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As we follow the decomposition of (small “r”) republican institutions around the globe, we often forget how fragile these institutions inevitably are. Who, after all, willingly relinquishes their private wealth?  Or who willingly submits to laws, regulations, institutions, and political bodies over which they do not enjoy direct control?

The answer to these questions, is, of course, republicans (again small “r”). Under the conviction that we are all better off submitting to laws, regulations, institutions and political bodies specifically and deliberately protected from private wealth, republicans — in the Americas, in France, in the Caribbean, England, and eventually throughout the world — willingly bound themselves and their wealth to shared constitutions.

I am thinking about constitutions today because constitutions rest upon nothing but the legitimacy they are granted by those who submit to them. Absent this legitimacy, constitutions are not worth the paper they are printed on. It was therefore with no small amount of dread that I  read first Stanford University political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s article (1989) and then his book (1992) End of History seeking to shift the ground for constitutionality away from Hobbesian mutual constraint and towards right-wing Hegelian legal theory. Not that Mr Fukuyama’s thesis was terribly original; it was not. But only that in its earlier articulations — by Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt; by his student Leo Strauss; and by eccentric anti-communist Hegelian Alexandre Kojève — it failed to land a punch. Now, finally, in 1989, with the communist world emptying into the dustbin of history, the story told by Schmitt, Strauss, and Kojève could be updated, cleansed, and made respectable. The fact that this story was deeply anti-republican troubled no one in 1989. Indeed, as of 1968, the Republican Party itself was on record as anti-republican. It no longer believed in res publica, “the wealth we hold in common.”

Here is Mr Fukuyama:

 This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest — desire combined with reason — and particularly the desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, because what truly satisfies human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions, Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process-the struggle for recognition — has now been satisfied in a society characterized by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible (F Fukuyama, End of History 1992:xviii).

To his credit, Mr Fukuyama admits here openly what most members of the Republican leadership either don’t know or do not care to mention: that contemporary Republican ideology is anti-republican. It is fundamentally opposed to what “Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed.” Mr Fukuyama is seeding a different ideological ground; a post-republican ground for a quite different constitutional future.

[Disclosure: Mr Fukuyama grew up in the University of Chicago’s shadow. His father received his doctorate from Chicago in the 1950s. While there, the young Fukuyama fell under the spell of Leo Strauss, student of Carl Schmitt; which influenced his decision to pursue his bachelors at Cornell under Strauss votary Allan Bloom.

[Further disclosure: Mr Strauss and Mr Kojève joined a fierce political philosophical battle over the status of politics, published as an appendix to Strauss’ On Tyranny (Chicago ). Mr Fukuyama’s End of History finds him adopting Mr Kojève’s Hegel to promote a post-republican narrative not unlike Mr Strauss’ or Mr Schmitt’s.

[Final disclosure: I studied Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Francis Fukuyama as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I have a horse in the race.]

Where Mr Fukuyama reduces classical republicanism to pecuniary self-interest, I would invite readers to more carefully explore both the published record — in the Federalist Papers — and the published, but more voluminous, record of the US Constitutional Convention in Elliot’s Debates and Farrand’s Records (Journals of the Continental Congress). Here one does find much evidence for a pecuniary self-interest among the framers. Yet, one also finds a genuine republican spirit, a spirit eager to constrain and limit private wealth for the sake of the wealth we hold in common. Here, following Aristotle, the framers deliberately and explicitly excluded anti-Federalists and anti-Republicans from the Convention precisely because they favored the Lockean philosophy grounded in private property and private labor. This was because, already in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle recognized that stable public institutions needed to limit access from private self-interest. When in 1989 Mr Fukuyama shifted the discussion to Hegel’s philosophy of the slave-master relationship, to self-respect, pride, and recognition, he also shifted the ground from the public agora to the private household.

This change of venue was precisely that against which Aristotle had argued in the opening pages of his Politics. But — and this is significant — it was also the change in venue against which Hegel had argued in his discussion of civil society in his Philosophy of Right (1820). A political economy organized around private self-interest, in Hegel’s view, destroys itself and its concept.

Which brings us back to the essential fragility of constitutions. We are, all of us, deeply invested in our own self-preservation. Our natural state is private, not public. Thomas Hobbes said it best when he declared in De Cive (1642) that our natural state is a bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all. It takes something unnatural, unusual, extraordinary for us to propose to make our private wealth public, to create what was once known as a commonwealth. This does not happen naturally. It is forced, coerced, constrained, limiting.

And it is precisely this constraint against which Mr Fukuyama inveighs in his End of History. It is a diatribe against republicanism, against res publica. And, it is an appeal to revert to our natural state.

Our natural state is not a state with constitutions. It is absent laws, regulations, and institutions. It lacks an agora, a public square.

I am not blaming Mr Fukuyama. He simply reflects his times. His mind is the mind of his age. There is nothing specially notable, one way or the other, about what he wrote; he wrote it well, but what he wrote is unnotable. Constitutions appear when communities recognize their shared interest, their public interest; when they recognize that their private wealth needs to be made public. These are very rare, exceptional moments. They are never pure and undistorted.

What is unique about our own moment is that the party called “republican,” which feeds upon and feeds the merely common longing for self-interest, is the most anti-republican party in US history. There is nothing noble, nothing notable, nothing distinguishing or distinguished in it. It is the essence of what Hannah Arendt meant by “banal.” It is that to which all of us, unattended, revert.

Thus my sense of dread. There is nothing here to legitimate. There is nothing here to defend. There is no constitution.

When he takes the stand in Chapter XVIII of Book Three of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark intones what his creator, Ayn Rand, believes to be a blistering critique of collectivism. It is at least that. Yet it is also, at the same time, a blistering critique of capital and of capitalism. Let me explain.

The Fountainhead is a theological treatise, not in broad sense in which any fiercely-held belief might be called “religious,” but in the most narrow technical sense where we expect to find and do find metaphysical subtleties, divine beings, eternal destinies, penitential rites, and the like. The Fountainhead is a theological treatise; which may help explain why individuals who fashion themselves deeply religious, such as Wisconsin Congressman, House Leader and former Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, can also feel absolutely devoted to Ms Rand’s philosophy of “objectivism.”

