To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
I recently finished reading Hamilton by Ron Chernow. It gave me a new respect for this, the most maligned member of the group referred to as our founding fathers. Not only did he anticipate the Orange Hate-Monkey, he anticipated the disposition of the Democrats and Republicans as believing they both have the exclusive ownership of the truth.
In the last analysis, democracy isn’t just a set of institutions or shared principles, but a culture of mutual respect and civility. People must be willing to play by the rules or the best-crafted system becomes null and void, a travesty of its former self. We are now seeing on a daily basis presidential behavior that would have been unimaginable during more than two centuries of the American experiment. Not only is Trump himself on trial, but he is also testing our constitutional system to the breaking point. In his worst imaginings, however, Hamilton anticipated — at least in its general outline — the chaos and demagoguery now on display in Washington. He also helped design and defend the remedy: impeachment.
…or “why the Federalist Society is not your great, great, great, great grandfathers federalist society.”
Facebook took the time to inform me today that the Federalist Society had added an event to their schedule. I was befuddled by this. Why should I care? Why is this in my notifications? Did I mistakenly like this right wing ideological factory? Why would I do that?
Well, the why in all those questions is quite easy to figure out. The Federalist papers and the Federalist party were a group of the founders of the United States who set about to promote the adoption of the constitution, most of whose writings came from Alexander Hamilton. When I ran across the page on Facebook I assumed that the group was organized to promote some form of return to the US’ constitutional roots, or at least to promote a move to update the language in the constitution to reflect the current structures that the government empowers so as to give them constitutional legitimacy (things like Social Security, Medicare, and money not based on a commodity like gold and silver) but what I have discovered since liking the page on Facebook is that the Federalist Society is just another Koch funded venture. Just another attempt to promote their desire to keep their ill-gotten gains cloaked in conservative ideology.
Within just a few years, the group was embraced and funded by a number of powerful, wealthy conservative organizations, which eventually included foundations associated with John Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Richard Scaife, and the Koch brothers. “The funders all got the idea right away—that you can win elections, you can have mass mobilizations, but unless you can change élites and the institutions that are by and large controlled by the élites, like the courts, there are limits to what you can do,” Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics at Pomona College and the author of “Ideas with Consequences,” a study of the Federalist Society, said. “The idea was to train, credential, and socialize a generation of alternative élites.”
The Federalist Society is one of the more the well-respected public faces of this dark conservative web of money within American society. This mechanism created specifically to throw off the yoke of income tax and to secure the wealth of the wealthy for the wealthy and their children exclusively. When I was a member of the Libertarian Party, no one talked about the Koch brothers influence on the party, on the nature of libertarian thought itself, and yet David Koch was one of the early (vice) presidential candidates and spent large sums of his own money to promote the ticket and the party. They co-created the CATO institute, frequently referenced in the early years of this blog, the leading libertarian think tank in Washington DC. Their views on money and finance permeate all of libertarian thought, which is why American libertarians deny the existence of libertarian socialism.
This desire to codify their wealth as theirs beyond question predates the Koch brothers even though they are the current target of choice for most liberals. Jane Mayer has been doing the generic book tour promoting her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. She’s been in high demand since the 2016 election upset that yielded the Orange Hate-Monkey. Here she is talking about what she learned while writing the book on last week’s episode of On the Media,
By about 1971, some of the leaders of the biggest businesses in America became alarmed. They watched the anti-Vietnam War movement taking on the companies that were involved in the defense industry, the consumer movement of Ralph Nader and the environmental movement that was beginning to call for all kinds of regulations on pollution. And you get this kind of call to arms by Lewis Powell, who was then a lawyer from Richmond; he wasn’t yet on the Supreme Court. He wrote a paper for the Chamber of Commerce and he said, ‘big business, if you don’t get organized, we’re going to lose our way of life. The enemy is not the kids who are on the streets protesting, it’s not hippies or yippies. The enemy is elite public opinion. And if we want to fight back, we have to change the way the elite public opinion is formed in this country, all of the instruments that form public opinion, meaning the media, the pulpits, academia, science, the courts and public policy. So the creation of right-wing think tanks, starting in the late 1970s, was an answer to Lewis Powell’s call to arms. The people who set up the Heritage Foundation were literally talking about this Lewis Powell memo and saying, ‘we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to spend money, we’ve got to fight back.’ Joseph Coors, who was heir to a brewing company in Colorado, sent a letter to his senator, Gordon Allott and said, ‘I’ve got money, how do I spend it?’ And an aide who was working for Allott saw this letter, and his name was Paul Weyrich, and he was one of the two founders of the Heritage Foundation and he said, ‘I’ve got an idea. We’re going to set up this think tank.’
The Heritage Society and the Federalist Society are no different from each other once you scratch the surface. Denying science when it suits their purposes, catering to the wealthy with their laughable ideas about supply side or trickle-down economics, undermining the ideals of civic duty and public good with their willingness to take large amounts of cash directly from the wealthy. They are worse than the John Birch society was. At least the Birchers believed the bullshit they peddled. These guys peddle whatever the wealthy pay them to say. They no more believe what they say than the Orange Hate Monkey might believe what he said yesterday or even an hour ago. They’ll believe it so long as they are being paid to believe it. They are preaching conservative ideology every bit as reprehensible as anything the John Birchers ever stood for, and they do it openly as just another thing they want to do to America now that they have control of it since that is what their funders want of them.
One hundred and fifty-six members of the current congress signed a pledge that was created by one of the Koch’s groups saying they will do absolutely nothing about global warming that costs a single cent.
Every time a conservative/libertarian calls calls you a collectivist, they are merely repeating a talking point of David Koch. They are all David Koch clones that are incapable of independent thought. If they could have independent thoughts they might actually question what is so bad about doing things as a group, since nothing much gets done these days without working as a team. They certainly aren’t opposed to owing fealty to a king or dictator, what they really mean by saying “collectivist”. If they were opposed to the centralization and assertion of power they wouldn’t be Stormtrumpers now, would they?
So the long and the short of this is that I unliked the Federalist Society page on Facebook. I really don’t have room in my headspace to sort out all of the various sources of bullshit I’m exposed to these days, especially with the conservative/libertarian love child currently sitting in the White House. The pruning of my libertarian delusions continues at its same, slow pace.
