible it is to keep a society and a civilization going if you are working in a totally fluid environment. If there is no reliably ‘solid ground’ then anything goes, anything can happen, and it can happen whenever, with no warning. But of course, in the Alinskyite vision, whatever is ‘solid’ is merely a Greed-hardened hypocritical illusion deployed by the Haves against the Have-Nots.

And all of this may also help provide a ‘deep’ explanation as to why nowadays, even with the profusion of reliable and genuinely scientific studies demonstrating clearly the wrong-headedness of the SO Mania as well as of its laws, the pols often behave like revolutionary ‘true-believers’, refusing to be confused by ‘facts’ because they are so certain that they are Achieving A Good Thing.

Alinsky, I am saying, reigns and has reigned for quite some time, in the national political consciousness, even though few might recall his name.

(Naturally, at this point, having made such a mess, there are also many in authority who cannot afford to admit what they have done or supported. Much like the war in Afghanistan, the elite leadership now can’t figure how to back away, let alone dare to admit that it needs to because its policies have gotten the country into a foreign version of the Little Big Horn – which is my take on all of that. In this way, Afghanistan and the SO Mania Regime are two fruits of the same poisonous tree, watered and nurtured by Alinsky’s dark visions and ‘techniques’.)

Well, that’s the SO-relevant material in Alinsky’s ‘Prologue’. He will draw those thoughts out in subsequent chapters and so will I in subsequent Posts.

I think that under all of this, from a legal point of view, there lies the huge question: is it within the scope of a democratic government in a Constitutional republic to deliberately pass and impose laws (regulatory, administrative, civil, criminal) that are designed to ‘change’ the most fundamental and profound habits and attitudes of the Citizenry?

OR must the path be, in a democratic government in a Constitutional republic, only that the government can pass laws based on the expressed Consensus reached by The People as to their most profound lifeways and folkways?

In the Alinsky-ite vision (adapted from Marxist and Leninist models) and in the Identity Politics vision (adapted from Alinsky) ‘The People’ is itself merely an illusion, an abstraction, and a sinister abstraction in the service of the Haves continuing to Extort the Have-Nots.

Hence the Alinsky-ite vision treats the Citizenry and The People as part of the problem, so to speak. And as a sinister and illegitimate illusion. Which may be one big reason why 30 years after his thought was forcefully injected into the bloodstream of the nation’s politics, the democratic and Constitutional ethos and its politics seems indeed to have become insubstantial, a thing of fantasy or memory more than vital, robust, efficacious real-ness.

And I think the SO community sensed all of this from the get-go of the SO Mania Regime.

And, I believe current events now demonstrate, the SO community has been right all along.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

**It is not often recalled that when the Democrats unveiled their new and still-nascent Identity Politics approach in the Party platform of 1972, their presidential campaign of that year was utterly trounced by the Citizenry: they only carried one State, Massachusetts.

I hold no large respect for Richard Nixon, but reflecting now on the deep skullduggeries of LBJ and on the breath-taking war-making of Bush-Cheney, ‘Watergate’ seems a very inflated matter in comparison. But it was essential, I think, that the Democrats of the era recover some semblance of ‘credibility’ for their new Identity Politics approach, even though it had been so utterly rejected at the polls. Hence there was a great deal of subterranean – truly tectonic – pressure to somehow discredit Nixon as awesomely as could be managed … and thereby create a little more ‘space’ for the Identity Politics to which the Dems of the day had so quickly and sweepingly (and desperately) committed their Party.

***Notice also, and it’s always a happy thing in pork-barrel politics, that Alinsky has provided the underpinning for what the Pentagoons like to call “the self-licking ice cream cone”: a program or situation that keeps creating the need for its own continuation and expansion. You have created ‘constituencies’ who will now accuse you of treachery or insensitivity if you try to correct your legislative mistakes and pull back from the abyss (as the Chief Judge of the Salem Witch Trials accused the Governor (although not the Crown – he didn’t dare go that far) of reining him in just as he was in the process of “clearing the land of witches” by hanging as many as he could get close enough to Find Guilty); you have also funded any and every ‘cottage industry’ that springs up to nurse itself on the government dime; and you have made a Faustian pact with influential media outlets that are happy to have ‘real’ melodramas and soap-operas on which they can luridly ‘report’.

