Neopopulist Blog

In his recent Wheaton Alumni article Dr. DeSoto of the physics department implies that it is "scientifically literate" to believe that scientific theories can be falsified.  But this Popperian falsificationist criterion is as dead as the verificationist principle that Dr. DeSoto quite rightly dismissed.  Falsificationism died at the hands of Quine, Kuhn and Feyerabend, among other contemporary philosophers of science.  How do I falsify the statement "There is a unicorn" (a statement which is both meaningful and a hypothesis for explaining trace evidence) or, similarly, "There is a God"?  If falsificationism is the test for rationality then belief in God, like belief in any "scientific" (I put it in quotes because there is no longer any clear meaning to the word) theory,  must not be rational since it cannot be falsified.  Darwinism is hardly falsifiable, even though some call it science.  The same is true of Freudianism, and any causal theory in science that appeals to some hidden thing-in-itself.  This kind of rationalism is, fortunately, dead in our post-modern age.  

It is important for Christians in general, and Christian scientists in particular, to reject the scientific illiteracy of falsificationism because this just prolongs the life of rationalism in our culture -- including our Christian subculture.  The primary mission of the Christian academy is not the promulgation of any kind of rationalism or even intellectualism.  The idea that just because A is thought about more than B, A is more likely to be true than B, is a logical fallacy.  Or even if we adopt a more sophisticated view of intellectualism -- say Popper's "critical rationalism" which Dr. DeSoto considers literate, Christian intellectualism would mean integrating faith with any so far unfalsified nonsense, since everything, including the pretense of the social sciences (and its political representatives) to knowing what's best for everybody, is so far unfalsified.  Christian intellectualism becomes little more than the precious attempt to accomodate nonsense that violates ordinary language and common sense, let alone orthodox theology.  

The failure of intellectualism and rationalism to preserve an open society which does not relegate Christianity to the cultural ghetto is apparent when "falsificationism" (which Popper argued would preserve an open society) is applied by American courts to the question of whether or not intelligent design theory, or for that matter, creationism, should be taught in public schools.  Sure enough, the courts see Darwinism as "falsifiable" and intelligent design and creationism as not falsifiable.  They are correct about the latter; wrong about the former.   None of this is falsifable, or verifiable, and when professor DeSoto endorses this kind of rationalism he is helping to perpetuate the closed society -- the closed society of rationalism.

We have made no progress in making this culture more Christian as a result of succumbing to the vague requirements of intellectualism let alone rationalism, promoted by those who continually bemoan the lack of intellectualism in the evangelical subculture.  

The job of the Christian academy is to hold rationalism by the nose and kick it in the ass -- right in our own subculture, and then in the larger culture, precisely so the religious world view can be revived culturally.   

Secular relativists like Paul Feyerabend have done more in our age to liberate religion from the tyranny of rationalism than Christian intellectuals intent on impressing the world with their "literacy".

Tom Dahlberg '75  

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Tom Dahlberg

When political "scientists" argue that an election "should" have resulted in an outcome unlike the one it actually produced, they become mere pundits and their opinion should be taken no more seriously by the people than those of obviously biased partisans.

More generally, when political "scientists" argue that pluralities are less desirable than simple majorities, they are expressing nothing more interesting than their own taste in elections; nothing more interesting than a taste for green over blue.  Because they are, by profession, rationalists, political scientists don't happen to like pluralities.  Because Neopopulists are not rationalists, they are perfectly comfortable with pluralities.  Neither preference is more rational than the other in and of itself.  The suggestion that the preference for majorities is somehow rationally binding is just one more sophomoric myth of the age of expertism.

The rationalist does not like it when a communist, a socialist, and a Republican receive 25%, 35%, and 40% of the vote respectively with the Republican therefore winning.  He thinks it is irrational that any political organizational unit would end up with a Republican representative where 60% of the voters are left wing.  He concludes that the "majority" is not being represented, and that this is absurd. 

But what is actually absurd is the political scientist imagining that he, the expert, knows better than the people, what the people want.

Obviously, the communists and the socialists must think that their differences are significant enough to have two parties and run two candidates, not one.  There is no clear majority.  It is all in the scientist's mind.  He thinks he is a better judge of whether or not the differences between communists and socialists are significant enough to warrant real hostility.  Of course, it is not empiricism when the expert imposes his view of what ought to happen when a communist and a socialist can't compromise. 

How might the political scientist fix this "problem" he sees from his relative point of view?

We can only assume that he would not blatantly eliminate the First Amendment right of either of the two left wing candidates to refuse any primary and register as a third party candidate.  In doing so one or the other is saying that the other candidate and his party does not speak for him or his supporters.  And he has every right to do so.

So if freedom, the First Amendment, is screwing things up for the "scientist" in a manner that cannot be fixed with a primary, what can he do?

He can propose a run-off.

But, of course, he'll then be disappointed when the Republican still wins because the bitter communists, who would otherwise come in last, wish to "spoil" the opportunity of the socialists.  Their preference is for ideological purity or bust. 

Or, as it may turn out, some of the moderate socialists just happen to like the Republican more than their own candidate, noticing that his hair is perfectly parted.  Or they may so dislike the way that the socialist parts his hair that it drives them to the Republican.

So, even after a run-off, the election is still screwed up from the standpoint of our rationalist friend.

So what to do next?  Perhaps test people for what he thinks are irrational motivations before he allows them to vote?

The voters, of course, are doing what they want to do.  It's just not what the scientist wants them to do.  He's got to get them to do what he wants them to do.  He has to trick them into doing what he wants them to do.  The voters understand the consequences of what they are doing, but nevertheless need to be protected from themselves.

So penultimately, what our rationalist friend can do, is propose "instant runoff voting" by designing a voting method which is not actually an instant runoff (because it is specifically intended to produce a different result than a real runoff).  He asks voters to rank their choices.  The communists are to rank their communist candidate first, the socialist candidate second, and the Republican candidate third.  The socialists are to rank their socialist candidate first, the communist candidate second, and the Republican candidate third.   The Republicans are to rank their Republican candidate first, the socialist candidate second, and the communist candidate third.  This, our rationalist friend thinks, will clearly elect the socialist consistently and provide the political unit with the obviously optimized representation of the majority's political perspective.  Given the opportunity to rank candidates, the scientist thinks, the people will behave rationally by his lights.

