Bettering Mankind by Enslaving It.
Do we understand freedom as individual agency leading to an emergent social order, or does the social order provide the material conditions and impose the constraints within which individuals exercise their agency? That's one of the more contested topics in political philosophy, and Victor Hanson, in The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, lays down a marker in support of the former concept, with a denunciation of the latter concept as being contrary to freedom.
Yes, that title is polemical and engages in more than a little question-begging, and I could keep Book Review No. 9 brief by noting much of the argument is about Donald Trump's tussles with the administrative state, with the role of citizenship being tangential to his argument. Perhaps, though, that is the point: if freedom is, see p. 41, the Life of Julia, "proudly and perennially a ward of the state ... unable to become autonomous and independent without federal help," which might be the working out of Franklin Roosevelt's freedom from fear and freedom from want, that Julia is in effect a serf, only "dependent on the Washington bureaucracy" rather than the benevolence of the local earl, well, Mr Hanson would argue that she is neither free nor a citizen.
Along the way, Mr Hanson touches on a number of familiar themes, including approaches to immigration, where his position is close to mine in that assimilation is a two way street; the political aggregation problem in that gridlock takes one form in presidential governments and another in parliamentary governments; the punishment cycles of a grim strategy outcome, with non-enforcement of immigration laws or non-enforcement of gun laws being a contemporary form of nullification; and suspicion of expert opinion, where a quarter century of expert failure of all sorts is the background music of our lives.
The review excerpts in the book and at Amazon tend to come from the populist right and the Militant Normals. Dying Citizen provides intellectual ammunition for those inclined to diagnose what has gone wrong from the populist or Militant Normal perspective. Understanding the arguments might prove productive in conversations with persuadable voters as the election approaches. Whether someone inclined to be skeptical of the populist right or the Militant Normals will be convinced is another matter. It is difficult to square "Millions of American citizens are, more than ever, determined not merely to stop the erosion of their rights and influences but to regain all that they have lost" as the closing sentence with "The Dying Citizen is a clarion call to rebuild our collective national identity," from the back cover blurb, as those differing beliefs about freedom and rights suggest a, singular noun, "collective national identity," does not exist.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
Yes, that title is polemical and engages in more than a little question-begging, and I could keep Book Review No. 9 brief by noting much of the argument is about Donald Trump's tussles with the administrative state, with the role of citizenship being tangential to his argument. Perhaps, though, that is the point: if freedom is, see p. 41, the Life of Julia, "proudly and perennially a ward of the state ... unable to become autonomous and independent without federal help," which might be the working out of Franklin Roosevelt's freedom from fear and freedom from want, that Julia is in effect a serf, only "dependent on the Washington bureaucracy" rather than the benevolence of the local earl, well, Mr Hanson would argue that she is neither free nor a citizen.
Along the way, Mr Hanson touches on a number of familiar themes, including approaches to immigration, where his position is close to mine in that assimilation is a two way street; the political aggregation problem in that gridlock takes one form in presidential governments and another in parliamentary governments; the punishment cycles of a grim strategy outcome, with non-enforcement of immigration laws or non-enforcement of gun laws being a contemporary form of nullification; and suspicion of expert opinion, where a quarter century of expert failure of all sorts is the background music of our lives.
The review excerpts in the book and at Amazon tend to come from the populist right and the Militant Normals. Dying Citizen provides intellectual ammunition for those inclined to diagnose what has gone wrong from the populist or Militant Normal perspective. Understanding the arguments might prove productive in conversations with persuadable voters as the election approaches. Whether someone inclined to be skeptical of the populist right or the Militant Normals will be convinced is another matter. It is difficult to square "Millions of American citizens are, more than ever, determined not merely to stop the erosion of their rights and influences but to regain all that they have lost" as the closing sentence with "The Dying Citizen is a clarion call to rebuild our collective national identity," from the back cover blurb, as those differing beliefs about freedom and rights suggest a, singular noun, "collective national identity," does not exist.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.