Your Political Philosophy

[Bpelta]

@tomndebb

Bpelta, over half of your threads have been started in the wrong forum.[ /Moderating ]

FTR, 2 of the 5 threads I have started were on the wrong board and I apologize for those. I was a bit confused about the difference between the sorts of threads regarding politics and religion which belong in IMHO and The Great Debates. I “get it” now.

[kelly5078]

I support a social safety net for those unable to work, and I think Social Security should be sacrosanct (and definitely not in any way dependent on the market).
I would like to see a single-payer health care system.
I think the size of the military should be reduced, and that every significant military adventure this country has undertaken in my lifetime has been a boondoggle, so it should be a lot more difficult for us to go to war.
I support the first amendment with no limitations. I support the second with some limitations.
I believe that corporations largely control the government, and that this is criminal. I think that considering a corporation as a person is lunacy.
I think the government has no business inside a woman’s body, although on ethical grounds I don’t like abortion.
Education should be given more than lip service. Teaching to tests is idiotic.
I support the complete separation of church and state.
Free trade is as bad as protectionism.
Snowmobilers in Yellowstone should be shot on sight.

[BrainGlutton]

I usually identify myself as a “democratic socialist,” but sometimes as a “progressive” . . . what I mean by these terms is a bit complicated. In a nutshell, I believe a good society should pass John Rawls’ veil of ignorance test: It should be a society into which a rational person would want to be born, even without knowing what circumstances (social class, gender, wealth, ethnicity) one would be born into.

Put another way: Ronald Reagan, accepting the GOP nomination in 1980, said, “We are the party who wants an America where you can always get rich,” or words to that effect. :dubious: Thank you, I would much rather have an America where it is all but impossible to be poor.

This might help put my position in perspective, philosophically: From “Which Civilisation?” by Michael Lind, Prospect, 10/25/01:

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

In this schema, I would place myself midway between the humanist camp and the socialist wing of the rationalist camp. I don’t necessarily believe in the state taking over the whole economy, nor any particular part of it; I just believe that reason does have very great power and as-yet-unrealized power to improve human society, and that we should move in a direction of greater community and equality-of-outcome very gradually, learning at every step from mistakes and the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The first step is a basic political-electoral reform, to adopt proportional representation, so that some socialist parties can get a chance to run for office on their own terms and win at least minority shares of seats in some legislatures, propose some forms in their general desired direction, get some of those implemented, and, if those work out, maybe get rewarded by the voters with more seats next election. And then, maybe, eventually, socialism or something that can be called that with a straight face. Lenin was being incredibly hubristic when he declared, “We shall now proceed to build the socialist order,” assuming that just because his Bolsheviks had the right ideology they knew how to run something as complex as a national economy. Nothing is ever that simple.

If you’re a Libertarian – consider how, if your ideas are valid, the same process described above could work in your favor: We get a PR system. The Libertarians run as Libertarians and get representation in some state legislatures in Congress, get seats on some committees, and are there constantly pushing to decriminalize this or deregulate that or abolish this tax or cut that spending allocation or eliminate this government agency. Sometimes, in the course of logrolling-bargaining for their votes to support a major party’s bill, they’ll get something they want. If it works out in real life as the Libertarians claimed it would, the public sits up and takes notice, and in the next election the Libertarians get more seats. They get some more reforms; maybe they don’t work out as intended, but with a little tweaking and tinkering, they turn out to be worthwhile and beneficial in a way that is obvious even to persons who do not accept the Libertarians’ ideology or value system. Eventually, through this process, the Libertarians become a major party, maybe even a majority party. And then we get something much nearer to a workable Libertopia than than what we would get (i.e., an American Somalia) if a Libertarian Revolution overthrew the status quo all at once.

It is even conceivable that, after a few decades, we can achieve a society at which both Socialists and Libertarians can point and say, “Yes! We won! This is it! This is exactly what we wanted all along!”

