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Time of India
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Operation Valkyrie: 81st anniversary of plot to kill Hitler
Operation Valkyrie: 81st anniversary of plot to kill Hitler Eighty-one years ago, on July 20, 1944, at 12:42, a bomb went off in the conference room of the Wolf's Lair military headquarters in East Prussia, the easternmost province of the German Reich until the end of World War II. It was supposed to kill Adolf Hitler, and had been planted by German army officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The former ardent National Socialist now no longer saw any other option apart from murdering the dictator. "There is nothing left but to kill him," he had told his closest confidants a few days earlier. Stauffenberg was not only the assassin, but also the most important organizer of a large-scale coup attempt by people from conservative circles, which included high-ranking military, diplomatic and administrative officials. Shortly before the time bomb exploded on July 20, 1944, the officer had left the barracks. He flew in a military aircraft toward Berlin, believing the "Führer" was dead. In the German capital, "Operation Valkyrie" was underway. Originally devised as a Wehrmacht plan to suppress a possible uprising, the conspirators — who held key positions throughout the Nazi state apparatus — wanted to repurpose "Valkyrie" for their own coup. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like SRM Online MBA – Empowering Future Leaders SRM Online Enquire Now Undo Doomed to fail But Hitler suffered only minor injuries. The heavy oak table and the fact the barracks' windows were opened wide due to the hot weather had dampened the force of the explosion. Despite this, the chance for a putsch would not yet have been completely lost — if everyone involved had followed through with Operation Valkyrie unswervingly. But there were delays, breakdowns and insufficient planning. In addition, facing the enormous pressure of possibly being discovered, some of those involved remained passive or even changed sides. By the evening, the coup attempt had failed. Hitler went on the radio to broadcast to the people and spoke of the "providence" which saved him. Stauffenberg and several co-conspirators were arrested and executed by firing squad that night. Others were only discovered later. In total, about 200 resistance fighters were killed. Historian Wolfgang Benz believes the main reason for the failure was because "none of the famous military leaders" from that time, such as General Erwin Rommel, took part. "At least one of them needed to have been at the helm, so that then the people would say: 'Aha, Rommel also sees it that way, that Hitler is a criminal,'" he said. An enduring symbol Despite its failure, the resistance to Hitler on July 20, 1944, became a strong symbol. A few days before, Stauffenberg's co-conspirator Henning von Tresckow had concluded that success was no longer what mattered: The important thing was "that the German resistance movement had dared to risk its life in front of the world and in front of history." There were other resistance operations, such as the narrowly failed attempt by carpenter Georg Elser to kill Hitler using a homemade bomb in a Munich beer hall in 1939, or the leaflet campaign by a group of young friends known as the White Rose. They were later unjustly overshadowed by "the late, not to say belated, resistance of the conservative elites," as Wolfgang Benz judged the July 20, 1944 plot. 'The Holocaust did not interest them' The remembrance of Operation Valkyrie and the assassination attempt has shifted over time. For a long time after the war ended, its initiators were still regarded as traitors. Stauffenberg's wife, for example, was initially refused the pension received by widows. Later, the conspirators were officially designated as heroes: Streets, schools and barracks were named after them, and public buildings were decorated with flags every July 20. Swearing-in ceremonies for Bundeswehr armed forces recruits were held on the anniversary: The military of democratic Germany invoked the resistance fighters surrounding the former Wehrmacht officer Stauffenberg. But there was always criticism of those involved in the plot. Stauffenberg biographer Thomas Karlauf pointed out that the group first acted in the European summer of 1944, shortly after the Allies landed in Normandy. Following Germany's rapid military victories over Poland and France in 1940, Stauffenberg had enthused: "What a change in such a brief time!" He and the other men who participated in the military resistance took a "very, very long path to reformation," said Benz, adding: "The Holocaust did not interest them at all. " Faced with a looming military defeat, they wanted to try to "save what can be saved" for Germany by initiating a coup. Stauffenberg, not a democrat? Fellow historian Johannes Hürter is of the view that Stauffenberg was no democrat: He had an authoritarian form of government in mind for Germany if the assassination had been successful. Wolfgang Benz makes a slightly less harsh judgment: "Under any circumstances, Germany would have become a constitutional state again. But democracy as we know it, as it was established in the Basic Law constitution, was not the vision of the July 20 conspirators." Many Germans today think first of July 20, 1944, when it comes to the resistance against National Socialism. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, as a result, has become its face. But there were many other heroes who rebelled against the terror of the Nazi regime: Jews, communists, people in the church, artists, partisans. There were certainly also people who resisted in silence and whose deeds, unlike those of the July 20 attackers, have since been forgotten.