But lo and behold, the people simply will not cooperate with reason.  The communists still rank the Republican second to try to insure that the socialist will not win.  It's still all or nothing for them.  They hate those wimpy social democrats.  In the mean time the socialists are discovering that by ranking their candidate first, due to the strategy of the communists, they are actually hurting his chances of getting elected in the second round over the Republican.  The Republican's hair compares even better to the communist's than it does to the socialist's, and the Republican becomes a somewhat popular second choice among the moderate socialists.  Not only do the socialists consistently lose, they haven't got a clue as to how to vote, election to election, to optimize their candidate's chance of winning!  The Republicans, being rich, hire consultants who help them game the system by actually coordinating the Republicans around a second choice strategy.

Oh what a tangled web the experts weave.  All for the sake of rational outcomes.  This mess almost drives our scientist mad.  Or was he mad in the first place and is now sobering up?

Having created a mess that no one is happy with, our political scientist finally arrives at the best solution.  Too bad it turns out to be the old hat, traditional solution:  The political unit is divided up into more homogeneous districts, so everyone gets represented.   Unfortunately, when this is done honestly, there are more Republican districts than communist and socialist districts that meet all of the redistricting requirements, starting with size. 

Our poor rationalist just can't win and be truly reasonable and fair at the same time.  He hates Republicans.  But even worse, he hates the fact that his inventions are useless, irrelevant in principle, and even damaging. 

Perhaps he can find a way to improve economic rather than political choices.  He calls his parents to see if they can subsidize a degree in economics.

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by Tom Dahlberg

I am getting the impression that our opponents on IRV are of the opinion that the constitution is satisfied if one's vote is counted, even if it's effect is not predictable.

There's some kind of confusion surviving in this case, some kind of confusion in the debate and the decisions, from an analytic philosopher's perspective. 

The implicit position of Magnuson, for example, is that we are making a category mistake when we suppose that our right to vote is identical with the right to know that that vote is going to have a particular effect.

He seems to be saying that as long as our vote is counted, the right is satisfied.  The effect of the vote is not guaranteed.

But clearly the right to vote is identical with the right to know what effect the vote will have. 

Everyone will agree that if I enter a vote for Jones, who is opposed by Smith, and the electors are allowed to change my vote to Smith, or not, then I could not know the actual effect of my vote and clearly, in this scenario, I have been disenfranchised. 

The IRV folks will immediately respond that this is not analogous since no one is literally changing my vote.  But it is changing my vote, by virtue of making it's effect unpredictable.  And the fact that this is happening to everyone doesn't make it acceptable.  If everyone's vote is subject to change by the electors  (the IRV algorithm) then we are all equally abused.  IRV algorithms, which would count some votes more than others, is changing my vote, altering its effect; making it's effect unpredictable with a complicated algorithm.

It  won't do, of course, to argue that the electors may NOT change my vote even though they MAY.  If they may, in principle, change it, then I cannot predict the effect of my vote.  To argue under these circumstances that I have voted, and that therefore my right has been satisfied, would be absurd. 

If all we have is the right to vote, and not the right to know what effect the vote is going to have, something has gone profoundly wrong.  Under my elector scenario, where the experts go all the way to explicitly changing my vote, the absurdity is absolutely clear.  IRV simply changes my vote -- the effect of it --  implicitly.

The legal doctrine would be that the vote is identical with an intended effect.  If that intended effect is altered against your will, your vote has been changed. 

In any traditional election -- a primary, a runoff, a general -- I do seem to know exactly what effect my vote will have.  What do we mean by the "effect" of my vote?  It is not a probability on the face of it.  We would not say, "Because I voted for Jones, the probability of his winning is higher."  I think if you examine this idea you'll find it's invalid.  Voting does not increase the odds that Jones will be elected; it either elects him or it doesn't.  We do say "Jones was elected ten to one" when ten of eleven voters vote for Jones and only one for his opponent.  But it would be odd to suggest that Jones "odds" of winning are ten to one.  He was elected ten to one.  It is merely analogical and confusing to talk about the effect of voting increasing the odds of a candidate winning.  I am not predicting the odds when I vote.  I am trying to get my candidate elected.

So what is the literal effect of voting which must be predictable?  Remember the all important criteria here for defining the effect of a vote: The effect must be defined literally, univocally, and it must be a predictable effect.  (This is the route to creating a legal doctrine -- a new one perhaps.  At least a clear one.)

Is the effect that I am "associating" with the candidate?  Although true, this is a relatively  abstract effect.  I can associate with the candidate even if I don't vote for him, and associating with the candidate, even by a majority of the people, isn't prima facie what gets him elected.  I think the argument that IRV impinges upon freedom of association, although true,  is not the heart of the matter, not a substitute for this hard core definition of the effect of a vote which needs to be guaranteed.

We know that the Constitution would strike down my elector scenario, even for judges within the Modern Liberal Rationalist Tradition (MLRT) where the effect of my vote clearly becomes unpredictable because my vote can be explicitly changed.  And if IRV can be shown to literally, although implicitly, change my vote -- my clear, as applied intention --  it cannot stand Constitutional scrutiny no matter what the MLRT says.  (Remember, the primary purpose of a tradition is to define what's good, and the primary role of judges within the MLRT is decide what's good from within that tradition.  It's not about deciding what's constitutional.  I'm just saying that even a MLRT judge might conclude that if IRV is changing my clear, as applied intention, albeit implicitly, it's a bad thing.) 

But what, exactly, is the clear, literal, univocal "effect" that I must be able to predict in order to have voted?  

The predictable effect must be that my vote CANCELS THE EFFECT OF AN OPPOSING VOTE, ONE TO ONE.  Literally, univocally, a traditional election is canceling votes against one another until there is no vote to cancel an opposing vote.  This has nothing to do with 51% majorities and the counting could stop right at that point and we would know who won.  In other words, all traditional elections are won, in principle, by one vote (your vote), NOT BY A MAJORITY, because this must be the predictable effect of my voting in order for me to have actually voted. 

We do not say that because Jones won by two votes instead of one, that he has "more won" or "won more".  Winning is NOT something that gets increased quantitatively.  It is a qualitative state.  The state of having won is NOT a matter of degree -- except in the odd mental machinations of IRV proponents.

