The line between ‘conservative’, ‘Republican’ and ‘Tea Partier’ seems to blur depending on the situation, so I hope we don’t fall into quibbling over that particular distinction.
My question arises from some definitions in the Preface for the Revised Edition of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. (If you care to read the whole thing, the 5th choice in this Google search is the 1.5MB pdf.)
Obviously the right has a problem with this. The right’s hobbies include ranting about ‘excessive entitlements’ and ‘welfare queens’, promoting a theory of freedom in which taxes drop forever and everyone is on their own, assistance should only take the form of charity and not government aid, and so on. ‘Welfare state’ is a dirty word for them AFAICT. (And I hope I am being fair here. If I’m not, let me have it.) Note that Rawls’ definition of the welfare state doesn’t spell the end of economic and political inequality altogether, but merely promotes a minimum standard of life.
Ok then, rationally we might expect conservatives to go the other way, in favor of a property-owning democracy. That is the other choice, right? See here:
But that doesn’t sound like what conservatives want at all! Take a look around and it seems conservative politicians will do just about anything to dismantle education/education funding for instance, which isn’t going to lead to a society of free and equal persons. They don’t seem terribly keen on preserving institutions supporting the ‘full value of political liberties’- see their efforts to deprive the poor of voting rights in many states. AFAICT, conservatives are gung-ho about placing control of institutions and ‘productive means’ precisely in the hands of a few, and not at all in the hands of ‘citizens generally’. I can’t see conservatives accepting any theory that includes the phrase ‘dispersal of capital’, unless that phase is always preceded by ‘no’. And the lower taxes -> smaller government theme seems intended to destroy public institutions generally, excepting perhaps the military. Unless you count corporations as institutions I guess.
So if conservatives are opposed to a welfare state, but their actions reveal they are not going for a property-owning democracy either, then what exactly are they trying to accomplish? And: is their goal just?
The current conservative movement pays occasional lip service to property-owning democracy, but I believe it’s more interested in property-owning period. That concept of a “fair system of cooperation” has been gamed to the extreme. It is taken about as seriously as Fox News’ “fair and balanced.”
Mainstream conservative thought these days is pretty much loyal to the GOP caucus’ goal of getting itself elected and reelected through pandering to the loudest single bloc of voters on the hottest button issues.
I’m confused. Some guy writes an article, gives us some definition, and you tell us that conservatives must support one or the other. Huh? I’m not going to click on the PDF, but the prose in your second quote is more than a bit on the dense side. Am I wrong in reading that the author is comparing a “property-owning democracy” to a “liberal socialist regime”? Because if I’m not, that would explain a lot about why conservatives aren’t keen on that.
From what I know there are various factions within the conservative movement. Groups like evangelicals, plutocrats, libertarians, etc.
For the most part, from what I’ve seen of conservatives I know in person, most are opposed to big government when it doesn’t benefit them, or because they don’t understand how they use big government. A tea party coworker was upset that environmental regulations were gutted under local conservative leadership, and now his property is suffering. An aunt lives on SSDI and complains about welfare. Someone else I know doesn’t consider education a form of socialism because (for all intents and purposes) socialism is bad but universal education is good. So therefore universal access to education can’t be socialism.
My point is that don’t look for the tea partiers to be the first in line to give up their medicare and social security. If you are looking for a coherent philosophy you won’t find one and if mainstream conservatives actually had to live under the society they propose (very little infrastructure, few protections against the powerful, few safety nets, regressive taxes, etc), they’d back off a bit. to be fair those of us on the left complain about organizations like big oil and big pharma, then we go out and fill our gas tanks and take medications.
I wonder if the plutocrats are going to pull away from the GOP. For the most part what they want (lower taxes on higher income, fewer regulations, a lopsided legal system, etc) are things conservatives want. But they also want things like a competent government that doesn’t drive the economy off a cliff, or not having a government where a significant minority believe in end time theories. Or a gov where people like Palin and Bachmann would be in charge of major decisions.
So I don’t know. The coalition of libertarians, evangelicals, plutocrats, etc. seems shaky at best.
There could be a third (or more) way. I think Rawls stakes out a significant amount of territory, and the conservatives clearly aren’t aiming for that, so which is their star exactly?
