They were supposed to. I think to some extent the Democrats still do. Recently the Republican party seems to have ditched every principle it once claimed to have in an attempt to hold power at any cost.
I think I at least partly agree with both of those, though I’m not sure they agree with each other.
I would say that one’s political philosophy has to do partly with what kind of world you want to live in, and partly with what you think are the acceptable political methods to use to try to get there.
Neither of those is likely to be directly contradicted by facts. If some people want to live in a world in which everyone is similar and agrees with each other on everything of importance, and other people want to live in a world filled with a wide variety of people who live drastically different lives and often disagree but have decided to be on friendly relations with each other anyway: I don’t see how that’s an issue that can be decided by facts (other, perhaps, than the fairly obvious fact that like it or not we are living in a world filled with a wide variety of people; but the political philosophy’s more about whether one thinks this is a good thing or a bad thing.)
And if some people think the best way to improve society is by having a strong central authoritarian leader who everybody else can rally around, and others think that’s a terrible idea and everything should be decided by consensus, and still others think the first one’s a bad idea and the second’s not going to work so the best we can do is to let people vote, but not everybody agrees on who should be qualified to vote – again, it’s hard to think of a particular set of facts that’s going to settle the matter.
Which is not to say facts aren’t applicable at all; but they apply at a different level. People who are in agreement that everybody should get enough to eat can disagree wildly as to how to best accomplish this – but should be willing to look at facts as to what’s happened when one or another technique has been tried. People who are in agreement that it ought to be safe to walk down the street can disagree as to how to accomplish this, but should be willing to look at facts about whether a particular technique is actually doing that or making matters worse, as well as whether it might be making things safer for some people but more dangerous for others. And so on.
Taking this as an example, if each side just argues that their vision of society is better because they value different things, then that can’t be contradicted by facts. But if they argue that their ideal would mean lower crime, or a more prosperous society, or happier citizens, that is something that can be true or not. And they always do seem to argue stuff like that.
Yes. It seems people always get attached to one way over another for ideological reasons, though.
Okay, but communism definitely has a particular means as a core part. So is that not a political philosophy, or are some only about ends and others include means too?
You’d have to ask a roomful of communists I guess, but it seems to be that if the completely equal distribution of goods and services looked like it could be accomplished without violent overthrow of existing political systems, many if not most communist folks would nod and embrace that. Not necessarily. To a large degree I do indeed regard most of them as behaving like a Party and not like a political philosophy. (And they are constituted as one more more parties in various places of course. You can join the Revolutionary Communist Party next time you register to vote if they have ballot access status in your home state). With a track record of implementing governments that show no signs of “withering away” and incomplete results on material distribution (although admittedly some partial success there), their tendency to give unqualified support to the governments that claim to be communist rather than critique them looks to me like “we just want to win” behavior.
I’m puzzled by this thread. Happiness and prosperity are somewhat hard to quantify (or, perhaps, hard to define), but saying that lowering crime is important and that it is worth the associated costs (both financial, but also the inherent tradeoffs to freedom, liberty, etc. as well as the inevitable costs of errors) is fundamentally a value claim. Certainly something to be debated, but I’m not sure how it can ever be tested empirically.
Whether or not something actually lowers crime can theoretically be tested with evidence (and should be tested, when possible), although cause and effect can be very challenging. But that’s not really a matter of “philosophy”. And it really doesn’t make sense in the context of your original question: it’s clearly not true that every policy isn’t going to accomplish its stated aim (i.e., “sooner or later the evidence will conflict it”) and we should strive to only adopt policies that accomplish our stated aims (and can do so without compromising our philosophies).
That’s my point. If party A claims their policy will lower crime, or improve the economy, or whatever, that’s something that at least in theory can be tested.
The policies or ideas each party embraces are mostly based on their philosophical ideas, not on evidence. And because of this they are usually very reluctant to change them even when the evidence is against them. Certainly not every policy will fail, but it’s statistically very likely that some policies of each party will fail, or perform worse than the alternative.
I’m not sure I can think of a good example of what you’re describing.
But surely part of it is that most people have multiple philosophical values and many policies requiring balancing them; and this is exacerbated when working in groups (political parties are inherently loose collections of people with various, at times contradictory, political values).
No one really stands for the proposition that we must enact policies that only serve to lower crime, no matter the cost. And if they did, they’d still have to convince people who were concerned about financial costs, and personal liberty, and racial equality, and all sorts of other important concerns.
