The Demise of Legitimate Political Authority
Consider this final warning from Nisbet: “Accompanying the decline of institutions and the decay of values in such ages [like ours] is the cultivation of power that becomes increasingly military, or paramilitary, in shape. Such power exists in almost exact proportion to the decline of traditional social and moral authority.”
Some forty years ago, in his groundbreaking study, Twilight of Authority, sociologist Robert Nisbet observed a disturbing trend in American culture. As respect for authority had declined among the population, he wrote, members of that population became increasingly willing to accept and actually applaud an increasingly powerful, albeit less legitimate, government
The notion of true authority, Nisbet wrote, assumes the strength of two essential social qualities—hierarchy, and privacy. Yet both are fading before our eyes.
For Nisbet, the egalitarian agenda of the elites—especially the liberal intelligentsia—is a driving engine of social collapse. It crushes a rich, varied, and multidimensional culture featuring an array of localities, organizations, institutions, and voluntary associations. The collapse produces a paltry pancake of “equality of result”—a result both fed and enforced by an ever more powerful government.
The social, cultural, and political leaders of forty years ago have departed—only Mick Jagger still struts and sweats his weary hours upon the stage. Yet the trends Nisbet descried have marched on, swaggering and swollen, flattening everything in their path.
Without the moral and metaphysical limits of legitimate authority, the cancer of illegitimate power festers and grows, attacking and oppressing any resistance, both within government and without.
Especially striking is the willingness of not only the demos, but their formal and informal institutions, to acquiesce in the willful destruction of their autonomy and, yes, their authority. Among the elites, however, the embrace of egalitarianism for others seems designed to guarantee superiority for themselves. Thus they merit exemption from the promised equality of result that they advocate for everyone else. But the Leviathan’s price is high, as the elite’s permissible terrain shrinks to a tiny fashionable island crowded with Thought Police and narcissists.
It should come as no surprise that those possessed by Nietzsche’s Will to Power will lie to get it and kill to keep it. The perplexing feature of the landscape still visible during these last rays of twilight in our own time is this: why have those who guard the crucibles of traditional authority not more strongly defended the principles that made possible their flourishing for so many centuries?
Founders Keepers?
The notion of true authority, Nisbet wrote, assumes the strength of two essential social qualities—hierarchy, and privacy. Yet both are fading before our eyes.
For Nisbet, the egalitarian agenda of the elites—especially the liberal intelligentsia—is a driving engine of social collapse. It crushes a rich, varied, and multidimensional culture featuring an array of localities, organizations, institutions, and voluntary associations. The collapse produces a paltry pancake of “equality of result”—a result both fed and enforced by an ever more powerful government.
The social, cultural, and political leaders of forty years ago have departed—only Mick Jagger still struts and sweats his weary hours upon the stage. Yet the trends Nisbet descried have marched on, swaggering and swollen, flattening everything in their path.
Without the moral and metaphysical limits of legitimate authority, the cancer of illegitimate power festers and grows, attacking and oppressing any resistance, both within government and without.
Especially striking is the willingness of not only the demos, but their formal and informal institutions, to acquiesce in the willful destruction of their autonomy and, yes, their authority. Among the elites, however, the embrace of egalitarianism for others seems designed to guarantee superiority for themselves. Thus they merit exemption from the promised equality of result that they advocate for everyone else. But the Leviathan’s price is high, as the elite’s permissible terrain shrinks to a tiny fashionable island crowded with Thought Police and narcissists.
It should come as no surprise that those possessed by Nietzsche’s Will to Power will lie to get it and kill to keep it. The perplexing feature of the landscape still visible during these last rays of twilight in our own time is this: why have those who guard the crucibles of traditional authority not more strongly defended the principles that made possible their flourishing for so many centuries?
Founders Keepers?
Consider the constitutionally-ordained central government. The Founders, more conscious of thelibido dominandi than we are in our own time, both acknowledged fallen man’s desire for power and embraced it as a central feature to protect liberty. As Madison puts it in Federalist 51, “the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others.”
So Madison trusts the natural self-interest of the statesman to guard jealousy his power from encroachment, thus performing his constitutional duty.
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