Ideas

The Repub obsession with “ideas” reflects to some degree that it takes more intellectual effort to lie than to tell the truth. Liberals (one cannot say “democrats’ because it is no longer true of most, evidently) advocate a progressive tax structure for fairly transparent reasons; Repubs want a flat or regressive one to redistribute wealth upwards, but they can’t say that, so they have to build Laffler curves and such voodoo.

Mr. Holbo,

From what I have seen in my thirty years as a conservative, Jacoby is absolutely correct. But he does not go into the roots of this – conservatism is merely the concatenation of every world-view that is not leftism. The variety of ideas that feed modern American conservatism is very broad – rational class interest (of more than one class), traditionalism (usually religious) of several flavors, patriotism, libertarianism, ethnic particularisms of several kinds, you can add others I am sure. Try the exercise of reconciling the Wall Street Journal vs libertarianism vs Russell Kirk vs Pope Benedict vs the Southern Baptists vs the Mormons, and you will understand. This was always the case – the conservative direction was always, and will always be, the sum of vectors coming in from all angles.

There is no real debate on the left because it has purged itself of everything that comes in at an angle to its perfectly aligned parallel vectors. All thats left to argue is merely a matter of how far left one is.

This is complicated by the fact that the experience of the twentieth century has shown exactly what the practical limits of leftism are – how much the system can tolerate in the long and short term without unacceptable costs – and we are not far from them in the US.

The result is a dead left – which has no ideas, in fact. It cannot go into more radical territory (which isn’t “new” anyway) because it is well known that that way lies disaster. It cannot go right, because it then becomes just another conservative vector (“compassionate conservatism”, anyone?). So all we get is what we see – an intolerant, dogmatic, culturally monotonous, semi-religious system of belief.

In Europe they have the beginnings, maybe, of something more interesting (in the sense of “may you live in interesting times”) in the fusion of leftism with Islam. Now that throws in some complex vectors.

Yeah, we’re all just stuck defending what we have against various brilliant plans to make it worse. And all liberals (i.e., Communists) agree about everything.

I’ve had arguments with conservatives where I had to defend public libraries (“Free riders!!!!!”), national parks, the Smithsonian institute, public schools, free vaccination, evolution, condoms, habeas corpus, etc., etc.

Conservatives are hopping with ideas. It’s like fleas on a carpet after the dog has died.

Hey, I’ve got an idea. Or, more accurately, a rule:

Anyone who argues that “X” (right, left, liberal, conservative, dogcatchers, Hollywood executives, whatever) has no debates and is out of ideas should supply evidence for that proposition.

Anyone who justifies this claim through an appeal to the putative causes for X’s intellectual impoverishment–e.g., X has no debates because X has no intellectual diversity–doesn’t have the right to be taken seriously.

Here’s another series of thoughts: what special kind of ignorance does it take to use right-wing opposition to the current “compromise” immigration bill as evidence of intra-Republican “debates” while totally ignoring the vociferous left-wing opposition to the same plan? What kind of idiot op-ed writer can’t tell the difference between, on the one hand, a front-runner candidate attempting to minimize distinctions between herself and her opponents in order to prevent voters from finding a reason to abandon her and, on the other hand, the absence of substantive differences on how to handle related issues? Or would invoke the split between the neocons and the paleocons over Iraq as evidence of “diversity” and fail to mention that, at the exact same time, the same split was occurring among liberal- and democratic-leaning opinion journals and editorial pages? I think we have an answer….

Shorter Alegria: conservatism is not made of straw, unlike this straw liberal I have spent a large amount of time constructing.

I am sure Mr. Ahmadinejad and his friends feel like they have the same problem.

Oh, do fuck off.

Since the beginning of time, liberals have yearned to destroy the sun.

Mr. Awlsdad,

I regret to say that my liberal (and even leftist) friends were not actually mean to me in college, as I tended to admire them in fact. I even admired the members of the NPA of which I was once a “guest” – they were people graced with a degree of nobility, misguided as they were.

Unfortunately, I have never been witness to such debates; which would be interesting, the usual form of such things is very different, in that the conclusion is either pre-ordained and unquestionable (government-mandated universal health care, say), or the nub of the matter is not in fact addressed (fighting terrorism,etc.). In fact, after having followed the leftist media for some time (I do get the American Prospect, and I have peeked into the others) and lived among your tribe for twenty years, I don’t think these discussions happen very often at all.

Mr. Holbo,

I would not dream of caricaturing it; it is an observable reality.

Like any culture, it is a set of beliefs, attitudes, and rituals, not all of which are rationally connected to the others, but one can say they travel in parallel, as in a convoy, or a fleet in formation.

Secularism is a big vessel in the fleet, defered to even by whatever religious remnants trail along. Socialism, the belief and enthusiasm for the power of government, is another. Feminism is another, etc. Tack across the path of any of these, and you are out of formation. Is there an anti-abortion leftist still around ? I don’t think so.

Can I define it more accurately ? I doubt it. Cultures have to be experienced to be properly understood, and are not easily described or taxonomized in text, even the attempt requires writing books. All I know is what I have experienced here in Northern California, and this culture can be seen in its pure state in the majority of the white upper middle class of the SF Bay area, which is culturally and socially distinct.

Travel into the small-town inland of California and the entire feel of the people changes; we are dealing with a substantially different culture, and voila, they have different politics.

Luis, have you missed the category links on the left? There’s “healthcare,” “environment,” “economics/finance,” etc. HTH!

“Socialism, the belief and enthusiasm for the power of government”. Really? That’s very interesting. Could you expand on the provenance of that definition?

Well, first of all this is not about Right and Left but about the strategies of mainstream politicians within two ruling parties.

It’s just that Republican party has been thoroughly discredited at this point and so they are, naturally, looking for a new theme. To find a new successful advertising line they, obviously, need all kinds of crackpots.

The Democrats, OTOH, are virtually certain to win anyway; rocking the boat now would’ve been counterproductive. So, they don’t.