Straits Times
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Straits Times
Sweden Democrats apologise for past Nazi links, antisemitism as election nears
FILE PHOTO: Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats Party, attends a news conference at the Parliament press office regarding the formation of the government, in Stockholm, Sweden October 14, 2022. TT News Agency/Jonas Ekstromer via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. SWEDEN OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN SWEDEN./File Photo STOCKHOLM - The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats apologised on Thursday for the party's past Nazi links and antisemitism, part of efforts to present a more moderate, mainstream image to voters ahead of a national election next year. The Sweden Democrats were presenting the results of a specially commissioned study that found Nazi and antisemitic views to have been common at party functions and in its printed materials in the 1980s and 1990s. "That there have been clear expressions of antisemitism and support for National Socialist ideas in my party's history I think is disgusting and reprehensible," Mattias Karlsson, a member of parliament often described as the party's chief ideologist, told a news conference. "I would like to reiterate the party's apology, above all to Swedish citizens of Jewish descent who may have felt a strong sense of insecurity and fear for good reasons." The commissioning of the study sought to acknowledge and break with a past that has long hindered its cooperation with Sweden's mainstream political parties. The Sweden Democrats hope to join a future coalition government after the 2026 election. The party first entered parliament in 2010 and currently supports Sweden's governing right-wing coalition government but has no members in the cabinet. Tony Gustafsson, the historian hired by the party to write the book, said the party had emerged in the 1980s out of neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations and that it had continued to cooperate with them into the 1990s. "The collaboration seems to have involved using these groups to help distribute election materials," Gustafsson said, adding there were strong indications that one such group, the "White Aryan Resistance", had served as security guards at party gatherings. Gustafsson said there had been a clear connection to Nazism until 1995, the year that current party leader Jimmie Akesson joined the Sweden Democrats, but that the Sweden Democrats had begun distancing itself from such links thereafter. REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Epoch Times
06-06-2025
- Epoch Times
‘The Last Twins': Mengele's Twisted Studies
NR | 1h 21m | Documentary | 2025 Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious 'Angel of Death,' was one of the worst National Socialist war criminals who escaped justice after World War II. Thanks to the courage of Erno 'Zvi' Spiegel, many of the young twins, who served as Mengele's unwilling research subjects, survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and could have duly testified against their tormentor had he been captured.
Boston Globe
01-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
How universities die
The University of Berlin, founded a century earlier, was the Harvard of its day. Every serious American university, from Hopkins to Chicago, to Harvard and Berkeley, was made or reformed according to the 'Berlin model.' Why else is the freedom to learn, across multiple disciplines. Although supported entirely by the state, universities themselves would decide who would teach and what would be taught. If university rankings had existed in 1910, eight of the top 10 in the world probably would have been German — with only Oxford and Cambridge joining them in that elite circle. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up As late as 1932, the University of Berlin remained the most famous of the world's universities. By 1934, it had been destroyed from without and within. Advertisement Germany's descent from a nation of 'poets and thinkers' ('Dichter und Denker') to one of 'judges and hangmen' ('Richter und Henker') ended its leadership in higher education. Advertisement The impact of the new National Socialist regime that came to power in January 1933 became clear on May 10 of that year, when the members of the German Student Union — among them many students from the University of Berlin — piled and burned books from public libraries on the streets of Berlin's Opernplatz, the square opposite the university's main building. A crowd of 70,000, including students, professors, and members of the SA and SS — the storm troopers for the National Socialist Party — watched as thousands of volumes were torched. Students and Nazi Party members at the book burning on the Opernplatz in Berlin, May 10, 1933. German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons The Nazi regime quickly purged universities of non-Aryan students and faculty and political dissidents. Leading scholars left Berlin in large numbers in a historic academic migration to the United States, Britain, and elsewhere. Universities lost any capacity for self-government. The University of Berlin abandoned its own traditions of teaching and research. Scholarship serving truth for truth's sake was jettisoned for scholarship in service of the 'Volk.' The Nazi period would be followed by East German Communist orthodoxy and finally, in 1990, by absorption into the German Federal Republic — with each change accompanied by a new purge of faculty. In 2010, at the celebration for the 200th anniversary of the university — now named Humboldt University — its president welcomed guests by saying: 'Today, nobody anywhere in the world is prepared to take this university as a model.' Indeed. No longer the leading university in the world, Humboldt University today is not the best in Germany — and not even the best in Berlin. Advertisement Beijing In the first half of the 20th century, China developed a remarkable set of colleges and universities: a small system, but pound for pound one of the best and most innovative in the world. Its institutions were Chinese and foreign, public and private. The system was composed of leading state universities — Peking University in Beijing and National Central University (modeled on the University of Berlin) in Nanjing. Its private institutions often had international partners. Peking Union Medical