Anti Federalist Arguments
As fine a document as the Constitution is, the Antifederalists, who were not frivolous men, raised some prescient criticisms. Patrick Henry was concerned that the “general welfare” clause would someday be interpreted to authorize practically any federal power that might be imagined. Others feared that the taxing power would prove an instrument of tyranny in the hands of the new government. Still, others feared the power of the judicial branch, whose pronouncements on the meaning of the Constitution may well run counter to the common understanding of the Framers but against whom the people would have little recourse. That the Antifederalists may have been on to something should be evident from a casual glance at the federal government today, which is not exactly the modest institution scrupulously confining itself to its enumerated powers that the Framers intended.
Del Noce said, if a society’s only ideal is the expansion of individual “well-being,” the left faces two equally bad options. One is to embrace what he calls the “reality principle,” and to compromise with the realities of late capitalism. Then the left must necessarily become the party of the technocratic elites, and end up pursuing power for power’s sake, because in the vacuum of ideals left behind by Marxism there is no common ground between the elites and the masses. This “realistic left” can only organize itself around two principles: trust in science and technology, and what Del Noce calls “vitalism,” sexual liberation, which provides a “mystified,” bourgeois replacement of the revolution. The second option is what Del Noce calls “unrealism”: dreaming the impossible, rejecting existing reality altogether, and embracing political extremism in various forms, all of which are destined for defeat. Unrealism “becomes an accomplice of the first attitude in the global rejection of all values.”
Then we have Agamben. Through the formation of the modern city, or body politic, the ‘disunited multitude’ of the state of nature exceptionally constitutes itself into the people. However, when giving form and substance to the sovereign, the people contemporaneously and paradoxically disappears, leaving the scene to an entity that ‘has no political significance’—namely, the ‘dissolved multitude,’ which ‘is the unpolitical element upon whose exclusion the city is founded.’ Importantly, this logic of simultaneous constitution and dissolution applies to monarchies, democracies, and aristocracies alike. Hence, Agamben continues, ‘in the city there is only the multitude, since the people has always already vanished into the sovereign’ as shown on the Leviathan’s cover. This passage is of pivotal importance for the correct understanding of Agamben’s philosophy and political project because it shows that, as he himself has further clarified more recently, ‘the city is founded in the division of life into bare life and politically qualified life.’
Here is where civil war enters the scene to never leave it. Indeed, Agamben writes, ‘[i]f the dissolved multitude – and not the people – is the sole human presence in the city, and if the multitude is the subject of civil war, this means that civil was remains always possible within the state.’ This is why, after his eschatological analysis, Agamben reaffirms that until the second coming of Christ, ‘the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and the Leviathan can only live together . . . with Behemoth – with the possibility of civil war.’ Civil war, we may therefore conclude drawing from Agamben’s Aristotelian terminology, lies at the threshold between actuality and potentiality. It lurks in the penumbra of social relations constantly defining them and always reminding the body politic of its occult, demonic origins: ‘civil war is a projection of the state of nature into the city.’
Dr Luca Siliquini-Cinelli, Lecturer, School of Law, University of Dundee; l.siliquinicinelli@dundee.ac.uk
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-doj-notes-reveal-fbi-panic-after-trump-tweeted-he-knew-he-was-being-spied
FBI knew that all the claims of Trump-Russia collusion had proven to be fake.
But things took a sudden and dramatic turn on March 4, 2017, when Trump said on Twitter that he knew that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, a very public claim of spying that set off alarm bells with both FBI and DOJ leadership. Trump’s tweet so alarmed these DOJ and FBI officials that the topic dominated a meeting two days later that included FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the acting U.S. attorney general, Dana Boente.
The problem for the FBI was this: They didn’t know how much Trump actually knew about their actions. Just a day earlier, on March 3, 2017, radio host Mark Levin had reported that the Obama administration had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that involved Trump and several of his campaign advisers. Levin also reported that Trump’s off-the-cuff joke in July 2016—“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”—had become the basis for the Russia collusion accusations.
But as we now know, the FISA warrants weren’t the only thing that the FBI leadership was involved with. The FBI was actively spying on the Trump campaign and the incoming Trump administration’s transition communications, a fact that also was revealed in the new notes. The FBI had not only spied on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but also on another aide, George Papadopoulos, going so far as to lure him to London, where they tried to set him up in a clumsy but elaborate sting.