Dialogical Postmodernism: Epistemological Resurgence of Classical Political Science

by Joseph Andrew Settanni

Freedom isn’t free, contrary to the effete cognoscenti and illuminati. An adventure is about to begin, unless there might be the vagrant rambunctious desire, which is not inconceivable, to remain in the sewer of contemporary politics. Placed against popular opinion, this is a solid critical discussion as to why modern political science is, actually, no better than having varieties of political philosophies as absurd and refulgent fantasies. A fundamental protreptic reorientation is called for concerning the having of a proper perspective for battling valiantly against intellectual, social, cultural, ethical, and moral degeneracy, due to the vile transmutation of political thought into various forms, modes, kinds, or types of ideological-based speculations upon politics, against political affairs.

The often bombastic edifice of political modernity is, thus, seen collapsing under the weight of its own many fashionable self-delusions, though too few publicly seem to give special requisite notice to this derivative existential reality; an era of transition exists; the failing welfare states of Western Europe, lead by Greece, are greatly indicative of the empirical truth of what is asserted; and, America is not really that far behind, if present trends are not more than just significantly reversed quickly or sooner. As the intellectual empowerment and alembic of many different ideologies, the main, philosophically-pivotal thinking behind such enormous disaster can, furthermore, be made well known.

One can note that the destructive cognitive thrust that has willfully backed up this both ill-conceived and unfortunate transformation, for the world, had surely been nominalism in philosophy, especially seen since the time of William of Occam, though there are, also, antecedents among some ancient Greek philosophers; more modern proponents have clearly included, e. g., Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Marx, Lenin, Marcuse, and many others; the rhapsodic cheer leaders of modernity. Of course, the suggested rejection of such extremism, radicalism, is often denounced as itself being extremist, too radical, not the beneficent need for a moderate realism as a significantly better philosophical approach, which resultantly pays many alible political dividends.

The assertion posited is that ideology is actually the sophistic negation of true political thought and, more gravely put, the final nihilistic attempt to boldly eviscerate and flatten into seeming nonexistence the both practical and theoretical need for intelligently respecting and conducting politics both as art and science; consequently, a free political order, free government, requires a clear view of political science, if freedom and liberty are to be properly maintained congruent with, consonant for, self-government and public order; therefore, tyranny, statism, ought to be a cognitive antonym for true government anywhere on the face of the earth, including, one hopes, the United States of America, though this may, at times, be increasingly doubtful for the friends of freedom, for the sons of liberty.

With important questions set regarding, e. g., the wanting of heightened security against contemporary terrorism, the issue and survival of social civil-liberty has been, increasingly, imperiled by the inability to exercise proper and rigorous thought; this is, in particular, concerning what legitimate and warranted political order is to needfully consist of and, moreover, the defensible intellectual basis of that correct perception of such order in terms of a modern polity, especially in the Western world.

Ultimately, it is the logical nature of the presented case here that the perceived endangerment of social civil-liberty, in particular, necessarily puts at quite substantial risk the larger matter of human liberty in general; and, an urgency has unfortunately arisen surely because of the efforts to impose a highly elitist technocratic order and its associated system upon the advanced nations of this world; the political and associated other elites, furthermore, do intensively assume that they have the inherent right to freely exercise such power and to force such a condition upon the common people, whose rights and liberties are to be consequently crushed or, at least, modified toward much certain effectual nonexistence for the alleged progressive ends intended by those elites. There is an answer to that belief in enlightened despotism. As a defender of Roman virtue and basic cognate republicanism, Cicero, in his De Republica, clearly asserts that: “Only in states in which the power of the people is supreme has liberty any abode.” But, contemporary democracy qua the people somehow deified has been horribly reified into becoming a supposed end in and of itself, an ideological shibboleth, not a mere means subject to various needed qualifications and clarifications of intent and meaning, of political objective and denotation as to reliable statecraft; the implementation of that which is truly political in nature in an organic, not artificial, sense.

Discussion of the “Political”

More to the heuristic point intended, the political order of human conduct provokes, therefore, intense consideration of the significant need to try to better understand and comprehend, define and construe, what it is that consists of political science versus political philosophy, as to the rightful and authoritative application of each set appropriately into its proper perspective. The aforementioned reorientation will be tried here, moreover, for the then advantageous and interesting sake of adventurously opening a requisite and truly important debate that was once critically started by, among others, Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott, which needs to be studiously kept in mind.

And yet, it can be so noted that the particular marked deficiencies and inadequacies of the Straussian and Oakeshottian viewpoints have usefully been addressed, whether done intentionally or not, by such writers as Hadley Arkes, J. Budziszewki, Alasdair MacIntyre, E. B. F. Midgley, James V. Schall, and others. [See attached bibliography.] Some might question, however, why Eric Voegelin is not also included; this is essentially because he, ultimately, had yielded fully to the often naturalistic dictates of nominalism in his own politics/philosophical speculations, as to final metaphysical conclusions made. Related reading would cover Thomas Pangle’s Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Legacy, Catherine and Michael Zuckert’s The Truth about Leo Strauss, and Ted V. McAllister’s Revolt against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order. What is considered here the particular dispute, explicitly involved with political theorization pertaining to metaphysical order, that is to be then addressed critically in this lengthy discussion qua anti-postivist prolegomenon?

What has been called modern political science, for the last hundred years or more, has been the endless and often tedious compiling of information pertaining to facts, administrative features, bureaucratic systems and structures, statistics, charts, graphs, and other such things to help establish the presumably “scientific” basis of what is being studied and put into textbooks, journals, classrooms, etc. It has been a matter largely related to quantitativeness and increasing degrees of abstractionization in the approach toward discussing political things. This is as opposed to philosophizing or analyzing what philosophers, upon the broad subject of politics, have been talking about, for many centuries, as to the both objective and factual existence of something known to be politics; this is, moreover, regardless of the enormous and known variables of time, place/geography, ethnicity, language, etc.; thus, political philosophizing is meant to be a fully humanizing and universalizing activity that creatively draws all people, on earth, into the endless and ongoing conversation as an extended analeptic dialogue, inclusive of civitas, civic or public virtue.

Such is the universality of true political science by which the adjunct of philosophy is meant to humanize people versus the forever or ongoing amassment of particularities concerning a wider range and extent of types of governments, administrative structures, political parties, etc. around the world, in general support of the quantitative approach toward knowledge that tends to dehumanize human beings. As ought to be better known, however, the ancient Greeks had used the term politeia as a much more expansive conceptualization and generous application of things that properly encompassed, and today would seem to generally surpass, the mere designation of politics. What, therefore, is the point being theoretically and critically made for discussion, analysis, review, and examination?

When looked at carefully and so critically from the ageless classical point of view, the act of gathering, discussing, analyzing, critiquing, etc. facts, administrative features, bureaucratic systems and structures, statistics, charts, graphs, and other such related things is really the same as looking at opinions about political matters that results, de facto, in a type of general philosophizing upon those matters, not an engagement in science, in the gaining of knowledge. Why is this said? The subjectivity-driven effort at the endless and repeated quantification and abstractionization of the politics of modernity is, therefore, more appropriately of the basic nature of what becomes, in essence, an endless quest for supposedly developing different ways to philosophize, on both numerous and coincidentally miscellaneous details, pertaining to politics and in the widest or most diverse senses imaginable; it encourages heterodoxy within attempts at understanding politics through the constant subjectivization of ratiocination that has gotten easily allied to ideological fixations of various kinds, due to nominalism in cognition.

How is this alleged thoroughgoing and comprehensive subjectivity proven? An example, as analogy, can be taken from the awarding of Nobel Prizes in Economics that, presumably, seeks to honor those who have made substantial and important intellectual contributions to economic science; the same would be true if the Nobel Prize Committee were to also give out awards for presumed excellence in the field of political science. The notable heuristic point to be made here is that, irregularly, in one year the prize in Economics might be given, e. g., to a socialist economist, while in the following year, the prize could be awarded to a free-market economist or, perhaps, to someone whose predilections might be anywhere in between the two extremes so mentioned. Points of any obvious dispute, set in either deliberate or potential contention, are reduced to the level of equal competing and merely subjective opinions qua opinions, not anything that is, in a logical sense, directive toward the ambition to present objective considerations for public view; thus, a clearly reflexive, intellectual reductionism in thought becomes a fairly logical consequence of the continued development, the slippery slope, of progressive nominalism in ratiocination and, resultantly, in modern political science. There comes about, among other problems of cognition, the often subtle reification of facts and, by design, factuality itself, which inevitably seeks its final apotheosis, in some a priori version of an ideology and its theorization as such.

The puissance of truth, consequently, is necessarily just relativized and, sooner or later, held casually at best as a relic of modernism and a nonentity, at a minimum, pertaining to most of postmodernism (e. g., Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rorty, etc.) in philosophy; what may be, thus, said to be economic excellence in thought, at the level of a Nobel Prize, is just then reduced, haphazardly, to what appears subjectively to be thought (so passingly) remarkable at some period in time, though, of course, different schools of economic thought can then contradict each other totally or, perhaps, to varying degrees; but, truth qua the truth never enters into vital consideration as such through the then usual intellectual worshipping of relativism as, in manifest contradiction, a rather dogmatic absolutism. Such a confusion, convolution, and confounded delusion is surely best perceived in both the mental and emotional (or psychological) existence of the matter of ideology, which has been so very productive of the ersatz protean gods of a triumphant modernity. How does this affect political thought? All ideologies are, as needs to be so intelligently seen, bold attempts to forever negate (true) politics, though they claim to either improve, supplement, confirm, or, among the most radical of them, fully transcend all (mere) politics altogether; but, actually, they end up reifying politics, through usually either pragmatism or positivism (or both), into something that it was never meant to be, meaning the assumedly great or cosmic, omniscient all-in-all of exemplified reality, of totalist infrangible truth itself.

The ideology known as totalitarianism, for instance, supremely claimed to be the most radical by making the State the absolute all-in-all that was to control all possible and potential aspects of the lives of all the citizens of a totalitarian State; some important reading would encompass Ludwig von Mises’ Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War; Hannah Arendt, in her contentious volume, The Origins of Totalitarianism, furthermore, had stressed correctly that it, totalitarianism, was so absolutely inseparable from integral considerations of racism and anti-Semitism, in terms of modernity, that had brought such tremendous evil into the modern world. The sure emotional and psychological force of modern ideology will, therefore, not be ever fully broken, wrecked, until racism, inclusive of race baiting, affirmative action, racial quotas, and, of course, racially-based ideological hatreds, is eradicated totally; but, that desirable and admirable achievement will not become actually possible—and the point must be stressed instructively—prior to the much more needed effort to eliminate anti-Semitism, which then ends up becoming either the direct or indirect, implicit or explicit, noetic and causal basis for attempting to both socially and culturally legitimate some sort of broad intellectual basis for (overall) racial hatred. Contrary to much propaganda, how might this, perhaps, controversial contention and its theoretics be made more readily and easily known?

Thus, as an instructive instance, e. g., it is known that Engels had definitely warned Marx against the latter’s virulent dyslogistic anti-Semitism, which is, for instance, explicitly discussed in Nathaniel Weyl’s excellent and classic volume, on the much too often neglected subject, properly titled Karl Marx: Racist. There should be no expunction of the truth. It is quite morally and politically imperative, therefore, that anti-Semitism must be vigorously fought against first as the then cognitively correct basis for, later, then destroying any ideological legitimacy evilly and viciously accorded to racism. What needs to be made better known, since it is not too well understood and comprehended as such, is that all of anti-Semitism functionally acts as the provocative pivot or lever by which justifications and rationalizations are, thus, provided leverage for seeking to make forms, degrees, or varieties of racism (more) palatable to those people who ought to supposedly know better. It is the set archetypal paradigm, besides being a great malignant evil, for all sorts of paranoid and other excesses involved with ideological thought, at many different and diverse levels of hate; until anti-Semitism can be substantially destroyed as a force in the world, there will, consequently, be no successful possibility of eradicating the more general control and attractiveness of ideology and its propaganda, a vile intromission, upon the minds of men.

For as David Horowitz and others can knowledgeably attest, many liberals and leftists qua progressive intellectuals, academics, commentators, cognoscenti, illuminati, etc., not just stereotypical KKK or Skin Head people, are quite genuine and enthusiastic Jew haters. Some historical knowledge may be useful. Modern race-related thinking had started basically in the 18^th century with the French philosophes and, especially, 19^th century with Francis Galton and many others seriously speculating on alleged superiority versus inferiority then concerning different races and racial characteristics; such thinking was later sadly incorporated into ideological formulations of evolutionism, eugenics, and race theories and cognate theorization efforts, as was to be found in, of course, Nazism, a quintessential artifact of quite rampant modernity. And, it can be added that, as was interestingly noted by Strauss, Nazism was actually a real product, in terms of the historico-genesis of certain basic ideas, of classical Liberalism, not a puissant development of reactionary thought, as is too often falsely supposed; for as Richard M. Weaver had, sagaciously and importantly, reminded people, ideas have consequences, which was, of course, the title of one of his still quite interesting books.

Progressivists, one can be so reminded, had been enthusiastic supporters of racially-biased attitudes concerning evolutionism, progressivism, and eugenics, as was certainly quite true, e. g., of such truly prominent historical figures as Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and many others; such was significantly part of the major influential thinking of strident modernity that had significantly influenced the leadership elites of the Western world. Further and massively true empirical substantiation, in the contemporary world, as to how anti-Semitism, in fact, remains the interpretative key to appropriately understanding how such profound hatred exists; it can be so intimately involved in ideological thinking (and its often attendant modernism) by being seen, vividly, in the continuance of what gets usually called Islamofascism or Islamonazism; because modernity has failed, it presents a real challenge for solid statesmanship and statecraft in the modern world concerning, among other matters, how to appropriately deal with Islamic aggression and its rabid jihadist terrorism; all of it, ironically, is based upon an insanely anti-political lust for hagiarchy under a united Islam that destroys prospects for true civic virtue, as opposed to just theo-blind obedience.

Modernity, however, is here not to be simplistically or reductionistically equated with the modern age, rather, with the rise and influence of nominalism in philosophy, translated into ideology, that had gone on to hold sway upon political philosophy, especially as it had influenced, in turn, modern political science. Such overt modernity (postclassical cognition) in thought can be easily seen, e. g., in the radical writings/teachings of Machiavelli, as was correctly noted by Leo Strauss in his Thoughts on Machiavelli. Consequently, the ideologies of triumphant modernism in thought, inclusive of Communism, Nazism, Socialism, Anarchism, Liberalism, Conservatism, etc., assume that the human conservation as to politics is consummated within the limits of each ideological system, meaning that, to all intents and purposes, such discussion, dialogue, etc. has been settled for all time; the right or correct way is known and people are to be just politically directed toward the goals, ends, or limits involved; all this is fully consistent with modern political philosophy that translates its activities into political science in terms of the activation of will. Such considerations can lead to thoughts of a societal paradigm. Paradoxically, the Closed Society (collectivism) and the Open Society (individualism), though falsely assumed rivals, end up being mirror images of themselves, in either making absolute the relativism of ideological discourse or relativizing the absolutism of political speculation; collectivism and individualism are, however, the two sides of the same coin of postclassical assertiveness, though only slightly related, contrary to Voegelin, to supposed Gnosticism; modernity is fundamentally a product of neo-Pelagianism and its secularistic theorization seen through various ideological systems of thought, practical and theoretical, that deal with degrees of human perfectionism and often ataractic promises of a future, intramundane, salvific Utopia. Such a point ought not to be ignored. For instance, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) had proclaimed, in true messianic terms, that the Great Society would, in fact, actually eliminate all poverty in America forever, meaning the War on Poverty, though almost all historians falsely report that he only or merely intended or hoped that this would be the probable result; it was not, however, just merely hyperbolic political rhetoric, as is usually so contended; one ought to go to the Great Society public speeches of LBJ and examine the literature to easily confirm this earthly quest for Utopia. The Left, dissatisfied with reality, seeks ever to uselessly transcend the tragedy of the human condition through either soft or hard revolutionism. This rather overt, secularist, neo-Pelagian immanentization of what ought, by definition, to only be an always necessarily extramundane theological desire is, in its then surely ultimate, manifestly demonic in nature, plainly satanic at its feculent, tenebrific core.

Gnosticism essentially, when it acts as it epistemologically really is, rejects the world, which is so fully consistent with such thinking that provokes an intra-negation of all reality; neo-Pelagianism, however, embraces the world as with, for instance, its highest terrene manifestation being perceived correctly in all sorts of (nominalist-inspired/radical) revolutionism (read: utopianism) favoring the supposed coming of a New Eden, meaning Utopia, once known, among other labels, as the Workers’ Paradise; thus, the Voegelinian critique of modernity is rejected as being both integrally unsound and inherently deficient, especially when considering the classical approach advocated here toward political thought. Though there have been some elements of it seen in modernity, Gnosticism seeks, ultimately, a basic rejection of man’s humanity; the other approach cited desires a reification of terrene humanity by the deification of Man as God in the polynormic Open Society where, e. g., gender, thus, obliterates sex as a New Age denominative through the ideological courtesy of cultural Marxism. Such radical thinking, congruent so easily with nominalism, has very effectively infiltrated, insinuated itself successfully into, the Western world’s soft consciousness and has, thus, been tremendously much more successful than any hardcore Marxism-Leninism; what is denominated as PC thought, in definite support of cultural Marxism, tends quite mightily to end (needed) rational debate and serious discourse in favor, instead, of propaganda as the acceptable “new language” of contemporary, meaning closed, discourse.

