Still nearly every comment here is backwards: par for the course for the intellectual life on the WWW. “The Primacy of Politics” or of “ideas” is a peculiarly modern peculiarly American idée fixe.-

“In America, a nation that hates politics—and seems to hate them more with each election—how do we convince its people that politics is their salvation?”

that is to say it is no more or less than the mirror image of the antipolitics of our cultural life. If any of you were more interesting in observation rather than intellectual object creation you’d see how ideas come from systems of communication and culture, not the reverse. Social Democracy is not an invention, it is a fact of social behavior that was first seen in it’s latency, then described, and finally defended. But none of this is invention. Invention is the dream of Randians Chicago School Economists and vulgar Marxists. The Scandinavian “model” is no more of an “invention” than Swedish. And as I keep trying to remind people, Esperanto was a failure.

The questions- I hesitate to say ‘choices’ for the future are whether we get Social Democracy or Hypercapitalism. You could call the web an example of the sort of communicative network that would foster the former, but ironically or not, in the Anglo American world the people who are most involved in the web are more comfortable with the latter. But as the web becomes normalized the romance and the futurist logic will fade.

The lack of imagination of those who prize imagination over observation never ceases to amaze me.

Second point, before the sergeant-at-arms cuts off the mike: when unions did change American society in the 1930s, it was because they had a healthy infusion of radicals of all shades. We’ve never been able to do it alone. Or, more accurately, when we try to we end up with the movement that Samuel Gompers led.

Without democracy (or “politics”) there is no freedom. You really need to think a lot harder about where your own “ideology” is leading you. People like you have a lot in common with supporters of Stalin, and I’m not just talking about your rhetoric.

Yes, sure, but try to move outside the atmosphere where there is no weather and you’ll see that it’s not a good option.

And it’s not the reason to become uninterested in weather, quite the contrary: if the one you have annoys you, you may want to try to find a better one (and, in the case of a government, you may even be able to improve it).

Engels,

Please continue to post here and elsewhere. Start a blog, even. Be as prolific as possible. From where I stand, nothing could be better than for you and others who share your ideology to be as vocal and explicit as possible.

If that isn’t exactly what you meant, perhaps you can tell me what were you trying to say here? It certainly isn’t an intelligent reply to anything I wrote. The most natural interpretation of it is that you thought my attitude to absolute property rights was evidence that I subscribed to an “ideology” that is so obviously objectionable to you that my argument did not merit a reply, and which would supposedly refute itself if made explicit. I do not think that Communism, let alone Social Democracy, is such an ideology but in any case I am not a Communist, just someone who does not share your views of property rights. Therefore I found the tone of your reply objectionable, and I think it is an irrational way to respond to someone with whom you have a substantive disagreement.

Why don’t you quote me where I imply that you are a communist and we’ll go from there?

And simply refusing to address anyone who disagrees with your premise, implying, as far as I can tell, that they are Communists, is pathetic. Within political theory – which in your blog you claim to have an interest in – most people to the left of John Rawls, and many, many people to the right of him would contest that premise. In the real world, many billions of people would. If you really have nothing to say to such people, except trying to insinuate that they are evil, then why on earth do you expect anyone outside of your tiny circle of extremist libertarian nutjobs to have any interest whatsoever in your ignorant, irrational opinions?

James, you self-righteous cretin, you don’t know the first thing about my “ideology”. Not everyone who questions absolute property rights is a Communist. If doing so puts them beyond the sacred circle of the virtuous souls with whom you will deign to defend your views, and forces you to resort to making faux dark and sinister prophesies, then you are a very stupid person indeed.

No, I don’t see politics as a zero sum game. I’m not even considering any interpersonal summation of benefits and costs. Rather, I see politics as an activity in which the risks to me exceed the benefits to me. It’s entirely possible that politicians will do things that I like, but that alone doesn’t make it seem like a good risk to me, any more than the possibility of winning the lottery makes a lottery ticket seem a good risk.

To answer your other question about highways, those persons who would rather have allocated their belongings to ends other than highways get screwed.

Engels,

Please continue to post here and elsewhere. Start a blog, even. Be as prolific as possible. From where I stand, nothing could be better than for you and others who share your ideology to be as vocal and explicit as possible.

One cavil: America is not the only nation that hates politics. Everybody but Hannah Arendt hates it. Europeans, Asians, Africans, Latins, Antipodeans…all of us dream of the machine that runs of itself or pine for the maximum leader who will finally shut up the goddam squabbling parliamentarians or just try to forget about the whole thing and retreat into the idiocy of our private lives.