Constant,

I agree with you that any value other than non-aggression could, when combined with the notion that it is O.K. to use the State to enforce values other than non-aggression, lead to aggressive actions or policies. Anti-racism included.

You also don’t have to convince me that government-imposed antidiscrimination policies are harmful. I think everything unjust is (therefore) harmful, and that they’re harmful in other ways besides the fact that they’re unjust. (Although we might disagree on the exact details as to why, I don’t think we’d disagree in a way that matters for this discussion.)

However, I think that there is good reason to say that a belief in natural orders of superior and inferior social rank, based on race, are more conducive to aggression than a belief in social equality among people of different races. It could quite easily be argued that it takes a bigger inferential step to get from “Racism is a social evil” to “The government should make specific policies to force people not to promote that evil” than it takes to get from “White people are naturally superior to black people and should be in a socially dominant position to them; black people who are not submissive are vicious and dangerous” to “The government should make specific policies to enforce white dominance.” I don’t think that in either case the premise logically necessitates the conclusion (without auxiliary principles), but an independent belief in the propriety of the State as a means of social change has more of a leading role to play in the first case than it does in the second case.

For what it’s worth, I also think that there are other reasons why racism is vicious and not merely foolish. The precise reasons why generally depend on what we’re discussing (prejudiced attitudes or beliefs? exclusionary actions? antagonistic actions? etc. etc. etc.). Part of the issue here is that I think there are things that are naturally classed as examples of racism, and not easily divorced from the fact of the perpetrator’s racism (for example, racist harassment, slurs and insults) which I regard as vicious, and which are very widely regarded as vicious. I don’t know whether Arthur means to deny that acts like these are vicious (if not, why not?), or whether he means to say that they are vicious, but should not be classified as a part of racism. So I’m asking him to clarify what he means to say about cases like those.

I might prefer to have a female secretary. If this is not as legitimate as preferring to marry a woman, why not?

I don’t know what you mean by “legitimate.” Are you asking me whether or not this is within your rights, or are you asking me whether or not it’s morally licit for you to do?

If the former, then certainly it’s within your rights. You have a right to prefer all kinds of things. If the latter, well, reasonable criteria for a good romantic partner for you are presumably different from reasonable criteria for a good secretary for you, and I suspect that the former allows a lot more leeway for unargued idiosyncratic preferences than the latter does. While nobody has a right to force you to go along with somebody else’s judgement about what criteria are the reasonable ones, it may very well be the case that they have good reason to suggest that your own understanding of the matter is mistaken, ignorant, foolish, or even vicious. (After all, you might have reason to change your own mind at some point; and if you can have good reasons for differing with your past opinion, then other people could have had those good reasons, too.)

As for whether such a preference really is mistaken, ignorant, foolish, or even vicious, I suppose it depends on what your reasons for having that preference are. Most of the historical reasons that men had during the 20th century for preferring women (as such) over men (as such) as secretaries have been fairly sleazy. But any serious discussion of a preference like that will require more details than just its existence.

For what it’s worth, while sexist hiring practices are a serious concern for those who are concerned with gender equality, there are a lot more issues involved than just that, many of which go well beyond exclusiveness in terms of who you want to associate with at your job or on your own property.

And anyway, G. E. Moore invented the term “naturalist fallacy” to label philosophers who disagreed with him about morality.

No, he didn’t.

Moore coined the term “naturalistic fallacy” to describe a particular kind of move in ethical argument, which Moore believed to be fallacious. (Specifically, an attempt to establish a substantial ethical conclusion by equivocating between a statement of the form “Everything that is X, Y, and Z is good” and a definition of the form “‘Good’ means being X, Y, and Z.”) His issue with the naturalistic fallacy is meta-ethical, not normative; it’s not that he disapproves of the conclusions drawn from it, but rather that he disagrees with the way they are drawn. (He argues that this kind of maneuver tries to resolve substantive ethical disagreements on the cheap, by changing the subject from ethics to semantics, which fails to offer an ethically serious inquiry, i.e. one which might possibly result in reasons for action.) He did not accuse all philosophers who disagreed with his own ethical views of committing the naturalistic fallacy. In particular, he specifically argues that Henry Sidgwick did not commit the naturalistic fallacy in his ethical arguments, although Moore disagrees with, and spends half a chapter arguing against, Sidgwick’s hedonistic view.

