Excluding felons, right? Because there’s no agreement on felons.
And the agreement on the importance of facts raises interesting epistemological questions. I’m not sure the two sides of the aisle agree on how to determine what’s factual, much less whom to trust, much less what the facts are.
There is wide variance on even that question. I believe every person of any age subject to US law and taxes ought to have the right to vote. Otherwise, “citizen” is a man-made privilege.
Deep down we all hate anarchists
I agree on a lot of that, but the social consequences for free speech have gotten out of hand. While laws and morality are not the same thing, they are supposed to correlate. We don’t just have laws against robbing people. We also have a culture that robbing people is not okay. If we felt that robbing people was just fine or had major disagreement on that point, such laws would be pretty ineffective. Likewise, we have free speech legally, but we’re also supposed to have a culture of free speech. If we don’t, then that means there is no free speech in practice.
I want to see Kathy Griffin and Colin Kaepernick on my TV again. I don’t want my decision to shop at Hobby Lobby and buy Ben and Jerry’s to be a statement on my political beliefs. It’s gotten to the point where NOT talking about controversial issues can get you in trouble. Taylor Swift is now being attacked on social media for being silent on race and gender issues. So we’ve moved beyond punishment for saying unpopular things, now we’re heading towards punishment for not saying anything at all!
Actually, there’s movement to give the vote to non-citizens, at least in elections where that’s possible. Plus there’s dispute about felons, the mentally ill, etc.
I think that in our current political climate we don’t actually agree on anything. Even when we agree on ends, we don’t agree on means. And even if we agree on means and ends, we’ll suspect each other’s motivations.
Despite not really missing Kathy Griffin or Kaepernick, I really like this post.
Except that most people who are fans of Fox News/Breitbart etc. are fans because they see Fox News/Breitbart as being truth-tellers, telling the truth that the rest of the media does not tell.
You would have a hard time finding a Fox News viewer who says, “I support Fox News because it spews lies.” They would say, “I support Fox News because it tells truth.”
So they too value truth, or at least, their perception of what truth is.
That is simply the real world. I believe that Machiavelli was correct when he said that. Even in a dictatorship, if conditions become sufficiently adverse, the governed will eventually topple the government (e.g., late 18th Century France).
A big bunch of what I think the Right believe in are good, solid principles. The flaw is that they tend to all be things that sound good, but are based on flawed or obsolete ideas. Per the name, “conservative”. The very idea of their philosophy is that what worked well in the past is a good thing to do today.
a. The right believes that it’s possible to work hard and become prosperous. Which is true, and some people have achieved great success in America. It’s just that the game is heavily rigged in favor of those who already were born into a good situation.
b. The right believes that gas powered heavy vehicles, like SUVs and trucks, are awesome, and that in their personal lives, they can’t perceive any noticeable changes to the climate. Which is true - you need satellites and careful analysis as climate change is slow compared to human lifespans.
c. The right believes that cutting taxes and letting people keep more of what they have earned is a good thing. Which is totally true - the problem is, deficit spending is a larger tax increase on the future. It’s as short sighted as buying Christmas presents for all your relatives on a credit card. Presents are nice, but if you couldn’t afford them in cash now, you are going to have even more trouble paying the debt back.
d. The right believes that guns are awesome, and a powerful tool that can be used to rapidly kill anyone threatening them. Which is totally true - it’s just that accidental gun deaths and homicides, while they don’t make the news very often, are this slow trickle of additional deaths that go up the more households have guns.
e. The right believe that paying for your own healthcare is how you get the best service from medical service providers, and that waiting lines for services like they have in socialist countries suck. Which is totally true - it’s just that health care is so inflated in cost that unless you have multiple millions of dollars, hospitals and doctors could care less what you have to offer. They are going to treat you the same moderately shabby way, since they are flooded with money, as they sit on a monopoly.
I agree with you about the marks, but there are surely plenty of conservative leaders who are aware that Fox etc. are bullshit, and I don’t see them giving away the game. They value party over truth.
I feel like this kind of thing really shouldn’t count. They’re applause lights. To the degree that disagreement is even possible, it’s on the level that is alluded to in the post. If the left thinks that the right is radical and crazy and can’t be compromised with, and the right believes the same about the left, that doesn’t somehow count as a point of agreement. Similarly, if the left believes that black people are treated badly relative the white people, and the right believes the opposite, this isn’t some point of agreement, it’s a fairly deep conflict. I suppose you could argue that “unwarranted discrimination is bad” is something the left and right agree one, which is another layer up… But that’s a much weaker statement, and saying it like that reveals just how much weaker it is. This kind of thing papers over the important differences and leaves us feeling like our unity is a lot stronger than it really is.
This stuff is pretty good though. So is this.
