If you’ve read Machiavelli, especially “Discourses on Livy”, which is actually his major work (“The Prince” is not) you know his emphasis on Virtu of the people and elites as what holds Republics together. Machiavelli thought that Republics were the best form of government and that the greatest feat was to create or maintain a Republic: he was not a fan of autocratic government.
To summarize an important part of the Discourses: good men can make bad systems work, but good systems cannot save bad men. This is the opposite of what most “leadership” and “management” thinkers say today, but they’re wrong and Machiavelli
I mention this because we’re seeing it in the US today. I won’t pretend the Constitution or the Bill of Rights were perfect, or didn’t include substantial evil (aka. slavery), but the Bill of Rights in particular is genuinely good. It’s failing completely right now, the government is just ignoring rulings it doesn’t like. The first thru fifth amendments are essentially dead letters, including habeas corpus.
Likewise the Constitution did include substantial checks and balances and they aren’t working.
It’s ironic that the worshippers of the US constitution have always touted its system of “checks and balances” as part of its distinctive genius and that at present every one of those supposed checks and balances is failing.
But I think this is unfair. The checks and balances exist, the system was designed fairly well, BUT it requires virtuous people to use them. When the Supreme Court, Congress and Presidency are all filled with corrupt men and women with no virtues (virtu), of course they don’t work. The best system in the world won’t work if the people running it don’t want to follow it.
American elites don’t believe in civil liberties. (Remember how the Patriot Act passed with only Senator opposing.) They don’t believe in liberty, freedom or equality. It is asinine to pretend that they do. They believe in nothing but enriching themselves and their donors, and they seem themselves as an elite and feel no duty towards the masses well-being. This is so obvious that arguing against it is absurd.
Since they don’t want to enforce the Bill of Rights, they don’t. Since they fundamentally are OK with ICE running rampant, genocide, war and impoverishing the American people, they make it happen and certainly don’t push back against it. Why would they want people to have rights? In what way does that benefit them, as long as they have rights (which, mostly, they do. Elite impunity to law is the real Constitution right now.)
Without virtue: without wanting to do the “right” thing, no system intended to produce good results can work. America doesn’t work to produce good outcomes for most people because American elites only want it to produce good outcomes for them. It’s that simple, and no laws or constitution or rights can fix that. The only fix is to replace the entire elite, wholesale, by whatever means necessary.
But that requires a population willing to replace them at whatever price is necessary, and that means the people have to be virtuous (brave, just and desiring the welfare of their fellow citizens) and enough of them aren’t, especially since at least a plurality of regular Americans are cowardly, unjust and want to hurt their fellow citizens.
In such a situation no laws, no constitution, can work and the issue is thrown back on power, as it was during the Civil War but since, this time there is no anti-evil party (Lincoln and the Republicans) there is no clear basis for organizing or fighting. This means a long descent is far more likely than a revival of the good parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Good people can make bad systems work. Bad people cannot make good systems work.
China works because the Communist Party, whatever its flaws, genuinely wants its people to be prosperous, genuinely tries to reduce inequality and genuinely wants China to be strong. America doesn’t work because American elites, including both major parties genuinely wants only a small minority to be wealthy, genuinely wants to impoverish most Americans and genuinely just wants money without the work required to keep or make America strong. And they sure as hell don’t believe in civil liberties.
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Excellent. Spot on. I agree with pretty much everything except to say we’re not losing the Bill of Rights but instead we are seeing it for the paper tiger it always was. Relying on virtue as the glue and grease is tenuous at best. It always was. Don’t get me wrong, virtue is certainly an admirable and positive goal and all of us should aspire to it, but it’s an ideal and, well, we know ideals are seldom achieved and it’s the direction that ultimately prevails and matters. Virtue is quite similar to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, no? It works in the abstract as a presumption but not so much in practice if at all.
Your post is perfectly timed with my latest video where I give you a hat tip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeDaNTcEPLU
Feral Finster
“The checks and balances exist, the system was designed fairly well, BUT it requires virtuous people to use them.”
The checks and balances work, when the sociopaths haven’t corrupted both sides, the check-ed and the check-er.
Once that happens, it’s harder to remove sociopaths, as they now are entrenched.
david lamy
“The only fix is to replace the entire elite, wholesale, by whatever means necessary.”
Regression to the mean would seen to protect these elites. For example, state governors have not mobilized their state police and national guard forces to arrest, and eject federal thugs.
I’m afraid that violence will be a necessary component to ridding our landscape of these elites. One problem is that those that cheer this savagery against immigrants and supporting citizens is that their distribution is uniformly distributed across non-urban locales.
Everyday new software and hardware deploys with the capability to limit any attempt to ply back our rights granted in amendments 1 through 5.
Jan Wiklund
The most essential “virtù” is the ability of collective action in the lower classes. “‘Asabiyya”, as it was called by Ibn Khaldoun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah).
It was the ability of collective action in trade unions that made both American New Deal and Scandinavian Social Democracy possible. But it was the systems, that more and more were considered as automatic, that lead to the loss of the ability. If everything will go well automatically there is no need for abilities.
Collective action requires permanent, or quasi-permanent, organization. According to Asef Bayat, the defeat of the Arab spring was caused by lack of permanent organization, https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/revolution-without-revolutionaries. It’s possible to topple a government with spontaneous risings, but this government will be followed by an equally bad one if there is no organization to back up something different. See also the European 1848.
Upper classes are always bad, however. Only the ‘asabiyya of the lower clases will keep them in check.
Ian Welsh
Virtue is quite real, and nothing works well without it. Even “bad” systems don’t work without morally neutral virtues like bravery, fortitude and and energy. The invisible hand is an observation that some good things happen from self interest (but not all. Most people haven’t actually read the Wealth of Nations, Smith was very clear on the limits of the good which could be produced by self interest, something the disciples of incentives forget.)
We all know that virtue is real, even Machiavelli, a genuine cynic who thought the worst of people as a rule, knew that virtue was real and that some people had it and that a certain level of it in the population and elites was required for Republics to operate.