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Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure
By Christopher Shea | September 23, 2007 WHAT if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream? That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some leading
social scientists are saying, in research that suggests prisons have a far
deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing criminals
Thomas Woods's forbidden questions cover a variety of topics, but a common
thread in his answers unifies the book: Throughout American history, the federal
government has been the principal enemy of liberty. Within the government, a
powerful president stands as the foremost danger. Under our constitutional
system, the defense of states' rights and strict construction offers the best
prospect to preserve liberty.[1]
But who bears responsibility for this "imperial presidency"? Woods places much of the blame on Theodore Roosevelt, who "loathed inactivity" (p. 136). Though highly intelligent — my late friend Mel Bradford rated him the brightest of all the presidents — he was dominated by passions he made little effort to control.
Woods makes a convincing case that we ought to fear a strong executive; but does
his Constitutional remedy really help promote liberty? He favors states' rights,
but was this not the catchword of Southern defenders of slavery? Well aware of
this objection, Woods is ready with his response. A centralized modern state is
inimical to liberty: in continuing to resist Lincoln's efforts to put an end to
their "rebellion," the Southern states acted to protect liberty.
Emory University's Donald Livingston has identified one of these larger issues.
In the modern age, Livingston observes, we have seen what he calls federative
polities giving way to modern states. A federative polity is one in which a
variety of smaller jurisdictions exist. (p. 77)[3]
Woods's defense of a strict construction of the Constitution is by no means confined to his Jeffersonian position on states' rights. He maintains that the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution was intended to give Congress only the power to regulate trade that takes place between one state and another. As both Jefferson and Madison pointed out, the clause did not give Congress the power to regulate internal matters within a state that affected interstate commerce. dc: very imporant inconsidering the rights of corporations. In the Supreme Court case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Chief Justice
John Marshall put a fateful stamp on the commerce clause when he observed that
the internal commerce of a state was a matter reserved to the state itself,
unless that commerce "affects other states." That proviso had not a
shred of support in the history of the commerce clause … It opened up a
potentially limitless field of power for the federal government, since anything
can be said to "affect" anything else. (p. 200)
Woods shows that the Founding Fathers, well aware of this view, rejected it out of hand. Jefferson said that Americans must not make of the Constitution "a blank paper by construction" (p. 127), and Hamilton in the Federalist addressed Ackerman's issue directly:
Woods has the resources to reply to this counterargument. If we adopt the principle that the government can do what it wishes to cope with present needs as it understands them, then we repudiate, not some legal technicality, but the basic principle of the American Revolution. The British government at that time claimed that "a measure was ipso facto Constitutional if Parliament approved it" (p. 123). The American colonists rightly saw that this principle was tyrannical. Instead, they held that only laws in accord with natural law and well-established custom were valid. The proponents of the living Constitution embrace the view that Americans repudiated in the Revolution.[4] Woods's entire book is a magnificent defense of the Revolutionaries' standpoint.[5] Rothbard came to appreciate the work of New Left historian William Appleman
Williams, and befriended a number of his students (including Ronald Radosh, with
whom Rothbard later edited A New History of Leviathan,[5]
Rothbard came to appreciate the work of New Left historian William Appleman
Williams, and befriended a number of his students (including Ronald Radosh, with
whom Rothbard later edited A New History of Leviathan,[5] an important collection of essays on the corporate state).
In Williams himself Rothbard found not only congenial foreign-policy analysis,
but also important hints of opposition to the central state in domestic affairs.
"The core radical ideals and values of community, equality, democracy, and
humaneness," Rothbard quoted Williams as saying, "simply cannot in the future be
realized and sustained — nor should they be sought — through more centralization
and consolidation. These radical values can most nearly be realized through
decentralization and through the creation of many truly human communities. If
one feels the need to go ancestor-diving in the American past and spear a
tradition that is relevant to our contemporary predicament, then the prize
trophy is the Articles of Confederation."[6]
In a way, it may be fortuitous that The Betrayal of the American Right is appearing only now rather than 20 years ago. The folly of the Iraq war and the propaganda campaign that launched it are making even people heretofore settled in their views stop and think. Listening to Bush Administration propaganda, they can't help but wonder if that is what they themselves sounded like during the Cold War. And even if they do not share Rothbard's analysis of the Cold War, plenty of people today, anticipating with dread the endless US wars that the future appears to portend, may be willing to consider at least one important argument against Cold War interventionism: it nurtured a military-industrial complex, born in World War II, that is evidently incapable of ever being dismantled. Milton Friedman's dictum that there is nothing so permanent as a "temporary" government program has found no more striking vindication than in the American "defense" sector, which always seems to find a rationale for higher spending and more intervention. American Machiavelli - Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=... American MachiavelliAlexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign PolicyJohn Lamberton HarperInterview on The Great Upheaval on National Rev...
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... JAY WINIK: The more I researched this book,
the more I came to realize that it was vital to bring alive the world that the
Founders themselves actually saw. Conventional scholarship has long isolated the
story of America’s founding decade from the rest of the globe. But this misses a
crucial part of the picture: The world of the 1790s was stitched together in
ways that we can scarcely grasp, from Philadelphia to Paris to St. Petersburg
and Constantinople. Our Founding Fathers were all consumed, and rightly so, by
events in Europe and on the global stage — from the increasing anarchy and
bloodshed of the French Revolution that swept the continent, to Russia’s
dismemberment of the ancient Kingdom of Poland. What emerges is ultimately an
unprecedented, new picture of America’s founding years.
