James, I am intrigued by the "whole ‘nother post", and would be glad to see your argument laid out fully to better understand what, I must confess, seens to me, at most, an american-constitution-only mode of interpretation - full disclosure, i'm a brazilian corporate lawyer who delves a lot into legal hermeneutics as a field of study, but my background is mostly on civil law theories of interpretation. That being said, please don't delay any further the next installment of Letters to a Growing Catholic, I love the other posts but those are the main reason I became a subscriber and eventually joined the paying list.
I am afraid you are right, though I wonder if a war over Taiwan happens first (which I think probably revolutionizes our politics enough to maybe reroute both the passions for hardball and the partisan hatred). Assuming we don't just surrender.
I don't know what the director INTENDED to say with the movie, but the message I got from it was:
1. War sucks. Civil war, doubly so.
2. Combat Journalists are utterly and completely insane.
It wasn't a movie about America at all. They just used some stock American background shots and geography terms because that's what the audience would be familiar with already. I actually sat and counted.... change ~20 words in the script, and you could easily set the entire movie anywhere else in the world.
And then when you look at what the Combat Journalists have to show for their efforts, in terms of actual photographs, versus everything they just lived through but AREN'T reporting, the answer just keeps coming back.... it wasn't worth it. It was never worth it. They were mercenary adrenaline junkies who thought they were far more important than they really were, and who missed the story for the trees. Any soldier with a helmet-mounted camera could have done what they did, with less interference in the story itself, and fewer double standards.
The reporters would have done better to become written print journalists, and just drop of one reporter at every major scene in the movie to write a story about THAT SCENE. That's the information the rest of the world really needed: highly detailed descriptions about how a broad cross-section of America was slowly falling apart. The President was nobody. A still from a soldier's helmet-camera of the dead president was all anybody needed about him.
Also, the decision for the reporters to be unarmed was utterly insane, and horribly irresponsible. It might have made sense as a policy 50 years ago, but when press gear stopped being unique and important, press pacifism became laughable. They were no different from any other tourists, and a tourist in that situation needed to be ARMED.
"and suddenly society no longer knows who has the authority to make and enforce laws."
I could go into a very long rant about why this is why monarchy is a superior form of government, so to make it slightly less very long: the monarch. The monarch has the authority to make laws. The monarch has the authority to enforce laws. The monarch, for that matter, has the authority to then act as judge in the execution of those laws.
The monarch forgoes all of this because the people would, sooner or later, rise up in revolt against any monarch that actually tried to exercise any of these powers in any meaningful way and instead delegates it all to institutions with a greater or lesser degree of democratic legitimacy in order to remain on the throne... but it is still the monarch, without any doubt, without any question, whose authority is being exercised and everyone else only acts on the monarch's behalf and, technically, legally, at the monarch's pleasure. The monarch just always makes sure that his pleasure coincides with what the democratic institutions say.
If you want the roots of American legitimacy crises, as far as I'm concerned, you can look all the way back at 1776 when (for, I fully admit, perfectly good reasons! In 1834 William IV tried to foist a Tory Prime Minister, Robert Peel, upon the country in spite of the large Whig majority in the House of Commons, and was only forced to select the Whig Lord Melbourne some months after an election which saw the Whigs returned with a reduced majority! The passage of the Parliament Act 1911, which entrenched the supremacy of the democratic Commons over the undemocratic Lords, was in part due to George V, having just succeeded Edward VII and wanting an end to the deadlock over Liberal legislation, sticking his fingers onto the constitutional balance of the day to tilt it firmly in favour of the then-Liberal-led Commons by threatening Conservative peers with the appointment of hundreds of Liberal peers who would all pass the Act anyway! Elizabeth II quietly meddled in Scottish politics to secure an exemption for the monarch from a green energy bill in 2021!) a section of the residents of the American colonies declared that the link to the monarchy was severed, but with that so too were the local governments severed from the legal source of their legitimacy.
None of this is to say that the people are not the only true source of governmental legitimacy, but there is a value in severing the legal forms of legitimacy from the actual source of that legitimacy.
I haven't thought about the myth of Marbury in a while.
I just got back from the movie, and really liked it, but I'm an Alex Garland fan. I don't think "does it make sense" is really the right way to judge Garland's work. I read him as being more interested in visual art than narrative art. Thematically, he's interested in how reality is extremely overwhelmingly and immediately brutal (though sometimes also beautiful) in a way that we are shockingly oblivious to. Alien invasion, androids, quantum simulation, zombies, and even photojournalists are just a means to this end, a way of convincing us to briefly come to our senses and see the world for the nihilistic wasteland that it is.
James, first of all thanks for taking the hit seeing “Civil War” so the ret of us don’t need to!
Masterful analysis of the cases of the (First) US Civil War, with the emphasis on legitimacy. Your article underscores the critical importance of having a legitimate government, able to resolve legal disputes. When legitimacy is gone, disorder, violence and in the worst case, civil war, result.
So when one candidate for President loses an election, tries to overturn the result, then spreads the falsehood that the election was ‘“stolen” and gets millions of people to believe him, that is a serious blow the the legitimacy of Constitutional government in the US. And that candidate runs again, that justifies voting for that candidate’s opponent, even if that opponent is otherwise unacceptable. Even if that candidate is old, of questionable competency, and (for us as pro-life Christians) favors abortion rights.
Because bad but legitimate government is better than no government.
