I don't want to turn this into a political discussion and we obviously aren't going to agree on political principles anyway, which is fine. My point was that it's unhelpful to see the current conflict as between "the Right" and "the Left", but much more helpful to see it as a relatively trivial squabble between different wings of the Liberal Monoparty which has consolidated its grip on the political systems of most western countries. And such squabbles are, by definition, the most bitter and most violent, paradoxically because the stakes are so small (think Freud, but also think magical movements, or even academic politics, which is one explanation for the bitterness of the SJW movement.) The two tendencies within the Monoparty agree on soaking the poor and giving money to the rich, but disagree violently on access to toilets and use of pronouns. One tendency is trying publicly and violently to wrest control at the moment, as often happens in one-party states. The Liberal Monoparty did not happen by accident, although its creation is easier to understand outside the US, because political evolutions there are very untypical. They first took over parties of the Right from the 1970s, and I can't imagine a Burkean conservative like you would have been very happy at the whirlwind economic and socially revolutionary consequences for those parties. Then they came for the Left, and, because there was an ideological edge to the confrontation they couldn't just promise power, as they did to the Right; they had to trash the traditional ideology of the Left as well. Thus, the contempt of politicians like Clinton and Blair for the principles of the parties that had brought them to power. (As I pointed out, such politicians never claimed to be from the Left, and never stopped sneering at its principles) Thus also, the substitution of Liberal, elite middle-class ideology, whose greatest exponents are the management consultant, the financial analyst and the contract lawyer, for any set of principles based on what people actually want and need. I don't know whether you have this phenomenon in the US, but in Europe, you are starting to see a rapprochement between the traditional (pre-1970s, non-liberal) Right, and the traditional (pre-90s non-liberal) Left, on issues like sovereignty and the defence of communities. We can debate the relative merits of political systems. I was born just after WW2, and grew up in a society with free health care and education, jobs for all, and, most of all, opportunities for people from very ordinary backgrounds to succeed in life. That's why I didn't have to leave school at fifteen to do unskilled work in the local light engineering factories, but could spend another decade in education, and why I'm typing this at the moment. My children's generation are worse off in every way. For me, this is an adequate argument for supporting policies of the Left, but of course such views remain subjective at the end. What isn't subjective, though, is the replacement of the traditional Left/Right scheme of politics by a dominant Monoparty with a radical Liberal ideology on the one hand, and a mass of people who are disenfranchised on the other.
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branchandroot
Re: Trump, Miller, and COVID-19
Date: 2020-10-05 04:45 pm (UTC)The Liberal Monoparty did not happen by accident, although its creation is easier to understand outside the US, because political evolutions there are very untypical. They first took over parties of the Right from the 1970s, and I can't imagine a Burkean conservative like you would have been very happy at the whirlwind economic and socially revolutionary consequences for those parties. Then they came for the Left, and, because there was an ideological edge to the confrontation they couldn't just promise power, as they did to the Right; they had to trash the traditional ideology of the Left as well. Thus, the contempt of politicians like Clinton and Blair for the principles of the parties that had brought them to power. (As I pointed out, such politicians never claimed to be from the Left, and never stopped sneering at its principles) Thus also, the substitution of Liberal, elite middle-class ideology, whose greatest exponents are the management consultant, the financial analyst and the contract lawyer, for any set of principles based on what people actually want and need. I don't know whether you have this phenomenon in the US, but in Europe, you are starting to see a rapprochement between the traditional (pre-1970s, non-liberal) Right, and the traditional (pre-90s non-liberal) Left, on issues like sovereignty and the defence of communities.
We can debate the relative merits of political systems. I was born just after WW2, and grew up in a society with free health care and education, jobs for all, and, most of all, opportunities for people from very ordinary backgrounds to succeed in life. That's why I didn't have to leave school at fifteen to do unskilled work in the local light engineering factories, but could spend another decade in education, and why I'm typing this at the moment. My children's generation are worse off in every way. For me, this is an adequate argument for supporting policies of the Left, but of course such views remain subjective at the end. What isn't subjective, though, is the replacement of the traditional Left/Right scheme of politics by a dominant Monoparty with a radical Liberal ideology on the one hand, and a mass of people who are disenfranchised on the other.