Liberals Unite!

[Elibe]

All conservative viewpoints are reactions to liberalism. The conservative viewpoint, whose ethic supposedly eschews dogma and doctrine, can be traced back to the work of Edmund Burke who, in Reflections, published in 1790, outlined his understanding of the fallacies of the French Revolution.

Burke attempted to make it clear that while a social contract did exist between the governed and the government as the revolutionaries asserted, each state’s “contract” with its people is but a smaller part – a clause as Burke put it – “in the great primeval contract of eternal society.”

Burke established the basic themes of conservatism that have remained as subtext for all later debates: that underlying all human systems is a deeper moral structure that is eternal and transcendent. The struggle for conservatives is to preserve or “conserve” the relationship between human systems and that moral structure, to protect it from the onslaught of the “liberal” who seeks to change things. For the liberal, the "moral structure" must have compelling reason to outweigh and overrule the essential liberties of human beings. .

Traditions, policies, hierarchies, routes of power and chains of command are all or variously seen by the conservative as root connections to the transcendent moral structure. In essence the heart of conservatism is the idea that we must hold on (or return) to that which defined us and brought us to where we are. Those things are our connections to what gives our society meaning and provide a path along which to make choices.

“Society is not held together by abstract principles such as a ‘social contract’,” Burke said, “but by people bound together through a sense of history, shared experiences and common beliefs.” All of the rhetoric aside, Burke’s premise remains at the core of the conservative ideology, such as it is.

While there is no more likelihood of locating a specific and unifying dogma for liberalism than there is for conservatism, liberalism like conservatism, has its roots in intellectual movements of previous ages.

Liberalism is based on two ideals:a defining sense that the dynamic relationship between the good of the society and the needs and desires of the individual must be balanced in a way that conveys a strong respect for individual liberty and an openness to change and progress which arises from the tendency for the liberty of the indvidual to be seeking new frontiers.

Much of what is now considered “liberal” thought derives from the work of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who expanded early definitions of natural law into an affirmative assertion of individual freedom vis-à-vis autocratic or societal domination. Rousseau in particular asserted that the individual’s compliance with society was self imposed due to an understanding of the concepts of the greater good and from the citizen’s natural desire to be a member of society. Inherent compliance is a “social contract” that empowers a government whose primary function is to bring about an articulation of the will of a of people.

In short, the functions of a government are ceded to it by a people in order to assure the general welfare of their community or society. From Rousseau derived the concept of popular sovereignty and with it the idea that a people are self-determining and that government is a tool for that self determination.

What tweaks conservatives is the liberals’ support for the idea of individual liberty, which Roger Scruton called the “great social artifact.” Scruton delineates the essence of the controversy: “One major difference between conservatism and liberalism consists, therefore, in the fact that, for the conservative, the value of individual liberty is not absolute, but stands subject to another and higher value, the authority of established government.”

Much philosophical and political rhetoric has flowed over the dialectical dam since the 18th century and positions on issues have hardened, softened, reformed and dissolved. When Burke and Rousseau were writing the forms of government in Western Europe consisted of monarchy and constitutional monarchy, with the budding concept of the democratic republic. Since then a much greater political diversity has emerged so that governments can be variously monarchies, constitutional monarchies, democratic republics, socialist democracies, communist dictatorships, totalitarian autocracies, and fundamentalist theocracies to name but a few of the possible permutations. As nations have been established and wars fought amongst these governments the dialog between liberal and conservative has taken on greater weight.

http://liberal-antidote.com/M.html

[Mister D]

Does the author realize that classical liberalism (free markets, limited governmenty etc.) and what we call "liberalism" today (i.e. statism, progressivism) are very different?

[MMC]

Does the author realize that classical liberalism (free markets, limited governmenty etc.) and what we call "liberalism" today (i.e. statism, progressivism) are very different?

Ah I see you went at that way eh D.....

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/weir...105917218.html

Researchers have determined that genetics could matter when it comes to some adults' political leanings.

According to scientists at UC San Diego and Harvard University, "ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4." That and how many friends you had during high school.

The study was led by UCSD's James Fowler and focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Scientists matched the subjects' genetic information with "maps" of their social networks. According to researchers, they determined that people "with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults." However, the, subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence.

"It is the crucial interaction of two factors -- the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence -- that is associated with being more liberal,” according to the study.

