Which differs from libertarianism how?
Brain. I like you. I am not just saying that. You are a conversationalists dream.
A libertarian has no self-respect in regards to national sovereignty AND they are frankly, cop-out peaceniks more akin to appeasing leftists than to classic liberals.
Read the Constitution of the USA and the many, many writings of our founders and you will see what contempt libertarians would garner from them then, and are garnering from me now.
I am not saying that libertarians have an agenda for peace, but rather a disregard for the mechanics of peace. Jokingly, they are too high to care about it. Seriously, they just plumb don’t go that far to understand that there is evil in the world, aggression in the world, and glory to be had by assembling a collective security force BOUND by strict, self-governing rules that are not to be tinkered by whims of the popular sentiment of foreign or domestic human individuals or collectives.
The most important contemporary writings on the Constitution are those of Alexander Hamilton, who was definitely not a “classical liberal” in the sense you are using the term.
Please check your email.
I do not know what you would like to come of your observation but if it makes you feel better, I am a registered Republican because it is an inch closer to classic liberalism than any realistically viable movement at the moment.
Am I supposed to take Madison to keep things going here?
Jefferson had different ideas during the framing, a few radical and a few tweakers, but when it came down to the signing and the patriotism, he was a team player for the best that could be had by all for the time being. This is not to say he was a quitter on his different beliefs. He gave his ideas his all and he carried on his ideas without giving up in the long run but knew when progress was effective rather than stalling.
Naturally this sounds like it comes close to a sort of sad capitulation on the part of Hamilton, but we are not talking about hostilities in this stage of American founding politics. None, not one of Hamilton’s ideas were incompatible with individual freedom and a thorough reading of his arguments and ideas show a man who was a genius in the realm of thinking ahead on a global, political basis. He knew what he was doing and I find it rather refreshing you hold the man in high regard.
Was he the most important writer on the Constitution in this current time? I don’t know. The Constitution has not ended yet as one of the greatest documents ever written. It is still alive and there may come a time where what was a minor consideration or interpretation by Madison all these years may turn into the facet that saves humanity.
Regarding Hamilton’s ideas and their relevance, I very strongly urge you to read this book (or at least the Amazon reviews).
How did his ideas differ significantly from Hamilton’s?
Jefferson also believed the Constitution should be discarded in toto, and a new one written, every 20 years or so, on the grounds that you cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket.
Only in the sense that I prefer his industrial vision for America’s future to Jefferson’s agrarian vision, and his nationalism to Jefferson’s localism. Hamilton, OTOH, was an elitist-authoritarian, while Jefferson was a small-l libertarian small-d democrat, insofar as that was compatible with slaveholding (on which question he was always morally ambivalent, but never to the point of freeing his own slaves, even in his will; but it has been well said of Jefferson that his life was a constant war between his principles and his appetites).
I didn’t say all, but I my powerful beliefs in having concrete ideas may have overshadowed my intent.
Why don’t you go look it up and report back to us.
I am not so that important that it should matter how I comport myself as long as I stay within the rules. BrainGlutton is having a certain level of fun with my writings… at least I hope so. It would be pretty weird if he was here in this thread for any other reason. Maybe if I behaved how you want me to behave then BrainGlutton would be disenfranchised. Disenfranchising another would make my brain sad, not to mention that I am nobody’s pawn.
Hell, it is fun to think that I myself, DevNull, am a great debate in myself, and you are only adding to that fantasy with your writings. I do not kid myself though. I am not a great debate even though there is a lot of debating about me.
Funny, it is like an individual shows up… you know, a person who can think like an individual… and a few people just can’t handle it. They are compelled to cow me into thinking like the herd. I don’t get it. If I wore a big fucking bone in my nose and stretched my earlobes with shiny baubles and put 100 piercings in my eyelid and had a tattoo of Falco on my tongue then I bet I would be a shining beacon of individuality around here. Instead I choose to follow a dictionary definition and am suddenly a freak of the establishment.
Do you see what you are doing?
I am not trying to win anything anymore than a tattooed goth kid is trying to be individual of the year. I am expressing myself as myself and it appears my self is not welcomed by a certain few. The owners are free to boot me and the users are free to shun me.
To the rest, thank you for being polite and decent human beings. I try my best to reciprocate no matter our differences.
There was one review on that book but a bunch of reviews on his other ones. I do not distrust the author at all but he sounds too much like me to spend too much of my time on. F’rinstance:
– Instead, Lind, a fellow at the New America Foundation, scours history for tenets that have guided U.S. foreign policy in the past and that should be applied in the future. The result is uneven; Lind is sometimes brilliant and occasionally silly. But his ideas are insightful, and he provides a fresh perspective on a wide range of issues, from regime change to globalization. –
He sounds like a much more disciplined and well-read sort of me.
I’ll give the Hamilton book an honest shot. It is hard to screw up pre-American history when writing a whole book based on factual writings. I just ordered two of his books from our library network. I’ll buy them if they are that good. If he is as good as you recommend then he will be added to my pile of “ooh ooh! I have the perfect argument for that” pile of books I keep on hand for just such situtations.
The other one was Vietnam book which jibed with my current, limited beliefs 100% from the writeup. If he is as all over the place as people say he is then it may be a great read.
