The function of criticism at the present time

Scott’s post on the astounding discovery of A Leading Scholar of Originalism that the Constitution did not actually institute the Divine Right of Kings also alerted me to a project of some worthies at NYU Law School, who are publishing 100 essays in 100 days on, I gather, the present crisis, from what I also gather is supposed to be a salubriously eclectic selection of authors (I don’t why I sound George F. Will today but I am writing under observation). I note that this bagatelle includes Samuel Moyn, Robert George, Mark Cuban, Edward Whelan, Werner Herzog, and Randy Barnett, so I plan to dip a cautious toe into Aguirre, The Wrath of Trump, at least here and there.

Turning now to the project’s prospectus:

Dissatisfaction with democratic government has been pervasive for the last decade throughout the West. We’re launching the NYU Law Democracy Project, which seeks to engage this challenge along many dimensions and from diverse ideological perspectives. 

One of our aims is to promote understanding and analysis of the challenges facing American democracy, including putting them in the context of the similar challenges facing most Western democracies. At another level, we will also assess the evidence behind proposed political reforms and which ones are most likely to help reduce polarization and extremism. One major focus will be exploring executive power issues as well as the challenges the technology revolution now poses for democracy. 

We understand democracy broadly. Thus, we will feature work on how education can be designed to promote civic understanding and citizenship. We will also address the role of civil-society organizations.

Work on these issues unfortunately often gets swept up in the polarization of the times. Important thinking has targeted or reached particular audiences, too often ignored or received with suspicion by others. 

The NYU Law Democracy Project will pursue these efforts by actively promoting dialogue across ideological and political boundaries. Dialogue conducted only with the like-minded has limited value. We will also bring in voices from other major democracies struggling with many of the same questions. We seek to help break through the hyper-partisanship of our moment by creating a forum of diverse programming, research, and perspectives that is institutional, empirical, and comparative in approach, informed wherever possible by the best available research.

Perusing the list of 100 contributors, I’m struck by the absence of anybody who I recognize as an actual open/enthusiastic supporter of the regime that currently controls all branches of the the United States government, although I don’t know all these people by a long shot. Still, no obvious Claremont Institute types etc., let alone someone who is currently part of the Trump administration. This makes me wonder what the point of all this “dialogue” is, except maybe insofar as it might be valuable to plumb the intellectual world of Trumpist fellow travelers and crypto-Trumpers, which some of these people no doubt are.

I’ve been re-reading The Affluent Society over the last couple of days, and one of Galbraith’s more acerbic observations is that ideas by themselves never change anything: only the crushing press of events can alter the conventional wisdom, so impregnable is it always to any logic or empirical critique, for the essentially sociological reasons he so wittily describes:

In large areas of economic affairs, the march of events—above all, the increase in our wealth and popular well-being—has again left the conventional wisdom sadly obsolete. It may have become inimical to our happiness. It has come to have a bearing on the larger questions of civilized survival. So while it would be much more pleasant (and also vastly more profitable) to articulate the conventional wisdom, this book involves the normally unfruitful effort of an attack upon it. I am not wholly barren of hope, for circumstances have been dealing the conventional wisdom a new series of heavy blows. It is only after such damage has been done, as we have seen, that ideas have their opportunity.

Keynes, in his most famous observation, noted that we are ruled by ideas and by very little else. In the immediate sense, this is true. And he was right in attributing importance to ideas as opposed to the simple influence of pecuniary vested interest. But the rule of ideas is only powerful in a world that does not change. Ideas are inherently conservative. They yield not to the attack of other ideas but, as I may note once more, to the massive onslaught of circumstance with which they cannot contend.