I watched a bigger snippet of that interview with Mandel – I couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole thing because her ability to be coherent wasn’t much better than in the short clip in the OP – and it’s ironic that she mumbles about the “martyrdom complex that a lot of young people are encouraged to adopt” and how “you gain points among your peers when you talk about your victimhood”. She seems to think this is a bad thing, so it’s unclear why she’s so adept at practicing it herself!
Also, she claims that the “woke” left has encouraged people to exhibit symptoms of fake mental illness. So all the more strange that she blames her disastrous performance on a “panic attack” brought on by hearing one of the hosts say something negative about parenting! This twit seems to think that a panic attack means “being nervous when interviewed”. Maybe she should learn what a panic attack actually is instead of throwing around terms from the mental health profession that she clearly doesn’t understand.
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but this ignorant home-schooling right-wing imbecile is a danger to society.
I’m not sure what the point of this is. It doesn’t refute the sentiment I expressed. There have always been injustices in our institutions and there probably always will be – though slavery was an exceptionally egregious one. Opposing injustices where we find them is the duty of every good citizen and kids should know that, too.
But that’s not a reason for failing to instill in our kids a healthy respect for the freedom and justice that’s been achieved in modern western democracies, imperfect though it is, something that tends to be appreciated much more by recent immigrants than by so many of us that take it all for granted. Do you think our kids should be taught instead that all public institutions are crooked and governments are just out to get them? That would seem to be a way to raise a generation of domestic terrorists.
I think I’m somewhere between y’all. I teach my kids that institutions are made up of people, and people are just monkeys wearing clothes and looking around like “What the fuck am I doing here?” and trying to make some sense out of the fundamental absurdity of our situation. Institutions don’t need to be respected as institutions, but nor do they need to be condemned as institutions; rather, they need to be seen as the way that some of us monkeys are trying to make things make sense, and it sometimes works better than other times.
I may have read too much Kurt Vonnegut as a teenager.
I think I’d say something like, “Human societies need some sort of structure to function. When there are a lot of humans involved, quite a bit of structure may be necessary. Some structures work better than others overall; none that I know of are perfect. Some structures work well for some of the people involved but very badly for others in that society. Respect the need for structure. Consider critically the particular structure you’re living in, and work to improve it.”
Sure it’s possible. Domestic terrorists and anarchists just happen to hold a rather extreme form of cynicism.
I am by no means saying that we must teach our kids uncritical support for our public institutions. Injustices have always happened and they always will. What we should teach them instead is what I might describe as a rationally-based optimism about them.
The problem with excessive cynicism about government is deeper and more subtle than potentially cultivating rebels. The problem is that when you have a deeply ingrained distrust of government, you become unwilling to cede to government the kinds of discretionary powers that are, in fact, essential to a just and well-functioning society, and instead see government as an evil that must be minimized and kept to only the most basic essentials.
Distrust of government has been woven into the American zeitgeist since the Founders and is stronger today than ever, and one of the most appalling examples is the impossibility of enacting any sort of universal health care as it exists everywhere else in the industrialized world. And if anyone thinks I’m just off on a familiar soapbox again, the linkage to distrust of government could not be more clear. When Medicare was being proposed in the early 60s, a young Ronald Reagan railed about how ceding this kind of power to government was going to result in “the end of our freedoms” and a rapid decline into the darkness of tyranny. In more modern times the ACA was associated with government “death panels” and other nonsensical alleged horrors associated with the perils of letting the government get its claws into people’s health care.
And so it goes. Meanwhile other industrialized nations enjoy the benefits of a much more expansive system of government much more closely aligned with the principles of a liberal social democracy.
Why are you grouping the two? Libertarians, death cultists and doomsday preppers hold the same cynicism.
“Lies”, you mean.
No. You’re projecting. I’m deeply cynical of government. But I’m also a realist, and realise government is currently necessary. I don’t rage against taxes or speed limits or hate speech laws.
I’m not in favour of small government. I’m in favour of larger government, in part because size actually acts as a brake on some government excesses. Only some, though.
I do not. however, fool myself into thinking that’s because of justice or good function. Nor is it the only possible model for that. It’s just the only one already in place that acts as a curb on society as it is currently structured.
Let’s just say I came by my distrust of government by a more direct and absolutely justified route than what your average White American libertarian did.
Pretty much, yes. Except that “libertarian” covers a very broad spectrum of beliefs, and the moderate ones are legitimately debatable. But a minority of the most extreme libertarians are pretty much anarchists, so all these lunatics have similar anti-government agendas.
Not lies. I’m proposing we start with the assumption that democratic governments represent the people and have basically good intentions and provide services that are both necessary and beneficial for maintaining a free and just society, and then we fix whatever isn’t doing those things. If we start with the assumption that governments are fundamentally evil and broken from the get-go, we’re skewing toward dystopian anarchy. At some level this really is ingrained into the American zeitgeist, mostly on the right, hence all the issues with health care and the obsession with guns, two of America’s biggest problems.