Matthias at #21 summed up very well, I think. Personally I’m not very interested in debates about libertarianism, for instance, because I disagree fundamentally with the various premises of libertarianism. This doesn’t mean that the debates and differences don’t exist and are not real.

Isn’t this just the psychologists’ in-group/out-group distinction? People in the out-group always appear more homogeneous.

As others have said, the problem is that for Luis Allegra, the different opinions on the left look all the same anyway, so he can’t see different ideas. A bit like how, for someone who thinks all trees are the same anyway, every forest looks like a monoculture.

Think of how he gave “government mandated universal healthcare” as an example for how debates on the left all come to the same “pre-ordained” results. Since for him, all government regulated healthcare is equally wrong, he can’t see it as a debate to argue about the merits of various forms of it.

It’s the return of A Very Real Problem For The Left! Happily this one has a pretty easy solution. If all you need in order to have a vibrant intellectual culture of debate is a lot of morons with silly ideas (to disagree with), then hell, shoulda asked, I can get you morons, real cheap.

When there was a resurgence of the young European and North American Left a few years ago (Seattle et seq) I seem to remember a lot of commentary from the complacenceriat to the effect that they didn’t seem to know what theywanted, they were all pulling in different directions, there was no clear set of ideas and so on. I also seem to remember observing that (apart from this being true of almost all movements of any size) if there were, indeed, one largely-accepted set of ideas then the movement would be accused of being dogmatic, ideologically straitjacketed, not open to fresh thinking etc etc.

I propose a rule with significant explanatory power: Jonah Goldberg is wrong.

Zdenek V at 39:

John Holbo asks : “what is the content of the “intolerant, dogmatic, culturally monotonous, semi-religious system of belief” that is the ‘one true faith’ of liberalism? ”
If I was Luis my answer would be ’ social constructivism ‘. “

But many left-liberals argue for cosmopolitan and redistributive policies on the basis of human needs and capacities (e.g. Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum). Others appeal to universal human rights on essentially Kantian grounds (e.g. Thomas Pogge). Others still are on the Darwinian left (e.g. Peter Singer). All are self-consciously opposed to social constructivism. All are the subject of plenty of debate, in academia, in development policy, etc. So no, that answer won’t do, and I doubt any other simplistic generalisation would either. To be honest, I don’t see how anyone could take seriously the idea that a tradition as rich, amorphous and long-storied as liberalism could be summed up so neatly. If the question is really not about liberalism, but about the mores of middle-class leftists in San Fransisco… who cares?

I love these debates…by far the greatest trick by what is characterised as the “right” in the US in recent times is to present TOTAL GIBBERISH as valid ideas\comment and force their opponents to engage on that basis. It’s the forcing to engage that is pure genius. In the US, it appears is no longer possible to dismiss complete lunancy (the far left are islamic terrorists who want to kill us all!!! etc.) out of hand without being stigmatised as unwilling to “debate the issues and ideas” etc. Not only that but to do so apparently proves you are devoid of ideas. It’s fantastic!

As it happens, I do not debate the merits of US foreign poilcy with my 5 year old daughter but apparently I should. For exactly the same reason, I have cut down drastically on arguing with people whose opinions are utterly and completely moronic and I DON’T CARE IN THE SLIGHTEST if the purveyors of said rubbish accuse me of arrogance/stupidity/fear of engagement or whatever. Fuck them – I refuse to have to even consider for one second creationism (yes, creationism for “intelligent design” see TOTAL GIBBERISH above), building walls around Canada, freeing the world and establishing democracy by starting wars (imaginary conversation “I know how to make us and everyone else safe: we’ll kill loads and loads of people” “Genius!”) and so on.

I have had people say things to me in conversation so breathtakingly dumb that I could not even guess where to begin to “argue” with them.

(The left is of course not immune to any of this but I think it’s fair to say that it was the right who worked to make it difficult to simply dismiss rubbish out of hand. As for the left in the US: what left? The Democrats? See what I mean…to describe the Democratic party as left wing (I mean properly left wing) is just dumb.)

Democrats need to mimic Republicans without ideas mimicking Republicans who, maybe (this is the idea), once had ideas.
and I blame Quine

“Yields a Republican mimicking a Republican when appended to its almost quotation”, yields a Democrat mimicking a Republican when appended to its almost quotation.

“Is there an anti-abortion leftist still around?”

Here’s one right here, Mr. Alegria. And please, don’t confuse the controlling ideological parameters contained within the platforms of major liberal and left parties with the actual range of debate within a particular group. If one insists on denying the existence of debate over abortion on the left because of what happened to Governor Casey fifteen years ago, then one should similar deny that, say, any real debate over immigration exists on the right, because none of the Republican candidates that at this point have a prayer of achieving the nomination or shaping their party’s platform in any significant way oppose Bush’s bill.

Republicans, by contrast, overflow with debate

Nah, I don’t think they normally do either, it’s just that this cycle is unusual. Typically the debate is, like, should we lower the top tax bracket or skip directly to a flat tax? is America merely the Number One or is it Absolutely Positively The Best Ever And Forever?

Oh, please. Jacoby is an idiot studying to become a moron. I’ve read the Boston Globe, but stopped reading Jacoby after I came to that conclusion.

The interesting question is why the NYTimes Company, which has owned the Globe since 1994 (or so) keeps Jacoby on, while getting rid of some of their newstaff and their relatively intelligent columnists–they just got rid of Eileen McNamara, for example. I’ll suggest that they keep Jacoby on because he toes the Sulzberger party line (the Sulzbergers are the family that controls the NYTimes company): Jacoby is staunchly pro-Israel-government-policy and staunchly anti-gay. It really is as simple as that.

“Is there an anti-abortion leftist still around?”

Wendell Barry.

But why should the evidence of debate among the left mean ‘is there anyone in the Left who holds Right Wing views’?

