LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM, PROGRESSIVISM, OBJECTIVISM, ETC.

We have threads for Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Libertarianism, etc. In talking about our various "isms", we shouldn't neglect some of the most common ones to pop up in discussions. I'm starting off with liberalism and conservatism in their "classical" and modern forms. Your input is welcome.

 

LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE--METAMORPHOSIS. METAMORPHOSIS: a complete change of character, appearance, etc The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have changed meaning over the centuries and have come to mean today practically the opposite of what they meant a couple of centuries ago. We have "classical" and modern versions of both which, in some respects, are almost the opposites of each other. Since it's come up on another thread, maybe we might address it here.

"Classical liberalism", as I understand it is Lockean individualism. Locke, of course, was the seventeenth century English philosopher whose ideas influenced the American Founding Fathers, especially the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed with the "inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (except Locke said life, liberty and property"). It was called "liberalism" because of a concern for individual liberty. To understand "liberty", we have to consider freedom from what and for what. Classical liberalism was exclusively concerned with freedom from government, which seemed at the time (17th and 18th centuries) to be the principal threat. It was also mainly concerned with what has been called "negative" freedom; freedom from external constraint. An individual was free if nobody put barriers in the way to keep him from doing what (s)he wanted to do. During the Industrial Revolution, this viewpoint mutated into Manchester liberalism, emphasizing economic freedom and the free market as the "unseen hand" guiding us to the greatest happiness in the long run if we just keep government from interfering with it. As the Industrial Revolution and unfettered capitalism proceeded, however, some thinkers noticed that the freedom of the ordinary individual was at least as much threatened by private employers (think Scrooge) as by the government, and that the ability of the ordinary individual to purse meaningful personal aims was increasingly limited. Hence, writers like John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hill Green came to introduce "social liberalism"--the idea that true liberty for the greatest number of people required government intervention to protect workers from their employers and promote positive liberty--the ability of every individual to enjoy positive freedom in the sense of being able to pursue personally meaningful goals. With the advent of the Great Depression, the idea of John Maynard Keynes that the government must actively regulate the market added the additional element that completed the transition from classical to modern liberalism.

Meanwhile, in the United States, "Conservatism " was also undergoing metamorphosis. European conservatism, favoring institutions and traditions that developed gradually and manifested continuity and stability, developed as a defense of the agrarian ruling class against the industrial capitalist interlopers, with the support of peasants and other traditionalists who perceived the industrial elite as a mutual threat. In the United States, there was not agrarian ruling class, at least in the North, and American conservatism, particularly after the Civil War, came to mean advancement of the interests of the industrial capitalist interlopers and farmers, shopkeepers, and laborers fearing competition from immigrants, religious and ethnic minorities and labor unions. So we have the ideological paradox that conservatism has come to mean an ideology opposing government regulation of the economy and social divisions while favoring government regulation to protect traditional morality, while liberalism does the opposite. That leaves two other possibilities open: libertarianism opposes government involvement in both the economy and morality while collectivism (Socialism, Communism) tends to be okay with government involvement in both areas. Within the conservative camp, there are important divisions between those who emphasize regulating morals (social conservatives) and those emphasizing deregulation of the economy (economic conservatives). Withing the ranks of liberals, there is a similar division between those who are into political correctness/identity politics (cultural liberals) and those emphasizing socioeconomic issues (economic liberals). With To complicate matters further, more, the folks who rallied to the Tea Party and Trump were a loose coalition of conservatives and radical right wing populists who are anything but conservative in the original sense of gradualism, continuity and stability. There is a point at which these right wing populists come close to their left wing counterparts (progressives) when it comes to such matters as economic protectionism.

If we can agree on that conceptualization, possibly we can proceed with our discussion. I think a classical liberal in the original sense could be a hippie, but a conservative in the modern sense represents the establishment which the hippies of the sixties and seventies were rebelling against. And the ethos of "Peace, Love and Understanding" gets lost in the shuffle.

Last edited: 44 minutes ago

 

I've found that liberal politics (left) tends to want to empower the people, and conservative politics (right) tends to want to empower the ego of the individual voter. In that sense conservatism is more intellectual than liberalism. But, on the other hand when you internalize the different moves you can make politically, the liberal agenda can also make you use your intellect, as opposed to initial gut instinct.

