"Midterms: 'Despair or Extinction'”
by John Leake
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. - Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates,” The New York Times (1979)
"As Ron Paul elegantly put it in the title of his essay today, “Republicans Deserve To Lose, but Democrats Do Not Deserve To Win.” President Trump promised “America First” but then chose Washington’s business as usual of more war, more debt, and more inflation. The Democrats are dumb opportunistic wretches.
Regardless of which political party gains control of Congress or the White House, the American people - especially of the working and middle classes - are thoroughly abused by the US government. Both political parties serve shadowy, undeclared interests that have little to do with the interests of ordinary citizens.
To my surprise - given that I’d long thought of Hegel as wrong about many things - the situation strikes me as a perfect example of what he wrote about in his 1824 book, "Elements of the Philosophy of Right," in which he defined the relationship between institutions and the ethical principles that give them legitimacy.
As he explicated it, institutions are not merely collections of laws, procedures, offices, and traditions, but an expression of an ethical spirit - the living embodiment of justice, freedom, and the common good. When this animating spirit departs, an institution may continue to exist in its outward form while losing the spirit that gave rise to it. In his view, the legitimacy of an institution does not only spring from its antiquity, legal authority, or established procedures. Legitimacy is conferred only when the institution continues to embody an ethical purpose.
The family, civil society, and the state are legitimate insofar as they give concrete expression to human morals and freedom. Their authority and activities are instruments through which these ethical purposes are realized, rather than ends in themselves.
Over time, institutions may become increasingly preoccupied with their own preservation and privileges. Officials may come to regard their activities as intrinsically valuable, even when they no longer serve the purposes for which they were created. What began as a living expression of a moral or political ideal may calcify into an apparatus of administration and authority that serves no one but the officials and their cronies.
This distinction between living substance and empty form lies at the heart of Hegel’s understanding of history. Human societies evolve, and institutions that once embodied rational principles may become inadequate to changing historical circumstances. Their continued existence does not necessarily mean they continue to be legitimate. The persistence of an institution’s outward structure may conceal the fact that the historical conditions and ethical convictions that sustained them in the past are no longer operative.
Hegel’s discussion of the decline of Roman political life provides an illustration. Republican institutions and legal forms persisted after the civic spirit that had once animated them died, and the driving force in public life became the ambitions and whims of an increasingly selfish and reckless oligarchy. Political participation became formal rather than substantive, while public authority became detached from the ethical life of the community. The preservation of institutional appearances could not compensate for the disappearance of their underlying ethical substance.
To be sure, Hegel did not regard institutional continuity as inherently suspect, nor did he believe that institutions should be discarded merely because they were old. On the contrary, he considered enduring institutions essential for the realization of freedom. His concern was whether their established forms continued to embody a living ethical order. Reform or transformation becomes necessary when a contradiction develops between an institution’s professed purpose and its actual operation.
A government may retain its constitution, a university its academic ceremonies, a church its liturgy, or a court its elaborate procedures long after the humans who occupy these offices have ceased to believe in their founding tenets. In such circumstances, institutional continuity can become an illusion of legitimacy. And so it is with the US government, which is now - with a few notable and decreasing exceptions - a coterie of ignorant and uncouth hucksters who neither understand nor care about the Constitution."
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