You want debate on the Left? See #42 above. Ask about Israel. Ask about military intervention. Ask about home schooling. Ask about whether ‘identity’ politics obscure the fundamental problems of class. Ask about God. Ask about essentialism v. performance-based modes of understanding subjectivity. Try, duh, Habermas v. Zizek. Hell, compare someone in the Black Bloc to, say, Josh Marshall. The only evidence I can see, Luis, is that you’re lazy and that you’re trying to pass it off as a world-weary virtue.

The variety of ideas that feed modern American conservatism is very broad – rational class interest (of more than one class), traditionalism (usually religious) of several flavors, patriotism, libertarianism, ethnic particularisms of several kinds, you can add others I am sure.

Fascism. Anti-intellectualism.

Ideas? What the contemporary right has is not ideas but another bout of what trilling called “irritable mental gestures.” Debate? “The narcissism of small differences.”

It is an easy thing to laugh at the follies of elected officials, and in fact the lack of debate or solid ideas, but then those trained or predisposed to being scholarly people more often than not do not run for public office, and, if they do or have done so, turn out to be no more effective than those they would belittle. There remain, I imagine, some within both parties who are good at discussions or debates, and selecting the few ninnies is in itself a poor example of debate

You’re leaving out that this is a rightwing commentator passing judgement on Democratic “ideas.”

As long as Democrats and commentators like yourself take Jacoby’s comments as meaning anything, much less to be followed slavishly, your argument holds.

Trouble is, it’s highly biased: Democrats don’t have ideas because Republicans say so. Yeah, right.

Julian Sanchez had a good take on Jacoby’s piece.

Silly John, the point is that liberals are wrong, and whatever they do indicates a deep crisis in liberalism, and why they are unfit to govern. Except for the nice tame liberals like Micky Kaus who say nasty things about over liberals. They’re OK. They might be offered an Assistant Consulateship in Tajikistan, but only if they’ve shown how reasonable and bipartisan they are by contributing to Republicans. However, if they’ve contributed more to Democrats than Republicans then they might be extremist leftists.

If there was a lot of debate amongst liberals, this shows they can’t unite around a set of ideas. Because the intellectual incoherence of liberalism means they can’t unite around a single agenda. Hence liberals are unfit to govern.

If there’s a lot of unity amoungst liberals, this shows the intellectual incoherence of liberalism, and that they’re uncomfortable because of their lack of intellectual firepower with debating ideas. Hence liberals are unfit to govern.

If liberals are muted in their criticism of conservatives, this shows that liberals don’t have the force of their convictions, and so are unfit to govern.

If liberals are vocal in their criticism, then this shows that liberals are uncivil, unparliamentary, against the first amendment and unfit to govern. And they’re undermining the troops, who lose morale and surrender to Al-Qaeda every time someone refuses to believe that the GOP President is not guided by Divine Wisdom. So liberals are unfit to govern.

If liberals are populist, this shows liberals lack deep ideas, and so have to appeal to the rabble with slogans and are inciting class warfare, and hence are unfit to govern.

In fact, liberals lack ideas, and can’t write, so much they have packed the academy and the media so real intellectuals and writers can’t get in, because they hate ideas and writing so much. So that’s why conservatives have to set up parallel institutions like AEI and Fox. Only extremist liberals would believe that the reason AEI scholars could’t get tenure at a university is because they’re hacks who couldn’t do rigorous original work. Because the liberals have packed the tenure committees you see. And because liberals are elitist academics disconnected with Real America(tm), they’re unfit to govern.

If a liberal appeals to the voters on their personality, history, and charisma, this shows the lack of ideas and coherence in liberalism, in that liberals can’t reduce nice slogans to detailed policy proposals. Hence liberals are unfit to govern.

If liberals propose a detailed policy agenda, however, it shows that they are disconnected with Real America(tm) who want to hear uplifting stories of personal struggle, success, and heroism, rather than boring wonkism. This misunderstaning of Real America(tm) is why liberals are unfit to govern.

If liberals are OK with entering a conflict (say Kosovo or Afghanistan, then they’re indulging in adverturist nation building instead of focusing on the national interest. Or they’re using this war as a distraction from the failure of their domestic agenda. Or the liberals are trying to fool everyone into thinking they can be trusted with national security, but everyone knows they’re just dirty smelly hippies on the inside. So they’re unfit to govern.

If liberals object to entering into a conflict (Iraq), that shows liberals can’t be trusted on issues of national security [because, as sensible policy analysts at the AEI and Heritage have proven, national security is attacking anyone who pisses us off.] SO you’re unfit to govern.

If liberals order a latte,, then that’s those elitist liberals indulging themselves, while feigning concern about the poor! So you’re unfit to govern, because Real America(tm) doesn’t like your hedonistic pursuit of pleasure and indulgence. So you’re unfit to govern.

If liberals order a black coffee, or an [American] beer then that’s a false hair-shirt, and a pretense, by ordering an ordinary cup of joe, at membership of the blue-collar class. Refusing the pleasure of the senses that a mere latte [or a beer that actually tastes of something] would give is just part of the rigid puritanism that underlys the left! Because Real America(tm) likes to enjoy itself at NASCAR and WWF is something you puritans can’t understand. And hence you’re unfit to govern.

If you liberals just were less partisan and understood how bipartisan objective pundits like David Broder see the world, then your analysis would be less biased. But because, unlike the analysis above, you let your prejudices color you views, and that’s why you’re unfit to govern.

So, “they” all look/dress/think the same, eh . . . Brilliant! Conservatives have just re-re-re-discovered outgroup homogeneity. Which would be all fine and good if they only used it against their ideological opponents as opposed to, say, everyone who isn’t a property-owning white male.

—which is that he wouldn’t endorse his party’s nominee and so wasn’t invited to speak at the convention. (The urban legend around this bugs me extremely.)

It bugs me too–as does the tendency among so many “progressives” to dismiss Dennis Kucinich, one of the only Democratic candidates who’s actually advocating getting our troops out of Iraq, as an “oddball.” As was done on this very thread.