The Fountainhead is a theological treatise that aimed to defend one dimension of the commodity form — its unique, irreplaceable, objective form of appearance — from its abstract, general, homogeneous, undifferentiated social being. And, yet, since both of these dimensions — both its objective form of appearance and its abstract social form — are inseparably bound together in the commodity form, qualitatively differentiating and isolating them from one another requires speculative, theological, metaphysical violence; “divine violence” (W Benjamin “Critique of Violence,” One Way Street 1979:148-154).

“Divine violence” mistakes the socially and historically specific contradiction immanent to the commodity form for an ontologically fundamental, objective, transhistorical state of being. To break the stranglehold the general, homogeneous, undifferentiated totality exercises over the particular and unique, self-determining “Being” breaks through and establishes its dominance over mere “being”; except that self-determining “Being” itself forms the dynamic, living inner core of the commodity form, the counterpart and compliment to its general, homogeneous, undifferentiated social form. “Divine violence,” even for Benjamin, entails the destruction of the law: the deployment of power to destroy the constraints on power.

The ontologically fundamental character of authentic Being everywhere requires a foundation myth that differs fundamentally from the Abrahamic-Babylonian myth to which it is opposed. Whereas the latter invites readers to recognize a natural order destroyed by human hubris, the objectivist myth invites initiates to identify this hubris itself as the essence of human being. Adam ventures out on his own; he tests the world; he breaks its laws. For his enterprise he is condemned. In the objectivist canon, Adam should instead be praised for resisting a world that constrains him; where the Adamic myth condemns hubris, the objectivist myth praises law-breaking.

This glorification of illegality captures the dynamic, living value form of the commodity as it turns upon and seeks to annihilate its material form of appearance: its merely outward social being.

Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world (A Rand, The Fountainhead 1971:1724).

As is only appropriate for a religious text, Ms Rand gave to her Fountainhead an epic form. Dramatic events and actions assume a secondary role. This foregrounds the dialogue. The dialogue, in turn, takes a secondary place to several strategically placed soliloquies, the most significant of which is placed in the mouth of Howard Roark at his trial for bombing a public housing facility. Roark refuses outside counsel, choosing instead to defend himself. He begins his defense with the origins myth reproduced above. Roark continues:

That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures — because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage (Ibid.).

Ms Rand’s mythic account has many parallels across the modern epoch. Two, however, stand out. The first is Adam Smith’s memorable story about the original human beings and their natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” (A Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I 1776:25). The second is Friedrich von Hayek’s origins myth in his 1944 Road to Serfdom.

Mr Smith’s story is significant not for what it tells us, but for what it conceals. As far as we can tell, for 2.4M years human beings have engaged in trade; for perhaps 20,000 years they have enjoyed markets. But, then, why did it take human beings 2.4M years to stumble upon a society mediated entirely — or so Mr Smith would like to believe — by abstract labor time expended? Would it not make more sense to seek a more proximate explanation for why communities began to change so dramatically in the fourteenth century?

Yet, it is the nature of origins myths to read contemporary social ontology back upon the past. As Hannah Arendt has noted:

Legendary explanations of history always served as belated corrections of facts and real events, which were needed precisely because history itself would hold man responsible for deeds he had not done and for consequences he had never foreseen. The truth of the ancient legends — what gives them their fascinating actuality many centuries after the cities and empires and peoples they served have crumbled to dust — was nothing but the form in which past events were made to fit the human condition in general and political aspirations in particular. Only in the frankly invented tale about events did man consent to assume his responsibility for them, and to consider past events his past. Legends made him master of what he had not done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo. In this sense, legends are not only among the first memories of mankind, but actually the true beginning of human history (H Arendt, Origins 1979:208).

Even allowing for Ms Arendt’s own myth-making, we can well understand why eighteenth century social philosophers, curious to explain why their community had come to distinguish itself qualitatively from every other community at any time throughout history, might feel compelled to develop a powerful legend — antithetical to the Genesis account they had inherited — to explain this unprecedented anomaly. Such “Robinsonades,” so named after Daniel Defoe’s famous Robinson Crusoe (1719), richly populate the eighteenth and nineteenth century political economic landscape. Here Mr Smith is far from unique.

Our second myth-maker is Friedrich von Hayek, who, like Mr Smith, is eager to establish the ontologically fundamental character of individualism. In 1944, Mr von Hayek spread his net of inauthentic — which is to say “collectivist” — being so broadly as to capture most of the governments then battling fascism in Europe; not simply Communist Russia, but New Deal United States and Labor’s equivalent in Great Britain.

How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilization the modern trend toward socialism means becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the nineteenth century but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely or Cobden and Bright, or Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism in herited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished (F v Hayek, Road to Serfdom 1944:67-68).

From which we might easily deduce that Mr von Hayek had either never read, but surely never understood, those “individuals” whom he here idolized; otherwise he would surely have known that the aristocratic Thucydides held nothing but contempt for the demagogue Pericles (a contempt, incidentally, Thucydides shared with the framers of the US Constitution, see Federalist No. 6).

But Mr von Hayek can hardly be faulted. Creation, innovation, entrepreneurship, and independence could be found on everyone’s lips (and on everyone’s pens) in the 1940s when both Ms Rand and Mr von Hayek crafted their respective religious treatises. German Fascism and Russian Communism seemed on their face  to articulate both the “common sense” indictment against all collectivisms — left or right — and the “common sense” proof of the virtues of individualism. It mattered little that the innovation and entrepreneurship that both Ms Rand and Mr von Hayek loudly trumpeted was virtually nowhere to be found in the 1930s until the US Congress voted to distribute $4.6T to research laboratories, manufacturers, universities, and the bank accounts of working families. Both Ms Rand and Mr von Hayek conveniently forget this mammoth, historically unprecedented, public gift to private enterprise without which, by all estimates, economic recovery would have taken decades — assuming, that is, that without this public gift, the US could have won the war at all, which is doubtful. In the mythic tales of Ms Rand and Mr von Hayek the recovery in the 1940s simply happens; or, as in Milton Friedman’s retelling, it unfolds as a tale of private entrepreneurs willing to sacrifice for their community.