Having won is a state that obtains whether I win by one vote or ten million.  Won = one.   IRV distorts the ordinary understanding, the ordinary language, of what it means to win.  It is trying to convince people that there must be something more to winning than just having more votes.  This is reminiscent of children proposing that its not fair that the other softball team got the trophy when it only won by one run.  When we teach kids sports, we are trying to teach them that in the real world there are hard edges.  But we live in a day and age where the losing team gets a trophy too.  Failure and risk are evil within the MLRT.

As soon as you take on the premise that winning must be something more than having one more vote than your opponent, there is no obvious, shared meaning for "winning".  And this is why IRV will devolve into controversy and chaos in the long run, alienating even its MLRT candidates (the ones who lose).   It's victory in the MLRT courts will continue (on the grounds that it's nice, it's good) until it's inherently controversial view of what it means to win gets on just about everyone's nerves -- including liberals.  IRV is an entirely relative, merely value based, expert perspective on what it means to WIN.   As soon as we decide that winning means something other than having at least one more vote, we condemn the concept of winning to subjectivity and rabid controversy.   Look at what's happening!  Democracy cannot afford questionable, vague concepts of what it means to win.  IRV misdirects the people on what it means to win.  It subjectifies what it means to WIN.  It makes the definition of winning too complicated and too controversial.

In order to predict the effect of my vote, IT MUST BE POSSIBLE FOR IT TO BE THE WINNING VOTE.  My vote must be able to cancel an opposing vote one to one, and therefore it must be possible for my vote to be the winning vote when there's no other vote to cancel.  If this is not predictable, then I have lost my vote.  My voting, or not voting, may have no effect at all given the complexity of winning under IRV.

If it is NOT even in principle possible for my vote to be the winning vote then why should I vote at all?  If it is not possible for my vote to be the winning vote, then I cannot even in principle predict the effect of my vote.  Everyone who votes for a winning candidate has, in principle, cast the winning vote.  This is literally true in a traditional election; literally predictable.

The effect of my vote, when I cast it, and which must be predictable, is that it can win the election.  If it can't win the election, then my vote has been stolen from me.  The confident prediction of this effect of canceling the other's vote one to one  is quite literally what the Constitution is guaranteeing if it is guaranteeing my vote.  If this does not happen then the protection is unequal.  If I express only one preference under IRV, it may or may not be the winning preference because a plurality is not accepted.  The same is true for each subsequent "runoff". 

IRV will NOT allow my one vote to win the election.  There are other conditions added on.  Therefore the effect of my vote is not literally and univocally predictable.  I cannot know that it will cancel an opposing vote one to one.  I cannot know that my vote can win the election.

So here's the argument which appeals to a compelling legal theory:

1.  In order for my right to vote to be satisified, the effect of my vote must be predictable in a literal, univocal sense.  My right to vote and the ability to clearly predict the effect of the vote cannot be separated.  This is demonstrated by my elector scenario.
2.  In order for the effect of my vote to be predictable in a literal, univocal sense, it must cancel an opposing vote one to one.
3. The predictable effect in (2) is logically equivalent to my vote being able to win the election.
4. But in IRV my one vote cannot, all by itself, win the election.  There are other conditions established for winning besides my casting a vote which is NOT canceled by an opponents. 

5. Therefore the literal, univocal effect of my vote under IRV is not predictable and IRV is no better, morally, than my elector scenario.  If my one vote cannot all by itself, win the election, if there are other conditions, I cannot predict the effect of my vote.

Without question, IRV leads to a despair of voting. 

The alternative to despair is to start gaming IRV to our advantage.  Then we'll see how long the rationalists of the modern tradition continue to think it's a good thing.   Let's manipulate an election, brag about it, demonstrate that it's been done, and then we'll see how happy Frankenstein is with the monster.

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by Tom Dahlberg 

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Executive Summary of Neopopulism

Read it and act!

There may be some disagreement about the details of this summary, but I believe most Neopopulists will agree with most of this:

Neopopulism is a post-modern democratic movement that focuses on the rule of law, political and cultural context (relevance) and democratic process.  What makes the shining city on the hill beautiful is not any ideological architecture, but HOW it is built.  It has to be built by the people. 

Neopopulism replaces the question "What is the objective truth?" with "Who's in charge here?" 

This  implies the elimination of discretionary bureaucratic power, the political and cultural demise of the expert aristocracy, the rejection of ideology as a will to power that abuses and even hates the people's language, the rejection of the conservative theory of the natural aristocracy and the statesman as more elitism, the rejection of utilitarianism as rationalist nonsense that perpetuates the myth of expertise and the statesman, and a Neopopulist theory of the politician as being directly responsible to the agenda of the people.  

 At an even deeper philosophical level, Minnesota Neopopulism is a wholesale rejection of the modern, rationalistic, scientistic, reductionist tradition.  Neopopulism is a political movement, but deeply respects the capacity of religion to put reason in its place and assert the intrinsic dignity and worth of the people. The rise of Modernism supported the rise of expert aristocracy.  The death of that tradition now supports the rebirth of democracy.  The critique of the modern tradition is in.  The rationalist roots are dead, and the whole tree has fallen on its utilitarian branch, smashing it.  It's firewood.  The people, not the experts, will now be the measure of what is politically correct.

Neopopulism is NOT a political party and should never become one, because the political parties trivialize politics, turning politics into nothing but a will to power -- an ideological process which is often out of context and simply focuses on electing an elite member of the party.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans oppose expert aristocracy, they just disagree about who the experts really are.

Neopopulism is strategic.  It focuses on the creation of political counter- culture.  The right political culture (culture = a belief system [religion, both secular and traditional] externalized, the practical implementation of a world view) will automatically produce the right agenda.

Core Values:

• The rule of law versus the discretionary power of the modern regulatory state.
• Democracy versus expert aristocracy (modern elitism) and rationalism.
• Common sense versus rationalism and  ideology as an out of context will to power.
• Religious faith versus scientism (religion putting reason in its place).
• Respect for the dignity, not just the rights of the people.
• Ordinary language versus technical language as more reductionism.