Now, maybe “democratic socialist” is not the right word for my position as described here. Maybe “progressive” is a better word. Fine by me, I have often argued on this board that “progressive,” as the word is used nowadays (as opposed to how it was used in Teddy Roosevelt’s day) actually means something well to the right of “socialist” and something well to the left of “liberal.” Certainly most self-identified American progressives, such as those of the Vermont Progressive Party or New York’s Working Families Party, are not demanding anything like class war, immediate expropriation and socialization of the means of production, etc., and do not seem to be influenced at all by Marxist thinking, not even in the attenuated way that the Democratic Socialists of America is.

For more on how I perceive the difference, earlier post of mine:

In this recent article, political commentator Michael Lind argues that “progressives” should drop that label and start calling themselves “liberals” again – revive that once-honorable name, instead of trying to distance themselves from the RW’s demonization of it by rebranding. Reasons given:

1. It’s futile – the RW is going to bash the center-left based on its policies, whatever name it uses.

2. Neoliberals have tried to appropriate the name “progressive” for themselves, which makes it rather confusing.

3. Radical leftists – socialists and Communists of various stripes – have done the same.

4. There is also risk of confusion with the early 20th-Century Progressives, whose politics were substantially different from all of the above.

5. The word “progressive” is “too German,” deriving as it does from Germany’s bureaucratically-oriented 19th-Century Deustche Fortschrittspartei (the word Fortschritt means "progress), whereas liberalism proper is rooted in values and civil liberties, not state action.

6. The most interesting objection: The world “progressive” implies “progress,” which is not necessarily a liberal value.

Unlike progressivism and conservatism, liberalism is not a name that implies a view that things are either getting better or getting worse. Liberalism is a theory of a social order based on individual civil liberties, private property, popular sovereignty and democratic republican government. Liberals believe that liberal society is the best kind, but they are not committed to believing in universal progress toward liberalism, much less universal progress in general. Many liberals have been skeptical about the idea of unlimited progress and have believed that a liberal society is difficult to establish and easily changed into a nonliberal society.

Because liberalism refers to a particular kind of social order, and does not depend on any implied relationship of the present to the past or future, liberals can be either progressive or conservative, depending on whether they seek to move toward a more liberal system or to maintain a liberal system that already exists. For that matter, liberals can be revolutionary, if creating or establishing a liberal society requires a violent revolution. Liberals can even be counterrevolutionary, if they are defending a liberal society from revolutionary radicals, including anti-liberal revolutionaries of the radical right like Timothy McVeigh or Muslim jihadists.

7. “Liberal” is, or could be once again, a badge of pride. It describes an American political tradition with an honorable history and great achievements to its credit.

Those, then, are six arguments in favor of using liberalism to describe the center-left. I’ve reserved the seventh for last. The word “liberal” is a badge of pride. What is more embarrassing in 2008, to be associated with self-described liberals like Roosevelt and Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Jordan, or with conservatives like Reagan and George W. Bush and Tom DeLay? I much prefer the public philosophy of the mid-century liberals, for all their blunders and shortcomings, to that of the three movements in American history that have called themselves progressive: the moderate-to-conservative progressives of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and 1990s; the deluded pro-Soviet progressives of the mid-20th century; and the Anglo-Protestant elite progressives of the 1900s, who admired Bismarck’s Germany and wanted to keep out immigrants and sterilize the native poor.

All very good reasons, to be sure; very persuasive and cogently argued; but I object for the following two reasons:

1. The word “liberal,” as Liberal will shortly be showing up to remind us, also is prone to ideological confusion. In the 19th Century it meant more or less what we call “libertarianism” today, which, at least in its modern incarnation, is also very, very different from what Lind considers “liberal” as described above.

