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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16242 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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I have no doubt that people think that way. I think that way about a great many decisions of our current Supreme Court. But I think the government should obey them anyway. I thought the Supreme Court judgement striking down Biden's student loan forgiveness was not a well reason decision, but it still would have been wrong of him to say to hell with the court and do it anyway.

Most of the time, most people think this way. But there is a window - broader than the Overton window - that you have to stay inside, or you lose the Mandate of Heaven.

I argue that:

The judiciary must, most of the time, make decisions that people broadly agree with and produce outcomes that they broadly like. This is a fundamental and underappreciated requirement of the Rule of Law.

As America or any country grows more diverse (on many axes) it gets harder and harder to stay inside this window for the majority of people for the majority of the time, with the resulting slow-motion breakdown that we see. FWIW I genuinely don't get the impression that most Trump supporters want a single executive king: instead they want Trump or someone like him to drag the Republic back within their window and then leave it to continue ticking along as before.

If you think we should only have a judiciary if the judiciary makes decisions you agree with and produces outcomes you like and when that doesn't happen we should instead have a single executive take the law and its determinations into their own hands then I think you are anti-American. You are clearly opposed to the fundamentals of the American experiment and what it means to be an American.

FYI I'm not American if you mean that as a personal 'you'. I'm just observing what I see in Anglo countries more generally. But of course many Americans have their own ideas of what it means to be an American! I find this essay very revealing on the topic. It mentions at one point an interview with Captain Preston, a minuteman who had fought against the British.

Excerpt below:

“Captain Preston, what made you go to the Concord Fight [on 19 April 1775]?”

“What did I go for?”

“Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw any stamps, and I always understood that none were ever sold.”

“Well, what about the tea tax?”

“Tea tax, I never drank a drop of the stuff, the boys threw it all overboard.”

“But I suppose you have been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of liberty?”

“I never heard of these men. The only books we had were the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ psalms and hymns and the almanacs.”

“Well, then, what was the matter?”

“Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”[4]

Here is the central problem in American history, as liberty and freedom are essential values in American culture. Scholars have attempted to study it in many ways.

The leading approach might be called the text-and-context method. It begins with American texts on liberty and freedom and fits them into an explanatory context that is larger than America itself. Historians have discovered many different contexts by this method. They variously told us that the meaning of American liberty and freedom is to be found in the context of Greek democracy, Roman republicanism, natural rights in the middle ages, the civic humanism of the Renaissance, the theology of the Reformation, English Commonwealth tradition in the 17th century, British opposition ideology in the 18th century, the treatises of John Locke, the writings of Scottish moral philosophers, the values of the Enlightenment, and the axioms of classical liberalism.

All these approaches have added to our knowledge of liberty and freedom but none of them comes to terms with captain Preston. As he reminded us, the text-and- context method refers to books he never read, people he never knew, places he never visited, and periods that were far from his own time. [5]

FYI I'm not American if you mean that as a personal 'you'. I'm just observing what I see in Anglo countries more generally. But of course many Americans have their own ideas of what it means to be an American!

I did intend that more in royal-you kind of way, not necessarily you specifically. I appreciate the clarification.

Most of the time, more people think this way. But there is a window - broader than the Overton window - that you have to stay inside, or you lose the Mandate of Heaven.

I assert that:

The judiciary must, most of the time, make decisions that people broadly agree with and produce outcomes that they broadly like. This is a fundamental and unappreciated requirement of the Rule of Law.

Perhaps I should take a different tact. My impression, based on polling, is that Trump's deployment of the National Guard to DC is not just unlawful, it is also unpopular. Here is a Quinnipiac poll from August finding voters disapprove 56-41. Here is an NPR-Ipsos poll from late September showing a disapproval of 47-37 for DC that rises to 52-34 when the question is about National Guard deployment to "your local area." To the extent Trump's resistance to the judiciary is premised on having popular support over them, I do not think that is the case with this issue.

I find this essay very revealing on the topic. It mentions at one point an interview with Captain Preston, a minuteman who had fought against the British.

Thanks for the article! I'm enjoying it so far.

I did intend that more in royal-you kind of way

Allowing the informal/singular you (thou) to die was unironically a huge mistake. If wonder if the French have the same problem with polite 'vous' and plural 'vous'...

[Polls]

Interesting and worthy of thought, thanks.

Thanks for the article! I'm enjoying it so far.

Good! He's one of the only really good bloggers I'm aware of, without any particular crankish tendencies.

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