Core Principles:

• The government should not only respect our rights, it should respect our dignity. It will not do the former if it cannot do the latter.
• There is no objective utilitarian calculator. No expert, no government can measure the net utility of individuals and communities. This can only be decided by the people themselves as a democratic compromise and, as such, is hated by experts who are evil for their ideological perfectionism and who appeal to the utilitarian myth.
• We are "post-modern". The modern rationalist tradition, including utilitarian justifications for giving power to experts, is dead. This also includes the death of modern scientific reductionism, which is the cornerstone of the myth of expertise.
• We reject the conservative theory of the natural aristocracy and the statesman. This is just more elitism.
• The Neopopulist politician is the politician who refuses to play the statesman, but instead remains true to the agenda he was elected on.
• What's new in "neo"-populism is the popular, historical conclusion that the government cannot do for the people what the people must now do for themselves. What we must first of all do for ourselves is liberate ourselves from the expert aristocracy - the excesses of the modern regulatory state (the modern scientific republic).
• The bureaucracy is not an evil conspiracy, it is just inherently mediocre and requires massive surveillance by the people.
• Socialism is rationalism and elitism and cannot be implemented without totalitarianism.
• Private property is power to the people.
• Serve the people or fear the people.
• Ideology is a will to power which has no respect for the common meanings that common people associate with words. Ideology, as opposed to philosophical consistency, is willing to falsify the experience and language of the people in order to achieve power.
• Reason alone has no authority.  But ordinary language, common sense, and the religious tradition have all the authority required to avoid radical relativism.

Core Processes:

• Massive surveillance of the government by the people. We are looking for particularly good informants.
• Bringing suit against the bureaucrats when they violate the rule of law or abuse discretionary power. Force the regulators to either abide by the rule of law or give up their power to regulate.
• Monitoring of all elected officials to keep them on the people's agenda.
• Recall.
• Initiative and referendum.
• Write-in campaigns.
• Civil disobedience.
• Education through the alternative media.
• Coordination through the alternative media.
• The direct control by the people of all educational institutions; the end of government education as a puppy mill for the government's own rationalist tradition.

Basic Agenda:

• Educating the people in the death of the modern rationalist tradition and the need to end the age of expert aristocracy.
• Creation of anti-rationalist, anti-intellectualist counter-culture.
• Direct election of judges. Make the judiciary directly accountable to the people.  Judges and their judgments are all tradition bound.
• Direct election of all state commissioners and police chiefs (as well as sheriffs). Make the bureaucracy directly accountable to the people. Establish the rule of law in the otherwise mediocre bureaucracy. Make the bureaucracy perform for the people; end its wholesale moral and technical mediocrity.
• Bring education under the direct control of the people. Make education directly accountable to the people in order to finally make the people fully free by putting them in charge of the means of cultural production.
• The election of Neopopulist politicians. Make the legislature directly accountable to the people.
• National and state initiative and referendum for deconstructing what the modern scientific republic constructs.
• Recall of any and all politicians including the president.
• Liberate the American worker by liberating him from big business as an extension of the regulatory regime. End the age of the employee by ending the government's regulation of the relationship between the worker and the firm.
• Ordinary language statutes which will control all other law by enforcing the people's common sense meanings for words.
• A constitutional requirement that elected representatives write their own statutes; not experts (lobbyists) or staffers.

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Conservatives are simply a branch of the modern, liberal rationalist tradition, along with liberals proper.  Liberals and conservatives are first cousins debating with each other, vying for dominance within the same family -- the Rationalist family.  After all, all conservatives are classical liberals, and libertarians are explicitly rationalist.  They all believe that authority is still proceeding out of reason.

Of course, neopopulists understand that the great god Reason is dead and generates no authority at all.  It speaks with a multititude of dissonant voices.

Conservatives, like liberals, believe that what it means to win is to dominate on the basis of reason.  But this is just nonsense from a post-modern Neopopulist point of view.  Reason doesn't win anything.  It has no universal, agreed upon standard of what it means to win; no universal standard of rational justification.  One cannot win, politically, culturally, morally, religiously, on the basis of reason alone.  Pure mythology.  Conservatives are repeating the myth of Sisyphus.  It is all a disgusting waste of time and energy from a neopop perspective.

One wins, historically, culturally, politically, on the basis of ordinary language, common sense, and the religious tradition.  That is, one wins on the basis of what is Good, not on the basis of what is rational.  The rational is subject to the Good.  The Good, by definition, is rational.  Neopopulist counter-culture is based first upon what is recognizably good in ordinary language and common sense, and then the realization that the good is the rational.

Rationalism actually demonstrated the primacy of the concept of the good in the Descent of Man by Charles Darwin in which we find the glorification of genocide and eugenics.  No one would consider this rational unless they already considered it good.  Thus, it appealed to Nazis as being entirely reasonable.  Reason cannot be separated from what one thinks is Good.

But reason alone, has no way of defining The Good.  Secular reason separates fact and value.  Only ordinary language, common sense (as the rules determining the proper application of moral terms) and the religious tradition can tell us what is good without intervening ideology which falsifies our knowledge of The Good.  It's the culture stupid.  It's the language, common sense and religion.  It is NOT reason.  Reason is nothing.  Reason is anything.  The Post Modern critique of Reason tells us that it has a billion voices.   It does not have one voice. 

Conservatives are rationalist cuckolds.  It is tempting to simply call them wimps, who choose to continue to debate with the Modern Liberal Rationalist tradition instead of committing real revolution against it.  (We love conservatives, but we also like to challenge them.)  But it is probably more accurate to simply recognize that conservatives are an arm of the Liberal tradition, just a competing tribe within Modern Rationalism.  They think that their experts, their reason, their science, is better than that of the experts, the reason, the science marketed by their "liberal" cousins. 

Conservatives have chosen the most decrepit and discredited weapon of all to fight the battle.  They do not want to overthrow the Modern Liberal Rationalist tradition, they simply want to dominate it with their own set of rationalist ideas.  We neopopulists, predict the fall of the entire tradition.  Conservatism as we know it can no more survive in a post-rationalist culture than liberalism can.  It would be recognized instantly for authoritarian impulses ironically dressed up as libertarianism.  It is not a big fan of democracy.  Given its rationalist republicanism it has not, and could not resist the construction of this tyrant we call the Modern Scientific Republic.