2. In my judgment, in contemporary American political discourse, the word “progressive” actually means something, and not what Lind seems to think it does. Specifically, it means something well to the left of “liberal” and well to the right of “socialist.” It is the political position of America’s erstwhile NDP-inspired New Party, or the Working Families Party, or the Vermont Progressive Party – any of which is easily distinguishable from even such a moderate socialist organization as the Democratic Socialists of America. Their politics is that of the social democrats of Europe. They don’t envision wholesale expropriation of wealth or socialization of all means of production, but they do regard greater socioeconomic equality as an important end-in-itself, and they do regard movement in that direction as a form of “progress,” and they do believe in the idea of “universal progress in general.” The American Greens – at least, the main body of them, the Green Party of the United States – are a branch of American progressives. (There is also a smaller and distinctly far-leftist, Marxist-influenced party, the Greens/Green Party USA.) And progressivism so defined is an important political tendency, far more important in American politics today than socialism as such – and, I think may become much more important in coming decades. The word “progressive” is worth preserving in American political discourse because it denotes that political tendency as no other term in current usage adequately does.

[BrainGlutton]

@Wesley_Clark

As much as people might want to think their political philosophies are due to rationality, a good deal of it is emotional and due to personality factors. Then you find the rational justifications later.

Isn’t that how it should be?

[Oakminster]

@BrainGlutton

Put another way: Ronald Reagan, accepting the GOP nomination in 1980, said, “We are the party who wants an America where you can always get rich,” or words to that effect. :dubious: Thank you, I would much rather have an America where it is all but impossible to be poor.

And therein lies our basic disagreement. I’m with Ronnie. I want the freedom to achieve whatever my talents may allow. If that turns out to be little or nothing, well, sucks to be me. If that turns out to be hookers and blow in truly epic quantities, then it would rock to be me. Not for very long, probably, but still a helluva ride. If that turns out to be somewhere in the middle, as it probably will, that’s ok. The world owes me nothing. I rise or fall on my own merit.

[Acid_Lamp]

Hmm, I guess i’m sort of a political frankenstein.

Generally speaking I think that government and bureaucracy should be as small and efficient as possible. On the other hand I also believe that we need a great deal more federal oversight and regulation in certain areas. Education for example should have a federally approved curricula as a minimum standard. I think that we need to vastly simplify most of our processes to eliminate time waste in response to issues. I support a strongly regulated capitalistic system that rewards careful growth and punishes cheaters and loophole abusers. I think that the judicial system also needs a good deal of simplification and lot more enforcement of the spirit of the law rather than mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance laws. I place a high value on all personal freedoms and believe that you should have carte blanche to act so far as your actions do no harm to someone else. Socially, I’m quite liberal and support gay rights, the right to choose, the right to die, and would like to completely eliminate the financial powers of religion. I support the second amendment with limitations and am a gun owner myself.

[sisu]

@Mr.Excellent

Well, it’s not as if it’s an all-or-nothing deal. I try to hold those political views which best reflect certain core values (civil libertarianism, an abhorrence of racism, etc) and which seem to function best in the real world. I support high taxes and the largest social safety net we can muster, for example, because states that run their economies in this way seem to do well in the UNDP Human Development Index, and there’s a sound argument to be made that this is because the government has a lot of money to throw at development problems. I believe in the broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment because I find controlling speech, protest or belief to be both morally repugnant and a policy that tends to fail in the real world. And so on.

I generally vote for Democrats, but that doesn’t mean I swallow the platform wholesale. I dislike affirmative action, for example, and I’m a bigger fan of free international trade than many (but by no means all) Democrats in office - because I believe, based on the information we have, that it tends to do more good than harm.

You sound like most Australians, very sensible, pragmatic and idealistic at the same time.

[Max_the_Immortal]

Decisions about social spending should be made along practical lines rather than ideological lines. Any given program may or may not be worth the drag on economic growth caused by the taxes necessary to fund it. A knee-jerk “big government is bad” argument isn’t nearly as compelling as arguing that a particular program is simply too expensive for the benefit it provides.