SO SERIES ON NUSSBAUM: 1

Well, here We go – the series on Martha Nussbaum’s 2007 Harvard Law Review article (94 pages), entitled “Constitutions and Capabilities: ‘Perception’ Against Lofty Formalism”. The link to the text of her article is here.

Why do this? It is clear to me – as I don’t think has ever been made clear before – that the ‘reforms’ demanded in and incorporated into ‘feminist law’ or in the ‘governance feminism’ agenda are really far more significant and substantial than most Americans have been led to believe.

And surely the SO community is aware as few others can be, through direct and stunning experience, just how all of this has played out ‘on the ground’.

But if what has come out at the business end of the SORNA sausage machine is so frightening and Constitutionally repugnant, it’s important to say what’s been going into the machine – the ingredients. And Nussbaum has served as a codifier, propagator, as well as thinker to all of this; she has for decades been weaving a web of high or innocent-sounding ‘philosophical’ ‘positions’ that – when they are put all together, can result in something like SORNA and the SO Mania.

And on top of that, her thoughts are not only seemingly ‘abstract’ and ‘philosophical’ but also large and, even more, hostile to any traditionally understood concept of Constitutional praxis and the role of government in the vision of 1787.

And a great deal of all of it has already found its way into major chunks of American law and legislation and regulations and regulatory law. And the idea of the SORNA regime as ‘regulatory’, and the justifications presented to the pols who vote for this regime, are going to draw deeply from Nussbaum’s work.

And it has all been presented as being quite reasonable through the philosophical visions and systems of such professors as Nussbaum (she is one of the most prominent legal professors in the country and has been for a while).

And her ideas have been widely propagated not only through feminist advocacy channels but even more significantly through several cohorts of law professors, whose students – or who themselves – have gone on to important positions as government or prosecuting attorneys, judges at all levels, and even as legislators at State or Federal level.

So this is important stuff if We want to grasp the dynamics underlying what has been happening – and what has happened – to the Constitution and the Republic and to a deliberative and democratic politics. And what is driving pols: it’s not just raw political pandering; there are professionals like Nussbaum who are actually putting all this stuff such as this article in front of them and telling them that they’re doing a Good and Right Thing and that they cannot fail the Constitutional rights of every decent Citizen just to respect the rights of SO’s (who were created as a demon-class by Fear and propaganda in the first place).

Enough said.

Let’s get to it. In this short series of Posts I’m going to go through the article sequentially, commenting on elements that strike me as significant.

As with all texts that are available in Adobe, there are two sets of page numbers: the page number assigned by the Adobe browser, and the actual page number of the document as it was written. In this case there is a 3 page difference, so when I make a reference to the text of the article it will look like this: page 13-16. The first number is the Adobe browser pagination, and the second is the actual text’s pagination.

When I discuss a particular point, I’ll try to quote the actual text on that point, so that you won’t have to do too much shifting from my Post to the Linked text.

Nussbaum starts by quoting Aristotle (2/5): “It is evident that the best political order is that arrangement in accordance with which anyone whatsoever might do very well and live a flourishing life”.

It’s a great thought. It represents a wonderful ideal. Western society has sustained a long struggle toward it.

Of course, you can’t just ‘quote’ a great thought from an acknowledged master and figure that you’ve done all work that needs to be done.

Aristotle, for example, would not have included women and slaves (and Greek slavery was not based on race – which was much more a European phase dating from the discovery of the New World) in his “anyone whatsoever”. He did mean, however, any adult male – and not just the ones in his particular City-State, which was quite a broadening thought in its time. He might even have meant ‘Persians’ and non-Greeks, which would have truly blown a few minds.