College, with Rockefeller Foundation funding, had a global reputation. Tsinghua University in Beijing began in 1911 as a prep school for students planning to enroll at universities in America. By the 1930s, it was China's leading research university, devoted to free and open inquiry. When the Japanese occupied Beijing in 1937, Tsinghua led the effort to relocate leading Chinese universities to China's southwest. Some of Tsinghua's most famous and innovative alumni, such as physicists C.N. Yang (Yang Zhenning) and C.T. Li (Li Zhengdao), who would become Nobel laureates in 1957, completed their studies during this time. Tsinghua's president and the leader of National Southwest University , Mei Yiqi, is still remembered today for his advocacy of liberal education, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom even in the darkest moments of the war. For that he is known as Tsinghua's 'eternal president.' In short, Tsinghua survived eight years of exile and war, and it stood firm by its academic values. What it could not so easily survive was the Communist conquest of China in 1949. Tsinghua's longstanding ties with the United States were severed, not to be joined again for three decades. Chinese universities were reordered along Stalinist lines and were rapidly Sovietized. A new Tsinghua campus arose next to the original one. Its 13-story main building, a brutal Stalinist complex of three structures, now dominated the campus. In 1952 Tsinghua became a polytechnic university to train engineers according to rigid state plans. The schools of sciences and humanities, agriculture, and law were all abolished, and their faculty members were scattered to other institutions. Faculty who would not or could not work under the new regime either fled abroad or were fired at home. Advertisement While Tsinghua began to train China's Communist technocracy, the relentless politicization of universities under Mao Zedong first weakened and then nearly destroyed the university. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the university became the site of bloody clashes and eventually shut down completely. The Cultural Revolution even destroyed Tsinghua's iconic gate, replaced for a time by a huge statue of Mao. Tsinghua resumed operations, but on a skeletal basis, only in 1978. It would take until the centenary of the university, in 2011, for Tsinghua to reclaim its position as a leading comprehensive research university. A Chinese politician, Wang Guangmei, was publicly humiliated at a denunciation rally at Tsinghua University in 1967. Wikimedia Commons Boston Harvard University began life in 1636 as a public institution. Its founder was not John Harvard but the General Court of Massachusetts. It was supported in the 17th century by taxes and other 'contributions' from as far south as New Haven, at times levied in corn, and by the revenues of the Charlestown ferry that connected Cambridge to Boston, paid in wampumpeag (the currency of the Massachusetts Bay Colony). Founded 140 years before the United States, Harvard was nonetheless central to the creation of our nation. After the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the Advertisement Harvard and the United States have been closely connected ever since. During World War II, the university once again devoted itself to the war effort. Soldiers were housed on Harvard's campus. Harvard faculty developed advanced torpedoes for submarine warfare and the napalm used in the firebombing of enemy cities, and they assisted in creating the first atom bomb. They also provided intelligence. Numerous Harvard scholars joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Their collective work at OSS, organized in regional departments, formed the foundation of postwar 'area studies' at Harvard and across the United States, supported by the Department of Defense. In the aftermath of the war, Harvard created a curriculum focused on 'General Education for a Free Society' to give students 'a common understanding of the society which they will possess in common,' a concept that would be adopted nationwide. The Vietnam War led, in contrast, to a Harvard sharply divided over the justness of that cause. But even so, in its wake, Harvard created the Kennedy School of Government to prepare students for careers in public service — a leading center for the study and practice of government. For nearly four centuries, the decisions and actions of Harvard have set the tone for American higher education. Today Harvard has become the leading research university in the world, with a reputation equal to, if not greater than, that of the University of Berlin in the 19th century. As it rose to national prominence in the 20th century, universities across the United States vied to be the 'Harvard of the South' (Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice), the 'Harvard of the Midwest' (Michigan, Northwestern, Chicago, Washington University), and the 'Harvard of the West' (Stanford). Advertisement Yet today Harvard is an institution that may be more admired abroad than at home, in an era of public (and politicized) critique of American higher education. At least 43 US states have cut back on their investments in higher education since 2008, according to research I gathered for my book 'Empires of Ideas.' Leading public and private universities, including Harvard, have become lightning rods in the political and culture wars of the day. Although the Trump administration's multifront assault on Harvard may be less violent (for now, at least) than the authoritarian takeovers of the University of Berlin and Tsinghua University, it is no less dangerous. It is an attempt to destroy the academic freedoms and institutional autonomy that have been hallmarks of every great modern university. Fortunately, the United States is not (yet) Berlin in 1933 or Beijing in 1950. It retains an independent judiciary and rule of law, and it has, in Harvard, a university with the history, will, and resources to resist. In its resistance, Harvard has reaffirmed its leadership in American higher education as nothing else could. Should it fail, we shall witness the destruction of the one industry, higher education, in which this country is still the global leader. We shall destroy our capacity to recruit talent from all shores. We will decline. For history shows that universities can die, and nations will decay. If American universities remain the envy of the world in 2025, the question must be: for how long?