A mishmash of contradictory goals; for decades, one hallmark of American conservatism has been incoherency. Various of their individual goals may be achievable, but put all together there’s no coherent plan or vision. They want low taxes and a large military, personal freedom and a state religion, economic freedom and absolute power to the corporations & wealthy, small government and a government that motors everyone for “immoral” behavior. They can’t ever get what they want because it’s a mass of logical contradictions. They aren’t just factionalized; even individual right wingers have goals that contradict each other.
The OP’s proof that the Republicans don’t favor law, property ownership, and individual worth is that they are “dismantling education” and trying to prevent the poor from voting. Failing to actually prove either of these points, there’s a not a lot to argue.
Republicans attempts to dismantle public education and disenfranchise poor and minority voters are well known. I expect the OP felt it no more necessary to “prove” such things that it is necessary to prove that the Republicans use an elephant as their symbol.
I don’t think the Republicans have a very good record in terms of enfranchisement.
However, they aren’t trying to dismantle education. They seem to want to take it over and purge it from what they see as promoting a “liberal, secularist” agenda. And when I say “they”, I mean many, not all. But that “many” is a lot.
Conservatives historically opposed womens rights and minority rights. Now they are passing ‘voter ID’ laws that are intended to set up roadblocks for demographics that lean democratic (non-whites, the poor, the disabled, young people, etc). So there is evidence of disenfranchisement.
Is that proof of a philosophical outlook, or proof of real politik? I may as well say that the Democratic party is anti-enfranchisement because they fought absentee voting from abroad (which would mean that a greater number of wealthy Americans are able to vote).
I’ll grant that it is generally better to rate someone based on what they do, rather than what they say, but the examples offered seem to merely point to political parties playing hard ball, not that they are following a particular political philosophy.
You are not being fair: it’s a blatant strawman combined with an undivided middle
Name one Conservative who has ever said that taxes should drop forever and that there should be no entitlements of any kind.
Then name one Leftist who has said that there should be no limits whatsoever to entitlements, including unlimited farm subsidies, and that taxes should be infinitely high.
Of course you cannot. That’s because both sides agree that both taxes and entitlements must necessarily be limited. The argument is over degree, not kind.
So if the right does not support a welfare state because it wishes to limit tax-funded healthcare to emergency procedure, then the left likewise does not support a welfare state because it does not support taxpayer funded nose-jobs or farm subsidies.
The right has all the same problems as the left has. The only difference is in degree, not in kind.
Well, it’s one other choice. It’s not a dichotomy.
Really? Can you name a single Conservative politician who has said that all education funding should be dismantled?
Or can you name a single Leftist politician who believes that education funding should be increased ad infinitum?
Because if you can’t you are once again engaging an undivided middle. Both sides agree that education funding must be limited and necessarily cut at some point. The difference is in degree, not in kind.
Seriously? You are arguing that unless education funding becomes infinitely high, we can’t have a society of free and equal persons? :dubious:
Really? Conservatives don’t support Libertarian institutions? Or institutions that give people the freedom to bear arms? Or freedom of corporations to make campaign contributions? In your world all those institutions are only supported by the Left?
Once again, you have engaged a blatant undivided middle. Both sides are keen on preserving some institutions that support the ‘full value of political liberties’, and keen on dismantling others.
The only difference is that you don’t feel as if firearm ownership or Corporate campaign donations or racist expression are worthy political liberties, so its OK when the Left opposes the NRA or political expression by Exxon. But it’s terrible when the right doesn’t want to preserve institutions that support liberties that the Left believes in.
Once again, the only difference between Left and Right is in degree, not in kind. Neither side is completely committed to all forms of political liberties, and both sides actively oppose institutions that protect political liberties. Your claim that Conservatives don’t support political liberty is just absurd.
I have no idea what you are referring to here, but how favourably does it compare to the efforts of the left to *directly *stifle the political expression of people who control corporations.
Really? Can we see some evidence for this? Because I have no idea how you came to such a conclusion.
So you think that Conservatives support the notion of heriditary peerage tied to title and land? Seriously, you think that conservatives oppose the ability of people to divide their wealth amongst numerous descendants? That they oppose “the laws of inheritance and bequest” that enable such a thing, and they support the medieval laws that compelled title and land to be bequeathed to just one heir?
Can we see some evidence?
Well why wouldn’t you count corporations?
And can you explain how lower taxes would destroy the following institutions:
Marriage?
The Sierra Club?
The Roman Catholic Church?
Network Television?
The Family?
Seriously, can you explain how the vast majority of institutions are affected *at all *by taxation levels?