In contrast, classical political science qua political philosophy intimately knows that proper and requisite human discussion of that which is of the political in nature cannot, by definition, ever end or be thought to be, somehow or other, simply or permanently settled to whatever degree in this world of men, action and events; in opposition to both the Closed Society and Open Society paradigms, there is yet the Good Society, where continuing political dialogue is then expected and encouraged as a normal part of human reality, as in the permanent classical pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is also related to the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude as part of a classic moral life within a (political) community; these can be, fruitfully, added to civitas, humanitas, fidelitas, and pietas, for G. K. Chesterton, a man of profound thought, properly reminded people of the fairly proto-Christian Roman virtues that the Catholic Church had, in effect, merely baptized and, thus, incorporated. Politics, known as the political substantive existence of human beings, is really inseparable from how people have chosen to organize themselves on a small, medium, or large scale, since at least the beginning of recorded history, which predates the Roman Empire. This is opposed, for instance, to those advocates of the so-called end of history view, spurred on usually by typical Hegelianism/neo-Hegelianism, who do come along, from time to time, and sophistically insist that a definitive culmination and/or fulfillment of all true rational (AKA political) discourse has, in truth, then finally occurred. Or, with the Marxists/neo-Marxists, being also influenced by Hegelianism, dialogue, as associated with alienation (the secularist’s substitute for sin) and its politics, is supposed to end at a time of termination, meaning in the (always pursued but never attained) Workers’ Paradise; all this is what Robert Musil had interestingly referred to as the “second reality” of the ideological realm, the hysteron proteron of such thought notwithstanding. As a late modernist, Lenin, among others, had easily seen the weakening influence of what he regarded as the mythology of the Church on the minds of the masses and wished to substitute, as another means of control, the mythology of the modern State instead; this was to be the start, if not necessarily the conclusion, of triumphant communist civilization, regardless of the actual hyposthenia of the brain that necessarily occurs under collectivist regimes to the detriment of civic virtue and its necessity; so, every communist regime, in a hubristic manner, proclaims itself a political success with all the justification of positivism or even neo-postivism.

Classical political science can only ridicule such a contention, as it is necessarily premised upon a fatuous reading of humanity’s struggle toward achieving a civilized society in that civilization, when looked at too closely, is realistically seen to be skin deep at best. Historian Kenneth Clark, in his book simply titled Civilisation, had recounted how the basis of any society and its culture can be put at risk and survival, consequently, may be merely accomplished by the skin of one’s teeth; civilization is more fragile than is usually imagined and surely requires effort, energy, ability, commitment, and much else for its possible sustainability, in the face of numerous real or potential dangers. The dramatically war-torn history of the pain-filled 20^th century (WWI & II) ought to have put all sage minds on notice as to the hard price that must be, more than may be expected, paid in blood; this is whenever a dream of earthly grandeur inflicts itself upon humanity; and, ideologies, in addition, have stimulated geometrically the desire for blood, as well as utopianism by whatever propagandistic euphemism; and, this is often added into a mix where people do decide between the issues of war and peace in a world that they did not create, yet, fitfully do try to understand out of necessity, if not always pure curiosity or wonder.

With the rejection here of both the Closed and Open Societies, the suggestion and, more than that, affirmation is given that political discourse and extensive dialogue ought, of necessity, continue under the auspices of the Good Society because it supports the proper understanding of that which is rightly political concerning human things and humanity’s proclivities toward imperfection. This is contrasted with the Closed and Open Societies that have, each in its own way, a version of some sort of human perfection on earth; good reading would, therefore, certainly include such books as John Passmore’s The Perfectibility of Man. And, as a direct and empirical result of pursuing forms or degrees of such terrene perfectionism, every attempt to create the New Eden, on this planet, has resulted in a version of Hell. But, wasn’t the end of the Cold War Era supposed to wondrously presage, therefore, a better and safer world? How quickly people [conveniently] forget (and, thus, the needed reminder put here). With a surely belligerent North Korea, Iran, Venezuela (perhaps?), and others seemingly set to eventually join the proliferating nuclear arms club, there seems, on average, to have been a rather uninformed and ignorant optimism mostly attendant with the once assumed, puerile desire for a triumphant political modernism. Regardless of the quite often perceived cognitive dissonance of liberals, some interesting recent reading would usefully cover David Albright’s Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies. People, logically, ought to be fairly troubled and, as a hopeful result, asking cognate questions about the many international implications of the spread of nuclear weapons among despotic and viciously idiomorphic regimes in this world.

Where has the general expectation of a safer and more peaceful world gone, concerning enlightened international relations activities, by which modern political science was then so thought to have the perfected methodologies and procedures and systematic formulas for better regulating and organizing, coordinating and managing, the New World Order? Is this the odd success of failure or the true failure of (assumed) success? One wonders if the liberty of millions of human beings, through a misplaced optimism, hopefulness, based upon a mainly supine rationalism, has been put into jeopardy during the start of the second decade of the 21^st century. As against such disgusting (anti-political) things as, e. g., the highly repressive and suppressive, illegitimate, theocratic-despotic regime that so corruptly runs Iran, liberty is, thus, quite a core question, meaning especially if politics is to have any real substantive meaning, inclusive of the existence of (legitimate) governments; and, on the specific matter of Iran, Obama will have to answer to history, if nothing else, as to why the democratic forces in Iran were not sufficiently championed by the American Administration, when freedom there was so heavily at stake, when the call of liberty was heard before it was silenced savagely. Obama’s is the third postmodern presidency, the first was Jimmy Carter’s and the second was that of Bill Clinton, as can be mainly seen concerning relations with Islamic entities. The current Administration’s postmodern foreign policy and cognate diplomacy has generally ranged from incoherent to incomprehensible, which is consistent with each postmodern presidency’s desire to substantially limit or diminish American influence in the world; this is because of a major concrescence of a basic lack of substantial faith in both traditional and modern Western values, the latter pertaining to modernity. As a direct result, substantial intellectual and moral deference is, thus, certainly given to Islam, meaning especially its more militant aspects inclusive of terrorism. The sure consequences of such a failure of American statesmanship and its mainly attendant inapposite statecraft or, rather, the fundamental lack thereof can be, however, rather devastating, and really needs the high talents of a Jonathan Swift to describe.

One need not guess what the real arrival of shariah would truly mean for the Western world, if it were to become basically predominate; Islam, an attempt, through an absolutist theology, to destroy politics as the human realm of freedom, is meant to be, by definition, a totalistic system, thus, ever supremely covering all law, ethics, mores, language, morality, aesthetics, politics, economics, society, culture, and anything else imaginable; besides numerous important books by Robert Spencer, concerning both Muslim extremism and terrorism as Islamist ideology, good current reading would include Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America; there is, therefore, no Gelasian doctrine of the two swords or an understanding of the Church and the Society as each being proper orders of human reality that, for instance, cannot contradict classical Natural Law teachings; this is, simply, because Islam permits no Western-style distinction between politics and religion that, in turn, allows for the requisite existence of liberty, within a solid system of government qua governance, when, of course, best properly understood as such; and, moreover, there are many logically denotative and connotative implications, implicit and explicit, of such rigid thought with cognate ramifications, which includes the rather so notable fact that the Open Society paradigm, with its relativistic tolerance, cannot deal with Islamic authoritarian aggression; its dictates, for true believers, are regarded as being always irrecusable.

Even, e. g., the ideological growth of environmentalism qua enviro-Marxism ends up within the sphere of politics as a Trojan horse affect that has captured the deluded minds of millions of unsophisticated and too often unsuspecting people; they do not easily see the genuinely collectivist ends intended, in the pious name of supposedly protecting the environment; some related recent reading [published by WorldNetDaily] can cover Brian Sussman’s Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam.₁ The related Green Revolution of environmentalism is a condign variant on the theme of neo-Fabian Socialism as a covert means to make collectivism (social control) both more popular and palatable to the ignorant masses.

One needs to intelligently know and comprehend that the modernist Old Left (Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.) sought materialist revolution as the basic goal; the postmodernist New Left (Gramsci, Marcuse, Alinsky, etc.) demanded, in contrast, true existentialist revolution to fully surpass and dramatically transcend the (mere) industrial-age mission of the Old Left; for both these radical orientations, however, there is still the insistence that ideology, ersatz religion, can overtake and completely replace any (antiquarian or atavistic) conception of “liberty” imaginable; this is so perceived as being done through a (clandestine) elimination of politics, since the major hubristic claim is utopianly made that all human alienation will be simply eliminated, totally, by the results of collectivism triumphant, the New Eden. It is, thus, fairly recognized how so quasi-theological Marxism has always been, especially in its more abstract theoretics and, moreover, associated chiliastic-oriented propaganda. It is not accidental, on an important related and highly instructive point, to here sagaciously note that the Left can often make common cause with Islamist extremism; this is founded, mainly and easily, on the overt Machiavellian principle of the enemy (Muslim terrorism) of my enemy (the Western ethos and power structure) being perceived as my friend. One rightly perceives this highly salient point, quite vividly, in such instructive books as Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. It is, historically, in line with how the philosophes had celebrated the notion of enlightened despotism; and, in more modern times, Walter Duranty and others revealed greatly their love and respect for communist tyranny. One can still read the classic work by Eugene Lyons entitled: The Red Decade. Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-1978 is yet another illustration, though most leftists wish to divagate from the truth.

Liberty as the Rational End of Politics

Political liberty, under a system of law, needs to be understood correctly as the true end, not the mere probable means, toward the achievement of sustainable government qua governance for any rational polity worthy of the name; any other goal or end in mind will, sooner or later, negate the purpose of politics, of political order, for any society said or thought to be a free society; for the Good Society ought to be synonymous with a free society; anything less is the negation of political liberty as the rightful end of the substantive purpose of government instituted, through consent, for the sake of the governed, not for any extraneous ends. Oakeshott differentiated between nomocratic governance (consistent as it then is with political liberty) versus teleocratic governance; the former pertains to the promulgation and respect accorded to law and its appropriate institution within and for the polity concerned; the latter, teleocratic governance, seeks to (ideologically) superimpose various specified ends upon all political discourse as the fixed purpose of directive government, which is much more associated with tyrannies, autocracies, despotisms, etc. and not free polities, free nations, free societies. For as Lord Acton, in his Lectures on Modern History, correctly put the matter: “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” And, this critically meant that liberty is the freedom to do what one ought to do within the realm and realities of civil society, not the haphazard or licentious pursuit of a mere anarchy of discordant desires, as is so often assumed today; it is fully conformable intelligently, among other matters, to what was once called “right reason” and Natural Law. The proper rule of law, moreover, used to be the correct ideal for any society wishing to rise above the anarchic or arbitrary dispositions of mere men acting according to their subjective will, not objective right reason; any other such consideration, as to political legality, must then be manifestly thought of, to introduce a useful neologism, as “infracausitive” meaning held below the level of a justifiable cause for inclusion into the realities of a civil polity and civic virtue.

The nomocratic ideal is a substantive government of law and not of men that indirectly comes to create the political order, through responsible civil discourse, based upon some sort of written or unwritten constitution; the other viewpoint’s ideal is the arbitrary establishment of an order, regardless of any respect for supposed law or even the absence of it. It is a deformative matter of not avoiding what could be called political idolatry (AKA ideology) by which the law itself is the end of justice and not the pursuit of justice, as being the correct end of the existence of law; thus, law is meant to serve justice, when the polity is correctly ordered toward the end of better securing political liberty for the citizenry of a country. Toward that important end, and in line with constitutionalism, there is the need to prevent the discordant creation of such harmful things as, e. g., judicial legislation as usurpation, due to activist judges, as on the US Supreme Court, who do often perversely see their expansive role as supposedly constituting an ongoing equivalent of an ad hoc constitutional convention; the lack of distinctions for the requisite and required checks and balances of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and functions of government ends up, thus, perverting the political order that then balances authority and power, with the latter being made, thus, dependent upon the former’s existence as part of legitimate statecraft, of proper governance; necessary and instructively reading certainly would include such works as Mark Levin’s Men in Black concerning the always illegitimate and disproportionate nature of any judicial legislation; it definitely violates, by definition, the necessarily representative quality and formal demands of true constitutional and political republicanism, meaning both its legislative prerogatives and privileges inclusive.

What is considered necessary is the rightful perception that authority and power are both needed for handling and enforcing the justice of the law in the sense that power is to be dependent upon legitimate authority and not divorced from such a certainly significant concept; power exercised without authority is, therefore, the definition of tyranny; it is both the convenient excuse and rationalized justification for oppression. And, with tyranny, as rightly recognized by Aristotle, it is not a simple question of the one, the few, or the many, as for the correct composition of any good polity; the important question is of tyranny and its illegitimacy by definition as always opposed to morally good features of suitably proper government qua governance, as with, for instance, the careful and freedom-guaranteeing maintenance of liberty under law; and, this consideration is fully consistent with Natural Law teachings, though it cannot negate, of course, what has been historically recognized as the intractability of power in politics.

Free governments, as can be understood by the aforementioned discussion, are to be only nomocratic institutions, not teleocratic regimes of power dedicated forcefully to ideological (read: unlimited) ends instead of political (read: limited) ends. The end, implicit or otherwise, of all ideologies is the pursuit of Utopia, of the New Eden, by whatever euphemisms, as can be seen in such interesting books as Thomas Molnar’s Utopia, the Perennial Heresy. When, e. g., social civil-liberty is then sought, the citizenry can be assured that there will be inherent limits placed upon what a government, as opposed to a mere regime, can or cannot do within the scope of the authority of the law in terms of justice, the end of law. When ideological influences start to take over a (formerly) free government, it can be, sooner or later, wrongly transformed into a regime; while all regimes can be generally defined within the main scope of potential government, not all regimes, however, are governments; only true governments have viable and actual constitutions that, by such rational definition, necessarily limit the existential and concrete purposes of all actual government to governance and not the execution, implicit or explicit, implied or stated, of various ideologically-based purposes, missions, ends, or goals, which, thus, describes here, quite perfectly, a teleocratic regime of power. One can, therefore, see the infracausitive errors of the welfare-warfare State, for instance, as being quite manifest to objective intelligences, to fair-minded people.

Instructive as to what is being contended is the taking note of the formerly existing Soviet Constitution of the USSR that has become the Russian Federation; the former was meant to be, empirically speaking, an unmitigated despotism or tyranny that sought to be as totalitarian as possible; and yet, supposedly serious scholars, academics, intellectuals, cognoscenti, and others wrote books, articles, held studious seminars, etc. concerning the Soviet Constitution, which classical political science would have regarded as a mere fiction having no real substance. That alleged “political” document, e. g., had contained and promulgated a plethora of enumerated rights of the Soviet citizens who, if they really had so chosen to then vigorously act upon exercising such purported rights, would probably have been, most likely, either persecuted, imprisoned, and, in many cases, executed promptly by the Soviet State. Political scientists had really studied, analyzed, commented on, documented, critiqued, etc. the denotations, connotations, interpretations, consequences, etc. of the (fictive) Soviet Constitution in learned and depth-conscious terms of what is understood as the appropriate and determined study of modern political science. And, this all acts as yet another prominent means of naturally discrediting what gets called political science in strict terms of its publicly and academically accepted status in the predictable realm of modernity and, increasingly, concerning what is now so regarded as being postmodernism in the most contemporary political thinking that exists. With all the proceeding, it is not really necessary, when keeping in mind how power can be an aphrodisiac to many people, to speak of conspirators, conspiracy theories, or any conspiratorial matters, since at least 95% of such things are just plain nonsense or pernicious pseudo-political paranoia; it is an often unrecognized form of modernist superstition created by substituting nefarious forces [oddly supposed to be formally covert but they do exist as well documented] for what once used to be ascribed to demons/evil spirits. Serious discussion normally ends where conspiracy talk begins, except concerning realities involved with supporters of those ideological fixations dominated by the will to power; Chinese, Soviet, and other espionage, front organizations, propaganda campaigns, etc. was/is real. But, normally, that is not the ultimate nature of most conspiracy theories that do normally include, e. g., the Vatican as a prime target of tremendous hate and ongoing vilification.

In contrast, classical political science incorporates the philosophy of politics, the perennial philosophy, in being a studiously comprehensive and substantive effort to epistemologically realize an understanding and comprehension of the political reality of human beings as political creatures, as beings capable of discourse and dialogue with one another; fanaticism is properly held in contempt; this is within the proper scope of political epistemology as to the rightful appreciation of what is involved in establishing and maintaining those important things, institutions, constitutions, and other such efforts, necessary for government and its authoritative purposes; such suitable cognition is realistically based upon how any manifestation of equitable and reasonable power is to be so appropriately based, directly or indirectly, upon a just authority, especially constitutional authority, as both intromitted legitimate and substantial authorization for purposes of governing.

