Pondering this one..................

Peter Augustine Lawler has penned one of those essays that makes a reader go, "hey, wait a minute."  A wee excerpt:

Neither being nice nor being brutal is being virtuous. And moral virtue is, after all, the foundation of the common life shared by all political beings inhabiting a particular part of the world. Both niceness and brutality are forms of domination and control. Both work against the consent of the governed who rule and are ruled in turn. We should, in fact, expect all Americans to be ladies and gentlemen, and to treat each other with equal dignity, free from condescension and contempt.

That means, if you think about it, that our courts and our bureaucrats should do less, and our legislatures should do more. The schoolmarmish soft despotism promoted by the experts driving our administrative state can be checked most effectively, of course, by majority vote. And the majority — in the name of virtue and dignified relational life — should be about resisting the experts both public and private who think of ordinary people as less than they really are. The idea that the nice should rule over the brutish is what, in fact, links together too much libertarian and progressivist thought about being on the "right side" of history and all that. That form of manipulation, thank God, is bound to fail them in the end.

The full essay, Our Country Split Apart, may be read here.