"Rights have a hierarchy and individual rights are at the top. When people are stripped of their rights by membership in a group and the democratically elected officials are enforcing those abuses as the will of the people democracy has already failed."

Remind me of a quote:

“The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness. Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is and that there is no coming to consciousness without pain. What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul.

My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung

In the case of some identity groups the concept of fate is "I'm like this because society this and that... and so individualism becomes more and more hard to construct. Hence people are either likley to join identity groups or are labeled as being part of one.

Case in point. Something like Millennials. Whole group of individuals labeled as identity group of one generation defined by stereotypes.

"As a million debates on libertarian principles have taught us — if you do not clearly define who and what you are in the name of individualism, then a more coherent and collective block will do it for you."

[morgoth.substack.com]

" Whatever failings were written into the civil rights legislation it is likewise the responsibility of the courts to correct. "

But as it has become more and more apparent, the same civil rights legislation have created courts that were results of that. How many judges and lawyers and persecutors and politicians benefited from civil rights legislation and are in those positions because of it, And by extension are not going to change the system they need to thrive.

What better example in recreant times than that of Alex Jones. A system that denied every right possible to him because they come from the "liberal, progressive" camp.

Roe v Wade was another case that supreme court took upon itself to do something that it was not its job or authority and in results in generations of what can only be described as debauchery mixed with eugenics. Good luck trying to fix that in courts. Its generations who group up with world view you can't legislate back. Its deeply entrenched in culture, and worldview of way too many people. And America will sooner end in Civil war of it , than legislate itself way out of it. Besides.... do we really want goverment to to fix something. Every time they tried , it ends badly.

I don't know how America will ever put back this genie in the bottle, but if it does, I imagine it won't be same America, but some kind of radically different place.

@Krunoslav

Diversity has always been the US problem. Different groups of people have always saw themselves first as members of some ethnic or cultural group and as citizens of a federation second. After all the States themselves were like a European Union. Only after it was was clear that independence from England was going to be difficult to achieve and maintain with a lose confederation did the individual States agree to a Union. It was in large part this sense of States rights that lead to the formation of the Confederacy and the civil war.

It gets worse, although the US has always been similar to the EU the continental European culture, with the exception of Eastern Europe, is more homogeneous. The culture in the various US states evolved on less uniform basic principles.

The point is that the constitution was written for a Union of fairly independent states. Even within those states various "colonies" of independent groups were to be tolerated. The Civil War broke the back of that system transferring power to the central government in Washington. The civil rights legislation was just one more step in a long process of limiting states rights. The culture war has been going on before, during formation and currently in the US. Although slavery was the issue that symbolizes the disunion it isn't clear that a happy union was ever possible with or without slavery because of economic and cultural differences.

Confederation of states didn't work in Greece because of external forces. Only after unification under Macedonia was Greece able to defend itself effectively. After Alexander died the Greek Empire was broken up and it was only a matter if time where a people with a strong central government would conquer Greece and the colonies. Even the conquering Romans were however transformed by Empire moving from a Republic to a dictatorship.

For the US Empire is a poor analogy but the same process of centralizing power was at work during and after WWII. The war gave rise to powerful intelligence agencies and the military, industrial complex. In effect it created the administrative state known as a corpocracy. Most people didn't notice as elections and life for the average person went on much as it had. Even today most people have only a vague idea of how much power has been transferred to unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies and corporations. Those that do have the delusion that campaign finance laws will solve the problem. The reality is that administrative states are always corrupt because loyalty lies with the bureaucracies and other institutions not the people.

Inherently weak confederations don't survive outside forces and administrative states collapse under their own weight. No perfect system exists.

What went wrong after the civil rights legislation had long been in the works. The question is can the problems be fixed.

@wolfhnd "The point is that the constitution was written for a Union of fairly independent states. "

I suppose that is how EU works, it quickly founds "excuses" to centralize power. Federal goverment in US does that same. I don't think federal goverment as a center of power was created for that reason, but it inevitably evolved to be that. While I'm pretty sure European Union project was meant to always be similar to Soviet Union. I'm not convinced that it was Soviets who were behind it, but I am convinced that it was modeled on Soviet union. And the most time passes the more we see this idea come to become reality. EU today is bureaucratic empire that wants to control all member states in similar way Soviet Union did. Every aspect of life , subjugated to EU ideology, which is basically what WEF is promoting.

Christopher Story - The European Union Collective

Apr 4, 2008 The European Union is a strategic deception operation. Masquerading as a means of institutionalising 'cooperation', it has been more accurately described by the cynical former President Mikhail Gorbachev as 'the new European Soviet'. Far from primarily representing a vehicle for furthering the various interests of its members, the European Union is in reality a Political Collective -- modelled along classically Leninist lines.

Its Member States have collectivised most of their interests in perpetuity -- a collective act of revolutionary madness, since the EU's real purpose is to strip European countries of their residual political, social and economic independence and sovereignty, and to control and absorb them within itself. It is indeed 'the enemy of its Member States'. The time has long since come for exposure of this corrupt collectivist geopolitical menace, and Christopher Story's book does just that.

