John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
Virginia’s odd-year elections this November 7th offer the nation’s premier race for governor, pitting Republican Ed Gillespie against Democrat Ralph Northam . . .
. . . oh, and also Libertarian Cliff Hyra.
Could it be a repeat of four years ago?
In 2013, notable Friend-of-Bill and Democratic Party nominee for governor Terry McAuliffe defeated Ken Cuccinelli, the state attorney general and Republican nominee, by a mere 2.6 percent. McAuliffe garnered 48 percent of the vote to Cuccinelli’s 45 percent . . .
. . . to Libertarian Robert Sarvis’s impressive 7 percent. In fact, the Sarvis vote more than doubled the margin between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli.
Last month, a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) poll showed a close gubernatorial race with Northam at 42 percent leading Gillespie at 37 percent . . .
. . . oh, and Hyra at 6 percent among likely voters. Once again, the Libertarian’s support proved greater than the margin between Democrat and Republican.
Back in 2014, Mr. Gillespie challenged incumbent U.S. Senator Mark Warner, nearly pulling a stunning upset, falling just 0.8 percent short. Libertarian Robert Sarvis was also in that race, receiving 2.4 percent.
Lt. Governor Northam, a former U.S. Army doctor, was twice elected to the state Senate.
Former Republican National Committee a Chairman Gillespie, a counselor to President George W. Bush and a lobbyist and political consultant, won the GOP primary by only one percentage point.
Hyra, a patent attorney with no experience in public office, is pushing a tax cut that dwarfs what Republican Gillespie advocates. The Libertarian is also campaigning on criminal justice reform and legalizing recreational use of marijuana.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, Gillespie seems mobile on the pot issue. He has announced his support for legalizing medical marijuana and wants to criminalize recreational use only after two offenses.
A Libertarian influence?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
As we explore the world of thoughts our changing understandings change its shape. Things we thought we knew disappear as unexpected beings take their place, and we move among different and higher platforms of understanding. The real secret of philosophy has perhaps always been the joy of escaping into this wonderland and playing in it freely, a joy that has even tempted sensible men to give up their practical lives. The necessarily unphilosophical State has never been able to understand the temptation of a liberating joy as anything but disloyalty.
Corey Abel, review of Liberty, Individuality, and Democracy in Jorge Luis Borges by Alejandra Salinas (Lanham MD, Lexington Books: 2017), in Voegelinview.
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.
“September 11 is one of our worst days but it brought out the best in us,” proclaimed Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander.
Today is the 16th anniversary of that terrible day . . . arriving as Hurricane Irma smashes into Florida and with fresh memories of so many acts of kindness and heroism by first responders and minuteman citizen volunteers alike rescuing folks from the recent flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey.
“These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat,” then-President George W. Bush told the American people that frightful evening. “But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.”
He was correct about the people of this country. All kinds of folks stepped up in a myriad of ways to help.
But what about the government?
Well, the “public’s trust in government,” according to Pew Research, “which was mired in the 30% range through much of the past decade, doubled in the wake of the attacks.”
That uptick wasn’t to last. Public disgust with the federal government reverted to form. By 2015, reports Pew, “Only 19% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (3%) or ‘most of the time’ (16%).”
What happened?
Well, have you met the Washington politicians?
And can our country really be “strong,” as Mr. Bush declared, if government cannot earn the trust of even one of every five Americans?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
But now we come to the most important thing. Those diverse projects or programs of life which our fancy elaborates, and among which our will, another psychic mechanism can freely choose, are not presented to us as looking all alike; a strange voice emerging from some intimate and secret depth of our own calls on us to choose one of these and to bar the others. All these programs, please note, are presented to us as possible — we may have the ability to be one kind of person or another, but one and only one appears to us as the one which we have to be. This is the strangest and most mysterious ingredient in man. On the one hand, he is free, he is not forced to be any single thing as is the star; and yet in the face of this freedom something always rises with a certain character of necessity about it, as thought saying to us, “You are able to be whatever you want; but only if you choose this or that specific pattern will you be what you have to be.’ That is to say, among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call ‘vocation.’ But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it.
Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (Mildred Adams, trans., 1958), p. 179.
September 11 marks several dates in the history of the clash between the West and the Islamic East:
• In 1526, the Ottoman army occupied Buda after the crushing Hungarian defeat in the Battle of Mohács.
• In 1565, Ottoman forces retreated from Malta, ending the Great Siege of Malta.
• In 1609, an expulsion order announced against the Moriscos of Valencia began the expulsion of all Spain’s Moors.
• In 2001, Muslim jihadists associated with Al Qaida hijacked two airliners flying out of Boston, Massachusetts, one out of Newark, N.J., and another out of Washington’s Dulles airport, commandeering two of those jets into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon near the nation’s capital. The fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — making this flight, United 93, the only one of the terrorist attacks that day prevented from achieving its target, the agency of the prevention being the united efforts of civilians on the flight.
Just how much do Americans hate Congress? How much do we dislike and distrust our leaders in the imperial capital?
Ask Alabamans. Or go to Townhall, and then come back here.
Descendants of the theologians of the Middle Ages, and heirs of the nation of fools so carefully elaborated by our old university; with our minds full of the formulas of our lawyers, and the dogmas of our priests, and moulded by a memoria technica education; instead of being brought up to observe facts, we are accustomed to think in the abstract, so that in the sciences we take energy, motion, matter, race, species, &c. — which are simply convenient terms for classification — for realities, having an existence of their own.
If in regard to such matters as these we commit such errors, we do worse when we enter upon the examination of social questions. We create for ourselves entities, such as order, morality, religion, society, and then, on the pretext of defending order, morality, religion, and society, the stronger crush down the weaker. In the same way as Calino discovers that the forest prevents him seeing the trees, behind these words we no longer see the individuals without whom, nevertheless, there would be neither society, religion, morality, nor order amongst men.
Yves Guyot, Prostitution Under the Regulation System (Edgar Beckit Truman, M.D., F.C.S., trans., 1884), p. 2.
Illustration is a detail from a caricature by the great French artist André Gill (1840-1885).
September 10, 1918, is the estimated date of birth for Rin Tin Tin, one of a litter of shell-shocked puppies found by an American serviceman in a bombed-out kennel in Lorraine, less than two months before the end of World War I. The dog went on to become the lead actor in a number of very popular films, and one of the great celebrities of his age.