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Goodness gracious, meme! Okay, gather round, children, I'll explain a few things to you.
In our political discourse, terms have come to carry a freight of implication and innuendo that sometimes obscures meaning. That is, most people don't know what the fuck they're talking about. And believe me, it is to the Man's advantage that smart, educated, and financially powerful people--we are the richest general citizenry in the history of the world--should run around spouting horseshit like Neo-Libertarianism, as if it means something. Now, some of my definitions may seem... ideosynchratic. Some people who are heavily invested in identifying as, for instance, I dunno, Welfare Democrats or whatever, have accused me of inventing terms, so I'm forced by convention to admit that there is a certain strain of crankism in my thinking. However, if you follow me closely I think you'll find that I am dealing mostly with horse sense and perspective.
Conservatism and liberalism are not opposing values, no matter what FOX tells you. The opposite of conservatism is progressivism, and in a healthy society you'd want both the conservatives and progressives to be vital forces. Liberalism, the belief in protecting the rights and priviledges of individuals from interference by the state or other individuals, is opposed by authoritarianism. So, in the United States at least, liberals are conservative, since this country is predicated on a liberal document (The US Constitution). Again, a healthy society will have a strong oppositional dynamic between liberalism and authoritarianism.
So much for the poli-sci. A little bit of historical perspective: After the French Revolution, when the (authoritarian) aristocracy was beheaded and all the smart fellows were figuring out how to redistribute the wealth of the Republic, there were two camps, two general ideas about the best way to do it. In one camp they said that the state--that is, a board of smart fellows appointed by the people, which is better than the aristocracy--should decide who gets what. In the other camp, they said that individuals should compete for wealth, and there shouldn't be any state involved. They all met in a big hall to talk about this and for convenience the guys in the first camp would sit on the left side of the room while the guys in the second camp sat on the right. So that's where we get our convention of Left vs Right. Ridiculous, no? Because those fellows couldn't have forseen technological advancements such as the corporate conglomerates that imperil both positions, since, while immensely powerful, they are neither The People nor The State. They wouldn't have expected the modern welfare state. Socialized medicine would've baffled them; they were only beginning to have anything resembling an actual medical profession. So, whichever side of the aisle you sat on, you'd be lost at today's political sea. The important thing to remember is that they were all Liberals. I think it would be a quantum leap forward in the rhetorical arts if we could simply get rid of the whole concept of left vs right and think instead in terms of power and personal liberty. Those French guys, they had just seized all the power and they were making the decisions. I bet if you'd asked some baguette-maker in the street, he'd have told you something different.
Does Candidate A claim he is going to empower me? Does he propose to protect my ability to empower myself? What in his background makes me believe him? Can I trust my own judgement in this matter or is there some emotional factor in play, such as my disgust for abortion or my horror of war? Are my emotional values* more or less important than my financial and political interests? These are the questions a reasonable person will ask, and which you never see anyone ask on television and hardly at all on the internet. Sometimes you can hear them being asked on NPR.
I am getting dangerously Ayn Randian here, but I think that the two biggest threats to this ideal empowered citizen and empowered citizenry, where people are informed and reasonable and have learned from history and all of that, are these sort of twin juggernauts, the radically politicized "church" and the corporation. They're aligned right now, which is why us poor Liberals are in such a fix, but the wheels are starting to come off and I don't know who's going to be more sorry. They have won control over the machines of government but they do not agree and their interests are really only aligned in that the corporatists don't care about abortion and the religionists don't care about the environment. Here is where my train of thought stops, because I dunno, I don't know how that shakes out and how we can protect ourselves. Comments welcome.
*Don't even get me started on values. And by the way, as long as we're doing a footnote, Libertarianism is juvenile bullshit. |
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