Partial Readings: The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy

Partial Readings: The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy

Partial Readings: Cultural Contradictions of Democracy

The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy
Kenneth Minogue joins a distinguished line of jeremiad-writers in the New Criterion, claiming that only the individualist ethos can save us from the moral decadence caused by welfare, statism, political correctness, and victimhood. The dynamic of democracy works to stifle the true morality of traditional privilege and hierarchy: “[The] drive to equalize the conditions of a population, to institute something called ‘social justice,’ to make society a model of ‘inclusion’?all such things will eventually be advanced as an element of ‘democracy.’…Democratization is the most dramatic of all the corruptions of constitutionality in which separation and balance are to be replaced by a single ideal believed to solve all problems.”

The “Postradical Generation”
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: David Fontana traces Obama’s moderate Supreme Court justice nominations back to “a distinctive generation of figures in elite law schools,” shaped by an aversion to the conflicts between law faculty of the Old and New Left. Kagan and Sotomayor may not be conservative, but their search for common ground has paved the way for a more aggressive conservative agenda: Many on “the left, who once might have aggressively pursued liberal legal ideas, are now increasingly writing about law from a more theoretical or quantitative, and therefore less practical, perspective?making their writing less related to the issues judges decide and making them less obviously candidates for future judgeships…Those pushing a more aggressive jurisprudential agenda now are more on the right of law faculties.”

Sons Near the Sun
Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome, a look at American foreign policy folly on the eves of the First World, Vietnam, and Iraq Wars, hit bookstores yesterday. Jim Sleeper’s review brings only the third case into focus, suggesting that Beinart is “writing about himself” as much as about American history–and that the former inhibits the latter: “But can history as therapy resolve such conflicts? Beinart’s mythic, Freudian views of our policy past need to be supplemented with harder-headed structural reckonings that would take fuller account of the economic and nationalist currents driving our leaders and their political progeny.”

Enhanced Interrogation Critiques
Barry Gewen writes an ambivalent retrospective on torture under the Bush administration, defending its limited use: “Ticking bombs are not mere figments of an authoritarian imagination. To assure national security, a president may have to bend or break the law?much as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War when he suspended habeas corpus and imprisoned thousands without benefit of due process.” And torture may not only reside in our past: [We] can well imagine that the moral calculus of national security would tilt the White House heavily toward the sort of decisions that would make Dick Cheney smile.”