In 1951 David B. Truman, president of Mount Holyoke College, published The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion, a monumental, scholarly work on the political science of special interest groups and the federal government. Truman illustrates his chief points with history, and he offers insightful anecdotes about many of the chief twentieth century interest groups such as the American Federation of Labor, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Grange, and the American Medical Association. Truman integrates his discussion of interest groups with a discussion of the structure of the federal government; he shows how the structure of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court determine how interest groups behave.
In Truman's chapter on the executive branch, which is near the end of the book, he dissects the characteristics of successful and effective American presidents. He writes this (p. 403):
The president's leadership of the legislature depends heavily upon his symbolic supraparty position. Although he cannot completely ignore the pleas of partisanship, he must play upon the multiple memberships of both fellow party-members and nominal opponents in order to effect winning support for the cause he is championing.
Truman also writes this (p. 402):
The president's partisanship and partiality among groups must be kept within limits...despite the need to maintain cohesion among the elements that helped him to power. The process by which he is nominated and elected inevitably gives some groups better access to him than others can command, but as the dominant symbol of the nation, he cannot be completely identified with a segment of it...The measure of detachment imposed on a president by his position as a chief of state is not necessarily a handicap. The obligation to remain minimally accessible to all legitimate interests in the society can supply him with a measure of independence and a persuasive power that effectively supplements his formal authority.
By these measures, President Barack Obama's presidency has been a failure. He has failed to represent all of America. This failure is due to the American media, which no longer offers diversity of viewpoints that reflect the range of legitimate views in America--a problem that Truman discusses at length but which has become more serious since Truman's day, when it was already a matter of concern. Rather, like the media in a totalitarian state, the American media attempts to delegitimize legitimate opinion that deviates from Obama's narrow party line.
Obama represents the interests of one segment of America: the pro-Wall Street left wing of the Democratic Party. He has made no effort to compromise, whether it be in his ideologically motivated health reform, his failed cap-and-trade proposal, his use of the IRS to target conservatives and other dissidents, and his attacks on the states in areas like his No Child Left Behind Act, er, I mean Common Core.
Obama has so divided America that, for the first time since the 1960s, we see pockets of armed resistance to the federal government. The contretemps at the Cliven Bundy ranch is a symptom of failed president who has divided rather than united a nation. The media's ideologues, ever eager to support the federal government's authority, paint the militia who support Bundy as extremists. Their extremism is the fruit of Obama's extremism and the extremism of the American media, which does not tolerate dissent.
Friday, April 25, 2014
A Constitutional Amendment to End the US Supreme Court
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has written a book advocating a series of constitutional amendments that aim to, well, increase the power of the supreme court. According to USA Today the retired federal judge advocates abridging the right to bear arms, abolishing the death penalty, restricting campaign spending, reducing the independence of states, and changing congressional rules.
The US Supreme Court is a failed, backward-looking institution, and a former supreme court justice's giving advice about government is akin to a former General Motors executive's giving advice about free enterprise or a former Enron executive's giving advice about morals. Actually, a former Enron executive, including the ones in jail, is better equipped to give ethics advice than is a retired supreme court justice, for the moral turpitude of the supreme court is worse than Enron's.
Instead of Stevens's stale ideas, why not a constitutional amendment to abolish the Supreme Court, which has been a cancer on the American economy since 1803, the year of Marbury v. Madison? The worst thing Jefferson did wasn't the Louisiana Purchase--it was the failure to overturn Marshall's illegitimate claim that the supreme court has the right to interpret the constitution. Instead of a Supreme Court, the state courts could set up an arbitration system to adjudicate disputes among states, and Congress could set up an arbitration system to adjudicate disputes with foreign powers. The rest of the things that the US Supreme Court does, all of which it has mangled, could be done by state courts. That would encourage diversity, one of the supposed aims of the totalitarian federal state.
Since centralization and excessive federal power has resulted in a stagnant standard of living for most Americans--but not Stevens, who has spent a lifetime living off federal taxes and centralizing policies that have benefited him at the public's expense--it is difficult for me to understand why Americans could possibly care what Stevens has to say.
The US Supreme Court is a failed, backward-looking institution, and a former supreme court justice's giving advice about government is akin to a former General Motors executive's giving advice about free enterprise or a former Enron executive's giving advice about morals. Actually, a former Enron executive, including the ones in jail, is better equipped to give ethics advice than is a retired supreme court justice, for the moral turpitude of the supreme court is worse than Enron's.