I think that lots of conservatives think they are right because they go with their gut instinct rather than being more rational (adding rationale to the debate) in decision making.

Other than my own personal thinking, I don't really know that much about the topic, to be honest.

 

The sign over the door is not what makes a society work.
Certain areas, such as railways, hospitals, utilities and major infrastructure need some degree of state control.
Other larger industries need capitalists to run them profitably and provide jobs for the people.
Smaller and private businesses need to be able to survive and make a profit.
It is the job of our elected governments to ensure that it all works together without greed and exploitation.
It all sounds so easy, but it rarely seems to work out that way.

 

I don't know what I am anymore.

I see myself as a Jeffersonian Republican or Rockefeller Republican, a classic liberal with soft libertarian leanings.

In other words, obsolete in the current political climate of absolutes (i.e. if you don't support this, then you must support the opposite, and, therefore, you belong to this political party.)

 

Politics are a con for the public to believe in.

Classical liberalism and classical conservatism were the same in many ways as both initially sought to limit the power of the state. Today, modern liberalism and conservatism are still the same in that they are both in favor of authoritarian, statist control. In other words, both have drifted along the same general path.

This is why both parties are generally exactly same when it comes to the banking system, war, erosion of civil liberties, state surveillance, etc.

I don't identify myself politically at all, because it's just another way of making people think they have a say within the confines of a completely controlled system.

 

But what would happen if the poor died out and the immigrants all went home? Who would do the work?

 

Lots of it wouldn't get done. I heard the other day on the news that either a law has been passed or was being considered to be passed, that people like waitresses, bar tenders, and other jobs that folks depend on tips to get by, will be changed. It will mandate businesses pay the federal minimum wage and employers get the tips! This must be Russian bullshit-----who in hell could get by on 7 bucks and change in this day and age. People will be carrying their own food if this is true. --------------
(Ok--checked that out and it is bullshit, so some asshole was putting up fake news.)

 

Ayn Rand and Objectivism: The Robber Barons' Assault on Altruism
Who was Ayn Rand and how does she fit into this picture? Ayn Rand (aka Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum), has been called the "Prophet of Profit". A Russian emigre to the U.S. in 1926, she made her fortune making rich people, capitalists, and wannabes feel good about greed. Her biggest innovation was to turn altruism from a noble ideal into a cuss word--something to be despised. Jesus? What a loser. Without acknowledging it, she developed an ideology for capitalism comparable to the Marxism of her homeland--a secular religion making greed a virtue and providing a system of beliefs and values that gave the True Believer a sense that (s)he had reality all figured out. The heroes of her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are essentially Nietzschean supermen, held back by inferiors: conformists, parasites, "moochers". This brings to mind Republican Party rhetoric in the United States about the "wealth creators" who must be accommodated and rewarded by perpetual tax breaks. Her ideas surfaced on other threads when Six-eyed Shaman invoked the "non-aggression principle" of John Galt, hero of Atlas Shrugged --a principle calling for basically laissez faire. The notion that private interests, as well as governments, can threaten liberty and that government action might be necessary to defend every individual's ability to pursue personally meaningful goals seems to be beyond her comprehension .

Ayn Rand herself said there were four components to her philosophy: (1) metaphysics:objective reality; (2) epistemology: reason; (3) Ethics: self-interest; and (4) politics: capitalism. Let's briefly look at each of these.

1. Objective Reality. By stressing objective reality, Rand is claiming that there is a world out there apart from subjective human consciousness, governed by causality and that we must accept it as it is and deal with it. That doesn't seem to be particularly original or controversial,but it sets her apart from the philosophical idealists, particularly the transcendental idealists in the tradition of Kant. Objectivists reject Kant to a degree that is quite extreme. Modern physics, with is theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, seems to challenge Rand’s assumptions about causality, so many Objectivists reject modern physics as “Kantian”and therefore wrong. Objectivists claim to be neither idealists nor materialists, but something else. (Peikoff, 1991. Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 33) What that “something else” might be hasn’t been clearly defined, but it seems to fall close to the materialist end of the spectrum. Rand’s arguments on behalf of these positions are relatively unsophisticated and shallow, derived from her “three axioms” of .existence, consciousness and identity. Essentially, it is that way because she says so.