This is part and parcel of how a government versus a mere regime is to rightly function, in a translational sense of being dependent integrally upon the free proper consent, implicit or explicit, of the governed in some way, shape, or form, for its presence and authority inclusive. Consequently, what needs to be made here better known? Political liberty, as may be rightly suspected, cannot thus realistically exist as such, therefore, in any other possibly questionable environment that absurdly possesses anything like a Soviet Constitution where men live in fear of the State, if they might, so foolishly, chose to actually seek the use of any (theoretical) enumerated rights; and, that was still true, regardless of what had been the supportive prevalent propaganda; for the greater the lie, the greater must be the associated lie telling done, and even that accomplished by the mass media in social-democratic countries, which do tend to ideologically support progressivism and collectivism; moreover, the same is also basically true of most academics and political scientists with their too often intellectually insalubrious prognostications.

One can yet guess, consequently, that at least much or, to some degree, most of the matters covered by what gets related as being the supposed science of the political is of a farcical or fanciful nature; this is in that the various subjects covered are just substantially fictional, not substantive in an empirical sense of reality, pertaining to actual politics or, rather, the lack thereof because, e. g., millions of people who were murdered by an aberrant regime are, one suspects, physically, existentially, incapable of exercising any political liberty. The substantially fictive nature of what goes under the name of political science is such because it acts, in effect, as a survey of variegated and variable opinions about things pertaining to many matters, situations, circumstances, etc. and, thus, not a needfully universalizing and descriptively holistic critique of politics qua the political concerning it as both art and science, as political truth. The historical foundations of such truth can, briefly, be touched upon here.

Although Aristotle is generally credited with the founding of the political as a science or proper study, the more advanced thought that genuinely seeking a suitably universal, not particularistic, viewpoint is, accurately speaking, most indicative of true science means that Plato, with his The Republic, is the actual founder of political science; this is certainly inclusive of an enlarged totality as the philosophy (the love of wisdom) of politics appropriately concerned with humanity, the focus of what it is really all about in a final summation of focus. It has been well said, as to the point being asseverated, that all of political writing, and especially that which is called political philosophy, consists of footnotes to The Republic and its various efforts at the expansive and derivative theorization of politics. [In contrast, Machiavelli’s The Prince exists as the mirror-image paradigm for modernism in politics; and, all the other such efforts are mere existential footnotes, as with, e. g., Marx’s Communist Manifesto.]

Although Plato’s text was meant to explore the limits or circumference of politics, at least as it could be expected to encompass a city-state of his own era, he had, nonetheless, raised questions of a universal nature that, among other areas, covered the most interesting matter of how far a government could or should reasonably go in controlling its citizens, which relates, of necessity, to the issue of liberty. Slaves, e. g., were not back then thought of as political persons worthy of any consideration, of liberty, within the understanding of the rights and duties of all the actual (male) citizens of the polis; also, as further examples, foreigners and women were not of associated concern, as to the grounding of authority and power that was meant to exist as to the aforementioned circumference of politics; and yet, The Republic and Aristotle’s Politics are still greatly worth reading, though classicism in thought did not end with the ancient Greeks but has, in fact, continued right into the 21^st century, as is proven, by this present article, being now read; such cognition is not meant to be frozen in time as a dusty relic; its important principles are as forever alive and always necessary as is the truth and political order, inclusive of requisite civic virtue.

Although the modern era has dispensed with unfortunate matters of neglect or oppression pertaining to slavery [outside of the Moslem world] or denial of civic rights to women [outside of the Moslem world], however, there is still certain animosity directed, rightly so, toward illegal aliens being as un-preferred foreigners who, in fact, act as political outlaws; this is perceived through the substance of their actual illegality as persons residing, without warrant, in a country. And, for the Federal government, especially in a time of war, not to substantially control and fundamentally secure all the borders of the USA ought to be regarded, moreover, as a highly serious matter; it is then, substantively and substantially, worthy of extremely important attention, as both an antiterrorist and anticrime measure, toward rightly seeking certainly effective results for correctly enforcing border security. A mass amnesty, an, in effect, inverted debasement of citizenship, would be equivalent to the mindless surrender to an ideological abstraction parading as a great honorific principle, for no illegal alien is, by definition, worthy of any true, viable civil respect. What, however, is meant here? Being a member of a political community, a person possessing civic trust (prior to any possible acts of illegality), is definitely part of the honor of participating in a true civil association, on a national scale of politics. Thus, citizenship, for men and women, in most countries of the world and, especially, in Western or Westernized nations is for those persons subject to liberties, rights, privileges, and responsibilities and duties related to the social civil-liberty of persons; they are those who can live at liberty and in freedom within their own countries; and, by international law and treaties can usually be assured of certain basic realities pertaining to all civil persons, meaning, thus, worthily covered by the aforementioned law of nations, within the context of civilization. Thus, any corruption and debasement of citizenship, as with a mass amnesty, ought to be logically regarded as more than just a political horror; it is an enormous legal nightmare that, one can guess, greatly portends ill for the then both uncertain and highly problematic future of any country stupid enough, meaning so vilely decadent and degenerate enough, to willfully yield to such progressivist dictates of an ideological dimension; because the cause of political liberty is debased, through its warped, politicized abuse by government, it presages a national calamity and catastrophe of enormous proportions and dimensions equivalent, in essence, to the substantially ill effects of the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. Many commentators have properly suggested the logical and beneficial need for a moratorium on legal immigration of at least 20 years to help with the possibility of assimilation, regardless of what might be done to stop illegals from coming; of course, the ending of the benefits of the American welfare-state, inclusive of all birth-citizenship for them, would stop almost all of the terrible flow across the border. The often perceived threat to the formal constitutional order of this nation, in the hope for maintaining domestic liberty, is the realization that millions here do not wish to be assimilated but, rather, want to keep diversity, multiculturalism, neo-tribalism, and their own pluralistic ethnocentrism; all that bodes ill, of course, for citizenship, especially as, e. g., home-grown Islamic terrorists seem to be increasing, which is a real issue that the vast majority of progressivists/liberals wish to basically ignore; and, this puts civic liberty, as a direct consequence, in grave peril.

As a direct and imperative consequence of the political epistemology recounted in this article, if liberty is not the end of government as to its holistic purpose for citizens, then political science can have no meaning whatsoever; this is because man’s humanity necessitates normal political behavior, inclusive of citizenship, as to the having of discussions and dialogue pertaining to the limits, the realities, of said citizenship; what is then critically meant is that, in the true absence of free citizenship, any reference to politics is negated to the extent that people are not fully nor freely permitted to exercise a true political role within their nation, within their polity; more to the point, constraints upon liberty are diminutions of the authority residing in a free people able to grant consent as to their being subject to government, which is related, intimately, to considerations of there being the appropriate existence of liberty under law, which resides with genuine governance; it is not something that is supposedly determined by the resort or appeal to power or power versus authority. Freedom of the citizenry qua civil persons, the freedom and liberty of the nation’s people, is substantively exemplified when the existence and claim to legitimate power is as related always, in turn, to warranted authority; no legitimate government, thus, would seek to debase the meaning or value or substance of citizenship, of the logical prerequisite for proper civil association itself; it would, moreover, integrally harm the basic authority of the political establishment, the order of politics, by the crass and contemptible exhibition of an act of raw power with a tenuity of justification.

Power exercised in the set absence of all or most authority is, by definition, axiomatically anathema to liberty because the political order of existential politics is so meant to then achieve a functionality and operational jurisdiction, meaning, and purpose so essential for political beings qua free people, free citizens, not any potential categorization, in effect, of them, e. g., as being supposed aliens, illegal or otherwise. Whether as citizens or subjects, they are, it is contended, not to be regarded or treated, implicitly or explicitly, as slaves; even a “democratic” despotism, among other considerations, is still despotic in nature; its sense of democracy is meaningless concerning any regard for free government and liberty under law, consent of the governed and a true system of law dedicated to justice; not mere legality in terms of legal positivism and its theoretics but, rather, the proper affirmation of substantial governance is, therefore, defended as appropriately requisite to political order and its true existence, which ought not to be, thus, any infracausitive matter.

When the directed focus of the critical end of political discourse is better recognized in this manner, the cause of liberty becomes seen as the cause in simultaneous favor of man’s humanity, as an extension of good politics as a truly universal science; this is, furthermore, seen most effectively within the proper mode and context not of modern but of classical political science, in that an appreciation and informed comprehension of classical political philosophy is then really genuine political science realized at its best. But, much of this discussion can, admittedly, be problematic, since G. K. Chesterton, in A Miscellany of Men, expressed well the consideration that “The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define.” The understanding of the origins of liberty, however, needs to exclude the modernist and false, historistic concept that the State is the author of it because, as noted by Chesterton, there is the definite metaphysical consideration always involved.

And, as Alexander Hamilton had instructively wrote in The Farmer Refuted, “Natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race…” since “civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.” But, true liberty is not any kind of license or supportive libertinism to do just anything anyone pleases to do; there is no supposed (natural) right to be wrong, which directs attention, for instance, to the inherent intellectual failure of libertarianism to know that salient fact requisite for any viable civil society and, thence, cognate order attendant thereto. Thus, when abortion becomes a right, guaranteed by the State, as is defended by libertarianism, it becomes clear that statism is functionally compatible with libertarian thinking in being pro-death, meaning an ideological devotion toward nihilism, as is fully perceived in abortion’s defense as a “human” right; libertarianism, then, is revealed as being the direct opposite of what it claims to be and, furthermore, is demonstrated, by its nominalism, to be essentially on the ideological Left; equally, neutral ethics and the associated maximumization of social vices, within the ideal libertarian society, directs an emphasis toward the modernist operative “virtue” of license and its impudicity ideologically disguised as liberty.

License, when it seeks assiduous fulfillment, produces the war of all against all, in the vain attempt to achieve a theoretical society of supreme individualists who make an absolutism out of the relativism of morals supportive of an alleged right to do wrong, as if an ethical neutrality were then real and viable; Jonathan Boucher, in A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, understood that, “True liberty is a liberty to do everything that is right, and the being restrained from doing anything that is wrong.” If this is not held to be accurately correct, then anarchy is the manifestly suitable height of all justice dedicated wildly to defending a limitless individualism left unchecked both by law and right reason; the so revealed slippery slope argument, logically, prevails here where there can be no rational circumscription of any imputed or assumed rights that would not, sooner or later, be exercised by some against others; and yet, such arrant rights as assumed liberty would be denounced, most likely, as being just arbitrary, unjust, or irrational, when demanded by others who would then wish to somehow defend themselves; any aleatoric barriers, appearing to the aggressive party, might seem present on any ethical or moral horizon imaginable or not, meaning as the endless pursuit of a (false) liberty, left unchecked, that ends, by devolving rapidly, into a mere license unbounded; of course, a devotion to positivism could still justify it.

The political apotheosis of the individual is the prescriptively apposite (not opposite) mirror image of the apotheosis of the modern State; each dramatically claims, by its own integral logic, its very own absolute and undiminished sovereignty, in a Hobbesian manner of justification, which can be set either implicit or explicit, in directive translational orientation, through much hubristic resolve. Because of such a major transition in modern thought, politics now has moved beyond merely having a government that secures the natural rights to such things as life or liberty and seeks, increasingly, to then confer artificial or State-created “rights” known as entitlements to, e. g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.; this thinking as to contemporary rights has, also, been extended to criminal rights, undocumented worker rights, etc. Natural rights are integral, by definition, to the fundamental and universal nature of human beings and are, ultimately speaking, based upon the affirmative assertion of metaphysical principles, concerning human dignity, related to acknowledgement of the existence of God; no one, no State, consequently, can ever subsidize or confer such rights and, thus, taxpayers are not ever needed for securing them for anybody. However, in sharp contrast, collectivist ideology firmly supports the existence and perpetual extension of entitlements and other such manifestly extraordinary “rights,” which must, sooner or later, be paid for by taxpayers and that, moreover, reveals forever the artificiality always involved inherently.

It can be remarked that civil-rights, in the modern era, and especially in America since the 1950s, has been ironically used to reduce social civil-liberty by the insistence that (peaceful) freedom of assembly bears no intimate or needed relationship to the freedom of association; yet, the case can be rationally posited and fairly examined that any empirical and practical effectuation of a civil-liberty (freedom of assembly) necessarily requires its attendant reciprocal civil-right (freedom of association); thus, it would be then impossible to, e. g., actually assemble without, simultaneously, associating; concerning the use of such terms for instructing upon the topic of political epistemology, one, then, naturally presupposes the other for its social and political actualization; and yet, almost any conceivable assault upon political and other liberty, in terms of political modernity, has been unwarrantedly justified as an assumed and purported extension of civil-rights. Western governments have knowingly and vigorously promoted, e. g., homosexuality qua homosexual liberation as, thus, being fully concerned within the supposed scope of contemporary political rights. Thus, affirmative action, a development of the modern Civil-Rights Movement, was ostensibly brought forth for promoting liberalism and more egalitarianism in society; but, latent real purpose of modern civil-rights was to prevent a surge into American society of White male ethnics (some years after World War II) who would have competed very strongly for many more advanced socioeconomic positions but were, thus, substantially prevented from broadly and effectively doing so; this was successfully accomplished, through Orwellian doublethink and doublespeak, by the political giving of preferential treatment qua discrimination in set favor of racial and other minorities. Under the then convenient guises of progressive, humanitarian, and altruistic purposes, all this was so covertly desired, by the nation’s power elite, to prevent too much nontraditional struggle for the top 5% of various economic and socioeconomic positions in the economic, social, and cultural orders within this country. This has supported the truly retrogressive, atavistic, mission of the progressivists to vilely reinstitute a society of status by crushing, sometimes swiftly but more often gradually, a society of contract. Thus, use of racial classification ideologically confers a form of status, which cannot trouble those people who are members of the power elite, of course. The rise of the common people, for centuries, has been fulfilled, in contrast, much more generously by the creation of a basic contract society versus, through the needed use of government, the status society for privileged elites, as is normally seen in upper-class-dominated societies. Although a truly constituted majoritarian democracy or, one may yet guess, any properly functioning constitutional republic would not have ever sanctioned such things as affirmative action, however, it has been the general case that Federal and lesser courts have largely instituted such policies to advance the progressivist agenda in the regnant realm of modernity and its ideological dictates.

Recovery of Political Science as Classicism Rethought

One positive sign of the ability to try to get past the swamp of ideology may be seen today in intellectual developments connected to philosophical postmodernism in that there appears to be two different and divergent streams, each claiming for itself the title of postmodern is thought; an analogous example of what has now happened can be gained from perspectives on the historical period in Europe called the Renaissance; there was, simultaneously, two kinds of intellectual movements; one sided toward the continuation of traditional Christianity and Christian thought, Christian humanism; the other tended mainly toward wanting further and further degrees of secularization by overtly propagandizing heavily the broadly pagan and, more importantly, paganizing attitudes coming out of a strong stress upon the reading of Greek and Roman texts, as to non- or even anti-Christian values and attitudes about life; this is, of course, materialist-secular humanism. Christian humanism, thus, saw no real conflict between faith and reason because truth does not contradict truth; and, revelation, faith, helped to then prevent reason from staking disproportionate claims to excess degrees of knowledge well above and beyond the capacities of mere human (read: imperfect) thought to reason, meaning the useful prevention of hubris and pride, of rationalism and its always attendant errors in logic and reasoning; interestingly, this could not really prevent the rise of superstitions as with the overt occultism, e. g., of Giordano Bruno, for the extreme excess (read: passion) of secularistic reason does not actually yield rationality but, rather, its opposite; as G. K. Chesterton put it, when men cease to believe in God, it is not the assumed case that they become so rationally minded; they can come to believe, with their moral impuissance, in anything.

Admittedly, there were overlapping tendencies and interactions that had occurred, nonetheless, these two, finally speaking, divergent strains of the same Renaissance pointed into two different directions of emphasis and concern, secular versus Christian orientations. Analogously, the same may be said to be essentially true regarding two kinds or types of postmodernism that do seem to exist, though there might yet only occasionally be some overlapping; however, each, ultimately, is the straight and sure denial or plain negation of the other; thus, e.g., deconstructionism is a basic continuance of ideological ratiocination in its being clearly, unabashedly, on the ideological Left of the broad political spectrum, a kind of secular neo-Renaissance in postmodernist cognition; it is, thus, involved with historicism.

In opposition, the Big Bang Theory in astrophysics represents a movement of postmodernism that still supports classical metaphysical notions as to how the universe did, in fact, have a true, definite, actual beginning, meaning that the universe was determined not to be something that was simply forever an eternal reality, as just a mere given of ontological reality. This matter is, for instance, appreciated by Intelligent Design Theory as to the Origins Debate. The kind of thoughtful postmodernism that deals creatively, within the realm of philosophical teleology, is surely very congenial with the classical view of political science as being, in essence, the genuine epitome of true political philosophy; this is certainly incorporating both a science and art of the politics of being, of ontological truth, that informs the order of the modern polis. As such, this needs to be critically seen, therefore, as a part of the effort to seek the recovery of political science, as a form of classicism in thought, that rightfully accommodates politics as part of the moral order and not related to a view of it from the Machiavellian point of view, from the stance of the worship of terrene power over men. It has already been noted, earlier in this article, that this world has not, in fact, been made a safer place merely by the disappearance of the Cold War; there may be more danger now than before the existence of an internationally-based communist movement intent upon spreading such an ideology. More than that point, modernist politics seems incapable, e. g., of dealing with the growing forces of Islamic terrorism because of its dedication to a rationalist view of political order, forged within the progressivist confines of modernity, and its so dedicated secularist orientation toward politics; but, modernism qua political order remains functionally and operationally ignorant of its historical and empirical failure to see its own integral faults and flaws that are inherently uncorrectable, with or without a Cold War.

