Keiller TN
New member
I think the following description of postmodern thinking's enfluence on the Florida vote grab also applies to Washington's attitude toward the 2nd Amendment.
Democratic operatives spun a sanctimonious paradigm of simply wanting every vote to count. Students of postmodernism know, however, that postmodernist hermeneutics does not believe in respecting an author's—or, by extension, a voter's—original intention. Objective meaning is inherently indeterminate, they believe, so it is completely legitimate to construct a paradigm that advances the power interests of your side.
According to these tenets, assiduously taught in just these terms in the nation's universities, contradictions of logic or morality need not get in the way. One may assert transcendent principles—such as the objective rights of voters—as a rhetorical ploy to persuade public opinion, but then work to get the ballots of military men and women thrown out on hyper-technical interpretive grounds, without worrying about the inconsistency.
Also, since every truth claim is ultimately a matter of personal preference and since logic is not valid, arguments are refuted with ad hominem attacks. The goal: Destroy your opponents personally, go after their reputations, give them a negative image, make them appear ridiculous and incapable of being taken seriously. Thus, the media trashing of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was vilified and ridiculed, in the vilest, most personal terms, for doing her job and standing up for an objective legal deadline.
Republicans, with their naive modernism or genteel premodernism, tend not to be so cynical, and have trouble coping with or even understanding what they are up against. They need to realize that, for postmodernists, the only thing that counts is power. Without any moral restraints—in the cosmic absence, in Mr. Gore's words, of the very possibility of any "controlling legal authority"—all that remains is the sheer exercise of power. Those who think in these terms are too cynical to be moved by moral or legal or rational scruples and will be utterly ruthless in their pursuit and exercise of this power.
On Nov. 20, the issue was in the courts. The founders, who so carefully checked and balanced the executive and legislative branches, assumed that the courts would be checked by the constitution. But in their touchingly premodern way, they had no conception of postmodern legal theory, by which courts do not just discover what the laws and the Constitution say. Rather, the law and the Constitution itself are matters of "interpretation," and the rulings of a court are legal "constructions."
As of the time of this writing, no one knows how Florida's judicial powers will rule. They may adjudicate the objective facts according to an objective legal standard. Or they may construct a ruling according to their own ideology, emulating the justices who constructed the right to an abortion.
But, however the election goes, Americans should be asking whether political institutions that originated in a worldview resting on transcendent absolutes can survive if the culture no longer believes in any of them. What were for the founders "self-evident truths"—belief in a Creator who endowed "inalienable" rights—are no longer self-evident. Indeed, in many circles they are routinely dismissed as unworthy of discussion. Rights are a social construction, not grounded in any kind of transcendent God. But, as postmodernists have shown, what is constructed can be deconstructed, and rights created by the state can be taken away by the state.
One tenet of postmodernism has not been brought up in public, and for good reason. According to postmodernism, freedom is an illusion. Our sense that we can do as we please is itself a social construction. According to the poster child of postmodernism, Michel Foucault, Western democracies are not free at all. Indeed, they are the easiest to control. This is because those in power make their citizens control themselves. This is far more efficient than a police state, since each individual, imagining that he is free but in reality internalizing the values of those in power, becomes his own policeman. And they are so easy to manipulate.
(This is an excerpt from http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/12-02-00/cover_4.asp )
Democratic operatives spun a sanctimonious paradigm of simply wanting every vote to count. Students of postmodernism know, however, that postmodernist hermeneutics does not believe in respecting an author's—or, by extension, a voter's—original intention. Objective meaning is inherently indeterminate, they believe, so it is completely legitimate to construct a paradigm that advances the power interests of your side.
According to these tenets, assiduously taught in just these terms in the nation's universities, contradictions of logic or morality need not get in the way. One may assert transcendent principles—such as the objective rights of voters—as a rhetorical ploy to persuade public opinion, but then work to get the ballots of military men and women thrown out on hyper-technical interpretive grounds, without worrying about the inconsistency.
Also, since every truth claim is ultimately a matter of personal preference and since logic is not valid, arguments are refuted with ad hominem attacks. The goal: Destroy your opponents personally, go after their reputations, give them a negative image, make them appear ridiculous and incapable of being taken seriously. Thus, the media trashing of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was vilified and ridiculed, in the vilest, most personal terms, for doing her job and standing up for an objective legal deadline.
Republicans, with their naive modernism or genteel premodernism, tend not to be so cynical, and have trouble coping with or even understanding what they are up against. They need to realize that, for postmodernists, the only thing that counts is power. Without any moral restraints—in the cosmic absence, in Mr. Gore's words, of the very possibility of any "controlling legal authority"—all that remains is the sheer exercise of power. Those who think in these terms are too cynical to be moved by moral or legal or rational scruples and will be utterly ruthless in their pursuit and exercise of this power.
On Nov. 20, the issue was in the courts. The founders, who so carefully checked and balanced the executive and legislative branches, assumed that the courts would be checked by the constitution. But in their touchingly premodern way, they had no conception of postmodern legal theory, by which courts do not just discover what the laws and the Constitution say. Rather, the law and the Constitution itself are matters of "interpretation," and the rulings of a court are legal "constructions."
As of the time of this writing, no one knows how Florida's judicial powers will rule. They may adjudicate the objective facts according to an objective legal standard. Or they may construct a ruling according to their own ideology, emulating the justices who constructed the right to an abortion.
But, however the election goes, Americans should be asking whether political institutions that originated in a worldview resting on transcendent absolutes can survive if the culture no longer believes in any of them. What were for the founders "self-evident truths"—belief in a Creator who endowed "inalienable" rights—are no longer self-evident. Indeed, in many circles they are routinely dismissed as unworthy of discussion. Rights are a social construction, not grounded in any kind of transcendent God. But, as postmodernists have shown, what is constructed can be deconstructed, and rights created by the state can be taken away by the state.
One tenet of postmodernism has not been brought up in public, and for good reason. According to postmodernism, freedom is an illusion. Our sense that we can do as we please is itself a social construction. According to the poster child of postmodernism, Michel Foucault, Western democracies are not free at all. Indeed, they are the easiest to control. This is because those in power make their citizens control themselves. This is far more efficient than a police state, since each individual, imagining that he is free but in reality internalizing the values of those in power, becomes his own policeman. And they are so easy to manipulate.
(This is an excerpt from http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/12-02-00/cover_4.asp )