One of the clearest regards in which conservatives demonstrate their subservience to the Modern Liberal Rationalist Tradition is their intellectualism.  They play the game of positioning themselves as superior intellectuals.  This will never capture the popular imagination like a movement which, alternatively, appeals not to intellectualism but to ordinary language, common sense, and the religious tradition.  Intellectualism, ironically, is a logical fallacy which argues that if A is approached in a more critical, "rational" fashion than B, then A is more likely to be true than B.  But obviously, B might be true, and A completely false, and no matter how much A is couched in critical rationalism, leading us away from goodness, away from wisdom.

In the Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper tried to save the Modern Liberal Rationalist Tradition by insisting that "falsificationism" ("critical rationalism") was the universal structure of Reason.  An open society is a society that respects so far unfalsified ideas (traditions).  Some conservatives believe that this approach protects Christianity and free market economics even in a liberal culture. 

But "critical rationalism" has proven to be nothing but an illusion.  Who is to decide what ideas are so far unfalsified or not?  Experts have decided that Darwinism is so far unfalsified (indeed, it cannot be falsified) and that Intelligent Design Theory has already been falsified.  The courts won't let creationism or intelligent design into the public schools based on Popper's critical rationalism even though both are clearly "so far unfalsified".  In other words, critical rationalism has not created or preserved an open society. Rationalism is incapable of preserving an open society.  Only the rejection of rationalism will preserve an open society.  There is no verification or falsification of competing traditions.

This is in fact the conclusion of the post-modern critique of Rationalism.  A tradition cannot be reduced to a single observation statement.  In fact the observations themselves are "theory-laden".

Conservatives, as intellectuals, are ironically unsophisticated.  The paradox of Neopopulism is that it has a much more intellectually sophisticated understanding of intellectualism and rationalism which leads, ironically, to the rejection of both.

Conservatives cannot destroy the Modern Liberal Rationalist tradition while standing inside of it.  They cannot win, and obviously have not won, using reason and intellectualism.  They have failed to ask themselves why it is that the liberal concept of what is good is so dominant.  It is dominant precisely because Conservatives agree that what is good is Reason and Reason first; that reason has authority, more authority than ordinary language, common sense, and the religious tradition.

But, of course, Reason is not intrinsically good.  It is just a pathetic, and very modest tool for securing the coherence of traditions from inside of those traditions.  Reason has no authority.  No authority whatsoever springs from it.  None.  Nada. 

Authority is inherently moral.  If someone says to you, "Jones is a scientific expert", he is saying that Jones ought be be listened to.  But why?  Scientism separates fact and value.  No matter what the rationalist expert says, there is no reason to conclude that we ought to consider it normative.

As long as Conservatives keep talking as if Reason is the highest good, they will make no progress.  The culture will continue to be based on the Liberal Rationalist concept of the good until Neopopulists inspire the people to completely reject this nonsense in favor of ordinary language, common sense, and the tradition. 

Eventually we will even relieve the Christian Academy of all "intellectualism".  It's real mission is to simply hold Rationalism by the nose and kick its ass, every day, 365 days a year, until the culture is completely anti-rationalist and sincerely democratic.

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Dr. Frank Wright, the President of the NRB, a Christian broadcaster's association, has recently attacked Neopopulism for what he thinks is its faulty subjectivity.  He even quotes our web site complaining that our landing page banner is an obvious symptom of a viscious disinterest in objectivity.  He fears that we have abandoned the "Truth".

What a demonstration of how completely saturated even the contemporary Christian mind is in Enlightenment rationalism.  Rationalist categories have become the reflexive content even of minds informed by faith. 

Of course Dr. Wright's misconceptions about our Neopopulist tradition prove that he has read nothing more than our banner and taken it completely out of context. 

We are happy to disabuse the good Dr., especially as our Christian brother, of his misunderstandings.

First of all, our Neopopulist tradition, as will be made manifest in our upcoming book, is NOT radically relativist.  In fact it is inseparable from America's Christian tradition precisely because Christianity puts reason in its place without radical relativism.

Much of the ineffectiveness of the contemporary Christian church, let alone the contemporary Christian academy, is induced by an implicit acquiescence to rationalism.  It is perfectly obvious that the Judeo-Christian tradition preserves its power when it recognizes its inherent anti-rationalism and loses that power when it promotes naïve intellectualism which is just the hand-maiden of rationalism.  Once religion mistakenly buys into the rationalist game (and it is just a game) it cannot win.  Or to put it another way, it has surrendered in principle to an unarmed poseur.  Paul Feyerabend, our favorite philosopher of science, once pointed this out in a letter to a priest.

Dear Father Rupert,

I am surprised.......by the speed with which the church now retreats in the face of scientific results.  The fearfulness of the church....rests on an ideology.  When I was a student I revered the sciences and mocked religion and I felt rather grand doing that.  Now that I take a closer look at the matter I am surprised to find how many dignitaries of the Church take seriously the superficial arguments I and my friends once used.....

Paul Feyerabend

Dr. Wright does not seem to understand that we neopopulists, like Paul Feyerabend, have grown up in the church of rationalism (this culture) and have simply lost our faith in it.  This should be good news, not bad news to Christian broadcasters who should better understand and explore such a phenomena.

The whole cultural crisis for the contemporary church and the Christian academy is its lack of any explicit understanding of two strategic truths:

1.  The only way that Christianity, and the political freedom it founds, can possibly be reasserted in this culture is through a massive attack on all of the rationalism which has eroded faith and freedom.  The modern scientific "republic" has to be put down.  A republic can no more be limited in a rationalist age than a pure democracy could be limited in any age.

2.  "Conservative" Christians, who are so often paradoxically rationalist, must start understanding, articulating and promulgating the difference between anti-rationalism and wholesale relativism. 

We believe that the clearest, most coherent mission of the Christian academy is to hold rationalism by the nose and kicks its ass, day in and day out, until there is no rationalism left in this culture.  The result of this is the complete liberation of religion, culturally and politically, without subsequently allowing religion to turn into religious ideology (just more rationalism) and proposing tyranny all over again.

Since Dr. Wright is concerned about the Truth, here is an inescapable part of it:  Rationalism is dead.  Yes, we are post-modern in the sense that we recognize that the Enlightenment dream of a single, universal standard of rational justification has never been realized and never will be realized.  Science is dead (as scientism). 