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Natural Law Does Not Lead to the Unbound Executive
In 2016, I was studying the rise of the National Socialist movement. My project was to investigate the philosophical origins of the National Socialist German Worker's Party—that is, the Nazi Party. That story is a complicated one, since National Socialism was not a cohesive philosophical movement in itself. It was constituted by a variety of different threads: the master morality of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosophy of Otto Weininger, Darwinian population medicine, and a number of other influences. It was during this work that I encountered the work of Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, famous for his legal justification of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Back in 2016, Schmitt's work was coming again into the public eye, thanks in large part to the influential Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule. Schmitt's sharp critiques of liberalism and his theories of law and politics, Vermeule argued, could be separated from his Nazism, and that to ignore these insights on account of Schmitt's politics was mere 'puritanism.' More recently, Vermeule has made waves with his idea of 'common good constitutionalism,' a new theory of legal interpretation arguing the executive branch can read into the law its own determinations about what serves the common good. (This is in contrast to the traditional notion that the courts make final determinations on constitutional questions.) In making this case, Vermeule makes liberal use of classical philosophical terms like 'common good' and 'natural law.' Vermeule's theories, however, should not be taken as representative of the tradition whose language he borrows. Rather, his project is fundamentally Schmittian and should be distinguished from wider theories about natural law and the common good. The significant and serious risks in Vermeule's project are not inherent in either natural law or common good political thought themselves. It would be a shame to throw out a tradition of thought, the tradition of natural law, that has so much to offer our public life because of a certain odorous bathwater. For the past several decades, Adrian Vermeule has been making an extended case for a more powerful executive branch of government. In the wake of the Iraq War, he co-authored The Executive Unbound, which made the case that legal constraints on the executive are really a fiction, and that American legal thinkers have overblown the need for separation of powers and the rule of law. In the modern era, given how quickly technology, markets, and foreign policy dynamics shift and how complex governance is, the legislature and courts are increasingly irrelevant. The executive is, or at least ought to be, 'legally unconstrained,' he wrote. Vermeule draws this line of thinking from Schmitt, a legal academic in early 20th century Germany and the 'crown jurist' of the Nazi Party. Schmitt played an important role in the early days of the Reich as chief legal counsel in party meetings. He wrote legal opinions for the party, drawing on his theories about the executive and the state of emergency, in order to justify Hitler's rise to dictatorial power and the extra-legal murders during the Night of the Long Knives. As the executive, sole power for determination with regard to the state of emergency—when to declare it, what it meant, and how long it would last—rested with the fuhrer. In this historical case, one element of the emergency was the existence of enemies of the party in important public positions. The fuhrer was, therefore, according to Schmitt, well within his proper role in ordering their killing or removal. Just as Vermeule claims that the executive's power rests not on what is granted to him by law but on the support of the people, so Schmitt claimed that Hitler's acts were justified because he had a special 'affinity' with what was popular among the German citizenry. Vermeule and his coauthor, Eric Posner, argue in The Executive Unbound that it is unreasonable to be afraid of tyranny on the part of an executive who is legally unconstrained, because public opinion itself will limit the administration's power (they have to worry about being ousted or about a lack of political will among the people). This, however, is precisely why Schmitt thought Hitler was justified in his policies: namely, because the German people wanted them. In the ensuing years, Vermeule has applied a Schmittian analysis to the administrative state—that is, to federal agencies acting under the executive. In articles like 'Our Schmittian Administrative Law,' and books like Law's Abnegation, he has argued that, inevitably, legislatures leave gray areas and gaps in the law, within which agency officials would have an unlimited breadth of action and judgment. The rise of the administrative state has long been a concern for originalists, who bemoaned the legal doctrine known as Chevron deference (overturned last year by the Supreme Court) which held that courts should defer to agency judgments in matters of the agency's own expertise. Many originalists regarded the legal doctrine as a problematic violation of the separation of powers since it gave unelected members of the executive wide latitude to exercise lawmaking power via regulations, unchecked by the courts or by Congress. Such a vast expansion of executive power opens the door to abuses of power, they maintained. But for Vermeule, this is a feature of the administrative state, rather than a bug. It is precisely with the executive, unfettered by law, that this kind of power should rest. 