@wolfhnd "For the US Empire is a poor analogy but the same process of centralizing power was at work during and after WWII. The war gave rise to powerful intelligence agencies and the military, industrial complex. In effect it created the administrative state known as a corpocracy. Most people didn't notice as elections and life for the average person went on much as it had. Even today most people have only a vague idea of how much power has been transferred to unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies and corporations. Those that do have the delusion that campaign finance laws will solve the problem. The reality is that administrative states are always corrupt because loyalty lies with the bureaucracies and other institutions not the people."

Indeed.

@wolfhnd "What went wrong after the civil rights legislation had long been in the works. The question is can the problems be fixed."

I don't think liberalism can remain or it can never be fixed. And I don't think America is ready to see itself as something other than liberal and remain proud of its roots.

I don't think another civil war can be avoided unless there is strong centralized power that subjugates everyone to its interests. And I hope it does not come to that. Which leaves only some form of civil war to settle the matter. Because the are clearly people in United States that have completely different worldviews and values. So different they cannot live together and corporate. And with as much resources in question, I don't think federal goverment would let peaceful diverse take place. In the end the most likley outcome is violent conflict to settle the differences. It would not be first time or last in the history. As you said, "The Civil War broke the back of that system transferring power to the central government in Washington. " I imagine second civil war would either end doing that once again or there would be new union of different states after the war taking away the power from federal goverment in its present state.

@wolfhnd Few more interesting quotes:

East European liberalism after 1989

One intriguing aspect of neoliberalism has been its attractiveness to a number of former communist countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. In the absence of a strong liberal tradition in those countries it was hardly surprising that garbled versions of liberalism took hold in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. What in fact went under the name of liberalism pulled in two very different directions. The already weak manifestations of liberalism in Eastern Europe suffered an identity crisis in the post-communist search for new identities: its emblematic defence of individual liberty and social solidarity were consigned to civil society, while its equally characteristic championing of competition and private property were the province of a market society. The two parts shared little and were made to lead separate institutional and ideological lives.

The appeal of neoliberalism was understandable in countries whose economies had suffered under communism. The personal circumstances of most citizens made a consumer society on imagined ‘Western’ models of opulence particularly alluring. Citizens were prompted to search for a more efficient economic system whose fruits were tangible and immediate, and neoliberalism seemed to hold out the prospect of a fast fix. But the other direction some East European countries took was a flight from the oppressive and dictatorial states under which people had lived. Here liberals genuinely had to make up lost ground for the many decades endured under totalitarian systems, in particular the absence of robust, basic first layer constraints and procedures. The liberal language of human rights and of bringing back the rule of law and democratic constitutional arrangements was in the mouths of many (Figure 5). As against the powerful state under communism, many liberals pinned their hopes on the strengthening of civil society as a refuge from the state. ‘Civil society’ was the prevalent term for the network of voluntary and private associations that made up society, in the civic and cultural as well as the economic spheres.

In that soil, fourth layer welfare liberalism, relying as it did on the benevolence of an active and democratic state, but a state nonetheless, could hardly flourish. Both civil society and market society tendencies shared the quest to diminish the centrality of the state as far as possible, whether it acted for good or for evil. The state, in the words of the Polish academic Jerzy Szacki, was seen ‘as the agent of all social injustice’, a position quite out of step with left-liberal ideological and philosophical theories. Collective action was mistakenly identified with the socialist collectivism of the old regimes. Anything even remotely associated with collectivism was thus to be avoided.

The belief in the harmonious functioning of civil society without some state regulation amidst the complexities of the modern world was naive and illusory, as it previously had been in liberalism’s past history, when private and charitable institutions proved unable to provide solutions to the social problems of the 19th century. Indeed, neoliberalism now illustrated once again how dominant private interests merely moved in to fill the power vacuum caused by bypassing the state. At the same time, visions of civil society in Eastern Europe demanded levels of social homogeneity that fifth layer multicultural liberals would consider utopian and regard with suspicion. And the misleading idea that civil society was a parallel society, happily separate from the distasteful world of politics, implied that political issues did not permeate the whole of society. The discrete notions of the state, the government, and politics were frequently and carelessly equated. Liberalism failed to take deeper roots in Eastern Europe, while its ideas of liberty were pressed into personalized and idealized intellectual and artistic spheres.

Liberalism A Very Short Introduction by Michael Freeden (z-lib.org) 2015

@wolfhnd

“Karl Marx, famously predicted the “withering away of the state” once the proletariats (The class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live, usually the lowest social or economic class of a community) spark a proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by globalization authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that economic injustice could be abolished by undermining the sovereignty of states and replacing it with a networked “multitude.”

Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously. This in turn led a generation of democracy activists in Eastern Europe to envision their own form of statelessness, where a mobilized civil society would take the place of traditional political parties and centralized governments. These activists were subsequently disillusioned by the realization that their societies could not be governed without institutions, and when they encountered the messy compromises required to build them. In the decades since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is democratic, but it is not thereby necessarily happy with its politics or politicians. The fantasy of statelessness continues.”

― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

The neoliberal offensive

As alluded to in earlier chapters, one of the most prominent misrepresentations of liberalism has been the introduction of the term ‘neoliberalism’. In this case an ideological variant dons the mantle of a rival in order to clothe itself in rhetorical respectability and even to wrest ground, deliberately or unwittingly, away from established liberal versions. Neoliberals tend to see the world as an immense and potentially unencumbered global market, in which the exchange of goods for profit overrides other aspects of cross-national relations. Individual understandings of neoliberalism will of course differ. But in general terms, being a liberal is understood by neoliberals to characterize the free individual agent, alone or in conjunction with others, as being above all economically assertive. The defining features of that assertiveness are to maintain and develop the economic power inherent in capitalist production and transactions, to open up new areas for investment, and to benefit from the plethora of goods available for consumption. Neoliberals subordinate social, political, and cultural spheres to a professed self-regulating economic market and their principles are supposed to inspire the ways all social activities are run.

In terms of liberal morphology, neoliberals confine the core liberal concept of rationality to maximizing economic advantage. They do away with any idea of natural sociability and minimize mention of human individuality as the end of social progress. State power is mainly marshalled to guaranteeing trade and commerce, not to creating the conditions for human flourishing and well-being. Instead the unfettered power of the market is unleashed, so that the liberal concept of constrained and accountable power is circumvented. It is retained mainly to protect entrepreneurs in going about their business, while sidestepping the aim of a genuinely free market that could unlock the economic energy and inventiveness held to be intrinsic to all individuals. In its most recent forms, neoliberalism champions a world in which huge multinational corporations and mega-banks increasingly control and dictate the way we live, fostering an imposed and conformist managerialism. Instead of regarding economic intercourse as a means to the furthering of political ends such as peace and international solidarity, it sees political institutions as a framework arrangement for securing the efficiency and financial prosperity of the private sector. Liberal universalism has been replaced with neoliberal globalism; the ethical permeation of individuals has been supplanted by the economic ingestion of territory. Even governments themselves are predominantly recast as investors and facilitators of trade, rather than deliverers of welfare or social justice. Only when financial crises erupt do governments make efforts to regulate the world of banking, but that is done with a relatively light touch.

In promoting the notion of a self-regulating market, neoliberals approach conservative terrain. One of conservatism’s key features is a belief in the extra-human origins of the social order, reflecting sets of rules that derive from the divine, the historical, the economic, or the ‘natural’. Neoliberals provide a self-assured economic version of the naturally balanced system. In that version, attempts to direct and coordinate human effort can trigger catastrophic intervention when ‘natural’ economic rules are flouted. Hayek’s inspiration is evident on this point. In terms of liberalism’s layers, neoliberalism has been decoupled from its closest antecedent, layer two market liberalism, which nourished a moral vision of markets as a part of a civilizing endeavour, emphasizing individual talent not corporate power. There are few vestiges of an ethical mission towards a fair society among neoliberals—instead, levels of social inequality have been rising under neoliberal policies. And there is little commitment to engaging the engines of progress in the quest for human self-improvement. The welfare-state role of layer four is whittled away or handed over to private organizations. The constitutional arrangements of layer one, with their safeguarding of individual space and liberation from tyranny, are retained but effectively redirected towards free competition among powerful and vastly unequal economic players. In sum, neoliberals do not possess the minimum kit to be located squarely at the heart of 21st century liberalism. Put more forcefully, the complex morphology of liberalism is shattered and becomes barely recognizable.

Liberalism A Very Short Introduction by Michael Freeden (z-lib.org) 2015

@Krunoslav

The establishment is well aware that the administrative state is vulnerable to being a dictatorship. They want to keep their power and not have a Napoleon as with the French Revolution. That is how they see Trump as a threat not to democracy as they claim but to their "reign of reason". The irony is if they were competent they wouldn't have to fear a Trump. People would tolerate a loss of freedom for the security a well ran administrative state could provide. But ideology always gets in the way of reason. But reason itself is more complicated than they propose. It requires that the categorizing brain work in harmony with the intuitive brain. They fail on both counts, little imagination and the blindness of the left brain to things outside it's categorization.

@wolfhnd Yes, Trump is too much of an outsider, to wild, cannot be controlled only contained.

"In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a dictator substitutes himself for the central committee." -- Leon Trotsky

And you are probably correct, they are afraid of one guy dictating it all. In essence they want technocracy, a system of systems that rules rather than one person.

Technocrats think society should be run by unelected bureaucrats and "experts" as a giant machine. Neither run by one person nor people elected by many voters. Hence any politician is either a mask for the system itself, giving illusion they are elected by the people. Human rubber stamp Biden is just a corpse there to pass the laws and read from teleprompter. Trump would have asked questions. And they can't have that.

Yup.

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015), Roger Scruton reminds us that “intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society in the belief they will be in charge of it” (p. 12), and this is one reason why they most often start with the area over which they have the most control: language.

Another reason is because reality has a stubborn habit of not cooperating with their utopian visions: thoughts are easier to control than economies or the revealed preferences of individuals.