@Oakminster

And therein lies our basic disagreement. I’m with Ronnie. I want the freedom to achieve whatever my talents may allow. If that turns out to be little or nothing, well, sucks to be me. If that turns out to be hookers and blow in truly epic quantities, then it would rock to be me. Not for very long, probably, but still a helluva ride. If that turns out to be somewhere in the middle, as it probably will, that’s ok. The world owes me nothing. I rise or fall on my own merit.

And I’m not too keen on being surrounded by people who have failed “on their own merit” if such a situation can be avoided with a little cooperation.

[bjbrashier]

So much to comment on, here. I’ll try to limit myself.

Richard Parker had a good description of the hows and whys of my choices and why they often don’t conform to a party line. As with Oakminster, I believe the Constitution exists to limit the power of the State and protect the individual. As such, I also was frequently at odds with the Bush administration, though not JUST the Bush administration by any stretch.

I’m agnostic (with atheistic leanings), pro life, pro gun, pro civil unions (incl. same sex), but anti gay-marriage, pro MINIMAL safety net, anti big government. I’ve stayed away from posting on these forums for many years because I know how left-leaning this board (and the Master) is. I tend to side with Republican ideals, yet have had a REALLY HARD TIME finding Repub candidates that actually carry these ideals. I identify more strongly with Libertarian ideals, but have yet to find a Libertarian candidate who isn’t totally off their rocker.

I’m of the belief that greatest good outweighs all else, but that (as someone pointed out recently) greatest good isn’t often well served by blanket policy. I’m also of the opinion that greatest good isn’t served by a large safety net (as this breeds poor choices), and that greatest good IS often served by improved economy. As such, I tend to make choices (such as votes) toward positive economic growth.

I came to my views circuitously. I was raised rather Republican, and in areas that were similarly oriented. However, in Junior High, I moved to Santa Cruz, California – about as far from Repub as you get. I became a Democrat – partly through skewed teaching, partly through a “me too” attitude from association. I stayed Democratic through college. When I left college and entered the working world, now in Seattle (also highly “blue”), I questioned all of my “handed down” beliefs and started forming my own (which is what I thought I had done when I turned Dem). I was raising a family, trying to save, trying to invest for the future, and so on. I saw people taking advantage of govt handouts, and I saw what a difference a few percentage points of income tax or sales tax made. I saw what values I wanted my children to have. For myself, my conclusion was that Democratic hearts are in the right place, but that the methods don’t seem to work (WA had higher unemployment than most states for many years). I started running the math on various programs and coming up with the idea that smaller govt is better.

I think that government has to be the exact size it needs to be, and not one bit smaller.

I agree completely. There are definitely things that a large government MUST do that simply cannot be done piecemeal by smaller entities. I think we’d strongly disagree on where to draw the line, however. I think the government exists to limit (preferably destroy) coercion by Force or by Fraud. One thing we agree on: The FDA.

The left isn’t perfect, but right now, the Conservative side in this country is run by morons.

I’ll grant you that, with the caveat that sometimes them Liberals ain’t all that great, either.

For what it’s worth, I’m for Obama as a person. I think he’s great, upstanding, and I’m happy to have him representing me from an ethical point of view. I’m happier with his character than I would have been with, say, McCain. I disagree with some of his spending choices, though.

I read something in psych today about childhood behaviors and how kids with some behaviors grew up to be conservative while others were more liberal.

If that’s the case, how does it account for the fact that populous areas vote Democratic, and rural areas vote Republican? Do these same behaviors dictate where one chooses to live?

Any given program may or may not be worth the drag on economic growth caused by the taxes necessary to fund it.

Precisely!

[DMark]

I guess I just feel that people should do what they can to help others less fortunate, and at the same time, stay out of personal lives as long as what others are doing does not harm anyone else.

For the most part, Democrats seem more willing to cough up funds for the poor and the sick and those who need it, plus they seem more willing to accept that not everyone is male, white and heterosexual.

