posted
Not to be coy, but not much. Basically trying to dig myself out of a hole I put myself in. :/
And now for some blather.
Speaking of being coy, did the relevant parties get what I was trying to say with my link? Let me add to that that it might be enlightening for some people to read up on the turn of the century Progressive party. I think 90% of [edit:liberals or conservatives on this board] you would probably have no problem with them.
The traditional expressions of progressivism/communism/liberalism are all, to me, expressions of some kind of yearning to be free, and to help others be as free as possible. To remove the bonds that others have put on you because of your class, or race, or sex, or sexual orientation, whatever. Whether or not you agree with their necessity or the outcome of the *ideal*, these attitudes have been around for as long as there have been people, and should be worthy of respect.
I agree with Magson that, sometimes, conservatives are fighting against entrentched liberal attitudes such that they are the 'liberals'. I hardly think that they are today's 'liberals', though.
I happen to like the label of liberal and conservative. Currently, I think conservativism and liberalism can best be viewed in terms of order.
To me, most people who can be called conservatives that I've met do believe that the 'old-fashioned' standards of God/Some kind of old-fashioned absolutism; reverence of country; economic competition such that it reinforces God, family, and country; and family are the cornerstones of what is good. Are there any people who consider themselves conservatives that do not agree that these are the best goals of a country?
In this sense, as you see on this board, many people who call themselves conservative are perfectly happy with government taking a hand to pull people up, to educate them and feed them, to take a hand in how business is run, to facilitate strong families and in keeping with biblical-ish principles of helping your fellow man. When Orson goes on about what the Democratic party used to be, he is pretty much talking about progressives.
So, liberalism and conservativism are very intermixed.
After thinking about this, I think that what seperates out the real liberals from the conservatives are how much pain and death you are willing to put up with in your fellow man. I'm not talking about anarchy, but freedom equals the freedom to fall, to fail, and to hurt yourself. The more you go towards the ideal of freedom, the more you go towards greater individually induced suffering and death. For various reasons, real liberals are o.k. with others hurting themselves, while conservatives are not.
Yes, I know. None of these opinions are really new outside of this board. But I'm not sure that I've seen them expressed on this board, and so am offering them up for your delight, or revulsion, Whichever is your choice.
quote:For various reasons, real liberals are o.k. with others hurting themselves, while conservatives are not.
I lack time to fully discuss your post, but this sentence puzzled me. A lot of conservative economic policies are based on people accepting the consequences of their actions (i.e., hurting themselves sometimes). In fact, I'd bet a particular social program will score higher approval among most conservatives the more the events that lead to the need for help are outside the person's control (or perceived to be outside the person's control, to be more accurate).
quote: I lack time to fully discuss your post, but this sentence puzzled me. A lot of conservative economic policies are based on people accepting the consequences of their actions (i.e., hurting themselves sometimes).
It's already been observed that sometimes conservatives are really liberals. In any case, many 'conservative' economic positions I've seen taken are *economically* liberal(free)...to a certain point. Conservatives are o.k. with risk inasmuch as it doesn't interfere with the healthy functioning of God (aka the religious life/the church), the country, the family, or the person. They believe that by 'accepting the consequences of their actions', they will behave morally, which benefits God, country, etc.
I'm not arguing that conservatives want the world to be free of *struggle*. As in exercise, resistance and pain create strength.
Liberal economic and social positions whose goal is freedom, and *not* an ordered ideal, don't care whether someone accepts the consequences of their actions or not, as conservatives want. They accept the fact that people are going to crash and burn and possibly destroy themselves and that this may have short-term dire consequences with many families and people suffering.
What I'm proposing is that the more someone supports individual choice (I know you hate that phrase in the context of abortion. Sorry.), regardless of consequences to themselves or others, the more liberal they are.
I'm not making a value judgement. I'm not really sure how much I believe what I wrote before. I'm really just throwing it out for discussion as a response to the extremely simple views Pixiest expressed in her initial post htat assumed a simple reality for what it means to be liberal or progressive.
