The possession in one person to make or change law is not thought of as possible in the idea of a perfect democracy or one that claims to be such. To think about wanting to have ‘the power to change one law’ is to think about so empowering oneself that no argument against you can hold force. Those who think in such a way often dress their thought in an antagonism to a status quo that rules in the interest of others thought unworthy. They will identify these others – rightly in some cases – as established elites, although most often the targets are not the true elites who hold power through an unfairly gained and massively disproportionate ownership of resources but those with an education based on a civic ideology – in particular a set of ideas favouring foundational principles like equality and the absence of negative discrimination against any group or subset of the population, or worse (in the eyes of these would-be magnates of power, the use of positive discrimination to redress structural disadvantage that marginalises communities and sub-communities made up of the historically marginalised (whether minorities or majorities) such as women, people of colour, people with a difference in physical or mental ability, or LGBTQI+ groupings (with trans people in particular in today’s firing line).
The Executive Order in the US Constitution allows one man (there’d never yet been a woman) to make Executive Orders with the force of law. Donald Trump signed 36 during his first week in Office. Many of these were law-like orders and regulations with a prima facie attack on the ideology of a group who think differently from oneself.
Such was the order of ‘Jan. 24 enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which prevents the use of federal funds to fund or promote elective abortion’. The object of attack is the link of rights for women of control over their own bodies long fought for by feminists ans socialists. These groups are not pro-abortion simply but against regulation of women’s bodies and right ts to make decisions related to those bodies.
There is some dressing up of the fairness of the law as based on the ‘rights of the unborn but alive’ fetus but its principle is to serve mainly the limitation of the idea of a woman to her reproductive duties in the interests of what remains a patriarchal society rather than her pursuit of other aim,s of human development should she so choose.
Other laws dress themselves as themselves opposed directly to discrimination – although you soon realise that the discrimination is against those who, as groups, actually still hold the majority of power and resources and reserve the right, as both Trump and Elon Musk never tire of repeating, to call such ownership the effect of individual merit and hard work. It is an ideology the current Labour government holds deeply in its acclaimed ‘respect for working people‘ (but only those who are ‘working’ by their definition).
Some executive orders actually pretend themselves to be anti-discrinatory, where the discrimination is thought to be against those who are already relatively structurally advantaged but never described or acknowledged as such. Such is the ‘executive order of Jan. 21 to eliminate DEI programs in the federal workforce, as well as contracting and spending’, describing its aims as: “Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” Here is the MSN account:
The order identifies DEI programs as illegal and contrary to American values of merit, hard work and individual achievement. The order also directs all departments and agencies to take strong action to end private-sector DEI discrimination, including civil compliance investigations.
Within 120 days of the order, the attorney general and the secretary of education will jointly issue guidance to all state and local educational agencies that receive federal funds regarding the measures and practices required to comply with recent affirmative action rulings.
The use of the courts in this endeavour has already been shown by the hand-picked Trump majority staffing the Supreme Court, which had already effectively outlawed ‘race-based affirmative action in college admission’ in June 2023. The antagonistic political nature of the order is affirmed in that it reverses orders signed by ‘former Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’.
Of course, executive orders, as the last fact emphasises, are used by all involved in the debate about how ideas about the nature of human freedoms can be reflected in law, regulation, and the state promotion of human rights and duties. But we need to see the beneficiaries of rights and the relaxation of duties upon them. Trump and Musk see themselves as exemplas of how ‘merit, hard work, and individual achievement’ manifests itself in the flesh.
They imagine themselves as so exemplary that they did not need state encouragement to succeed but that other less loud ‘Trumps’ and less rancidly smelling ‘Musks’ may need such relative state encouragement. They often focus on race, where facts about the disadvantage experienced by non-white populations are addressed with positive discrimination, but the effect will be to further empower white middle-class straight cis men with bodies and minds empowered by social and economic norms.