Instead of Stevens's stale ideas, why not a constitutional amendment to abolish the Supreme Court, which has been a cancer on the American economy since 1803, the year of Marbury v. Madison? The worst thing Jefferson did wasn't the Louisiana Purchase--it was the failure to overturn Marshall's illegitimate claim that the supreme court has the right to interpret the constitution. Instead of a Supreme Court, the state courts could set up an arbitration system to adjudicate disputes among states, and Congress could set up an arbitration system to adjudicate disputes with foreign powers. The rest of the things that the US Supreme Court does, all of which it has mangled, could be done by state courts. That would encourage diversity, one of the supposed aims of the totalitarian federal state.
Since centralization and excessive federal power has resulted in a stagnant standard of living for most Americans--but not Stevens, who has spent a lifetime living off federal taxes and centralizing policies that have benefited him at the public's expense--it is difficult for me to understand why Americans could possibly care what Stevens has to say.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
C Wright Mills, America's Elite, and the Wisdom of Third Parties
I finished reading C. Wright Mills's Power Elite over the past couple of weeks. Published in 1956, the book offers more insight into current events than most contemporary commentary. Mills says that there are three levels of power--lower, middle, and upper--and that the pluralism upon which most political science focuses is characteristic of the local (lower) and Congressional (middle) levels. Although interest groups function on the lower and middle levels, there is little diversity at the upper level. The upper elite does, of course, contain advocates of different social orientations and degrees of socialism, but the underlying viewpoint is stable. The upper elite that runs America is comprised of presidential appointees selected from the broader power elite, which Mills depicts as coming from multiple sources: the Metropolitan 400 or social register types, the corporate rich, and the senior officers in the military.
When Mills wrote the book, the military and the military budget were more important than now. Mills was unaware of the Fed's role (hence the centrality of banking interests) in the subsidization of the power elite and the US governmental system. As a result, he understates the importance of banking interests, which Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh tease out in their New History of Leviathan and that James Perloff illustrates in his Shadows of Power.
Mills briefly describes the central role of the white-shoe law firms and investment banks, but these were more central in the 1950s than Mills describes them; they have become more so since Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971.
According to Mills, the president and his advisers select the highest-level elite from the various groups within the power elite. During the Kennedy years social and intellectual elites, represented by the Bundys, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara (recommended by fellow Skull-and-Bonesman and partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, Robert Lovett ) were dominant. More recently, much as in the days of George Washington, bankers like Henry Paulson (who parallels but is not the intellectual equivalent of Hamilton) have been dominant.
The upper elite interacts within itself, and typically there are one or two degrees of separation between any two members. Mills does not claim that there is any sort of conspiracy, for that would be foolish. Rather, each takes cues from the other. Conformity derived from educational-and-university experiences obviates the need for overt conspiracy.
The last few chapters move from analysis to broadside as Mills criticizes what he calls the crackpot realism of America's narrow-minded upper elite.
Mills's depiction of America as having moved from a public liberal to a mass society is on point. His emphasis on the mass media as transforming Americans from a free, imaginative people to a nation of cowed serfs (my word, not his) is also on point. Mills is not that far from writers like James Perloff, who writes about the Council on Foreign Relations. No president since Hoover has been independent of the CFR. That does not imply conspiracy any more than the leadership of a modern corporation's interacting with each other is a conspiracy. The elite interacts and forms opinions. Its mindset, like that of leading university professors, is conformist, lockstep, cowardly, and lacking in vision.
Mills offers little hope for those who care about America or hope to see a change from the current trend. It occurred to me that his book was the inspiration for Eisenhower's 1961 speech about the military-industrial complex. If Mills is right, then a useful long-term strategy in politics is to support third parties. Another is simply to jump ship and move to a smaller country in which a mass culture and an elite bred to narrow-minded arrogance and the subjugation of a foolish mass of TV-news-viewing idiots won't exist because of the smaller scale.
In the Federalist 10 Madison argued that America's large scale was an impediment to the formation of faction. As transportation and communication modernized, universities began to serve as the proving ground for elite conformity and groupthink. The power of America's elite is made possible by large scale combined with modern communication methods. The Internet and other postmodern developments, such as community activism, pose a challenge to America's mass culture. Nevertheless, as long as Americans continue to support the two mass parties and as long as at least a plurality of Americans derive their news from mass-market newspapers and television, the trends that Mills observed will continue to escalate.
