Political Legitimacy Quotes

Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: the overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles and undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.

The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.

The speaker calls for a careful examination of Christ's principle of turning the other cheek before we use it as a demand or excuse for total personal pacifism. After all, when literally struck on the cheek, Jesus did question the legitimacy of the authority by which this was done.

Multi-lateralism's dilemma: that the inclusion of more actors increases the legitimacy of a process or organization at the same time as it decreases its efficiency and utility.

Ideology follows the money." "Governments don't protect people, people protect governments." "To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.

The habit of disguising ideology as expertise has created a deficit of legitimacy.

Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.

Campaign managers and other staffers point to at least three major benefits that would flow from a national popular vote: more public participation, more political moderation, and more presidential legitimacy.

I once asked Bill McKibben, after an energising speech to a capacity crowd, when – given that the situation is as urgent as he portrayed it and we all know it is – we escalate. He was visibly ill at ease. The first part of his response presented what we might call the objection from asymmetry: as soon as a social movement engages in violent acts, it moves onto the terrain favoured by the enemy, who is overwhelmingly superior in military capabilities. The state loves a fight of arms; it knows it will win. Our strength is in numbers. This is a pet argument for strategic pacifists, but it is disingenuous. Violence is not the sole field where asymmetry prevails. The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money. If the movement should shun uphill battles, a divestment campaign seems like the worst possible choice: trying to sap fossil capital by means of capital.

Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it. What we call political correctness is the natural outcome of civil rights, which makes fighting bias a condition for the legitimacy of the state. Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations… It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm… Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings. —Benedict Anderson

Is the Church fulfilling a purely religious role when by its silence or friendly relationships it lends legitimacy to a dictatorial and oppressive government?

Legitimacy," says Griff sagely, leaning back to prop an ankle on a knee, "sounds like a fancy word created by someone with a shorter knife to keep themselves from getting stabbed by someone with a longer one.

Hindu persecution can end only with political legitimacy. SPH #Nithyananda Paramashivam has created Kailasa Nation. Now UN recognizes Hindu Holocaust #UnitedNationsRecognisesPersecutionOnTheSPHNithyanandaAndKailasa

As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

The social justice question is: does the state treat its citizens well and equally in selecting the order that it imposes? The political legitimacy question is: does the state treat its citizens well and equally in the way it imposes that order?

There is one great advantage to being an academic economist in France: here, economists are not highly respected in the academic and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything.

Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us – are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States – that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1995 by We the People, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself.

Legitimacy is the elixir of political power. "The strongest is never strong enough to be the master", Jean-Jaques Rousseau observed, "unless he translates strength into right and obedience into duty". Only democracy has that authority in the world today.

The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decadence is our fear of theocracy or autocracy or any ideology whose project is not to argue or persuade but to adjourn the whole debate sine die. It's this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics

Maybe perversion was not illness at all. Maybe every form of deviance was just a potential force of union and community, one that had not yet organized itself into political lobbies, self-help groups, bowling leagues...Once you grant legitimacy to one sexual proclivity, what's to stop the others from demanding their rights too?

Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo.

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest and the Holocaust are vulnerable to this kind of concerted denial because of their unfathomability, the unjustifiability, and the threat they pose to the politics of patriarchy and anti-Semitism respectively. Over and over, survivors of the Holocaust attest that they were warned of what was happening in Poland but could not believe it at the time, could not believe it later as it was happening to them, and still to this day cannot believe what they, at the same time, know to have occurred. For Holocaust deniers this is a felicitous twist, for their arguments denying the Holocaust and therefore the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state capitalize on the discrepancies of faded memory. In the case of incest, although post-traumatic stress disorder, amnesia, and dissociation represent some of the mind's strategies for comprehending the incomprehensible, incest deniers have taken advantage of inconsistencies to discredit survivor testimony.

Among Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries no one questioned the legitimacy of divorce. The only question was what constituted adequate grounds;

Until genuine political, economic, and cultural liberty are established, democracy is unlikely to offer anything more than a simulacrum of legitimacy for an oppressive regime.

Politically, the ideal state is authoritarian, basing its legitimacy on submission to authority, rather than popular consent.

If the wartime killing of human beings is used to establish the legitimacy of meat eating, then challenging meat eating challenges a world at war.

Legitimacy involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society.

The police can use violence to say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its legitimacy from something called 'the people.' But how did 'the people' actually grant legitimacy to the Constitution? As the American and French revolutions make clear: basically, through acts of illegal violence. So what gives the police the right to use force to suppress the very thing–a popular uprising–that granted them their right to use force to begin with?

From the Renaissance until today, Christianity, and also to some extent Judaism, in the West have had to carry out a constant battle against ideologies, philosophies, institutions and practices which are secular in nature and which challenge the authority of religion and in fact its very validity and legitimacy. These challenges to religion have varied from political ideas which are based on secularism to the denial of the religious foundation of morality and the philosophical denial of the reality of God and of the after life or of revelation and sacred scripture. The history of the West has been marked during the last few centuries by a constant battle between the forces of religion and secularism and in fact the gaining of the upper hand by secularism and consequently the denial of the reality of religion and its pertinence to various domains of life.

Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.

Though Locke’s empiricist ideas are important, it was his political writing that made him famous. He proposed a social-contract theory of the legitimacy of government and the idea of natural rights to private property.

majority of Russia’s leading figures—whatever their political persuasion—refuse to accept the collapse of the Soviet Empire or the legitimacy of the successor states, especially of Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy.

Military intervention cannot liberate women because it is embedded within a set of assumptions, beliefs, and social relations that reinforce and reproduce gender inequality, as well as other social inequalities within and across nation-states. Military intervention depends upon a belief in the legitimacy of armed violence in resolving political problems, which in turn depends upon our adherence to particular ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman.

Meanwhile, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, the very legitimacy of democratic politics is being corroded because ‘interest groups . . . are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying’, a process that he dubs ‘repatrimonialization

Critical understanding can arise from powerlessness, but does it always do so? Few champions of standpoint epistemology would argue that it does. And, if not, can we allow the experience of powerlessness to be elevated to an inevitable source of political authority?

On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and other forms of systematic exclusion are somehow intrinsic to the country’s DNA.

Revolutionary movements look back, as well as forward, to reclaim lost or disappearing rights and privileges, real or imagined, both as a means of expressing what might otherwise be almost impossible to express, and of driving forward fresh agendas for political, economic and social change.

Other victims of the fraud included several public and union pension plans.102 Although Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints were all over Burnham. The “legitimacy” that his name and political status as the vice president’s son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial.103

The “rational,” the “natural,” the “legitimate,” are nothing more than what is customary. To live under a political constitution that endures, among customs that endure, is the only thing that allows us to believe in the legitimacy of the ruler, in the rationality of habits, and in the naturalness of things.

These ruptures between police and communities undermine trust in government, as well as the constitutional legitimacy of government as represented by such police action and its prosecutorial and juridical blessings. Distrust of government is an unfortunate trend now shared by both extremes of the political spectrum. Tea

Such forms of what we might term 'carewashing' join a rich array of corporations trying to increase their legitimacy by presenting themselves as socially responsible 'citizens', while really contributing to inequality and ecological destruction. They go further by trying to capitalise on the very care crisis they have helped to create.

Although Manmohan Singh, the helmsman, got the credit, it was Rao who took the tough and aggressive decisions and provided the energy and political support. He was shrewd and knew how to deal with dissent. The manner in which he pushed through the industrial policy in the cabinet is an example. At the same time, the reforms would not have happened without Manmohan Singh. To the extent that there was one, he created the road map. In a brilliant move, he set up a set of committees—bank reform under Narsimhan, tax reform under Chelliah, and insurance reform under Malhotra—and they provided crucial intellectual sustenance and legitimacy for reform measures in these areas. It needed Manmohan Singh to come and change the nation’s mind-set to growth. But Manmohan Singh is a reticent man and cautious by nature. On his own, without Rao’s constant support, he would not have done it. The new trade policy would not have come about as speedily without Chidambaram. Varma was a terror as the head of the steering committee and he provided the momentum for the implementation of the reforms for two years. He knew the system well, and he played it in favor of the reforms. Varma’s crucial contributions, I believe, have not been understood or appreciated. In the end, all three—Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, and Varma—derived their strength from Narasimha Rao.

Politically, kings became figures of no importance. Yet those that survived possessed a quality which politicians can peruse for years and still never acquire. They had the vital attribute of legitimacy because they occupied a role they had never striven for- one, furthermore, which would continue when they and their prime ministers were long gone.

Without the participation of one fifth of the global population, without the endorsement of the world's second-largest economy, without the political will and security guarantee of this emerging power, international institutions and norms will be irrelevant and the legitimacy and credibility of their resolutions and arrangements will fall short of promise.

Some of his [Chester Bowles's] friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy. ... He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.

A program that stops and frisks predominantly those who are the least likely to have illegal contraband is not law enforcement.80 A war on drugs that uses race and ethnicity as the litmus test for crime is not justice.81 Millions of black citizens recognize this and, therefore, question the very legitimacy of this key pillar in American democracy.82 Meanwhile, state budgets have cracked under the strain of bloated, unsustainable prison systems.83 Mayors worry that their cities will ignite when yet another black person, who is more likely than not unarmed, is killed by police.84 The costs of the continued misuse of the criminal justice system are more than the United States can bear—morally, politically, and financially. It is time to rethink America.

Unprecedented state secrecy gave the power elite vastly expanded realms in which to pursue desired political ends. Its dimensions and details obscured by state secrecy, exceptionism—the institutionalized abrogation of the rule of law—allowed for the state to decisively influence politics at key moments in a top-down, authoritarian manner while practices of plausible deniability preserved a degree of democratic legitimacy.

It is written, By me kings reign. This is not a phrase of the church, a metaphor of the preacher; it is a literal truth, simple and palpable. It is a law of the political world. God makes kings in the literal sense. He prepares royal races; maturing them under a cloud which conceals their origin. They appear at length crowned with glory and honour; they take their places; and this is the most certain sign of their legitimacy.

The academic literature describes marshals who “‘police’ other demonstrators,” and who have a “collaborative relationship” with the authorities. This is essentially a strategy of co-optation. The police enlist the protest organizers to control the demonstrators, putting the organization at least partly in the service of the state and intensifying the function of control. (...) Police/protestor cooperation required a fundamental adjustment in the attitude of the authorities. The Negotiated Management approach demanded the institutionalization of protest. Demonstrations had to be granted some degree of legitimacy so they could be carefully managed rather than simply shoved about. This approach de-emphasized the radical or antagonistic aspects of protest in favor of a routinized and collaborative approach. Naturally such a relationship brought with it some fairly tight constraints as to the kinds of protest activity available. Rallies, marches, polite picketing, symbolic civil disobedience actions, and even legal direct action — such as strikes or boycotts — were likely to be acceptable, within certain limits. Violence, obviously, would not be tolerated. Neither would property destruction. Nor would any of the variety of tactics that had been developed to close businesses, prevent logging, disrupt government meetings, or otherwise interfere with the operation of some part of society. That is to say, picketing may be fine, barricades are not. Rallies were in, riots were out. Taking to the streets — under certain circumstances — may be acceptable; taking over the factories was not. The danger, for activists, is that they might permanently limit themselves to tactics that were predictable, non-disruptive, and ultimately ineffective.

