Minor and Major Disagreements

It seems like an overly ambitious, or presumptuous thing, to disagree with someone very smart and very well respected. But I’m going to do that today anyway.

Since January, when I became aware of Jordan Peterson, I’ve enjoyed learning a lot from him. But this past week there were a lot of us conservative Americans who took issue with a tweet or two Peterson sent out concerning the Kavanaugh confirmation.

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Dr. Peterson was addressing the polarized tension. And he suggested that one possible thing to consider was for Kavanaugh to be confirmed—which means he was safe from the accusations—and then step aside to allow another conservative justice to take his place. This would leave him with his life intact (he’d still be a circuit court judge, which wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t been found worthy of the Supreme Court following the accusations against him). And those who were so upset about him personally would be mollified.

Here’s the thing. Jordan Peterson is Canadian. He isn’t a political person, and it’s hard to pin him down with a label. He talks about justice and Western civilization as though the US, Canada, and Great Britain—and others—are equivalent in their debates between freedom and it’s opposite (which I call tyranny, but is called liberal, leftist, progressive, socialist, and other names). But there’s a reason Canada didn’t join with the colonies to rebel against the tyrannical British crown back in the 1770s, and failed to join us in our constitutional republic in the 1780s. They tolerated more tyranny than we were willing to tolerate.

And then there’s a difference in recent experience. Brett Kavanaugh is not the first US Supreme Court nominee who has been viciously opposed by the tyranny side, who abuse their advise and consent role.

The way “advise and consent” was set up to work, the President would be allowed to appoint justices that shared his political ideas, as long as they were qualified to be justices and were not unsavory characters or simply cronies.

The Republican side, which is the side that actually follows the Constitution, if anyone does, has allowed the president that privilege with very little rancor over the many decades. Republicans have voted to sustain candidates even when there was clear evidence those justices would not judge based solely on the Constitution, but would impose their personal viewpoints from the bench, making themselves an unelected extra-legislative body. The Republicans could have been fully justified—had they had the strength of numbers—to refuse to accept justices such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, for example. But, in the spirit of collegiality, they limited their own advise and consent power.

But the Democrats, most obviously with Robert Bork, and certainly continuing since then, have decided to block nominations based simply on their (the Democrats’) political bias. And their bias happens to be against the Constitution. They object to justices who will keep their oath to abide by the Constitution.

Only one Democrat voted to confirm Justice Kavanaugh; that means every single remaining Democrat is claiming the appointee was unfit to be a judge, despite a sterling character record and long and open record on the bench proving he was fully capable. And they were willing to pull out all the stops: wait until after the hearings, toss out a still anonymous accusation about 36 years ago that had no evidence or corroboration, lie under oath, collude with other liars, and orchestrate the character assassination of a good man—because they don’t agree with him.

Kavanaugh was the most egregious since the derailing the Robert Bork nomination—or maybe including that. But they also nearly succeeded in undermining Justice Clarence Thomas’s hearings, with false charges against his character—and to this day they continue to honor the woman who falsely accused him.

Their threats led to less controversial appointments by Republican presidents, for the sake of peace, which took the Court in a bad direction, from which it will take maybe another lifetime to recover. Justice O’Connor and Justice Kennedy are two, both appointed by Reagan (who had to deal with a Democrat Senate and House his entire eight years).  Also Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed by Gerald Ford, and David Souter, appointed by George H. W. Bush.

In other words, Republicans have already tried the conciliatory route, to avoid controversy and tension. And the result has been a much less Constitution-following court. We’re trying to make up lost ground.

There can’t be compromise for the sake of peace over certain things.

Jordan Peterson agrees about that. In a response about what he’d meant by his tweets, he said this: 

And, people said, “No, that’s wrong, because if you let the accusers knock you out of the race, then they win, and that will embolden them, and you should know better than that, because you have told people not to withdraw.” And you know—look, fair enough. I don’t know what the hell is the right way out of this mess. I don’t see a clear path forward out of this.