Thus, while I don’t know what Arthur meant (and I see he has replied but I’ll take a gamble and submit this without reading his reply), as I understand him what he writes is not only true but trivially true. If something is natural in the sense of natural law, i.e., if it occurs in the absence of a state, then it is trivially true that in order for it to stop occurring, a state is necessary.

If that’s what Arthur means (I think it’s still not especially clear from his response), then he is either walloping a strawman or asserting a strong claim without evidence. If the argument started out about whether gender roles are or are “socially constructed” or “natural,” then the latter presumably refers to those things which aren’t derived from social construction (which may be a coercive process, a non-coercive process, or an admixture of both), rather than to those things which emerge spontaneously in the absence of coercion. If his claim is the trivial claim you attribute to him (that things that emerge spontaneously in the absence of coercion will emerge spontaneously unless coercion is applied), then he’s not successfully responding to Francois’s expressed concern. If, on the other hand, his claim is the substantive claim that things that aren’t socially constructed cannot be limited or eliminated without the use of coercion, then what he’s saying is responsive, but it’s also not as yet supported by argument. (And in fact is pretty obviously wrong, if it’s intended as a universal claim.)

Arthur B.:

Racism is at best stupid not immoral.

So you say. But why do you say this? I can think of lots of examples where racism has led people to do incredibly violent things, which I think that you would clearly agree to be vicious. I can also think of lots of examples where racism has led people to do things that, while not violent, were extremely cruel. Do you mean to claim that that’s not immoral? Or to claim that the cruelty is immoral but not the racism which produced and justified it? Or something else again?

The only reason there are historical problems with racism in the US is because of forced integration through slavery (forced for the slaves that is) and then forced integration through the end of segregation (for the rest).

Your account of the history of racism and the law in the United States has an interesting lacuna. Specifically, the period from roughly 1865 – 1965.

For a hundred years of U.S. history black people and white people were forcibly segregated, partly through the use of contractual exclusions made on the market, but mostly as the result of government segregation laws. The connection between the existence of those laws and the prevalence of white supremacism among white people, especially among politically powerful and well-connected white people, was probably not entirely accidental.

However, I might also note that, as an account of “racism” in general, your explanation is somewhat lacking. There are more races of people in the U.S. who have been subject to racism, in its various forms (especially white supremacism) than just black people. The history of white prejudice and oppression against black people is a very important part of the story about American racism, but people of American Indian, Irish, Polish, Italian, Chinese, Filipin@, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Central American, Arab, etc. etc. etc. descent have all suffered from racist prejudices, racist exclusion, and at times racist violence, whether at the hands of mobs or at the hands of state, local, or federal government agencies. But it’s very rarely the case that any of these histories involved “forced integration” of any kind prior to the mid-1960s. Therefore, I conclude that American racism and the “historical problems” associated with it probably have at least some explanatory conditions other than what you call “forced integration.”

No I don’t understand why women might want to be treated “equally” with men. Women and men are not “equal”, in fact they are not even commensurate, the whole concept of equality is meaningless here. The closest thing to what you describe would be : treated without regard for the gender… I don’t see why.

Semantically speaking, “equality” is not just used to refer to position within a quantitative range (as in “equal portions”). It’s also often also used to refer to the lack of a particular difference or distinction (as in “treat me like an equal,” or “equal opportunity,” neither of which makes any claim about comparative quantities of treatment or opportunity). So if a woman or a group of women demand equal treatment to men, then what they’re likely talking about, in perfectly good English, is treatment which doesn’t make a distinction based solely on her or their sex.

As for why a woman or a group of women would want that, well, honestly, who cares whether you “see why” or not? Presumably those who are making it have their own reasons, which many of them have explained at length in conversation, in articles, in films, in music, in books, etc. If you have some specific case against those reasons as they have been presented, it would help to explain what you’re taking issue with and why, by engaging with those arguments rather than just playing dumb. If you acknowledge those positions, but have some specific reason to go on insisting on making sex-based distinctions in how you treat other people, whether or not they want you not to make those distinctions, then it would help to explain what are your own reasons for insisting on making those distinctions nevertheless.

William,

You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an “evil” while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. “Evil” is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an “evil” in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a “moral and political evil” was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime — as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia — no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context — that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline’s actual thoughts about the nature of the “evil” in question and what if anything ought to be done to “alleviate it” (short of “wholly cur[ing]” it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines — that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have “caught” me plagiarizing. I’ll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as “plagiarizing” either of the other passages that you mention here.

jackson:

The standard Keynesian line is that stimulus is bad when an economy is at full employment, because any stimulus at that point must lead to inflation or asset bubbles, rather than additional output. But stimulus during a crash is sort of the textbook answer for what the government should try to do.