What is interesting to see how closely your rhetoric matches that of the Right. They likewise decry the Left’s policy of “Interfering Big Government”, “Excessive Taxation” and “Nanny State Totalitarianism” for destroying institutions such as marriage, hunting and free enterprise.
Your “strive for inclusiveness and social responsibility” is their “oppressive tyranny of the common man”. And vice versa.
Same shit, different blowflies.
Well, as I have pointed out. Leftists are likewise opposed to a welfare state, but their actions also reveal they are not going for a property-owning democracy either.
It’s always worth considering these things from the other side. Your freedom fighter is their terrorist. The differences are not as distinct as you seem to believe.
Asking “what do conservatives want?” assumes that they actually desire progress…that conservatives have a plan and a vision of some kind. This is not necessarily a valid assumption. In fact, their whole approach is negative; it is no accident that the Republican party has become known as the party of no. They have demonized “libruls”, gays, pacifists, muslims, conservationists, educators, scientists, ethnic minorities, democrats, ad infinitum. I have no idea what, if anything they are actually for. The last good thing (some would say the only good thing) that G.W. Bush tried to do was to effect some kind of meaningful immigration reform, and his own party turned on him and blew it up.
This anti-intellectualism and lack of coherent vision has always affected right-wing movements. While it is not entirely fair to equate the American right-wingers with European fascists (nor, for that matter to compare Liberal Democrats with communists as republicans have done), there are some interesting parallels to the European experience in the first half of the 20th century. What follows is a prescient observation by a young American writer who travelled and studied in Europe during the 1930’s when that continent was aflame with the opposing passions of Fascism and Communism:
The right-wing movement in America does not seem to know what they really want…only what they don’t want. This inherent negativity makes them extremely dangerous in the short term, but also provides a ray of hope for the long haul. I can think of very few instances in history where a movement based on a negative, with no positive vision has been able to maintain long-term momentum. Fortunately, it carries the seeds of its own destruction.
SS
James A. Michener, The world is my Home, pp 247-248
For a self-professed amatuer’s promotion of a socialist economy, see Albert Einstein’s Why Socialism? Rawls isn’t taking that position.
Rawls goes into an interesting explanation of ‘the difference principle’ in section 13:
Rawls maps out on graphs a number of relations of the expectations of a the two groups- you know, how successful do they expect to be in life considering how they were born &etc. In just cases (the common factor between a ‘property-owning democracy’ and a ‘liberal socialist regime’), the rising fortunes of the most advantaged raises the fortunes of the least advantaged, and Rawls seeks to engineer which point is the most just. It’s a Theory of Justice remember, not a theory of maximum profit for the CEO. And Rawls ends up arguing for, IME, a larger allowance for inequality than a socialist would accept. It is all based on utilitarian math: assuming the more fortunate class is much smaller than the less, additional increases in the former’s expectations would amount to an overall larger total increase for the less fortunates’ (per capita!), and the optimum is more unequal than you might think. see pg 65-68.
Holy run-on sentence Batman. 46 words in one sentence.
Whenever i see someone after 1920 writing in this style, my immediate suspicion is “deliberate obfuscation”. I am almost always correct. The times I am wrong, the writer is almost always being a pretentious dick. There is just no excuse for this sort of prose after the early 20th century. It doesn’t aid the reader, or the writer and it doesn’t even have the excuse of being the style of the period. It is confusing and tedious.
In Modern English the passage is as follows:
“I contend that there are institutional frameworks needed to achieve equality of both freedom and opportunity. Additionally, people who already possess wealth and power have a much greater chance of becoming even more wealthy and powerful than people without those assets: Those What Have, Gets! If we accept these two points, then the greater opportunities for the privileged can only be considered fair if that advancement also produces advancement for the least powerful members of society.”
I had to read that sentence at least 12 times and parse every clause at least 3 times to produce that passage. This guy may be a great thinker, but he is a lousy writer in desperate need of an editor.
Additionally, I don’t see any reason to accept what he says. It appears to be a complete non-sequitur. Imagine a small railway town where the most priviliged people are all working 16 hour days, and the least powerful are all commune-dwelling hippies who feel no need to work. How exactly is it just to demand that all progress made by the working people must improve the expectations of those people who feel they do not need to work? What is just about that? What is unjust about the working people benefiting only themselves by their work?
If you are starting from an assumption that those two things inherently incompatible, then I think we can all see why Conservatives do not support it.