Naturally, the SO Mania must claim that SO’s – since they are such a violent and abnormal class – can’t possibly be afforded such a chance to ‘flourish’ since by their conviction they have proven that they have no control over themselves, and do the most unspeakable and abnormal and violent sexual things. They constitute a sub-human class, deeply in need of ‘therapy’ (if anybody ever devises it) but in the meantime they need to be locked up or – if they are allowed out – to be ‘belled’ like the proverbial cat and made to wear some sort of ‘Star’ that will warn everybody of their presence and invite ‘normal’ and ‘decent’ people to – ummmm – take what action they think is necessary.

But there’s the second question about that “flourishing life”: you can’t know if a life is flourishing or not unless you know what it’s ideally supposed to look like. And that means you have to figure out what the Nature of the human being is, what the purpose of the human being is – in order to judge whether any individual’s life is actually conforming to the ideal.

(Nussbaum will depart from Aristotle here: in order to maximize its base and justify its deconstructive agenda, feminist law would claim – and the Supreme Court would echo in such cases as Casey – that while everybody has a right to ‘flourish’ YET nobody has the right to say what the ideal human being, or ideal human behavior, is or can be. In other words, the human being is totally ‘autonomous’, meaning that no power on earth can judge whether an individual human being is conforming to any ideal human-ness.

But she likes that ‘flourishing’ bit, so she’ll slyly keep it and let you think that she and Aristotle are of one mind and that her ‘thinking’ is just a continuation of Master Aristotle’s thinking, and equally as solid and reliable. Her bottom line – as you will see – is that the government has the responsibility to clear a path so that everyone can ‘flourish’, which means that they can do whatever they want to do and the government has to help them do it and keep everybody else from ‘judging’ it. Neat – a teenager’s dampdream.)

In this regard, she not only departs from Aristotle, but from the follow-on work done by Christian philosophers. For them it was not only the bright realities of human ideals and possibilities that lay within human nature; it was also the darker but thoroughly human reality – evident in all human beings – to ‘sin’, to fail those ideals.

Nussbaum doesn’t like to make references to ‘religion’ or ‘particular beliefs of particular religions’, but she also doesn’t like the question of Sin because it implies a) that there is a Nature you can sin against; b) that there is a God who can ‘judge’ human behavior; and c) that ‘being judgmental’ is not a thing nice people do.

AND YET SO’s are thoroughly drowned in such ‘judgementalism’ through the operation of that same SO Mania which Nussbaum favors because it is the product of Law that recognizes the ‘rights of Fear’ – and indeed feeds off such ‘rights’.

So she focuses on the question: “What are people able to do and to be?” (2/5) NOT ideally, but in terms of whatever they think it is that they want “to do and to be”. There can be no ‘ideals’ in Nussbaum’s (and feminist law’s) world: if there is an ideal, then somebody could ‘judge’ somebody else, and that’s a no-no.

But then you realize that this whole article deals with Constitutional law and thought, and thus with the role of the government, and especially in what ways the government MUST (because these are ‘Constitutional’ and ‘rights’ issues) aggressively and assertively shape national culture and deploy its sovereign authority to keep the field clear for all that ‘autonomy’.

So it gets your whiskers twitching when she immediately asks a follow-on question: “And are they really able to do or be these things … ?” (2/5) [italics Nussbaum’s] What she is introducing here is the queasy distinction between what things actually are when subjected to common objective examination, and what things really are [italics Nussbaum’s] … which means that only those with a certain special knowledge will be able to ‘see’ what’s ‘really there’. And you can see where she is going to be moving us into the realm of ‘special knowing’ (like Lenin’s idea that only the truly committed cadres, the ‘vanguard elite’, can really see and really know what’s good for Russia and for the Russian people).