A rejection of what passes as modern political science would help, moreover, lead to the here called for resurgence and revitalization of those matters that do deal with a science of politics for human beings, not petty gods of power on earth variously or, perhaps, vicariously empowered by their own ideological predilections. What is being fully asseverated may require the creation of a neologism: “synpolinoetics” to be defined as the practice of the creative synthesis of political thought seen through a classicism-oriented approach; political modernism cannot accomplish any synpolinoetics because each ideology axiomatically takes a part of the truth and interprets it as being the whole truth; each, in effect, seeks supremacy of thought over and against each other ideology and does not fully respect the need for open and responsible civil discourse. Therefore, the recovery of classical political science for domestic and, by extension, international politics as well is vitally necessary; this is, therefore, if there is to be the real hope that the existential end of politics, as being for the requisite purpose of human liberty, can be then substantively and substantially retained for any and all responsible postmodern polities; the matter is related to the ethical and moral existence of free government, of liberty under law, and also the larger matter of the metaphysics of the creative theorization of politics, especially fully against incognizant historicism and pragmatism, in either modernist or postmodernist thought.

What is being considered is not at all an abstract matter. An intellectual and moral crisis of enormous proportions had seriously occurred when, as with Machiavelli, politics had divorced itself from ethics because, previously, it had been seen as an extension of ethics into the political realm of human life, as with Plato and Aristotle’s teachings. Why might this be important? Strauss critically reminded people that the highest level of modern ethics was the minimum baseline for classical ethics, which is a good point worthy to remember. Men, in the later age of modernity, then thought that if they had the real power to do so, then they would exercise such power, regardless of a concern for ethical requirements pertaining to action; this lead to the idea that the State, also, had the right to do as it pleased, especially as, e. g., the so-called Divine Right of Kings got later transmuted into the legal positivism of the radical bourgeois State in that whatever was said to be the law was, ipso facto, legal and, thus, whatever was legal, by such a simple tautology, was held to be true law; the proverbial cart got put before the horse as a form of idolatry ended up reifying legality so that the end of law was not really justice any longer but only the greater adherence to that which was said to be legal. Thus, Nazi, Fascist, or Soviet law was supposed to be legal as such by being promulgated, by respective States, that had transactionally and operationally lent their power qua (warped) authority to the then resulting functionally positivist set understanding of law, which was, necessarily, allied to militarism in definite support of tyranny.

But, even the kind of State empowered, e. g., by the influence of the radical bourgeoisie also adheres to legal positivism that can be directly contrary, as in the USA, to the US Constitution; for instance, it is a fact that nowhere in the Constitution is there any legal warrant whatsoever for engaging in any kind, type, or degree of economic redistributionism; however, this contentious matter has become a rather routine and usually quite aggressive part of government activity conducted under both Republican (rightwing socialist) and Democrat (leftwing socialist) Party administrations of the Federal government. Both major parties, because of having many progressivist politicians and their supporters, do support the welfare-warfare State, currently boasting 40 million on food stamps and 50 million on Medicaid, besides the other programs; one can read such instructive books as Stephen Slivinski’s Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government, though this attitude goes back to at least Herbert Hoover who, in fact, was a true progressive and not a limited-government statesman. Unfortunately, this orientation toward the modern State has deleterious consequences for the survival of human liberty. How so? The resulting debased citizenry is then made, increasingly, subject to an interventionist State (corporatism) where they are, thus, to become dependent, surely more and more constantly, upon the arbitrary existence of a redistributionist situation, concerning the political order, dominated by the collectivist ideology. Such has been one of the terrible political-ideological penalties of the aforementioned separation of politics from ethics, in clear terms of modernity and its then much developed product, modern political science. Another feature of modernity has been how, since the time that Germany’s Prince Otto von Bismarck had recognized how the welfare state and warfare state were certainly symbiotically reciprocal realities, as with his endorsement of social-security legislation, the modern State when possessed of imperial ambitions had, therefore, to exist as a welfare-warfare establishment; thus, e. g., America’s own power structure explains so clearly how the existing United States’ imperium has been, in fact, quite successfully maintained, as a popular enterprise, congruent fully with nationalism and national power; it has, also, embraced much of militarism, which cannot really be properly consistent with a genuine devotion to substantial free government, for this or any nation.

If classical political science is not reconstituted and recovered substantially, therefore, it will not be feasible to seek the fullest recovery of liberty under law where the former honors free government as the set necessity for strengthening self-government and an independent citizenry, and the latter then reorients law back to a concern for achieving the ends of justice and not the worship of power. Thinking pertaining to what exists as a division (political science) of the social sciences is more important than just general concerns about governments or states, their forms, functions, and the economic, social, psychological, and other factors that are involved in political phenomena. As society had modernized, of course, in quite various and often complex terms of increased specialization and the further added compartmentalization of life, there had also occurred the realization, century by passing century, of a more complex State, which, in turn, lead to a quite definite field of study called political science. Such complexity and other often interrelated matters made many thinkers assume that things could and had to be done that were mainly opposed to most past ways of thought, which usually resulted in mere convenient rationalizations for the art/science of what got usually called power politics and, moreover, cognate utilitarian speculations; this is as to logically mandating much pragmatic activity in favor of the empowering of the centralizing, modernizing nation-state, as a power structure, for the biased sake of the political class and its interests, not the public interest or what used to be better called the common good.

The regard for State power and its demands had then increasingly provided self-legitimation and self-justification for actions thought to be simply based upon a supposedly morally neutral pragmatism, which was and is not, in fact, really so neutral, especially as to its both direct and indirect consequences. This has included, e. g., what has been denominated as the (often unacknowledged) law of unintended consequences, besides those ideological influences, inclusive of pragmatism, that sought to support the rationalization, cognitive streamlining, of politics that seemed, most often, not too far different from hard implementation of one or another ideology; an ideology, being a system of thought conjured up by (mostly radical-bourgeois) intellectuals confident of their assumed omniscience, which had and will ever mainly manifest a rather cold hubris, which is related to a lust for power.

Although the expansion of constitutional government, in the modern era, and the heightened respect for the assumption of legality in politics seemingly created a so marked tendency toward some solid legalism in political science, however, this inclination later became self-defeating by the aforementioned attempt to seek the rationalization of politics; it can best be observed, therefore, in legal positivism as a reification and deracination of law as just becoming an end in and of itself, contrary to the once classical concern for justice as the end of law, not a variable or adjunct concern of some (usually undetermined) kind or type of law. A result of modernity in ratiocination, meaning the expansion of nominalism in thought, was that the State was estranged increasingly from what had been its important social context and was, moreover, examined and considered in pragmatic isolation. What once was thought to be matters bringing about a mere or basic change in government, through a limited revolt, later became translated ideologically into a change in State, by a revolution, that would affect economic, social, and all other aspects of human life in, of course, a suitable revolutionary manner. But, not all revolutions, though called such, have been true revolutions. As Hannah Arendt and others have wisely noted, the French and Soviet (so-called) Revolutions, as surely vivid historical examples, were really continuations, consolidations, confirmations, and much further rationalizations of the various despotic tendencies and traditions that were then quite inherent in the French and Russian nation-states of the late 18^th and early 20^th century, respectively; and, this is an important analytical-political point to keep in mind.

In fully sharp contrast, the American Revolution was a genuine liberationist struggle to positively change things by righteously revolting against the horrid attempt, by the British monarchy, to unjustly tyrannize the colonists; this was to be through the very radical and despotic effort to roughly and contemptuously destroy the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen, as Edmund Burke, Forrest MacDonald, Russell Kirk, M E. Bradford, M. Stanton Evans, and many others have so rightly acknowledged. The change from adherence to a monarchy to a then republican form of government did not, however, involve any really massive or even intended change in State, totally unlike the French, Soviet, and many other ideological efforts to supposedly transform humanity itself by revolutionism. Trotsky, e. g., fanatically hoped for what he explicitly had called the permanent revolution, as to its theorization as such. Q. E. D.

The requisite understanding of liberty, as the true end or reason for political order, is then what forever divides and distinguishes true versus false revolutions in government. Equal to such an important point is the fact that, e. g., economic liberty is indivisible from all other kinds of liberty because liberty itself is an inalienable right not given by the State; classical Natural Law, ultimately dependent upon attribution to Divine Law, can be yet seen in the US Declaration of Independence, which (Natural Law) ought not to be confused, as it often is, with the abstractionized, 18^th century-inspired, a priori Law of Nature, as was so defended, for instance, by Rousseau and the other French philosophes. Unlike how each generation born is able to adapt itself to existing technology as with the case that children just simply easily assume that what they find had always existed, every generation growing to adulthood must yet relearn and reacquire the art and science of politics, of political life and order; and, this is a vital part of the heroic quest for intelligently defending classical political science as logically congruent with man’s humanity, not just with politics alone.

Thus, in the nominalist realm of modernity, governmental interventionism qua collectivism is the base attempt to ideologically separate out and diminish economic liberty versus political liberty, which is a false conflict provoked by ideological fixations; often, this is, systematically, done through having a central banking system, its fiat money, and progressive, confiscatory taxation with a VAT tax, cap and trade laws, (radical) environmental laws, etc.; but, that clearly ideological effort is always forever politically illegitimate, however, in light of the nomocratic existence of inalienable rights and (classical) Natural Law teachings; this is, of course, besides it being a manifest violation, for Americans, of the US Constitution itself. All this then helpfully both explains and illustrates why each generation, therefore, must arduously relearn what it needs to know for requisitely and appropriately defending precious liberty; in truth, it has then been so well said, consequently, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. However, the above understandings rendered were easier to comprehend when people, in the Western world at least, were able to assent to the existence of self-evident (read: universal) truth, meaning that which ought to be known without having to provide any demonstration as a proof of such an assertion; this can be seen in the wording to be found in the previously cited Declaration of Independence as to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being among the prominent self-evident truths listed in that rather overt political genesis document; it notably defended, of course, the various justifications for the American Revolution, which were not, for the most part, related to the thinking of the Enlightenment, as is quite often so falsely alleged. Christianity and, in particular, the Trinitarian Dogma (metaphysical orthodoxy) had helped to delay the onrush of the ill effects of nominalism that, historically, were to become a massively surging flood in terms of the ideologies, Socialism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Anarchism, Feminism, etc., resulting from a mainly triumphant modernity. What happened, in this nation, was actually not a Leftist revolution-in-State. How can this be politically and philosophically known concerning what is true?

Truths known to be “self-evident” were more easily accommodated intellectually within the 18^th century classical-Christian mindset that, in turn, more readily and willingly, logically and confidently, had then adhered to the once quite traditional rudiments and tenets of classical political science. In set contrast, nominalist philosophy, as had been well pointed out, had so unfortunately inspired the ethically and morally harmful cancer of ideological thought, which might suggest the need for creating a special field of study called “fanaticology.” Related reading, against any insouciant thinking by the intelligentsia, would encompass Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.

Although the Declaration is, certainly, among the most prominent founding documents of this country, however, few people today, relatively speaking, meaning aside from, e. g., traditionalist, orthodox Roman Catholics and some others, would agree to readily accept the nature of there being the existence of self-evident truths. Why can this matter be so problematic to contemporary intellects? Because a self-evident truth is, by inherent definition, such since it is then always set beyond any empirically real or even a purely metaphysical demonstration; it ought to be as plainly obvious as is the fundamental existence, the reality, e. g., of gravity, which cannot be seen and, moreover, is not actually yet so fully known as to just exactly and completely what it is. And yet, one can so perceive that gravity remains, constantly and unquestioningly, self-evident as just a given basic fact, whether, of course, considered scientifically or otherwise. As can be epistemologically suspected, therefore, the hoped-for attempt to reestablish or reconstitute political cognition as being properly definitive of classical political science, instead of that prevalent mode dedicated to the subjectivistic or relativistic celebration of modernity, is fraught profoundly with “unfortunate” difficulties that include statements dependent upon acceptance of self-evident truths. Knowledge or, in effect, the retrieval of what ought to be (political) knowledge may then require what could be, perhaps, called “symbolication” properly defined as the active attempt to, thus, provide substantive thought in firm support of symbolic representations of political truth as with, e. g., having pieces of paper existing as written constitutions; they rightly symbolize, certainly, how human beings have tried to concretize somehow the need for forming and maintaining and justifying political order and community, for affirming the existence of a valid and viable polity; all this has a “progovernative” signification, to introduce a useful neologism here, concerning how necessary it is to appropriately define and defend the qualities of political governance, as part of the overall metaphysical order of reality: progovernative symbolication and its cognate theorization.

Symbolism can often take up most of what politics ends up seeming to be about, according to, e. g., Oakeshott, in that people need to believe that there is a substance to their political understandings of such things as civil liberties or civil-rights; in that particular regard, representative government, as with the election of representatives to a government body, is what republican government represents; this is different from the notion of democracy, rule directly exercised by the people, in which the voters can effectuate immediately their choices or decisions, as in a direct democracy; thus, a democratic republic or a republican democracy is an actual contradiction; both terms are oxymorons that contain refutations of each principle when the two, thus, do get absurdly combined, in most popular rhetoric; a republican government cannot, therefore, ever be a true democracy, though elections could be democratically conducted, of course; the ancient or classical ideal, one ought to know, was a mixed polity that would creatively combine the alleged best features of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy by combining and balancing each against the other feature(s) to then achieve a greater or, perhaps, truly holistic synergy; however, popular comprehensions of democracy and republicanism are too confused and confounded.

Within the minds of most of today’s people, therefore, substantial metaphysical foundations need to be properly established; this is then critically done, in a translation of knowledge, by which they may more securely have the appropriate cognitive and philosophical ability to understand and comprehend those important intellectual bases for political knowledge; these are upon which stand the full edifice of the classical interpretation of politics as being, in fact, the true notion of that science specifically said to be so designated as naturally political in nature. Ironically or otherwise, it is strongly suggested that the anti-ideological half of the movement of postmodernism in thought, what can be called dialogical postmodernism (which incorporates theocentrism), seems to now offer a truly genuine opportunity for assisting with the retrieval and reclamation, reinvigoration and restoration, of classical political science; this is, on the whole, based mainly upon its quite basic rejection and solid knowledgeable refutation of cognitive modernism that, in fact, generally favors utilitarianism, pragmatism, subjectivism, rationalism, relativism, materialism, hedonism, and, ultimately, nihilism as to the final destination.

As a manifestation of what can be called an “epiprologic” development, a higher and prior synthetic comprehension of premodern consciousness, dialogical postmodernism is the opponent of affirmative postmodernism (the furthermost reification of philosophical nominalism added to anthropocentrism); the latter adamantly supports deconstructionism and all the various forces and features, movements and tendencies, of the ideological Left that will logically, of course, forever be enthusiastically enthralled by nominalism and by whatever euphemism the nominalist persuasion may go by, now or into the future. One sees it quite forcefully displayed in the widespread repaganization of the Western world with its quite very evident, mass apostasy, odd occultism, fashionable superstitions, enviro-pantheism, various customized ethics, (tribalistic) tattoos, masochism (body piercings), and other such atavistic, retrogressive, manifestations of social, cultural, and moral chaos and anarchy; the apostate, prodigal, culture of the West is a reality; also, there is the cultural Marxism (AKA Culture of Death) of abortion, multiculturalism, (artificial) contraception, infanticide, diversity, [racist] affirmative action, euthanasia, homosexual liberation, feminization of the culture, and much else. Because way too many people are blind to such a reality, it is necessary to stress, as in the previous sentence, the quite manifest interrelatedness and firm compatibility of cultural Marxism and the (anti-Christian) Culture of Death, which, as is known, almost all intellectuals would seek to keep as mainly separate considerations; this is usually to so better hide the then surely virulent nihilism in covert support of integral, secularist-humanistic rationalism. A noted important consequence is the birth dearth, in the world, as human replacement levels go far below the minimum realistically needed; most of humanity has chosen long-term self-extermination that is, in fact, producing an increasing demographic disaster of an enormous magnitude, though the illusion of overpopulation is created because most people are just living longer. Another serious result of such blatant nihilism can be noted. It is, supposedly, ironic but true that affirmative postmodernism has sought to substantially rationalize Islamist terrorism and, moreover, often finds disgusting or obnoxious ways to ideologically defend the vicious terroristic destruction of civil society and civility that occurs in this world of human tragedy, of the human condition.

