Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Unicorns exist!

 

To add to what @ultrabike is saying, in Classical Liberalism (the history/basis of our form of government) government should be "limited" because of human nature. Since human nature is corrupt (i.e. men are not angels and their hearts are always (always) corrupt to an extent), then the external system/process of government itself should be limited in such a way that the 'space' as it were for individuals, families, and civil institutions should be as wide as possible, and the government's ability to direct/control these institutions should be limited as much as possible. It does not matter if today this particular politician or policy is as pure as the driven snow, sooner or later internal/external corruption will creep in and it will start to do as much (or more) harm than good.

All that said, the foundational premise of a corrupt (or just plain limited) human nature has largely been forgotten in the past 60 years or so. It used to rest on the 'Protestant Consensus', that vague cultural acceptance of a minimal "Christian America" that lasted up until the 1960's or thereabouts. Now that that anthropology is refuted, the progressive left and the libertarian right are grasping for an anthropology and basis for their beliefs. The left has mostly shifted to a kind of historical materialism (examples being critical race theory/BLM/unlimited and inherently righteous government) that has more in common with Hegelian-Marxist inevitability than anything else. The right has more memory and (mostly unconscious) acceptance of corrupt human nature, though they have no idea how to articulate and support it in today's public square and cultural language/environment. Thus most often they just sound like shrill "don't tread on me" semi-anarchistic libertarians.

 

Size of the government bureaucracy is a huge problem in terms of limiting people freedom. Large number of civil servants depending on the state for their salaries and wellbeing will naturally gravitate towards giving the state any power the state require to protect the bureaucracy from public scrutiny and oversight. It is not a coincidence that Germany in the Bismarck era and Russia before the revolution had the largest bureaucracy that ever existed. It was a political class that never objected to any power grab by the state and destruction of democracy, actually they supported it. Those bureaucracies transitioned very comfortably to the Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

 

Fundamentally I think it really boils down to quite a simple concept. We spend so much time talking about how institutions (private or public tbh) generally speaking fail to provide a fair and just society even when they are specifically legislatively controlled to avoid bias and bad behavior. I have never understood why roiding up one side of the public-private balance has ever been proposed as a reasonable solution. Making a flawed system more centralized and/or more powerful isn't a good idea.

To me I think we all agree we want people to live well. We all want people to have housing, healthcare, happiness, etc.

To me it comes back to the fact that no matter what system you set up you need strong moral leadership. And that isn't an institutional problem. It's not a legislative problem. This is a multigenerational undertaking that requires that we reorient our values as a society.

 

Eh that’s a reach. The poor and disabled in this country lean more liberal.

and you’re leaving out corporations! Less govt does not equal more freedom in a black and white way. Sometimes it does but sometimes it means less freedom because individuals get to do whatever they want, mostly rich individuals who have the power to, and they intrude on your freedom because the government doesn’t stop them with regulations to protect YOU. Like a corporation dumpling toxic waste in your front yard. Good for them less freedom for you.

how about my favorite simple example: traffic laws. We all hate them I know. But without them a small number of people would wind up with more freedom on the road driving like maniacs and the vast majority would wind up with less freedom because of how treacherous and dangerous the roads and driving would be.

it’s a balancing act. Too many traffic laws and it stops giving us freedom from crazy individuals and starts restricting all of us.

sound familiar? Extrapolate this example to the rest of society. It’s the same balancing act.

it ain’t as black and white as the Tea Party makes it out to be.

 

nicely worded you’re obviously intelligent. But I disagree.

I’ve come up with a theory that conservatives are less understanding of interconnectedness. How we depend on each other in a society for nearly everything. Conservatives are holding onto what I call “The Cowboy Mentality” which basically stems from the Wild West and frontier era in America where a lot of people moved out on their own and really did depend on mostly just themselves, not a society around them. (Though they got lots of goods and materials from other people so it’s always been kind of a lie). But this caused an American culture to develop around a strong sense of individualism. Which works when you live in a log cabin in the woods and grow/hunt your own food and the human population is a fraction of what it is today.

Cities tend to be more liberal not just because of more education like people like to say, it’s more because they are acutely aware of interconnectedness and the need for a system to make their interactions and dependency on one another function. And by extension the multitude of factors that for example cause someone to wind up homeless.

conservatives tend to just blame the homeless person more often than not. Liberals understand how many factors in his/her life CAUSED the state they’re in now. So they want to setup systems to help with those factors while conservatives blame the person so don’t want to invest in infrastructure to mitigate these factors.

Same mentalities extend throughout society and politics.

 

This is often stated as fact by the media, the Democrat party, etc. (and by "liberal" you mean "progressive", pro big- government, etc.). My experience is the opposite, and this has been true all my life. Two examples:

1) The medical practice my wife and I own does a certain amount of indigent care (i.e. charity work - we are volunteering our time and resources and do not get paid). This demographic is more likely to be non-liberal politically and traditional religiously (and thus inherently suspicious of any assertions of the perfectibility of human nature/government) than any other group we serve. They are also the most humble, whereas the relatively well off and insured are more likely to be entitled, litigious and otherwise (in their mind) not responsible for their situation in life.