I just find that a lot of the Republican platforms are mean-spirited, no matter how hard they try to candy-coat the subject. I often get the feeling many people want to go back to the “good old days” when minorities knew their place and shut up.

[Blaster_Master]

As a libertarian, my political philosophy boils down to a very simple concept, the maximization of liberty. This naturally leads to a minimization and decentralization of government, large scale backs on taxation and regulation, and maximization and protection of individual liberties. However, this also has to take on some matter of pragmatism in that I realize that not all of my ideals are necessarily achievable today or even necessarily within my lifetime, so to some degree, I’m willing to accept lesser options, provided they are closer to those ends rather than steps away from them.

The problem I usually encounter is that neither major party is anywhere close to matching my views, where Republicans tend to be a little better on smaller government and individual liberty, Democrats tend to be better on issues of civil liberties. However, another part of my philosophy is a refusal to vote for the lesser of two evils. I’m okay with voting for a candidate that doesn’t perfectly represent my philosophy, but there comes a point where a candidate is far enough away from my views that he isn’t worth voting for, even if he’s the closest one that “has a chance of winning”, because often views that differ enough mean that, while they may get closer in some regards, they’ll more often do damage in others. As such, I will always vote for the candidate I feel is most in line with my views, which often means third party, and if no candidate is sufficiently close, I will make a point of expressing so with a write-in.

[Mr.Excellent]

@sisu

You sound like most Australians, very sensible, pragmatic and idealistic at the same time.

Thanks - I doubt I could ever make it as an actual Australian, though. You guys have far too many animals that could kill me. I’d be dead inside a week

[septimus]

Political “philosophy” depends on which way the pendulum has been pushed too far. Your voting choices depend on what’s available.

As a centrist, I might find myself voting for right-of-center politics in European countries where social democracy has gone too far. In U.S.A. I’d rather vote towards the “left” since our social democracy doesn’t go far enough. Instead I have to vote for the right-of-center Democrats since there’s no real alternative. I’d like to believe rational-minded conservatives would also vote Democrat in U.S.A. these days – the GOP has become a hideous embarassment.

[Hari_Seldon]

Mostly I am pragmatic, what works. But I have a strong libertarian streak. I wish more people would mind their own business. I notice that most libertarians are opposed to anti-smoking laws and in favor of anti-drug laws. Exactly the reverse of me. If you want to smoke go ahead, kill yourself (I almost did–heart attack at age 28), but keep your smoke out of my face. But if you want to eat hasg brownies, go right ahead. A week ago, a hundred cops raided a hash farm not far from here. Don’t they have better things to do? Of course, I really blame the members of parliament who won’t repeal the laws. I guess they are in the pay of the drug mobs (for whom repeal would be a disaster).

Non-libertarian opinions: I am in favor of gun control laws because they work. The first murder of the year here i Montreal was last month. What American city of over a million can say that? Pragmatic, as I said. I love, absolutely love, the Canadian Health Care system. It works and administrative costs are held to a minimum. Yes, there are problems, mainly delays for elective surgery. But what the hell, we pay about 60% of what Americans do and have, on average, better outcomes. We pay relatively high taxes for that, worth every cent. And you don’t see the abject poverty you see in American cities.

Oh yes, our banks mostly kept of vacuum-backed securities and came through fine with no bailouts. They are highly regulated and will stay that way. I believe that any organization “too big to fail” is just too big.

Unlike most big gov’t advocates, however, I am a strong believer in balanced budgets. Our budgets were balanced between 1995 and 2008 (actually large surpluses that drained the debt significantly), until spending went into high gear, on account of the recession (which has not had a great impact there). I approve of spending during a recession; that’s what the previous surpluses gave the gov’t the ability to do. Clinton had huge surpluses, of course, but Bush took care of that right quick.

When voting in the US (which I still do), I have never been able to bring myself to vote for a Republican. Not that I am crazy about most Dems either. Enough.