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| Britain |
| The closing of the conservative mind: Politics and the art of war |
| 2019-10-26 |
| h/t Instapundit Very long. Very well thought out. Some excerpts [NewStatesman] ...No discussion in polite society of the state of politics is complete without a reverential genuflection to the 18th-century parliamentarian. Get rid of Cummings and Boris Johnson, along with the right-wing libertarians in the cabinet, recover Burkean moderation, and all will be well. It is a familiar narrative in the opinion-forming classes, and all the more appealing for being baseless. The notion that Conservatives have ceased to be conservative ignores transformations in other parts of the political spectrum. Labour has also abandoned any small-c conservative disposition and become a vehicle for anti-Semitism and a version of Marxism that deems working-class values of place and community racist when they are expressed as concern about continuing mass immigration. The Liberal Democrats have become hyper-liberals, making the nullification of a clear democratic mandate their signature policy. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is not simply a right-wing splinter movement but a response to a state of affairs in which large sections of the population are unrepresented. Rather than being the creation of Boris Johnson and a fanatical Eurosceptic minority, Tory populism is a sign of the Conservative Party reinventing itself ‐ as it has done many times before ‐ in order to survive. ...But there is something more powerful here than mere snobbery: the belief that politics can be governed by formulas derived from some large theory. In the past, such theories were derived from Marxism and positivism, utilitarianism and Fabianism, among other ideologies. Today they emanate from the prevailing variety of rights-based liberalism promoted by philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. The key feature of this liberalism is that it transfers decision-making from political to judicial institutions. Liberals are turning to law to entrench values and policies for which they cannot secure democratic assent. ...The haute-Remainer mind is an example of what the 20th century’s subtlest and most original conservative philosopher called political rationalism. Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) used the term to describe totalitarian ideologies such as Leninism and National Socialism, but he was clear that any kind of political tradition could succumb to rationalist ideology ‐ including conservatism. ...The core of rationalism in politics is an idea of politics itself. Rather than being a practice in which people negotiate the terms on which they co-exist with one another, politics means the imposition of an idea. The idea is self-evidently true; anyone who questions it is ignorant and stupid, or else wilfully malignant. ...Today the tacit understanding of liberals in all parties is that the world would be far more civilised if the grubby business of politics was replaced by the legal adjudication of justice and rights. The evidence for this view is ‐ shall we say ‐ patchy. In the US, Donald Trump’s capture of the White House enabled him to begin reshaping the judicial system, including the Supreme Court. When political issues become the province of courts, the law is politicised. At the same time, because so many are unrepresented and the void left by liberal legalism must somehow be filled, politics becomes more polarised and vicious. ...The technologists of power are today’s true rationalists. That superior intelligence is found among the practitioners of populism is a fact of our time. When liberals talk about reason they mean a mishmash of ideas they picked up at university. Scraps of Rawls, Dworkin and Thomas Piketty, together with a smattering of modish conspiracy theories, form the folk wisdom of the thinking classes. Rationality means deferring to this ragbag of ephemera and ignoring enduring truths about the deciding forces in politics. ...The Remainer elite has been guided by the ruling philosophy of liberal legalism, which is essentially anti-political. But sooner or later, politics is bound to assert its primacy over legal and procedural manoeuvres. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #2 "Some trans creature in a robe wrote a piece of paper says you can't do that." "Do tell..." |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2019-10-26 09:18 |
| #1 Inevitably, there will be more lawsuits attempting to overturn what were once accepted to be political decisions. As a consequence, it may not be long before judges are chosen by a political process, as in the United States. Both judges in the open system as well as those in the unseen, secret FISA court system. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2019-10-26 06:13 |