I guess one example would be drug prohibition. We have multiple lines of evidence going back to the twenties that shows that this does not decrease crime, but rather increases it. Yet up until recently no national politician could be taken seriously if they supported ending or even easing drug prohibition.
Whether they were law and order types, or social justice types, both supported harsh drug laws.
This illustrates two separate disconnects:
For liberals, most of the disconnect was between their philosophy of liberty and social justice and their need to be perceived as serious politicians. The Overton Window was such that supporting drug legalization was an automatic disqualifier. Media and the general population would treat anyone who proposed it as a kook. So, since supporting defined you as a fringe kook, only fringe kooks supported it.
For conservatives, the same disconnect was present to some extent, but a bigger factor was the difference between stated and unstated political philosophies. In the case of drugs, you have the stated philosophies of safety/order and maximizing personal liberty competing with the (usually) unstated philosophies of the guilty must be punished and white supremacy.
What political parties in the US have is platforms, not philosophies. You can read the Democratic and Republican 2020 platforms (which in the Republican case was officially declared to be the same as their 2016 platform) at those links.
It might be “true or not”, but that doesn’t always mean that its truth can be effectively tested.
Whether or not a particular “ideal” has been adequately implemented in policy, and whether or not a particular evidentiary outcome can be conclusively ascribed to the implementation of that ideal, are very, very non-trivial questions.
If, for example, Republicans say that Republican political ideals will mean lower crime, and then Republicans get elected and crime rates go up, it is far too simplistic to try to argue that the evidence has “disproved” or “conflicted with” Republican political philosophy. Establishing unambiguously causal relations between specific political events and broader social phenomena is a very complicated business.
Sure, but the fact something is hard to test does not change the principle. Eventually enough evidence accumulates to say that eg trickle down economics or rent control are generally bad ideas. Or that communism has been tried enough times to say that either it doesn’t work or it can’t be implemented as intended. We can never prove anything 100% in science either, but it makes sense to use the best evidence available to make decisions.
And then there’s stuff like global warming on the right, and ideas I won’t mention on the left for fear of derailing the thread, where political parties simply endorse unscientific ideas. Perhaps that is more related to partisan politics than any kind of philosophy though, like @thorny_locust said.
It is not necessary for religion to be dogmatic or immune to evidence.
Just because the propaganda of the political Right insists politics be dogmatic does not mean we should accept that–the political Left rejects it. And just because the propaganda of the religious Right insists religion be dogmatic does not mean we should accept that–the religious Left rejects it.
Or to put it more bluntly: religion doesn’t have to be dogmatic, that’s yet more Right-wing bullshit.
I’d say that the difference here is that it is fine to say that lower taxes is a goal, that people shouldn’t have to part with their hard earned money any more than necessary. That would be a philosophy, it is the goal in and of itself, it cannot be right or wrong, it’s an opinion.
Something like Trickle Down Economics, OTOH, is more of a dogma, that lower taxes will stimulate the economy. It is linking a policy to an outcome, and that can be tested in effectiveness, and whether it achieves the stated goal.
Same with rent control. The idea that everyone should be able to afford housing is a philosophy, one that is neither right nor wrong. The policy of rent control itself as a means of achieving that can also be tested.
If it is found that rent control is not an effective means of ensuring affordable housing, then that is all it means. It does not mean that the philosophy that everyone should be able to afford housing is wrong.
Yes, that makes sense. It does seem common for parties to stick with ineffective policies, though. Maybe because they sound good, or because other ways of achieving their aims would require unacceptable compromises?
Makes me wonder how much different parties really disagree on aims and how much they just disagree on the best way of achieving them.
Mostly baked in interests. There are many who support trickle down because it benefits them. There are many who support rent control because, even if it’s not an effective way of ensuring universal housing, removing support for it would make a whole lot of people homeless, in the short term at the least.
A little of column B, a whole lot of column A. Take abortion, for instance, those are certainly competing aims, where one side is concerned over the agency of women, and the other is concerned about the welfare of the unborn. Or immigration, where one side wants to grow the country and to provide a better life to those who want to come here, and the other side doesn’t want more people.
The goals in some cases are mutually exclusive, and there is little to compromise on the means to achieve those goals.
True, there are areas where parties clearly disagree on aims. But I doubt any party has ‘raise taxes’ as a goal, for example. It’s more about what they prioritise.