America is a nation in deep agreement and common belief. The proof lies, somewhat paradoxically, in the often tempestuous and increasingly acrimonious debate between the two main US political parties. The widening divide represented by this debate has, for many of us, defined the scope of our political views and the resultant differences for at least the past one hundred years. But even as we do tense and bruising battle, a deeper form of philosophical agreement reigns. As described by Louis Hartz in his 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America, the nature of our debates themselves is defined within the framework of liberalism. That framework has seemingly expanded, but it is nonetheless bounded, in as much as the political debates of our time have pitted one variant of liberalism against another, which were given the labels “conservatism” and “liberalism” but which are better categorized as “classical liberalism” and “progressive liberalism.” While we have focused our attention on the growing differences between “classical” and “progressive,” we have been largely inattentive to the unifying nature of their shared liberalism.
While classical liberalism looks back to a liberalism achieved and lost—particularly the founding philosophy of America that stressed natural rights, limited government, and a relatively free and open market, “progressive” liberalism longs for a liberalism not yet achieved, one that strives to transcend the limitations of the past and even envisions a transformed humanity, its consciousness enlarged, practicing what Edward Bellamy called “the religion of solidarity.”1 As Richard Rorty envisioned in his aptly titled 1998 book Achieving Our Country, liberal democracy “is the principled means by which a more evolved form of humanity will come into existence.… Democratic humanity…has ‘more being’ than predemocratic humanity. The citizens of a [liberal] democratic, Whitmanesque society are able to create new, hitherto unimagined roles and goals for themselves.”2
In the main, American political conflicts since the end of the Civil War have been fought along this broad division within liberalism itself. We have grown accustomed to liberalism being the norm and defining the predictable battlefield for our political debates. Largely accepting at least the Hartzian view, if not also Fukuyama’s claim that liberalism constitutes the “end of history,” we have been so preoccupied with the divisions and differences arising from these two distinct variants of liberalism that our debate within the liberal frame obscures from us an implicit acknowledgment that the question of regime has been settled—liberalism is the natural order for humanity. Further, the intensifying division between the two sides of liberalism also obscures the basic continuities between these two iterations of liberalism, and in particular makes it nearly impossible to reflect on the question of whether the liberal order itself remains viable. The bifurcation within liberalism masks a deeper agreement that has led to the working out of liberalism’s deeper logic, which, ironically, brings us today to a crisis within liberalism itself that now appears sudden and inexplicable.
Really? I’ve heard a lot of talk about how Roe v. Wade or DC v. Heller or <insert controversial court case here> is somehow “fake law”. I mean, sure, we can’t just ignore it, but the idea that it’s not real law because it’s derived from case law and the constitution and we disagree with that interpretation is very widespread. Indeed…
…Roy Moore is just the latest outgrowth. Remember Kim Davis? Remember Kent Hovind? Remember the whole backlash to laws banning anti-gay discrimination? There’s a fairly substantial strain of right-wing thought along these lines.
But this is true of many of the other things that people are suggesting, where both sides agree that there is a problem but disagree as to the solution. In this case there is very wide agreement that congress is broken due to overwhelming partisanship, and that a return to civility and compromise is what this country needs. But they have diametrically opposed notions as to what form this should take.
I’ve never actually heard that… Maybe I’ve been lucky… Lots of people think the decision was bad, and lots think that the “penumbra” of the right of privacy was badly reasoned, but I’ve never heard it, or any other Supreme Court decision, denigrated as “fake law.”
(Maybe Marbury vs. Madison, the grand-daddy of judicial review; I actually heard a law-school lecture where that decision was criticized as an example of circular reasoning and condemned as a grave extra-constitutional power-grab.)
Both the left and the right are willing to infringe upon Supreme Court decisions, nibbling away at the edges: the right by taking away abortion rights, the left by taking away gun rights. But neither the left nor the right is willing – to date – Roy Moore notwithstanding – to declare a Supreme Court ruling “null and void” and to disregard it unilaterally via executive action.
(Well, okay, Eisenhower had to send troops in to desegregate Arkansas schools… Never mind: it has happened. It just isn’t happening right today, thank Ghu!)
Conservatism, by definition, has inertia on its side. Liberalism requires the expenditure of energy to hold equilibrium.
Bacon = Good
Blowjobs, too.
And yet, when you ask conservatives, they can make a pretty good case that Cthulhu only ever swims left:
In each of the following conflicts in Anglo-American history, you see a victory of left over right: the English Civil War, the so-called “Glorious Revolution,” the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Clearly, if you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field.
Where is the John Birch Society, now? What about the NAACP? Cthulhu swims left, and left, and left. There are a few brief periods of true reaction in American history – the post-Reconstruction era or Redemption, the Return to Normalcy of Harding, and a couple of others. But they are unusual and feeble compared to the great leftward shift. McCarthyism is especially noticeable as such. And you’ll note that McCarthy didn’t exactly win.
In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.
I think the big problem is a lot of people don’t understand the difference between something being believable and something being true.
We do agree with this. But it’s the mainstream media that should be universally condemned.
Isn’t it interesting how assiduously American Conservatives desire to Liberalize Iran? Maybe some people haven’t thought through their self-definitions very well.
The color of an orange?
I might be aiming a tad high there.