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized goverment. Columbus did not set out to seek a new route to China in response to a majority directive of a parliament, though he, was partly financed by an absolute monarch. Newton and Leibniz; Einstein and Bohr; Shakespeare, Milton, and Pasternak; Whitney, McCormick, Edison, and Ford; Jane Addams, Florence Nightingale, and Albert Schweitzer; no one of these opened new frontiers in human knowledge and understanding, in literature, in technical possibilities, or in the relief of human misery in response to governmental directives. Their achievements were the product of individual genius, of strongly held minority views, of a social climate permitting variety and diversity (M Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom 1962:3-4).

In fact, there is no one in this list who did not benefit directly or indirectly from sizable centralized government expenditures — Mr Friedman himself, whose first jobs (with the NRC and NBER) were with the Federal Government, not excepted.

The challenge for Ms Rand, as for these others, was to redeem the material form of appearance from its social form; the bare fact from its concept. Capital has always assumed this two-fold form. On its surface, it presents as a world of individual things, products of individual creators, innovators, or, in Ms Rand’s Fountainhead, architects. Underlying this world of things, however, is a social form knitting all things together into a homogeneous, undifferentiated whole. Ms Rand, Mr von Hayek, and Mr Smith are sworn enemies of this homogeneous, undifferentiated whole. In this whole, independence is eliminated. In its place is a web of mutual dependence, where no individual is able or is permitted to distinguish him or herself; where, in their drive to achieve social harmony, the individual is completely lost.

The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality — the man who lives to serve others —is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism (Fountainhead 1729-1730).

Here Ms Rand perfectly describes the social form of the commodity. Here in its most degraded form is what Martin Heidegger and his student, Hannah Arendt, understood by “social being.”

Over and against this abstract social form, however, is its inexplicable individuality or particularity — its material form of appearance — Dasein, its “being there-ness.” The indigence of the individual captivates Ms Rand — as it captivates Mr von Hayek, Mr Heidegger, Mr Adorno, and Mr Smith. They mistake it for ontologically fundamental Being — for Dasein. To it, they oppose the general, the homogeneous, the undifferentiated. And, yet, in the commodity form, these two are themselves interdependent.

In the commodity form, specific actions, individuals, and materials are harnessed to produce a good whose value arises from none of these — not the action, not the individual, and not the materials — but from the price a good commands in the market. In non-capitalist social formations, the market is subject to the deliberations of actual individuals who are burdened (or blessed) with actual interests — their families, their souls, their defense of borders. These extra-market constraints place limits on the conditions under which trade takes place. Under capitalism, by contrast, these actual interests — familiar, religious, local, cultural — are made to give way to a new, abstract social form: capital. Capital is burdened by limits. It seeks to annihilate limits. Therein, limitation — the social form — strikes capital as a limitation on freedom. Indeed, from the vantage-point of capital, embodiment of any sort entails a limitation. And, yet, capital cannot dispense with the particular. It cannot dispense with the particular because it is in the particular that it finds its most cogent defense against the general, homogeneous, and undifferentiated: I want an apple, not an orange. I am a pipe fitter, not a brick layer. And, yet, this particular it sets against the universal, the general, the homogeneous — capital, which is its actual object. It cannot pursue one without the other. The two are essential. And, yet, in order to achieve its full potential — in order to “realize itself” — the one must destroy the other. There is no other way.

Ms Rand seizes one end of the commodity form, which she believes to be its material form of appearance, and she weaponizes it to defeat the other end of the commodity form, its homogeneous, undifferentiated, immaterial value form. And, yet, having seized the material form of appearance, she discovers that it has no substance: it is pure will, energy, life. It dematerializes because the moment that this energy achieves materiality it suffers from the same disability that mere things display: all things are subject to constraint.

In Ms Rand’s Fountainhead, the immaterial value form of the commodity turns upon and lashes out against its material form of appearance because what it perceives in this material form the constraints placed upon it by its social being. The social being Rand despises (and invites us to despise), however, is the social being of the commodity form whose abstract immaterial value she now seizes as the vantage point of her critique. The “second-handers” whom Ms Rand despises since they are so clearly socially constructed are made to pay for their social constitution by the immaterial value form of the commodity by which they are driven. And, yet, because this immaterial value form is itself socially constituted and reproduced, it requires an ontologically fundamental origins myth to redeem it from its social limitation. Ms Rand is driven to theological speculation and myth-making by the terror of social constitution.

In historical terms, the New Deal and FDR rally capital — through the voting of war bonds — to defeat the “collectivist” fascists and (following FDR’s death) “collectivist” communists. In so doing, they help compose the welfare state version of the collectivist identity. But this identity is nothing more than the social expression of the abstract value form leveraged in 1938 to defeat German fascism and Japanese nationalism. It is “collectivist” on both sides — both the capitalist and the fascist/socialist. Against this collectivism, the Mont Pelerin Society rallies the “individual” who is free from extrinsic determination; Howard Roark, if you like. But with equal justice we might call him Mikhail Bakunin or Vladimir Ilyich — the man who stands on his own, who acts independently, who is in control of his self; Ms Arendt’s “natality” standing erect against “fatality.” This individual stands against the homogeneous, undifferentiated totality composed by the abstract value form of capital; and, yet, this individual believes that it stands outside of and against the whole. It is, instead, the fountain head, the origin, the uncaused cause. It is God.

But unlike the God of Hebrew, Muslim, and Christian piety, the objectivist God seeks to annihilate its own body, its own creation. The objectivist God hates its own constrained being. And herein it behaves in a manner consistent with every commodity ever produced. Since every commodity ever produced aims not to satisfy the desires of consumers, but to escape from its own body — to produce value — it behaves towards those who have bodies — including its own body — as though they could, if they wished, escape from their bodies and in this manner free themselves from constraint. And, yet, they require bodies in order to realize their own abstract value.