Interview on The Great Upheaval on National Review Online
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... WINIK: For example, you can’t appreciate
America’s fears of foreign invasion in its formative years in the 1790s or of
being swallowed by a predatory European power without seeing them in relation to
Napoleon’s armies that were devouring Europe “leaf by leaf” — not to mention
reaching deep into the heart of the Middle East — or against the backdrop of
Marshall Suvorov’s “tidal wave” of Russian armies laying siege to Islam, and
literally wiping Poland off the face of the map. These grim examples powerfully
underscored to the young republic the perils of weakness in the face of
imperialistic European empires. Similarly, the crisis of the Whiskey Rebellion
that George Washington faced — at a time when the Terror was deepening in France
— takes on an entirely different coloration when one realizes that the American
rebels in Western Pennsylvania were singing French insurrectionary songs and
carrying mock guillotines.
Interview on The Great Upheaval on National Review Online
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... WINIK: Arguably, the period of the 1790s is
the most significant era in all of human history, but it’s also arguably the
most tumultuous. These years saw a young America literally struggling for its
life, at home and abroad. It saw a savage revolution that upended the French
dynasty, then the most significant in the world, and with it, a cataclysmic
global war. It witnessed the first modern holy war between Christianity and
Islam, the consequences of which the world is still grappling with. And for good
or for ill, it saw an unremitting struggle between leaders of their nations all
fighting desperately for the ideals they believed in, whether divinely inspired
autocracy or man-made democracy, whether constitutional republicanism or Allah’s
law.
Interview on The Great Upheaval on National Review Online
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... WINIK: Unquestionably it would have to be the
survival of America with its ideas and ideals intact. Revolutionary France
started out with the noblest intentions, but then descended into unspeakable
bloodshed and barbarism. For its part, the Russian Empire and the rest of the
world’s monarchies became reactionary. While it was touch and go, only America,
a small, minor country on the periphery of the world, managed to weather the
cruel upheavals of the age. The result was what would become the first fully
functioning democracy. It was an extraordinary achievement that changed the
course of civilization, one accomplished against all the odds.
Interview on The Great Upheaval on National Review Online
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... WINIK: I think it would have to be how
precarious America’s existence was in the first decade. Throughout history, all
republics had stumbled and failed, or fallen prey to predatory powers. We almost
did, too. In a related vein, it’s an eye-opener just how different America’s
Founders look when viewed on the world stage. We get a completely new take on
George Washington, for example, by seeing him not merely in comparison to his
fellow Americans, Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson, but also to his reigning
European peers like a dispirited Louis XVI, or such giants as a charismatic but
aggressive Catherine the Great, or an increasingly dictatorial Napoleon, let
alone an often bloodthirsty monster like Robespierre. Seen in this light, the
entire founding period looks different.
Interview on The Great Upheaval on National Review Online
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... Ironically, a number of the more moderate French revolutionaries hoped to import
an American-style form of Republicanism to France, but soon found themselves
unable to control the very forces that they had helped to unleash — and many
were ruthlessly guillotined. Yet, if somehow the French had managed to put a
brake on their excesses, the world might have been spared 21 ghastly years of
war that consumed all of Europe and left millions of dead. France’s political
system could have been more like America’s, and there would have been no
Napoleon. And the modern face of despotism might have looked very different: The
worst aspects of the revolution paved the way for the ghastly excesses of
totalitarianism in the 20th century, whether Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Nazi
Germany, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. At the height of the Terror, to speed up
France’s death machine, priests were systematically drowned. Elderly people were
forced to dig their own graves before they were mowed down with machine guns —
not unlike what the SS did in World War II. Foreshadowing Auschwitz, one
distinguished French chemist even proposed the use of poison gas.
Interview on The Great Upheaval on National Review Online
article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkwMjhhN2Q4MThhYWYz... I did a number of studies of direct democracy as a mechanism for popular voice.
It's not always that, because direct democracy is now being manipulated by the
very institutional actors it was originally intended to constrain, but that was
my take on the tax revolt. It really was a development of previous work
Conversations with History: Institute of
International Studies, UC Berkeley
My family and I never felt as a citizens, never had voted, never had the legal
right to vote. Here was a situation where in a stable democracy these bonds of
trust and commitment were obviously under assault, so I studied it not only
empirically but also analytically: what is the meaning of trust, what does it
mean to say that you trust an institution, and what does an institution have to
do to sustain that trust, and what are the consequences of trust being lost?
Proposition 13, the tax revolt -- by that time I was collaborating with a
professor at UCLA, David Sears -- we've done a lot of work together, and our
work essentially began with a theoretical question: how much is personal
self-interest the motivation of one's political attitudes, as opposed to broader
attitudes such as ideology, patriotism, racism. We were doing work along those
lines already, and then the tax revolt occurred and [we] had an opportunity to
look at that. My own take on that was the tax revolt was, in some sense, another
act of mass defiance of established elites, because Proposition 13 was opposed
by every elite actor in the State of California, both major political parties,
the business [establishment], the educational establishment, the labor
establishment, and yet it passed overwhelmingly. It should never have happened.
The way in which property tax revolt developed was, in some sense, a failure on
the part of state political leaders to react to an obvious problem. My take on
the tax revolt [was] that it was a manifestation of the loss of trust, or the
lack of trust, that I'd been studying earlier.
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