Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is in hot water over this unwelcome bit of advice to President Donald Trump:
Predictably, Pelosi’s tidbit on ‘proving innocence’ has plunged the twittersphere into meltdown. Most reaction has centered on her purport to reverse the judicial process: guilt is now assumed, and innocence must be proven.
Before one jumps to total condemnation, it is likely worth mentioning that Pelosi is unlikely to have either voiced the tweet to staff, or typed it out herself. She remains a busy woman, despite her loss of the speakership. Most probably, the tweet was punched out by an Aide. If it were checked at all by Pelosi, it would have been as a verbal approval, relayed quickly after hearing it dictated by staff.
So, let’s ascribe credit where it is likely due - to the average mid-level staffer, roaming the halls of the Capitol, looking for loose grenades to lob over the trench walls at an orange-tinged arch-enemy.
Still, such a statement is a dangerous thing to reckon with, and points to a larger problem emerging in Western democracies: Liberal illiteracy.
Liberal illiteracy is the loss of functional understanding of how our world works. It is the intergenerational disappearance of the technical knowledge that informs how the levers of freedom-fairness and action-consequence interact. It divides into two broad competencies: financial-economic literacy, and social-legal literacy.
I have written previously about the intergenerational loss of western financial-economic literacy. This economic literacy governs the sphere of public prosperity essential to the health of thriving western democracies. The liberal free market, though it remains alive in principle, is an invention functionally lost to today’s generation of political movers and shakers. They do not understand the virtue of the profit motive, nor do they grasp the inherent societal fairness of a market system left to its own devices, kept free of government intervention, or regulatory overreach.
It appears a similar story is playing out in the rule of law, which governs the sphere of public liberty, a sphere equally essential to the health of western democracies. Citizens of a free society need to be able to count on such liberty in order for their nations to function coherently.
The primacy of the rule of law, and the primacy of the free-market, are the two complimentary pillars which hold aloft the grand experiment in freedom which the United States and its allies purport to represent.
Incensed at the abandonment of legal norms, many commentators on the right today have already moved beyond anger at the mission to ‘Get Trump’, and are pointing the ‘hypocrisy’ finger at the Democrat-controlled DOJ, State Attorneys General, and various Soros-backed prosecutors. Some are even further ahead of the game, pointing out that the hypocrisy is not the point - Democrats know what they are doing and don’t care if there’s a double standard, so long as they win.
Each of these positions ignores a frightening truth: That an entire generation - a generation who now act as the foot soldiers of the West’s ruling class - has lost a functional understanding of how liberalism works. Moved by passion and unrestrained by prudence, they have forgotten the basics of life in a liberal democracy. As a colleague pointed out to me today, why would Pelosi’s staff have even known any better? It’s not like the importance of the presumption of innocence was something stressed in their own education.
And here lies the functional breakdown of the liberal order: Where the justice system, the financial system, and the social and political life that flows into and out of them lose their predictability, so too does the liberal order cease to be a viable way forward for life in human society. Adam Smith already knew this when he first conceived of the modern free market in his Wealth of Nations. Smith’s prior book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, is largely devoted to the building of this matrix of predictability and reliability. This reliability is the thing that gives rise to the possibility of the rule of law and the free market being able to function in the first place.
The persistent failure of Marxism-Communism is an illustrative parallel.
Karl Marx’s historical system of unlimited revolution failed, ultimately, because he appropriated the mechanism of his philosophical predecessor Hegel, but failed to balance the functional ingredients when adapting Hegel’s work to his own designs. I acknowledge it is a contested point, especially on the right of politics, but I still maintain that Marx was no grand master of civilisational destruction, calculatedly setting about his work to undo society forever. He was simply a man with a magnificent idea, who didn’t know what on Earth he was doing in seeing to that idea’s functional execution.
In their hubris, modern-day liberals (postliberals, as some like to say) make the same mistake as Marx. They claim to love, care for, and promote the liberal democratic order as a system promising ultimate freedom for the individual. But in executing its governance, they fail to understand the way liberalism functions. They give in to tribalism where restraint is the only way forward, and they enslave themselves to rule by passion, where reason ought to be the order of the day. They cannot see that the consequence of their decision to hunt Trump at all costs - a decision which has seen them necessarily destroy the predictability and reliability of the justice system - will be the crumbling of the rule of law’s effectual governing power in the United States of America.
This blindness - this liberal illiteracy - is the core problem of which Nancy Pelosi’s shocking tweet is a mere symptom. We are likely only seeing the beginning of its consequences. Only with a radical reinvestment in good education, may we be in time to stop the whole show - the very liberal democratic order itself - from coming apart at the seams.
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Ben Crocker is a research fellow for Common Sense Society, in Washington DC, and a Postgraduate Scholar at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation (Sydney, Australia.
Spot on Ben. I spent 3 days at a Marxism conference in Melbourne Australia during easter. I wanted to get my head into the heads of the modern day marxists. It was an effort to wash my head of my free market thinkings and free up to understand them. I wrote up my ‘learnings’ in as objective manner as possible. But ultimately they have nothing to contribute to society, except the irrational tearing down of... well it seems everything that makes human behaviour civilised