There is still another reason for conservatives to be against what they see as a “negative” history. If conservative politics rests on Strict Father morality, the national family must be seen as a moral family and the rules by which the national family operates must be seen as moral. Otherwise, the legitimacy of all forms of governmental authority is called into question. The very foundation of Strict Father morality is the legitimacy of parental authority. To someone raised with Strict Father morality, a “negative” history might call into question that authority. Strict Father morality cannot tolerate the questioning of legitimate authority by children. Children are supposed to venerate and idolize legitimate authorities, so that they can develop character by following the rules laid down by that authority. “Negative” history, conservatives believe, would lead to questioning authority and would threaten that process. Of

And the extraordinary thing is that according to these texts all powers, all the power and glory of the kingdoms, all that has to do with politics and political authority, belongs to the devil. It has all been given to him and he gives it to whom he wills. Those who hold political power receive it from him and depend upon him. (It is astonishing that in the innumerable theological discussions of the legitimacy of political power, no one has ever adduced these texts! [Matthew 4:8-9; Luke 4:6-7]) This fact is no less important than the fact that Jesus rejects the devil's offer. Jesus does not say to the devil: It is not true. You do not have power over kingdoms and states. He does not dispute this claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down before him. This is the sole point when he says: 'You shall worship the Lord your God and you shall serve him, only him' (Matthew 4:10). We may thus say that among Jesus' immediate followers and in the first Christian generation political authorities - what we call the state - belonged to the devil and those who held power received it from him.

Trump represented a broader trend in international politics, toward what has been labeled populist nationalism.1 Populist leaders seek to use the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections to consolidate power. They claim direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are often defined in narrow ethnic terms that exclude big parts of the population. They don’t like institutions and seek to undermine the checks and balances that limit a leader’s personal power in a modern liberal democracy: courts, the legislature, an independent media, and a nonpartisan bureaucracy.

In a meeting, the Estonian president, Toomas Ilves, insisted to Obama that we had to take Putin at his word if he said he would take Kiev. Ilves had an academic manner, and he described methodically how Russia was using fake news and disinformation to turn Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority against Europe. Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL. These are people, he said, who fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the liberal order. They are looking for another form of legitimacy—one that is counter to our notion of progress. After the meeting, I joined Obama for lunch and told him I thought Ilves did the best job I’d heard of tying these disparate threads together, explaining a theory of the forces at work in the world without having to rely on a construct that roots them all in American foreign policy. Without missing a beat, Obama said, “That’s the same dynamic as with the Tea Party. I know those forces because my presidency has bumped up against them.” He paused. “It’s obviously manifest in different ways, but people always look to tear down an ‘other’ when they need legitimacy—immigrants, gays, minorities, other countries.

The role unquestioned assumptions play becomes obvious if we look back at sociopolitical norms of the past, things like the absolute power of royalty, political participation only for men, property passed to the eldest son, slavery, serfdom, a prohibition on divorce, only men being allowed to file for divorce, only property holders being allowed to vote, child labor, colonization, and the “white man’s burden.” For a long time each of these was assumed to be an intrinsic part of the given culture, and passed unnoticed and uncontested until its presence was brought into the foreground and its legitimacy questioned.

Government exists to protect the product of men’s labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that man possesses inalienable natural rights, that they belong to him as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights, like the other terms discussed in this chapter, are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy." from "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Andrew Ferguson

Although the US State Department has not officially designated the MB [Muslin Brotherhood] as a terrorist organization, Egypt did so in 2013; and in 2015, a British government review “concluded that membership of or links to it should be considered a possible indicator of extremism.” However, in 2003 the FBI uncovered the MB’s multifaceted plan to dominate America through immigration, intimidation, education, community centers, mosques, political legitimacy, and establishing ‘interfaith dialogue’ centers in our universities and colleges. A document confiscated by the FBI outlines a twelve-point strategy to establish an Islamic government on earth that is brought about by a flexible, long-term ‘cultural invasion’ of the West. Their own plans teach us that ‘the intrusion of Islam will erupt in multiple locations using mulciple means’. But near the top of this strategy is immigration. To be more specific, the first major point in their strategy states; ‘To expand the Muslin presence by birth rate, immigration and refusal to assimilate.’ This strategy transformed Indonesia from a Buddhist and Hindu country to the largest Muslin-dominated country in the world. As Europe has discovered, open borders for refugees may be viewed as a compassionate response to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, but it has long-term risks and consequences.

identity politics is valid, then the idea that education should make the educated a member of a larger intellectual culture is invalid. If the premise of identity politics is true, then the idea on which America rests is false. If the premise of identity politics is true, then there is in no meaningful sense a universal human nature, and there are no general standards of intellectual discourse, and no ethic of ennobling disputation, no process of civil persuasion toward friendly consent, no source of legitimacy other than power, and we all live immersed in our tribes, warily watching other tribes across the chasms of our “differences.” No sensible person wants to live in such a society.

When Marxian socialism came to the United States after the 1848 revolutions, it brought along in its baggage this European suspicion of liberal-democratic procedures. Eventually that was dispelled and socialist organizations began participating in electoral politics. But they continued to think of themselves more as the vanguard of a movement than as voices in a democratic chorus. And their preferred political tactics remained the mass demonstration and the strike -- rather than, say, winning elections for county commissioner. The significance of these groups in American politics peaked during the Great Depression and then faded. But their movement ideal retained its grip on the left, and in the 1960s it captured the imagination of liberals as well. There had been emancipatory movements before, against slavery, for women's rights, for workers' protection. They did not question the legitimacy of the American system; they just wanted it to live up to its principles and respect its procedures. And they worked with parties and through institutions to achieve their ends. But as the 1970s flowed into the 1980s, movement politics began to be seen by many liberals as an alternative rather than a supplement to institutional politics, and by some as being more legitimate. That's when what we now call the social justice warrior was born, a social type with quixotic features whose self-image depends on being unstained by compromise and above trafficking in mere interests.

The last section, Mostly Harmless, is my most personal rant. It is directed at the rest of you, the 20% or so who would never in a million years call yourselves atheists but who practice such a watered-down version of your own religion that you’re just one honest admission away from being atheists. It is an angry and impassioned plea to those of you who most likely champion progressive social causes during the day but who still cling to, or gloss over, the wild superstitions of your parents’ religion at night. Mostly, though, it’s my explanation of why I have no patience for your insistence on the virtues of religious tradition and why your actions (and inactions) give legitimacy to the very dark-ages policies and politics you claim to abhor.

The America promised in Lincoln’s speeches and delivered by the Reconstruction Amendments is not a fulfillment of founding ideals but their repudiation. It is based on inclusive equality, not exclusive individualism. Its political community is open rather than closed by race. Its criterion of legitimacy is not whether a government protects the natural rights of insiders—a principle that prohibits redistribution to outsiders and even to other insiders—but rather whether it represents the will of the people. This principle allows insiders not just to fight for their own rights but to make sacrifices for others. The Civil War, far more than the Revolution, embodies this principle, which the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” celebrates: Let us die to make men free.

Tell you what: Ask a Baptist wife why her husband treats her like a personal slave. Ask a homosexual couple why their love for one another is treated as a sick joke in some parts of the world and as a crime punishable by death in others. Ask a starving African mother with ten starving children why she doesn't practice birth control. Ask a young Muslim girl why her parents sliced off her clitoris. Ask millions of Muslim women why they cannot attend schools or show themselves in public except through the eye slits of a full-body burqa. Ask the Pakistani woman who's gang-raped why she is sentenced to death while her rapists go free, and why it’s her own family leading the murderous chorus. Ask the American woman who’s raped why her local congressman would question the “legitimacy” of that rape and would force her to bring her rapist’s child to term. Ask the dead Christian children why their fundamentalist parents wouldn’t give them an antibiotic to stave off their infection or an insulin injection to control their diabetes. Ask the Parkinson’s or paralysis victims why their cures have been mired in religious and political red tape for decades now because an increasingly hysterical and radical segment of American society believes that a clump of cells with no identity and no consciousness has more rights than they do. Ask them all to point to the source of their misery, and then ask yourself why it doesn't bother you that they are pointing to the same goddamned book you're using in your religious services and in the celebration of your “harmless” and “quaint” traditions.

There is a particular view, still popular among left-wing intellectuals in the West, that the Soviet system was “socialism gone wrong.” This thought expresses precisely the major political danger of our times, which is the belief that politics involves a choice of systems, as a means to an end, so that one system may “go wrong” while another “goes right.” The truth is that socialism is wrong, precisely because it believes that it can go right—precisely because it sees politics asa means to an end. Politics is a manner of social existence, whose bedrock is the given obligations from which our social identities are formed. Politics is a form of association which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. It is founded on legitimacy, and legitimacy resides in our sense that we are made by our inheritance.

The assertion that "traditional Judeo-Christian values proscribe" [sodomy] cannot provide an adequate justification for [the law]. That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends instead on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine... Thus, far from buttressing his case, petitioner's invocation of Leviticus, Romans, St. Thomas Aquinas, and sodomy's heretical status during the Middle Ages undermines his suggestion that [the law] represents a legitimate use of secular coercive power. A State can no more punish private behavior because of religious intolerance than it can punish such behavior because of racial animus. - Bowers v. Hardwick dissent

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are own, irreversibly, if not fatally. It is not easy to understand how a political community is wrought from such ties. One speaks, and one speaks for another, to another, and yet there is no way to collapse the distinction between the Other and oneself. When we say "we" we do nothing more than designate this very problematic. We do not solve it. And perhaps it is, and ought to be, insoluble. This disposition of ourselves outside ourselves seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure.

The legitimacy of Oswald’s alleged alias, Alex Hidell, is tainted beyond repair by the nature of the Selective Service card supposedly found on him after his arrest in the Texas Theater. This card bore a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald but the name of Alex Hidell. The problem is real Selective Service cards never had photos on them, so the card would have been worthless as a means of identification. It was perfect, however, for instantly associating Oswald with the Hidell alias. Oswald apparently only used this alias twice— once to order the unreliable rifle later dubiously tied to the assassination, and once to order the revolver allegedly used to kill Officer Tippit. The authorities claimed Oswald utilized a P.O. Box, under Hidell’s name, for just this purpose. Critics quickly pointed out how senseless this would have been, as anyone could have purchased better, cheaper weapons on virtually every street corner in 1963 Dallas, with no convenient trail left behind.

One way I try to do it is to observe that in any other area of life that people take seriously, they naturally assume there’s legitimacy to objective values. Take a golf swing. Nobody would seriously say, “Just go swing it any way you want to, because who am I to tell you what to do?” Well, how would that work out? Horrifically. We know that in something like golf, you start to internalize objective ideals, and in that process, you become freer and freer. You become a freer player of golf, and you can actually do what you want to do. That’s true of anything—language, music, politics, anything. You begin to internalize objective values in such a way that they now become the ground for your freedom, and not the enemy of your freedom. The binary option we have to get past is “my freedom versus your oppression.” What we need to say is, No, no, the objectivity of the moral good enables your freedom, opens freedom up. Once you get that, you see the Church is not the enemy of your flourishing, but the condition for it.

A new form of lying has emerged in recent times. This is what Arendt calls “image-making,” where factual truth is dismissed if it doesn’t fit the image. The image becomes a substitute for reality. All such lies harbor an element of violence: organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate. The difference between the traditional political lie and the modern lie is the difference between hiding something and destroying it. We have recently seen how fabricated images can become a reality for millions of people, including the image-maker himself. We have witnessed this in the 2016 American presidential election. Despite the obvious falsity of his claims, the president insists that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in history; despite the fact that he did not receive a majority of votes, he insists that this was because millions of fraudulent votes were cast; and despite the evidence that Russians interfered with the presidential election, the president claims that the “suggestion” that there was Russian interference is just a devious way of calling his legitimacy into question. The real danger here is that an image is created that loyal followers want to believe regardless of what is factually true. They are encouraged to dismiss anything that conflicts with the image as “fake news” or the conspiracy of elites who want to fool them. What Arendt wrote more than a half a century ago might have been written yesterday. “Contemporary history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be more dangerous, and even more hostile, than the real opponents” (Arendt 1977: 255). Arendt was not sanguine that tellers of factual truth would triumph over image-makers. Factual truth-telling is frequently powerless against image-making and can be defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be. Nevertheless, she did think that ultimately factual truth has a stubborn power of its own. Image-makers know this, and that is why they seek to discredit a free press and institutions where there is a pursuit of impartial truth.

What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.

Throughout my years with Obama, I publicly deflected questions about whether the vehemence of his opposition was rooted in race. “I’m sure some people voted for the president because he is black and some people voted against him because he is black,” I would say, with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime working with minority candidates to knock down racial barriers that blocked higher offices. “The election of the first black president was a dramatic step forward for America, not a magic healing elixir.” I simply didn’t want to fuel the discussion or appear to be setting the president up as a victim. Still, the truth is undeniable. No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than

The institutions that American’s founders created to safe guard liberal democratic government cannot survive when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergrid the American system of government. The presidential election of 2024, therefore, will not be the usual contest between Republicans and Democrats. It is a referendum on whether the liberal democracy born out of the Revolution should continue. Today, tens of millions of Americans have risen in rebellion against that system. They have embraced Donald Trump as their leader because they believe he can deliver them from what they regard as the liberal oppression of American politics and society. If he wins, they will support whatever he does, including violating the Constitution to go after his enemies and political opponents, which he has promised to do. If he loses, they will reject the results and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of of the federal government, just as the South did in 1860. Either way, the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrecoverably. (Page 3)

By entering into the arena of argument and counter-argument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming: surely this is now obvious. In a way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past. It is no more debatable than the Italian war in Abyssinia or the Russian suppression of Hungarian freedom. The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction – all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured. It is not pleasant to use such words, but candour permits no less.

The idea of the “people,” as the fount of legitimate order ... has been of some service to the left-liberal intellectual in our time, in his endeavor to wipe out the past, and to find a basis for political obligation that looks only to the present and the future. ... The idea is usually combined with the fantasy that the intellectual has some peculiar faculty of hearing, and also articulating, the “voice of the people.” This self-delusion, which has persisted unaltered since the days of the French Revolution, expresses the intellectual’s concern to be reunited with the social order from which his own thinking has so tragically separated him. He wishes to redeem himself from his “outsideness.” Unfortunately, however, he succeeds in uniting himself not with society, but only with another intellectual abstraction—“the people”—designed according to impeccable theoretical requirements, precisely in order to veil the intolerable reality of everyday life. “The people” does not exist. Even if it did exist, it would be authority for nothing, since it would have no concrete basis on which to build its legitimacy. Nobody can speak for the people. Nobody can speak for anyone. The truth, however, strives to be uttered, and may find expression, now on these lips, now on those.

Young, bored, tasked with what authoritarian regimes have ordered young, bored soldiers to do since time immemorial—stand there projecting the violent underpinning of political power—they also didn’t care. One of them stopped my father. Your papers, he said. My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor. Your papers, he repeated. In the forty or so years since that day, I have thought about this moment more than anything else in the stories my father told me. I’ve thought about it while shuffling my passport across the counter at border crossings; while running from RPG attacks in the dead of night; while sitting in a guesthouse in Kandahar listening to two Taliban officials explain, with utmost confidence, how the world should be run; while sitting in a courtroom in Guantánamo Bay watching highly educated men and women assign legitimacy they know is unearned to an ad hoc, hopelessly compromised legal system. It has been, for as long as I can remember, the memory that anchors my overarching view of political malice: an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

Populism is an authoritarian form of democracy. Defined historically, it thrives in contexts of real or imagined political crises, wherein populism offers itself as antipolitics. It claims to do the work of politics while keeping itself free from the political process. Democracy in this sense simultaneously increases the political participation of real or imagined majorities while it excludes, and limits the rights of, political, sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities. As noted above, populism conceives the people as One—namely, as a single entity consisting of leader, followers, and nation. This trinity of popular sovereignty is rooted in fascism but is confirmed by votes. Populism stands against liberalism, but for electoral politics. Therefore, we can better understand populism if we think of it as an original historical reformulation of fascism that first came to power after 1945. Populism’s homogenizing view of the people conceives of political opponents as the antipeople. Opponents become enemies: nemeses who, consciously or unconsciously, stand for the oligarchical elites and for a variety of illegitimate outsiders. Populism defends an illuminated nationalist leader who speaks and decides for the people. It downplays the separation of powers, the independence and legitimacy of a free press, and the rule of law. In populism, democracy is challenged but not destroyed.

After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of “the people” altogether.17 America was founded with the phrase “We the People,” but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in Anti-Pluralism, his 2018 attack on populism, “We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.”18 There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking; it is a new iteration of the old elitist fantasy. The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump—who is in no way a genuine populist—but because it is populism’s opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn’t seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be “good.

Carol I must not be confused with his nephew’s son, Carol II. Whereas the latter was undisciplined and sensual, the former was an anal-retentive Prussian of the family of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who, in the course of a forty-eight-year rule (1866–1914), essentially built modern Romania, complete with nascent institutions, from an assemblage of regions and two weak principalities. Following 1989, he had become the default symbol of legitimacy for the Romanian state. Whereas Carol I signified realism and stability, the liberal National Peasant Party leader Iuliu Maniu, a Greek Catholic by upbringing, stood for universal values. As a mid-twentieth-century local politician in extraordinarily horrifying circumstances, Maniu had agitated against the assault on the Jews and in favor of getting Antonescu to switch sides against the Nazis; soon after, during the earliest days of the Cold War, he agitated against the Soviets and their local puppets. Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop once demanded Maniu’s execution. As it turned out, the Communist Gheorghiu-Dej regime later convicted Maniu in a show trial in 1947. Defying his accusers, he spoke up in court for free elections, political liberties, and fundamental human rights.16 He died in prison in 1953 and his body was dumped in a common grave. Maniu’s emaciated treelike statue with quotations from the Psalms is, by itself, supremely moving. But there is a complete lack of harmony between it and the massive, adjacent spear pointing to the sky, honoring the victims of the 1989 revolution. The memorial slabs beside the spear are already chipped and cracked. Piaţa Revoluţiei in 1981 was dark, empty, and fear-inducing. Now it was cluttered with memorials, oppressed by traffic, and in general looked like an amateurish work in progress. But though it lacked any

Most common discussions of political authority presuppose existing political institutions and ask under what conditions do institutions of that kind have legitimate authority. This begs many questions, and precludes many possibilities. It presupposes that either this government has all the authority it claims over its population or it has none. Here again we notice one of the special features of the account of the previous chapter. It allows for a very discriminating approach to the question. The government may have only some of the of the authority it claims, it may have more authority over one person than over another. The test is as explained before: does following the authority's instructions improve conformity with reason? For every person the question has to be asked afresh, and for every one it has to be asked in a manner which admits of various qualifi cations. An expert pharmacologist may not be subject to the authority of the government in matters of the safety of drugs, an inhabitant of a little village by a river may not be subject to its authority in matters of navigation and conservation of the river by the banks of which he has spent all his life. These conclusions appear paradoxical. Ought not the pharmacologist or the villager to obey the law, given that it is a good law issued by a just government? I will postpone consideration of the obligation to obey the law until the last section of this chapter. For the time being let us remove two other misunderstandings which make the above conclusion appear paradoxical. First, it may appear as if the legitimacy of an authority rests on its greater expertise. Are political authorities to be equated with big Daddy who knows best? Second, again the suspicion must creep back that the exclusive concentration on the individual blinds one to the real business of government, which is to co-ordinate and control large populations.

A consociational democracy exists when the class interests of the ruling elite in preserving a unitary multi-ethnic state prevail over countervailing interests to break the state down into ethnic components. The consociational democracy is a special case of bourgeois democracy, a state run by a capitalist technocratic, bureaucratic elite supposedly representative institutions elected officials and other paraphenalia of parliamentarism. In a plural society however, where primordial attachments to ethnic collectivities compete with class affiliation, the illusion of democracy can only be maintained if the elite itself is multi-ethnic and in proportion approximating those of constituent ethnes in the general population. If that condition is not met, then the political system is perceived by the under-represented group as undemocratic, dominated by the over-represented group or groups. Proportionality at the elite level is thus a key feature of consociational democracies, for it is true proportionality that preserve the democratic fiction of representativeness and thus its own legitimacy. If one accepts the principle of ethnic representation, then the ethnicity of a member of the ruling class contains a validation of the right to rule. An essential corollary of the ethnic proportionality of such systems is the muting of class conflicts to the extent that ethnic sentiments are politicized, class consciousness is lowered. If the main line of cleavage in a society is ethnicity or some feature of it like religion or language. If the political game is seen primarily as an ethnic balancing act and the allocation of scarce resources, if there are no glaring disparities in ethnic representation at various class levels, it follows that the significance of class cleavages within each ethne is correspondingly decreased. Under such circumstances, the class interests of the multi-ethnic elite are best served by a system. The more politicized ethnicity becomes, the ethnicized the polity, the more attention is deflected from class conflicts and re-directed.

For Heidegger, authentic Being expressed itself on the political plane only as a “moment of vision,” a breakthrough beyond modern man’s self-limited fallen nature. Legitimacy, due process, constitutional forms, and other inauthentic constraints fall away, as man decides the moment has come to take action, regardless of consequences.24 That moment, Heidegger decided, was 1932 and the man was Adolf Hitler. Heidegger believed that National Socialism would decisively overturn modernity’s lack of depth and values and recapture “our historical-spiritual existence, in order to transform it into a new beginning.” Nor was Heidegger bothered by the threat of Nazi violence and brutality: “The beginning must be begun again, more radically, with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a new beginning”—even if that meant a return to barbarism.

In reality, two factors often tied to the emergence of nationalism in the early modern West, general education (as distinct from specialized training) and commercial printing, already existed in China by the eleventh century.20 Under such circumstances, one might expect the appearance of a new form of collective consciousness in Northern Song China as well. The relationship between the Song nation and the modern Chinese nation is, however, complex. Besides adhering to a very different ideology of political legitimacy, Northern Song Chinese differed from modern nationalists in how they defined the boundaries of their state. Contemporary China is conceived today to be a multiethnic state composed of fifty-six “nationalities.” Its “natural” territory extends deep into Central Asia. In its Song iteration, as will be clear in a later chapter, China was imagined to be a monoethnic nation that controlled neither Manchuria, nor the modern peripheral provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.

In the end, the only measure of the Court’s legitimacy that matters is the extent to which it gets the law right and applies it correctly...sometimes justices seem to make decisions not based on their legal principles but for strategic purposes. The public can see through that; it’s when justices think about ‘legitimacy’ and try to avoid political controversy that they act most illegitimately.

The Independent rants, “Not voting isn’t clever or brave. It is, in effect, saying to everyone else ‘you decide’.” Not voting is not only clever and brave, it’s the only rational way forward. You are thereby deciding the way forward. If there is a total boycott of the democratic front office of capitalism, it will remove the political legitimacy of the banking corporatocracy that rules over us. Democratic politicians are the plastic smile of the unacceptable face of capitalism. They are enemies of the people. Who in their right mind would vote for their enemies?

The fact that the root of Fourth Generation war is a political, social, and moral phenomenon, the decline of the state, means there can be no purely military solution to Fourth Generation threats. Military force is incapable, by itself, of restoring legitimacy to a state.

The violence in which we have been living for so long acts naturally and incessantly to turn human beings into faceless, one-dimensional creatures lacking volition. Wars, armies, regimes, and fanatic religions try to blur the nuances that create personal, private uniqueness, the nonrecurrent wonder of each and every person, and attempt to turn people into a mass, into a horde, so that they may be better “suited” to their purposes and to the entire situation. Literature—and not necessarily any particular book, but the attentiveness engendered by direct, profound, “complex literature—reminds us of our duty to demand for ourselves—from the “situation”—the right to individuality and uniqueness. It helps us to reclaim some of the things that this “situation” tries relentlessly to expropriate: the subtle, discerning application to the person trapped in the conflict, whether friend or foe; the complex nuances of relationships between people and between different communities; the precision of words and descriptions; the flexibility of thought; the ability and the courage to occasionally change the point of view in which we are frozen (sometimes fossilized); the deep and essential understanding that we can—we must—read every human situation from several different points of view. Then we may be able to reach the place in which the totally contradictory stories of different people, different nations, even sworn enemies, may coexist and play out together. This is the place where we are finally able to grasp that in true negotiations, our wishes will be forced to encounter the Other’s, forced to recognize their justness, their legitimacy. This is the moment when we feel the sharp growing pains that always attend the arrival of sobriety, and in this case the realization that there is a limit to our ability to mold reality so that it perfectly suits only our own needs. This is the moment when we feel what I called earlier “the principle of Otherness,” whose deep-seated meaning, if you wish, is the rightful existence, the stories, pains, and hopes, of the Other. If we can only reach this Archimedean point, we can begin to dismantle the barriers and detonators that prevent us from solving the conflict.

Many observers, including historians, compared it to previous periods of societal strife in the United States, including the Civil War and the Civil Rights era. “What’s different about almost all those other events is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system,” Owen Wasow, a Pomona College political scientist, told The New York Times. “The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have—from a president on down—politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.

In the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and hence over the very meaning and legitimacy of Zionism, thrust itself into the very center of global politics. There is no simple explanation for this development. In the Zionist world the right wing is certain that this is merely a recurrence of anti-Semitism, now masked as anti-Zionism, unfairly scapegoating the Jews, yet again, for the world’s sins, and there is indeed substantial evidence that all too often anti-Zionism is indeed used as a mask for anti-Semitism. But most anti-Zionists are not anti-Semites, and the two ideologies cannot be lumped into one. The left insists that it is the Occupation that is at fault for the spread of anti-Israel sentiments and policies: reach a peace treaty with the Palestinians and the opposition to Israel will dissolve.

political leaders and employers decided that a new system of labor management paid for out of the public coffers would be cheaper for them and have greater public legitimacy and effectiveness. The result was the creation of the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905, the first state police force in the country. It was modeled after the Philippine Constabulary, used to maintain the US occupation there,

Al-Wahhab allied with Muhammed bin Saud, the founder of the state of Saudi Arabia, and provided religious and ideological backing to the newly formed state.  The Wahhabi Saudi troops took advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I to seize control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It’s probably safe to say that the Shia will never forgive the Wahhabis for the zealotry they pursued upon taking the cities, which included obliterating centuries-old sacred Shia shrines and claiming that they were used to worship the Imams as gods and were therefore heretical.  In the Cemetery of al-Baqi in Medina, they utterly destroyed the tombs of the Imams Hasan, Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammed ibn Ali, and Jafar, as well as the tomb of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad.  In Mecca, they destroyed the Cemetery of Mualla, where the ancestors of Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were buried.  These prominent destructions were part of a pattern of violence that witnessed the Wahhabi Saudis smash buildings, tombs and mosques associated with the history of the Prophet and his family and which were venerated by Shia.  In addition, they alienated Shia from governance and oppressed them throughout the kingdom[26].  This vandalism has been repeated time and time again by Wahhabis in other areas as well, including the much-publicized destruction of the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001[27] and the outbreak of violence in 2013 around the city of Timbuktu, where Wahhabi fundamentalists  destroyed holy artifacts and burned a priceless library of manuscripts before fleeing the arrival of French troops[28]. While the establishment of the Wahhabi school of thought created an intellectual form of anti-Shia ideology, it is probable that this philosophy would have remained isolated in the political backwater of the Nejd Sultanate (the core of modern Saudi Arabia) if not for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the final abolition of the Caliphate. The Ottomans had claimed to be Caliphs of the Muslim world since 1453, the same year that they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Byzantine Empire, and they ruled over a considerable portion of the world's Sunnis, as well as the shrine cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.  After 1876, the Sultans had placed particular emphasis on their role as Caliphs in order to bolster their global position by asserting their Empire's "Muslim” character, and while this was never universally accepted by all Sunnis or Shias, Sunni Muslims everywhere at least could say that there was a government that claimed to represent the form of rule established by the Prophet and that provided legitimacy and continuity.

On May 14, 1948, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the first in two thousand years. The US government recognized its legitimacy on the same day; but Washington’s backing for Israel was not benevolent. To understand the thinking at the time, the essay by George Biddle, a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, published in the Atlantic in 1949 after his visit to the new nation, is instructive. Biddle was unequivocal in his endorsement of Israel, arguing that Western interests in the Middle East would be assured if the Jewish state was in its orbit. He did not seem to like Jews much, writing that they used to be “grease-spotted” and “moth-eaten.” But after arriving in Israel they suddenly acquired “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were akin to US president, founding father, and slave owner Thomas Jefferson.13 Biddle dismissed the Arabs he saw but thought they were “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians.” Not being white, they were “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.

Maybe the other side was simply brainwashed—and so were we. Identities and interests are socially constructed. This can help explain not only the depth of conflict that can exist between countries, but also the hostile divisions that can emerge between competing political parties, different religious ideologies, pro-life and pro-choice advocates, labor unions and management, and even rival corporate entities. In all such environments, each side can come to see its own perspective as moral while others are viewed with suspicion and derision. The discrepancy can persist and widen because all sides pass judgment on events using their own self-serving standards of legitimacy.

In his memoirs, Nixon explains why he decided not to contest the Illinois results. He was concerned that a challenge to the legitimacy of a presidential race would have hurt the nation’s standing in the world, he says. Perhaps more sincere was the other reason he gave: his concern that if he did contest the result “[c]harges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.

From this standpoint, Schmitt came to the following conclusions about modern bourgeois politics. First, it is a system which rests on compromise; hence all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional, never decisive. Second, such arrangements can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy. By the universalism implicit in its claims for equality, democracy challenges the legitimacy of the political order, as liberal legitimacy rests on discussion and the compromise of shifting majority rules. Third, liberalism will tend to undermine the possibility of the political in that it wishes to substitute procedure for struggle. Thus, last, legitimacy and legality cannot be the same; indeed, they stand in contradiction to each other.17

Socialists today disavow this historical record, insisting that these were authoritarian forms of socialism that they have no intention of copying. While socialism may have been the economic program of Communism and early fascism, modern socialists seek to dispense with the tyranny and merely keep the economic program. I’ll examine the legitimacy of this selective borrowing later, but here it’s worth stressing that socialism wasn’t merely a political failure; it was also an economic failure.

All anarchists reject the legitimacy of external government and of the State, and condemn imposed political authority, hierarchy and domination. They seek to establish the condition of anarchy, that is to say, a decentralized and self-regulating society consisting of a federation of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals. The ultimate goal of anarchism is to create a free society which allows all human beings to realize their full potential.

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

Hamas declared that the perceived demise of the peace process meant that its political participation could not be seen in the context of conferring legitimacy onto the Oslo Accords. In 1996, Hamas had boycotted the legislative elections for fear of legitimating the accords.125

The goal of the Democrat Party and their press mouthpieces is to destroy the reputation and undermine the legitimacy of the constitutionalists on the Court and the Court’s present majority, regardless of the hypocrisy of their political and media attacks. Besides, few will call them out on it.

Do not understand only the words; also understand their contexts since they illuminate you precisely. If you vote wisely, you won’t have to fight for your rights and peace everywhere. The political mafia is the mother of all mafias and often causes wars and uses vetoes to disrupt global peace. My every minute of life is for the entire humanity and human rights; it is a core prayer of all my prayers. What is a mafia, how do you understand it, and when do you overcome it? It is neither easy nor difficult; just be brave for your rights and never ignore them. No one can stand in front of your rights if you truly believe that. I have described the context of the mafia in the form of quotations that may guide and enlighten your life journey honourably. When a nation faces the Mafia Judiciary, which employs and applies an unfair way that fractures justice, the criminal mafia groups become licensed, and freehand is a juristic disaster. Wherever the medical, trade, business, media, and political interests of the mafia prevail, there is certainly neither a cure nor freedom possible nor justice nor peace. A vote holds not only significant power; it also carries a key to a system, essence to the welfare, surety to the career of a future generation, and a magnet to the stability of the state. The wrong choice or emotional pledge and favor of the vote-casting can indeed victimize a voter himself as a consequence. Realize this power and use it wisely, disregarding all external influences and tricks. Such a political party remains the proprietorship of a particular family, a rich circle, a corrupt mafia, or an establishment that accomplishes neither transparent democratic legitimacy nor fair democracy. Undoubtedly, such a party enforces majority dictatorship when it comes to power. It is mendacious dishonesty and severe corruption in a precise democratic voting context. I have been critical of the undemocratic rule, but now I think it may be the option of neutral law, but not martial law, which is essential for the stability and unity of Pakistan’s state, constitution, economy, and institutions to eliminate the democratic mafia and terror. International intelligence agencies and their hired ones avoid the weapons now; however, they utilize deadly chemicals to kill their rivals, whether high-level or low-level, whereas doctors diagnose that as a natural death. Virtually becoming infected and a victim of deathly diseases through chemicals is neither known publicly nor common. As a fact, the intelligence mafia can achieve and gain every task for their interests.

The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.

A madman who believes himself to be a king is no more mad than a king who believes himself to be a king

A fool’s argument must constantly be fed by increasingly absurd rationalizations in order to maintain some disintegrating shred of legitimacy. And at some point the argument will have run its course to the degree that no amount of feeding will be able to sustain it. And at that point, the fool is forced to declare that the death of the argument was the very thing that legitimized its existence. And in the end, the only thing that’s legitimized is the fact that the person who builds their life on a bunch of dead arguments is, in fact, a legitimate fool.

Our analysis points to four structural drivers of instability: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflict; failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.

Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.

and intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything. This, in any case, is the charm of the discipline and of the social sciences in general: one starts from square one, so that there is some hope of making major progress. In France, I believe, economists are slightly more interested in persuading historians and sociologists, as well as people outside the academic world, that what they are doing is interesting (although they are not always successful

Around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization—the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources of this legitimacy were the Axial religions, or more broadly ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (and later Christianity and Islam). During this time, gods evolved from capricious projections of human desire (who as often as not squabbled among themselves) into transcendental moralizers concerned above all with prosocial behavior by all, including the rulers. The

the overzealous institutionalization of social relationships, which comes along with the increasing formalization and physical and numerical growth of modern settlements and societies, makes people unhappy and undermines the moral legitimacy of political authorities. The more powerful the institutions, the more ‘rights’ and vested interests they will have in the affairs and interactions of the ordinary citizen, and the more marginal individuals will be compared to the interests of the institutions. The ultimate form of this trend is a situation where institutions become not only a burden, but a threat to public well-being, even to public security. I argue in the book that there are ways to revive organic communities in modern political systems by conducting decentralization, and by adopting models from the existing

In truth, there will never be enough power in the presidency for an incumbent to make good on a purely constructive leadership project, and it is unlikely that there will ever be another president stretched so thinly by a determination to use great power to do just that. Lyndon Johnson was a full-service president who had at his disposal an alignment of political resources, economic resources, international resources, and military resources unmatched in the annals of presidential history. The problem is that in a full-service presidency, where no interest of political significance is denied a modicum of legitimacy, resources turn fickle; the exercise of power consumes authority. Committed to a wholly affirmative result, Johnson could not rest content to let anyone carry the brunt of change.

If the Word of God referred to the factual claims within the Bible, then the true experts of the Word would be the academics who understand when these words were written, what the context was in which they were written, and what influences were at work in the composition. In addition to this, the legitimacy of the Word of God would always rest upon the answers one gave to questions such as when the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life were written, whether or not they were recorded by eyewitnesses, whether there was a political agenda at work, whether the information in the text matches up with what we know about historical and geographical data, and so on.

Fellow economists get very cross with me when I tell them that we face a choice: we can keep pretending we are scientists, like astrologists do, or admit that we are more like philosophers, who will never know the meaning of life for sure, no matter how wisely and rationally they argue. But were we to confess that we are at best worldly philosophers, it is unlikely we would continue to be so handsomely rewarded by the ruling class of a market society whose legitimacy we provide by pretending to be scientists.

Times have changed, and international laws and norms surrounding belligerency are far less permissive than they were in the early twentieth century. While this means that weak states have greater protection available to them from predatory neighbours, it also enables the survival of states and institutions that are not necessarily well adapted to their environment. The sovereignty – and sometimes territorial and fiscal integrity – of weak states is guaranteed to a significant degree by external sources, which can undermine the need for robust internal sources, such as popular legitimacy, or a productive economy.

we in this society must remind ourselves again how we threaten our own interests and rights when we condone by our silence the government's use of surveillance, attacks on the legitimacy of political activists, and the use of the criminal law to suppress and punish political dissent.

In American politics, power is presumptively illegitimate. It’s important to remember this. Our founding is premised on the notion that power is inherently hostile to freedom. The pamphlets of the Revolution are heavy with warnings that citizens must “jealously” guard their liberties against tyrannies of the state. The Constitution, even as it created a stronger national government, hobbled that government with checks and balances, separations of power, local prerogatives, and deliberate ambiguities meant to be resolved in favor of the people. So if power has always been suspect here, on what basis does it truly earn legitimacy in America? On this basis only: inclusion. From hatred of “taxation without representation” to passion for “equal protection of the law,” we Americans have believed in and preached inclusion. Even when we have failed to practice it.

I have over the years of my research been struck by the frequency with which the present makes use of the past either in a detrimental manner where it becomes a part of various political ploys, or alternatively in a positive manner to claim an enviable legitimacy and inheritance.

At the center of discussion were the questions of legitimacy of succession to the caliphate, the relationship of leadership to faith, and the concomitant problem of unbelief when that relationship was considered by some factions as inadequate. The conflicting views that were expressed on these controversial issues eventually gave rise to theological positions, or to a theology of controversy (Kontroverstheologie), as termed by Josef van Ess, which constituted part of the political discourse of the nascent Muslim society.30 Right after the turn of the first Islamic century and just before the Abbasid revolution (ca. 720s), however, a new, cosmological element was introduced into theological discussions – in particular, atomism – apparently through the Manichean sects.31 The need for a cosmology other than atomism occasioned the translation of Aristotle’s Physics by the end of the eighth century, a work that was repeatedly to be re-translated (or revised).32 Also related to such theological disputes is the appearance, in the first half of the eighth century and before the beginning of the translation movement, of certain Plotinian ideas in the theology of Jahm Ibn S.afwan (d. ¯ 746), ideas that, in this case, appear to have traveled without written translations.33

Political democracy, judged on its own terms (as a basic political value in itself), is not to be judged (consequentially) in terms of its outcomes (successful or otherwise), but in terms of engagement. This is obviously reflected, quite basically, in electoral turnout figures (which, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, are in global decline); but it is also reflected in related elements such as levels of public debate, competition for and accessibility of office, accountability of representatives, and so on. In other words, if people do not engage seriously or, at a minimum, even bother to vote at all, then the political system has failed and those who claim a democratic mandate lack popular legitimacy – lack authority.

Then there are spurious intellectual discussions about ‘voter apathy’ and so on, as if such factors could possibly explain and somehow justify massive disengagement from our political processes. Indeed, such discussion is hugely insulting to those who choose to abstain from the political lottery on principle or out of plain disgust (and who, incidentally, might participate in dramatic numbers if a ‘none of the above’ option were offered on the ballot, a solution to the turnout problem that has been vigorously thwarted since it would make an implicit rejection of the political process as it stands more explicit). We cannot simply assume that half the eligible population is too bored or too lazy to participate in political life, say, once every four years; that demands a pretty extreme assumption of disinterest and lethargy. There is little doubt that a great number feel that the mode of ‘participation’ available to them is inauthentic6 – and that the ‘choice’ they might be a party to would make them culpable for its consequences. As such, non-participation can be seen as a very modest form of moral revolt, since it undermines the legitimacy of those who exercise political authority and the very institutions that embody this authority.

By hamstringing the ability of French governments to act in the interests of the French people – or, to put it more realistically, by giving them an excuse for not so acting – that embrace has destroyed political legitimacy in France. It has contributed to a contempt for democratic politics so profound, among both rulers and ruled, that the survival of the Fifth Republic may be brought into doubt in the next few years, ‘Europe’ or no ‘Europe’. The

Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable proportions.

the logic behind this process of legitimization of homosexual behavior undercuts any objective standards by which we could judge the moral legitimacy of anything. This is the ultimate danger it poses—including to America’s political foundations.

Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigorous civil society.29 The mobilization of social groups allows weak individuals to pool their interests and enter the political system; even when social groups do not seek political objectives, voluntary associations have spillover effects in fostering the ability of individuals to work with one another in novel situations—what is termed social capital. The correlation noted above linking economic growth to stable liberal democracy presumably comes about via the channel of social mobilization: growth entails the emergence of new social actors who then demand representation in a more open political system and press for a democratic transition. When the political system is well institutionalized and can accommodate these new actors, then there is a successful transition to full democracy. This is what happened with the rise of farmers’ movements and socialist parties in Britain and Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century, and in South Korea after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1987. A highly developed civil society can also pose dangers for democracy and can even lead to political decay. Groups based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. 30 Social mobilization can lead to political decay. The Huntingtonian process whereby political institutions failed to accommodate demands of new social actors for participation arguably happened in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 1990s and 2000s with the repeated unseating of elected presidents by highly mobilized social groups.31

Among ideas, legitimacy, and all of the other dimensions of development Ideas concerning legitimacy develop according to their own logic, but they are also shaped by economic, political, and social development. The history of the twentieth century would have looked quite different without the writings of an obscure scribbler in the British Library, Karl Marx, who systematized a critique of early capitalism. Similarly, communism collapsed in 1989 largely because few people any longer believed in the foundational ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Conversely, developments in economics and politics affect the kinds of ideas that people regard as legitimate. The Rights of Man seemed more plausible to French people because of the changes that had taken place in France’s class structure and the rising expectations of the new middle classes in the later eighteenth century. The spectacular financial crises and economic setbacks of 1929–1931 undermined the legitimacy of certain capitalist institutions and led the way to the legitimization of greater state control over the economy. The subsequent growth of large welfare states, and the economic stagnation and inflation that they appeared to encourage, laid the groundwork for the conservative Reagan-Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s. Similarly, the failure of socialism to deliver on its promises of modernization and equality led to its being discredited in the minds of many who lived under communism. Economic growth can also create legitimacy for the governments that succeed in fostering it. Many fast-developing countries in East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have maintained popular support despite their lack of liberal democracy for this reason. Conversely, the reversal of economic growth through economic crisis or mismanagement can be destabilizing, as it was for the dictatorship in Indonesia after the financial crisis of 1997–1998.33 Legitimacy also rests on the distribution of the benefits of growth. Growth that goes to a small oligarchy at the top of the society without being broadly shared often mobilizes social groups against the political system. This is what happened in Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, who ruled the country from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911. National income grew rapidly in this period, but property rights existed only for a wealthy elite, which set the stage for the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and a long period of civil war and instability as underprivileged groups fought for their share of national income. In more recent times, the legitimacy of democratic systems in Venezuela and Bolivia has been challenged by populist leaders whose political base is poor and otherwise marginalized groups.34

This is, in effect, the essence of politics: the ability of leaders to get their way through a combination of authority, legitimacy, intimidation, negotiation, charisma, ideas, and organization.

Government in and of itself is the foremost agent for destroying order and imposing chaos." "To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war." "Political theory would be fine in a perfect world, but in an uncertain one, it is a dangerous gamble.

Demonstrating the Obama administration’s awareness of both the lawlessness of its actions and the fact that they were certain to undermine legislative efforts to reform immigration law in a manner consistent with the Constitution, one DHS memorandum observed: Even many who have supported a legislated legalization program may question the legitimacy of trying to accomplish the same end via administrative action, particularly after five years where the two parties have treated this as a matter to be decided in Congress.3

Such criticism grew in the later 1970s, as the immediate post-Nasser years gave way to the period of economic opening up (al-infitah) under Anwar Sadat, and the entire Nasserite project was assailed as a failure rooted in a lack of dynamism. If anything the exact opposite was true. Nasser's development programme was frenetically action-oriented as well as rich in rhetoric. In the space of a few years following the July 1952 coup that abolished Egyptian monarchism, Nasser overhauled Egypt's entire political system; sidelined the political class that had ruled Egypt for half a century, replacing the Turco-dominated aristocracy with ordinary Egyptians, who at least in theory represented the will and aspirations of the masses; emasculated all political parties; tried (and in many cases imprisoned) most of the key politicians of the ‘bygone era’; created a new constitutional order; and established a new system based on an ultra-powerful presidency supported by an executive government, the legitimacy of which was derived from the consent (albeit without formal electoral channels) of the people.

Egyptian authorities, the mere presence of prestigious outside observers gives the balloting a much-desired stamp of legitimacy, even in the face of the government's harsh crackdown on political dissent.

The Donald has the political players rising on their hind legs in defense of their realm. And he has hitherto shattered the totems and taboos these players enforce. Debated as never before are vexations like immigration, Islam, and, yes, the legitimacy of the Republican National Committee.

There has always been an element of stupidity in America, only now it’s become a valid intellectual stance. Fact has been relegated to just another opinion. Voices that, at one time in our history, would have been laughed off the national stage have now been afforded mainstream legitimacy. Idiotic remarks that would have been walked back when the speaker sobered up are now backed up with even more bluster than when they were uttered. Even racist and sexist taunts proudly ride in under the false banner of flouting political correctness.

Some writers have drawn analogies between these dynamics and ideological struggles in the West’s own past.6 This book takes that insight much further. It is the first sustained analytical comparison between the Middle East today and various region-wide legitimacy crises in the history of Europe and the Americas—crises that exhibited remarkably similar chains of events. I present lessons about the current upheaval in Muslim societies, and its troubled interactions and interpenetration with the rest of the world, drawn from past ideological struggles in other parts of the globe. I make two general claims in this book: 1.  Understanding political Islam requires understanding its long twilight struggle with secularism. 2.  Understanding that Islamist-secularist struggle requires that we understand the origins, dynamics, and ultimate end of similar ideological struggles in the history of the Western world.

According to the Mundell-Fleming Theorem, countries cannot simultaneously maintain an independent monetary policy, capital mobility, and fixed exchange rates. If a government chooses fixed exchange rates and capital mobility it has to give up monetary autonomy. If it chooses monetary autonomy and capital mobility it has to go with floating exchange rates. Finally, if it wishes to combine fixed exchange rates with monetary autonomy it has to limit capital mobility. In a paper published in 2000, Rodrik argued that the open-economy trilemma can be extended to what he called the political trilemma of the world economy. The elements of Rodrik’s political trilemma, in its more recent (2011) version, are: hyper-globalization, the nation state, and democratic politics. The claim is that it is possible to have at most two of these things, as in the standard trilemma of international economics. If we want deep globalization (‘hyper-globalization’), we have to go either with the nation state, in which case the domain of democratic politics will have to be significantly restricted, or else with democratic politics. In the latter case we would have to give up the nation state in favour of global federalism. If we want democratic legitimacy we have to choose between the nation state and deep globalization. Finally, if we wish to keep the nation state, we have to choose between democratic legitimacy at home and deep globalization internationally.

an ideology may resonate among a particular community due to a broad range of political issues like incompetent, authoritarian or corrupt governments, as well as economic issues like widespread poverty or unemployment. In many instances, the political and socioeconomic grievances that lead to terrorism are tied to a government’s legitimacy, or lack thereof.

However, even though I find much of this anti-essentialist-inspired analysis compelling, I nonetheless hope to illuminate two problems that arise when this form of criticism is uncritically wielded in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. First, using recent feminist and deliberative democratic critiques of Indigenous recognition politics as a backdrop, I demonstrate how normative appropriations of social constructivism can undercut the liberatory aspirations of anti-essentialist criticism by failing to adequately address the complexity of interlocking social relations that serve to exasperate the types of exclusionary cultural practices that critics of essentialism find so disconcerting. Second, and perhaps more problematically, I show that when constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticism ought to mitigate.

Catalyzed by an international economic crisis that crystallized with the oil crisis of 1973, in essence it was a crisis of the dictatorship’s domestic political legitimacy.

How the new Chinese middle class behaves in the coming years will be the most important test of the universality of liberal democracy. If it continues to grow in absolute and relative size, and yet remains content to live under the benevolent tutelage of a single-party dictatorship, one would have to say that China is culturally different from other societies around the world in its support for authoritarian government. If, however, it generates demands for participation that cannot be accommodated within the existing political system, then it is simply behaving in a manner similar to middle classes in other parts of the world. The real test of the legitimacy of the Chinese system will come not when the economy is expanding and jobs are abundant but when growth slows and the system faces crisis, as it inevitably will.

And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other external actors, which are seen as pulling strings behind the back of a weak Greek government. Although there is considerable distrust of government in American political culture, by contrast, the basic legitimacy of democratic institutions runs very deep. Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes. Americans loudly proclaim their dislike of taxes, but when Congress mandates a tax, the government is energetic in enforcement. Moreover, international surveys suggest that levels of tax compliance are reasonably high in the United States; higher, certainly, than most European countries on the Mediterranean. Tax evasion in Greece is widespread, with restaurants requiring cash payments, doctors declaring poverty-line salaries, and unreported swimming pools owned by asset-hiding citizens dotting the Athenian landscape. By one account, Greece’s shadow economy—unreported income hidden from the tax authorities—constitutes 29.6 percent of total GDP.24 A second factor has to do with the late arrival of capitalism in Greece. The United States was an early industrializer; the private sector and entrepreneurship remained the main occupations of most Americans. Greece urbanized and took on other trappings of a modern society early on, but it failed to build a strong base of industrial employment. In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige. Moreover, the Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development tended to dissolve.

This way of seeing things makes it impossible to distinguish free states from tyrannies, just rulers from unjust rulers, or healthy regimes from abusive regimes. In practice, it would mean that whatever political group happens to wield power, by arms or by propaganda, is, ipso facto, legitimate. Yet the whole point of the Declaration and the Constitution was to found a government on something more than accident and force. If rights and political legitimacy are created by accident and force, then there is no moral difference between the dictatorship of a military strongman and a free state governed by fair laws; whatever the political authorities choose to call “just” is so, by definition.

Balochistan was refused legitimacy for its nationhood with the creation of Pakistan due to the geographical location and the rich natural resources. The story would have been completely different if this has been a barren land.

A judge who announces a decision must be able to demonstrate that he began from recognized legal principles and reasoned in an intellectually coherent and politically neutral way to his result. Those who would politicize the law offer the public, and the judiciary, the temptation of results without regard to democratic legitimacy.

Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.' Huntington concludes (regretfully) this was no longer possible by the late sixties. Why not? Presidential authority was eroded. There was a broad reappraisal of governmental action and 'morality' in the post-Vietnam/post-Watergate era among political leaders who, like the general public, openly questioned 'the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception—all of which are, in some measure,' according to Huntington, 'inescapable attributes of the process of government.' Congressional power became more decentralized and party allegiances to the administration weakened. Traditional forms of public and private authority were undermined as 'people no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.' ¶ Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, too many people participated too much: 'Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [sic] before. [Italics mine.] ¶ Against their will, these 'groups'—the majority of the population—have been denied 'opportunities, positions, rewards and privileges.' More democracy is not the answer: 'applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.' Huntington concludes that 'some of the problems in governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy...Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.' ¶ '...The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. In the past, every democratic society has had a marginal population, of greater or lesser size, which has not actively participated in politics. In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic but it is also one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively. [Italics mine.]' ¶ With a candor which has shocked those trilateralists who are more accustomed to espousing the type of 'symbolic populism' Carter employed so effectively in his campaign, the Governability Report expressed the open secret that effective capitalist democracy is limited democracy! (See Alan Wolfe, 'Capitalism Shows Its Face.')

The constitution has thus ended up not as Japan’s ultimate governing legal document, but in the grand political Japanese tradition as a somewhat blurred and compromised token of legitimacy, hoisted about erratically like a portable shrine by competing contenders for power.

When you rent yourself to some concentration of capital in the private sector—that’s what taking a job is—you’re giving your life over to a dictatorship, in fact, an extreme form of dictatorship that reaches far beyond political dictatorships. The tyranny to which you are handing yourself over to has almost total control over you. It controls every minute of your working day: what you wear and are allowed to say, when you’re allowed to get a bathroom break, how your hands and legs move, whether you smoke cigarettes at home. Just about everything in your life is controlled by this extreme dictatorship, which goes far beyond any totalitarian dictatorship in the degree of control it exercises. That raises some questions. One is whether a socioeconomic system is legitimate if it subjects people to extreme forms of tyranny for most of their lives. And that leads to the next question, whether the wage labor contract is itself legitimate. The argument in favor of legitimacy is that the contract is freely undertaken—in the sense of Anatole France’s remark that the rich and poor are equally free to sleep under the bridge at night. In the real world, the contract is accepted under duress. You accept it or you starve, conditions exacerbated under increasing monopolization, as Marv discussed in our last session. There are very few options.

The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.

As the foundation lifeline has sustained the NPIC’s emergence into a primary component of US political life, the assimilation of political resistance projects into quasi-entrepreneurial, corporate-style ventures occurs under the threat of unruliness and antisocial “deviance” that rules Abu-Jamal’s US “cavern of fear”: arguably, forms of sustained grassroots social movement that do not rely on the material assets and institutionalized legitimacy of the NPIC have become largely unimaginable within the political culture of the current US Left.

A written Constitution is meaningful only if its principles, those which authorize and legitimize governmental authority, are understood to be permanent and unchangeable, in contrast to the statute laws made by legislatures and governments that alter with changing circumstances and the political requirements of each generation. In other words, such a regime must have a theoretical or reasonable ground that distinguishes it from government. When the principles that establish the legitimacy of the Constitution are understood to be changeable, are forgotten, or are denied, the Constitution can no longer impose limits on the power of government. In that case, government itself will determine the conditions of the social compact and become the arbiter of the rights of individuals, as well as every other interest in society.1

Under authoritarian governments, vital communities will tend to coalesce in political opposition as they bump into regime surveillance and control. The regime still controls the apparatus of repression. It can deny service, physically attack, imprison, or even kill H. informaticus—but it can’t silence his message, because this message is constantly amplified and propagated by the opposition community. Since the opposition commands the means of communication and is embedded in the global information sphere, its voice carries beyond the reach of any national government. This was the situation in Egypt before the uprising of January 25, 2011. This is the situation in China today. The wealth and brute strength of the modern state are counterbalanced by the vast communicative powers of the public. Filters are placed on web access, police agents monitor suspect websites, foreign newscasters are blocked, domestic bloggers are harassed and thrown in jail—but every incident which tears away at the legitimacy of the regime is seized on by a rebellious public, and is then broadcast and magnified until criticism goes viral. The tug of war pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed: under such conditions of alienation, every inch of political space is contested, and turbulence becomes a permanent feature of political life.

But the rise of Homo informaticus places governments on a razor’s edge, where any mistake, any untoward event, can draw a networked public into the streets, calling for blood. This is the situation today for authoritarian governments and liberal democracies alike. The crisis in the world that I seek to depict concerns loss of trust in government, writ large. The mass extinction of stories of legitimacy leaves no margin for error, no residual store of public good will. Any spark can blow up any political system at any time, anywhere. I began by posing a question about how something as abstract as information can influence something as real as political power. Let me end the chapter by proposing an answer, in the form of three claims or hypotheses.

Radical Christian dominionists have no religious legitimacy. They are manipulating Christianity, and millions of sincere believers, to build a frightening political mass movement with many similarities with other mass movements, from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty. It creates its own "truth". It embraces a world of miracles and signs and removes followers from a rational, reality-based world. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy.

people make the mistake of thinking the illusion was made by truth. So they still make the error of attempting to bring legitimacy to the illusion rather than giving it up. You cannot hope to break the cycle of birth and death as long as you maintain this confusion. The unconscious mind goes to such lengths to avoid God that you will either ignore Him, or even more likely you will attempt to devolve non-dualism into dualism. An extraordinary example of this is what happened to one of the great teachings of Indian philosophy called the Vedanta.