In true set contrast, good reading would usefully include Fr. George William Rutler’s Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-Modern Catholic concerning what, in this present article, has been philosophically denominated as being dialogical postmodernism; this concerns, among other considerations, its basic openness, dialogue, toward the latest advancements in various fields of science that do, for instance, confirm, rather strongly, the existence of God; this is surely inclusive, e. g., of what is called Intelligent Design Theory, which ought not to be ever improperly confused with or wrongly identified as Biblical/ Fundamentalist Creationism. Pertaining to all proper synpolinoetics, a truly marked concern for, e. g., directive metaphysics, regarding political science and the philosophizing upon it, in acting without the requisite intellectual support for the fundamental existence of metaphysical order, would be, ultimately, a cognitive and an epistemological absurdity, a nullity. What needs to be understood, for clarification, is that as reason and faith do not conflict because of the unity of truth, as taught by, e. g., Thomistic philosophy; the same, logically, applies to science and faith since truth does not contradict truth; true faith, set contrary to all superstition, gives a higher meaning and clarification to reason through a kind of metaphysical enlightenment, due to the upward movement from axiology to epistemology and, finally, to ontology; for as Étienne Gilson had so well noted, the truly greatest thrust of philosophy is set ever toward the study of Being, of all ontological reality itself. The real degradation of modern philosophy by its many lesser concerns, secondary or tertiary, for examinations, critiques, etc. of axiology, aesthetics, semantics, and other such merely derivative matters parallels, quite so significantly, the much related degeneration of political science (and politics) in the modern age.

Because of the great influence of modernity, however, rationalism (read: ideology) in politics has had the upper hand; this has been by which the theoretical straight line from a hypothetical point A to a point B may involve or logically “necessitate” the deaths of millions of people, as per the French, Soviet, and Red Chinese Revolutions as suitable examples. Because pragmatism is not correctly recognized for being an ideology, nonviolent examples are the welfare states of Western Europe and, increasingly, the welfare-warfare State of the USA that exhibits this thrust toward a rationalization of bureaucratic and regulatory roles of modern statism, as just contemporary postclassical governance; thus, modernity in politics, the often explicit or, at least, implicit worship of power, does not give up the ghost easily and, more to the point, sees itself as yet being the certainly viable future of the (assumed) future; it cannot ever be actually reformed because as with, e. g., Communism, it sees itself forever as the true perpetual reform needed or required; this is, furthermore, as with the observation that pragmatists assume that they are not at all ideologists but merely people who insist upon the dominance of pragmatic thinking, of the exercise of pragmatism as their version of mere realism, though it is, in truth, radicalism, as with all ideologies; it is, nonetheless, the bold deification of the factuality of human action through the prior reification of the supine rationalization that has, in fact, already so occurred, courtesy of nominalism.

It may be fairly hard, therefore, for people of the early 21^st century, to fully realize how monumental the task is to adamantly struggle with and against the terrible legacy of modernism. Throughout the 19^th and into the early 20^th century, the terms Science and Progress were stupendously reified into becoming the earthly gods of modernization that would heroically lead to a true form of earthly salvation, the New Eden, for mankind, especially as seen in the Western world; rarely was this properly recognized, in its ultimate significance, as the utopianism that it, in fact, really was. There was to be, for instance, the solid writing of only scientific history, scientific politics, and any other such modern subject to which a decisively scientific approach could be taken, by which the forces of superstition (read: religion) could be positively defeated or, at least, damaged severely; this was by the application of ever greater degrees of rational (read: secularist) thought. Under the joint and attractive spell conjured up by such Science and Progress, the sociologist Max Weber, taken as a genuine exemplar of such bourgeois thinking, had then so invoked the interesting notions of routinization, bureaucratization, and rationalization of society and culture; they then were perceived as being in the genuine vanguard of an advanced and enlightened, tolerant, secularized civilization, moving from certain triumph to triumph, toward dynamic and positive societal and cultural modernization.

And, in almost all Sociology textbooks and other such academic or intellectualist volumes that still do, thus, seek to suitably celebrate and propagate the advancements of modernity, Weberian optimism, as to his sociological speculations, are still so [into the 21^st century] presented; they are, thus, consistent with the asserted, welcomed progress of routinization, bureaucratization, secularization, and, especially, rationalization, as to an advanced civilization. So, with the philosophical issues kept appropriately in mind, what is the epistemological problem to be effectively encountered and so noted for right effect? Such a pro-modernist view, in the end, is fundamentally false, however, and basically rejects responsible civil discourse, intelligent informative discussion, as to an understanding to proper public order. How could this, in rational and objective terms of reference, be fairly meant?

By 1918, Weber, with witnessing the rather dire and horrific, shocking and disgusting, consequences of such applied thinking, as sadly manifested during World War I, had, in truth, basically reversed his older views of such matters and, moreover, then questioned them severely. As could be guessed, however, modernity will not yield ground easily to dialogical postmodernism, even in the case of promoting a revival of classical political science, for the sake of the cause of human liberty. And yet, not even the enormous devastation of the Great War (as it was originally called) could yet break the secular faith of a mainly confident radical bourgeoisie, whether oriented toward capitalism or socialism as the supposed true path toward the New Eden; this was because many intellectuals, academics, public figures, etc. were devoted to modernity’s presumably attractive strictures and prescriptions for the wanted and expected enlightenment; but, this positive attitude could not be absolutely nor confidently sustained after the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II because, e. g., such a prominent intellectual as H. G. Wells, by 1946, found himself (his mind), as he put it, at the end of his own tragic tether.

Nonetheless, the supporters of modern political science will, therefore, still fight vigorously to prevent any resurgence whatsoever of a point of view that would, by definition, then deny wanted legitimacy to modernism in thought, pertaining to an alleged science of politics, prefaced mainly upon triumphant rationalism and positivism. Although the secular Utopia of the (once future) present forever eludes the supporters of cognitive modernity, nevertheless, progressivists and collectivists of all types, degrees, and kinds can get political support, especially from those political scientists and other social scientists who wish to be in on the creation of statist measures, interventionist actions, designed to achieve the ideological nirvana; all that is surely contrary, by definition, to translational dialogue in marked favor of intelligently applied synpolinoetics, as a preferred mode of postmodernism in thought. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of professors of politics, political philosophy and the social sciences are liberals or leftists who, axiomatically, demand tolerance for their point of view; however, most textbooks, related internet resources, academic courses, etc. are, also, generally biased against, athwart, the political right; consequently, it is rather difficult to expect much fairness or open-mindedness on the part of those who are not genuinely tolerant of differing points of views that do not regularly or usually bend toward the ideological Left of the political spectrum; it is quite possible to go through either undergraduate or graduate schools, covering courses in the social sciences, without encountering any of the authors listed in the bibliography of this article; and, this is not an exaggeration; the fight against such tremendous narrow-mindedness, prejudice, discrimination, insularity, unfairness, and bigotry is uphill, all the way, and necessarily against tremendous odds. (For instance, the general reader of this article would be, not unexpectedly, totally unaware of probably all of the authors listed in its bibliography.)

The categorization of a pro-normative politics, defined translationally for a science of politics, seems, perhaps, at first a supposed contradiction of terms being used to favor something that also wishes to properly claim the title of being scientific; however, it is critically contended that the fruits of modernity, seen through the alleged “political science” of the modern age, has not empirically brought about the assumed rationalization of politics that had been expected, unless one includes the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Nazi death camps, Soviet gulags, and other vast “monuments” to ideologized existence on this planet. World wars, genocides, nuclear weapons/WMDs, and other horrendous features of the 20^th century were the least of the sorrows inflicted by rampant modernity. Why might that, the least of the sorrows, be said? Man’s exaggerated, heightened dehumanization of his humanity through the ideologically-inspired rationalization of massive evil’s infliction, on a previously unprecedented scale of iniquity, had so mightily occurred. Not surprisingly, the clear anti-modernism of the positive classicism in politics, as affirmed here, could be denominated rightly as “dispolynormic” meaning that modernity, in contrast, promotes a diversity of supposed (utilitarian) norms that cannot all be truly understood, interpreted, defined, or defended as (adequately or otherwise) normative; this specifically concerns any truly universal level of measurement, especially if not consistent, e. g., with universal, classical Natural Law that could be, properly, affirmed by rational intellects on this planet. What has been defined, for instance, as the Golden Rule has been taught, as being normative, by respected thinkers in all of the world-historic civilizations that have existed; thus, the understanding of Natural Law, of proper right reason, is not a merely or uniquely Eurocentric or Western invention, as is often so falsely alleged.

As Oakeshott would have, thus, reminded inquiring minds, one ought then never to simply confuse or confound rational thinking with rationalism, the attempt to abstractionize reality by substituting pure thought, a priori, for the effort to carefully reason within the context of human experience. Ideology, whether of the supposed soft kind (democratic collectivism or democratic despotism) or the hard kind (Communism), is similarly the harsh glorification of rationalism in politics, which necessarily leads to either the slow death of liberty or, with the latter version of political modernity, the usually much faster extinction of it through certainly massive suppressions and executions. In strident opposition to the empirical failure of such modernism, either soft or hard, to truly guarantee simultaneously both (an often enormously claimed) prosperity and true social civil-liberty, it is rightly and clearly perceived that contemporary postclassical governance cannot, thus, be sustained if property/wealth and liberty are not politically and substantially secured, which is the solid thrust of a classical rendering of government qua governance. What must then be carefully recognized, however, is the very notable effort to supposedly achieve the acceptable rationalization of tyranny (despotism), by whatever name, in the so progressive rationalist cause of the clear modernization of politics at whatever cost, in either lives or money, blood or capital, to be then expected by ideological dictate, of course. By ignoring the true reality of human tragedy, of Fallen Man, as a genuine part of the human condition, all this is the disguised march toward Utopia, which, as a theme, has been well covered by Molnar’s Utopia, the Perennial Heresy.

In contemporary America, a quite curiously democratic effort at revolutionism (though contrary to the Constitution) now seeks to peacefully enact, through mostly presidential and congressional means, the teleocratic-directed regime of terrene power, while in, e. g., China this kind of rationalist course has clearly required more substantial violence; this has been, of course, so provocatively directed toward that questionable end which seeks to coldly justify the often exerted Machiavellian means held to be (ideologically) needed. If there is, however, any sure desire to reject modernism, then classical political science, in a venerable tradition stretching from Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Juan de Mariana, Leo Strauss, and to the present day, can be then applied to and affirmed as the requisite and rational antidote, substantial remedy, to the both noetic and mortal poison administered by the (often lustful) appeal to cognitive modernity and its many baneful, associated consequences. Of course, unlike the tiny city-states in which the notion of politeia had originated, the effort today goes beyond mere nation-states and transnational organizations with quasi-governmental powers and encompasses the matter of civilization itself, as to both the world-historic political realities existing and international order itself. There is no call here for any supposed recreation of ancient or medieval realities in some sort of weirdly nostalgic effort at creative anachronism, as asinine modernist or postmodernist critics might suggest. As to the Western world, the older, rejected political ideal of a chivalric united Christendom (however imperfect) has been replaced by a quite substantially pornography-saturated, hedonistic, materialistic, secularist-oriented cosmopolitanism as the new ideal; a world without universal truths holds no place for any omnipresent and omnipotent God who is then, logically, eviscerated by the satanic worship of earthly power, neopaganism, or whatever other terrene fascinations that do exist.

However, as the historian Christopher Dawson, author of The Dynamics of World History and Religion and Culture, knew, every true civilization was definitely founded by a religion; secular order has, in fact, never ambitiously engendered anything as so necessarily extensive as is an “enterprise” expansively concerning ethical, moral, spiritual, social, cultural, literary, educational, etc. complexity into a vast and synergistic whole. The larger matter set in dispute is at least as old as the basic disagreement between Protagoras and Plato; the former had taught that man is the (anthropocentric) measure of all things, the latter held that God is the true (theocentric) measure of all things, the universal gauge of all of reality, which (Platonized) Christians had just translated into the Christocentric perspective; the point of view was once related to what was called gens sancta, videlicet Christianorum within Western civilization and beyond if possible. In specific regard to this consideration is the case that dialogical postmodernism, consequently, is a true pro-civilizational project, a humanizing effort, that spiritedly favors the requisite recovery of the true science of the political that is just as properly and needfully universal as a world-historic civilization ought to, thus, necessarily be in the 21^st century and for all centuries to come.

The rational urgency of this requisite project can be easily related to such important things as, e. g., the possibility of an exchange of nuclear weapons between Iran and Israel, (perhaps, sometime before the end of this year). Syria, Russia, and China, after all, have been all helping Iran toward an effort at a new war in the Middle East. Nonetheless, what, as they say in the business world, is the real “bottom line”? If the ever supposedly enlightened teachings of modern political science were then verifiably true and honest, the existence of the current civilization itself ought never to actually be put into real or serious question because the mechanisms are, or supposedly could be put into place, for substantially denying its destruction as a real possibility. In the vast realm of modernity, however, the, e. g., international agreements in existence prior to the First World War could not prevent that war, the later League of Nations had failed miserably to prevent or stop the aggression leading to the Second World War, and it is somewhat rather doubtful whether or not the United Nations can halt effectively a spiraling out of control of enormous aggression and aggressive nation-states, which could, probably, trigger yet another world war.

The rather and obviously poisonous fruit of modern political science can, therefore, be well and readily visualized by sagacious minds seeking the truth. What is being discussed may be said to be opposite to popular perceptions; thus, e. g., the more and more complex and advanced a society becomes, the less and less is there a real need for Big Government, meaning the supposedly omniscient interventionist-redistributionist State (corporatism); thus, manifestly macropolitical designs and cognate rationalistic schemes seem mainly to exaggerate the too often puerile assumptions involved, without mitigating major faults and flaws that become magnified, to concertedly reveal that (hidden) micropolitical errors do create an environment that makes a sure mockery of all good intentions; in short, stupidity covertly magnified, while parading as new wisdom, does not lend itself to the certain revelation of a tremendous sagacity; this is, thus, calmly claimed to be perceived by the macropolitical ends intended, regardless of the micropolitical failures that had, in truth, been rather too cavalierly ignored, through the fairly cold courtesy of ideological hubris; the application of rationalism (qua utopianism) in modern politics, as Oakeshott would have concurred, just leads ultimately, sooner or later, to what ought to be an expected failure, a lack of purported rationality.

Consequently, if the substantive and critical nature of dialogical postmodernism is ignored, concerning the superiority of classical versus modern political science, then the macropolitical, therefore, becomes a magnification of the both axiological and epistemological disaster contained within the constraints and limitations of the micropolitical theorization effort and, moreover, often attendant practice. How might this be explained, however, to then provoke a better comprehension of what is being considered? Back in the early 1960s, e. g., Daniel Bell, just before the vast explosion of what was called the New Left, had sincerely and actually spoke about the true end of ideology; Francis Fukuyama, yet another “blind man” proverbially taking hold of the elephant, in the 1990s, truly thought that he, in effect, (as with Hegel in the 19^th century) had really come to see the actual end of history, which he vaingloriously had predicted. The unfortunate matter of confusing and confounding the micropolitical with the macropolitical or vice versa, thus, has its own special hazards for willful intellectuals who, nonetheless, do help to dramatically and empirically reveal the always integral faults and flaws of what goes by the name of modern political science; such “science” often appears, as a consequence, to be a higher form of modernist superstition.

The premodern, anti-utilitarian, and dispolynormic view of the actual science of the political is, in true contrast, forever incapable of deluding itself or of being made subject to delusions of the mind; these are usually made quite possible by various and sundry ideological or philosophical speculations that, continuously, seek various ways and means for the bold reification of politics toward an unlimitedness that is, by sure epistemological definition, so enormously anti-political in nature. In strong defense of synpolinoetics, politics, as art and science, is circumscribed necessarily by (imperfect) human nature and also further delimited by the truly overwhelming and ultimate fact that it really, in the end, cannot ever achieve what only the metaphysical order of reality (AKA God) can promise, not the omnipotent State. And yet, it was so true that, in the expansive era of modernity, each and every generation, one suspects, had to arduously, painstakingly, relearn and re-comprehend this certainly important and, moreover, highly consequential aspect of the predominant reality, sometimes at a most perilous cost (world wars, genocides, etc.) indeed.

Regimes, Governments, and the Modern State

In ancient and medieval times, when a king, a ruler, became notably despotic or autocratic by, e. g., violating severely the laws, customs or traditions of his people, it was, generally, rather obvious to all as to what had happened; and, by extension, the resulting anger was a natural byproduct of the suffering or anguish caused by the either direct or indirect consequences of despotism; a massive change came, with the modern era, pertaining to the Divine Right of Kings as with the Sun King, Louis XIV, who had hubristically declared: “I am the State”; in the realm of later modernity, however, with its ideological predilections, an “enlightened” or progressive politician could do as much or more and, ironically, be well praised by the mass media, academics, etc. for pursuing what is thought to be the public interest, regardless of how many people might, nevertheless, complain or be fearful of the real and potential results of such aggressiveness, as to political power and its use; a debate might revolve around how much the public interest might be at stake and how far public opinion ought to be consulted, if at all, concerning what had occurred or, perhaps, what might probably happen in the future. Does a political establishment, claiming, e. g., a democratic sanction, truly possess the characteristics of a legitimate government? Can the system of power degrade itself sufficiently, nonetheless, into becoming only a regime of power manifestly dedicated to its own needs and ends, though providing liberal/progressive self-justifications for various and sundry actions taken? The State can do things that if done by private entities would be, logically, condemned as thoroughly unjust and corrupt grand-scale theft, whether the nationalization (a glorified euphemism for massive thievery) of GM, in the USA, or other such despicable acts taken, in Venezuela, by yet another kind of Sun King, observed in the early 21^st century.