2) At my daughters RCatholic school (I volunteer there regularly and have a sense of the community), it is the working class parent/student (or those who are on scholarship) who are more likely to be "conservative" politically and orthodox religiously. It is the well off upper middle class parent/student who are much more likely to be "liberal" politically and religiously.

Just two examples that correlate to the rest of my life (my college experience for example).

Right. This is the tension within Classical Liberalism - Anarchy is a no go, but so is non-limited or "progressive" (which implies that government is a "moral" agent and has no inherent limit) government. In our current environment, it is the Classical Liberal 'middle way' that is being refuted, rejected, and otherwise left behind. It is the "radical" ends both the "left" and "right" that have all the vitality, confidence, and energy.

Everybody has an opinion as to why this is so. Mine is anthropological - with the dissolution of the Protestant Consensus we have no unifying agreement as to what mankind is, and thus no common language to even talk about "The Good", let alone how to politically get there. Into this vacuum has rushed a purely
consumeristic/prosperity conception of man/the good, and an exceedingly vague idea of "happiness", while at the same time we usually admit (and our social scientists objectively measure) we are the most anxious (for ourselves, our future) and the unhappiest people who have ever lived.

edit: "interconnectedness" Yes, so called "conservatives" (though you described liberatarianism, not conservativism) and the American character in general is individualistic, even "cowboy". Yet, you are still presuming that government as such and those identified as "liberals" politically have a systematic answer to the problem of corrupt human nature - more government. The Elephant in your liberal living room is human nature. The hard truth is, that in general it is the so called "conservatives" in our society who are even able to acknowledge this central problem, not liberals. Liberals just put their head down and pretend its not there, or claim that systems such as government can fix it while not becoming tainted by it, etc.

 

I bet the working class in the Middle Ages were pretty unhappy.

Also, there isn't a radical left in our country, not an organized one anyways. Democrats are almost all conservative and in the last decade or so because of Obama (too much writing to explain why it was his doing) we've shifted way far to the right so it's just right wing extremists and conservatives with a few centrists and even fewer actual liberals and like one real liberal in Bernie. But. he's not even a socialist, he's a democratic socialist, two very different things. their names are the only thing they have in common.

I don't agree, and I've written up my theory, but appreciate the intelligent thoughtful ideas.

 

Agreed, but I think corruption can be worked on even if it can't be eliminated. l think it's our number one problem. If I could just do one thing, it would be "separation of money and state" for the same reason we separate church and state. honestly I don't understand why the writers of the constitution didn't add much to stop corruption. The constitution is so thoughtful in most other ways.

 

hmmm I don't even know what to say to this. I disagree with everything here but still like ya!

 

On top of @crenca comments, in my experience I met so many Rich/Poor "Conservatives"/"Liberals" in my life that it comes to the point that it is useless to label. I know met richer "Conservatives"/"Liberals" who give money/donate, but I also met of poor "Conservatives"/"Liberals" who are on government assistance and major asshats.

In Jacksonville alone I can show the world a pooer "Conservative" area where it actually have a town run grocery store, of course the people won't say the Socialist word on this one. If you go deep in rural FL like I have you will see very poor areas that are mostly Republican like you never believe.

I can also show you an area in Jacksonville that is heavily "Liberal" that is also poor. Being in NYC where I saw people regardless of color and political beliefs sucking on the tits of NYC welfare programs, I came to realize that labels are dumb. I met this one "Conservative" guy at my local flea market who called the N word to black people and telling them they are welfare queens. His job? He didn't have none, he gets State/Federal assistance since he qualified for assistance (he even stated he could work, but choose not to). I shake my head on that one even to this day.....

 

You would lose that bet. Central to the myth of the Progressive (which is a bourgeois version of the Enlightenment story) reading of history was that before itself, all previous peoples/societies/cultures were ignorant and unlearned slobs who bathed in their own shit, were religiously and/or sexually repressed, and mere fodder for their aristocratic "masters". As @Psalmanazar noted upstream, in general your average villager in the middle ages was happier, more free (in most objective measures) and in many cases better educated than today's typical inner city liberal sycophant

 

can't type that much haha. love ya still though

 

Perhaps the usual labels are like SINAD - they have been pressed into carrying far more than they ever could. If there are any real Classical Liberals left today, they are all in hiding. If there ever was a real "conservative" party/culture in America, it died in the civil war. "Progressive" and "Libertarian" are two lables that are more helpful IMO, but still have severe limitations and much work needs to be done in correlating them with (an ever shifting) reality. At the end of the day people are always more than (and more complicated) than a philosophy/label. Still, they can be more or less helpful depending...

 

You should be a teacher. Then again, I know your day job.