Taking short glimpses of the televised Democrat candidates for president in the debates and at their rallies I saw two of them raising their right arms with their fist clenched. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I may have missed others doing it but to me it was disturbing. The fist is a symbol of brute force, of power.
Now I know that in sports a fist is often used as a symbol in victory over an opponent. I don't have a problem with that. But in the context of a political speech given by candidates who are offering their ideas of how they will run the government, a clenched fist is not a comforting image.
Politics is the fourth of five branches of philosophy. Its task is to determine what kind of social system is most conducive for conceptual beings like us humans.
For centuries it was believed that some men had the right to rule all others by force. But with the Renaissance then the Enlightenment it was thought that men were better off if ruled by permission of enlightened governments.
That led to the further innovation in America that a proper government would get its just powers only by the consent of the governed: a profoundly historic political and moral principle.
But since the ink dried on our Constitution, state and federal governments have been trying to reverse this process to the point where today government can do anything it wants through regulations while the citizens cannot do anything without getting permission from a host of permission grantors called regulators. (There is a great deal of public confusion about what is a rights protecting law and a law that violates rights as regulations do. But that is a subject for another post.)
And so we see today's political hopefuls promising more regulations on our energy, our freedom, our self defense and everything else. And when we watch our prospective rulers raising a clenched fist, we had better understand that image is an omen as to how they plan to govern us: not by giving us more freedom to provide for our own welfare, but by their idea of what should be our future achieved via their brute physical force.
Now I know that in sports a fist is often used as a symbol in victory over an opponent. I don't have a problem with that. But in the context of a political speech given by candidates who are offering their ideas of how they will run the government, a clenched fist is not a comforting image.
Politics is the fourth of five branches of philosophy. Its task is to determine what kind of social system is most conducive for conceptual beings like us humans.
For centuries it was believed that some men had the right to rule all others by force. But with the Renaissance then the Enlightenment it was thought that men were better off if ruled by permission of enlightened governments.
That led to the further innovation in America that a proper government would get its just powers only by the consent of the governed: a profoundly historic political and moral principle.
But since the ink dried on our Constitution, state and federal governments have been trying to reverse this process to the point where today government can do anything it wants through regulations while the citizens cannot do anything without getting permission from a host of permission grantors called regulators. (There is a great deal of public confusion about what is a rights protecting law and a law that violates rights as regulations do. But that is a subject for another post.)
And so we see today's political hopefuls promising more regulations on our energy, our freedom, our self defense and everything else. And when we watch our prospective rulers raising a clenched fist, we had better understand that image is an omen as to how they plan to govern us: not by giving us more freedom to provide for our own welfare, but by their idea of what should be our future achieved via their brute physical force.
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