"These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” said Fowler, who is a professor of political science and medical genetics.

The researchers also said their findings held true no matter what the ethnicity, culture, sex or age of the subjects were.....snip~


I guess since they are born that way.....we shouldn't be to hard on them. >

[Conley]

That is funny stuff...a liberal gene.

Hmm...color me skeptical

[MMC]

That is funny stuff...a liberal gene.

Hmm...color me skeptical

Hmmmm.....Color you skeptical??? Does this mean you are feeling Blue, CL? > :-* ;D :P

[MMC]

I guess it would help if I put the video in the first time.....huh? : :P

[Conley]

That is funny stuff...a liberal gene.

Hmm...color me skeptical

Hmmmm.....Color you skeptical??? Does this mean you are feeling Blue, CL? > :-* ;D :P

Euro Techno?

MMC you never fail to make me laugh ;D

Nah, I just think trying to explain so much through genes is silly. Of course those researchers depend on big federal bucks to pay for their research so I'm not surprised they came up some findings.

[Elibe]

Today conservatives hold sway in the United States government. This is due in part to the emergence of a virulent strain of conservatism frequently referred to as “neo-conservatism.” Neo-conservatives like to distance themselves from the “paleo-conservatives,” but there are not really great differences between them. Neo-conservatism is simply a radical wing.

Three points differentiate the neo-conservative. First is a recognition of the need for (or at least the inevitability of) the welfare state. Secondly, the neo-conservative maintains a conviction that the inclusion of religion – specifically conservative Judeo-Christian religious doctrine – in governance can help the nation recover its (apparently lost or missing) moral core. Finally the neo-conservative believes in an activist foreign policy, they see spreading democracy, eliminating autocracy (or rather fighting communism and Islamic fundamentalism) and forcing markets to open to American goods as being a specific mission of government.

Over a period of 25 years this radical wing has not only been successful in becoming the dominant political force in government, it has also waged a successful campaign to devalue and demoralize liberals to the point that many flee from the name and call themselves progressives, or moderates or centrists as if the word liberal was a pejorative. Indeed the way conservative pundits, talking heads and waterboys toss it around the word liberal is a pejorative.

This is just silly. There is nothing in a conservative point of view that makes it inherently more valuable, logical or moral than the liberal point of view. In fact, if broken down into positions the similarities between conservatives and liberals are far, far greater than the differences.

Sadly, rather than stay on point, liberals have allowed themselves to fall into a pattern of reacting to the reaction. Many liberals have shifted toward “centrist” positions that are distinguishable from conservative positions only by virtue of whose mouth they fall out of. The National Democratic Leadership Council is the home base for these reformed liberals and Bill Clinton was and now Hillary Clinton is their spiritual leader.

In part this defection from liberalism has been due to the conservative’s effectiveness in establishing an identification of liberalism with socialism. Leftists in the thirties were drawn off track by the idea that the single way to achieve mass equality was to restructure society along collectivist lines. However much the left associated themselves with this concept it was not and is not liberalism: subsuming the individual into the collective is completely contrary to the ideal of individual self-determination. That fact notwithstanding, the expensive social programs of the mid 20th century drew fire from conservatives who labeled them as socialist. The label stuck.

Neo-conservatives, in the kind of logical leap for which they have become famous, like to point out that the victory of their hero Ronald Regan over communism (a extreme revisionist view) proves that liberalism is a bankrupt idea. Leaving aside the gross and inaccurate generalization that communism and liberalism are to be equated, the collapse of communism does not lead anyone but a neo-conservative inexorably to the conclusion that the only meaningful alternative for governance is neo-conservative capitalism.

Because of attempts by conservatives to define liberalism out of existence it is important to make clear what a 21st century liberal is. To dramatize these points the listing of them is referred to as a “Liberal Manifesto”. In fact it is more a re-statement of the obvious. Be that as it may, the “manifesto” consists of the following:
The Liberal Manifesto
The maintenance of a democratic society requires a role for government in assuring that all of its citizens have the opportunity to succeed.

The concept of ensuring the general welfare is simply an extension of the understanding that the citizen gives sovereignty to the government in exchange for something. This is by no means to be taken as a gift to the individual, nor is it altruistic for the society. If the society is to succeed, its citizens must themselves be successful in the sense that they are productive and, at the same time, empowered and enabled to consume the products of its economy.

