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What does it mean not to have a political order?
A correspondent writes: “How long are you going to give the American people to rise up against Grutter before you accept your own posting on 7/9 as true: ‘After Grutter do we have a political order?’” First, don’t jump to the conclusion that this crisis means we no longer have a political society, and are therefore in a lawless or stateless situation. The political order we used to have is gone or significantly gone. But that doesn’t mean that there is not a political society still in existence. There is. We have laws, we have a government, we have government entities of all kinds functioning. When the president gives an order to the armed forces they obey it. When the Supreme Court tells a state university it can or cannot pursue a certain admissions policy, the university obeys. If our country were threatened by a foreign enemy, we would still support her defense. And so on. All these things constitute a political society. But at the same time the constitutional and moral structure, the inner nature, of that political society has been profoundly disrupted. There have been other points during the course of the 1990s when there were grounds for similar thoughts. But never, in my experience, anything like this. This goes to the very core of the country. So where does that leave us?. I don’t know. As I said in a recent article, I feel as though I were up in the air. Others have written to me that they feel the same. And, as you ask, if there is no organized protest of responsible Americans saying, “We do not accept this,” then where are we? I just don’t know. We’re in uncharted territory. We’ll have to figure this out together. And one of the strangest parts of it is that for most Americans, life goes on as before. They have allowed their political order and their nation to be killed, yet they don’t know it yet, just as Nietzsche said that man had killed God, yet hadn’t realized it yet. In Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, Section 125 (of course he was using “gay” in the older sense of light-hearted), a madman comes the town square and announces the death of God:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him——you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?”But the people stare at him in astonishment and say nothing.
“I have come too early,” he said then. “My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering, it has not yet reached the ears of men…. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.” Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 21, 2003 01:47 AM | Send Comments
I share Mr. Auster’s foreboding, and for many of the same reasons. What he characterizes as feeling up in the air I would describe as a hollow feeling, but we are talking about the same thing. The United States has been turned upside down and, except perhaps for a vague unease, most Americans really aren’t aware of it. The United States has a political order. It is no longer that of a constitutionally limited federal republic of states except in form. (Belay, for the time being, debate about when the change was definitively accomplished.) Our political order is that of a centrally consolidated, officially secularized social welfare state nominally responsive to democratic elections. This new order shields itself from accountability by imposing its most revolutionary mandates through judicial rulings. It is a measure of how corrupted the remnants of the old federal order are that both the legislative and executive branches are happy to hide behind the judges’ robes. The actual order has a governing ideology: secular liberalism with Marxist elements. The Democratic Party is the overt wing of the permanent welfare state; the Republican Party the covert. Both are pillars of the new order; neither will oppose it in any material way. The new American order is particularly poisonous in that it prefers to deal with people as group-members, with everyone not a white man (including any non-white foreigner from the moment he gets here) able to claim entitlement to some form of grievance-preference. Fomenting racial and ethnic hostility through preference schemes and mass incompatible immigration, the new order seems Hell-bent on destroying the country utterly. Sanctimonious references to “foundational propositions” and the “first universal nation” are no defense against the charge of subverting the real nation those Founding Fathers founded! What leaves me feeling even more hollow than usual is the lack of reaction Mr. Auster has noted to the Grutter and Lawrence decisions. Grutter ratifies racial prejudice against the country’s majority by their own government. Lawrence throws the traditional moral beliefs of this (and almost any other) society into the trash. These are revolutionary developments, and directly counter to the legitimate interests of most Americans. Except for a flutter of indignant columns (outweighed by jouralistic encomia, of course) and Ward Connerly’s attempt to start an anti-preference initiative in Michigan, there is no real response. So, the old question remains: how far can Americans be pushed? HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on July 21, 2003 10:11 AM |