cartoon from History4Kim
I was startled to see political scientists associated with the New Left go so far as to condemn the Constitution and the Founders as terrorists, inflicting Federalist authoritarianism upon antiFederalists and before that, Indians and Nature herself.
This blog is about the coordinated attack on the US Constitution by “moderates,” social democrats and New Leftists in academe. My views have been informed by reading leading political scientists: Sheldon Wolin (The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution, 1989), Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Ziegler (The Irony of Democracy, 1970 now in its fifteenth edition!).
Dye and Ziegler, unlike the late superstar Sheldon Wolin, make the argument that New Deal liberals (social democrats) are the only advocates of “democracy.” Of course, all three political scientists. take a dim view of the power elite, and are critical of the Enlightenment, white males and, in Wolin, the Reagan administration).
Illustration by Michael Hogue for American Conservative
But in both books such contemporary conflicts as the culture wars are viewed as outgrowths of the elitism inherent in a society that defends private property and the meritocracy at the expense of benighted women and blacks. Wolin is more measured in opposing current-day Federalists, but he still ends one essay by lamenting the force that Hamiltonian-style statism exerts on you and me. The late Princeton professor ends up agreeing with Dye and Ziegler that the American state is militaristic and outrageous in its power and reach.
By implication, capitalism, not social democracy (the latter an understandable elite response to capitalist crisis in Dye and Ziegler), is thus blamed for all social ills, but especially for the oppression of blacks and women. Gone is the 1930s’ charting of class conflict with predictions of working class victory. It is all New Left “anti-imperialism” and cultural relativism now. (On the case for and against cultural relativism, see https://clarespark.com/2014/03/13/what-is-cultural-relativism/.)
With the deceptive Constitution and the Federalist Founders thus tainted as designing aristocrats, is it any wonder that the electoral victory of Trump and his supporters appalls half of our country, conditioned as they are by the ascendancy of the New Left and its revolt against what they deem to be a terror state, American style?
Antiwar album cover
The Clare Spark Blog 