The “standard Keynsian line” is generally taken to have been either decisively refuted, or else shown to be in need of substantial revision, by the plain fact that a recession and massive monetary inflation coexisted for several years during the 1970s. There are cases where government monetary manipulation can create short-term bubbles in certain assets or industries, but it always comes at the expense (realized either sooner or later) of everyone else outside of those beneficiaries, and there’s no real guarantee that you won’t just end up pushing on a string, anyway.

I realize you’re not a Keynesian, but I’m not clear on what you think the appropriate (short-term) course forward is.

Repeal the government money monopoly, instead of trying to find yet another government scheme to make the world safe for finance capital. That may seem drastic to you, but the fact is that it’s quite easy to do on the margins (just stop prosecuting people who, on their own, decide to establish alternative forms of currency and who set up alternative forms of banking), and in any case anything else is just going to produce more of the same old shit.

David J. Heinrich:

Same sex relations may have a higher burden of proof, even if the teenager or near-teenager claims to be gay.

Um. Why?

Rob:

While Western cultures have made it the norm to prohibit sex between adults and anyone under 16 or 18, from my understanding of history, the majority of cultures throughout time (and even a lot of cultures today) have left the responsibility to decide with the parents of the child ….

It seems to me that somebody’s consent is getting lost in this discussion of “responsibility.” Can you guess whose?

Rob:

Concerning girls – if parents today were actually paying attention and protecting their daughters there would not be a need for government involvement in the issue of age of consent.

It’s interesting that, in a discussion of age-of-consent clauses in existing rape statutes — which usually do not say anything about gender — you’d spend your entire reply talking about “parents … protecting their daughters” and about the supposed sexual behavior of adolescent girls. I hear that adolescent boys sometimes have sex, too.

I read through Kevin’s post on the Fed, and I don’t think he is claiming that inflation is caused by wage increases (or other price increases).

His point is that the Fed has made decisions about monetary policy partly in order to manipulate labor markets so as to keep employment rates within a particular fixed window. When employment is “too high” in their view, they have ratcheted up interest rates with the express purpose of “solving” that “problem.”

I don’t think that depends on a false theory about the causes of inflation. It just depends on reading public policy-oriented statements by Fed board members.

William:

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time …

The “status of slavery” where and for whom?

For black people in Virginia, or for that matter for white slavers in Virginia, it was a pretty important issue.

William:

… and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question.

What do you mean by the question “What can we do?”

If it’s intended to be a moral question about what those who were in positions of legal power, or who perpetrated slavery as individuals should have done to get rid of it, the answer is easy: immediate, complete, and unconditional emancipation. This is something that Garrison, Spooner, and Gerrit Smith all believed in, advocated, and acted (in different ways) to bring about. It’s something that Jefferson and Taylor explicitly rejected in favor of continuing slavery, and gradual emancipation conditional on forced exile from America.

If it’s intended to be a strategic question about what abolitionists ought to have done in order to get around the efforts of obdurate or unrepentant slavers to prevent or halt emancipation, then that’s a more difficult question, but it’s a question that is only difficult because of the difficulties inserted by slavers like Jefferson and Taylor. It’s certainly not a “difficulty” that offers any reason to mitigate the judgment on Jefferson’s character, or his libertarian credentials.

William:

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

I’m going to repeat this one last time, to make sure that we are clear. Nothing that I have said concerning Jefferson’s political views is a denunciation of “decentralized republicanism.” I’m an anarchist, so I don’t believe in any form of government, no matter how decentralized or how republican. But as it happens, I think that political decentralization is better than political centralization, and republican and democratic governments are better than monarchical governments.

The issue here is not that I’m using slavery in order to stop discussions of decentralized republicanism. This is either a careless or a deliberate distortion of what I’ve explicitly and repeatedly said. What I’m doing is denying that the political system actually advocated by Thomas Jefferson counts as a form of decentralized republicanism, any more than the Roman Catholic Church counts as a “democracy” on account of the cardinals voting for the Pope.