But the body they have learned to despise is, after all, their own. It is a body socially and historically limited to a specific epoch. From other epochs we know of bodies not so constrained; differently constrained, never perfectly. We know of bodies not orchestrated homogeneously, generally, abstractly; bodies that are truly differentiated, whose collectivity forms no whole, but only always a partial, incomplete body of individuals. But this also exposes Ms Rand’s weakness. Her deep hostility to religion is not really a hostility to religion at all, but to a specific religion: to Judaism and, more specifically, to Christianity. Her deep, fundamental hostility is to a God that willingly constrains itself by what it has made, by creation, which it declares “Good.” And, even more, she is hostile, fundamentally hostile to a God Who undergoes death.

Herein, Ms Rand adopts one end of the commodity form and leverages it against the other. It is a critique of capital, but not a very sophisticated one. Indeed, it is quite common, even “banal,” to use Ms Arendt’s term. What distinguishes Ms Rand from her epigones and sycophants is that she, at least, had the courage to acknowledge and even proclaim that her god was not in any way, shape, or form, the God of Allah, Moses, or Jesus. This God she and her followers hate fundamentally, even when they feign Christian faith (e.g., Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan). And, yet, their theology is the same. It is misanthropic to the core of their being.

According to a recent Pew Research study, University Professors are overwhelmingly more likely to lean left than right; which is to say, they are not representative of the voting public. Which raises an interesting question about the independence of institutions of higher learning. As followers of this blog will long ago have noted, I am a keen follower of a strain of conservative thinking that is, on principle, anti-democratic and, ironically, anti-republican. Since it takes the revolutions of 1848/49 as its point of departure, this strain of conservative thinking holds suspect any critical reflection that rests upon survey research: truth is not subject to the demos.

But, what if the aristos, the “excellent,” were able to convince the doulos, the “slaves,” to adopt policies that were excellent, let us say, through “slight of hand” or “turn of speech”?

This, obviously, is the question that Plato raised and answered in his Republic. Insofar as the doulos, the slaves or workers, are ignorant of what the aristos know; and, therefore, are ignorant also of what is good for them, the aristos are obligated to deceive the doulos to embrace policies that promote excellence, not mediocrity.

In his recent blog, Paul Krugman wrestles with this dilemma; unsuccessfully, I would argue. As we might guess, Republicans are incensed over their lack of representation at institutions of higher learning. They are urging university administrators to craft their recruitment of professors to more accurately reflect the public these professors will teach.

Mr Krugman is correct to note that colleges have not grown more liberal. He is also correct to note that professors have grown more hostile to conservative views.

Yes – but surely that has a lot to do with the changing nature of what it means to be a conservative. When denial of climate change, and for that matter the theory of evolution, become tribal markers, you shouldn’t be surprised to find academics, very much including those in the hard sciences, decline to be identified as members of the tribe.

Here, presumably, is where Mr Krugman could shine. He could illuminate the economic and social changes that have given rise to a change in ideology. Or he could point out how control over public information has shifted over the past half century.

Instead, he falls back upon information itself — as though accurate knowledge were an independent variable.

When Mr Krugman appeals to the broadened educational franchise of the 1950s and 1960s; when he credits this broadened franchise with the leadership that the US enjoyed, albeit briefly, he allows the tail to wag the dog. Economic rigor invites us to reflect critically on the conditions that gave rise to the broadening of the educational franchise: the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, a Great War, and a President eager to spend whatever was necessary to defeat fascism in Europe and totalitarianism in Japan. That huge expenditure not only defeated fascism; it poured into the bank accounts of working families who suddenly found it within their means to send their sons and daughters to college. Moreover, these baby-boomers attended college at a moment when professors trained in the 1930s and 1940s were specially sensitized to the dangers both of populism (left and right) and of authoritarianism (again, both left and right). So, yes, Mr Krugman is right:

America basically invented the modern, educated society, leading the way on universal K-12 education, building the world’s finest and most comprehensive higher education system; this in turn was an important factor in how we became leader of the free world.

But, it was never ideology that underwrote the expansion of the educational franchise. In fact, it was the reverse. A great depression gave rise to social discontent. This social discontent might have yielded a movement to fascism or totalitarianism. In fact, sympathy for fascism was quite high in the 1930s in the US, at least in some circles. President Roosevelt, pressured by movements on the left, steered in a different course. Yet, were it not for the unprecedented spending required for defeating Germany and Japan; and did this spending not find its way into the pockets of working families, the “modern, educated society” that Mr Krugman praises would have been nowhere on the map.

What is odd is that Mr Krugman avoids this clear economic explanation for the expansion of the educational franchise and settles instead upon an ideological explanation; or, worse. He credits education with economic expansion; not economic expansion with education.

In the end, the two — knowledge and wealth — are mutually constitutive, each shaping the other. Yet, by isolating knowledge from the conditions that make it possible is, I would argue, a most un-economic way of thinking.

Call me cynical. Or, simply call me another investor. Although I would like to believe that my investment portfolio is as “progressive” as progressive can be, I also recognize that money is, by necessity, “dirty.” I part with my dollar, so someone else can use it. I part with it because I anticipate a return. But that “someone” may also part with it because she determines that it will earn more in some other venture. And so on, and so forth.

I often reflect on this Econ or PoliSci 101 example when I think of the behavior of the 45th President and his Cabal. They are investors. They are cynics. And, as often as I think of this example, I think of how terribly naive the 44th President was to feel that principal might triumph over self-interest.

I am not suggesting that the 44th President was innocent of political or economic maneuvering. No one is. Rather am I reflecting, personally, about how little “principle” comes into play when we theorize the contemporary world. Even principled action is driven — or so we cynically argue — by the utilitarian pleasure-pain principle. Our neoclassical models would not function (they do function quite well) were this not the case.

A member of the 45th’s team meets with a Russian who says he has dirt on the 42nd’s wife. That’s golden! Go for it!

Wouldn’t we do the same?