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posted
I think the personal choice thing can be floated in support of both. Affirmative action restricts personal choice as to who gets hired, just as minimum wage and maximum hours laws restrict the right of someone to freely contract for sale of their labor. The latter two were struck down by the Supreme Court consistently in the first part of last century on the basis of interfering with the right to contract. Yet all 3 of these are more typical of the conservative than liberal position.
And that's ignoring gun ownership altogether.
So I think you're missing a factor in your definition.
Dagonee P.S., now THIS is a fun conversation.
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quote: I think the personal choice thing can be floated in support of both. Affirmative action restricts personal choice as to who gets hired, just as minimum wage and maximum hours laws restrict the right of someone to freely contract for sale of their labor. The latter two were struck down by the Supreme Court consistently in the first part of last century on the basis of interfering with the right to contract. Yet all 3 of these are more typical of the conservative than liberal position.
And that's ignoring gun ownership altogether.
So I think you're missing a factor in your definition.
Your point is well taken.
I think what your post brings out is that there are some things that are liberal for the short term, but not for the long term, and vice versa. When we look at the long-term effects of where your specific issues lead to, I think many people would argue that, at least in the case, of AA and minimum wage, there is a net loss of freedom. Now, the funny thing here is that I think that when a 'liberal' works for something like AA or minimum wage, which deny individual choice, in order to force some order on a group of people that would result in greater freedom (choices/power) for others, he is in fact being a short-term conservative.
On the other hand, I think many conservatives (whether they admit it or not ) support the liberal short-term choice because they think that it maintains a certain order in the long term.
This is why I think that what is normally called liberalism and conservativism, to me, are intertwined, whether people want to admit it or not. Conservatives are liberals when it suits them. Liberals are conservatives when they want to establish a certain order. Or, as has long been noted, a liberal is just a conservative who has been pulled over by the police. A conservative is someone who just got mugged. Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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I don't think your characterizations hold up all that well.
In the early 1900s, one of the agendas the progressives pushed was forced sterilization, something that denies personal freedom. To be fair, they were also pushing for access to birth control (and for awhile there was overlap between the two - some would say the rhetoric of eugenics was never completely purged from the language of reproductive rights advocates).
The union movement was also a complex situation. As a response to horrendous conditions in sweatshops, mines and other industries, individual workers gave up some of their freedom in order to band together to force industries to deal with them collectively.
There are interesting contradictions between the right and left today, too. I wish I could find it, but a little over a year ago, some columnist published a great analysis of the right and left - very fair. The right and the left just choose different areas in which they think central government should play a role or in which personal liberties should be curtailed.
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posted
One of the main themes of what I've been writing in this thread is that there is often a broad overlap between the ideals of people who currently identify themselves as liberals or conservatives. I held up the progressive party as symbolic of that overlap, not of liberals in particular. This was in response to Pixiest's belief that progressive=liberal, when it's obvious at this point in the thread that that is not historically or semantically accurate. Pardon for the confusion.
In regards to your specific points, I have never seen forced sterilization given as a major plank of the party, or the movement, though I know it *was* a fairly large movement at the time. You would know better than I, however within the context of that era, I would argue that they felt they were doing 'good'.
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posted
Storm, I like everything in your posts on this topic except how the labels apply (which isn't central to your argument). I think the problem is that the way you talk about the temporary liberal conservative splits depend on the definitions you're using these statments to justify, which is a little circular. You're thesis is consistent, but I'm not sure how much buy-in you'd get from either side.
Especially when you get to the second and third layers of the arguments. For example, while restricting the right of a worker to work for less than minimum wage hinders liberty in the short term to create more long-term personal freedom, some conservatives would argue that in the longer run it lowers personal freedom by limiting economic growth and access to job training that would let that worker move "up" the job chain. And I'm sure there's another layer that can be talked about to show the minimum wage in the even longer term can increase personal freedom in some other way.
Without getting into the specifics of that argument (mainly because I find it dull ), I think it's clear that a colorable argument can be made on both sides that their position is best for long-term personal freedom.
And, just to be clear to some other person who posted on this thread and to close that loop, there are a lot of conservatives who think that their economic policies are a better way to end poverty and the suffering it causes. Their motives are not just selfish attempts to line their pockets. I'm sure selfish (or self-interested, to be a little nicer) conservatives exist, just as I'm sure their counterparts on the liberal side of things exist.