You may want to talk about decentralized republicanism more than you want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. That’s fine; it’s an interesting subject. But this post is, again, about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. You are the one changing the subject in order to try to redirect conversation to something other than the original topic. Not me.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these. Taylor was a colonizationist, not an abolitionist, and he explicitly stated that while slavery was an “evil” that continuing to enslave black people was preferable to freeing them without the condition of forced deportation to Africa. He specifically criticized Jefferson’s own writing on slavery because he felt that Jefferson was too negative about it, and that “well managed” slaves were better off than free blacks in America. I gave you several direct quotations in order to contextualize your own quotation and to explain the ways in which his views were a point of transition between the older anti-abolition views of Jefferson and the later positively pro-slavery views of Calhoun, Ruffin, Fitzhugh, et al. You have simply ignored these quotations rather than engaging with them and repeated the original quotation, apparently unaffected by direct evidence to the contrary of your interpretation of it. I don’t know whether or not you have any actual knowledge of John Taylor of Caroline’s political writings on slavery other than the quotation you’ve misused here, but I do know that so far you haven’t engaged with his full views in anything resembling a comprehensive or accurate way, even when the full content of those views has been directly pointed out to you.

Gil:

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities …

Abolitionism is not a “modern sensibility.” It already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson in particular was familiar with the abolitionist arguments; at times he even made some of them himself, while consistently refusing to act on the conclusions that he drew.

William:

What is being argued, though, is that the late 18th century system of Jeffersonian republicanism in the U.S. (though indeed marred by the imperfection of slavery) …

Chattel slavery was not some minor “imperfection” marring a fundamentally humane system. It was the central organizing principle of the law and daily life in Jefferson’s Virginia. It was a crime against humanity that sustained a thoroughly hideous cannibal-empire filled with self-satisfied thugs and posturing hypocrites, who lived on the blood and labor of their fellow creatures, and who passed law after law to protect their neo-feudal economic system and fortify their prison camp plantations at government expense. In Jefferson’s Virginia, this legal cannibalism devoured the lives, property, and labor of three hundred thousand souls, about 40% of the entire population of the state. A conversation about early American politics that ignores such plain facts or marginalizes them as “imperfections” in a basically worthwhile system (rather than what they were — the ghoulish essence of the system itself) is bullshit. And bullshit conversations like that ought to be stopped.

Me:

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say was “the decentralized republicanism advocated for white people by Jefferson.”

William:

Of course such a qualifier was hardly “forgotten” as I had acknowledged Jefferson’s fault on slavery from the outset and readily contextualized that grievous fault aside his better characteristics long before you got here. So you return to the slavery canard not to inform the discussion, that discussion already being informed of it, but rather for its conversation-stopping shock value.

No, the reason that I return to chattel slavery is that to describe Jefferson’s slavocracy as “decentralized republicanism” is to carelessly spread an absurd lie. What Jefferson actually believed in, and actually practiced, was decentralized republicanism for white men, patriarchal tyranny for white women and children, and a hereditary, invasive, absolute tyranny accountable to none save God alone for all black people regardless of age or gender. You may as well describe the Roman Catholic Church as a democracy, because, after all, the Cardinals all get to vote on the Pope.

William:

First, by means of comparison between Hamilton’s “views” and Jefferson’s “practice” it appears that you intend to cast the latter as comparatively more offensive.

No, I don’t intend anything of the sort. As I’ve repeatedly said, I consider Hamilton to have been perfectly loathsome, and to be directly responsible for all kinds of political rot. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I’ve never claimed that Jefferson is “worse,” from a libertarian perspective, than Hamilton. I don’t even know how that kind of global comparison would be made — each one was clearly much worse than the other in some respects, and much better than the other in others, and I neither know, nor much care, how you’d make those different respects commensurable with one another to make the comparison.

The reason for linguistically leaning on Jefferson’s practice is that, in addition to being a slaver, he was also a posturing hypocrite, especially on this issue, so the preferences manifest in hisd eeds sometimes need to be stressed over his idle words, when it comes to assessing his character or his legacy.

William:

Second, why the need to constantly qualify Hamilton’s faults …

I don’t.

William:

Why is it not sufficient to fault Hamilton as Hamilton for things he did in and of themselves?

It is.