There is really no answer to this question. I have spent more time than most pouring over the records of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. They are not pretty. They are not pretty even though, to a person, the anti-federalists were excluded from the assembly. Had they been admitted, there would have been no constitution. But, it was not their exclusion that brought the anti-federalists to mount a centuries-old campaign against the U.S. Constitution. On principle they are opposed to its underlying logic. Which is why they feed upon those few scraps offered to them — the 3/5ths clause, the militia clause — that promise to unravel the fabric from inside out.

They are not unprincipled. They are anti-republican and anti-federalist; on principle.

The question is: what is that principle? It is not republican. It has no respect for “the wealth we hold in common,” for the “commonwealth.” Nor is it aristocratic. They are not champions of blue blood — not champions of power by blood. So, what is their principle?

Their principle is money; not inherited wealth, but money. They will just as quickly turn upon old wealth as they will turn upon new learning. Money is freedom; freedom is money. This is the old yarn that Milton Friedman used to tell about why the common man and the self-made millionaire are one and the same: money. Or, should we not say “private wealth”?

There is a reason why this doctrine — principled to the core — is antithetical to the republic. There is a reason why the framers excluded every anti-federalist and every anti-republican from Philadelphia. The Federalist Papers are propaganda. No doubt. They are politics. Because the folks who stand on the other side hate — they really hate federalism and republicanism, on principle.

Their whole raison d’etre is wrapped up in “private wealth.” The very essence of the U.S. Constitution, by contrast, is “the wealth we hold in common,” res publica, the republican ideal.

But if “private wealth” forms the beginning and the end of political being in the U.S., then what danger is their in a meeting with Russians who have dirt on a politician who threatens, however modestly, private wealth? If “private wealth” is the bottom line, then cynicism is simply another word for common sense.

There is a passage in Fountainhead that Ms Rand places in the mouth of newspaper oligarch Gail Wynand:

“I mean the person who has the filthy insolence to claim that he loves equally the man who made that statue of you and the man who makes a Mickey Mouse balloon to sell on street corners. I mean the person who loves the men who prefer the Mickey Mouse to your statue—and there are many of that kind. I mean the person who loves Joan of Arc and the salesgirls in dress shops on Broadway—with an equal fervor. I mean the person who loves your beauty and the women he sees in a subway—the kind that can’t cross their knees and show flesh hanging publicly over their garters—with the same sense of exaltation. I mean the person who loves the clean, steady, unfrightened eyes of man looking through a telescope and the white stare of an imbecile—equally. I mean quite a large, generous, magnanimous company. Is it you who hate mankind, Mrs. Keating?”

It is not an uncommon sentiment, specially among misanthropes. I have come across it twice this week, once in Carl Schmitt and again in Frank Knight.

If it is not a contradiction in thought that one might give the same quality and intensity of affection to all human beings, good, bad, and indifferent, to the most callous criminal or the farthest Eskimo or Patagonian as well as to one’s ” nearest,” and still “love” any of them — if this idea can be formed, it is surely neither attractive nor helpful as a moral ideal. It would seem that a “Christian ” who tried to practice such love would have no friends — being in that respect like the famous economic man. He would not be human (F Knight, “Ethics and Economic Reform” Economica (Nov 1939).

And,

The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” agapete tous eksdrous humon, and not diligite hastes vestras. No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary (C Schmitt, Concept of the Political 1932). 

What strikes me about these sentiments of misanthropy is that they pass for moral and intellectual superiority; hatred and contempt for others as a marker of depth. Knight even credits those who love mankind with the degeneration of civilization because philanthropy promotes mediocrity.

But it is wholly superficial, common, and banal to hate those who hate you or to love only those who love you. Indeed, in the passage of Ms Rand’s cited above, Gail Wynand is portrayed as the ultimate lover of mankind since he always plays to what mankind wants, which is always what is base and common; which is then portrayed as a sign of his misanthropy.

Yet, in one critical respect Ms Rand and Mssrs. Schmitt and Knight differ from Rep. Paul Ryan, open lover of Ms Rand. Where they all were openly hostile to Christianity, he pretends Christian faith. And in this he becomes the object of their jeers. But this poorly conceals their base and common instincts, if that is what we can call them. Saint Paul already made short work of such misplaced elitism in the first two chapters of his first letter to the Corinthians. 

I rarely find myself accused of being insufficiently radical; more often, too radical. Nevertheless, like many academics on the left, in general elections I find myself pulled to the center. In local elections, I select the alternative slate, which, in our voting district, often wins. In regional elections, which often pits a left of center against a center Democrat, I vote left of center or Green or Pink. And, yet, I cast my ballot twice for Barrack Obama and (after supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary) Ms Clinton in the General Election. Lately, however, friends have grown increasingly critical of my moderation.

The latest row was provoked by doubts I expressed over Nancy Pelosi challenger Stephen R Jaffe. For one, I am not all that unpleased with Rep. Pelosi’s record: Votesmart.org. For another, the movement to replace Ms Pelosi is largely being driven by the right-wing of the Democratic caucus (see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/us/pelosi-georgia-ossoff-democrats.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share). I am reminded of the DLC’s take-over of the Democratic Party, made possible in part by electoral failures in 1980, 1984, and 1988. When Ted Kennedy lost in the Democratic primaries to his better organized rival, it spelled the end of a serious pro-working family opposition within the Democratic Party.

Here, Ms Pelosi is a throw-back. Her record on issues dear to organized labor is unparalleled. Nevertheless, she suffers from one serious weakness: she receives high ratings on trade from the Cato Institute for her stance on trade barriers and from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (again on trade). Otherwise her voting record is solidly pro-regulation of business, anti-Militarist, pro-immigrant — her voting record and ratings are public record. So, is it only for her support of TPP that she has become #1 enemy of the left?

I suspect that it is more complicated than that. Although they fall well down the line among her contributors, Opensecrets.org shows some representation among developers, real estate, agriculture, and finance. Nothing that would cause alarm, but also far from Manichean. More problematic — but virtually unavoidable in San Francisco — is wealth in general. Although Ms Pelosi’s support from organized labor is iron-clad, it is doubtful that she spends much of the little free time she enjoys with steam fitters and laborers. (That said, she is a far cry closer to working families than many vaccine-shunning, weekend silent-retreating Greens with whom I am familiar from Marin County.) She is not a socialist. But neither is Mr Jaffe.