Trump even tried to blame, whilst ignorant of the true causes of the tragedy, a helicopter crash recently on inappropriate promotion of people not fit, in his view, for their responsibilities in the US army. This was a sickening turn in the view of the responsibility of powerful men to regulate their voice in public statements with some respect for decency, fairness, and truth. His aim was to underline the justness of his executive order discussed above.
No man or woman should have given to them the power to make or change law without some direction given by either legislative process, consultation, or hearing voices other than those of the already privileged. Trump rules by appointing family or friends, usually those that mirror his own power and its sources in ruthless behaviour. The problem with Keir Starmer is a less egregious one than with Trump but is equally based on the exclusion of voices antagonistic to his world view of the rights of the ‘working family’ and the interests of global capitalism. He, moreover, has no equivalent of the executive order, thankfully.
There are difficulties in my view. Obama Care, as it was called and which is at least based on the beginnings of active principles of inclusive social care, could not have been achieved without the use of executive orders given the strange workings of a bizarre two-party system laced with real financial corruption. In my heart, though, I feel the cases are different, not least because done in Obama’s case with a keen sense that this is not how governance should preferably be handled and used only in extremis.
Perhaps we need brain and heart though in thinking this through. My first thought was that the uses by Obama were based on a presumption of popular agreement outside of electoral mathematics and based on a much larger sample. Obama-care sought to benefit many who had good reason to believe the American system of democracy was stacked against their interests. Both the need for it and perceived demand for it was based not only on academic research (about the Trump right is suspicious as a tool of bias) but of consultation. Such processes provide a basis for a note of the presumptive (or presumed) consent of a wider population than even the electorate which might be used to justify those earlier Democrat presidents.
However Trump too believes he acts with presumed consent though his evidence for – the size of pre-organised rallies and folk-beliefs about common American values that cross classes and interests fall short of what is usually called evidence by academics. @but academics are leftists and biased’ sats Trump in retort. Maybe presumed consent to one-man lawmaking id not the strongest measure. After all, my own feeling is that they are secondary to moral evaluation of the ends proposed by the law change, whether in qualitative or utilitarian quantitative terms – ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ principle of Jeremy Bentham. In my view the Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogans fail to make any more sense morally than in assessment of their logic.
In the end qualitative judgement of the end achieved by one-person-of-sufficient-granted-power decisions are what I must lean on, which carry presumption not just of pursuing what can be interpreted or represented as the will of the most in any group but also on the quality of GOOD achieved by the end pursued. For this we mean a much more refined philosophical basis than materialism – or even dialectical materialism which presumes a true purpose and goal (teleology) to history – and even very right wing thinkers like Plato need to be invoked to define the Good we ought to pursue.
But to Trump and MAGA this is just more elitist academic moonshine that does not respect the majority will of the relatively poorly educated. Ay! But there’s the rub!. Pursuit of the Good is also the aim of opening access to education and yet MAGA believe that redressing imbalances in access to education – which operate over class, race, differing ability and capacity, sex/gender, trans/cis and sexuality considerations – is itself a source of bias and negative discrimination to those of merit and hard work, whom they presume to be naturally cis male white straight and/or otherwise normative for the society considered rather than because of systematic and structural bias. Te systematic and structured bias is an invention of the myth of the ‘social’ rather than the individual good. As Margaret Thatcher proposed to Woman’s Own: “There is no such thing as society”, except in the minds of deluded academics and manic socialists.
Donald Trump signing 65 Executive Orders in one week is extreme, though likely to the style of governance for some time to come in the USA. I would not contemplate validating that by accepting this challenge, but that is not to say that I do not believe an enlightened and altruistically-motivated, rather than benighted and self-interested, President should not use Executive Orders in the future. After all, it is clear that the majority of the population is refusing to look to means to save the planet (or at least human and most other animal and vegetable populations on it) from its extinction. We may need to get to a point when someone stops the rot. Let’s rather it is by democratic discussion and defeat of the vested interests which believe in the profligate pumping oil from the ground forever.
All my love as ever
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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