This means that secular philosophers and scientists do not and never will have some way of rationally binding the culture to secular models of Reality.  And it means that Christian philosophers and scientists will never have some way of rationally binding the culture to Christian models of Reality.  (Christian scientists "see" design -- irreducible complexity.  Secular scientists just don't, and there's no rational way of forcing them to see it.)  Orthodox Christianity never suggested that pure reason was going to win souls.  And frankly, we think C.S. Lewis was exaggerating if not lying when he suggested that he was forced into orthodoxy by reason alone. 

Orthodox Christianity is obviously very skeptical of human reason and pride of the mind.  Friederich Hayek, obviously a champion of freedom, and a Catholic, noticed that socialism was nothing more than "crude rationalism".  All modern statism is part of a sick, rationalist syndrome.  This is an anti-rationalist statement of Truth.  Dr. Wright is experiencing false anxiety about neopopulism.

We are confident we can get Dr. Wright, as a Christian, to join us in an increasingly conscious rejection of rationalism.  This means the rejection of the scientistic myth that there is some one method, or some one standard of justification (or even one standard of falsification) which can settle our questions about Reality.  This hasn't happened yet and it's never going to happen at the level of metaphysical model building.

Instead what we Neopopulist Christians recognize is that God is in control of human nature.  Whereas rational thinkers can build alternative models of the empyrean, none of which can be either verified or falsified, none of them can alter human nature.  Once one recognizes that the religious world view is no more and no less verifiable or falsifiable than secular world views, even when this involves objectifying human nature, subjectively we will all tend, each one of us, to either become liars (existentially inauthentic) or end up in the same tradition if human nature is universal.  God doesn't need abstract reason to be binding on people.  He has a much more powerful weapon: The moral causes and effects in human nature which He directly controls.  Neopopulists believe in moral and religious knowledge, not so-called "objective", "scientific" knowledge.  We have discovered that the latter is the myth, and the former is the reality.

In other words, from a Christian point of view, the decisive objectivity of faith is in our subjective reasons for embracing it.  How could the universe have produced our subjective demand for Christ if it was not a Christian universe?  In effect, as Christians, and neopopulists, we refuse the separation of the objective and the subjective.  It is a false dichotomy.  The only universal method for arriving at the same place is not the building of abstract conceptual models of reality, but confronting the same subjective needs.  The use and products of reason are not universal.  But if human nature is universal, then this need not be considered a dangerous situation.  A culture which recognizes the relativity of reason, and the universality of human nature (by faith) is an inherently Christian culture.

The key to returning to a Christian culture and, therefore, a political culture of freedom, is not to sustain the naïve rationalism that has consistently mischaracterized and shackled religion, but to liberate mankind's utterly legitimate subjective motivations for choosing faith over despair.  This choice is the most dramatic symptom of the objective truth of the religious understanding of reality.  Any Christian who believes in human nature need not fear the demise of rationalism but should, instead, celebrate its death.  It has kept us from focusing on the ancient subjective methods for discovering the objective Truth.  Christianity tells us that our subjectivity means something.  This is something which other traditions cannot claim.  And it is perfectly consistent, perfectly rational for Christianity to notice that human nature, from God's point of view, is an objective process which may be designed to lead to the objective Truth from His point of view, while being lived (not objectified) by the one who arrives at the truth.  In other words God has fore-ordained a lived moral journey to the truth, not an abstract theoretical road.  This is why life is worth living and is so very interesting.  This is precisely why it really means something.

It's time for even the popular Christian mind to get past all of its naivete about subjectivity, objectivity, Truth, and Reason.  The best way to start is to cooperate in spreading the news of Rationalism's demise.  What a delightful mission for Christian broadcasters as well as Christian professors.

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Tom Dahlberg 

In a well known scene from the movie "Braveheart" the Scottish highlanders gather at Stirling to fight the English for their freedom.  The Scottish nobles are also present and propose to negotiate with the English.  They have every reason to do so since they have lands and titles in England.  To a large extent the Scottish nobles and their elite counterparts in the English army are rooted in the same tradition.

William Wallace arrives in time to disrupt the compromising cowardice of the Scottish nobles.  He rides across the field behind the nobles not to negotiate a peace, which he knows will not insure the freedom of his countrymen, but to pique a fight.  He insults the English elites and prevents the Scottish nobles from continuing to compromise with the tyrant.

If we use the English in this scene as a metaphor for the Modern Liberal Rationalist Tradition (MRT), then the Scottish nobles are contemporary conservatives - related to the enemy by virtue of sharing the same kind of lands and titles, the same kind of assumptions about how to work things out, about how reason works.  William Wallace and the highlanders are neopopulists.  They are there strictly to pique a fight; to kill the monster, not to talk to it.  The highlanders are disgusted with both the English (the liberals) and the Scottish nobles (the conservatives).  All the conservatives are really good for is flanking the archers at the end of the battle.  It is the neopopulists that will have to cut the heads off the liberal rationalists with a direct attack.  Again, the Scottish Nobles and the English are rooted in the same political paradigm, the same tradition.  They fight over who will control it.

Modern conservatives, coming out of their classically liberal roots, are Rationalists just like their cousins the liberals.  They continue to dialogue with the rationalists, based on the assumption that Reason is still the legitimate monarch of liberals and conservatives alike.  Neopopulists are not here to make peace with the monarch, to share the same culture with liberals.  Neopopulists are here to pique a fight with them, by insulting them, abusing them, and swarming over them.  Reason is not our king.

Conservatives, like liberals believe in the myth of the open society based on reason.  (See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies.)  But critical rationalism has not resulted in an open society.  The ordinary language, common sense, and Christian religious tradition of the people have been pushed into the cultural ghetto.   It is perfectly obvious that the mainstream media, the universities, the bureaucracy, the government schools, Hollywood, and even some churches have pushed the people's tradition, and the people's language, to the periphery.  Rationalism has not and cannot preserve an open society.  Radical relativism is more likely to preserve an open society than rationalism.  But we don't have to go that far.  We just have to promulgate the fact that rationalism has already been discredited.  Conservatives are afraid of this.  It will make our political culture too democratic.

