The Atlantic Semi Spots The Chaos

How American Politics Became So Ineffective - The Atlantic:

According to science, language, like life, is an "emergent phenomenon" -- which is scientific for "damned if we know where it came from"! They like to sound more sophisticated than that -- it "emerged" via "memes" in populations where some forms of wording conveyed proper meaning better than others and thus "were selected". How? Well, like the Heisenberg compensators in the Star Trek transporter, "very well".

Whole rafts of things in human existence are unsurprisingly "emergent", since according to Darwin, all life is emergent, and thus humans themselves are an example of "stuff that showed up because it must have worked better than other stuff".

Free Markets are emergent. Culture is emergent. Darwin's Cathedral tells you that religion is emergent. The linked article tells you that political parties were emergent from the basic framework of the Constitution. So far, political scientists have not tried to assert that the Constitution "emerged" from some primordial soup of ancient memes and the "founders" are merely "myth", but give them time.

In any case, Trump has the folks at the Atlantic trying to figure out "what went wrong?", and it is entertaining at least to observe their thinking.

"Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick."

See, political parties, "middlemen", local hacks, toadies, sycophants and all sorts of flora and fauna "emerged" to magically make the American political system work -- but we failed to understand that you can't have a "political market" without "market makers", and thus "attacked our immune system" (the "political professionals" acted as gatekeepers) ... an "immune system" if you will.

The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior.

Ah yes, "order from chaos". Me thinks that the column authors targeted a WEE bit too precisely here. In a truth free, value free, culture free nation, do you really expect that "political parties" can bring "order from chaos"? My assertion is that we attacked our CULTURE -- which was based on RELIGION, and the problem that the Atlantic perceives with "political parties" is just a SYMPTOM ... like "liver spots" on the skin being a sign of a failing liver -- but they want to treat the spots!

Middlemen have a characteristic that is essential in politics: They stick around. Because careerists and hacks make their living off the system, they have a stake in assembling durable coalitions, in retaining power over time, and in keeping the government in functioning order.

It used to be that religion, culture, community, family, truth, values and a whole lot of other stuff including the Constitution "stuck around". The columnist has a pretty high expectation of the powers of "political middlemen".  The article writer actually gets it right early on in the article:

The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise. 

The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on.

If you summarize the relatively long article, the author is really attempting to constrain democracy by party political patronage!  Naturally, as a liberal, he is only REALLY worried about Trump, but he DOES point out that Bernie, Cruz and Trump are all "political psychopaths" -- meaning that they don't care what their political parties think.

The problem is in the paragraph I quoted above -- we were NEVER intended to be a "democracy" AT ALL!  but rather a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. The ONLY "democratic election" was to be for the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES! There would be no need to try to hack political parties to subvert the democracy needed to elect the House!  The death of party politics is just one more symptom of the chaos engendered by directly electing the Senate, neutering the Electoral College,  and abandoning the Constitution with it's amendment process!

The left is unable to see that ever more massive government is NOT American, nor even sustainable ANYWHERE -- no matter how much party patronage you have. He can only see that "parties losing power" (the Republican party) has given rise to two "pathogens" in his mind -- the Tea Party and Trump. Take a look around. Are brontosauruses still in existence? Are blue whales being replaced by "mega blue whales"? SCALING PROBLEMS EXIST! Bigger IS NOT always better!

I signed up for IBM because I really thought that a large corporation had distinct advantages -- it did, but it also had big DISADVANTAGES -- as does big government, or the EU, or ANY large organization or organism!

What he fails to see is that when there is no culture, no truth, no standards, no shared common values, then for a nation founded on IDEAS, there is NO COUNTRY -- just a rotting massive hulk where EVERYTHING is rotting, and the political parties are just one small example!

Trump, Hildebeast, BO, Bernie, political middlemen,  etc are ALL just symptoms!

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