A small "d" democrat..................

 

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt.

-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

Wondering about Francis Bacon...........

 

The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution. 

-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay

Ah, history..................

 

     In America—a constitutional republic that build barriers, checks and balances, and the separation of powers within the construct of the national government and between and among the national and state and local governments—the Constitution was established for the explicit intent of defending against the failed experiences of past republics, such as Athens and Rome, as well as the tyranny of the monarchy, such as Britain, or the mob, such as the French Revolution.  Nonetheless, even the best minds, armed with the most noble and prudent of purposes, are unlikely to birth a republic forever safe from the relentless manipulation, deceit, and plotting of tyrannical minds and forces.  The threat from within is real and always present.  I wish it were not so, but experience and history point otherwise.

-Mark R. Levin, On Power

Still..........................

 

.........one of the most powerful letters ever written.

Mixed blessings....................?

 

     The legendary Morgan was seventy years old in the fall of 1907, nearing the end of his epic reign.  Founded in 1871, J. P. Morgan & Co. was regarded as the "greatest international banking firm in the world" and "what the business world considered the headquarters of financial power."  No single person in the history of Wall Street had ever wielded more power and influence than J. Pierpont Morgan.  Under his rule, the House of Morgan had helped modernize the American economy, transforming the sprawling hinterland of relatively small companies that characterized nineteenth-century capitalism into the mighty corporate structures that dominated the twentieth century.

-Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside The Greatest Crash In Wall Street History And How It Shattered A Nation

Freedom—it's not so easy.................

 

A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed.  But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power—a power not available to opponents.  Sooner or later, if not in the lifetime of the ruler, then in that of his or her descendants, there is an inescapable risk of tyranny.  Freedom can only be guaranteed in a political system where the constitution sovereign is God himself, where he has sought and obtained the free consent of the governed, and where he has bound himself to respect human freedom.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

True, until it's not..............

 

Through time and across countries, history has shown that there is a symbiotic relationship between those who have wealth and those who have political power, and that the type of deal they have between them determines the ruling order.  That ruling order continues until the rulers are overthrown by others who grab the wealth and power for themselves.

     Wealth and power are mutually supportive.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order:  Why Nations Succeed and Fail

Ah, the Constitution........................

 

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

-Alexander Hamilton

No sense having power...........

 

.......................if you don't know how to wield it:

Checking in...................................

 

............................with Ray Dalio:

No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.

To see the big picture, you can't focus on the details.

What I don't know is much greater than what I know.

I have been wrong more times than I can remember, which is why I value diversification of my bets above all else,

. . . throughout time and in all countries, the people who have the wealth are the people who own the means of wealth production.  In order to maintain or increase their wealth, they work with the people who have the political power, who are in a symbiotic relationship with them, to set and enforce rules.

-All quotes culled from the early-going of his book, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

centralization...........................

 

     I think that extreme centralization of government ultimately enervates society, and thus, after a length of time, weakens the government itself; but I do not deny that a centralized power may be able to execute great undertakings with facility in a given time and on a particular point.  This is more especially true of war . . . All men of military genius are fond of centralization; and all men of centralizing genius are fond of war . . .

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Fourth Book, Chapter IV

pressing advantages.............

What Alice Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt, is true of Mr. Trump, at least as far as his approach to international and domestic politics. He wants to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening. . . .

The 47th president loathes crusades for democracy, despises multinational institutions, and treats international courts with the contempt he believes they deserve. While he genuinely hates war, Mr. Trump believes in pressing America’s economic, technological and military advantages as far as he can in pursuit of an expansive vision of the national interest.

-Walter Russell Mead, from here

misuse........................

 I would counter that the purpose of putting limits on yourself is not only to encourage the other side to reciprocate. It is to safeguard against your own fallibility. The problem with authoritarianism is not just that the other guy might misuse power. It is also that you might misuse it.

-Arnold Kling, from this episode

the very condition...................

 

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.  Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

-Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics

on unlocking human doors...............

 

     It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay The Poet

Coyote's Law...............................

......................Don't give the government a power that you would not like your worst political enemy to wield.

"money power".........................

 

This idea was at the core of Van Buren's worldview.  It would never change.  Collusion between government and private interests, he believed, would always enrich the few at the expense of the many.

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

and no solution in sight.............

Politics is about power, and at the heart of the Abrahamic vision is a critique of power.  Power is a fundamental assault on human dignity.  When I exercise power over you, I deny your freedom, and that is dangerous for both of us.  The opening chapters of Genesis are about the abuse of power.   Cain murders his brother Abel, and two chapters later we read, "The Earth was corrupt in God's sight and was full of violence" (Genesis 6:11).

      Abrahamic monotheism is based on the idea that the free God desires the free worship of free human beings.  The historical drama of the Bible turns on the question of how to translate individual freedom into collective freedom.  How do you construct a free society without the constant risk of the strong dominating and exploiting the weak?  That is the issue articulated by the prophets, and it was never completely solved. 

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,  The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

maxims.........................

 

Unlike Clinton, who wasted precious capital after his 1817 landslide, Van Buren moved at once to consolidate his power.  "It was one of Mr. Van Buren's maxims," Hammond wrote, "that that which ought to be done, should be done quickly."

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren:  America's First Politician

unflagging diligence...............

 

     Making votes was one example of how corruption evolved—one could even say became democratized—in post-Revolutionary New York.  Given that land was no longer the sole path to wealth, politics became another pipeline.  Elites funded newspapers that promoted their interests.  They bribed legislators in exchange for votes on banks, turnpikes, and chartered corporations.  Van Buren saw this "implied alliance" between monied interests and the state as a means of restoring colonial-era oligarchy under a different guise.  Columbia's "money power" was, he believed, the essence of Federalism, whose raison d'etre was to "combat the democratic spirit of the country . . . an object which it has pursued with unflagging diligence."

-James M. Bradley,  Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician