supreme leader: democratic constitutionality

---

I want to share the letter I wrote to the Editor of The Atlantic magazine where I praised his article on General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose explicit “constitutional patriotism” expresses that strict fidelity to democratic constitutionality protects against autocratic exploitation of military power.

There is “supreme leader”ship located in (distributed through) the three estates of (1) jurisprudential “divining” of implicit lawfulness, which yields to (2) Congressional action, which yields to (3) valid electoral legitimation.

anomie of ordinary luck in a time of heat and war

---

I’m unremarkably lucky among persons not living with intense heat or war. As a news junkie, I regularly feel gratitude and depressing sadness —and anger: How many Ukrainian civilians must die before a conspiracy of confidantes arrests Putin and sends him to The Hague?

staying oriented by the better sense of Our humanity

---

It’s not that my sense is “the” better sense because it’s basically mine. Rather, prospecting all manner of issues for decades results in—has derived—a “simple” sense of Our humanity which seems better than any other sense I’ve found—which I assert here in hope that—inasmuch as I’m misguided—senses better than mine will come my way!

To be brief, I’ll divide my supposedly better sense into three modes: global, discursive, and life cyclic; and simply allude to how they differ.

overcoming negate-ive ("Dialectical") thinking

---

‘Dialectic’, in the modern sense (not Socratic), names an approach to thinking about differences as primarily oppositions. The opposition is resolved through synthesis which transcends the opposition. Typically, opposition is understood negatively: “A is opposed to B” is the same as
“A = not B” or A is the negation of B.

The appeal of this arises in two ways:

• A person (or party) finds oneself in a disturbing condition of opposition to something, and thinks of this dialectically, i.e., as a challenge of getting beyond the opposition through “synthesis” of some kind (“situated transcendence,” for example: ch. 7 here). 
• One comes to a disturbing situation already thinking dialectically, so the disturbance is understood oppositionally (e.g., disagreement; or alienation which objectifies the other). 

But the etymological history of the notion isn’t dialectical in any sense,
not even in the Socratic sense, which pertains to a conception of pedagogical debate.

standing for a principle-based global order of Values

---

I responded via email to Professor Eliot Cohen’s Atlantic article “The Strategy Than Can Defeat Putin.” Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Strategic International Studies. He replied “I think we are in agreement.”

What America is really about now pertains to the validity of U.S. leadership along the lines you've detailed; and pertains to…how the American Idea should be understood now, in this first half of this century. 

There is validity to the often-dismissed notion of American Exceptionalism, which is vested in the superiority of democracy vis-à-autocracy that is at the root of the "rules-based international order" which is misrepresented by Putinism—and China!—as a U.S. hegemony.

better humanity through better being

---

This day, Our humane planet—the True humanity of Us—continues
an historic show of coordinated global response to the invasion
of Ukraine, whose men are fighting to death for their democracy.
Whatever the outcome, this March marks a milestone in Our decade.

for a Literary university in a democratic ecology

---

for someone engaged with “scholarly work on ecology
and literary modernism” 

What Universities Owe Democracy, by John Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels et al. (Oct. 2021), inspires (for me) an idea of interplay wider than conceptions of the university and democracy:

Literary understanding <—> the university <—> democracy <—> ecological understanding.

Moreover, the interplay isn’t linear. Literary <—> democracy;
university <—> ecology; and Literary <—> ecology are equally relevant.

Indeed, a rich appreciation of ecological thinking—highly humanistic thinking—can contribute importantly to the university <—> ecology interface (which is absent from Daniels et al.’s book).

Usefully, though, they advance four foci, i.e., “four distinct functions of American higher education that are key to liberal democracy: social mobility, citizenship education, the stewardship of facts, and the cultivation of pluralistic, diverse communities” {publisher’s description].