On Power and Authority

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 186

There's a fundamental difference between mere power and legitimate authority, and that difference needs to be dragged into the center of our political discussions against Woke. Power is the raw capacity to do something, but authority is something more. It's power, which is to say capacity and permission, combined with right, which is justification. Woke movements covet power. They have no genuine authority. In that gap all the difference that matters hides. Our forefathers in the American Founding era understood this and called power without authority "arbitrary power," which they found slavish and absurd, and believed to be their sacred duty as men to resist. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay does a kind of "book club" reading from Timothy Sandefur's new book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, to draw out this distinction and make it clear and relevant. Join him for an important discussion, and get the book for yourself.