I don’t dispute that. We are all products of our experiences. But the existence of many successful social democracies such as in Europe and elsewhere is testament to what good government can be. This has to be the conclusion to be drawn when I tell you, for instance, that my lived experience has instilled in me the opposite belief from yours.
Specifically, I will say that in a long life I’ve never had a significantly negative experience with government at any level, and the few typical issues were generally the result of bureaucratic incompetence rather than any sort of ill will, and were quickly resolved. All of my experiences have been consistent with basic integrity and good intentions. Lord knows I’m not trying to sanctify our governments – we have our share of political corruption – but those are abstract things that don’t affect my life. I’m talking about my direct relationship with governments. The government dutifully pays my pension, adjusts it for inflation, builds and maintains public infrastructure, funds our educational systems, protects me with health care, police, and fire services, and otherwise leaves me in peace. I’ve never had a quarrel with it.
That’s definitely an intrinsic character of institutions. But institutions cannot blithely engage in that sort of self-interested aggrandizement in the presence of transparency and accountability. Which should exist in properly structured democratic institutions, along with the ability of voters to pass judgment both on individual leaders and on their party policies. I tend to see that sort of unaccountable self-perpetuation in NGOs more than in governments.
And don’t waste your timing posting online definitions and Wikipedia articles. Anarchism is a leftist ideology, libertarianism is rightist. They are not the same thing no matter how many websites say so.
And I’m an anarchist - so easy with the “all these lunatics”, thank you very much.
I don’t agree with at least two of those assumptions. I do agree that governments provide necessary and beneficial services, but that’s as a side effect of their real function, the maintenance of power and privilege for the few…
They could also be amoral and broken.
There’s not a one of those that doesn’t exhibit all the same problems of other governments, just to lesser degrees. Being functionally less broken doesn’t mean they’re not broken all the same. That, and they’re fundamentally built on stolen value, in more ways than one. None of them are morally good.
I’m already aware that many people come from a fundamental place of privilege. I choose not to base my attitudes to institutions on how they cater to the privileged.
We obviously have very, very different definitions of what “anarchist” means. I would never have thought you would identify as such based on my own definition, so I must apologetically point out that I obviously didn’t intend in any way to be insulting. Perhaps a discussion for another time, but your rejection of dictionary definitions and online articles in favour of your own definition may make that difficult. For example,
It’s absolutely not that clear at all. It would be hard to argue that the “sovereign citizen” stuff is “leftist”, for instance, as it’s long been associated with American far-right groups like the Posse Comitatus and the militia movement, yet it sure sounds to me like anarchistic rejection of government authority. Conversely, libertarianism shares many progressive values with social liberalism.
That’s an important point that does need to be acknowledged. But in the experience that I’ve recounted, the “privilege” going on here was mainly the privilege of living in a more enlightened and equitable society than many others. I could equally say, with equal validity, that I choose not to base my attitudes to institutions on their less successful implementations, because such failures as exist there are not intrinsic.
Rejection of hierarchical government authority is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for anarchism. Rejection of capitalism is just as important, and is what makes anarchism a far-left ideology.
The difference between the two attitudes is that governance failures are universal in occurrence, so the onus is on the person saying they’re not intrinsic to the system to prove it. They are not equally valid stances.
The Sovereign Citizen nonsense is the opposite of anarchism. The philosophy behind it is that government rules are absolute, and if you can list laws in the right order like some kind of arcane spell formula, you’ll ve protected by an absolute shield.
Philosophically that’s about as far from anarchism as I can imagine.
Really drifting off-topic now, please don't reply to this post. {What Exit?
I’m not really interested in getting into a long semantic argument which is rather off-topic anyway, because these terms have many different definitions, especially if one gets into the weeds of political studies. But I’m a simple person with a simple mind, and do not get that impression from common definitions and descriptions like these:
“Anarchy”, from several different dictionaries:
absence of government
a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority
a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government
Sovereign citizen:
… [Sovereign citizens] believe that they are therefore not subject to any government statutes or proceedings, unless they consent to them.
… in the United States, the FBI describes sovereign citizens as “anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.” Sovereign citizen movement - Wikipedia
The assertion that “governance failures are universal in occurrence” is a claim that you make without evidence. I’m not trying to be argumentative here, I’m genuinely interested. For example, what do you mean by “they’re fundamentally built on stolen value”?
Name me the social democrat government that has not had some sort of corruption scandal, then…even the Nordic model countriesfail occasionally.
Name me the Western social democracy that isn’t at least partly beholden to colonialism, imperialism and exploitation of Others for its current privileged status.