Hic Sunt Dracones is Latin for the warning phrase “There be Dragons” which seemed a perfect way to end this Trilogy. I have been warning of the coordinated convergence of what can only be described as a Left and Right pincer action to shepherd people blindly in a common direction. The rationales vary, the soothing euphemisms differ, and the admitted alliances among various public policy think tanks shift nominally. Behind all the deceit though, the distant social, economic, political, and personally enslaving destination never varies anymore. Since the Left at least admits what it intends, let’s start there and then I will show how the Right Pincer works as it seeks to guide to the same place in our respective futures.
When I started this Trilogy, I had come across a phrase “the process theory of the law” that seemed to fit with what I had been seeing on how to reliably lock the real Education and other local initiatives that we now know fit with the Social Determinants of Health or what Urie Bronfenbrenner called the various levels of his Bioecological Systems Theory into place. When we read references to the ‘rule of law’ now, most times it actually (and invisibly) references an affirmative, normative use of the law to bind individuals to a vision selected for them, whether they recognize this reality or not.
The Process Theory of the Law was developed at Harvard in the late 40s and spread to other elite law schools. It was apparently an elective 2nd Year Course there that has greatly influenced what many in our federal judiciary here in the US and also the professorate see as the new late 20th Century and 21st Century use of the law. Since SCOTUS member Stephen Breyer is considered an exemplar and he does like to write books, let’s take a look at what he laid out in Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution. In my mind what Breyer is saying is that the law and cries of public policy, human flourishing, and democratic purpose can all be use to enslave the individual. (my bolding)
“…a certain view of the original Constitution’s primary objective…sees the Constitution as furthering active liberty, as creating a form of government in which all citizens share the government’s authority, participating in the creation of public policy. [See why I have been warning we will not like where the phrases governance or self-government actually shift us?] It understands the Constitution’s structural complexity as responding to certain practical needs, for delegation, for nondestructive (and hopefully sound) public policies, and for protection of basic individual freedoms. And it views the Constitution’s democratic imperative as accommodating, even insisting upon, these practical needs.”
Now, not to be sidetracked by political theory here, but when someone starts to insist that meeting human needs is an obligation the State at all levels and each of us has, we have shifted to Uncle Karl’s Human Development Society, whether anyone cites the bearded old destructive theorist or not. This relates as well to what I covered here back in January http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/niti-nyaya-government-by-think-tanks-and-every-student-succeeds/ If anything the drumroll of deceitful false narratives and the offered rationales have simply become more profuse in 2016. Let’s go back to someone who at least admits to where this is all going and who remains alive in a place to see it implemented.
Let’s look up Stephen Breyer’s definition of the law and how a legal text should be interpreted: “law that helps a community of individuals democratically find practical solutions to important contemporary social problems.” See how it is not about the individual anymore except as needed to bind him or her to the stipulated common vision? Anyone still wondering why the actual definition of Career Ready Practices for the Classroom or mandated Positive School Climate for the school all end up pushing practices backed by communitarianism theories? Breyer hypes a theory he calls ‘cooperative federalism’ because of the federal government’s limited “ability to control the activities of individuals and businesses.” Get a different level of government to do it then and then hype it as “preserving a more local decision-making process.”
Does that sound to anyone else like the official talking points on ESSA–the new federal education legislation? How about what a recent paper from the RSA in the UK told us about New Public Governance and “Changing the Narrative: A New Conversation Between the Citizen and the State”:
“it is actually the local state rather than the national state that is best positioned to re-negotiate its relationships with citizens, communities, and businesses. Potentially at least, local government operates at a scale of accountability, with a degree of accessibility, and with a sensitivity to identity and diversity that it would be hard for central states to match.”
Potentially at least, but not when the mayor, state legislator, city council members, or other local political figures go to presentations by local think tanks or go to national conferences to be trained in viewing their cities, schools, area businesses, etc. as systems that can be planned and directed by political power and the affirmative use of the law. As part of the right pincer, supposedly opposite side of the Guided by Public Policy Sluice, we get lots of talk these days of ‘subsidiarity.’ Yet if we have School Choice that actually leads to internalized changes in beliefs at the level of the human mind and prescribed practices that make responding from emotion an unconscious habit, are we not playing right into what Stephen Breyer called a “lawmaking process…[that] involves changes that bubble up from below…this ‘bubbling up’ is the…democratic process in action?”