So, why is the left joining the already deafening right-wing chorus demanding Ms Pelosi’s head? I have not talked to Thomas Frank but Katie Halper has (see Thomas Frank on the Demise of the Democratic Party). Frank points to the same data that he covered in greater detail in Listen Liberal. He points to the gradual, but quickening drift of the Democratic Party from its New Deal high, to its denouement as the party of wealthy white liberal Americans. Fair enough. Mr Frank is less clear about why, socially and economically — culturally — the New Deal Democrats began to lose market share.

Here the Democrats follow a familiar trajectory. In 1918, in post-war Germany, there were three games in town: the proto-fascists, roving the streets, throwing bombs, assassinating politicians, seeking to force post-war Germany to renounce Versailles and “fight to the death” both against liberal Europe and against “the enemy within”; the communists, who at the time were the only citizens ready to face down the proto-fascists; and the SPD, the socialist party, whose long experience in electoral politics placed it in what many at the time considered a mediating role. (Recalling also that the SPD allied with the proto-fascists so long as they were attacking the communists.) I think it is not unfair to liken the 1918 SPD with the present-day Democratic Party. It was, in fact, only after the Dawes Plan was put into effect — only after Germany won sufficient liquidity to begin paying reparations to France and England — that it was able to bring inflation under control and proved ready to begin to implement a social and institutional program more in keeping with its socialist agenda. When I think about what was best about Weimar, I think of this brief period, from roughly 1925 to 1929. Not surprisingly, this was also the period when support for the nationalist and fascist parties dropped to virtually zero.

The 1929 crash and subsequent Great Depression showed that the nationalists and fascists — and the communists — were far from dead; prosperity merely rendered them mute. In 1929 political extremism sprang back to its feet.

In retrospect, we might argue that the socialists ought to have made league with the communists, setting up a “final battle.” Instead, the socialists splintered into a brilliant, but impotent, array of center-right and center-left parties. The 1932 elections were completely dominated by the extremes.

One could argue — John Maynard Keynes did argue — that 1932 was set up by Versailles. Or one could argue that 1932 was set up by JP Morgan whose bank won a huge windfall from the Dawes Plan, which enabled Germany to pay France and England, who then repaid their debt to JP Morgan, with interest. All of these liquid assets needed some place to land, mostly in unsecured, questionable assets. This overheated and grossly under-regulated market collapsed in 1929: the immediate cause for the revival of extreme politics. Still, more remotely, JP Morgan’s financial scheme was the more distant cause. Without it, it is doubtful JP Morgan could have recovered his substantial outstanding credit to England and France. Or we could also argue that blame rests with all of those governments — the US, the UK, and DE — unwilling in 1932 to heed Lord Keynes’ plea on the pages of the Atlantic Monthly for the industrial powers to spend money “on anything” short of all out war. Tragically, but not surprisingly, it was only preparation for all out war that pulled the industrial powers out of the Great Depression.

But it is here that the story moves sideways. In Germany, as we know, economic recovery was predicated on the elimination of left-wing resistance and political opposition more generally; in England and the US, by contrast, war preparation and war boosted support for organized labor and even normalized communist participation in some locals. Everywhere, however, in 1945, organized labor was lionized.

What Thomas Frank remembers of New Deal Washington, DC, was, to this extent, inconceivable without the kind of massive public deficit spending — roughly $1T in the US — spent on winning the war. Theoretically, Lord Keynes was right. Had that $1T been spent on transportation or building or exploration or — “anything” — it would have had an even greater, positive effect. Frank is less ready to remember the political and cultural compromises that made the Marshall Plan palatable — marketing the plan as a war on communism — which sealed the fate of Europe for the next half century.

The lessons of this brief overview (1918 to 1948) are mixed. Ideally, we could wish that the communists had soundly defeated the proto-fascists in 1918, which conceivably they might have done had the socialists joined them; which the socialists might have done, except that in 1918 they were already the party of the bourgeoisie. Or we could wish that the allies had listened to calmer voices at Versailles, which would not only have permitted Germany to regain its feet, but would also have obviated the need for a Dawes Plan. Again, it is possible in the unregulated markets of the 1920s, the market would have overheated on its own, but JP Morgan’s self-serving largesse did not help the cause. Or we could hope that the industrial powers would have awakened to the real need in 1932 to spend money on anything short of war. Or we could hope, once again, if not in 1918, then at least in 1932, that the socialists had joined the communists to defeat the National Socialists.

In the end, none of these more desirable alternatives materialized. And, arguably, they failed to materialize because individuals made self-defeating choices. Indeed, it is possible, at every turn, to cast blame on the socialists, the equivalent in our story to today’s Democratic voters; who failed at every juncture to do the right thing. They did not throw their support behind the communists fighting the proto-fascists; they did not join the communists to defeat the fascists. They instead took up position with various shades of middle-of-the-road mediocrity.

At the same time, it may be equally important for us to note the conditions under which extreme politics retreated; when prosperity was spread most broadly, from 1925 to 1929 in Weimar, and from 1945 to 1972 in the post-war economy. Is it also important to note that absent war, this evenly-distributed prosperity is likewise unthinkable? I think that it is, not only because it indicates how deeply political sentiment is shaped by individual prosperity or poverty; but also how easily broad economic prosperity masquerades as political enlightenment. Thomas Frank’s lionization of the New Deal downplays the central role that war bonds played in the subsequent prosperity of working families and organized labor. It also downplays the role that European economic recovery played in the growing global competition among industrial powers after 1968; and the diminishing rates of profit investors enjoyed subsequently, from 1968 to 1980. Marxist economist Robert Brenner (UCLA) correctly identifies alternative steps that industrial powers might have chosen in the 1970s and 1980s to maintain broad-based prosperity. But, again, this ignores the actual influence reduced real wages had on the voting patterns of working families.