That said: I agree with francis. #66 pretty much sums it up.

Yes, #66 is awesome. My hat is off to you, Sock Puppet.

Matt, Uncle Kvetch, you’re both absolutely right about Governor Casey and the way his story has been spun over the years. There were plenty of Democratic and abortion rights activists back in 1992 who loathed the man, for sure, but they weren’t in any sense the promixate cause of him not being invited to speak. I only dropped a reference to his story into my post because it’s such a regular feature in these sorts of accounts of the “intellectually bankrupt” left.

Also, Uncle Kvetch–I think I was the one who called Kucinich an oddball. Let me assure you that I actually like the man quite a lot. (I liked him more when he was, like Gephardt once, more of a social justice Catholic-type, but still.) I simply grabbed him as a contrast to Tancredo because he’s clearly a representative of some minority views on the left, and therefore is every bit as good evidence (as if some were needed) that there is variety on this side of the aisle as Tancredo provides for the right. Maybe I should have mentioned Carol Mosely-Braun instead.

Say…I just aired a disagreement with a fellow lefty. Luis, I’m eager to hear why in this particular case it doesn’t count.

“You misrepresented Kucinich’s position, apparently because the reality wasn’t kooky enough.”

Again, very true. It was a vaguely humorous attempt to demonstrate the (I think indefensibly stupid) ways in which certain media figures structure what counts as “diversity of opinion” so as to make the left seem dull and monolithic, but maybe I just played into their hands in making my case that way.

Matt Ygelsias did better, citing the Maoist International Movement when he made his response.

Reading the comments of one Luis Alegria, I’m struck by what I think is a rather indicative example of the way conservatives see liberals of “leftists” in this country. A few points, the number of actual “leftists” in America, you could fit in a parking lot, and usually they all are in the same parking lot demonstrating against something (h/t: Matt Taibbi). Secondly and more importantly, the reason that those of us on “The Left” don’t argue over things like stem cell research, abortion, evolution, building giant walls to keep out immigrants, or under what circumstances its okay to torture people, is because none of these “questions” are really up for debate. If you think the universe pre-dates the invention of agriculture by a few hundred years or that a microscopic cluster of cells is a human being, there is no point in having a debate of any kind. These are issues that have been closed several hundred years ago. It’s always heartening to see conservatives whole-heartedly embrace the most cutting edge moral, and philosophical debates of the 14th century.

It’s always heartening to see conservatives whole-heartedly embrace the most cutting edge moral, and philosophical debates of the 14th century.

Neo-donatism?
Antifraternalism?
Which Pope to honor?
Volanterism?

Am I the only one who finds the conflation of “liberal” and “left” alarming?

When I was a young feller, “liberal” had something to do with the tradition of Mill et al. and “left” designated class politics, with statist and anti-statist varieties (a not insignificant difference in itself). These historical and intellectual distinctions seem worth keeping in mind.

“Liberal” in the US and Europe just mean different things. In the US it means “welfare liberal” only. Free-marketer liberals are a kind of conservative here. They say that this is because all Americans are liberals, so that the conservative tradition a la Europe barely exists.

My theory is that Roosevelt tried to sneak a dilute Social Democracy into liberalism via the third of the Four Freedoms, “Freedom From Want”. This was not a classical liberal freedom at all.

Since Roosevelt represented American liberalism for almost 16 years, the redefinition stuck.

I will take up John Holbo’s challenge to define the dogma Luis is describing.

1. “Powerful and/or religious people who do not profess that racial, gender, ecological and income equality are good things are bad.”

2. “Policies, attitudes and behaviours associated with, or in general preferred by, the bad people identified in 2 above are to be opposed.”

Its not perfect but I’ll stand up for it.

I must say I was a little surprised by the vehement opposition to the idea that the left is short on ideas and on the voluminous attack on its defenders.

Intellectual noblesse oblige would seem to require that the educated and well-informed respond to the BEST form of the argument a person is putting forward not the actual argument that they do.

Now, I happen to believe that both parties are rather devoid of ideas and that the people of the world are somewhat at a loss on what ideas we use to cope with our nascent global culture and all the conflict industrialization and globalization are bringing us.

So, in order to try to bring out some discussion from the left-leaning on ways leftist may be failing to cope with the political aspirations of the world citizenry, I will offer a case in point.

The California gubernatorial election following the recall of Gray Davis seems to me to have been the most populist and partisan-free election in recent history. It took place in a state that has changed from Republican to Democrat over time but has a long standing traditional of free thinking and populism evidenced by the very referendum and recall provisions that brought the election about.

I would argue that the official democratic party candidates were fairly low on the interesting idea ranking. Now I maybe unfair in this because official bureaucrats always have to balance and make dull compromises but nevertheless I think its at least a symptom of a relative lack of exciting ideas that Arnold won so easily.

Yes, it may have been his charisma or fame but I would say that it was also partly due to the fact the Arnold could violate the dogma I described above. Arnold could say I make tons of smack and its a good thing. I get lots of tail and its a good thing. I am a European immigrant and its a good thing.

I’m not saying that Arnold had the best ideas, I’m saying that the dullness of the Democratic party’s ideas and the possibility that Arnold might be interesting was appealing to many people.

This example is obviously not the main ideological cleavage in the world but its an opening to some discussion of true relative merits of the proposition that the left is somewhat idea-deficient.

Spartikus,

I went to the CA Dem. Party website but couldn’t find an old platform but I did find the “Arnold” page.

Here were the first 8 articles.

