For the record, the term “liberal” as I use it is the way it is commonly understood in most of the world, including Europe. It is only in the US that the term has come to mean practically the opposite of what it once did. With hope, the term as used here will eventually revert to meaning advocacy of liberty.
People keep telling me that my control over things is my vote. Same same for you, isn’t it? Isn’t it the case that if enough of us insist on an end to tyranny, it will have an effect or no? Because if I am a solitary loon gibbering in the corner as Merijeek says, I’d appreciate your being honest with me. If my vote indeed means nothing, tell me so.
The rational thing to do in that case is to use it in the European sense when speaking with Europeans and in the American sense when speaking with Americans. Thinking that you’re going to change the meaning in America is, quite frankly, nutty. Words are just sounds, and they mean whatever a group of speakers want them to mean.
Otherwise you’re just going to have to keep explaining yourself over and over again. You wouldn’t want to do that, now, would you?
With still more respect, I’m afraid that statement is a slight exaggeration, which I’ve frequently seen presented in US libertarian propaganda, but often contradicted by non-US usage.
Yes, outside the US the term “liberal” does often mean “conservative-liberal”/classical-liberal/libertarian policies or principles of the sort you advocate. You’re right that that sense of “liberal” is more familiar in Europe than in the US. But the word “liberal” is also often understood outside the US as meaning the same thing “liberal” commonly means in the US and Canada: namely, social-liberal advocacy of a moderately leftist viewpoint that champions individual rights but also relies largely on central government regulation and initiatives to accomplish major policy goals.
To take just one example, consider the UK’s Liberal Democrats party, most of whose policy positions, although they speak favorably of individual rights and decentralized power, are positively awash in what you would doubtless consider abject statism:
Depends what kind of tyranny you’re talking about. If you happen to be chafing under the tyranny of universal gravitation, as in my earlier example, then no, insisting on an end to it won’t accomplish jack shit. Not even if all of us voted against it for a month of Sundays.
Similarly, I do not believe that it’s humanly possible in complex societies to achieve the end of political tyranny (using “tyranny” in its common libertarian sense of “exercise of power by any partly-autonomous legally recognized authority figures whose effective accountability to those subject to their authority is incomplete”), no matter how much we “insist” on it.
Exercise of legally recognized power by the imperfectly accountable is inevitable in complex human societies. If we get rid of the tyranny of Congress and Chief Executive, we’ll have the tyranny of the judiciary, the arbiters, the army, and/or the plutocrats. We can to some extent choose what type of “tyranny” we prefer (so to that extent our votes certainly are meaningful), but we cannot choose to abolish “tyranny” entirely.
Like I’ve always said, the libertarian principle of complete individual autonomy and completely voluntary social cooperation with no coercion of any kind has many noble aspects. And I’ve always maintained that it could work in a real-world society—as long as that society was about the size of a string quartet. In modern societies shown actual size, however, it is impossible to function without some exercise of centralized power. And that inevitably entails what libertarians call “tyranny”.
Your respect is greatly appreciated. It is nice (and rare here) not to be considered a lunatic simply for my political views.
Well then, wouldn’t you at least concede that my usage is not outside the common usage? There are other Dopers who understand the term the way I do as well. Maastricht, for example. She’s from The Netherlands.
I think it is the opposite. It is less likely to work well in a small society, and more likely to work well in a large one.
(Incidentally, you can stop with the laws of gravity. That’s an equivocation, and the analogy does not hold since it is an immutable physical law as opposed to an arbitrary ethic.)
Oh Lib, I certainly don’t consider you a lunatic simply…nah, never mind, too easy.
In Europe, you mean? Sure I would, in fact I thought I already did.
Hmmm, well, it’s differences of opinion that make horse races. Like I said, though, the thing about an increasingly large and complex society is that it becomes harder and harder to get major things done in it without the exercise of some form of coercive power. Wholly voluntary cooperative action, on a large and sustained scale, simply isn’t practical (at least, as long as its voluntary nature is genuine, and not just a fig leaf cloaking effective coercive power).
Nopity nope nope nope nope. The point I’m making is precisely that some things about human societies are NOT merely an indefinitely mutable arbitrary ethic. They are rooted in human biological and cultural heritage, just as the effects of gravity are rooted in the laws of physics. They are certainly somewhat more malleable and less predictable than the action of gravity, but I firmly believe that we can NOT simply get rid of them just by deciding that we don’t want them in our societies anymore. Their basic impulses and effects are fundamentally ineradicable.
IMHO, libertarians are falling into the same folly that seduced the Communists: imagining that they could rationally construct an “intentional” society based on their choices about which parts of human nature they approved of and which parts they wanted to get rid of. It didn’t work for the Communists, and it won’t work for the libertarians, even if they ever do take an opportunity to try it.
By the way, aren’t we supposed to be talking about some guy named Trent Lott here? Should we maybe call a halt to this and return to the regularly scheduled rant?
With one-liners like this, you get to pretend that your opinions regarding policy questions are merely a matter of linguistic usage, and, thus, imply that it is matter of scientific fact that anyone who “loves liberty” must, by definition, reach the same conclusions you have regarding public policy. That’s demagoguery.
It’s a philosophical principle called spontaneous order. It is a central tenet of Austrian economic philosophy (Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, et al.) It is also applied in social philosophies about the evolution of language and so forth.
It’s been awhile since I read those guys. Good recall.
I think it also explains the success of something like wikipedia, that many people are baffled by. How can something as open as wikipedia is be any good at all? I heard a fascinating interview by the creator of wikipedia on NPR* a while back, and he was very good at explaining exactly how it self corrects.
*No coercion was used in my listening to that program, though.
We have a new “law” on the SDMB. Every thread, if it is open long enough, eventually devolves into a discussion of libertarian philosophy, not Hitler or NAZIs.