2. Reason. The concept of “reason” in Objectivist terminology includes both empiricism and rationalism in the form of inductive and deductive logic. She emphatically rejects intuition, faith, and “mysticism” as paths to knowledge. Some wrtiers have compared her to Nietzsche, but she objects, because Nietzsche, she says, was about will and subjectivity. She also rejects all of the “Kantian” objections to our ability to perceive “objects in themselves”, as opposed to things as we perceive them, and. Her rationalism is essentially what philosophers call “naïve realism”. She thinks that through reason we can gain objective knowledge about reality that is certain and unquestionable. It is this belief that gives Objectivists their distinctive dogmatic cocksuredness. Reason functions in Objectivist ideology that way “science” functions in Marxism-Leninism, giving the adherent confidence that they have a superior understanding of reality. I think they're fooling themselves.

3. Self-Interest. In “About The Author” in Atlas Shrugged, Rand writes: “My philosophy is, in essence, the concept of Man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” She planned to introduce each chapter of her other major novel The Fountainhead with a quotation from Nietzsche, but decided against it. Both works, however, reflect the Nietzschean ideal of the hero’s triumph. She says, however, that unlike Neitzsche, whose supermen were that way genetically, hers are self-made men. Rand was never a fan of Darwin (her followers are), but her ethical views reflect an undercurrent of Darwinism. "The fact that a living being is, determines what it ought to do." ( The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 17), and that is to pursue its own individual interests in a competitive world; and it is right and just that the fittest end up on top. Two things are noteworthy here: she implicitly rejects that notion of some evolutionists, Huxley and E.O. Wilson in particular, that human survival depended on co-operation, as well as competition; and she rejects Hume’s contention that ethical imperatives can’t be derived from natural facts. Hers is the pop Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, with its faith in progress and the "survival of the fittest."

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (1964), is a collection of her thoughts on the subject, in which she develops the idea that selfishness is a virtue.. She does not advocate destructive competition that would ignore the rights of other individuals to like pursuit of their interests. It would be to no one’s advantage to have a society composed of backstabbers. As John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, put it: “ I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for me”. The mortal sin of Objectivism is altruism, which is defined as sacrificing one’s own interests for the sake of another. Religions which try to get people to do that are therefore not just wrong but evil. Presumably, the people we celebrate as heroes for giving their lives to save others are chumps or worse—in the same category as suicide bombers. Rand does not say it is necessarily wrong to engage in rescue operations, but it must be done after careful risk-benefit analysis: what are the risks and costs to the rescuer and what are the likely rewards. There must be an anticipated explicit or tacit quid pro quo: monetary gain, gratitude, reputation for heroism, etc. Helping the poor would require the same kinds of calculations. As Rand puts it: “If you want to help them, you will not be stopped.” So reciprocal altruism would be allowed.

4. Capitalism. Rand regards capitalism as the only moral socio-economic system, since it is the only one that protects individual rights. But she does not think the United States currently has a capitalist system. It has a “mixed” economy, and that is bad. The mixed economies of Canada and Western Europe are "socialist' and should be contained. She would like to return to a pre-New Deal American society with laissez faire government and then some. She thinks that the only proper functions of government are police, courts, and national defense. Like Locke, she believes that the proper function of government is to protect life, liberty, and property, to which she adds Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness.” Welfare programs, antitrust laws, public education, child labor laws, public health care programs, environmental regulation, and a minimum wage are all illegitimate government functions, and taxation is theft. For the poor, who “leach” the hard-earned money of the wealth creators, there should be no safety net.They don’t deserve one.

So what can we say? Count me out! I doubt that the "wealth creators" create as much wealth as they make out, and they also tend to be wealth exporters. If they take more than they give, as I suspect they do, they can be considered social parasites and moochers, "leaching" .our hard-earned money from us. Mixed economies are the fairest and most viable.

 

This is why this whole thing is bullshit. I would probably need to read several books to understand what that even means.

 

Read several books? Perish the thought!

 

Well, I'm simply not current on all this political nomenclature. And I don't really care to be honest.

 

More freedom for individual citizens; less government intrusion and power.

 

That's what everybody says.

 

They do? Their voting patterns suggest otherwise.

 

I suppose it would be irony that her life ended with her on welfare.

 

They do. Say ain't play though.