1. Budget Cuts to Transportation Threaten California’s Future
2. Arnold’s Budget Declares War On the Poor
3. “Dems Have Taken the Upper Hand” On Health Care
4. Arnold’s Green Credentials Questioned
5. Arnold Wants More Crony Cash
6. Arnold’s “Reform” Rhetoric vs. His Pay to Play Behavior
7. Arnold’s Appointees Create Multiple Scandals
8. Dems Keep Pushing Arnold On Greenhouse Gas Emissions

I would characterize accoring to my dogma
4&8 as ecological
2&3 as income
5&6 as income

1&7 as well as 5& 6 have a “competence theme” which could be considered ideologically neutral but also could be a criticism of the corruption of powerful rich people who don’t care about the enviroment or poor people.

As an aside I went to the Cruz Bustamante page in wikipedia and found this

“In 2001, Bustamante was speaking before a group of approximately 400 black labor activists when, reciting a list of black labor groups which came to existence over a hundred years ago, many which still had “Negro” in their title, he mentioned the National Negro American Labor Council, but the word “nigger” slipped out. Realizing the mistake, he immediately apologized to his audience: “If you heard what I think I heard, I want you to know it wasn’t me,” he said. “It’s not the way I was raised, it’s not the way I was taught, it’s not the way I raised my children and it’s not what’s in my heart.”

This is clearly an example of PROFESSING the racial creed.

Are you questioning that there is a race, gender, income and ecological creed or just that it doesn’t play a large role in the democratic party platform?

Once upon a time I was taught about the fallacy of assuming one’s conclusion.

If one defines a left/liberal as a person who holds a particular suite of views, then one is likely to conclude that there is a striking lack of dissension among left/liberals on their core views.

Of course, the intellectual value of that conclusion is precisely zero because the conclusion was established by the definition.

One could equally say that there is a paucity of dissent among American conservatives because they all believe in a strong military, lower taxes and smaller government. so? if they didn’t believe those things they wouldn’t be american conservatives.

86: Arnie got reelected because he got behind a whole bunch of ideas from the center-left and worked with the legislature to pass them. That’s why California has the most ambitious environmental (carbon control) agenda in the country, the most ambitious health care reform agenda in the country, and some of the biggest infrastructure investment plans around. So if anyone is a testimony to the ideas now coming from liberalism, it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Also, Luis makes it pretty clear in 83 that he doesn’t think governance (the actual management of the state) is a worthy intellectual topic, and doesn’t give a damn about any ideas related to that topic. Showing why so many Repubs tend to be unfit to govern.

Actually, I find myself in agreement with Luis on a main point. Conservatism in the US right now (to properly qualify it) is a mishmash of everything opposed to liberalism. The Republicans are the party of the drug warriors *and* the libertarians, the Bibilical literalists *and* the Social Darwinists, the most ardent free traders *and* the nativists. So there is much disagreement. But is there really debate? At times, such as now on immigration, these rifts are forced to the fore, so the arguments must be had. Mostly, though, the libertarian attitude is if you cut my taxes and don’t legalize pot, well, that’s close enough for me; I stopped smoking anyway, plus I can afford to buy off the cops if I change my mind. It’s not a debate; it’s a compromise to hold a coalition together. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, it doesn’t denote intellectual vitality, but incoherence.

Why are the two big political philosophies now liberalism and everything else? Because liberalism is the great success story of the 20th century. The greatest period of improvement of living standards in the West has the period from 1945-1972 or so; the heyday of Keynesianism, when even the Republicans were liberal by contemporary standards. On cultural matters, the biggest liberal fights – against arbitrary prejudice against groups like blacks and gays – has been such a success that opponents usually have to represent their view cryptically if they want to be at all mainstream.

One odd result of this is that the liberals are now the Burkeans. They are primarily defending policies and attitudes that have proven successful in experience. Not long experience, to be sure, and there may be longer run problems with them that are not yet visible, but so far the liberal program looks pretty good to most people.

It is also true that the decline of the radical left, which put too many eggs in the Marxist basket, has left only the liberals and the environmentalists to the left of center in any numbers, and only a small minority of the latter can be called radical. There are still some basic differences – the small is beautiful decentralism of the deep ecologists versus the classic big government liberalism, for example.

I find the liberals in this discussion thumping for serious policy proposals as “ideas”. I don’t think those are “ideas” in the serious sense; those are applications. Marxism, Libertarianism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Religious Fundamentalism all have big ideas: basic notions of how to concieve the world. Policy proposals follow from such things. The lack of big ideas on the left reflects the lack of extremism. Look even at the big ideas liberalism has implemented successfully: race equality, gender equality, social welfare of various kinds, government regulation of the market, marriage at will – most of this came from utopian and radical thought and was not at all respectable when first concieved. The extremes are where the ideas come from, though not necessarily in practical form.

I agree, though extremism has its serious problems; extremism should not be pursued for its own sake. But Burkeanism is a dead end, at least in this age. The only thing clear about the world a hundred years hence is that it will be much different than it is now, so the only sure losing hand is defending the status quo.

Martin J. Just temporarily, if anything. The radicalism of the 60’s had a strong Marxist element. The Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, for example, has a lineage from SDS. I think what destroyed Marxism was fatal flaws in the philosophy itself to which it kept trying to adjust, but ultimately failed. The whole approach was a wrong turn, IMO.

abb1, You’re extremism of choice is…?

Well, Martin, extremism is anything outside the ideologically acceptable “mainstream” views. In the US it’s a very narrow spectrum.

For example, yesterday I watched Sicko and it’s an extremist documentary, because it directly declares that French ‘socialism’ is superior to the American socio-economic model. That’s extreme.

There are hundreds of dogmas mainstream commentator in the US is not allowed to challenge, from foreign trade to class struggle to legitimacy of Israel to America’s history and its role in the world.

So, I want more left-extremism of all kinds, and a lot more.

luis alegria is wrong to suggest that there are no big ideological differences within the left, notwithstanding martin bento’s interesting interpretation of that claim. (I, too, recommend Julian Sanchez’s take on this.) That said, I confess I am annoyed at the people who mock alegria rather than engage him.