We could wish that economic violence contained within itself an undistorted map for emancipation. It does not. Instead, many who had every reason to support a left alternative in 2016, either opted for the center or the right. (Many, many also supported Bernie Sanders.) This, it should be noted, is not anomalous. It is, instead, what we should anticipate. This is what happens in industrialized nations during economic contractions that deprive working families of real wages and benefits. Indeed, had Bernie Sanders been nominated and elected with a slate of left-leaning congressional newcomers; this would have been anomalous and would have sent all of us scrambling back to our models to see what went wrong.

If I am right and if economic conditions play a far more central role in political outcomes than many of our theories hope for or even allow; then does that mean that we are doomed?

No. I do not think so. But nor are we guaranteed a happy ending. Let us suppose, however, that we are not only interested in slates, but in legislative outcomes, not in ideological victories, but in legislative victories, not in theoretical virtuosity, but in actual possibilities. Those on the left must learn to read candidates less by their colors than by their voting records, less by the metadiscourse than by pragmatic outcomes. We all know by now that there are many Democrats who today stand far to the right of Richard Nixon. (An informal survey of High School students in Berkeley, CA, found Dwight D Eisenhower the most liberal President in the post-war period. Can we imagine any Democrat talking about the “industrial-military complex” today?) But we also know that many Democrats display voting records that place them on the left-wing of actual possibilities; among them Ms Pelosi.

When the alt-right began organizing back in the 1960s, they did so at the most local level: school boards, commissioners, councils. When microeconomic realities turned in their favor — when military Keynesianism spent its wad — the alt-right stood poised to claim their reward. In the mean time, however, they made it a point to support the most conservative of candidates capable of winning (some of whom did not win, but many of whom did). I do not believe that it is defeatist to support left of center mainstream candidates while focusing my energy on vulnerable right of center candidates.

This, to be sure, risks repetition of 1918 and 1932, where a fragmented center gave rise to a polarized right and left; and, where, at least in Carl Schmitt’s taxonomy, the right always enjoys an advantage. Nevertheless, by targeting vulnerable right-wing seats (and by preserving those that are left of center), it might be possible to push the alt-right back far enough to make room for more broad-based organizing. That is my hope. But it is only a hope. We might well end up with 1918 or 1932. And my reservations over rigid adherence to the far left might be a contributing factor. I hope not. But history is not in my favor.

I am therefore, by default, caught in the middle.

It would have been easy to feel in 1932 that paralysis in the Reichstag would have tipped support away from the extreme parties back toward the center. It did the opposite. For those of us giddy over Republican inability to govern, Germany may bring a note of caution. Inaction would only push voters back to the center if their move to the right had been reasonable in the first place. A more likely scenario is for voters to want a dictator who can get things done without politics getting in the way. Sobering. 

As I have for almost ten years, today I finished my semester with Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1928/32). When I last taught Schmitt we were gearing up for the presidential elections last fall. He is even more appropriate today than he was then.

For those not familiar with Schmitt or why his thought has proved so enduring, consider this. Let us suppose that you are a political entity that wishes to reach a compromise with other political entities with whose principles you differ. Now let us suppose that among the entities with which you must compromise is a political entity committed to the principle of never compromising. Which of you will win?

Carl Schmitt is well worth the read, so don’t take this summary as sufficient. Nevertheless the logic holds infallibly.

When Barrack Hussein Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican leadership staked its future on the principle: never compromise. And they won. Moreover, even should voters punish them in 2018 for sticking by this principle, their electoral defeat will itself reinforce the principle of no compromise. They will have lost. But their principle will remain intact. When, by contrast, Alisha Kramer beat Jon Ossoff in the Georgia special election, it prompted Democrats everywhere to nod their heads in agreement with Tim Ryan (D-OH): “Our brand is worse than Trump.” Representative Ryan, in essence, was declaring: “I am ready to compromise. I am ready to boot Nancy Pelosi. I am ready to concede defeat. And more.” Thus the brilliance of “never compromise.”

On a less polemical more inquisitive level, we can ask how we have reached a point — politically, institutionally — where a sufficient number of voters no longer trust in the validity of the U.S. Constitution. We knew — we have known for some time — that the U.S. Constitution does not command universal allegiance. Indeed, upon its first publication it generated a groundswell of opposition: the anti-Federalists. These anti-Federalists have never disappeared. Indeed, in 1861 they provoked a bloody and costly war. They were defeated not by compromise, but by guns and ammunition. They objected again in 1939 — see yesterday’s blog — and, again, they were defeated (see WWII). They objected again — in 1964 and 1965. And, again, they were defeated: not with arguments, but with force. The anti-Federalists — those fundamentally opposed, in principle, to the 1783 U.S. Constitution — are now in the majority. And this was Carl Schmitt’s point. The “political” — those opposed to compromise — always win in the end.

Let us suppose, however, that we spread our wealth out with sufficient breadth and depth. Let us suppose that all of those workers made redundant by innovation were not simply retrained — because, in most instances, this is not possible — but were instead sustained; because their memory, experience, know-how, their lives are not redundant. Let us suppose that they are free to enroll in courses at their local community college or university; to continue to learn and grow. And let us suppose that they are relieved of the fear that so many of the feel.

This is not a natural process. The market will not produce it on its own. It must be won through hard work. And, while it undeniably generates huge efficiencies, it is not for the efficiencies that we value it.

When we redraw our strategic outline for the next decade, we must not ignore “the political”; these folks will not ever be placated. But we also must not forget the overall goal. We believe in life; they don’t. We believe in growth; they don’t. We believe in the future; they don’t. Tim Ryan is wrong. We are right. That is the political.

I have just concluded my penultimate lecture in the History of Economic Thought: Adam Smith to Lord Keynes. And, as I have for almost a decade, I devoted the lecture to Jacob Viner and Frank H Knight, both University of Chicago economics professors, neither specially fond of Lord Keynes. Clearly, however, did I conclude with Lord Keynes, without reference to the emerging Chicago School, that could give the impression that we had already reached 1944, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and three decades of neo-Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy. We are not in 1944. We are in 1937. Before us looms a horrible war. And so it is important that we listen to and hear what the Chicago School is telling us on the eve of this horrible disaster.