As was previously covered in this article, it is politically important and necessary to properly distinguish and differentiate between a mere regime versus a true and substantial government. In addition, what has historically evolved is the additional difference between the State, the further needed and defined reality of a modern, European-style, consolidated and centralized, unitary nation-state, meaning versus a government, which may be either a federated one or a composite entity of some kind. Thus, prior to the War Between the States (AKA American Civil War) the American Federal Government was, e. g., not a fully consolidated, centralized political power, as it had definitely become so after that sad war. Many political powers, especially into the 20^th century, were not satisfied in being equivalent to old-fashioned despotisms, authoritarian regimes, or brutal autarkies; and, more than that, some decided to become, as much as possible, totalitarian States. From about the late 18^th to the 20^th century, moreover, there had come about the juxtapositioning of the Society as (actually) opposed to or, perhaps, vigorously in conflict with the State; previously, in history, there was no consciousness of any kind or type of division or (necessary or rational) distinction; both were just simply or obviously equated as being the same one thing; the compartmentalization, due to an increasing modernization and rationalization, had then lead, however, to a basic analytical differentiation between the social order and the political order of reality; this lead to the production of such texts as, e. g., Woodrow Wilson’s The State concerning the fullest rationalization of what government, on a national level, was supposed to be in terms of doing whatever it, pragmatically speaking, thought was needed to be done, whenever it pleased to do it; Wilson thought in terms of the supposed progressive maturation of political power being its own self-justification in existential and phenomenological terms; and, this was through the convenient concatenation of (barely disguised) Machiavellian principles and the Hobbesian self-interest of the State energized for itself; it was but one short step, however, less than true absolutism, authoritarianism, in a clearly modern mode.

Though it has truly proven itself to be an utter failure, the totalitarian State (e. g., Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba) sought to incorporate and absorb all moral, social, economic and other orders by attempting to become the one great all-in-all of ideologicalized existence, a complete tyranny qua statism consolidated absolutely. Though not ever seen as the best of statecraft, lesser efforts saw the rise of authoritarian regimes, as with, e. g., Francisco Franco’s Spain or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which had finally ended up significantly creating economic and other conditions that historically led to the eventual destruction of such regimes; there then seems to be, therefore, a basic functional and operational difference between authoritarian versus totalitarian orders; the former are not forever capable of ever absolutely seeking permanence; the latter try to become always permanent through their ideologically-based self-justification, their determined rationalization, for why they do and must forever hold power; this is even though it is not really possible.

Today’s China, as a different and contemporary example, is less totalitarian than it once was but still severely authoritarian with tight controls upon any dissent such that it does not exist at all as any kind, type, or form of free regime; it is basically, on the whole, a modern brutal despotism run as a power-oriented oligarchy using the full justification of an imposed legitimacy; this is, thus, functionally and operationally due to the Chinese Communist Party’s “right” to control the State, since, as Mao [in the spirit of Machiavelli] had just viciously said, “All power comes through the barrel of a gun.” It is debatable, of course, how long a period of time must lapse before this both oppressive and suppressive despotic and oligarchic regime might, perhaps, somehow evolve into a free government or, at least, a non-authoritarian regime of some kind; but, its massive military buildup tends to so openly indicate substantial international ambitions to extend its influence into the future. What may be evidently understood, quite plainly, is that the purpose of the modern State, and intensively so for the social-democratic kind of regime, is to try, as much as possible, to direct all energies toward the public sector and away from the private sector; and, most of those who call themselves political scientists approve, more or less, of this progressive engrossment of the modern State, which is, in turn, easily supported as is known, of course, by the biased thinking of modern political science, both in its implicit and explicit theoretics, analytics, epistemology, and empirical studies; all of this ought to broadcast its juvenescent thought in juxtaposition to the advanced intellectual maturity of classical thought on politics; in line with the best creative consideration of epiprologic cognizance, classicism seeks wisdom, while modernity feeds upon power to, thus, create a bigger and better State.

There is the wanted ideological transition, by it, from merely a concept of Big Government toward the extensive having of the social-market economy to then more efficiently back up the full-scale, sovereign, social-democratic State, with all its set economic-political overregulation and, thus, necessarily involved bureaucratization. What is called sovereignty, national sovereignty, or the holding of sovereign power imputes to the State an absolutism, dedicated to political modernism, that needs to be denied. In the 19^th century, Blessed Pope Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, made the point to permanently condemn such an authoritarian notion, as is seen in the following statement: “The state, as the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” Such a proposition is forever pregnant with the clear lust for tyranny, for absolutism, that gets manifested in the notion of sovereignty, especially if ever just left unchecked by classical National Law and international law, jus genitum, as needed progovernative principles. Thus, pertinent and certainly allied considerations do naturally and necessarily exist within the sphere of responsible civil discourse and, in addition, the various needed rights and responsibilities of citizenship regarding substantive public order.

There is ever the key question, in political science, of the purpose or mission of government as a part of basic statecraft versus that of a regime or the State itself. Although those thinkers who would identify themselves as being on the traditionalist right mainly see government in terms of the limited purposes of governance, however, anarchists and libertarians would be comfortable with the views, e. g., of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State in terms of either the complete elimination of government or the assumed attainment of the minimalist State (in the minds of idealists who support libertarianism). The permanent failure of the former view (Anarchism) is that any power that could disestablish a State, the monopoly of force, must be at least equal to or greater than what it seeks to eliminate, which is the inherent integral contradiction that then negates Anarchism forever; the latter approach, the minimalist or simple night-watchman State, is a rather pleasant fantasy that can ever readily achieve theoretical perfection, in studiously intellectual supposition of conception, yet, has and will never, in fact, realize the concrete proposition, in empirical political substance, for an entire nation. In any event, one must come to some reckoning and basic appreciation of the true differences between and among regimes, governments, and, finally, the State which seeks its own apotheosis, meaning if allowed to do so by any dedicated ideologists who may gain control of State power, legitimately or otherwise, of course.

Any political entity that seeks to exist for the purpose of maintaining rulership, over an entire country, needs to be given the appropriate scrutiny that proper political science can set upon it concerning what that entity qua political order is, by definition, supposed to properly encompass, directly and indirectly considered. Unlike the existence of choices in a free market, where one can go to another pizza place for better food and/or service, the State, by definition, allows for no rivals and, hence, no competition against the monopoly of force. For those with eyes to see, contemporary governments are and will, more and more, fail to achieve true proper governance principally because the trend of secularization has meant that religious organizations and other nonpolitical bodies have diminished their former roles in society; governments, going beyond mere statecraft, have tried, increasingly, to provide the goods and/or services that were once formerly the main concern, especially in the Western tradition, of the Church and, in addition, various other types of societies or orders, within the entirety of the social-civil reality existing as such; but, this empirically, functionally, and operationally represents, in fact, no real achievement for legitimate statesmanship and politics, just the opposite.

As the nation-state had historically sought to so crescively engross for its own needs various attributes, inclusive of multiplying the social-welfare functions of what had been the activities of private or, at least, non-political bodies, it then tended to do many things with less and less real success and ability. Government, a limited instrumentality that can yet do some things in more than an adequate manner and, sometimes, in a superb way of basic achievement (e. g., war), then ends up, for ideological reasons, trying to do, as noted, too many things; as a fairly direct consequence, many things and, finally, most things/activities are generally done badly at best, excessively stupidly, at worst, by just ending in plain disaster(s); and, this more than just strongly suggests why, for proper statecraft, it is always inherently improper and illegitimate for a country, especially with a written constitution, to have people claim that it is a living, breathing thing, with protean meanings for each new generation; if the rules of the game can change with each roll of the dice, then a constitution easily ceases being what it is supposed to be, meaning a legal and authoritative constraint upon government and its power, not a license for perpetual political aggrandizement without any genuine end; unfortunately, what sadly exists, because of various ideological rationalizations for steadily or quickly enhancing power, is today a profound and troubling misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the true nature of constitutionalism as, by definition, an ever integral and important delimitation of political power; many contemporary nation-states have sought to surpass whatever limits might exist in any sphere, inclusive of economics, by favoring political and legal positivism to the manifest detriment of national welfare through becoming homes to interventionism, collectivism, as social-democratic entities; mere, e. g., democratic constitutionalism, as a consequence, just becomes a sick joke; nor, e. g., is autarky a realistic answer for modern economic difficulties.

Greece, the certainly renowned birthplace of democracy, may ironically end up providing its graveyard as well, if it does not learn the extremely important lesson of knowing about the law of unintended consequences, besides not comprehending that the interventionist State, Regulatory State, cannot forever be then easily providing just an endless system of welfare, without really suffering from such spectacular extravagances. As it has been well said, moreover, one can, thus, perceive keenly that the myth of the modern State prevails much too strongly; too many people, ignorantly and supinely, believe that everybody, courtesy of the State, can really live at the expense of everybody else; but, eventually, truly intelligent observers do know that everybody else’s money runs out, sooner or later; and, as a clear result, there are certainly definite rational and economic limits, in fact, to continually be then borrowing, especially if it is for absurdly spending a country, further and further, into an enhanced level of massive public debt for generations to come; as of 2010, the various government economic stimulation packages had not revived the American economy in terms of getting the nation out of the depression, which was just called a mere recession; thus, it could be then reasonably suggested that free-market economics, especially as exemplified through and by the Austrian School of Economics, is the best way to get out of the fiscal and political crisis created by such crass interventionism and its absurdly ideological luxating of economic laws.

In the Western world, there is now coming about the solid realization, by many people, that the social-market/social-democratic regimes have, substantively and substantially, reached their ends because there are, in the end, real limits in this world; no nation-state, in all of recorded history, has ever been truly able to spend its way towards prosperity, regardless of, for instance, any studiously applied efforts at forcefully applied Keynesianism/neo-Keynesianism, in concerted economic policies. China, e. g., is economically progressing primarily due to its State capitalism, not because, it ought to be so obvious, of its official communist ideology. In high contrast, as of 2010, the attempt to now supposedly transition America into becoming a substantial social-democratic regime, with its own social-market economy and VAT tax, is manifestly destroying this nation’s economic system and its domestic vitality. Although State capitalism is a thoroughly corrupted version of what really needs to exist as, thus, being surely requisite support for free-market economics, however, the notable and significant point is that market forces do objectively exist as such and are not fictional matters that can be ideologically manipulated to conform to any prevalent statist or interventionist beliefs, though this ever quite salient, basic economic fact gets denied strenuously, e. g., by State technocrats, bureaucrats, the related illuminati, and their supporters.

If the destructive trends of the social-democratic regimes are not seriously reversed and in a dramatic manner, any further pretension of their being qualified to yet call themselves legitimate governments should be made subject to critical questioning, by those informed thinkers who support the contentions of classical political science; this is as opposed to others who do favor the fictions defended, vigorously and constantly, by the many dedicated expositors of modern political science, which is to the detriment of statesmanship and statecraft, of course. Propaganda, unsurprisingly, has been, in effect, the kind of existential language of deception that has been in solid support of the various efforts set in favor of the State, as being more than just a mere political order for the modern age.

In the early 21^st century, it may, thus, be not that highly surprising that the United States, today’s only (current) superpower, seems to be reaching a tremendously decisive turning point in its history, if political trends do substantially remain true to the seismic event coming up or, at least, being widely predicted for this November. A quite dramatic change is, thus, fully expected and needed because, for instance, even the world’s first superpower, meaning the Roman Empire, which thought it [too] would actually last forever, by a then truly special kind of purported exceptionalism [as with, e. g., American exceptionalism], still eventually fell. The alternative for America, if survival is really wanted, is to reject the present structure of imperium allied to a desire for constructing a regime of power and, instead, to seek a just return to government related to the need for requisite governance, as part of the essential definition of government, which is, of course, a rejection of statism, of tyranny. National security policy must be carefully rethought and reformulated closer to the national interest, contrary fully to Wilsonian globalism. America’s extraordinary commitments to, e. g., both Iraq and Afghanistan have, therefore, become excessive burdens that need to be properly terminated, as soon as possible. Iraq can fairly exist as a basically 19^th century-style, quasi-democracy, if that, in general, mainly suits the situation to keep it a satisfactorily neutral regime, as to Islamic aggression; Afghanistan can, within reason, remain what it essentially is, meaning a medieval-style political entity, if that seems to generally suit the formal nature of the situation and substantially primitive conditions of the people. Imposing, arrogantly, (today’s) 21^st century, populist-democratic regimes, on a fully Western model, for each such nation is internationalist (rapaciously idealistic) Wilsonianism liberalism at its worst and “ugly American” type dramatics, at its supposed (but still ignorant) best. To purposely cite John Quincy Adams, America is the friend of liberty everywhere in the world, but the guarantor only of our own.

With those two countries, as rightly contemporary examples of empirical truth, it is obvious that one can perceive fairly, moreover, that all these kinds of PC commitments are rationally untenable and PC wars are, by definition, forever unwinnable. There are consequences, of course, stemming from the reduction of both international and domestic interventionism. Both international and domestic readjustments are, furthermore, critically necessary for then properly sustaining and, much better yet, reviving solid, republican constitutional governance within the USA. With the continued advancement of intellectual, societal, and cultural forces, it would, thus, seem very highly preferable to necessarily transfer all of the social-welfare functions of the State to many nongovernmental bodies and institutions, meaning a truly needed devolution of the hyper-government favored by modernity, though no longer rationally required for the postmodern age; this is assuming it was then ever actually needed as such, of course, in the first place; surely creative and dynamic diffusement and decentralization, delegation and transference, of the nonessential parts of the American political entity, the Federal government, is in intelligent line with the thinking of dialogical postmodernism; such knowledgeable organizations as, e. g., the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation can give requisite guidance, concerning these important matters, for the advancement of American domestic republicanism in the contemporary era. A creative restructuring and rethinking of this country’s foreign policy will enhance national security, substantially restore basic respect among the country’s allies, and rightfully reduce international obligations to then better aid in appropriately diminishing most of the militaristic, nationalistic impulses behind the American imperium; and, all this will have the added benefit, moreover, of mostly destroying the major influential power of the pernicious, nationalistic neoconservatives.

In contrast, the modern idea of the State, connected to (often aggressive) nationalism, must also be critically disposed of for the sake of encouraging patriotism, which is, in truth, actually the opposite of nationalism, which originally was a product of Liberalism. For instance, Adolf Hitler, in his Mein Kampf, had explicitly denounced patriotism because he had firmly stated that he was a great supporter only of nationalism; as defended by the traditionalist right, the sentiment of patriotism, one ought to know, supports the more intimate view of true localism, not the collectivist-oriented attitude of a supremely national perspective pertaining to the expansive, abstract collectivity of a people or a race. The vile theorization of the Master Race, based clearly upon eugenics, social Darwinism, Aryan mythology, anti-Semitism, and Germanic ethnocentrism, was made possible by the thought that Science and Progress had mandated modernity that, in turn, justified anything to be done in the name of the Nazi revolution; it was, thus, a manifest rationalization and theorization of modernism for, of course, explicit ideological ends, which were thought to be suitably progressive and, moreover, highly scientific by its fanatical adherents; none of whom, as modernists, would have rejected, e. g., either pragmatism or positivism in the, to them, higher service of Nazism.

It is known, e. g., that eugenics was a definitely firm component of the early 20^th century’s Progressive Movement and its creation of practical and theoretical justifications; nonetheless, its metatheoretical theoretics of ideological formulation was still integrally flawed and defective, however, because its intra-rationalized self-justification was put forever beyond all rational argumentation, as part of the second-reality ontological perception conjured into existence; in short, it had phenomenologically existed as a higher form of modernist superstition posing within the set hyper-structuralization of a pseudo-religion having clearly neo-pagan existentialist dramatics, as a suitably dark background, for Wagnerian-style excessiveness galore; but, neither Fascism nor Communism were really any better as to what kind of a revolutionary State was supposed to exist for its citizens; the latter, on the whole, has been extremely much worse, especially concerning the deaths of many tens of millions who, uselessly and vainly, had terribly died for the collectivist Utopia that, as always, never arrived. It is good to intelligently refer to the Venona Papers as well as such solid works giving details: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, and Repression (1997) concerning how anywhere up to about 100,000,000 people perished, as a direct consequence of such ideologically-inspired fanaticism. Of course, in America, most historians, in their dedication to liberalism/progressivism, had so cavalierly dismissed any concern with the extremely dismissive and minimizing epithet of the “Red Scare” of the 1920s and, later, of the 1950s. But, in this known to be fallen world, statism, however, has been quite real and deadly; and, national security issues have not all been wildly exaggerated, as progressivists/liberals have so often alleged; the Berlin Wall, the Soviet gulag immortalized forever by the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, etc. were not mere figments of fevered, illusionary, reactionary imaginations.