Dagonee Edit: And your main post from the immediately preceeding post is dead on - there's definitely overlap, and it can be used by either side to show why policies on the "other side" are really examples of their own side's principles.
posted
One of my goals in bringing up this topic is to determine whether there really is such a thing as a clear political divide in this country such that anyone should even bother with labels like liberal or conservative or left and right. If, as we seem to be saying, the outlooks and methods of liberals and conservatives, left and right, are really intertwined in how they view things and do things, then it seems to me that liberalism, conservativism, left, and right are meaningless labels with zero practical value.
I think a lack of clearly defined definitions is important because it calls into question what is really being said when people talk about the 'liberal press' or 'liberal faculties' at universities, on the one hand, and conservative talk show hosts on the other. And let's not even get into left and right!
I think these lack of clear definitions are important because if the labels don't fit, or are so vague and broad that they are meaningless, then I think we shouldn't use them, and those that do use them are really clueless about the political landscape.
So, I made a stab at what liberal and conservative meant and it seems that it fell flat. That's fine.
I then hereby call on Hatrack in general, specifically Pixiest and Michael8 and OSC, to give up the use of the terms left, right, liberal, and conservative until such a time as people know what the hell those terms mean.
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posted
Sounds good to me. And I think your definition was as good as possible. I could come up with one almost exactly opposite that would be just as good, which pretty much proves your point.
Dagonee P.S., so Storm was the missing ingrediant all along. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:This raises the question: what, if any, is my ideology? What kind of ideology, if any, can an organizer have who is working in and for a free society? The prerequisite for an ideology is possession of a basic truth. For example, a Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order or the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage - the political paradise of communism. The Christians also begin with their prime truth: the devinity of Christ and the tripartite nature of God. Out of these "prime truths" flow a step-by-step ideology.
An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist. He accepts the late Justice Learned Hand's statement that "the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right." The consequence is that he is ever on a hunt for the causes of man's plight and the general propositions that help to make some sense out of man's irrational world. He must constantly examine life, including his own, to get some idea of what it is all about, and he must challenge and test his own findings. Irreverence, essential to questioning, is a requisite. Curiosity becomes compulsive. His most frequent word is "why?"
Does this mean that the organizer is rudderless in a free society or a free society is rudderless? No, I believe that he has a far better sense of direction and compass than the closed-society organizer with his rigid political ideology. First, the free-society organizer is loose, resilient, fluid, and on the move in a society which is itself in a state of constant change. To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of of the widely different situations our society represents.
--Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Organizing is one component of my political work - the demands vary across time. But Alinsky describes the scenery as I see it very well. Specific ideologies aren't especially helpful. Pragmatism almost demands eclecticism and improvisation.
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posted
That's part of my point, Storm. The people currently calling themselves Progressive change what they're calling themselves frequently.
Now, just because there used to be a Progressive party doesn't mean that that progressive is today's progresssive.
Heck, the Democratic party doesn't even mean what it meant in the 60s. Back in JFKs day they were for lower taxes and standing up to the Soviets if you can believe that!
posted
You're opening post suggested to me that the turn-of-the century communists are the ideological equivalent of today's progressives. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one to interpret it that way. If that's not what you meant, you may want to clarify more.
posted
I'm really pleased to see you still posting in the thread, Pixiest.
Kind of along the same lines of what Dagonee was saying, you seemed to be saying in your initial post that progressive/liberal/communist/socialist were all the same thing except for the name. My belief at this point is that this is not so, and that the labels themselves are not historically and semantically equivalent: communal living, the ideal of sharing all things in common, has been practiced by many, many, many cultures throughout history, for both reasons of practicality and idealism, but many of htese cultures weren't what you would probably call social liberals. People who would probably agree with many progressive ideals--FDA, anti-child labor laws, public schooling, some degree of publicly funded medicine, anti-monopoly-- abound on this board in the guise of Mormons and Catholics.
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) support the liberal short-term choice because they think that it maintains a certain order in the long term.
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