Politics

Edit

Created: 2023-03-03

The political left has become more institutionalist, more invested in experts and establishments,

How to establish the balance between efficient, well run organization and those of the individual?

But if we want to make law and policy that are implementable, then we have to have implementers at the table when that law and policy is being written

Trump emerged from the make-believe world of pro wrestling

What The Right Has Done

rather than having a liberal democracy in which we primarily are seen as individual citizens with the same rights and duties, we should primarily be seen as members of our racial or perhaps religious communities.”

Politics is no longer about argument; it’s just jamming together a bunch of scary categories about people who are allegedly rotten to the core.

In other words, no matter how much wrongdoing Mr. Trump engages in, however outrageous and brutish his conduct, he remains wildly popular. His indecency and sulfuric rhetoric are a plus; his most loyal supporters are galvanized by the criminal charges against him, which they consider political persecution. He is their beau ideal, and he has spawned hundreds of imitators — in the presidential campaign that he is dominating, in Congress, among governors, in state legislatures and in the right-wing ecosystem. The haunting question raised by Mr. Bloom is more relevant now than it was when he first posed it: “When there are no shared goals or a vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?”

Those who once celebrated the three transcendentals — the true, the good and the beautiful — now delight in deceit, coarseness and squalor. Jonathan Rauch, a friend and sometime collaborator, calls this a “degenerate postmodernism.”

Politics “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.”

I think you miss the emphasis on a market economy. McArdle in a recent post said something like: conservatives trusted anonymous market forces to do good, even though bad sometimes happened, and progressives trusted conscious government planning to do good, even though bad sometimes happened. IMO she's about right.

Libertarianism:

(1)Doctrinaire faith that government is the only important threat to liberty.
(2)Ideology trumps science, fact and logic.
(3)Taxes are the greatest evil, except for;
(4)Collective ownership or control of anything.
(5)Subject to the above limitations, individual liberty is desireable.
(6)A tendency to attribute entirely bogus notions (e.g., 1,3, 9, and 10 of your list) to opponents.

The Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty.† H.L. Mencken, 1926

Not discussed so far is what progressives believe about the use of police power domestically and military power internationally

Not so much equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity." Except that the only way to have equality of opportunity is to have equality of outcome in certain fundamentals such as education, nutrition, shelter, and health

BK - sports analogy is you don’t get to start on first but you do get access to a bat and ball

The actual policies and positions of conservatives, libertarians, and progressives seem to drift over time. What I see as more fundamental is their moral philosophies. As I see it, libertarians see protecting people from being harmed by other people as the most important moral goal, and besides that people should be free to do whatever they want. Progressives believe that protecting people from being harmed by others is important, but not quite as important as fairness. Conservatives value protecting people from other people and fairness, but they also put a high value on keeping society morally pure, patriotism, and respect for existing institutions; their positions reflect tradeoffs among all of those. The positions change, but the values driving the three groups stay the same.f

John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged… the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law

RAILROADED The classical liberalism of Thomas Jefferson or Smith feared government intervention in the economy as always favoring the rich. This liberalism valued property because is passion bestowed more than access to things. It gave independence, " sale productive wealth, a chance to exercise initiative, do valuable work and standing in a community?"* These values seemed precisely what competions and corporate property threatened. They made people depender

'The embrace by Gilded Age conservatives of laissez-faire, however, property was not the means to freedom but the reward of freedom. Conservatives embraced the rich; they did not fear them.