Both the reified State and an appeal to having a revolutionary regime need to be properly condemned as inappropriate, in terms of wanting to give assent to dialogical postmodernism, so that a restorative orientation toward free government may occur; no political order, legitimate or otherwise, should ever be held as supposedly superior to the liberty of its people; free government, thus, as a quite suitable and needed conception of political rule should, it is suggested, be appropriately connected to an appeal to the (Roman Catholic) political principle of subsidiarity. This means that when there are social and other difficulties, the right appeal ought to properly begin at the lowest private level for seeking a redress of any grievance(s) and then proceed toward higher levels until some adjustment or redress can be found in that process; next, if no private means can be realistically and successfully found, then the process is to start again at the most local level of government before going upwards toward the higher realms of government until there is a considerate or better resolution of the, thus, perceived difficulty or trouble. Added to this principle can be that of (social or communitarian) solidarity, meaning a good sense of compassion with respect pertaining to human beings, so that no one is ever seen as supposedly being a member of a separate species of human (or sub-humanoid creature) deserving only, perhaps, a short, delimited modicum of pity; this sense of solidarity is related to an ethical and moral concern for justly upholding human decency and the Golden Rule at one and the same time, as part of the social civic order related so directly to all aspects of political order, inclusive of proper government itself. It can be rightly said, moreover, that when subsidiarity is properly added to proper solidarity, social civil-liberty exists much more firmly and impressively, meaning within any such fortunate society, the Good Society, and its then generally so much more healthy culture; this is opposed to the moral mysophilia of either the Closed or Open Society models of (an assumed) reality.

More possible then is it that the political matters successfully encompassing, e. g., the consent of the governed, representation, constitutionalism, and liberty under law become ever more realistically granted assent readily, by the people, who have gained both reasonable and rational confidence in their institutions, inclusive of the economic, social, cultural, political, etc. Instructively, The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton defends, in a more defined context, the Rights of Englishmen, as construing how William Blackstone’s thinking versus that of Jeremy Bentham, shows how the latter’s has helped to destroy the rights and freedom of citizens, which has often been done in the generally hallowed name of (utilitarian) reform. Thus, e. g., a constitutional order should mean that real legal limits are to be intentionally placed upon what a government is supposed to be permitted to do, in line with the explicit political prescriptiveness, directedness, of constitutionalism. And yet, one more feature to significantly consider may be called a good need for some sort of a recognizable social consensus orthodoxy; this is by which the (hopefully) revitalized society and its culture do properly acknowledge that the dogmatism of absolute relativism is, in truth, always an absurdity; therefore, it can be viably appreciated as logical and rational that norms are, by definition, normative because human beings, by definition, must be human to be called political beings, not just political animals. While the aforementioned things are, as can be guessed, more oriented toward just domestic political concerns, however, important matters concerned with international affairs and policies of a nation, pertaining to such foreign affairs, ought logically, also, to be given certain critical recognition, as part of the wisely associated realities of any modern polity, of any substantial political order. What may be some fairly assured implications for the subject of world politics?

Though the terms were not yet conceived (fully) or quite yet invented for use in ancient times, however, geopolitical, geostrategic, and geohistorical frames of reference must all suitably inform the foreign policy choices of nation-states, though such notably wide and encompassing perspectives work better, admittedly, for civilizational empires. But, the geopolitics and quite related matters called for here is not meant to be ever associated with Realpolitik, a definite synonym for Machiavellianism set upon the stage of international affairs. Although progressive thinkers have loudly insisted, for at least the past 100 years, that the nation-state is supposed to be rapidly disappearing as a truly viable political entity, nonetheless, the 20^th and, now, 21^st century is still seeing the so vigorous creation of such polities as emergent nationalities, aggressively or otherwise, do persistently claim their special place in the sun. The nation-state, for better or worse, is what practically exists as the still highly preferred archetype of modernist international community to generally assist in providing (an often assumed) comity among the nations, though this ideal has, in fact, never really prevented wars or other conflicts, of course.

International order, even in the supposedly well experienced and preferred hands of modern political science, is mainly a convenient fiction in that one or more of the major world powers do/will determine the actual basic characteristics of what that transnational order may happen to be from age to age, era to era. In the mid- to late-19^th century and, moreover, even into the (very) early 20^th century, the hardened believers in Progress had expected that anything like a titanic war, involving many countries in a life or death struggle, would be so simply unthinkable; and, yes, even after World Wars I and II and much else, there are enthusiasts for, e. g., the UN who hold to some sort of version of the myth of Progress in a world still governed, as always, by the aggressive use of/threat of real force, not simply diplomatic remonstrances, applied endlessly or piously, for the assumed goal of maintaining world peace; contrary to, for instance, the Obama administration, the diplomacy of appeasement, by whatever euphemism, does not deter aggression, and the requisite defense of civilization itself, of the Free World, cannot be truly accomplished and necessarily secured through pious thoughts and pleasant gestures.

American foreign policy, consequently, must be restructured, redirected, redesigned, and reoriented toward not frittering away superpower status by carrying on too many or any inappropriate overseas adventures that counter-intuitively help to degrade and diminish United States influence in the world; this is happening by picking secondary and tertiary “targets” of American national interest concerning matters that do not intimately and directly involve concrete and long-term indications of global concern reflecting back onto absolutely important national needs. It is granted, by geostrategic and geopolitical necessity, that this country must yet maintain a two ocean and seven seas navy to protect its trade and commerce on the high seas; and, there are, therefore, additional geohistorical interests to be defended, when and where vitally needed. There is the ancient Roman maxim: If you would seek peace, prepare for war; weakness, not strength, typically invites aggression as history has repeatedly proven. But, an overcommitted country, as now exists, cannot be a good ally of, e.g., Israel or any other nation because it is acting as if its basic manpower and all related military and related resources seem to be supposedly infinite when, in fact, they are not. For instance, Western Europe and Japan do greatly need to take on to themselves at least 95% of their military-protection requirements, unlike today. Closer cooperation is desired, e. g., between the USA and those Latin American nations that side with the cause of human liberty, by having actually such things as free, open elections to determine how their governments will function; Mexico, which needs to pay for those of its citizens who come here illegally, needs to be recognized as a failed State dominated by a thoroughly corrupt oligarchy that knowingly cooperates with major narcotics gangs. For all of this appropriately important political and, also, strategic thinking, however, the proper acknowledgement of a world political order and its needs requires an expansive viewpoint, focused on a suitably large scale of reference, beyond that of just individual governments or nations; there ought to be a good sense of what could be intelligently called an aristocratic/excellence-oriented internationalism, for any nations, as with Columbia, that have free-market support attitudes being generally advocated; this is clearly versus the vilely mediocre cosmopolitanism and quite corrupt egalitarianism of the collectivist and interventionist-directed regimes (Cuba, Venezuela), with their own failed socialist or social-democratic economies; the former can have the useful ability, the capacity and capability, to so rightly build civilizational-sustaining values as free societies; the latter never really can; they are, essentially speaking, just basic parasitic structures, merely derivative regimes, as to their both integral and implicit natures and activities.

What ought to be understood and comprehended is that neither a regime nor government nor the State itself can ever be correctly ordered conceptually, unless such political order is so linked intimately to that of a civilization and its order. Otherwise, such earthly compositions, for the sake of constituting a polity of a certain kind, become simply abstractionized and isolated from the larger reality of that which must give a holistic point of view, meaning well beyond the denominated territorial borders of mere nations; and, further than that pertinent observation is the superior thought that no civilization can last without primal recognition of the spiritual foundations, the theologico-historical roots, that had truly given it meaning and purpose; this is as to its being in existence as a fundamentally comprehensible unity of some kind, of some political universe. For as Lord Acton, in his Political Thoughts on the Church, had sagaciously noted, “Christianity introduced no new forms of government, but a new spirit, which totally transformed the old ones.” To the point, Rev. E. Cahill, in The Framework of a Christian State, asseverated that “according to the Christian concept of the State, the members come before the State itself, which can never override men’s inalienable rights, nor limit any of their natural rights, except for a sufficient cause connected with the public good.” Such a truly proper progovernative understanding favoring statecraft, therefore, would seem to need to be rightly reestablished in the face of the growth and aggressiveness of social-democratic/interventionist-collectivist regimes necessarily allied to social-market economies. The massive religious apostasy of the Western world, however, does not presage a successful future for the civilization of the West; modernist or postmodernist contempt for the Judeo-Christian heritage bodes ill; a revival of classical political science can, nonetheless, help to substantially restore some essential minimum of that intellectual, political, and moral force necessary and sufficient to politically and otherwise save the West; it would be, naturally, consistent with epiprologic reasoning; and, this is so especially needed now in the face of, e. g., Islamic aggression from Iran and elsewhere, besides being challenged, increasingly, by Russia and China, with either or both of them seemed poised for a future major confrontation with the United States, though one might hope nothing will happen.

There needs to be noted, for apt and instructive illustration, the repeated failures in reasoning on the party of modernity in politics because it applies certainly fallacious logic qua logicism, the parody of logic as, for instance, scientism is the aping of science. China, as with Russia before it, seems on its way to wanting the achievement of what would be a position of world hegemony, though probably being only successful in Asia. Commentators, on international events, do seriously consider the merits or various problematics of hegemony and such matters as, e. g., the balance of power theory; both invite future wars or, at least, aggressive acts that can easily provoke full-scale warfare; the former seeks a solid monopoly of clearly fantastic degrees of strategic, hegemonic power for overawing any and all real or potential foreign threats and, so, encourages fear and the hate that naturally flows from it; attempts at achieving the supposed balance of power arrangements, in this world, has been highly productive of wars, though the theory as an ideal or, actually, a rationalist abstraction ironically promises peace. Thus, Great Britain, as a major historical example, has conducted numerous wars on the European Continent, including World War I, in an incredibly vain pursuit of such a hypothetical equilibrium of powers; this is justified by the logicism of modernist politics, which is no better than a cheap tautology that, in fact, rarely, if ever, produces the (resultantly corruptive and militarist) results absurdly claimed. Meanwhile, the odd notion of hegemony is usually used as a surely hypocritical charge by a power, in a properly duplicitous Machiavellian form, seeking to achieve it for themselves, as with China into the 21^st century. Because such kinds of modernist political principles are both logically corrupt and, thus, encouraging of major ideological corruption, on an international scale of endeavor, any related kinds of philosophical or political theoretics qua modernist metaphysics are then so equally fraudulent, as to any such associated cognition; modernism, which is ever a mass of contradictions, is truly a dog chasing its tail pointlessly.

In set contrast, as can be intelligently recognized and understood perfectly by now, such productions as John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice or Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia are only, in full retrospect, reciprocal failures of thought; they recklessly embraced modernity, with a passion, toward its destined dead end of epistemological futility and ontological nullity; in short, these complementary kinds of faulty and fraudulent efforts do exemplify, at best splendidly, why modern political science is but a caricature of politics. Why? Because, among other unfortunate but significantly indicative reasons, many political scientists have, in fact, taken such stuff quite seriously, as being worthy of profound consideration, as if any of the speculations could be, somehow or other, fairly applicable to the real world of politics, either directly or indirectly. There are rather definite consequences to be well noted. It has been well said, in another context, that those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and, those who can’t teach, teach the teachers. For the utilitarian, pragmatist, existentialist, positivist, and other such confident advocates of modernism, therefore, mediocrity seems, as such, to become its own logical reward. From the opposite point of view, one example is the constitutional composition of various nations that is seen to be a much more indicative and certain guide toward reality; this is related to how and why ways and means can be found, for rightly seeking to appropriately retain a successful understanding and useful comprehension of proper constitutionalism; and, the Founding of the American Republic can be used, as an appropriate paradigm, for creatively provoking useful thought and philosophical reflection.

Auxiliary Discourse on the Second Constitution of the United States of America

Most American historians, inclusive of constitutional scholars, usually for mostly ideological reasons, tend to gloss over or, perhaps, just merely use the first Constitution of the USA as a mainly prevenient introduction for better discussing the second Constitution. The first one that had existed was known as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union that had so existed, in full legal force, from 1781 to 1788; note the addition of the words “Perpetual Union” concerning that particular document; it is still highly important regarding political epistemology, for the (current) Constitution of 1789 does not, in point of fact, contain any such interesting phraseology. What is formally meant, it is hoped, to eagerly excite the rapt attention of the reader? In an earlier America, words were meant to mean what they said and say what they meant, not otherwise; today, of course, people do clearly live, e. g., in a post-Freudian, post-Skinnerian, postmodern, etc. world, with various distinctly Orwellian age overtones (doublespeak, doublethink, and newspeak) to most political and such related discourse. Much of the related thinking here, however, has been fairly well informed by the writings of Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, and others who truly defend American constitutionalism against most current nescience. It is held as being significant that the states of New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island, as an explicit condition of their own ratifications, reserved the firm right to withdraw from the Union, at some future time, if sufficient cause were thought to exist; it was not considered to be a permanent political connection, a perpetual union, but was then only a rational and empirical part of the American experiment in free republican government. Words on such documents, especially in constitutions, were, thus, once meant to be non-plastic, unchangeable, or definite in nature as to the clear meaning, denotation, particularly attached to words, unless, of course, e. g., amendments or revised statements would be later added, if thought to be legally needed; one could, thus, guess that important legal terms were never meant to vagrantly suffer from a careless preterition of meaning; all this is a needed exercise in historical thinking.

At least several of the states (as was properly noted), who had consented to form, once again, the new Union had directly tied their renewed new assent to the right of secession; the states, as the then free sovereign contracting agents of the people of those political bodies, agreed through ratifications to have a national government, once again; it is a supremely odd thought, like weirdly reading backwards into history as a perverse form of blatant historicism, that the then created national body would, somehow or other, become, in certain absolute perpetuity, definitely greater than any, a majority, or even all the sovereign states fully combined in the Union; later, the proverbial tail demanded, in effect, the right to wag the entire dog (the free, separate, contracting political bodies), virtually at will.

One can still profitably remember, instructively, that the previously cited Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union had, in effect, established what then ended up existentially being a provisional national government; the same might, also, have been true for the later entity, created by the (now still current) Constitution. This needs to be related properly to the right consideration of the legal and constitutional nature of the Federal government that was meant to be called into actual formal existence; this was to appropriately serve and service the national-oriented needs of the several states, as all the originating states were, in fact, thought to be fully equal to all other states of the Union; all the United States, as a group, were to subordinate only parts of their sovereignty to the created national government, not all or even most of their rights as states or, of course, what was explicitly called their states’ rights. One can read such allied books as Charles Adams’ When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.₂ Adams, interestingly, explains with thoroughness how Abraham Lincoln definitely used many extra-constitutional means of maintaining the (broken) Union of the still affiliated states; of course, such means were, by definition, unconstitutional and, therefore, illegal; however, as the old saying goes, it is usually true that nothing succeeds like success; and, both oppressive and suppressive force of sufficient magnitude and duration, intensely applied, can truly achieve wonders, in bringing about a genuine revolution in government, through massive centralization of power by military might; others might argue, sophistically, that the means employed were suitably para-constitutional and, thus, designed to save the essence of the Constitution, meaning through temporarily suspending parts, as per wartime emergency measures; but, the consolidation of real power that occurred proved otherwise that expediency is ever an excuse for authoritarian actions rationalized ex post facto. Benjamin Franklin had reminded people, therefore, that they who would give up some essential liberty for obtaining temporary safety deserved neither liberty nor safety.

Prior to what later came to be called the American Civil War (AKA the War Between the States, War for Southern Independence, etc), the Federal government was only meant to be composed of, for most purposes of government, two equal and coordinate bodies; the national government was to only have limited and specified powers, as is openly admitted and reiterated by The Federalist Papers, James Madison’s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, and other forms of manifestly originalist documentation, concerning, e. g., national defense, foreign affairs, and some other matters that only a national entity was thought to properly handle; those things are so stated in the Constitution, moreover, pertaining explicitly to a formal republican government; thus, the sovereign states or, as they were often legally called, the “several states” in set conjunction with the national government had then composed together the clearly composite Federal government of the United States of America; after the terrible Civil War, however, meaning through force of arms as with might making right, the monumental change permanently occurred such that the USA would, from then on, be always a European-style nation-state, contrary to all the original intentions of the Constitution. Equally, for instance, a parliamentary system was purposely rejected because the Revolutionary Generation had seen and experienced intimately the many problems inherent, as with, for instance, the executive being formed directly out of the existing legislature; too much amassed power was, thus, found to be too heavily concentrated by such a form of government. The Founding Fathers, seeing so clearly the enormous mess that Europe was in, had so wanted their own country not to ever emulate the monarchical kinds of (corrupt and/or arbitrary) political orders found in the Old World; this, also, included constitutional monarchies; one can go to easily consult the allied writings of the Founding Generation, inclusive of their open desire for proper checks and balances in a government, in seeking enormous confirmation and profound substantiation, furthermore, of these still quite compelling and important political facts; such directive reading would then help to importantly avoid the terrible error of historicism, which encompasses the clearly phony view, among others, gained absurdly when, thus, seeking (false) comprehension backwards into history.