You know, what I see now is the—  I mean I don’t like the believe-the-accuser philosophy. I think that’s an appalling philosophy. You have to be naive beyond comprehension to think that that’s a good idea. To think that people wouldn’t misuse— If that was the rule, every accuser is right? Oh, that’s a great rule, that is. [sarcasm]

I’m not willing to give up the presumption of innocence. And for the idea that it’s better to let, you know, ten guilty people walk free than to convict one innocent person—that’s a good bloody rule. That’s a good rule. And we don’t just give that rule up because we’re feeling all empathic and morally superior about it.

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So there’s a baseline we can agree on. Whatever we do, we can’t give up on the presumption of innocence. Not even for the sake of peace.

But how do you know when you’re at the point of refusal to make peace for the sake of a relationship? It’s a more personal question that is now playing out on our larger population. These are questions about accountability, justice, forgiveness, and mercy. If you’re trying to be merciful and have peace for the sake of a relationship, how do you hold someone accountable and have justice for the sake of the larger community?

In a relationship the size of this country, when there are essentially warring factions, how do you stand up against the bullying side to keep both your personal sovereignty and your self-respect?

What about mob rule? Can we agree that’s a bad thing? We should. But the opposition, at this point in history, defines “mob rule” as something only “right wing” extremists can do. Meanwhile they mob conservatives to run them out of restaurants. They scare police away from downtown Portland,OR. They riot if a conservative speaker is invited to a university campus.

Eric Holder, Obama’s former attorney general, suggested Democrats forget taking the high road; "kick them." Hillary Clinton called for no civility until they’re in power—that is, wielding power over us. This isn’t about Trump’s lack of civility, as they claim; it’s about their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that we the people have not kowtowed to their supposed right to rule over us.

They talk about repealing the Second Amendment, or doing away with the Electoral College, or even doing away with the Senate—which is based on equal state representation rather than population. They want to get rid of anything our founders designed to keep us free from tyranny—because their goal is tyranny, and the Constitution is in their way.

We don't really have a lot of disagreement with Jordan Peterson. He was doing a thought experiment that happened to go down a path many of us have traveled before, so we know how that would go, and we reject it. But there's still this question he was dealing with:

We’ve got a problem. The problem is, is that, I don’t see any way of moving this forward without exacerbating the polarized tension.

He may be right. There may be no path without polarized tension. But he’s the clinical psychologist. So my question for him is, at what cost should peace be the goal?

If Europe and beyond had succumbed to Nazi rule, they would have had peace, of a sort. But they would be subjects of tyranny; that would be the cost. Can we agree that cost would have been too high?

The thing with logic is, if you start with the wrong “if” statement, you’ll get the wrong “then” outcome. So the starting point may not be, “If the goal is peace,” unfortunately. We might be beyond a peaceful outcome with people who are our literal enemies. Peace only comes after we defeat them.

Well, there’s one other way to peace: Those who are seeking to wreak havoc on our constitutional republic could stop it. Life would get better for them—even though they don’t see how—and it would certainly get better for us. But the record of power mongers doing that is pretty dismal.

The problem is that, at a granular level, all of us know Democrats that aren’t actually trying to tyrannize us; they’re just not thinking things through the way we freedom lovers do. So we mostly just avoid talking about divisive issues with them—anything beyond work, weather, food, and sports, maybe. And we can get along fine with them as long as we can avoid being attacked. That’s a sort of peace we’ve been used to for about a century.

The hope, then, has to be separating out regular people who have been among those enemies, but are really just our neighbors who don’t have a good understanding of the alternatives. If they knew they could choose freedom,prosperity, and civilization—rather than tyranny, poverty, and savagery—they’d step over to our side.

But for those who insist on ruling over us—on taking away our liberty, property, and civilization—and who stir up mob violence against us, there’s no path to peace. We are, however, still very hopeful—possibly naively so—that we can defeat them in the arena of ideas, without violence. (Though that explains why they have been calling speech that disagrees with them “violence,” because they prefer to think of us as the bad guys.)