So here at the outset Nussbaum is creating a slippery, shadowy field upon which national life and Constitutional issues are to be examined: there are things going on which aren’t going to be visible (or provable) to just-anybody, but instead will require special-knowledge (sorta like ‘you just have to get it’).

And the SO community can see here where ‘spectral evidence’, visible only to those who ‘know’ and who ‘get it’ starts to get injected into mainline Constitutional legal and philosophical thought AS A VALID AND CUTTING-EDGE PRINCIPLE.

And this is on top of the fact that since these are Constitutional issues, then hugely fundamental matters are at stake, and the follow-on matter of how government might or must deploy its sovereign authority without obstruction or objection. So brace yourself.

About people, she continues asking, “Are there impediments, evident or hidden, to their real and substantial freedom? Are they able to unfold themselves or are their lives, in significant respects, pinched and starved?” (2/5) This is a flower-image – of the lovely flower unfolding as it blossoms, which recalls Flower Children, nicely enough. But it also implies that anything that keeps a flower from blossoming is bad (which it is, assuming the plant isn’t poisonous) and starts to grease the skids toward the follow-on connection that anything that keeps her ‘totally autonomous’ person from ‘blossoming’ is anti-natural and verrrry baaaaad.

And, with an eye toward anybody who will object to her vision: what sort of baaaad person would want to keep a flower from blossoming? Which greases the skids towards her conclusion that nobody can object because this is a matter of Constitutional Rights and so the government must impose it, and immediately and fully, without being slowed-down by deliberation, discussion, or the tolerance of any ‘intolerant’ dissent. Heeeeere we goooooo! You can see where all this might quickly lead.

And here SOs can be cast as a criminal class that is predictably and uncontrollably engaged in repetitive violations of the ‘right to flourish’; so that a ‘sex crime’ is not simply a crime but also a civil-rights and Constitutional-rights violation.

She continues with the image: “What about their environment – material, social, political?” (3/6) So you can see how quickly we’re out of the gardening and into the running of a nation and a culture.

“Has it helped them develop their capacities to be active in important areas of life? If people are like Pindar’s vine tree, is their environment more like a rich soil tended by wise and just gardeners, or more like an arid soil tended by indifferent gardeners, or gardeners with a restricted conception of their task?” (3/6)

So right off, you see where she’s going here. Assuming that the garden-tree image is valid, then it has to have a “rich soil” – and government has to make it so, and is Constitutionally required to do so. AND if there are “gardeners” (the government) that either don’t care or don’t really ‘get’ just how much they’re supposed to be doing … then they are BAAAAD. As are, of course, any Citizens who might object to whatever she’s going to ‘discover’ with her ‘special knowledge’ that not everybody else can see; although they wouldn’t have the ‘right’ to ‘judge’ it anyway, and if they can’t see it, then clearly ‘they just don’t get it’.

Can you get a sense of how Nussbaum is weaving a remarkably dense feministical web here? And laying the groundwork for a very anti-democratic, special-knowledge elite that nobody else has the right to argue with because nobody else ‘gets it’?

Thus the SO, although a human being and a Citizen, is degraded and demonized as some sort of weed or bug that prevents ‘blossoming’. The SO is de-humanized as some sort of violent parasite in the National Garden. This can happen easily in Nussbaum’s philosophy because ‘human-ness’ is not Grounded in any Human Nature, certainly not one created by a God – which traditionally has been taken as the source of a dignity so self-evident and inalienable that no other considerations may take precedence over the it; so if there is a ‘consensus’ of ‘proof’ that the SO is not acting as a normal human, than the SO is not primarily a human, let alone a Citizen with Constitutional rights.

She cuts right to the chase: “How have the basic constitutional principles of a nation, and their interpretation, promoted or impeded people’s abilities to function in some central areas of life?” (3/6) Not a bad question, although from what you’ve already seen, she’s going down the garden path and we are all supposed to go along – and may well not have a Constitutional right to object.