America, therefore, was not then to have any centralized, consolidated State; the intention of a federal institutional situation was to be seen in a republican-style distribution and decentralization of political powers, within the borders of the country; this original understanding and comprehension of the Union had ended forever with the victory of the Northern forces, representing the national regime, that sought to ruthlessly bring about a permanent centralization and determined consolidation by which the, thus, central government would always be absolutely superior to all of the states combined. The Confederate States of America was, as is known, defeated thoroughly and absolutely; sovereignty, which had once resided in the united people of the USA as is, in fact, still so stated quite explicitly in the Preamble to the Constitution, was—illegally, illegitimately, and unconstitutionally—transferred to the central/national government, as a then so logically direct result of winning the war. Of course, this highly realistic and empirically-based conclusion is not stated as such in all standard textbooks of American constitutional history nor is it ever typically taught in schools of higher learning at either an undergraduate or graduate level; it is typical, logically, that the victors, in a titanic struggle, get the chance to write the predominant majority of history books, which tend to significantly include quite substantial propaganda.

And, this remarkably points out a tremendously significant difference between modern versus classical political science; the latter deals with the rational observation and obvious recording of real events, not theoretically assumed events that are, in fact, completely incongruent with substantial and substantive political reality. What is meant is that a definite and true revolution in American government, from the top down, was brought about, successfully and completely, by the victory of Honest Abe Lincoln, the, in effect, Republican Party, and the amassed Federal/Union forces as they were called. The Constitution’s (original) understanding was confidently reinterpreted, by the aforementioned historicism, to support the truly revolutionized view of the Federal establishment as being the constitutional instrumentality of a modern, centralized State; it can forever politically, militarily, economically, etc. overawe any or all the states combined because the triumphant national establishment had become completely the one and only sovereign power, due to the known principle of national sovereignty, as was then borrowed from European theory and practice and propaganda; although unconstitutional precedents were often set by them, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Nixon, Obama, and other presidents have done things, on the grounds of political expedience or convenience, for which, in fact, they never became deservedly impeached; and, one sees the dangers of permitting the executive to aggrandize himself and diminish the citizenry to the basic equivalent of a mere plebeian mass. (Related current reading should include Christopher Horner’s Power Grab.) American republican constitutionalism, meaning a government of defined and restricted powers, was clearly violated, many times blatantly so; one sees that, e. g., even wartime extraordinary exigencies ended up becoming acceptable new rules, instead of just being only emergency measures and extremely limited, decisively narrow, exceptions to the known political rules of constitutional governance, of free government.

Such foreign political theory and practice as to this significant matter is, of course, not really to be found defended anywhere in The Federalist Papers or in any other of the originating documents of this nation. The true importance of this presented consideration is that, because this nation is supposed to have a defined republican form of government, the American people’s demonstrative sovereignty is to be seen appropriately symbolized in the quite precise formulation of “the United States in Congress Assembled,” which indicates how the people are correctly represented by the states of the Union; this is since the USA has a representative, meaning republican, form of government; it is not meant to be a democracy in any way, shape, or form; this understanding is upheld by the Constitution, especially so due to the fact that the first Constitution was thought to have some democratic defects built into it that were corrected by the present/second Constitution; a better mixed polity was achieved, it was thought, by the still existing, fundamental Law of the Land, meaning, of course, the national political charter; it is also clear, as an added point, that, e. g., any extra-constitutional acts such as appointing administrative “czars” to various positions, through decisions by executive fiat, is against substantial republican order, besides being consequently politically irresponsible as per the Constitution; moreover, an executive order, though issued by a president, can set a dangerous precedent and be filled with a nescience of unintended consequences.

As to the aforementioned matters noted, it is fairly seen, therefore, that classical political science gives a substantially better and more informative and manifestly clearer comprehension of real constitutional interpretation than does the modern or modernist view of a forever plastic or living document that can mean new things to each new generation. Thus, once the originalist viewpoint gets rejected, obscured, or perverted beyond proper recognition, moreover, then relativism, sooner or later, epistemologically takes over the political comprehension of the situation; this is then carried, as may be guessed, to the certainly absurd limit of its becoming interpreted in an absolutist or dogmatic sense, which ought to fairly illustrate and manifestly elucidate its final or nihilistic absurdity to unprejudiced minds.

Problematics of Contemporary and Future Political Matters

Is it realistically expected, however, that the concept of dialogical postmodernism, connected to a proposed reorientation toward classical political science, will then lead to the replacement of modern political science? No. Furthermore, with a readership of such matters that is ranked as infinitesimal and an impact being consequent as less than negligible, it is to be logically expected. Fundamentally inadequate measures, as always, will then be taken just to “save” postclassical politics from itself, at whatever cost to human lives and prosperity; the often equivocating name of reform may be perceived in all this. For instance, the contemporary Tea Party Movement, though it may be yet an absolutely magnificent effort to behold, will have only a just relatively provisional, transitory, affect because the political theorization involved will then generally reflect Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, J. S. Mill, and those so allied basically, of course, to cognitive modernity; the wrong theoretical-philosophical foundations will, consequently, mainly produce substantially inferior and so very corrupted empirical results, as many memories, on average, logically fade and sound activist thoughts do lapse.

It is freely acknowledged, as one can see from some current popular reading that [as reported, e. g., by Amazon.com] has included Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as well as such political novels as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, that many people are, justifiably, worried about the future; the estimated ugly prospect generally appears to be a post-American, post-Christian nation embracing affirmative postmodernism and hurtling toward much gross nihilistic self-contempt; one good example is worth a thousand words, as to the significant difficulty that must be critically surmounted; this is not surprising because, for instance, it is easily guessed that thousands of times more people have and will read Mill’s On Liberty (absurdly thinking it to be highly profound) who have and will never read its certainly quite brilliant and deliberate refutation well done by Sir James Fitzjames Stephens in his ever magnificent Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. What gets called, for instance, political conservatism usually traces itself through Edmund Burke substantially back to Locke and then forward to Mill, meaning all being a variant of what is Liberalism. The prevalent low level of revealed mental ability and knowledge of most average Americans is fairly illustrative and does, thus, exist because of substantial philosophical ignorance, which produces national political disgraces (AKA candidates) of the inferior intellectual status and caliber of a McCain or an Obama; as mediocrity seeks its own natural level and, also, prefaced by a manifestly failed educational system in this country, such an unfortunate reality, therefore, has then produced negative consequences, for America, presaging disaster and encouraging tragedy.

The Obama Administration has successfully instituted a hyper-New Deal on steroids, having a robbing Peter to pay Paul mentality, operating through an inverted “social justice” of confiscatory expropriation of the taxpayers. The Tea Party Movement (TPM) is clearly inadequate to the enormous task. What will happen will be, in effect, too little and too late, though most initial results will, undoubtedly, be fairly spectacular; and, this may create the fateful illusion of an enormous future greater success, supposedly, going well beyond the year 2012. Because the political centralization of power, in America, has really occurred over a period of about 150 years, only a violent revolution could, however, substantially de-structuralize this basic situation, which is, within reason, completely inconceivable under all present circumstances; thus, no genuinely solid, lasting results are to then genuinely be expected from the TPM, though the best of intentions, of course, may be yet involved. Interesting reading would, however, certainly include John M. O’Hara’s A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution Against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless Spending, and More Taxes; his idealism and dedication are both commendable.

It is, however, very difficult to be realistically optimistic, when it is suspected that the wrong theoretics of politics will be adopted for the sake of Hobbesian, Lockean or other modernist orientations, which are assumed, erroneously, to be ways out of the dilemma caused, in fact, by modernity in thought. Obama and his loyal minions have decisively and mostly successfully put into place such a vast, interrelated, and interconnected web of infrastructural complexes of power, with important political constituencies, such that it will then become so virtually impossible to extricate the nation, mainly the taxpayers, from it; this is more so true because of the tremendous financial interests, major statist aggressiveness, bureaucratic overregulation, new hyper-regulatory powers, and associated government debt load that, all combined, manifestly negates any significant chances for reversing direction clearly away from a quite determined collectivism in approach; in any event (assuming he is not impeached and then convicted of some high crimes and misdemeanors) Obama is, in fact, still president until 2012; such an important matter cannot, thus, be simply overlooked or ignored in a cavalier manner; it has obvious implications and ramifications for both domestic and international politics.

History teaches much; in 1994, the Republican Party, in what was thought to be a major triumph of conservatism, had dramatically taken over dominance of the US Congress for the first time in about 40 years; Bill Clinton [the second President in American history to be later Impeached] had then quite so fatuously proclaimed the supposed “end of Big Government”; it was, also, widely assumed, moreover, that the presumed future belonged to a substantial trend favoring mainly limited government; now, in the first decade of the 21^st century, there exists the general assumption of a future hyper-interventionist State that geometrically surpasses the older mere concept of Big Government; therefore, short of a violent revolution in this country, as had been above noted, the general inclination or movement toward basic statism seems, fundamentally speaking, mainly unstoppable. In firm support of the globalization of economics, the Iron Triangle of Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor, as allied to the logical needs of the ruling political class, is not really willing to give up power so easily. But, this is not a single-party issue in America; both George W. Bush and his father, e. g., had acted willingly, as Republicans, in the role of Big Government conservatives. And yet, an important question might still here be profitably asked for consideration: Could any truly thoughtful re-conceptualization of the right mode of carefully understanding the needed science of the political come to properly incorporate the useful strictures and admonitions contained, in this article, on the subjects of politics and political science? No.

Realism, if nothing else, must knowledgeably pervade any substantial or substantive considerations of, logically, what ought to be done or what is rationally and appropriately needed for then saving Western civilization and its political order, if such an effort is thought to be desirable. The mainly decadent and degenerate intellectual, political, academic, and other morally jaded elites of the West remain basically doubtful, meaning as to the purported true value of what the West represents and has accomplished over many centuries. This article’s overt presentation is meant to essentially speak for itself and not to be additionally involved with supposedly many endless augmentative appeals, though there is yet an attached bibliography and references; the USA is, of course, inextricably a part of this present Western world and, moreover, its horrific difficulties. Thus, if human liberty is basically lost in America, it is hard to easily imagine its fundamental survival elsewhere, in any significant instance of definite success, on a genuinely major scale of tremendous endeavor, as to the essential truth of contemporary politics.

Since political truth does exist, however, the macropolitical and micropolitical realities of human order must, thus, reject the existence of any teleocratic-directed regime and all of its nefarious purposes that disrespect political order, politeia, qua the humane order of an evocative realism. Consequently, the recovery of a progovernative political science as a recommended classicism, in its asserted approach, is specifically meant to enhance the possibility, contrary to the predominant elites, of the good recovery of liberty, of true liberty under law, which correctly needs to exclude, by definition, any and all ideological orientations in thought; they are properly held to be philosophically extraneous to the right nature of government qua governance, though mere regimes and the State itself, of course, seem to thrive upon the set appeal to such surely nominalist cognition. What should, after all the aforementioned points have been raised, be still carefully and importantly considered in the clear light of a past Judeo-Christian and American heritage?

Contrary to constitutionalism and Natural Law teachings, those entities made descriptive of regimes and what seeks to be the omnipotent State are, as noted conditions of power concentrations, fundamentally anti-political as arrangements that do, thus, seek to just mimic genuine polities. As may be then quite intelligently comprehended, what has been called the Good Society is, therefore, suitably formative, through appropriate concerns for subsidiarity, solidarity, and a social consensus orthodoxy, of what resides empirically best, when seen as the nomocratic order of that which is political. Moreover, as justifications for modernity, it is well perceived that such stridently pro-modernist forces as are, e. g., rationalization and secularization have, in fact, both necessarily lead to complete dead ends, for both the Open Society and Closed Society approaches to political reality; such debased alternatives that are often rendered as societal paradigms necessarily result in inherently corrupting substantive statecraft and any such possibly attendant pretensions to substantial statesmanship, which is, however, the least that could be fairly said or elucidated.

Such a modernist construct as is, e. g., the United Nations needs to be fruitfully dismantled into, for instance, possible constituent parts that still might be useful for more limited needs; this is as per international matters that might necessarily benefit from such a proper reconstruction of that extremely misguided and intensely corrupt organization, which is highly emblematic of a morally diseased world, of a fallen world.

Conclusion

What would be fairly useful for the requisite advancement of political science would be, perhaps, to hold a symposium or conference to discuss how there may be an explicit philosophical progression, through a metatheoretical theoretics of politics, in clear favor of dialogical postmodernism; this could be rightly accomplished, for instance, through trying to, thus, develop a substantive and good synthesis of Straussian, Oakeshottian and certain other thinking (which do show some true deficiencies and definite shortcomings by having or manifesting some nominalist-oriented tendencies of thought) to then reach a better erudite resolution; that both advanced and sophisticated resolution, in turn, should significantly surpass the failures of modernist ratiocination/rationalism by incorporating successfully the basically related efforts of such thinkers as: Hadley Arkes, J. Budziszewki, Alasdair MacIntyre, E. B. F. Midgley, James V. Schall, and others. Within the requisite and intelligent context of promoting a proper concern for human decency and respect, there is equally the need for helpful, responsible civil discourse, as to the various philosophical limitations and, also, actual mistakes made by Strauss, Oakeshott, and others. Nominalism in thinking, inherently pregnant with errors, is so extremely pandemic and pervasive as to be almost totally un-thought of by almost all people, even by those who really ought to know better; it, consequently, needs constantly to be brought into substantial consciousness, if it is to be successfully combated and defeated, as is always needed to then prevent logically unwanted mental, ethical, and moral failures/errors in ratiocination.

Such a matter is not at all insignificant, for Aristotle had rightly warned that an error unrecognized as such, in the beginning of a line of reasoning, would then later develop into its creating greater cognitive difficulties; this is by seriously provoking, more and more, many critical problems pertaining thence to the thinking undertaken and, logically, its then assumed extrapolation in the unfortunate direction of usually greater error; with political classicism defended as to its then epiprologic signification, the right answers will yet be found, contrary to modernity’s quite rampant nominalism and its hard support for various ideological systems of thought; and, contrary to the clear neo-Pelagianism of modernity, serious thinking can be directed toward the kind of proper reflections and solid considerations so found in the above-noted formulation of postmodernism₃. [The author of this present article had once tried, back in 1990, to then deal, with the aforementioned considerations, in his brief monograph entitled Dialogos: A Rhetorically Epistemic Theory of "Onticized" Metatheoretical Theoretics.]

Regarding a directly seen result, dialogical postmodernism qua synpolinoetics in cognition presents its avowed superiority, for honest and clear examination, by minds open to the objective pursuit of truth; this is as being associated, thus, with the genuine/universal love of wisdom, philosophia, as it is so open to all human beings, for the sake of a common humanity and human decency, a prospective humane order of reality, of politics in its best sense.

Notes

1. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2435422/anthropogenic_global_warming_as_a_postmodern.html?cat=37

2. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2864244/secessionist_thinking_revived_in_america.html?singlepage=true&cat=37

3. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2027986/modernism_versus_postmodernism_advanced.html?cat=37

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____. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.

____. The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages.

____. Three Quests of Philosophy.

____. The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

____. Methodical Realism.

____. Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge.

Kevin R. C. Gutzman, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.

John H. Hallowell, The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology.

____. Main Currents in Modern Political Thought.

____. The Moral Foundation of Democracy.

James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command.

Willmoore Kendall, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition.

____. The Conservative Affirmation.

____. Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum.

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot.

____. Liberty or Equality.

Forrest McDonald, A Constitutional History of the United States.

____. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution

____. States’ Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876.

____. E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.

____. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

____. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.

____. The Tasks of Philosophy.

____. Ethics and Politics.

Fr. C. N. R. McCoy, On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy.

____. The Structure of Political Thought.

E. B. F. Midgley, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations.

____. The Ideology of Max Weber.

Thomas Molnar, Return to Philosophy.

____. Archetypes of Thought.

____. The Pagan Temptation.

____. Politics and the State: the Catholic View.

____. God and The Knowledge of Reality.

Thomas P. Neill, The Rise and Decline of Liberalism.

____. Makers of the Modern Mind.

____. Religion and Culture.

Gerhart Niemeyer, The Communist Ideology, Between Nothingness and Paradise.

____. Aftersight and Foresight.

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.

____. On Human Conduct.

____. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism.

____. Hobbes on Civil Association.

____. What Is History?

____. The Vocabulary of a Modern European State.

Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language Abuse of Power.

____. For the Love of Wisdom.

____. In Defense of Philosophy.

____. The Four Cardinal Virtues.

Paul A. Rahe’s Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect.

Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought.

____. The Natural Law.

James V. Schall, S.J., Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.

____. Christianity and Politics.

____. The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy.

____. Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy.

____. At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From the "Brilliant Errors" to the Things of Uncommon Importance.

____. The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays.

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History.

____. On Tyranny.

____. Persecution and the Art of Writing.

____. Liberalism, Ancient and Modern.

____. Thoughts on Machiavelli.

____. What Is Political Philosophy?

____. The City and Man.

____. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.

J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy.

____. The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarisation in the Twentieth Century.

____. Political Messianism – the Romantic Phase.

Stephen Tonsor, Equality, Decadence, and Modernity.

Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolution.

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Christianity and Political Philosophy.

____. Being and Knowing.

____. Man’s Knowledge of Reality.

Bertram D. Wolfe, Marxism.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

____. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

References

www.michael-oakeshott-association.com/

http://www.morec.com/schall/

www.leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/