When Mills wrote the book, the military and the military budget were more important than now. Mills was unaware of the Fed's role (hence the centrality of banking interests) in the subsidization of the power elite and the US governmental system. As a result, he understates the importance of banking interests, which Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh tease out in their New History of Leviathan and that James Perloff illustrates in his Shadows of Power.
Mills briefly describes the central role of the white-shoe law firms and investment banks, but these were more central in the 1950s than Mills describes them; they have become more so since Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971.
According to Mills, the president and his advisers select the highest-level elite from the various groups within the power elite. During the Kennedy years social and intellectual elites, represented by the Bundys, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara (recommended by fellow Skull-and-Bonesman and partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, Robert Lovett ) were dominant. More recently, much as in the days of George Washington, bankers like Henry Paulson (who parallels but is not the intellectual equivalent of Hamilton) have been dominant.
The upper elite interacts within itself, and typically there are one or two degrees of separation between any two members. Mills does not claim that there is any sort of conspiracy, for that would be foolish. Rather, each takes cues from the other. Conformity derived from educational-and-university experiences obviates the need for overt conspiracy.
The last few chapters move from analysis to broadside as Mills criticizes what he calls the crackpot realism of America's narrow-minded upper elite.
Mills's depiction of America as having moved from a public liberal to a mass society is on point. His emphasis on the mass media as transforming Americans from a free, imaginative people to a nation of cowed serfs (my word, not his) is also on point. Mills is not that far from writers like James Perloff, who writes about the Council on Foreign Relations. No president since Hoover has been independent of the CFR. That does not imply conspiracy any more than the leadership of a modern corporation's interacting with each other is a conspiracy. The elite interacts and forms opinions. Its mindset, like that of leading university professors, is conformist, lockstep, cowardly, and lacking in vision.
Mills offers little hope for those who care about America or hope to see a change from the current trend. It occurred to me that his book was the inspiration for Eisenhower's 1961 speech about the military-industrial complex. If Mills is right, then a useful long-term strategy in politics is to support third parties. Another is simply to jump ship and move to a smaller country in which a mass culture and an elite bred to narrow-minded arrogance and the subjugation of a foolish mass of TV-news-viewing idiots won't exist because of the smaller scale.
In the Federalist 10 Madison argued that America's large scale was an impediment to the formation of faction. As transportation and communication modernized, universities began to serve as the proving ground for elite conformity and groupthink. The power of America's elite is made possible by large scale combined with modern communication methods. The Internet and other postmodern developments, such as community activism, pose a challenge to America's mass culture. Nevertheless, as long as Americans continue to support the two mass parties and as long as at least a plurality of Americans derive their news from mass-market newspapers and television, the trends that Mills observed will continue to escalate.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
An Inconvenient Truth: Bill Maher Resembles a Rat
I've not watched the comedian Bill Maher for more than a few minutes, but HBO has been running advertisements about his show. The advertisements make me want to cancel HBO. The material on Netflix, such as Zoey Barnes's murder on House of Cards, is at least as good as the HBO programming. Who needs HBO?
Why have television and the entertainment industry, which have always emphasized attractive appearance over substance, elevated an announcer as ugly as Maher? After looking at his ad a few times, I thought of a deeper philosophical question: Why does a television network sponsor an announcer who looks like a rat?
Maher's predictable, politically correct views are the obvious answer. Other commentators who have the patience and stomach to watch his show have described his tasteless humor and his bigoted remarks about others' religious beliefs. Putting an announcer on HBO who makes distasteful remarks about Blacks or Jews is unthinkable, and rightfully so. Putting an anti-Catholic bigot like Maher on television is acceptable to the ignorant left-wingers at HBO.
HBO's programs aren't good enough to compensate for Maher, and in addition to the outlandish cost of Comcast's services, Maher offers an excellent reason to terminate cable television service. Many of the left-wing and pro-Fed blogs consider Maher to be "brilliant." In the same way the coarse, realist art under communism and the cliched neoclassical art under Hitler were held up as "brilliant" in those totalitarian lands. When media is state controlled, the coarse, ugly and mediocre are elevated, especially when they serve the state.
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