The Political Hat

     A hallmark of Fascism is a disgust with both the individual ipso individual and for democracy. This hallmark is shared and enthusiastically endorsed by the New Republic in an article that celebrates an enlightened technocratic elite.

     Ah, the elite that fancies itself as new Feudal Lords, to take and give based not upon any rational basis but upon Progressive ideology so contrary to reality and human nature…

     Let us, if we may, grok yet again the depth of the Left’s ideological obsession:

“It is hard to make out, but there is a deeper dialectic at work in the Progressive mind, not unlike that more famous dialectic conjured up by that hairy German fellow. The purpose of the Administrative State—best understood with Saint-Simon’s famous single sentence description about how ‘the government of men is replaced by the administration of things’—is to create a new people.

“The late, great Martin Diamond—a former Leninist—understood this clearly. I ran across this old passage from Diamond over the weekend, writing back at a time (the late 1960s) before the more accurate term ‘Progressive’ had re-emerged (hence his use of ‘liberal’ here, which means the same thing as today’s ‘Progressive’):

“‘The liberal aim is thus clear. In order to transform the human condition, which is his deepest aim, the liberal seeks to make the political order fully dependent upon a transformed people. To achieve the transformation, he seeks the right kind of constitutional institutions to produce the right kind of party to produce the right kind of majority. At the very center of liberalism there is the theory of the truly democratic party—unified and coherent and thus capable of summoning up from the unformed mass the majority acquiescence in the liberal goals that, the liberal believes, is the natural inclination of the true majority. To such a majority, the Constitution with its “auxiliary precautions” does indeed obstruct the way.’

“Yes, this is a polite way of saying Progressives are indistinguishable from totalitarians. An elitist minority defines a priori what the majority must believe to be truly ‘democratic.'”

     With that in mind, let us yet again Fisk the rambling idiocy of the Left…

Yes, you must give us all a good fisking!

“‘The point of politics is policy,’ Ezra Klein explained in the happier days of spring 2014. The statement could be a credo for the Beltway’s wonk class—the congressional staffers, anonymous bureaucrats, and think-tank fellows whose careers rest on the belief that all the histrionics of campaigning and the hyperventilating of cable news are just a freak show that distracts from the real work of governing. Spin might sustain a political movement for an election, but eventually voters will want to see results, and the technocrats will have their day.”

     IOW, “oh lordy how can those ‘freak shows’ upon which any legitimate government rests, being upon the consent of such ‘freaks’, dare impinge upon the enlightened revelations of the Beltway class???

     Can’t the hoi polloi keep their own serfdom kind?

“Underpinning this argument is the conviction that, as Barack Obama put it, the government has a responsibility to ‘get stuff done.’ From that simple premise follow the many issues that consume political debate today: foreign policy, economic policy, immigration, health care, education, environmental policy, and on and on. However disparate the subjects under consideration, once they have been elevated to the realm of policy, a set of assumptions clicks into place. A policy is a commitment to use government power to achieve a specific goal. Policy needs policymakers, trusted experts with the discretion to carry out the tasks they have been assigned. The policymaker’s work is never done: foreign affairs, the economy, and all the rest are issues to be managed, not problems that can be resolved once and for all. Think of Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve, constantly monitoring the economy’s performance to ensure that it is growing at a sustainable rate.”

     Ah, so once the incompetent dregs somehow form a holy and divine “Volonté Générale” the self-declared overlords must impost the will as they have divined it! And, after all, who else could scientifically and divinely determined such holy writ!

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