Kings, Laws, and God

CrowdSource 7.8.2024

Jul 08, 2024

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that have piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, a Nazi jurist, and reactions to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s religious conversion.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

The Coronation of King Donald?

On July 1, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the case of Trump v. United States, declaring that the President of the United States enjoys total legal immunity for matters related to his core constitutional powers, and “presumptive” immunity for matters peripheral to the core. What does this mean for the republic?

The Sky is Falling: Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, revered American historian, calls the Court’s ruling a “historic disgrace.” The Court, he continues, “has radically changed the very structure of American government, paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism just as the Taney Court tried to pave the way for enshrining the Slave Power.”
Nothing to See Here: Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule insists that the Court’s decision does not imply that the president is “above the law.” Instead, it merely reflects a long-held view in jurisprudence, that the sovereign is bound by the “directive” power of the law, but not by its “coercive” power.

Not Too Complacent, Not Too Alarmed: Samuel Moyn joined us on the pod to discuss all this and more. Not to brag, but we think it’s probably the best discussion you’re likely to get on the topic.

Holy Schmitt!

Lots of discussion on the immunity ruling ends up name-checking the notorious Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

To say that the executive has always reigned supreme in the American constitution is “part of the sociology of authoritarian and fascist ideology and not simply a descriptively neutral claim . . . (Schmitt’s view!)” political scientist (and friend of the pod) Jason Blakely tweeted shortly after the ruling.
Well ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision, Andrew Kolin wrote: “If the Court rules to provide some form of immunity for Trump, it will be realizing Schmitt’s exception, which allows presidents to be completely above the law in all circumstances, acting, in essence, as fascist dictators.”
What’s Schmitt’s “state of exception”? Think Lincoln suspending habeas corpus — as well as his other lesser-known decisions taken during the Civil War. (Indeed, Lincoln was a case study for Schmitt in his book on dictatorship.) More recently, Schmitt’s ideas were at the center of academic disputes around COVID emergency measures.

New Theists and Old Secularists

Last November, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion to Christianity, saying that “Atheism can’t equip us for civilizational war.” In the 2000s, Ali became famous for her activism against Islamic terrorism and her advocacy for secularism and atheism.

Say it Ain’t So. Ali’s conversion shocked her secularist allies, most notably the biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. In an open letter to Ali, Dawkins wrote: “I might even agree that Christianity is the bedrock of our civilization … None of that comes remotely even close to making me — or you — a Christian.”
No Going Back. Here’s Matt Johnson, pushing back against Ali’s claim that Christianity is needed to “save” Western civilization: “Building a liberal society … is difficult, which is why the lure of a return to old ways and faiths will always hold some appeal … But the only way to go back to those traditions is by sacrificing or diluting core aspects of liberalism that enabled diverse Western societies to flourish for so long in the first place.”
The New Theists. Ali is one of a group that Ed West has dubbed “the New Theists,” including Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland, who believe “not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity made the West successful.”
Ali’s Wager. Channeling Pascal’s Wager, Ali has also said that her conversion had an intimate, spiritual side: “I was in this place of darkness and I thought, ‘What the hell?, I’m going to open myself to [God]’.”

From the Crowd

In response to Tara Isabella Burton’s essay, “Lockdown Nostalgia,” Sam Mace writes:

… Having lived in a poor part of a big city and being in the middle of my PhD during lockdown I can only say it was largely a miserable and hellish time. Stuck inside an overpopulated house with dodgy internet I can't say that I had the feeling you describe. I still had the feeling that I had to ‘do’ everything but now I was existing in a space where I had to do it alone. My supervisor who was immunocompromised couldn’t meet, my research materials were stuck in the office as I was laid low with covid before lockdown and what was already a lonely experience turned into full on isolation with the arrival of lockdown. The experience triggered a re-emergence of relatively severe depression which I've struggled with since my first year at university.
The social damage which has been done is serious and we haven’t begun to even think about how to fix it. That’s not even discounting for the educational disadvantage which has been visited upon our young people. Covid was not just a medical disaster but a social and economic one too. The expensive management crippled many economies, dragged the job market to a stuttering halt and at best has released another endemic which will continue to take up significant healthcare resources. We still live in the shadow of covid and it has been nothing short of a disaster that I wouldn’t visit upon my worst enemy.