However, Wilkinson’s original post was about Thomas Jefferson. It was not about Alexander Hamilton at all. My post was about Thomas Jefferson. It mentioned Alexander Hamilton only to explain what a dangerous creep I think he was. Wilkinson’s kind notice of my post was, again, about “Thomas Jefferson’s loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials.” It is only the people trying to apologize for Jefferson who keep insisting on dragging Alexander Hamilton into the discussion, apparently in order to try to change the subject from Jefferson’s anti-libertarian positions to something else — e.g., Hamilton’s Caesarianism, or European monarchy, or the United States Constitution, or just about any damn thing other than the original topic. I responded to some of these comparisons, initiated by you and not by me, by pointing out that American chattel slavery is actually a salient issue in the comparison you’re trying to make, not something that can be waved or set aside, and now, for my trouble, I am told that I ought to be faulting Hamilton as Hamilton rather than comparing him to somebody else. This is really too much. If you want to know my views about Alexander Hamilton or George Washington or the U.S. Constitution or the Whiskey Rebellion or slavery in New York or slavery in the Caribbean or central banking or the Civil War or the Ludlow Massacre or any number of other things, I’ve written about them all, on their own, elsewhere, and I’d be happy to discuss them with you, on their own, in a forum other than this one, but for here and now you should not be surprised that my focus is on Jefferson, not Hamilton, in discussing an article on Jefferson; and you also should not be surprised that if you insist on inserting a comparison with Hamilton into the discussion, I’ll urge that you consider the crime of slavery if that’s one of the salient issues in the comparison. I certainly will not waste my time “faulting Hamilton as Hamilton” in a discussion that’s about something other than Hamilton’s many follies, vices, and crimes.

William:

And that is why I make the claim that decentralized republicanism is a lesser evil than monarchy or other autocracies.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about this. What I deny is that Jefferson advocated decentralized republicanism, if either the term “decentralized” or the term “republican” means anything at all. What he actually advocated, and practiced, was a form of brutal autocracy for everyone other than his fellow white men.

William:

If you doubt that ask yourself this: is a child inherently marked with evil character if, by pure chance of his birth, he happens to inherit the plantation of his slave-owning father?

No. However, if, as an adult, he continues to spend the rest of his life enslaving those people, even though he had decades in which to legally emancipate them, or simply to treat them as free men and women (by letting them come and go as they pleased, work or not work on what they chose, distributing his unearned lands to the people his father had forced to till, and generally treating them as his equals rather than his servants), and did nothing of the sort for his long life, and continued to live his life of idleness on the backs of his victims and their forced labor–well, then, that certainly does indicate very deep and grave vice in that man-stealer’s character.

William:

But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, …

Well gosh, William, that was mighty white of him. But the only way that a slaveholder can “advance in goodness” that matters more than a tinker’s cuss is to stop holding innocent people as slaves. Jefferson didn’t do that. And that’s important.

William:

He called the agrarian trades morally superior to manufacturing based on the fact that manufacturing interests at his time were using the government to subsidize their own existence and tax their competitors abroad.

As opposed to Southern “farmers,” who never sought favors or subsidies for their interests from the United States government.

I don’t know whether you actually intended to endorse this view of Jefferson’s, or merely to explain it. But whether you do or not, it’s worth noting that this is just another example of Jefferson’s posturing hypocrisy. And it’s certainly true that the Southern slavocracy went on for the next three-quarters of a century demanding and getting more and more privileges and protections from the state and federal governments (gag orders, fugitive slave laws, etc. etc. etc.) through the same processes of political back-scratching and log-rolling; something that Jefferson somehow failed to predict.

William:

I’m no expert on Jefferson’s correspondences, but I do know of his influence on the most prominent follower of his agrarian model, John Taylor of Caroline.

Another Virginia slaver and “colonizationist,” who wrote that the abolition of slavery without forced exile for the freed black people, would bring “miseries on both their owners [sic] and themselves, by the perpetual excitements to insurrection,” and that “the blacks will be more enslaved than they are at present; and the whites in pursuit of an ideal of freedom for them, will create some vortex for engulphing the liberty left in the world and obtain real slavery for themselves,” and who had the shamelessness, after a life of man-stealing and useless slave-driving parasitism, to dare to assert that free black farmers, when not forced into exile from their homes, are “driven into every species of crime for subsistence; and destined to a life of idleness, anxiety, and guilt.” Perhaps less of a posturing hypocrite than Jefferson, in the sense that he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

You’re making things harder on yourself by bringing up John Taylor of Caroline, not easier.

William:

… the decentralized republicanism advocated by Jefferson ….

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say was “the decentralized republicanism advocated for white people by Jefferson.”

The system of rule that Jefferson advocated, and personally instituted, for black people, was not “decentralized republicanism,” but rather hereditary, personal, absolutist tyranny–tyranny of a form almost unparalleled in human history for its invasiveness, immiseration, and ruthless brutality against its unwilling subjects.