Squabbling Congresswomen Are Not the Problem Signs of Madison’s Constitutional guardrail that “ambition must be made to counter ambition.” by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/squabbling-congresswomen-are-not-the-problem/
Last week several Congresswomen went toe-to-toe in an exchange of insults during the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Hearings. The pugnacious Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took on Democrat firebrand Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), with Brooklyn Dem Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an aggressive interlocutor, piling on.
This unseemly brawl is a litmus test for how we think about the state of our government and how it should work. Many people see such vulgar exchanges of harsh rhetoric and personal attacks as a failure of our system of partisan faction who sacrifice the good of the public to their parochial ideological interests, instead of “reaching across the aisle” to “solve problems.”
But such passionate confrontations are nothing new, and do not bespeak a breakdown in our Constitutional order. Rather, they are signs of James Madison’s Constitutional guardrail that “ambition must be made to counter ambition,” that in the political tournaments of power, the efforts of one faction to aggrandize more control and influence will be checked by those of other factions who possess the same political rights. The goal is not to “solve problems,” which is the job of citizens, civil society, churches, families and states. Rather, protecting our freedom by checking and balancing power is how our political freedom and equality can be fortified against tyranny.
This fundamental feature of our Constitutional architecture reflects another dimension of human nature. Not only is faction “sown in the nature of man,” as Madison said, but also reflects the reality of diversity in the settlement of the original colonies. Our Diversity Inc. industry ignores these true variations that comprise America’s complex identities, and instead reduces it to crude, racist categories primarily expressing physical traits and characteristic.
Such caricatures, moreover, have kept alive stereotypes predicated on victimhood and grievance, and embodied them in fictive cultural narratives, all at the expense of our most important identity––that of unique individuals who exist on this earth only once. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut points out, “Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extremes, and in the name of a multiplicity of specific causalities destroy any possibility of cultural community among peoples.” Hence, we end up with imperialistic homogeneity and an intellectual and political monoculture rather than diversity.
The Founding generation acknowledged the diversity of ethnicity, regional cultures and mores, dialectics of English, distributions of wealth and status, notions of honor, habits of deference, various Christian denominations, a penchant for physical violence and verbal crudity, not to mention conflicting attitudes toward social and economic institutions, most obviously slavery and loyalty to England.
This acceptance of genuine diversity, moreover, had various social and political consequences. As happened in ancient Athens, allowing this intricate complexity of diversity, and the inclusion a broad-based citizenry, a role in running the state–– public participation in voting, public debate and deliberation, and holding office––meant that citizens all had to tolerate this diversity.
Thus, our First Amendment says nothing about decorum, “norms,” manners, vulgarity, slang, grammar, politesse, or communication skills. Citizens must be free to speak as they see fit, no matter how offensive others may find them. After all, the manners and decorum of elites whether of birth or wealth too often become a form of gate-keeping dissenters from the town square, thus effectively censoring alternative points of view.
The world of the 18th century, however, has radically changed. The growth of science and technology unforeseen by the Founders has fostered the conceit that human beings can be improved. But the Founders believed that our problems are caused by a flawed, permanent human nature beyond improvement by science that identifies material causes, and develops new technologies or knowledge that can mitigate or even eliminate those dysfunctions that cause conflicts, oppression, and injustice.
From this set of assumptions has arisen the progressive technocracy that order and manage society more justly than common sense, tradition, or religious doctrines. Now, as progressive Walter Lippman wrote in 1914, “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its methods, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means.”
This paean to the technocratic ideal, remember, appeared the year the First World War erupted, a conflict in which, as Winston Churchill wrote, “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”
But in the following years, such graphic and horrific scenes of human savagery could not check the progressive project to transform our Constitutional order–– designed to protect our freedom and unalienable rights–– into technocratic, government bureaucracies. These agencies “of skilled, economic administration,” as Woodrow Wilson put it, would be staffed by the “hundreds who are wise” empowered by the federal government and its coercive powers to guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish,” that is, the mass of ordinary, uncredentialed citizens.
With the tenets of faith driven from the town square, for the cognitive elite science, or more often scientism, bestows status and social authority, as we see in the supercilious arrogance of progressive who call themselves “brights” and order hoi polloi to “follow the science.”
If the past century of mass violence, from the industrialized slaughter of Verdun to the genocidal savagery of Hamas’ attacks on Israel; if all that carnage and suffering can’t make us think more critically about our dangerous technophilia, we should consider the recent news about the crisis in scientific research.
For a while there have been reports about a “replication crisis,” the failure of researchers to reproduce the same results as the original researcher reported, the “cornerstone of science.” More recently, Nidhi Subbaraman reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which [announced] that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.”
Such news shouldn’t surprise us, given our own experience with the Covid debacle, with the politicized and ineffective information about its origins, lethality, transmission, treatments, and mitigation protocols like lockdowns, social distancing, and masks, all of which were touted as “following the science,” but now have been exposed as dangerously wrong.
Even more telling is the continuing squandering of billions of dollars in pursuit of “renewable energy” and “zero carbon” policies based on an incomplete understanding of global climate, a gap papered over with dubious computer models riddled with confirmation bias, and serially unable to comport with observed temperature changes in the real world.
These failures of bad science, along with the persistence of global mass violence, tyranny, slavery, and torture, explodes the pretensions of technocracy to improve human beings enough to eliminate their destructive, irrational passions and actions, and achieve the utopia that has been promised by modernity’s most violent and destructive political ideologies.
Technocratic arrogance, then, and government’s aggrandizement of more power that has taken place for a century is the real danger to our freedom and unalienable rights, not the insults, bickering or the “politics of personal destruction” that have typified American politics from its beginning.
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