Some of what has to be done is pointing out the extremes of the would-be tyrants—getting that message out despite the complicity of so much of the media and academia who hide the truth.

It’s a time to stand up and speak truth, even when peace is at stake, and even when it looks to bystanders that we haven’t been tolerant enough of tyranny yet. In this case, the bystanders don’t know what we’ve already learned by hard experience.

Tyranny and Terror

I’ve been going through the online course offered by Hillsdale College called Public Policy from a Constitutional Viewpoint. Last week was week six. The lecture, given by Will Morrisey, professor emeritus of politics at Hillsdale, was on “Terrorism and Foreign Policy.”

Professor Will Morrisey
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What caught my attention was how he defined terrorism, using the concepts of tyranny and civilization. There are three interrelated ideas: political freedom versus tyranny, economic freedom versus coerced or controlled economy, and civilization versus savagery. That sounds like we’re describing the Spherical Model. 

The half-hour lecture is coherent, so it’s hard to pull out quotes without missing some of the flow of the argument (which is why I spent the day transcribing the whole thing, as a starting point, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything). So I recommend the entirety. [It may require signing up for the class in order to view, but there is no fee.] 

Here’s a key: as it says in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” and “they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Morrisey uses the word regime to mean, “the most authoritative form of ruling in a political community.” He calls the type of regime we have in America a democratic republic—democratic because it is not based on any right by birth to rule, but all citizens are equal; republic because, rather than directly ruling ourselves, we elect representatives. He also calls us a commercial republic, a term I hadn’t heard before:

In addition to being a Democratic Republic, we’re also a Commercial Republic. And on the same natural rights foundation. Commerce, or trade, is the practice of self-government in the realm of economic life. Commerce and trade operate by persuasion, not command and coercion. In both our political life and our political economy, Americans rule themselves by consent.

Consent isn’t mere assent, or acquiescence. Consent means reasoned assent. Whether it comes to selecting a congressman or buying a house, either way we’re comparing and contrasting; we’re thinking about the choice we’re about to make.

A regime consisting of a tyrant or of an oligarchy, commanding a military and a secret police, enforcing edicts on who is to rule us and on what we buy and sell, with most of the profits going to the tyrant or the oligarchs, would leave a people with very different habits of mind and heart than a people that had established a democratic and commercial Republic.

To live in a tyranny or an oligarchy is to have a different mental and moral environment. And the founders of tyrannical and oligarchical regimes know that.

Both political and economic freedom require consent, as opposed to coercion. This is background to the “what is terrorism” question. Here’s the simple definition:

Terrorism is savagery deployed as a technique by rulers or would-be rulers.

He adds more detail later, in describing the definition that has been with us since the Declaration of Independence.

Terrorism, a form of warfare and of ruling that refuses to distinguish ages, sexes, and conditions, aims at ruling not by reason, but by fear. Terrorists attack civilians. This is true of terrorist organizations that don’t control territory—the old Irish Republican Army, Al-Qaeda, for example—and those that do control territory, and indeed control sovereign states—the Nazis in Germany, the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, the Maoists in China. 

But more than that, terrorism is anti-civilian in a much deeper sense; terrorism attacks civility itself, the habits of self-government by reasons persuasion. It seeks command with no backtalk. And it does so because, whether it’s deployed against civilians and against civility, by the Nazis and Communists of yesterday, or the jihadis of today, it denies the principle of the American founding that “all men are created equal.”

Alternatively, it may deny that all those we call men are really men, really human at all.

His definition is broader than I would have used. I would have called the Nazi and Soviet regimes unjust wars, but their attempt at gaining territory was mostly military. However, where they purposely targeted civilians, including people living in their own countries, Morrisey and I agree on definition.

So, terrorism, committed by either a state or a group, is a war crime; it attacks all ages, sexes, and conditions. It is savage, not civilized. It intends to rule, not according to the will of the people, but by coercion. It intends to impose and enforce tyranny, both political and economic tyranny.