And a lot of apparently unwarranted assumptions
That isn’t an assumption, it is a fudge factor. You can always define “more fortunate” in such a way that it is much smaller than the less, and conversely you can always define “more fortunate” in such a way that it is much larger.
This is just begging the question. There is no rational justification for claiming that anyone on or above the mean wage is not “more fortunate” than those who are below that wage. Yet such people, by definition, outnumber the less fortunate.
It appears that ll this person has done is produced a de facto socialist policy by simply begging the question. Hardly surprising that conservatives reject such a policy.
Nah, he’s writing long sentences full of terms he spent a book defining. Well ok he may need an editor too, but I don’t think you have read enough of it to make these claims.
He’s talking about equal(ish) opportunity, not a bunch of hippies. And I haven’t exactly quoted the entire book- you’re rushing ahead here.
Is there any point at which disparity becomes unjust? How about the theoretical limit, in which one person owns everything? If preventing that outcome requires any mechanism at all for redistributing capital, it seems conservatives will always label that as ‘socialism’.
As practiced, the conservative position these days appears to replace the social safety net with… more tax cuts for wealthy people who don’t even need them. Its just an accident of the clashing of the internal factions of the conservative camp, not intentional at all! Oh, and crashing the stock market for a seemingly philosophically empty ideology. It does seem unjust to a lot of people, especially since circumstances don’t warrant such drastic effects.
Hm… at least read it. I provided a cite. Then talk about assumptions.
Your last post seemed to have more content and I hope to get to that one later. I’ll do my best to provide textual specifics that clear up your misapprehensions, but I don’t always have a lot of time. At least look at the pdf.
The problem is that he is writing 50 word sentences. That’s just not justified after the early 20th century. I’ve done my fair share of technical writing, including a couple of 300+ page theses, and of course I have read a lot more.
Self-defined terms should be defined in an effort to reduce sentence length and increase readability. If the defined terms are leading to increased sentence length and decreased readability, the writer has failed.
I can only make my judgement on what you posted here. You can not seriously expect to quote extracts from a 200 page, dense, unreadable essay to support your argument, and then expect people to read the whole thing.
If the quotations are not making your point out of context then there isn’t much point posting them. You need to present your arguments in your own words, because the author of this article isn’t making your argument for you.
So you and I are in agreement that some people, such as these hippies, do not deserve equality of opportunity in a just system, even when they are the least privileged members of society
Then we are reaching agreement, because the sections you quoted say that any system that does not advance opportunities for these hippies is inherently unjust.
See above.
Once more, this is a blatant strawman built on an undivided middle.
Name me a single conservative who believes that all taxes and all anti-trust and competition laws are socialism. Because if you can not do that then clearly this is just a caricature of the position of real life conservatives. It is as ludicrous as claims that all Leftists want people to live in caves with no electricity.
Once more, the difference is in degree, not kind. Both Left and Right agree that taxes cannot be infinite, and the social safety net must take effect after a fall from some level (hence the term safety net). Neither side believes, or at least admits belief, that the safety net should lead to perfect wealth redistribution or should be abolished altogether.
First off I don’t see that at all. Once more, I ask you to quote a single conservative who believes in replacing the social safety net with tax cuts. Your argument seems to becoming more based upon caricatures as time goes on.
Secondly, who gets to decide who “needs” tax cuts? From those according to their ability, with Politburo deciding on ability? What does it even mean to say that somebody “needs” a tax cut?
So your position in this thread hinges upon an even more contentious position that is being argued in numerous other threads, and is thus even less clear.
This is a textbook example of begging the question. Basically you are arguing that Republicans are stupid and evil and misguided based on an unproven assertion that that they are stupid and evil and misguided.
I will simply point out that the expert consensus is that the current crash is primarily due to the European debt fiasco. A fiasco brought about largely because of unfunded Socialist policies. IOW Leftists crashed the stock market for a seemingly philosophically empty ideology. That seems unjust to a lot of people, especially since circumstances don’t warrant such drastic effects.
So you make an argument, support it with quotations, and when the quotations are shown to be unreliable you respond that we need to read the entire freakin’ book in order to judge *your *argument?
I will judge your argument on the basis of the argument presented here. Maybe this book is insightful and convincing, but the argument you have presented here, including the book extracts, is unconvincing.
“Just read someone else’s argument in someone’ else’s book” doesn’t make for a debate at all, much less a great one.
That’s not a particularly unusual sentence in the field. I don’t know how much technical reading you’ve done in political theory or political science, but that sentence isn’t of unusual length or complexity.