reading some of the comments on Matt Stoller's follow-up post...
Percy here quotes David Atkins, who blogs at Digby's as "D-Day":“This is what liberalism is. It is unavoidably, inescapably paternalistic in nature. It is so because it understands the inevitable tendency of human beings to be truly awful to one another unless social and legal rules are put in place-yes, by force-to prevent them from doing otherwise.”
This is a truly obnoxious, wrong-headed view of human kind, at least of human kind in America. It posits that there are no decent people who do good things for reasons of the heart and do them without anyone requiring them to do so. The real problem may be that we do not recognise (or trust) that there are many of these and that there are enough of them to prevent, through our existing political means, those who instead actually do match Atkins’ wrong-headed, terribly sad characterization of the “inevitable tendency of human beings,” of which there are surely too many - not in number necessarily, but any at all, frankly - from doing great harm to others for personal gain or out of sheer perversity. (I tend to see banks this way.) These suffer from a disorder: being systematically inhuman to fellow humans. Are we asked to believe that this is so for all of us - or at least most of us? Is that why we need liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is to be called? I doubt this, that is, what seems to be the underlying premise, that there are so many of the latter than the former that the former will be and are regularly are stopped and disempowered, fooled, and rendered incapable of protecting themselves and others better inclined by the latter. In America, so far, the former have had the best of the contest over time. For that reason, I and many others continue to reject a political philosophy of whatever name that is based on the warped view of human nature embraced by Atkins. Human nature is simply too complex, one that also and often has its better angels, to be captured in such a tiny, dark-glassed bottle. Atkins and his ilk would do better to let themselves out of it.
I dunno but I'm gonna bet Percy is white, able-bodied, and at least middle-class. And was never abused by his parents, molested by a priest or coach, bullied severely at school, or otherwise traumatized by other people.
And then Ransome replies:Greed is most likely learned, a bad behavior that only adults can partake. Read the Kropotkin essay "Mutual Aid." Mutual struggle happens under ordinary conditions but when the going is tough, mutual aid is prevalent.
LOL WUT. Has this person never seen children taking one another's toys away? Never heard of sociopathy? Never heard of hoarding during times of scarcity?
There's more discussion of Markos Moulitsas, Digby, and Atkins as Democratic Party hacks. Goes without saying for Markos. I wasn't aware that Digby and Atkins are allegedly censoring comments on Hullaballoo that criticize the Democratic establishment too harshly. That's a disappointment. I understand the instinct of big-name liberal bloggers during an election year to circle the wagons around Obama so that we don't wind up with President Santorum or whomever, but not to the point of intellectual dishonesty.
Parvaneh Ferhadi gets it:There is no such thing as non-intervention.
If your neighbour’s house is burning and decide to not intervene, you allow it to burn down.
If you see someone drowning and decide to not intervene, you allow him to drown.
If you see someone robbed and decide to not intervene, you allow a robbery to happen.
So these are all conscious choices do signal to society the preferences of the actor(s) making these choices and thus do influence a society and create or change rules by which a society works.
Thus, a non-intervention is still an intervention.
It’s a fiction, but a convenient one. This fiction allows you to hide behind a (bogus) principle so that you have no need of justifying your preference for things like segregation, genocide, discrimination, crime, bullying and so forth. It allows you to just step aside and claim, “sorry, I am a non-interventionist”, no need to reflect on morality or anything like that.
Which, of course, is not a claim that all interventions are just. "Reflect on morality" would imply otherwise. She continues...A state is not an entity you can separate from society - the two influence each other. Its acts - and its non-acts - send messages to society.
...and expands upon that here.
Here's a good discussion of what "liberal" means anymore in the U.S., other than an epithet slung by Rush Limbaugh et al. I don't agree with Francois T. that "the paradigm Left v Right is obsolete. It is now us v. the corporations." Lots of "us" who aren't the corporations don't want me to have "consequence-free sex" or GLBT people to have sex at all, yada yada yada. Such are the blind spots of regulars on a blog about economics.
Dan Kervick is correct that New Deal liberalism does not spawn empire but is drained by it. He points out that "the most prosperous social democracies in northern Europe show no imperialistic proclivities at all," and that neoliberalism - the greatest driver of imperialism for the last few generations - is inimical to the domestic safety net.