Because she’s into Constitutional principles and interpretations here, and in matters that can be established to be relevant to fundamental Constitutional principles and interpretations, then the government in all its Branches can’t allow itself any delay in ‘fixing’ whatever is wrong.

And here you can imagine ‘advocates’ assuring legislators that under this new, cutting-edge ‘knowledge’ the legislators can with good conscience make SO regime laws that under the old and ‘quaint’ system would not be possible. And, it SOs are actually violating the ‘constitutional right to blossom’ and have been and will continue to do so, then the legislators are justified in acting quickly and decisively.

This, you may recognize, is the application of the argument made in the First phase of the Civil Rights Era (up to July, 1965): because Negro/black rights to vote and influence public policy and live a life unhindered by race prejudice have so thoroughly been stifled by Jim Crow, then the Federal government, in the face of such clear, profound, and long-standing abuses has no right to delay in fixing things in the South right away, doing whatever it takes to clear away Jim Crow from Southern law (but also from Southern mind and heart and culture and society).

Which got the government verrry quickly into huge expansions of its power.

And in two ways.

First, the Federal government now took on the task not only of clearing away unjust laws, but also of literally Deconstructing Jim Crow in the minds and hearts and culture of the South and its Citizens, but also of Reconstructing those minds and hearts and that culture. Which is a huge expansion indeed.

Second, since Negro/black Americans lived all over the country – and were Citizens – then this entire project had immediately to be applied to the entire country, including the minds and hearts of its Citizens and the national culture. Which was even more huge.

When, shortly thereafter, the Feminist Revolution got itself going, the Feminists basically deployed the same scenario and the same argument (though never clearly and concisely stated): Males have done and have been doing to females exactly what the Whites of the South did to the Blacks through Jim Crow. Indeed, the entire American culture and all its males and all its male-identified females are basically oppressing women with a gender-version of Jim Crow.

And SOs then can be considered as sort of the Klansmen of gender-based Jim Crow: they are the most vivid and rapacious representatives of this oppressive system that denies (gender) rights to women and victims. And if you live in Fear of them, in Nussbaum’s theory that Fear is a form of knowledge, then you just ‘know’ they are and the government has to act on your claims and your demand to live without Fear because it’s a Constitutional right.

So then, ‘logically’, the government must Deconstruct and Reconstruct American ‘male’ society and culture and all the Citizens (male and female) who support it. And it has to be done NOW without any delay (or public discussion or deliberation – which is useless since most folks are gender-Jim-Crow types anyway) and if you can’t ‘see’ that, then ‘you just don’t get it’.

And that’s what drove so much of the wrack of the past 40 Biblical years. And – who could be surprised? – a Constitution that couldn’t be respected because it was Jim Crow in a gender as well as a race way, was in the Bush-Cheney era considered to be a Constitution that didn’t have to be respected when it came to government waging wars and doing all sorts of other stuff without wasting time on ‘ public deliberation’. And the toe-bone is connected to the foot-bone, and the foot-bone is connected to the ankle-bone, and the ankle-bone is connected to the leg-bone, and … you know the rest of the old song.

And immediately she sets the script and the plot: “Does the interpretation of constitutional entitlements yield real abilities to choose and act, or are the constitution’s promises more like hollow verbal gestures?” (3/6)

Bang. What the country has now, she intends to show, are merely ‘hollow verbal gestures’. And that what she (and feminism) wants are not ‘new’ things that are ‘changes’ (which could be argued about and deliberated upon) but instead are “constitutional entitlements” – so no delay or dissent can be permitted. See where she’s going?

The Fear of being sexually vulnerable thus prevents – in the theory – persons from going out and exercising their rights to a happy and full and free life, just like the fear of the Klan or of police road-blocks on the way to the polls kept Southern blacks from exercising their right to Vote. (And I hope it’s clear to everyone that I am not a supporter of the Jim Crow regime of the pre-1965 South.)