Thanks for the recommend and the smart matchup.
The US Constitution was an odd duck at the time. Perhaps I am a visionary with godlike features. Horatio, heaven, Earth, all that. Someone said it first here.
My political stance is liberal… Classic liberal. It is pretty much deliberate since I chose it after hefty research and many years of trying out others. I was never a contrarian and they piss me off more than people who play devil’s advocate. My penchant for toying with theories is a deeply held joy that cannot help but burst out all over the place.
Debating with people here is one way I make sure I am right in my choice of being a classic liberal.
I am a registered Republican though. My likes include kitties and M+M’s and my turn offs are mean people and traffic.
Thanks for participating in this thread. Come again.
Lind (a former National Review editor) is often (and unfairly) described as “all over the place,” or words to that effect – sometimes he is described as “right-wing” and other times as a “conservative apostate,” and sometimes even as a socialist – but by his own account, as presented in his book Up From Conservatism, his politics have always remained in roughly the same place even as the national political center-of-gravity shifted (mostly to the right) around him. The best insight into his views is found in his book The Next American Nation, which I confidently predict will one day rank with The Federalist as a seminal text in American political thought. As might The Radical Center and The American Way of Strategy. You might also check out his published articles on the website of the New America Foundation, the so-called “Silicon Valley think-tank” in Washington, of which Lind is a Senior Fellow.
While I’m an admirer, my own politics don’t jibe entirely with Lind’s – I think of myself more as an internationalist than a nationalist, for one thing, and while I reject Marxism as ultimately an ill-conceived drag on the whole socialist cause, I do not quite share Lind’s avowed hostility to “ideological socialism”. But he does indeed think very, very clearly, and write very, very clearly. Even his fiction and poetry are worth a read.
Can I skate with the fact that the first two US political parties were Republican and Federalist with Hamilton being a Federalist and Madison being a Republican. The first and foremost division of the parties were based on the debt of the Revolutionary war and who was going to be paid and how… “who” being more of a point of contention but how lasting as a legacy.
Deeper reading (not exactly my style or modus operandi) figures in more divisions that began on that one incident but all ends well a decade or so later where Hamilton does win out overall and there is where I pick up with my judgment that the genius of either remains to be tallied in the entire scope our nation.
Constitutions should not, and more importantly are not discarded without bloodshed. I like the original sentiment but it remains a sentiment… not so much wisdom and not so practical in retrospect.
I am a HUGE fan of industrial vision (try me) but seeing as how I am not much of a disciplined student of history then I will never be much more of a prick than I have to be in celebrating the gift of our freedom founders fought for, as opposed to the dinkwads who are all about the revolution for whatever cause they are told to rally for.
I will not be much in the way of picking a great from the olden days. Their decisions and why they fought for them hardly apply when it comes down to the decisions I make in my day. Their contributions and wisdom were uncannily great in their day but have been whittled down to a few self-evident truths that are embarrassingly easy to side with now. Naturally that is what is left in the passage of time - self-evident truths.
The framework is still genius. The self-evident truths are still self-evident truths (for free thinkers and those who cherish freedom). But in the scope of this thread, many historical writings will only lead to pissing contests regardless of the existence of possibly millions of small truths. Those small ones are fraught with nuanced details that the chowderheads of today’s leftist movement will waste time with trying to prove the insane.
Nuff said.
Yes, well . . . for better or for worse, Jefferson was not averse to the idea of revolutionary bloodshed:
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
My standard font style and standard font size certainly does betray my emotions, because I assure you, I am in hysterics right now.
But seriously. Jefferson was on to something and I’ll take the changing political parties as an important stand-in for bloody revolutions. Even the nuanced change from the traditional conservative party to the ruling neo-conservative party coupled with the change from the ever-failing Democrat party to the perma-failing socialist dirtbag party is an acceptable token of a revolution.
Each side does a number on Constitutional interpretations so it is like a revolution every generation… minus the bloodshed.
Well, Madison started out as a Federalist. And the Republican he became was a mite different from some of the Republicans I’m familiar with today. One of the things Madison fought against was the Sedition Act. That Act was essentially designed to keep Republicans from criticizing the Federalist government. Both Jefferson and Madison knew that the right to be critical is of great value.
No doubt he was different. Shout it if you like. I’ll back you up… FWIW.
(I am mad at the Republicans of today for being leftists)
The Virginia Resolutions. Yes.
Madison fought with his words and wisdom, not with any elected office at the time.
Once I saw a 400-pound transvestite in a mesh bikini stomping to and fro across a TV stage in front of a howling audience. “Y’all just jealous!” he thundered.
In fact, it is more than “a mite different,” it is not the same party at all. The Republican, aka Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Jefferson and Madison, was ancestral to the modern Democratic Party. The modern Republican Party was founded in 1854 by a coalition of Whigs, Northern Democrats and Free Soilers.
I’m very curious as to where you’re getting the latter characterization, considering that today’s Dems are much, much less “socialist” by any measure than the party was from FDR through LBJ. The party has since moved to the right, not to the left. And so has the Republican Party. What alternate-universe America are you living in, DevNull?! :dubious:
BTW, DevNull, it might do you good to review the Wikipedia links in this post.