But possibly the best critic of Stoller on that thread, other than Ferhadi, is Aletheia84. Replying to libertarian straw-leftists:No one on the left believes the government is a guardian angel. That kind of claim just sounds like so much conservative boilerplate. You’re mistaking opposition to Ron Paul for a belief in government’s angelic nature. The two things have nothing to do with one another.
Most leftists I know are opposed to Ron Paul and government overreach, empire, war, the surveillance state, etc. etc. We oppose both. We also know, unlike propertarians, it would seem, that oppressive, tyrannical power resides in the private sector as well, and must be combated through democratic means. Ron Paul and most propertarians are against that, believing that any democratic checks on their property rights is an assault on the very notion of “liberty and freedom.” As if, liberty and freedom is solely the purview of those with property - read, business owners. As if the liberty and freedom to pollute, steal from workers and consumers, pay crappy wages, fire workers at will and so on is a legitimate definition.
It’s not. Except for American libertarians, who, in my view, have a truly warped idea of what liberty and freedom are all about.
And to Stoller directly:Yes, by all means, write a critique of liberalism and the Democratic Party. That’s fair game. Chris Hedges, David Harvey, Noam Chomsky and many others have done valuable work in that field. Leftists (whom I identify with) have written excellent critiques of the “liberal class” for decades, and they’re well worth reading. If you had done that, it would have been a welcome addition.
Instead, you and Glenn confused your critique of liberalism and the Democratic Party with a rationale and an explanation for why people criticize Ron Paul. The two things are separate. Ron Paul’s positions on most issues are easily shredded and deserve rebuke. He has truly odious positions on most major issues, and it’s fair game to attack him on these. One can do so from a leftist perspective (as I do), a progressive, a liberal or a diehard Dem perspective, and make valid points, supported by the evidence.
You and Glenn ruled that out from the getgo. You said implicitly and explicitly that any and all criticism of Ron Paul is nothing more than fear of the supposed mirror he holds up in front of the liberal establishment. This, Matt, is truly a speculative reach, and impossible for you to prove. You just asserted your gut feeling as fact, and that’s where you went south.
Delink the two. Delink your (valid) critique of liberalism, etc. from your psychoanalysis of motives for the criticism of Ron Paul, and you’re back in business. They don’t belong together.
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1762070.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.
This is a truly obnoxious, wrong-headed view of human kind, at least of human kind in America. It posits that there are no decent people who do good things for reasons of the heart and do them without anyone requiring them to do so. The real problem may be that we do not recognise (or trust) that there are many of these and that there are enough of them to prevent, through our existing political means, those who instead actually do match Atkins’ wrong-headed, terribly sad characterization of the “inevitable tendency of human beings,” of which there are surely too many - not in number necessarily, but any at all, frankly - from doing great harm to others for personal gain or out of sheer perversity. (I tend to see banks this way.) These suffer from a disorder: being systematically inhuman to fellow humans. Are we asked to believe that this is so for all of us - or at least most of us? Is that why we need liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is to be called? I doubt this, that is, what seems to be the underlying premise, that there are so many of the latter than the former that the former will be and are regularly are stopped and disempowered, fooled, and rendered incapable of protecting themselves and others better inclined by the latter. In America, so far, the former have had the best of the contest over time. For that reason, I and many others continue to reject a political philosophy of whatever name that is based on the warped view of human nature embraced by Atkins. Human nature is simply too complex, one that also and often has its better angels, to be captured in such a tiny, dark-glassed bottle. Atkins and his ilk would do better to let themselves out of it.
I dunno but I'm gonna bet Percy is white, able-bodied, and at least middle-class. And was never abused by his parents, molested by a priest or coach, bullied severely at school, or otherwise traumatized by other people.
And then Ransome replies:Greed is most likely learned, a bad behavior that only adults can partake. Read the Kropotkin essay "Mutual Aid." Mutual struggle happens under ordinary conditions but when the going is tough, mutual aid is prevalent.
LOL WUT. Has this person never seen children taking one another's toys away? Never heard of sociopathy? Never heard of hoarding during times of scarcity?
There's more discussion of Markos Moulitsas, Digby, and Atkins as Democratic Party hacks. Goes without saying for Markos. I wasn't aware that Digby and Atkins are allegedly censoring comments on Hullaballoo that criticize the Democratic establishment too harshly. That's a disappointment. I understand the instinct of big-name liberal bloggers during an election year to circle the wagons around Obama so that we don't wind up with President Santorum or whomever, but not to the point of intellectual dishonesty.