Neither Darwinism nor Intelligent Design theory are actually verifiable or falsifiable.  Both have a legitimate claim to being "science" since science has no distinctive method except in the eyes of the terminally half-educated.  But "critical rationalism" (Popper's belief in the rational standard of being so far unfalsified) has done nothing to open up the schools to a different point of view.  All the modern liberal rationalist tradition has to do is keep dominating education and teach generation after generation that science is whatever it says science is, to keep our society closed.  Conservatives, as rationalists, keep approaching the bar with rational arguments that they think should convince the liberals in control to provide the open society.  But it is not working.  As long as the appeal is to the same tradition, to the same worship of the great god Reason and his incarnation in "science", they cannot succeed.  The approach is simply not radical enough.

The naiveté of the specific tactic involved is perfectly obvious to neopopulists.  In the first place the Intelligent Design advocates buy into the falsifiability standard for science, and argue that Intelligent Design Theory (ID) is falsifiable and Darwinism is not.  But it's just not true.  (See the whole post modern critique of falsifiability, as the supposedly universal standard of rational justification, in Kuhn, Quine, and Feyerabend.)  In other words, from the outset, ID advocates buy into naïve rationalism and then they are surprised when they lose to a culture which is saturated in the idea that design theory is inherently religious and unfalsifiable.  The fact that Darwinism is not falsifiable is never addressed by the liberal tradition.  It is an article of rationalist faith.  Again, these conservatives, resting on the rationalist tradition, just like their opponents, cannot win fighting on that liberal cultural ground.  They are too naïve to understand what neopopulists understand.  You win this game by rejecting the entire playing field.  You don't play on their rationalist field.  You destroy it.  You burn it, bomb it, plow it under with the post-modern rejection of the entire rationalist myth.  You get out of the public schools and then you teach your children to kick rationalism's ass every day of their lives.  That's how you win.

Stop preaching the conservative gospel!  Stop preaching the conservative gospel!  Stop preaching the idea that the liberals just aren't as rational as conservatives.  This will never change a thing.  Instead, blow up their entire pretentious tradition by freeing your mind from it completely and then the minds of your children.  Reject the entire paradigm.  Reject the whole idea that there is some way to establish what is objectively true in some binding way.  Yes, the objective truth is out there.   But if you could force it on people then you would be God.  Stop pretending to be God.  Stop thinking that Reason has one voice and that it speaks through you.  This is as crazy as thinking that you speak for God.  If God wanted you to be able to bind people with reason He would have given you the power to do so.  He has not. 

The power that He has given you, Mr. Conservative, is to assert your practical knowledge of Good and Evil; in effect, the power to preach the gospel.  He has given you the Word, embedded in ordinary language.  He has given you a religious tradition rooted in history and ordinary language, not in philosophy or in the "science of man".   Preach it.  Denounce the Modern Liberal Tradition for the evil thing it is.  Demolish it by describing its naivete; its completely passé faith in reason.  Convert people from the worship of reason, which was never satisfying, to the worship of ordinary language, common sense, and their religious tradition.  Disintegrate the Modern Liberal Tradition by paying no attention to it (it pays no attention to you); by walking away from it.  Get your neighbors to come with you.  Walk out of Egypt to the Promised Land.

Religion is more powerful than philosophy.  Philosophy is more powerful than economics.  Choose your weapon.

Neopopulism will keep pounding it into your brain that the Modern Liberal Rationalist Tradition (MRT) believes that it owns all of reason, that it is not a tradition.  It will never be self-aware.  It has no knowledge of good and evil.  The devil created this tradition precisely because every man, woman and child on earth does have objective knowledge of good and evil and, therefore, evil needed a tradition which lacks this knowledge.  Liberalism can never be authentic.  Why talk to it as if it is?   It can never be self-critical.  It will never recognize its true, pathetic nature.  Why would you try to relate to it in any other way than to laugh at it and walk away?  It cannot hear you.  It cannot communicate with you.  It cannot understand you.   Slaughter it like the mindless animal it is.  It is standing between your children and your front door.  Why would you tolerate a rabid dog attacking your children?  That is exactly what it is doing.

Stop preaching conservative rationalism!  Start preaching the death of the great god Reason and the resurrection of the Christian God -- which is a complete mystery!

William Wallace was right.   He understood that negotiating with the nobles, both Scottish and English, was death.  Caving into their tradition, trying to work within their tradition, was hopeless.   It's war.  The rationalist tradition needs to be slaughtered by us savages the way the English were slaughtered by Wallace and the highlanders at Stirling.  Neopopulists are Huxley's savages.  We do not want peace with rationalism.  We are here to pique a fight.  We are here to put the ugly dog down.  Permanently.

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The rationalist age that we live in has seduced the people with a big lie.  This lie is that rationalism is moderation and that all other traditions are extreme.  Precisely the opposite is, of course, true.

Enlightenment rationalism arrayed itself against the extremes of royalty and the church, to the extent that both were authoritarian.  But it served as the foundation for creating and sustaining the most authoritarian class in history - the experts, the "scientists", the "intellectuals", the philosophers, the bureaucrats.  The authoritarianism of all other traditions is a Sunday school picnic compared to the authoritarianism of rationalism.  Rationalism, by its very nature, by commission, is totalitarianism.

Marx was nothing but an Enlightenment rationalist and materialist.  The implementation of Marxism requires totalitarianism.  The Nazis were enamored of Darwinian rationalism and committed themselves to both the reasonableness and goodness of genocide and eugenics. 

Rationalism is extremism.

Nothing is more extreme than a tradition which claims that it transcends all traditions, all perspective, all bias and relativity.  Nothing is more extreme than a tradition which claims it has the ultimate method for establishing objective truth.  And nothing is more phony and false.

Rationalism in all of its permutations is extremism.  As scientism it is a religious faith which presents us with the bald-faced lie that it has eliminated faith from life.   In all of its ideological instantiations, Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, Behaviorism, Positivism, Environmentalism -- it is nothing but reductionist absurdity.

Neopopulism is the death of rationalism in our culture.  We deny it for its extremism.

The elite and the experts descry all populism as the death of reason, because they do not wish to be stripped of their power.  They think that they can continue to call on reason as if it is rationalism and no one will notice.  But we're going to get everyone to notice. 

