The Root of Political Disfunction
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Baltimore Sun
Commentary |
The root of our political dysfunction | GUEST…
OPINIONCOMMENTARY
The root of our political dysfunction | GUEST COMMENTARY
Photos of former President Trump and current President Biden.
The race looks familiar with President Joe Biden (R) and former President Donald Trump topping the ballot. (Brendan Smialowski and Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images/TNS)
Author
By GEORGE LIEBMANN
July 10, 2024 at 6:10 a.m.
Those perplexed by the descent of American politics into a competition between demagogues should explore this phenomenon’s roots in the “liberal” cultivation of irresponsible individualism. A good introduction to this subject is Lawrence Friedman’s 1993 book “Crime and Punishment in American History,” which lends nearly as much insight into the rise of political demagoguery as it does crime.
Friedman describes a “collapse of a system of restraining values … such as self-discipline, delayed gratification and restraint. … The culture simply does not encourage people to be modest, self-effacing, to submerge their egos, to sacrifice their personal desires on the altar of some higher cause.” Friedman attributes this trend to the collapse of the authority of families and other adult groups in favor of “the peer group and the power of a culture that disdains authority and glorifies the individual self.”
To be sure, as Friedman says, “The era of the self has its more positive side: more human freedom, less discrimination and intolerance, less racial and ethnic and sexual repression. Most people will not want to go back to the hierarchical, repressive, prudish, intolerant — and racist, and sexist — society of a century ago.”
Nonetheless, we can find alternatives to the damaging “culture wars” brought about by irresponsible individualism without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Racial discrimination can be curbed without rubbing raw racial grievances, as President Joe Biden did in his recent speech at Morehouse College. Lax election laws can be reformed without raising the specter of blood in the streets by telling paramilitary organizations to “stand by,” as then-President Donald Trump did in 2020. Police abuses can be curbed without denying that black crime claims far more lives than the police. The law can be humane to women without proclaiming absolute abortion rights, which has led to an explosion in the number of children born out of wedlock.
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Ever since the Warren Court era, “liberal” judges with a warped sense of the individual’s role in society have shaped some of the most far-reaching transformations in our country’s history. They handed down a jurisprudence of simple answers: forced school busing; reapportionment cases that empowered prospering suburbs at the expense of declining cities and rural areas; the total secularization of public education; Ginsburgian feminism with its denial of gender roles and expectations; Borkian economics, leading to the dissolution of antitrust laws and the concentration of 40% of the retail trade in two corporations, Amazon and Walmart; the demise of the restraints on the media imposed by the libel and obscenity laws; and finally the introduction of social issues into national politics via the abortion, gun control and “gay rights” cases.
The effect was a transfer of power from legislatures, normally agents of compromise which can swiftly correct their errors, to judges and executive delegates, more insulated from public opinion. The litigation process pitted highly organized advocacy groups and large corporations against young and unprepared state and local attorneys. While there has at last been some countervailing pressure from more conservative advocacy groups, the process is still a contest of extremists.
The result is what Arthur Krock called “a society sickened by quack cure-alls.” One of these was campaign finance “reform” with individual contribution limits for all but self-financed billionaires, transferring power from local leaders who knew candidates to national advocacy groups and megalomaniacs.
The reduction of the power and influence of families, churches and professions results in an empowerment of state institutions, most ominously an ever-growing national police. When the manners of the people no longer have a major voice in the control of society, as Edmund Burke said, “at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affection on the part of the commonwealth.”
George Liebmann (george.liebmann2@verizon.net) is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and politics, most recently “The Tafts” (Twelve Tables Press, 20
Posted in: Criminal Justice, Culture Wars, Education, Judiciary and Legal Issues, State and Local Politics, The Right, Urban Affairs, Welfare and Other Social