Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy writes:

Despite allowing the confirmation of judges for other courts, and one D.C. Circuit nominee, Republicans have continued to block Obama’s latest D.C. Circuit nominees. Now that Senate Republicans have … successfully filibustered five Obama nominees — the same number as Senate Democrats blocked with a filibuster (but half those for which cloture was initially defeated) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to change the rules. According to several news reports, Senator Reid is prepared to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” and force through President Obama’s nominees on a party-line vote, perhaps as early as today. What this involves is making a parliamentary ruling that only a majority vote is required to end debate on a judicial nomination and then sustaining that decision with a majority vote. Some Senate Republicans threatened to take such a step during the Bush Administration, but backed off when a group of Senators from both parties forged a temporary deal to end the stand-off and avert the rule change.

The ‘nuclear option’ represents the clear admission that the division of powers is not only dead but spectacularly cremated, with judicial appointees formally reduced to partisan functionaries. It would thus signal the explicit demolition of the US Constitution. Since a wheezing travesty is worse than a corpse, even strong supporters of the constitutional principle should have few problems with this specific instance of incendiary termination.

America’s crisis of governance is hurtling to a conclusion far sooner than most sober commentators had imagined. As with so many other institutional questions posed in the hysterical phase of Left Singularity, there’s only one realistic response: Let it burn.

ADDED: It’s about jobs.

ADDED: “Democrats nuked the ratchet” (roughly my argument, but on MDMA).

This blog has zero confidence in ethno-nationalist street-fighting to achieve anything beyond an even more deeply vulgarized demotism, as inchoate mob impulses erupt under demagogic direction. So we consider the ‘decision‘ by Tommy Robinson to step back from the hooligan counter-barbarism of the EDL to be a defeat only for those who misguidedly think crypto-fascist politics might have the key to the out-house, along with those who find a crypto-fascist enemy convenient.

Politics in the streets is the primary indication of de-civilization in the modern age, and nothing could ever make it worthy of ultra-right support. Since street politics can occur only under government sanction — which is to say in the absence of grape-shot — any claim it might make to oppositional authenticity is wholly bogus. A right-wing riot is an absurdity.

The story here has a genuinely important angle, however. Robinson’s conversion to “better, democratic ideas” followed upon a carefully-crafted diplomatic exercise by Britain’s state broadcaster, which arranged for him to meet with Muslim ‘representatives’ — under the supervision of the Quilliam Foundation — in order to learn how nice and reasonable they are.

In other words, the BBC seems to have acknowledged its responsibility as the country’s effective government to directly settle the few remaining awkward ideological misalignments among the people. Neoreactionaries have learned that any democratic regime is really governed by its least democratic elements, and the more fanatical its democratization, the less democracy has to do with its rule. As with any Popular Protectorate under advanced democratic conditions, therefore, elections for the governing BBC Trust are not under consideration — because democracy is too important to throw like chum amongst the people (except of course in Hong Kong).

(Thanks to ZD for the pointer.)

A new series begins, triggered by Dennis Mangan (on Syria):

No blood for democracy.

In an intriguing post on migration and ‘expressive voting’ in Alsace-Lorraine  after the 1871 annexation, Bryan Caplan notes that although “over 90% of the new citizens of the Second Reich voted for … anti-Prussian regional parties” only 5% decided to emigrate back to France. Clearly in this case, migration patterns revealed genuine commitments — based perhaps on economic opportunity — while elections were merely an occasion to express ethnic emotionalism without consequence. As usual in human affairs, microeconomics was aligned with approximate reason, whilst politics was possessed by destructive irrationality, redeemed only by its impotence.

It’s hard to imagine what Caplan is seeing as the politically-correct take-away from this example. What it demonstrates starkly is that even populations characterized by scrupulous rationality in their private economic affairs will exploit electoral opportunities to vote for insanity — as judged by their own revealed preferences. Expect even model immigrant workers to expend their votes signalling an adherence to ethnic zealotry and ruinous economic populism — and in particular, the reproduction of exactly those social pathologies they have migrated away from. Like the French in post-1871 Alsace-Lorraine, they’ll probably vote as if they want to live somewhere they manifestly don’t want to be. (But that’s not supposed to be the message, is it?)

The idea that political seriousness can be evacuated from any situation by invoking (purely procedural) ‘democratic’ norms was always an evasion. It was a way to avoid the reality of ‘who-whom’, and thus dependent upon a haze of Cathedralist insincerity. The implicit selling point — “Don’t worry, the rabble will accept representatives that we can work with” — isn’t bought by anybody anymore. Things have gone wrong badly enough, often enough, for such promises to have been discounted down to zero.

If you don’t want the rabble in power, you have to keep them from power. That’s the simple, and now overt, understanding of the dawning post-demotic age. Michael Hirsh doesn’t like it at all:

As the Egyptian military consolidates control by murdering pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters and declaring a state of emergency, we may be witnessing the most dangerous potential for Arab radicalization since the two Palestinian intifadas. Despite the resignation Wednesday of Mohamed ElBaradei, the vice president, in opposition to the Egyptian junta’s action, the discomfiting fact is that most of Egypt’s liberal “democrats”—along with the United States—have never looked more hypocritical. If the bloody crackdown is allowed to continue while the U.S. and West do nothing, the actions of the Egyptian military could de-legitimize democratic change in the Arab world for a generation or more.