They accuse all forms of populism of "irrationalism".  But of course, we believe implicitly in the modest claims of real reason, which is worked out primarily within traditions, and simply attends to their coherence.  This modest role for reason will never support the authority that the elite and the experts demand. 

For the elite and the experts there is no moderation.  There is no in between.  There is no golden mean when it comes to reason.  Reason is either the god that gives them their power or it is nothing.  We are not the extremists.  The rationalists are the extremists.

The counter-revolutionaries will try to reconstruct rationalism again and again.  They will always try to revive "the Enlightenment". 

But it is too late.  We have already moved on to the real Enlightenment -- our post-modern understanding of the failure of rationalism.   And this leads to the rejection of all rationalist, authoritarian government.

Feyerabend understood that the death rationalism is the resurrection of democracy - or should be.

Now politics, as I understand it, is in many ways related to love.  It respects people, considers their personal wishes, does not "study" them whether by polls or by anthropological field work but again tries to understand them from within, and connects suggestions for change with the thoughts and emotions that flow from such an understanding.  In a word: politics, rightly understood, is firmly "subjective".  It is impossible to develop "objective" theoretical schemes for it.

I fully agree with those who demand that people be protected from peer group and leader pressures.  But this caveat applies not only to religious leaders such as the Reverend Jones but also to secular leaders such as philosophers, Nobel Prize winners, Marxists, Liberals, hit men of foundations and their educational representatives: the young must be strengthened against being imposed upon by so-called teachers, and especially ratiofascists...and their peers.

If Americans like the "inflation of goods, images, ideas, traditions." look forward to new and improved hair sprays, car models and soap operas, and use money as the ultimate measure of value, then a dissenting intellectual may of course plead with them like a preacher but he becomes a tyrant if he tries to use more powerful means of persuasion.

Excerpts from Farewell to Reason 

 

Feyerabend always emphasized that science itself was just another tradition and that the elevation of it in modern times to an authority that supposedly trumps any subjective system of values, adjudicated democratically, is the limit of absurdity.  There is no "objective", binding basis for this "ratiofascism".  It is simply the competing subjective passion of those whom it empowers.

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Tom Dahlberg

Nothing could be more ironic than Marx, perhaps the most spectacular idiot in history, imagining that he is infusing the "proletariat" with power by destroying private property.  Property is power.  The more property in the hands of the people -- you and your neighbors -- the more power the people have and the less power the state has.  Lenin understood that his statism depended upon the elimination of private property.

Socialism is naive rationalism.  New Leftists like David Horowitz became ex-leftists after realizing that the destruction of private property was the destruction of all freedom.  Obviously if you have to get permission from the government (say your collective's committee) to use and dispose of property -- whether it's the gas you consume to take a family vacation, or the cash you want to donate to your church -- the oppression is comprehensive.  The idea that one could simultaneously dispose of the whole idea of property and liberate people is the all time greatest rationalist absurdity.  Marxism inevitably led to totalitarianism.

Henry George, one of those soft-headed evangelicals who went liberal (read: rationalist)  attacked property with a philosophical abstraction at the turn of the 20th century.  This was not a coherent expression of his Christian faith; it was his conversion to rationalism.  He appealed to the same kind of abstraction used by ideological environmentalists today.  George thought that people should not be allowed to own land, even though they should be allowed to own what they actually produce.  He thought  men have no right to own a natural object which has preceded them.  George proposed a single tax on land to fund all of government, and even a neo-classical economist like Milton Friedman was sympathetic to this idea; proof positive that neo-classical economists are rationalists just like socialists. 

In the Old Testament God gives the land to the people.  He tells them to go into the land and "possess" it.  There is no suggestion here that people should not be allowed to own something "natural".  The land was God-given, and no force on earth had the right to take it away from them.

One of the best things our government ever did was award ownership of land to the people, who either paid cash for it or earned it by supplying the price that the government demanded -- homesteading it.   Our government was once sane enough to see the benefit to all of society in the private ownership of land.  This is not to deny the benefits of public ownership (by all of the people) of some land.  It is to simply insist that land can and should be owned privately.  It is a concrete, essential, pragmatic human arrangement based on common sense and experience.

Today, we all know of aging couples who have been chased out of their real estate by rising property taxes.  This is evil.  They have worked all their lives to own the land and then because of rising taxes they are reduced to renting "their" real estate from the government.  If they cannot pay the rent, they are thrown off of "their" land.  This is the kind of evil that an evangelical like Henry George would apparently support.

How can we own anything that we produce with the fruits of our labor if we cannot own land?  Onerous real estate taxes can be used by the government to control most if not all of what we produce by controlling the land we need to produce it including the ore, the soil, the timber, the water, the plants and so on.  In what sense can any of the crops we produce be separated from the land as the matrix of their production?  Should the government own all of our farms?  In what sense do we "produce" a natural object like an ear of corn, or an apple in an orchard?  If we shouldn't be allowed to own the land as a natural object, why should we be allowed to own what it naturally produces?

Neopopulists may disagree about this but I, for one, believe in the abolition of the property tax.  The property tax is a direct attack on the whole idea of property (real estate and everything which is contingent upon it) based on the abstract rationalist notion that it does not belong to anyone in its "natural" state.  In fact, this is a clearly anti-religious, naturalist notion.

The concrete,  pragmatic, historical reality is that land is first possessed by all the people as a gift from God which cannot be reversed by any government.  The people then divide it into private property based on the common sense realization that freedom and productivity is impossible without private property, including real estate.  Even North American indians were territorial, killing each other over encroachments.  The idea that people do not naturally crave land ownership, that they have somehow been corrupted by unnatural needs, is nothing but ideological mythology.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prospered at God's behest.  They owned lots of natural objects -- cattle.  And finally, their descendents were given the most precious thing of all -- the land itself.  Stewardship implies control; it implies property rights.

What God has put together, let no man put asunder.   Free your mind from all phony, ideological rationalist notions about the evils of property, including land.  These notions are simply meant to allow the government to steal your property so it can control you completely. 

Elsewhere we have emphasized the necessity of the  people owning and controlling the means of cultural production -- the schools.  The foundation of this freedom is owning and controlling the land, and what it can produce both naturally and by your labor. 

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