It may seem odd to the chorus of libertarians and tea-partiers now packing the Republican delegation, but, to a person, your pre-war heroes — and many of your post-war heroes as well — held nothing but contempt for your political base. They were all atheists; not agnostics. They were atheists. They felt that any intrusion of ethics or morals into perfect markets yielded only distortions, moral hazard, misallocation of resources, and — if that was not enough — the end of western civilization itself. So clear was it to Professors Viner and Knight that western civilization did not rest on Christianity — that it was a science — that neither deemed it worth mentioning; until, that is, Christians began in large numbers to denounce the capitalist social formation; prompting Professor Knight to pen his now-famous third article in “Ethics and Social Reform” published in 1939 on the pages of Economica.

Professor Knight scarcely concealed his fury. In 1931, the Roman Catholic Church issued its infamous Quadragesimo Anno, its declaration opposing capitalism and demanding a living wage for all families. Five years later the world-wide Protestant churches added their voice at the Oxford Conference on Christianity and the Economic Order.

Capitalism — both bodies concluded — was anti-Christian.

Thus Professor Knight’s fury. In summary, Professor Knight responded that (1) Christianity, an ethical religion, has nothing whatsoever to contribute either to institutional, or economic, or political policy. It is ignorant of the contemporary issues. But (2) where it does contribute to the contemporary issues, its counsel is to obey authority. Therefore, when the Pope or the Protestants seek to leverage their faith against capitalism, they are both wrong and deluded.

Now. Self-evidently, this is not a message that would sell to contemporary voters; and therefore it is not a message that would sell to contemporary vote-seekers.

But here is where it gets weird. A student in my class — an alum — approaches me after class to remind me about the less than wholesome investments of the Roman church. True. So true. And about the contradiction between their holdings and their public position. Yes?

And, then I realize. OMG, my students — even my alumnae students —  believe that my recounting of a position aligns me with that position. OMG.

The same Pope that issued the Quadragesimo Anno also supported the Nazi solution to this problem; not the Holocaust, but the totalitarian state formation of the Nazis.

Economic analysis is difficult because students may be inclined to see in your analysis solutions that you did not intend. So, for example, we discussed K Marx at length. I like K Marx. But I do not believe that the answer to our current problems rests in the working classes. (Nor do I believe did K Marx.) Pope John criticizes capitalism. (So do I.) But I do not believe that Rome’s analysis of capitalism is adequate. Nor, in fact, am I entirely in sympathy with the Protestant’s 1931 Conference. I think they were wrong.

What strikes me, however, is that we need to renew the capacity to read those with whose views we may disagree sympathetically, not only because we want to counter them more effectively, but because they may have something to say to us. There is no point any of us occupy outside the event horizon. Listening and understanding does not entail consent.

We have a problem here, a very serious problem. This problem may lead to the end of the Earth. It is therefore imperative that we understand it. I believe the Roman Church, in 1936, grasped a piece of what was wrong. So, too, did the Conference at Oxford in 1931. Yet, Professor Knight was so transfixed by the beauty of equilibrium that he could not see what was just around the corner: the invasion of Austria; the invasion of Poland; the Final Solution. He just didn’t see it. He couldn’t see it.

A Cardinal today was charged with sexual abuse in Australia. We will all today think of Rome. We will think of the bodily mortification entailed by contemporary Roman priesthood and we will all shake our heads in wonder. But sexual abuse does not arise from theology. It arises from the misuse of power. If Rome is abusing power, we need to know this. We need to address this.

The Roman Church owns much property and much wealth. We might wish to know how it uses this wealth.

But these issues are, in some sense, beside the point. They are surely not economic issues. It is 1939. Hitler is poised to enter Austria; to enter Poland. He is poised to initiate the Final Solution. And we are writing an article about how Protestants and Catholics are collaborating with Marxists to subvert the economic order.

Professor Knight. You missed the moment. Have we?

Ok. I will admit it. Go ahead and gloat. Although he is a tad right of Richard Milhouse Nixon, I was hoping that Jon Ossoff would beat Alisha Kramer. Prompting Tim Ryan (D-OH) to blurt out: “Our brand is worse than Trump.” Well. Yea. So?

I will not lay into Rep. Ryan, as so many have, for thinking in terms of “brands.” Wake up. This is the 2010s. If you are looking for substance, you missed it by (oh, I don’t know) about a half century minus a year or two. Branding is everything. Substance is nothing.

What is remarkable — really worth noting — is that Mr. Ryan associates this misbranding with Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the house minority leader, who now, tragically, represents the center of the Democratic Party. Which means . . .

That Democrats should not be so quick to embrace the macroeconomic theory of Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even Chicago and USC. Really? Or does it mean that Democrats should pull back from support for equal human rights for all classes of citizens? Mr. Ryan can you help us here?

But, of course, we know exactly what Mr. Ryan means. (No need to respond to this blog Mr. Ryan. I understand completely.) Mr. Ryan knows that political fortunes rise and fall as parties calibrate their messages to the culture industry’s carefully massaged nodes, out of which survey respondents develop their opinions. Short-sighted politicians — I am led to believe that Mr. Ryan has Ms. Pelosi in mind — allow their principles to fall out of step with the nodes conveyed by popular media.

An older generation — a generation that lived through two horrendous world wars — felt otherwise. They felt that this economic and human carnage might have been avoided had leaders led. (Let me wait a moment while Mr. Ryan shakes his head, which a thought has just clumsily entered.)

We press forward, Mr. Ryan, with human rights and with full access to the full array of health and education choices spread before us for all citizens in our land, because we recognize that only when they are performing at their best can they make the best decisions, politically, socially, culturally, and economically. You want mediocrity Mr. Ryan. I am sure that mediocrity has rewarded you richly. We want something else.

So, yes, the Democrat brand may be worse than Trump. But, no. You are mistaken. Ms. Pelosi is not our problem.