A newly-released series of video documentaries — The Labour Files — based on material leaked from Britain’s Labour Party revealed how the right-wing within the party mortified the former party leader, the far-left Jeremy Corbyn, costing him his position. The documentary uncovers Israel’s role in orchestrating the departure of Corbyn who had been a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights. Evidence reveals that the Israel Lobby within the Labour Party — supported by other pro-Israel camps in Britain — campaigned against the left-wing Corbyn, accusing him of antisemitism. The right-wing party establishment manipulated these allegations to its own political advantage, which eventually led to the election of the pro-Israel Keir Starmer as party leader in 2020. While the future course of Labour’s left wing is uncertain, one thing is for sure — Israel is an apartheid regime. The Zionist lobby has been using hybrid warfare techniques to procure worldwide legitimacy for Israel’s illegal actions in Palestine. As the Labour Files reveal, Israel has waged a war of fabricating narratives and counter-narratives. In this sort of warfare with limitless bounds, the only positive that can be drawn is that everyone is a soldier. At a time when great powers have given in to the deceptive Israel lobby and no Muslim state is in any position to challenge Israeli advances in Palestine using conventional methods, we need to focus on building our capacity to effectively counter the Zionist narrative. With the right-wing ex-Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, set to return after elections next month, the plight of Palestinians will only exacerbate. It is high time we stopped blatantly labelling one another as ‘Yahoodi Agents’ and started educating ourselves. The least we can do for Palestinians is continue exposing the pro-Israel elements engaged in the widespread dissemination of Zionist propaganda.

Among my concerns in writing this book has been the fate of democracy in the indecisive conflict between the public and authority. From this perspective, OWS’s numbers may have been small, but the message was consequential. It helped tip American politics at the highest level toward pure negation and distrust, eroding the legitimacy of democratic institutions. For this reason alone the Occupy protests belong with the bigger revolts in my investigation of phase change.

Israeli hasbara (technically translated as “propaganda” but used to represent all of Israel’s public relations tactics to promote its political positions and its self-identification as a Jewish and democratic state, the “only democracy in the Middle East”). “Israel has a serious racism problem,” Pfeffer writes. “There is a legal and social framework that discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens. For the last 52 years it has been occupying millions of stateless Palestinians who still have no prospect of receiving their basic rights.” He continues, “Acknowledging these fundamental issues has nothing to do with the argument of whether Zionism was a practical and just solution for the historical and genocidal persecution of Jews before 1948. That’s why hasbara is a waste of time. All it does is undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Because real countries don’t have to argue they are legitimate. Hasbara’s one function is to deny Israel is a real country with real problems that need dealing with.” 62

their feet. That is a black woman’s specialty. The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.

the Bush administration was struggling to maintain any notion of legitimacy about the Iraq War. With the excuse of weapons of mass destruction no longer viable, the war was now being justified as an effort to spread democracy to the beleaguered Iraqi people.

Once the great and the good had the privilege of granting pardon. Today, they want to be pardoned in their turn. They take the view that, on the basis of human rights, they are entitled to the universal compassion that had until now been the prerogative of the poor and of victims (in fact we cannot pardon them enough and they deserve all our compassion, not for reasons of rights or morality, but quite simply because there is nothing worse than being in power). However this may be, they believe they must now stand before the moral tribunal of public opinion and even declare their corruption before it (more or less spontaneously!). They would even accuse themselves of crimes they did not commit in order to gain an artificial immunity as a by-product. But the cunning of the dominated is even subtler. If consists not in pardoning them (you do not pardon those in power), nor in inflicting any real punishment on them, but in passing over their little acts of embezzlement and this faked-up spectacle with a certain indifference. And this should leave the politicians very crestfallen, as it is the clear sign of their insignificance for everyone. Some of them have demanded to be judged and found guilty (though they are innocent, of course!). But the 'ordeal' the judges have put the politicians and the big industrialists through has in the end only restored legitimacy, recognition and an audience to people who had lost them. Hence the strange confusion that prevails in the political sphere. For there is in the fact of this universal compassion a deep disturbance of symbolic regulation. Everywhere today we see the tormentors (pretending to) take the victim's side, showing them compassion and compensating them (as in Charles Najman's film La memoire est-elle soluble dans l'eau ... ?). This may perhaps resolve things on the moral plane, but it aggravates them at the symbolic level.

Such a political party remains the proprietorship of a particular family, a rich circle, a corrupt mafia, or an establishment that accomplishes neither transparent democratic legitimacy nor fair democracy. Undoubtedly, such a party enforces majority dictatorship when it comes to power. It is mendacious dishonesty and severe corruption in a precise democratic voting context.

Hispanic" and "Latino" are terms whose descriptive legitimacy is premised on a startling lack of specificity. The categories encompass any and all individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean; Latinos hail from Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and beyond-more than twenty countries in all. Such inclusivity is part of the problem: "Hispanic" and "Latino" tell us nothing about country of origin, gender, citizenship status, economic class, or length of residence in the United States. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala is Hispanic; so is a third-generation Mexican American lawyer. Moreover, both categories are racially indeterminate: Latinos can be white, black, indigenous, and every combination thereof. In other words, characterizing a subject as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an exercise in opacity-the terms are so comprehensive that their explanatory power is limited. When referring to "Latinos in the United States," it is far from immediately clear whether the subjects under discussion are farmworkers living below the poverty line or middle-class homeowners, urban hipsters or rural evangelicals, white or black, gay or straight, Catholic or Jewish, undocumented Spanish monolinguals or fourth-generation speakers of English-only.

National identity begins with a shared belief in the legitimacy of the country’s political system, whether that system is democratic or not. Identity can be embodied in formal laws and institutions that dictate, for example, what the educational system will teach children about their country’s past, or what will be considered an official national language.

But the stability of democratic politics in the period from the end of World War II up to the present revolved around dominant center-left and center-right parties that largely agreed on the legitimacy of a democratic welfare state.

Face your political opponents according to legitimacy, democracy, and the constitution, not hypocrisy, autocracy, and transgression.

For Lefort, modern democratic society, which was formed in the eighteenth century, removed the ontological certainties of previous orders and based itself instead on heterogeneity and division; it is structured by a symbolically empty place of power, left vacant by the absent body of the prince. As a result of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which according to Lefort split the orders of power, law and knowledge, society could no longer be represented as a single, unified body. However, this empty space of contingency created at the same time a desire for absolute foundations, for a point of transcendence – once provided by religion – that could unify a fragmented social order and master this experience of uncertainty. The persistence of religion is therefore a symptom of the uncertainty and contingency at the foundations of democratic society. This is also why, at various times, ideas of nation, community and people become substitutes for religion, attempting to fill the empty space of power and unify society. For Schmitt, sovereignty fulfils precisely this function. Such ideas, which as Lefort believes speak to a real, yet unavoidable, structural deficit in society, appear at moments when a perceived loss of legitimacy is seen to threaten the social order. The survival of religion itself in modern society – which now works on an imaginary rather than symbolic register – evokes the illusion that firm identity and absolute unity can be restored. The constant danger, for Lefort, is that these representations of identity become so invested with desire that they open the way to a totalitarian drive to forcibly reunite the social order.

It is important to note that Israel does not demand that Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United States, Australia, or any other country recognize it as a Jewish state. This demand is unique to the Palestinians. The legitimacy of this demand, with these conditions, is really at issue.

Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state whose legitimacy depended on the upholding of sharia law. In theory, the law and the scholars who interpreted it placed a check on the sultan’s executive authority. The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 marked the end of the political system that had governed the Arab world for over a thousand years. First colonial governments and then newly independent, republican Arab regimes sought to replace Islamic institutions with foreign concepts such as elected legislatures, written legal codes, and secular court systems. Nearly everywhere in the Arab world, the ulama were marginalized. They became minor officials with no real political authority. Everywhere, that is, except Saudi Arabia—where there never was a colonial government or secular Arab Nationalist regime, and where the classical Islamic constitutional order in which executive power was counterbalanced by the scholars is to this day preserved in a still-recognizable fashion.

Since the abdication of King Saud in 1964, the sons of King Abdulaziz have transferred political power four times without violence or public protest: to Khalid in 1975, Fahd in 1982, Abdullah in 2005, and Salman in 2015. This is a much better record than many of the Arab World’s so-called republics. In a region where violent coups and revolutions have been more common than orderly political transitions, the Al Saud’s consistent ability to transfer power swiftly and peacefully has contributed to their legitimacy

Abdulaziz relied on the sheikhs for tribal loyalty and the ulama for ideological legitimacy. In his early years, he also relied on prominent merchant families for financing. In many parts of his newly unified kingdom, where the established political and religious elites were swept away by the Al Saud, the traditional landowning and commercial families remained as vestiges of the old order. These urban families formed an identifiable and relatively closed set of Hijazi and Nejdi merchants with long-established wealth and social status. Abdulaziz made alliances with them, and they became part of the Al Saud’s national coalition.

Emotions also can justify acts that would otherwise be reprehensible. We are quicker to except the legitimacy of a violent response to an insult or a wrong if it is believed to have arisen spontaneously from the understandable anger that it triggered than if it is seen as the product of calculation. Revenge may be a dish that is best eaten cold, but serv­ers are more willing to accept it if it is hot.

If intuitionism has been characterised with a certain propriety as revolutionists who overturned the ancient régime, Hilbert migh be compared with Napoleon who, without regard for considerations of legitimacy, established, through a brilliant political stroke, a new order whose success is the substitute for legitimacy.

Large-scale Central American migration to the United States dates to the civil wars of the 1980s and came primarily from El Salvador and Guatemala. Most came fleeing political violence, and their presence became politically very inconvenient for the Reagan administration, which was seeking to justify its support for these countries’ governments. Others were economic refugees. Either way, the refugees gave the lie to Reagan’s claims of the governments’ legitimacy and right to US support.

American politics, the Republican Party had become “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

The idea that bisexuals can choose their sexuality stems from a standpoint that sees choice as a negative or as a mark of illegitimacy. In a movement where the dominant discourse relies on a lack of choice as its political path to equal rights, this lack of choice (the "born this way" argument) becomes a "tool" for attaining legitimacy and acceptance by society...this argument marks immutability--this is "nature--as authentic and therefore legitimate, while marking choice--that is "culture"--as unauthentic and illegitimate.

As Palestinians, our legitimacy depends on whether or not we "recognize" Israel. But supporters of Israel are not required to even acknowledge that Palestinians exist. For an Arab to be taken seriously, he must be "tolerant" of Jews (whatever that means). When a Jew is tolerant of Arabs, he is "open-minded" and forward-thinking." At the essence of the Palestinian question lies this complete inequality, this absolute and utter disparity in status. It is almost surreal for the oppressors to be demanding "tolerance" from the oppressed. But it is not without precedent. In America, whites in power demanded that blacks "behave" before they considered "giving" them rights. In South Africa, blacks had to conduct themselves "civilly" before they were taken seriously by the apartheid regime and, indeed, by some powerful political forces here in America. This sort of calculated framing of the debate by Israel and her supporters serves to silence any Palestinian narrative. Well, guess what? I don't need anyone's permission to be Palestinian. I don't need your go-ahead to tell my story. And you thinking I do kind of pisses me off.

At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war,4 lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and “causes.” Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty.

Inappropriate level of politeness – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person interjects an overly polite or unexpectedly kind or complimentary comment directed at the questioner when responding to a question. Example: Uncharacteristic use of “sir” or “ma’am” when responding to a particular question. Inappropriate question – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person responds with a question that doesn’t directly relate to the question that’s asked. Inconsistent statement – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person makes a statement that is inconsistent with what he said previously, without explaining why the story has changed. Interrogation – See Elicitation. Interview – A means of establishing a dialogue with a person to collect information that he has no reason to want to withhold. Invoking religion – A verbal deceptive behavior in which a person makes a reference to God or religion as a means of “dressing up the lie” before presenting it. Example: “I swear on a stack of Bibles, I wouldn’t do anything like that.” Leading question – A question that contains the answer that the questioner is looking for. Legitimacy statement – A statement within a monologue that is designed to explain the purpose or reasoning behind what the interrogator is conveying.