Read without judgement, Hirsh’s article is a fascinating document, punctuated by a raging despair that marks a transition of aeons. “Egypt’s liberal ‘democrats'” can either change course in accordance with their name (as Hirsh would like, but does not expect), or they can teach the world that ‘liberal democrats’ know nothing of global political reality, and need to call themselves something new. A sound name would describe a plausible, though ambitious, aspiration: Modernity in Power (freed of democratic dreams). It will still be a while before we hear anything of this kind, but its intimations are not — any longer — difficult to detect.

ADDED: Crossing the Rubicon: “While we Americans are babbling about a new politics of ‘inclusiveness’, even some of the Twitter-Facebook liberals of Tahrir Square are coming to see Egypt as it is. Us or them.”

This series was preparing for the flight out from Cairo International Airport, to go WMD hunting in the Crescent, when a call arrived – from Fotrkd (on this thread) – turning our plans back around. It was hard to pick out the exact message from the stream of excited babble, but it was basically: “You’re not going to believe what Kerry just said to the Pakistani’s …” (who, we have to remember, are next in line for A New Beginning®.)

I’m guessing you’ve already heard it – since it’s all over the media. The Israelis string it together well (notice the encrypted message to Kerry in the URL: Ufu02Kzk2-k (!)):

“The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people, all of whom were afraid of descendance into chaos, into violence,” Kerry was quoted as having told Geo.

“And the military did not take over, to the best of our judgment – so far. To run the country, there’s a civilian government. In effect, they were restoring democracy,” he added.

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The cartoon would look something like this:

An Egyptian (or it could be a Pakistani) walks into the Bank of America, with a hand-grenade daubed ‘Radical Islam’ taped to his ear, and shouts out: “Hand over the money or my head gets it!”

The teller looks up and says: “You don’t have to keep doing this. There’s a standing order to pay you $1,500,000,000 a year.”

Offended, the Egyptian replies: “But the grenade is the only reason you respect me!”

We could try to update the joke (… “then the black lesbian bank teller says: ‘Why are you repressing that grenade?’”) but there’s going to be more than enough torture in this story already. It suffices to note that in the Egyptian version of the cartoon, the grenade was provided by the bank, and its inscription read: ‘Democracy’. We can fast-forward straight through the explosion stage, and begin on the far side of the ‘Arab Spring’.

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There’s no direct evidence that Adam Garfinkle has been reading Moldbug, but he’s at least reinventing the wheel:

… the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. …  this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, salvationist idea of progress, and … its unselfconscious use says a great deal more about what’s wrong with us than about what’s wrong with Egyptians. […]

… the best way to understand U.S. foreign policy is, as the late Michael Kelly once put it, as “secular evangelism, armed.” American foreign policy is, as James Kurth has brilliantly and incisively written, a product of “the Protestant Deformation”, a declension of a religious worldview, complete with logical train and eschatological pretensions, but rendered systematically into secular language that masks its real source. As G.K. Chesterton said, America is indeed a nation with the soul of a church—and not just any church, but a multi-sectarian Protestant one. […]

We Americans believe in global democracy promotion, including in Egypt, ultimately for religious reasons tied to our belief in progress, which is itself a key premise of the aforementioned Protestant Deformation. So when both Islamist and even merely Islamic critics characterized the Bush “forward strategy for freedom” as a Christianity-based attack on Dar al-Islam, and most Americans were embarrassed for them on account of the supposed primitive level of their understanding, the fact of the matter is that they were correct. […]

When I hear democracy-export advocates talk about their plans and aspirations, whether in government or in the NGO think-tank world without, it reminds me of the tone, though of course not with the identical vocabulary, of what meetings in Methodist church basements must have sounded like as missionaries in the mid- to late-19th century were about to head off to fulfill their sacred duties to save the heathens in China. We sometimes worry about mission creep, and rightly so. But what we should be worrying about more broadly, as Lawrence Husick once shrewdly quipped to me, is missionary creep—a version of which infests the infernally silly “debate” we are now having about democracy in Egypt.

Claus Offe lucidly explains what the proponents of ‘solidarity’ are hoping for utterly hopeless about in Europe. The entire article is so thoroughly saturated in doom-drenched, soul-scouring melancholia that by the end I was searching for Odysseus-style restraints to prevent myself doing a wild happy-dance around the office. From the Euro-progressive perspective, things look seriously bleak.

As a bonus, there’s a great gloss on degenerative ratchets: “… those fatal errors which, once committed, prove irreversible, closing off any return to the status quo ante.” By carrying everything relentlessly to the brink, they’re more of a nightmare for the perceptive left than they are for us. By this stage in history, the left has much more to lose. It’s their regime that is going over the cliff. (Yes, I realize this reboot-friendly Schadenfreude will earn a spanking from Goulding.)

ADDED: France is in its worst shape for more than three decades, since François Mitterrand nearly blew up the economy in the early 1980s trying to stimulate growth through government deficits and nationalisations. Unemployment is at 10.5 per cent and climbing. The economy is contracting. And overseeing the shambles is the suety, confidence-draining face of François Hollande.

Goldman: “There wasn’t before, there is not now, and there will not be in the future such a thing as democracy in Egypt.”

(Except for that, though, things look really bad.)