Enjoying the view from Limbo
I reproduce here, with minor modifications, my reply to a multi-part inquiry from a serious Korean student about the meaning of equality, as that term is used in the context of democratic theory and practice. I have included a few of the student’s own questions (designated with “Q”) from our written exchange, as they form the context for my particular points of emphasis. ...
If democracy, in its essence, is reducible to the principle of one man, one vote, which is to say if, in its purest, most unadulterated instantiations, democracy amounts to some form of simple majority rule, then there is almost no limit to the horrors that might be perpetrated and perpetuated under the auspices of democratic self-government. Furthermore, the special danger of such democratic...
We are told in a thousand ways today that we are engaged in a global struggle to save democracy. Perhaps we are. If so, it would do us well to take a moment to ask what it is that we are trying to save, exactly, and furthermore, whether or in what sense it deserves to be saved. Democracy, we like to say, was...
Whatever it might once have been, or may someday be, at this moment Fox News — that media entity as a whole, as may be judged, with total fairness, by its most popular and unfettered content — is essentially a fount of quasi-Soviet propaganda served with neo-Nazi overtones. It is an apologist for genocidal terrorism, a willing mouthpiece for messaging framed by the...
“We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!” So everyone says these days, quoting a character no one remembers from a movie no one has seen — repeatedly, incessantly, droningly, ad nauseam. Our performative riling up, on cue and at the cracked whip of our preferred “news sources,” is not a call to action, let alone to serious reflection,...
Whatever one thinks of the ultimate validity or political importance of the right to free speech, there is an ironclad condition that must be understood as essential to the concept, and no free speech defense which ignores or seeks to limit this condition can amount to anything but a self-contradiction.
From Day One of his mock-political career, Donald Trump has been a classic and self-evident example of the unprincipled sycophant who pretends to be strong by parroting in an authoritative voice whatever he perceives to be the feelings or preferences of the people whose love and admiration he so weakly and desperately craves. In other words, the danger of Trump, like all of...
One of the great falsehoods of late modernity is that our political structures are so ingeniously self-renewing and self-correcting that the days of the just revolution are over. This position is not only untrue, but likely an indication of devious motives on the part of those who maintain and seek to perpetuate it. For political leaders to say, as President Biden and others...
Over the next forty-eight hours, the United States Federal Government is either going to become substantially dumber and more unhinged from reality, or substantially more Marxist and inclined towards the coercive silencing of all alternative thoughts or ways of living. In either case, however, the U.S. is about to become more overtly authoritarian (which is saying quite a lot given the recent trajectory),...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 10, 2022
Elon Musk, who soiled himself for all time by defecating on the people of Ukraine last week, has decided to raise his profile in the pantheon of profiteering punks to yet another level of shame. This time, rather than waiting for a tyrannical government to actually invade a smaller, sovereign neighbor, destroy much of that neighbor’s infrastructure, and kidnap thousands of its children...
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