He notes that those who claim “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” are usually Americans—and they are Americans who fail to remember what their regime is: a way of protecting life, liberty, and property. More than that, terrorists who claim to be freedom fighters or soldiers of God are nevertheless terrorists if they fail to value life—and fail, even to view all humans as human.

He tells this story from shortly after 9/11.

An Arab television station aired a film in which a three-year-old girl was asked, “What are the Jews?” “The Jews,” she answered dutifully, “are apes and pigs.”

Such a catechism of contempt flows from the rejection of natural right. It forms habits of mind and heart consistent with the regime of tyranny. Tyranny enshrines not the natural rights to life, but the right to kill.

The Islamic version of terrorism is new, but tyranny—and its refusal to value all lives as equally human—has been around all along.

Either you value all lives equally, or you don’t. In America we do. One example Morrisey shares is about the natives of the continent:

When fighting the American Indian nations during and after the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the other founders distinguished between what they understood as the savage nations and the civilized ones. For example, they referred to the Cherokee Nation, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Creek, and Seminole Nations as the five civilized tribes. Civilized Indian nations that were not allied with the British Empire against us were not the enemy. Some of them even fought on our side.

The early Americans settled land for these civilized tribes, gave them farming implements, and intended to live peaceably together. Morrisey acknowledged, later in the lecture, that there were unfortunately times the nation failed to follow its own policies, as in the Trail of Tears. It isn’t, of course, a matter of race the determines who is savage, but the behavior.

Early on, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he faced, not terrorism, but piracy, sponsored by the Muslim states of Morroco, Algiers, and Tripoli. Jefferson was no isolationist when it came to keeping our trade lanes clear.

But Jefferson fought, not all Muslims, but those whose savage behavior was intended to ruin the democratic and commercial republic that was the fledgling United States of America.

While there were very few Muslims in America early on, we can see how the founders treated various religions in general.

There were few if any Muslims in the United States in the 1790s when he was president. But we do know the way Washington thought about religious congregations generally. Among his first acts as president were his letters to the major American religious congregations, his own Episcopalians, but also Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Quakers, and perhaps most importantly Jewish congregations in Newport, Rhode Island.

Although European regimes had reestablished one or several types of Christianity as politically privileged, Washington’s America was having none of that. The government of the United States, he told all of them, “welcomes members of any religious confession insofar as they conduct themselves as good citizens of the United States.” [from “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation,” August 18, 1790]

Although many American protestants had looked with asperity at Catholics, and peoples around the world had persecuted Jews, Washington and the other founders cared only that citizens act like citizens, obeying the laws respecting the civil and natural rights of their fellow citizens. “No set of religious practices consistent with American constitutional law will be grounds for denial of civil rights by the American federal government.”

The simple way was the best way—don’t judge the religious people on their beliefs, but look at whether they live as good citizens. They need to support our laws, and value and respect the natural rights of their fellow citizens.

The lecture was, on the whole, about developing policy, so it ends with this:

Any American foreign policy must first understand what America is, what we stand for. Confusion on that basic point can only yield confused policy.

After clarifying who we are, the next priority for American citizens who think about our foreign policy must be to identify the primary enemies of our regime and rank them in order of danger…. In dealing with the terrorists we must take care not to exhaust ourselves, leaving our country vulnerable to more formidable powers.

The third and last priority is the strategic one. Setting a strategy, choosing allies, calibrating diplomatic, economic, and military actions to weaken and eventually defeat the terrorists. No simple rule can guide us in that strategy, because it’s a matter of practical judgment on the spot.

In such judgments we should take care to guard our sovereignty, our self-government, by recurring to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which can and should both animate our actions and restrain.

So, to summarize, we need to have confidence in who we are: the people who believe in freedom, free enterprise, and civilization—because we have God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. We live in peace with those who believe those same things. Those who want to impose some other regime on us must be resisted to the fullest extent.