Naturally, what in current ‘everyday’ political talk is called ‘patriarchal oppression’ or some such, is – on Nussbaum’s much deeper Constitutional level – an ongoing Constitutional deprivation which must be addressed without delay or dissent. This is the old culture-war feminism now not claiming to be a ‘new way of thinking about things’ but rather now claiming to be a long-standing Constitutional issue of rights-and-entitlements-denied. And so there need be no more public debate or concern: it’s all Constitutional.

So if the legislators have bought the Nussbaum vision, then any objections raised about the ‘Constitutionality’ of the SO regime no doubt strike them as irrelevant.

She’s going for government imposition of the whole old culture-war agenda, not simply out of political expediency (as it had been decades ago) but now out of Constitutional responsibility.
Of course, if a pol can do something politically expedient while being told that s/he’s doing it out of Constitutional responsibility – well, that’s real catnip.

And this thought of Nussbaum’s is not ‘new’ in 2007 when she wrote this article. She’s been teaching it and writing about it in law schools and other venues for decades, so generations of lawyers, judges, and pols are now not only familiar with it but also – I’m going to bet – were taught in law school that this was the True and Only Way to look at things. And you wonder why democracy and the Constitution don’t seem to be working so well recently?

But this is her plan and she’s sticking with it. “The idea that all citizens in a nation are equally entitled to a set of substantial preconditions for a dignified human life has had a lasting appeal over the centuries in Western political and legal thought – less because intellectuals have favored it than because it has great resonance in the lives of real people”. (3/6)

Notice what she’s doing here.

Suddenly it’s not a matter of the political rights of 1787, many of which limited the government’s ability to interfere not only with individual Citizens’ lives but also with the much wider civil society and culture. NOW she’s changed the field of concern to “a set of substantial PRECONDITIONS” … which means that government is not only going to simply referee a Game – so to speak – whose laws and bounds are already drawn (and refs have to follow the rules just like anybody else). Instead, government is now going to be mussing around in ‘preconditions’ – the refs are going to say where the field is built, the composition of the soil, the drawing of the lines, the whole enchilada.

And the government as uber-ref is now also going to be ‘interpreting’ just what those “preconditions” are (and of course, the more and deeper the preconditions, the more room for government authority). And what earthly government is going to say No to such a free-buffet of power?

Well, the government put together by the Framers of 1787 said No, but – Nussbaum and others are convinced – they were ‘defective’ and their Constitution and their Vision was ‘defective’, ‘incomplete’, and altogether “quaint” (as the feculent Alberto Gonzales said with waayyyyy too much candor in the service of the Bush-Cheney imperium … and his era of Beltway biggies had simply concluded that if the Left can re-arrange the Constitution for its own purposes, so can the Right).

And this approach of Nussbaum’s isn’t going to be on the visible spectrum, as say the great struggle from the 1870s to the 1930s was; Teddy Roosevelt and FDR and LaGuardia and the Progressives of the 1890s to the 1920s were trying to deal with concrete issues like wages and social insurance and the role of the government as being the only power in the country that could stand up FOR Citizens against the huge new agglomerated power of the industrial corporations and corporate combines.

No, this approach of Nussbaum’s is going to be along an invisible spectrum that only those who ‘get it’ can see. And this itself mirrors the attack – spearheaded by the Feminist Revolution and its cadres – upon the entire foundation of assumptions and beliefs and structures that not only have grounded world cultures since the beginning of human history but also ground the Constitutional Vision of 1787.

So SOs and the Fear that many persons have of being sexually vulnerable create a ‘precondition’ of Fear that constitutes a violation of Constitutional rights. But of course, the huge danger here is that ANY crime, or the Fear of being a victim of any crime, can therefore be seen as a Constitutional-rights violation. Which is a recipe of a police state far more thorough than anything Hitler, Stalin, or Mao ever conceived – because even on their worst days those monsters still realized that there’s a difference between a ‘crime’ and a profound violation of the basic authority of the State (treason).