Zdenek, just because something’s socially constructed, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t widespread and enduring. Take ‘monarchy’, for example.

barry in 103:

True , I mean you are right, and there certainly are many things , and facts about them that are socially constructed ( these things could not exist without society plus importantly each of them could have been constructed differently if we chose so ): money,newspapers,citizenship and so on.

No problem here but consider what Latour /Woolgar are saying :

” … our point is that “out there ness” is a consequence of scientific work rather than its cause “.

In other words it is scientific theorizing that make it the case that there is HIV or quarks .

Second , what about socially constructed beliefs ? That is, is it the case that when it comes to *believability* of some claim, it is the social values ( political and religious outlook say ) that do the justifying and not the relevant evidence ?

Again the answer from this outlook is yes :

” the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by factual evidence ” ( Kenneth Gergen 1989 ).

So the criticism must be understood as focusing on these outlandish bunch of claims and not the banal boring suggestion that money say is socially constructed.

Actually, I find myself in agreement with Luis on a main point. Conservatism in the US right now (to properly qualify it) is a mishmash of everything opposed to liberalism….Why are the two big political philosophies now liberalism and everything else? Because liberalism is the great success story of the 20th century….One odd result of this is that the liberals are now the Burkeans. They are primarily defending policies and attitudes that have proven successful in experience. Not long experience, to be sure, and there may be longer run problems with them that are not yet visible, but so far the liberal program looks pretty good to most people….I find the liberals in this discussion thumping for serious policy proposals as “ideas”. I don’t think those are “ideas” in the serious sense; those are applications. Marxism, Libertarianism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Religious Fundamentalism all have big ideas: basic notions of how to concieve the world. Policy proposals follow from such things. The lack of big ideas on the left reflects the lack of extremism….The extremes are where the ideas come from, though not necessarily in practical form.

Martin, this is a thoughtful observation, one that puts the whole debate upon a different footing. So long as the claim is “there is intellectual debate and diversity amongst conservatives/on the right; there is none amongst liberals/on the left,” then clearly Luis and the op-ed idiots who push this line along with him are all utterly wrong–there’s been serious self-definitional debate over who counts as what amongst liberals/on the left in this very thread (as well as an argument against combining those two labels together!). But if we want to actually sort out the various kinds of “debate and diversity” which are relevant here, then something else becomes clear, something which abb1 and Harry B. as well as others have touched on. I’m not sure talking about it in terms of “extremes” vs. “applications” is best, however. Why not instead observe that all those “isms” which you cite–Marxism, libertarianism, feminism, environmentalism, religious fundamentalism–are ideologies: worldviews that are the progeny of specific and detailed philosophical and theoretical conceptualizations of the world and its meaning? Looked at in this light, what you see (and what, most generously, we can see Luis getting at) is the fact that there is serious and ongoing ideological disagreement on the right, going beyond the well-known “fusion” of traditionalists and classical liberals. As you note, so-called “conservatism” today has attracted and absorbed at least elements of almost every single ideological alternative of contemporary liberalism, whereas the liberalism which dominates the Democratic is in fact much more “conservative” in a Burkean sense; it is far more resistant to ideological ferment, having basically shooed away anything except the most pallid forms of socialism, feminism, etc.

The one part of your claim that I think I would dispute is your explanation as to why things have developed this way–not that contemporary pragmatic liberalism isn’t one of “the great success stor[ies] of the 20th century” (I agree that it is), but that such success alone doesn’t explain the whole phenomenon, nor explain why there is so much bitter resistance to it (yes, you could that every single person who disagrees with liberal ideology does so simply because they hate equality, hate freedom, hate individuality, but that would be neither fair nor accurate). I think, instead, it’s necessary to look at how contemporary liberalism is in many ways deeply entwined with modernity itself–with technology, with capitalism (which supposedly conservatives love, but which their preferred social outcomes ought to dictate they oppose), with secularism and more. The ideological ferment of the right–and the supposed ideological complacency amongst the majority of the left, if that is what we want to call it–is at least in part a de facto result of the fact that we’re all moderns here, a reality which one party is fully prepared to deal with (through pragmatic social and economic redistribution and regulation), and which the other party is continually confused by.

Given that my political preferences are a mishmash of cultural traditionalism and economic socialism, I’m one of those who wouldn’t mind a little more ideological variety amongst those liberals and leftists I almost always vote for. But that’s a long and deep project, and not one that has much of anything to do with Luis’s superficial pot-shots.

I suppose it might look like Liberals and Democrats (the monolithic Left, we are told) look like they are in realative lockstep, but only in comparison to the 31 flavors of crazy coming from the Right.

Progressives want fair taxation, universal health care, a solution to global warming and energy independance. They agree on these as the goals and their debates are limitted to finding the best way to reach them.

Meanwhile, Conservatives are suggesting we build the Great Wall of Canada, cite a television show as a rational for torture as a foreign policy, want to solve global warming by switching to liquified coal, or just ignore global warming altogether because the magical carpenter they worship will be coming back to life any day now.

Conservatives might have the most varied ideas it’s just too bad they’re all stuff and nonsense.

“So the criticism must be understood as focusing on these outlandish bunch of claims and not the banal boring suggestion that money say is socially constructed.”
Posted by zdenek v

Please note that (IIRC) the definition of ‘money’ proved a problem for monetarists, in the end. Within a single country, and over the course of a couple of decades (decades which did not see hyperinflation, depression or any of the obvious major economic crises).

As for the validity of scientific claims not depending on evidence, please note the global warming denialists, and creationists. Non trivial, and almost entirely right-wing.

“…cite a television show as a rational for torture as a foreign policy,….”

BTW, when we’re discussing the ideas of political factions, it’s not just the sheer number of ideas; there are presumably many, many millions of ideas flashing through the brains of many millions of people.

What counts is (a) who’s holding the ideas (the guy muttering to himself in the corner, or somebody who’s on the stage), and (b) how popular those ideas are.

In the case I quote above, the holder is one of nine Supreme Court justices.

barry writes :
“…please note the global warming denialists, and creationists. Non trivial, and almost entirely right-wing.”