'As for the structure and distribution of authority within government,' Vermeule writes, 'common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law's inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule.' Finally, in Common Good Constitutionalism, his most recent book, Vermeule argues that it is within the executive's prerogative to read into the text of the law its own judgments on what serves the common good. This prerogative, further, ought not be limited by ideas about the original public meaning of the Constitution or later statutes. Originalists have long argued for their position on the basis that straying from the original public meaning of the text in favor of 'reading into' the text the policy priorities of a given judge effectively untethers judicial and executive action from the law altogether. It provides no principled limit to a judge's ability to disregard the actual meaning of a law in favor of his or her preferred policy objectives. Here again, this kind of wiggle room is what Vermeule likes, and he likes it not just for judges but for administration officials. In Common Good Constitutionalism, as legal scholars William Baude and Stephen Sachs note, Vermeule's motivation for attacking originalism seems to be that it has failed to achieve his preferred policy ends (among these are a stricter public health regime, the curbing of elite liberal wealth, and forming 'better beliefs' among the public). For Vermeule, the limitations of original public meaning are too constraining. Despite the introduction of natural law and common good language in his most recent book (following on Vermeule's recent conversion, in 2016, to Catholicism), that work's project is the same Schmittian one that Vermeule has been on for decades. Additionally, the elements of Schmitt's thinking that Vermeule affirms were not incidental to Schmitt's support for Hitler, but constitutive of it. It was on the basis of the very theories that Vermeule affirms that Schmitt gave to the Nazi party the justifications it needed for dictatorship and political murder. I do not think this is the outcome Vermeule wants. But it is a grave misjudgment to think there's a nugget of gold hiding within the mottled stone of Nazi jurisprudence. Again, Vermuele's latest work has a distinct flavor from his earlier writing, in that it makes liberal use of 'the common good' and 'natural law' and of quotations from Thomas Aquinas. The term 'natural law' refers chiefly to a tradition of ethical, not legal, thought. It is a tradition as broad as it is deep, and includes ancients like Aristotle and the stoics, medievals like Aquinas and Ibn Sina, and moderns like Hugo Grotius and Jean-Jaques Burlamaqui. On the other side of the world, it includes also the epochal philosophers Mengzi and Zhu Xi. These thinkers are united by the idea that ethical truths can be drawn from facts about human nature. Within the natural law legal tradition in America today, Vermeule is decidedly on the outskirts. The leading thinkers in this world are people like Jeff Pojanowski, Kevin Walsh, and Robert P. George, none of whom would agree with Vermeule's particular application of classical or natural law terms and traditions. Where Vermeule sees the meaning of law as open to the unconstrained interpretation of the executive, Pojanowski and Walsh ably argue that the classical tradition has more to say in favor of faithfulness to the original public meaning of duly promulgated law. The differences between these thinkers is enough to show that Vermeule's line of thought should not be taken as representative of the natural law legal theorists at large. The strength of natural law theory is that it holds that ethical and political debates may be grounded in facts about human nature that are accessible to all. This does not mean that the answers to moral and political questions are obvious or easy. It simply means that it is possible for us to argue, disagree, deliberate, and reason together constructively, because we all have access to some degree of common ground upon which to argue. To understand natural law in the American tradition, you might turn to Hugo Grotius, the Dutch natural law legal theorist of the Early Modern era and an influential figure in the legal landscape that shaped America. Working mostly in the early 17th century, Grotius was facing a newly diverse, pluralistic, and interconnected world, one in which the dictates of particular religious traditions would not have universal sway. Was it ever possible to come to any kind of agreement about moral life and the law? Grotius thought so, because essential facts about our human nature, like the fact that we are rational and social animals, are universal, and can ground our deliberation about what constitutes the human good. In his great work, De Jure Belli, Grotius argued that natural law is 'a dictate of right reason' based upon human nature, one which could ground the laws of engagement between diverse nations. We still find ourselves in the same situation: a pluralistic and diverse society. Natural law allows us to govern together based on certain fundamental facts about human nature. We will all bring our own biases and interests to the table, but—unlike the executive branch Vermeule would make all powerful—the legislature is specifically designed for bargaining, reasoning, deliberating, and accommodating in order to achieve stable, moderate, and reformable governance through law. Natural law theory supports the idea that this kind of deliberation is possible, and