James, I am intrigued by the "whole ‘nother post", and would be glad to see your argument laid out fully to better understand what, I must confess, seens to me, at most, an american-constitution-only mode of interpretation - full disclosure, i'm a brazilian corporate lawyer who delves a lot into legal hermeneutics as a field of study, but my background is mostly on civil law theories of interpretation. That being said, please don't delay any further the next installment of Letters to a Growing Catholic, I love the other posts but those are the main reason I became a subscriber and eventually joined the paying list.
I am afraid you are right, though I wonder if a war over Taiwan happens first (which I think probably revolutionizes our politics enough to maybe reroute both the passions for hardball and the partisan hatred). Assuming we don't just surrender.
I don't know what the director INTENDED to say with the movie, but the message I got from it was:
1. War sucks. Civil war, doubly so.
2. Combat Journalists are utterly and completely insane.
It wasn't a movie about America at all. They just used some stock American background shots and geography terms because that's what the audience would be familiar with already. I actually sat and counted.... change ~20 words in the script, and you could easily set the entire movie anywhere else in the world.
And then when you look at what the Combat Journalists have to show for their efforts, in terms of actual photographs, versus everything they just lived through but AREN'T reporting, the answer just keeps coming back.... it wasn't worth it. It was never worth it. They were mercenary adrenaline junkies who thought they were far more important than they really were, and who missed the story for the trees. Any soldier with a helmet-mounted camera could have done what they did, with less interference in the story itself, and fewer double standards.
The reporters would have done better to become written print journalists, and just drop of one reporter at every major scene in the movie to write a story about THAT SCENE. That's the information the rest of the world really needed: highly detailed descriptions about how a broad cross-section of America was slowly falling apart. The President was nobody. A still from a soldier's helmet-camera of the dead president was all anybody needed about him.
Also, the decision for the reporters to be unarmed was utterly insane, and horribly irresponsible. It might have made sense as a policy 50 years ago, but when press gear stopped being unique and important, press pacifism became laughable. They were no different from any other tourists, and a tourist in that situation needed to be ARMED.
"and suddenly society no longer knows who has the authority to make and enforce laws."
I could go into a very long rant about why this is why monarchy is a superior form of government, so to make it slightly less very long: the monarch. The monarch has the authority to make laws. The monarch has the authority to enforce laws. The monarch, for that matter, has the authority to then act as judge in the execution of those laws.
The monarch forgoes all of this because the people would, sooner or later, rise up in revolt against any monarch that actually tried to exercise any of these powers in any meaningful way and instead delegates it all to institutions with a greater or lesser degree of democratic legitimacy in order to remain on the throne... but it is still the monarch, without any doubt, without any question, whose authority is being exercised and everyone else only acts on the monarch's behalf and, technically, legally, at the monarch's pleasure. The monarch just always makes sure that his pleasure coincides with what the democratic institutions say.
If you want the roots of American legitimacy crises, as far as I'm concerned, you can look all the way back at 1776 when (for, I fully admit, perfectly good reasons! In 1834 William IV tried to foist a Tory Prime Minister, Robert Peel, upon the country in spite of the large Whig majority in the House of Commons, and was only forced to select the Whig Lord Melbourne some months after an election which saw the Whigs returned with a reduced majority! The passage of the Parliament Act 1911, which entrenched the supremacy of the democratic Commons over the undemocratic Lords, was in part due to George V, having just succeeded Edward VII and wanting an end to the deadlock over Liberal legislation, sticking his fingers onto the constitutional balance of the day to tilt it firmly in favour of the then-Liberal-led Commons by threatening Conservative peers with the appointment of hundreds of Liberal peers who would all pass the Act anyway! Elizabeth II quietly meddled in Scottish politics to secure an exemption for the monarch from a green energy bill in 2021!) a section of the residents of the American colonies declared that the link to the monarchy was severed, but with that so too were the local governments severed from the legal source of their legitimacy.
None of this is to say that the people are not the only true source of governmental legitimacy, but there is a value in severing the legal forms of legitimacy from the actual source of that legitimacy.
I haven't thought about the myth of Marbury in a while.
I just got back from the movie, and really liked it, but I'm an Alex Garland fan. I don't think "does it make sense" is really the right way to judge Garland's work. I read him as being more interested in visual art than narrative art. Thematically, he's interested in how reality is extremely overwhelmingly and immediately brutal (though sometimes also beautiful) in a way that we are shockingly oblivious to. Alien invasion, androids, quantum simulation, zombies, and even photojournalists are just a means to this end, a way of convincing us to briefly come to our senses and see the world for the nihilistic wasteland that it is.
James, first of all thanks for taking the hit seeing “Civil War” so the ret of us don’t need to!
Masterful analysis of the cases of the (First) US Civil War, with the emphasis on legitimacy. Your article underscores the critical importance of having a legitimate government, able to resolve legal disputes. When legitimacy is gone, disorder, violence and in the worst case, civil war, result.
So when one candidate for President loses an election, tries to overturn the result, then spreads the falsehood that the election was ‘“stolen” and gets millions of people to believe him, that is a serious blow the the legitimacy of Constitutional government in the US. And that candidate runs again, that justifies voting for that candidate’s opponent, even if that opponent is otherwise unacceptable. Even if that candidate is old, of questionable competency, and (for us as pro-life Christians) favors abortion rights.
Because bad but legitimate government is better than no government.