I do not think this is right because global warming denialists ( if I am not mistaken ) dispute the evidence available ,and this is a move *within* an outlook that defers to science. They are not anti-science in other words.

Their debate is like the debate within evolutionary biology about the pace of evolution.Both sides accept the fact of evolution but disagree about the pace of the process.

Creationists and social constructivits on the other hand, are the real repudiators of inquiry here ( the Creationist says that faith is epistemically more reliable source of knowledge then reason and the left wing social constructivist has it that it is perfectly legit to use political criteria in evaluating scientific theories.)

Who has more influence in universities, the creationists or the social constructivists ?

barry writes :
“…please note the global warming denialists, and creationists. Non trivial, and almost entirely right-wing.”

I do not think this is right because global warming denialists ( if I am not mistaken ) dispute the evidence available ,and this is a move within an outlook that defers to science. They are not anti-science in other words.

Their debate is like the debate within evolutionary biology about the pace of evolution.Both sides accept the fact of evolution but disagree about the pace of the process.

Creationists and social constructivits on the other hand, are the real repudiators of inquiry here ( the Creationist says that faith is epistemically more reliable source of knowledge then reason and the left wing social constructivist has it that it is perfectly legit to use political criteria in evaluating scientific theories.)

Who has more influence in universities, the creationists or the social constructivists ?

But part of the global warming denialist’s argument is that scientists are producing results that serve their own end – therefore they are socially created. The arguments of the denialists are not accepted in peer reviewed journals and in that sense are not scientific and are socially constructed. Not that this is a bad thing science can bring many benefits to society.

MQ,

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I strongly disagree with Martin Bento at 96. Burkean incrementalism becomes more useful and more helpful in situations of rapid change. Indeed, the best argument for liberal incrementalism is that it provides a helpful buffer to the rapid, revolutionary change that is more or less guaranteed by capitalism.

I’m not sure that was exactly Martin’s point, but your claim here has a great deal of merit. Any reasonable person, after looking back at the ideological horrors and revolutions and state plans of the 20th century, should want to be an incrementalist. This is simple–and totally defensible–prudence. I would add, though, that there is a murky theoretical issue here, one which occasionally crashes into policy debates but mostly operates at the deep background level, and that is that sometimes–I’m thinking of the “Vital Center” liberalism of the 1940s-60s, the sort of stuff given us by Dewey and Hofstadter and others–such prudent incrementalism itself becomes a kind of ideology, with pragmatic, technical social science seeming to answer all “serious” political questions, and all the questions it can’t answer being shunted off as private and unserious matters. This is the sort of thing–much more than a revival of Marxism–that got the New Left going in the late 60s, and the sort of thing–much more than some overarching and authoritarian loathing of modernity–that got ordinary evangelicals fired up and voting in the mid-70s. I’d say there’s something to be learned from all that. I think there are good, prudent reasons to be liberal and incremental, but I don’t want those reasons to take on any ideological life of their own.

The only ideology that has successfully opposed modernity at the mass level has been fascism. (The key of course here is the qualifier “at the mass level”; liberalism itself helps create space for small communities to be self-consciously anachronistic). This may change in the future as we gain wealth and sophistication, but I think the same forces that led mass anti-modern movements to slide down toward fascism are still in place.

I don’t disagree that the elements of fascism are absolutely out there amongst all sorts of antiliberal positions. Nor would I disagree that, properly understood, a prudently liberal society provides exactly the sort of space you’re talking about for local antimodern alternatives. I would, however, give a little bit more credit to certain forms of populism though. Some folks on both the left and the right like to blur the lines between populist movements and fascistic ones, and clearly the former can bleed over into the latter, but I think populist politics can also inject a fair amount of social democracy into ideological liberalism, certain a lot more than liberalism will discover entirely on its own. (Herbert Hoover once attacked the New Deal as just another form of “Bryanism,” and he wasn’t, I think, all that wrong.)

I think the left is certainly more aware of the social construction of, for instance, identities, whereas the right would prefer to naturalize or essentialize them: nation, race, gender, &c. That’s why nature-nurture debates and so on tend to have a clear political cleavage: they’re about what sot of arrangements we can put ourselves in other than the ones advocated by conservatives.

A variation of this theme is that the right likes to treat “natural” as a not only meaningful but desirable quality, whereas for significant portions of the left, if it’s a meaningful quality, it’s a negative one. Rightist love of the organic above the synthetic (however defined) goes from lowest-common-denominator opposition to homosexuality and miscegenation, to Burkean preference for evolved over designed institutions, to ev psych defenses of traditional gender roles, to the presumption that markets are the natural state of an economy absent obviously synthetic “intervention,” and so on.

There are certainly segments of the left – the World Peace Through Crystal Power set, some but by no means all or even most environmentalists, and so on – that take nature as normative, just as there are the high-modernists who view the synthetic as superior (Marxists, liberal policy wonks, secularists, a good chunk of feminism, &c.) and those who are sufficiently strong social constructivists that they don’t see “natural” as having any real meaning. There’s certainly more diversity on the left than the right in this area! Right modernists seem to be restricted to Ayn Rand worshippers and neoconservatives, the latter of whom were emigres from the left anyway.

Metaphysical social constructivism of the Rortean variety does probably have some sway among left academics within the humanities but is a very minor one within the broad category of left politics. The dominant view on the left if anything – certainly on the far left – is moral absolutism (just not the right’s) and metaphysical materialism. But when conservatives decribe the left their major impression is that they are extreme relativists, social constructivists, and so on. The best guess I can make about this is that because lefties tend to say that certain things that the conservatives think are both natural concepts and morally important – the nation, gender, religion, race, capitalism – are in fact artifacts of human social processes, and because most of the arguments that the left and right have are about these sorts of things, the natural conservative saltation is that the left doesn’t really believe in anything, do they, they believe in total moral anarchy.