Or between a crime and the fear-of-a-crime, since some human failure is inevitable and not even a totalitarian State can muster and sustain the power to stamp out all Fear of crime by stamping out all crime.

I’m not saying thereby that all of the Revolution’s agenda is ‘wrong’ – I’m saying that some change THIS big and THIS profound has to be looked at verrrrry carefully. And certainly has to be given more and more thorough public deliberation and airing than has been the case up to now. For 40 years the government simply imposed the Correct changes, with the cheer-leading connivance of a ‘free press’ that is supposed to be the watch-dog, not the cheerleader, of government activity.

BUT THIS IS PRECISELY what Nussbaum is trying to sidestep by saying that all of this is a matter of Constitutional rights and therefore you can have no delay and no discussion and there’s nothing to be deliberated anyway. Neat. Dangerous. Treacherous, maybe even.

And again, the effort to sidestep the deliberative process is a hallmark of the SO laws: rarely are they debated even in legislatures let alone among the Citizenry, and certainly they are rarely discussed in any media reporting (that focuses on the Fear or on this or that crime, but not on the legal philosophy that has been evolving to essentially undermine Constitutional and deliberative process among the public as well as among legislators).

It’s a verrrry iffy thing – just what those “substantial preconditions” are. And also just what “a dignified human life” is – although we already know that Nussbaum, true to feminism’s agenda, is going to say that no government and no culture has the right to ‘judge’ what behaviors or characteristics constitute such a “dignified human life”; no, rather a human life is “dignified” simply by virtue of the fact that a human being says that this is what she wants to do and nobody can say No and the government has to make it all work out well.

And Nussbaum is writing in a cultural context where feminism has already ‘deconstructed’ any sense of the ‘moral’ and of the Beyond or of any standard or criterion in which a culture or a society or a civilization can say or choose just what characteristics and what Vision will Ground it. For political purposes, America exists in a flattened, two-dimensional world where there is only politics as a determinant of what does (or should) happen – which, come to think of it, closely resembles the Materialistic reductionism that ultimately made Marxism (from the Left) and Fascism (from the Right) so utterly inadequate to the task of addressing the reality of human beings who are – notoriously – so stubborn in their yearning for a Beyond-the-Material dimension to their daily existence.

Shrewdly, she is spinning her plan as not simply ‘good’ because “intellectuals have favored” it (the academic and Beltway elites of today) but rather because it has “great resonance in the lives of real people”.

That last bit sounds nice, but her (and feminism’s) view of “real people” is two-dimensional and Flat (as Marxism’s was). And as I have observed, “real people” are and since the dawn of the species have always been desperately and implacably concerned for a Beyond, for a Real that is more than the ‘real’.

And ‘real people’ are – as any church or religion worth its salt will tell you – ‘sinners’ and ‘under judgement’ … which usually has a sobering effect on the frenzies of ‘I’m pure and you’re evil’ that fueled so many violent communal Manias over the course of human history.

It will be this actuality that will prompt her to give up, later in the article, on any democratic and deliberative process to get her vision accepted: because so many of those “real people” for 40 Biblical years have been stubbornly resistant to being Flattened. It’s not ‘backlash’; it’s more like the horse’s sense, after putting one hoof on it, that a bridge it’s supposed to walk over is wayyyyy too rickety and won’t hold up.

Nussbaum, just to give you a sense of where she’s going to be going, will argue that since most people in the country can’t be trusted to ‘get’ her ideas, then the acceptance of her (and feminism’s) vision and scheme can’t be left up to them and instead has to be imposed by the Courts (she doesn’t even trust Congress any longer). Thus this ‘Constitutional’ approach – since it sidesteps any public debate and deliberation.

Well, that’s enough for this Post. Let me just say that it’s not going to be necessary to go through every page of her 94 pages the way I have had to move through this first couple of pages here. In these early pages she is pretty much outlining her approach and so I have to spend more time on them.