Let us not fall prey to the leaching negativity and rank pessimism that runs unleashed all around us. Rather, with the utmost determination we must bring ourselves to understand that these lies have been given legitimacy by people who thought themselves as powerless in the face of them, rather than recognizing that we have the power to rip the face off of them.

A dose of social and political nihilism—a suicide wish—becomes inevitable, if you grant the hypotheses I have sought to establish in previous chapters. If the industrial-age hierarchies of contemporary democracy are suffering a crisis of authority, if the public is on the move and expecting impossibilities, then, all things equal, the system will continue to bleed away legitimacy—and there will be those who argue it should be put out of its misery. One concern is to discover the point at which such a chain of reasoning turns fatal.

the old narrative focused on carving out separate spheres of autonomy for citizens and experts, the new legitimacy narrative will focus on collaboration between these groups

impact of these measures has not, however, marginalized public broadcasters; on the contrary, the signs are quite encouraging from the public broadcasters’ point of view. First, public broadcasters clearly retain substantial – and in several cases improving – market shares, at least in the countries of northern Europe where the public service tradition has been most resilient. By 2004, the public broadcasters still dominated the national television markets in Britain, Sweden and Norway.6 Second, most European countries, including the UK and the Scandinavian countries, uphold some form of licence fee or public funding, and few governments have actually abolished or are seriously discussing the abolition of the licence fee.7 Third, the social and political legitimacy of public broadcasters remain strong in national and European politics. Although the private broadcasters regularly challenge the right of public broadcasters to provide popular programming and develop attractive digital services, national parliaments and the EU Commission have on several occasions defended their rights to do so8 (Levy, 1999; Papathanassopoulos, 2002; Steemers, 1999; Syvertsen, 2004).

Because legitimacy comes from fighting for what’s right, politicians who compromise for the sake of interest or power have sold their souls and lost their legitimacy. For amateurs, justice means not a transactional outcome but fidelity to an abstract ideal, like the public interest. They are suspicious of compromise, loyalty, insiders, inducements, deals. Being amateurs, they typically have jobs outside of politics or enter the political fray only temporarily, a fact which they will trumpet as a source of disinterest and political chastity. (In New York, Wilson notes, anti-Tammany reformers in the 1950s were heavily drawn from Protestant and Jewish middle-class young professionals.) Not being repeat players, they can afford to play single hands for high stakes, and they cannot easily be held accountable for losing.

The ‘atrocities’ that are occurring or are alleged to have occurred in Israel are overshadowed by the myriads of killings of innocents in Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq to name a few. So what makes this particular conflict so outstanding? The most logical explanation is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not about land, occupation, politics, or a dispute over historical legitimacy and ownership of a tiny corner of real estate -especially one that lays within a sea of sand and has virtually no natural resources. This conflict is rooted in a much more encompassing issue: it is the battle between Islam and Judaism. Judaism and Islam are indeed at odds.

Challenges to President Obama’s legitimacy, which had begun with fringe conservative authors, talk-radio personalities, TV talking heads, and bloggers, was soon embodied in a mass political movement: the Tea Party, which started to organize just weeks after President Obama’s inauguration. Although the Tea Party framed its mission in terms of such traditional conservative ideas as limited government, low taxes, and resistance to health care reform, its opposition to Obama was far more pernicious. The difference? The Tea Party questioned President Obama’s very right to be president.

economic performance counts heavily in the development of a political system’s legitimacy

The sanctioned return of religion to public life bolstered the moral authority of the state, but it undermined the Soviet Communist Party, which found itself increasingly marginal to the emerging ideological and political landscape.53 Soviet Communism’s break with atheism in favor of universal values and ideological pluralism signaled the end of the party’s monopoly on truth, ideological coherence, and thus moral authority and political legitimacy. The Soviet Communist Party gave up the faith and became simply a political party, no longer seeking to make windows into the human soul.

The Nazis and their friends had been defeated, but in view of the scale of their crimes this was obviously not enough. If post-war governments' legitimacy rested merely on their military victory over Fascism, how were they better than the wartime Fascist regimes themselves? It was important to define the latter's activities as crimes and punish them accordingly. There was good legal and political reasoning behind this. But the desire for retribution also addressed a deeper need. For most Europeans WWII was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything.

Although Spanish politics is among the most corrupt in Europe, political corruption is in the basic DNA of almost any political system, the USA and EU included, and one of the factors that has had the biggest part to play in the crisis of legitimacy. If

The United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights follows the same intrinsic logic, namely, the power behind any constitution or charter is derived from the legitimate authority of a state; the legitimate authority of a state, in turn, rests upon a mandate to promote and protect freedom, justice, and peace; this mandate requires that every state recognize the natural rights and the intrinsic dignity of every human being (because freedom, justice, and peace cannot be achieved without the protection of natural rights). If any state fails to protect the natural rights of human beings, that state loses its legitimacy and its right to govern and can be legitimately rebelled against in the interest of justice, peace, and freedom.

There is no reason to believe that political agency must solely be located in the modern state, and Nietzsche does not hold such a view. He instead locates his political project in the transition away from the nation-state. Indeed, the decay of the state signals the superseding of the modern question of political philosophy as framed by Leiter: the theory of the state and its legitimacy. The new question for Nietzsche will revolve around determining which institutions can fullfill the Platonic mission of producing the new Platos that the culture-state failed to achieve.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.

Our support for Israel is based on their political legitimacy as a functioning liberal democracy, but that legitimacy just evaporated. A country whose police murder unarmed people has no legitimacy, Marcus. We can no more support an Israel that does things like this than we could have supported Somoza, Marcos, or any other tin-pot dictator—

Legislatures: "The fluctuating and ... multitudinous composition of [a popularly elected legislature] forbid us to expect in it those qualities which are essential to ... [the formation of treaties]. Accurate and comprehensive knowledge of foreign politics; a steady and systematic adherence to the same views; a nice and uniform sensibility to national character; decision, secrecy, and despatch, are incompatible with the genius of a body so variable and numerous." — Alexander Hamilton, 1788 Legislatures, belligerent nationalism of: "Parliaments are usually more nationalistic and belligerent than executives, and people than parliaments, because they are less aware of the risks." — Quincy Wright, 1955 (See also Amb. Freeman's remark on domestic climate of the US in June 2025: I think if I were a foreign ambassador in Washington, asked to analyze that question [who's in charge of foreign policy], I would make a number of comments. First I think the United States is in a pre-revolutionary situation. There's widespread dissatisfaction: the laws are being broken, the legitimacy of the government is in question, the operation of the federal system is broken, the policy process is chaotic. And as Alastair [Crooke] indicated, well, you go back to the federalist papers, one of them — I think written by Alexander Hamilton — argues very cogently that the legislature should not be in charge of foreign policy, because of the fickle nature of legislative decisions. This should be a matter of discretion, primarily for the president, and the constitution does give the president primary authority in foreign affairs. It's his decision whether to recognize a country or not, whether to receive foreign emissaries or not, to appoint ambassadors subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. And our constitutional system is not functioning on many, many levels. So of course everybody abroad is confused. Excerpt from interview "AMB. Charles Freeman : Israel Destroying Itself.")

Arguing in Legalität und Legitimität that every constitution embodies principles that are sacrosanct, principles that may include liberalism, private property, and religious toleration, Schmitt opposed the view of those who interpreted the constitution in a “value-free” and “legalistic” fashion.21 He acknowledged that such an interpretation might be appropriate in countries where political parties accept the legitimacy of the constitution and hence adhere to what are commonly known as the rules of the game, as in England, for example. There, as Lord Balfour noted in his introduction to Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, “[the] whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker; and so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict.” Because such conditions did not exist in Germany, Schmitt argued, a value-neutral and legalistic interpretation of the constitution facilitated its subversion. Having once gained power, a militant party would not hesitate to exercise sovereignty in order to transform itself into the state.

All states concentrate and use power—that is, the ability to violently coerce people—but successful states rely more heavily on authority, that is voluntary compliance with the state's wishes based on a broad belief in the government's legitimacy. In peaceful liberal democracies, the fist is usually hidden behind layered gloves of law, custom, and norms. States that make heavy use of overt coercion and brutality often do so because they cannot exercise proper authority.

Landlords and Realtors saw government-built and -managed buildings offered at cut-rate rents as a direct threat to their legitimacy and bottom line.8 At first, federal policymakers disagreed and at midcentury decided to fund the construction of massive public housing complexes. But real estate interests kept lobbying for vouchers and were joined by numerous other groups of various political persuasions, including civil rights activists who thought vouchers would advance racial integration.9 Eventually, after America’s public housing experiment was defunded and declared a failure (in that order), they would have their day. As housing projects were demolished, the voucher program grew into the nation’s largest housing subsidy program for low-income families. In policy circles, vouchers were known as a “public-private partnership.” In real estate circles, they were known as “a win.

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we treat terrorists as politically motivated activists, we give them an honor they don’t deserve. If we treat them as soldiers, and kill them as such, we both give them legitimacy and violate our own laws.

The rise of radical Islamism received a good deal of state help from Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family agreed to propagate Wahhabism as a means of propitiating the clerics, thus buying “their own political legitimacy at the cost of stability elsewhere.”65 Because funding of Wahhabist institutions comes from both Saudi government ministries and private charities, it is virtually impossible to estimate the total spending. One expert testified to Congress that the Saudis had spent roughly $70 billion on aid projects since the 1970s, and others report that they sponsored 1,500 mosques and 2,000 schools worldwide from Indonesia to France.66 These institutions often displace more moderate and worse-funded institutions promulgating moderate interpretations of Islam.67 Even if these numbers are incorrect, a fraction of the dollar figures still dwarfs what the United States has spent on public diplomacy in the Muslim world.

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Ideology: A mode of moral reasoning, consisting of myth, doctrine, and rhetorical style, that purports to explain cause and effect and that evaluates these with approval or disapproval. Ideology: "The belief that international politics should be the struggle not of interests but of principles ... accords awkwardly with diplomacy. It calls in question a fundamental premise of a state's system, the independence of the member states and the right of each other to decide for itself how to manage its domestic affairs. This difference of assumption goes with a difference in style. The dogmatic formulation of principles, especially in a political or religious crusade, is doctrinaire and inflexible, unlike the elasticity and preference for give and take of the diplomatic dialogue. The more a man is attached to dogmas, the less responsive he is to calls for agreement through compromise, believing that the fundamentals may be negotiated away if they are treated on a level with mundane balancing of interests familiar in negotiations between states." — Adam Watson, 1983 Ideology in foreign policy: Ideological conviction implies the desire to export the system of government it justifies; it is inherently revolutionary and aggressive because it transforms relations between states from a difference of interests, which it is right to seek to conciliate, into a conflict between philosophies, in which to compromise is unrighteous. It expands the arena of international struggle to include the internal policies and social structures of foreign states, explicitly challenging their legitimacy and implicitly inviting their overthrow. A foreign policy based on the impulse to propagate principles and ideas, no matter how noble and apparently benign, is therefore inherently more disruptive of international order and more likely to engender armed conflict than one based on tolerance of diverse systems of government and realistic accommodation of antagonists, morally flawed as they may be.

The coup de grâce was the crisis in America’s political and moral legitimacy brought about by the presidency of Donald Trump.