(A less interesting explanation would be that professors in the humanities are, like highly-paid actors, a subset of liberals whom liberals/leftists pay absolutely or very nearly no mental space to but whose importance to liberalism at large is percieved as very great by conservatives. But this begs the question of why they find humanities professors to be so very important to the left.)

Martin James, that’s a good point, and I think you’re right that from that perspective all American politics are limited. It seems to me that the sort of change you’re looking for is one that generally won’t be brought about by mainstream politics but by civil rights movements; which reorient our politics so that some group that was previously excluded is now taken into account.

I do think that Jacoby, given his examples, is pretty clearly talking about policy proposals and not goals. (In fact, rereading the article, it’s appallingly hackish; on two of the three main issues that he uses to demonstrate ideological diversity among Republicans [immigration and health care], not only does he not demonstrate that Democrats lack ideological diversity, he doesn’t even bother to make an assertion about what the Democrats’ position is. On the third, abortion, he disregards Harry Reid.)

matthias wasser writes :

“Metaphysical social constructivism of the Rortean variety does probably have some sway among left academics within the humanities but is a very minor one within the broad category of left politics. The dominant view on the left if anything – certainly on the far left – is moral absolutism (just not the right’s) and metaphysical materialism. ”

There are two things wrong with this picture. First a small point .I think your suggestion that far left is moral absolutist and so on is maybe 40 years out of date because postmodernism has made inroads here.

Second ,SC comes in another flavour besides metaphysical one i.e. social construction talk is often applied to our beliefs about facts. This involves *epistemic* claim that the correct explanation for why you have a particular belief has to do with the role that particular belief plays in our social lives and not exclusively with the evidence advanced in its favour.

What this means is that we can abandon beliefs without fear of irrationality : if you have a belief not because there is good evidence for it but because having it serves some contingent social purpose , then if we happen not to share the social purpose it serves ,we are free to reject it.

It is quite easy to see how this leads to relativism and if we assume uncontraversially that this is a widespread view on the left it is easy to see how conservative’s take is vindicated.

luis alegria is obviously confusing socialism with liberalism and here ( # 123 )is a yet another example of this ( this has been pointed out already above ) :

“The modern liberal ideal seems to be a technocratic, bureaucratic centralization of everything, with grudging concessions to reality. There is no role here for “mediating institutions” independent of and disconnected from the central government – the modern liberal idea seems to want these to be, at best, functions or organs or subsidiaries of the government”

This is just wrong headed because best modern formulation /defense of liberalism is in Rawls ,and on his view almost nothing is centralized not even ideology ( see especially his later work for this ).
It is hard to take Luis seriously when he gets the basics wrong.

Mr. Alegria,

I thought it clear in your initial post that you were referring to “liberalism” in the modern American, not the classical or European, sense, as was the article that set off this discussion. What you said makes no sense to me at all if another sense of the word is imputed. I used the word in the same sense. If we all agree that we are using the term in this sense, why bother arguing about different senses of it now? Someone did mention the “problem” that the word is used in different senses, but that’s not a problem – many words are used in different senses; that’s why dictionaries have multiple entries for the same word. We just have to be clear, and I see no cause for confusion here.

When I said liberals are the new Burkeans, I meant this in a fairly limited sense: 1) That much of what liberalism sought has been achieved and is therefore the status quo. Therefore, liberals are in large part defending a status quo they embrace, rather than seeking to overturn it, and 2) That much of what liberals currently defend are the things that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century. These ideas are not necessarily defended from first principles because that is not how they were arrived at; they were compromises, chiefly, but their track record is such that liberals believe they are more desirable than the boundary positions of the dispute. This is particularly so in terms of the key economic conflict of the 20th century between socialism and laisser-faire.

The glory days of lassie-faire were the 19th century, not the 20th. Leading conservative intellectuals like Milton Freidman and Roger Scruton acknowledge this. The 20th century saw trust-busting, the Federal Reserve (a compromise between having the currency in the hands of private banks, as previously, and having it in the hands of the federal government), and a radical labor movement. All that before the New Deal. After WW2, the shape of the compromise became visible and fairly stable, and it was liberalism – that was the compromise. Even Eisenhower said that all were liberals now. Part of what kept this together was the need to maintain social solidarity against the Soviet Union. After Kennedy, however, the Cold War was a stalemate, which gradually became clear. It was Nixon who bought himself breathing space by starting to wind it down – initiating detente and arms control with the Soviet Union, and recognizing China, and, at the same time, undermined the existing liberal economic order by ending the Bretton Woods currency regime. It was also about this time that it became clear that time was on the West’s side in the cold war; the Soviets were stagnating, and the Chinese were going nowhere. The last quarter of the 20th century saw the Cold War resolved and the elites feel less need to compromise. So there have been serious and partly successful efforts to restore a sort of laisser-faire, but not really the 19th century kind, as this is not the 19th century. Nonetheless, we are still in the compromise; we have just moved closer to the other pole; we are still in liberalism.

As for “mediating institutions”, no I don’t mean that liberals are thorough-going Burkeans, but actually they do seem to have matched big government with big mediating institutions: private entities focused on public ends, which have no government authority but which often seek to influence the government or fill public needs it does not: Amnesty International, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the NAACP – the very backbone of liberalism. Benjamin Barber uses the very words “mediating institutions” to characterize these entities, and Peter Drucker said in the 80’s they had been for several decades and would be for several more the fastest-growing sector of the world economy. Not all are liberal, of course, but they seem to be a liberal forte. Not that it matters; I think my point about Burkeanism is made.

Shorter Luis Alegria: Over here on the right, we have bubbling intellectual debates raging between Mordor, Isengard, and free agents like the Balrog. On the left, meanwhile, there is merely a deadening unanimity between Gondor, Rohan, and even the Shire.

I think I’d have to get out quite a bit before I met someone who knew who David Bloor was.

And this leftist would support industrial Mordor and Isengard over feudal Gondor and Rohan any day.