Parvaneh Ferhadi gets it:There is no such thing as non-intervention.
If your neighbour’s house is burning and decide to not intervene, you allow it to burn down.
If you see someone drowning and decide to not intervene, you allow him to drown.
If you see someone robbed and decide to not intervene, you allow a robbery to happen.
So these are all conscious choices do signal to society the preferences of the actor(s) making these choices and thus do influence a society and create or change rules by which a society works.
Thus, a non-intervention is still an intervention.
It’s a fiction, but a convenient one. This fiction allows you to hide behind a (bogus) principle so that you have no need of justifying your preference for things like segregation, genocide, discrimination, crime, bullying and so forth. It allows you to just step aside and claim, “sorry, I am a non-interventionist”, no need to reflect on morality or anything like that.
Which, of course, is not a claim that all interventions are just. "Reflect on morality" would imply otherwise. She continues...A state is not an entity you can separate from society - the two influence each other. Its acts - and its non-acts - send messages to society.
...and expands upon that here.
Here's a good discussion of what "liberal" means anymore in the U.S., other than an epithet slung by Rush Limbaugh et al. I don't agree with Francois T. that "the paradigm Left v Right is obsolete. It is now us v. the corporations." Lots of "us" who aren't the corporations don't want me to have "consequence-free sex" or GLBT people to have sex at all, yada yada yada. Such are the blind spots of regulars on a blog about economics.
Dan Kervick is correct that New Deal liberalism does not spawn empire but is drained by it. He points out that "the most prosperous social democracies in northern Europe show no imperialistic proclivities at all," and that neoliberalism - the greatest driver of imperialism for the last few generations - is inimical to the domestic safety net.
But possibly the best critic of Stoller on that thread, other than Ferhadi, is Aletheia84. Replying to libertarian straw-leftists:No one on the left believes the government is a guardian angel. That kind of claim just sounds like so much conservative boilerplate. You’re mistaking opposition to Ron Paul for a belief in government’s angelic nature. The two things have nothing to do with one another.
Most leftists I know are opposed to Ron Paul and government overreach, empire, war, the surveillance state, etc. etc. We oppose both. We also know, unlike propertarians, it would seem, that oppressive, tyrannical power resides in the private sector as well, and must be combated through democratic means. Ron Paul and most propertarians are against that, believing that any democratic checks on their property rights is an assault on the very notion of “liberty and freedom.” As if, liberty and freedom is solely the purview of those with property - read, business owners. As if the liberty and freedom to pollute, steal from workers and consumers, pay crappy wages, fire workers at will and so on is a legitimate definition.
It’s not. Except for American libertarians, who, in my view, have a truly warped idea of what liberty and freedom are all about.
And to Stoller directly:Yes, by all means, write a critique of liberalism and the Democratic Party. That’s fair game. Chris Hedges, David Harvey, Noam Chomsky and many others have done valuable work in that field. Leftists (whom I identify with) have written excellent critiques of the “liberal class” for decades, and they’re well worth reading. If you had done that, it would have been a welcome addition.
Instead, you and Glenn confused your critique of liberalism and the Democratic Party with a rationale and an explanation for why people criticize Ron Paul. The two things are separate. Ron Paul’s positions on most issues are easily shredded and deserve rebuke. He has truly odious positions on most major issues, and it’s fair game to attack him on these. One can do so from a leftist perspective (as I do), a progressive, a liberal or a diehard Dem perspective, and make valid points, supported by the evidence.
You and Glenn ruled that out from the getgo. You said implicitly and explicitly that any and all criticism of Ron Paul is nothing more than fear of the supposed mirror he holds up in front of the liberal establishment. This, Matt, is truly a speculative reach, and impossible for you to prove. You just asserted your gut feeling as fact, and that’s where you went south.
Delink the two. Delink your (valid) critique of liberalism, etc. from your psychoanalysis of motives for the criticism of Ron Paul, and you’re back in business. They don’t belong together.
Unlocked.
This entry was originally posted at http://ms-daisy-cutter.dreamwidth.org/1762070.html. Please comment there using either your DW account or OpenID.