that politics can be something more than raw expression of preference and power. In a legislative body, members will bring many resources to bear in making judgments about what is and is not good law. For deliberation to be possible, however, there must be some common ground, some public set of reasons accessible to all. Otherwise the parties are at an impasse. Natural law holds that this realm of public reason really is accessible to us through observation of human nature. In the rationality and freedom of the human person, for instance, we might be able to ground arguments about rights; in the sociality and fellow-feeling of human nature, we might be able to ground arguments about duties. This does not mean everyone will come to the same easy conclusions, it just means that there is a common, non-sectarian discourse within which reasons can be exchanged. Natural law holds that there really are objective claims we can make about what is good and bad for the human person. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, makes his famous 'function argument' to express how this works. In looking at any natural thing, we determine what is good or bad for it based on its characteristic functions. Thus, we know that it is better for a dog to be able to run and play and be with other dogs than to be legless, caged up, and alone. This is because we can observe the nature of the dog is to run, to play, to be social. So it is with human beings. Our characteristic functions include our health, security, but they also include distinctly human things, like our freedom, sociality, and rationality. Early Americans thought that the law should protect certain liberties, like freedom of speech, worship, and expression, because these were conducive to the characteristic functions of free and rational creatures. But this exchange of reasons, this deliberative practice where, as a group, we try to come to practical arrangements in accordance with human flourishing and the common good, does not satisfy Vermeule. He would like government to instantiate his own conception of the common good without compromise and deliberation. In his picture, the executive will be in the best position to decide difficult questions of politics and morality. But how can we be sure the executive will use this awesome power well? On the one hand, in The Executive Unbound, he says that public opinion will constrain the executive, but in Common Good Constitutionalism, Vermeule claims that the executive will do what's best for the people whether they like it or not. How we guarantee that the executive will be so wise, restraining itself from using its unchecked power tyrannically, remains a mystery. Vermeulism also should not be taken as 'the Catholic position.' Although Vermeule quotes St. Thomas Aquinas—a towering figure in the natural law tradition—in support of his legal theory, whether Vermeule's view represents Aquinas's, let alone the actual teaching of the Catholic Church, is debatable. Pope John Paul II, in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, affirmed that there should be a balance of power between executive, legislative, and judicial, with the law reigning over all. 'This is the principle of the 'rule of law',' John Paul II wrote, 'in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals. … Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law.' What is more, Vermeule bases his thinking on the political theology of Carl Schmitt. But no less an authority than Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in 1970 that it was 'impossible' for a Catholic to adhere, as Vermeule seems to, to Schmitt's 'political theology.' Our constitutional system, inspired by the writing of Aristotle among others, is designed with human weakness in mind. An unbound executive was precisely what it meant to avoid because the Founding Fathers recognized, as Aristotle did, that an executive unconstrained by law is a tyranny, and that those in whom such power was concentrated were likely to be corrupted by power. Aristotle thought that it would be lovely to have a perfectly wise and just monarch, but recognized that, human nature being what it is, a tyrant was much more likely. The solution of our founders was the elaborate system of separation of powers and of checks and balances. And even further, the founders, as expressed in The Federalist and elsewhere, did not believe that their system was self-enforcing or self-constraining. They understood that it could devolve into tyranny in various ways. As John Adams said, our Constitution is only fit for a moral and religious people, and any other would 'go through it like a whale goes through a net.' The founders also believed that, fallen as human nature is, it could still rise to virtue under the right cultural influences and within a well-designed constitutional system. The Constitution is designed for people who have the virtue to adhere to, rather than violate, its limits. As administrative law scholar Adam White argued in his review of Law's Abnegation, the rise of a more imperial presidency is not a historical inevitability, but a consequence of a lack of public virtue. The loss of the rule of law is, in some respects, a matter of choice. Today, perhaps, we face a choice. Do we still believe in the Constitution handed down to us, or do we want to slide toward Schmitt's authoritarian vision? It is a vision that could be embodied on the right or the left theory and that of the founders both made use of the idea of natural law. If we accept Vermeulism, let us at least not say that natural law made us do it.