Under Standards- or Competency-based education and where School Choice actually leads under current legal dynamics in charter language or when money follows the child, what is in place to ‘bubble up’ is still to be very much of a planned, directed blueprint down to the ‘internalized capabilities,’ beliefs, and values of the students. Suddenly the Right and Left pincers, education policies, and the actual use of the law mean that every level of any human activity system, including people individually, are being guided in a coordinated, planned manner so that “laws will work better for the people they are presently meant to affect” as Stephen Breyer put it.
At least he is honest with his declared “better to translate public will, determined through collective deliberation, into sound public policy.” My problem is when I hear a think tank fellow tell a group that they must adopt his recommended education policies or a state will never be able to afford the health care costs of its aging population when I know the policies do not actually work as prescribed. Likewise when I heard about the speech of Donald Trump Jr at the Republican Convention, it was apparent to me that someone had incorrectly explained to him how School Choice operated in reality. Since he cited FH Buckley of George Mason Law and his book The Way Back, and Professor Buckley agreed he was the advisor, I decided to take a look.
That April 2016 book may be one of the more obnoxious books I have ever read. We have to wonder why the Bradley Foundation that owns Encounter Books wanted this particular narrative to be disseminated. “Socialist Ends by Capitalist Means” is the declared premise and it envisions a future where “everyone is provided with the opportunity to flourish.” Stephen Breyer calls that active liberty and Amartya Sen considers that to be what individual freedom is now to mean. See what I mean about right and left pincer action once we recognize the underlying theory and what the admitted Left states they intend to do with it?
Interestingly, we may want to tell Professor Buckley about the BRAIN Initiative I have covered and the Science of Virtues Project the Templeton Foundation and the NIH are pushing at the University of Chicago since he sarcastically declares that: “I haven’t heard of plans to rewire our brains to eliminate it” [referring to the acquisitive instinct of individuals throughout history]. I do not know why Professor Buckley chose to cite so many radicals and admitted Marxists from the Left to frame his desire that “the promised land of equality might follow.” I recognize them because I have to read so much from the Left to accurately locate these blueprints. I do not want the US to become Denmark as the book cites and I know Buckley knows his Marxist theory because he states:
“As the most advanced capitalist country, America should have been the first place where socialism triumphed, according to Marxist theories of history…Today America is both unequal and immobile. As that becomes more apparent, we might begin to see the kind of class consciousness that Marx thought was missing in 1850s America, and with this a greater support for wealth redistribution schemes.”
Does that sound ‘Conservative’ or pro-market? When I say this is Uncle Karl’s vision and both sides are pushing it using euphemisms, I am not using my imagination to chase ghosts. At least Justice Breyer states honestly where he intends to go with the law, even if he is prone to taking a political theory like ‘deliberate democracy’ and stating it as a factual tool to now be used. He also cited a revisionist historian Bernard Bailyn who is associated with what James Block in A Nation of Agents called a major effort to “frame fundamental historical divisions as the precursor of a new organization of society.” See what quotes I can locate when I recognize a cited fact as actually not true?
Block went on to say that this so-called “republican reading of history” should be seen as “at least in part as a quest for participatory community composed of virtuous civic actors living for the common good.” Sounds like what Stephen Breyer wants as an active liberty, ‘bubbling up’ process and what Uncle Karl pronounced as the Human Development Society. So where’s the tie to Buckley’s book? Well, Block stated that other proponents of this republican misreading of history, as I will call it, “were Gordon Wood and JGA Pocock.” Gordon Wood is the historian Buckley kept citing to in The Way Back. Methinks The Way Back is actually the way forward to Uncle Karl, which is why the book really exists and if I were not a lawyer, history major, AND a maniac researcher I would never have recognized what was wrong with the framing of the book and where it really goes.
Accept the offered vision and defer to the prescribed path from a so-called pro-market public policy think tank. No need to actually accurately inform all of us people being affected. Buckley ended his book with the phrase “Ye are Many, They are Few” and called on a rejection of an “America…increasingly riven by class distinctions, best explained by the sociobiological imperatives of parents who wish well for their children.” Such poppycock, but intended to be influential and deferred to nonetheless.
If we are able to still rely on facts, habits of logical thought, and an accurate understanding of all these coordinated Public Policy sales pitches, we might not go along with the planned vision. We may still be capable of climbing off the Public Policy Sluice or departing the Planned Pathway and jumping free. That’s why we adults get spoon fed euphemisms if we are not on board with the declared Left Fundamental Transformation. Students are just to get neurologically reshaped via Preschool through high school until they are amenable to this entire planned process.
Who else is ready to step off the clearly set out pathway prescribed by the admitted Left and aped by the so-called Right? Ready to move away from the Pincer Action of a Planned Upravleniye Society?