In the modern world the “opportunity for success” means that every citizen has access to affordable and effective education, health care, housing, and human services. Again, these are not altruistic measures; they really do nothing more than assure that the labor force is well trained, healthy and able to adequately assure the well being of family or loved ones.

Nor is this a socialist initiative; it does not require the abandonment of capitalist democracy, though it may require an abandonment of the idea that for-profit entrepreneurship is the solution to all problems.
A national democratic government must assure that all citizens have the same basic rights regardless of the province in which they reside. That government must be empowered and willing to overrule provincial governments and to impose certain standards on them.

This, of course, is anathema to the neo-conservative. Given a belief that each community must have the capacity to formulate and fulfill its moral sense, the efforts of a central government to enforce the concepts of egalitarianism are seen by the neo-conservative as interference at best and totalitarianism as worst. If Texas wants to imprison homosexuals because they insist on have sexual relationships with each other, the neo-conservative point of view dictates that they should be allowed to do so because that community (interesting concept when discussing a state containing 20 million people) has decided that homosexuality is immoral.

What is not often discussed in the debate is that there is nothing in the concept of federal limits on local control that prevents a community from establishing and supporting their own values. Community standards, mores, values and accepted practices are and will always be transmitted through churches, social organizations and myriad other mechanisms that do not need, in fact do not benefit from government oversight or participation.

At the same time we cannot allow our society to deteriorate into a balkanized association of communities who set their own rules and use criminal or administrative codes to enforce them. The issue, in terms of balance, will always be the degree to which that community can use its government, law enforcement, and public services – funded by public tax money – to impose majoritarian values on individual taxpayers who do not hold them.

The compelling national interest is to assure that each of our citizens has equal access to the laws, protections and services of government. To the degree that local control interferes with that, federal intervention is required.
A democratic government must oversee and regulate the mechanics of capitalism.

One of the significant areas of similarity between American conservatives and American liberals is in their support for the free market. Vitality and innovation depend on the rewards for creativity and initiative that can only be established in a free market economy.

However, the capitalist also has the capacity to be rapacious, unethical and completely self-serving. The production of goods and services, particularly in our post-industrial society, is based on the work of human beings, not mechanical parts. Those people – the workers, employees, “associates,” human resources, team-members or whatever euphemism the capitalist world invents to blanket over their essential humanity – are the same people as in “We the People” and as the empowerers of government have a specific and affirmative capacity to limit the degree to which they themselves will be consumed in the processes of production.

Capitalism and democracy are interdependent but can coexist only insofar as the selfish interests of the capitalist do not undermine the society or deprive citizens of basic human rights. A fair wage, a safe workplace, clean air and water, a reasonable expectation that money invested will not be stolen, products that do not poison, burn or explode – these are all things that the people who enable a government have claim to.
Government is not a business; its critical mission requires that it approach service in a manner that would not make sense in a corporation.

The idea that government can be operated based on capitalist, free-market ideologies is, in a word, specious. While it is undeniable that government could benefit from a dose of good customer service ethics, taxpayers are not customers. There is no free market for government. There is no rational basis for the assumption that a model that is successful in a competitive market place will be therefore be effective in providing the services of a government.

Citizens are also not shareholders. Although taxes are an “investment” of sorts and government operates based on those funds, the nature of the agreement between a government and its taxpayers is vastly different from that of a stockholder. As a stockholder, all one can reasonably expect is a return on investment in a manner that is commensurate with that investment. A taxpayer should have the reasonable expectation that the government will provide services without consideration to how much money the taxpayer has paid and there is no specific correspondence in the taxpayer/government relationship that can mirror the concept of return on investment

The citizen is not part of government, not an investor or beneficiary. She is government. She is both the object and the process of government. She is both intervention and outcome. The belief that the formula for managing this unique set of relationships can be drawn from a capitalist model whose sole function is the creation of wealth defies logic.
What adult human beings think, read or say, who or what they worship (or whether the worship at all), who they associate with and who they have relationships with are not areas for government regulation.

[Elibe]

In the draft for “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1779), Thomas Jefferson laid out the principle – later codified in the Bill of Rights that “…the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.” While conservatives would not disagree with this basic premise, the idea that the privacy of conscience implied in the 1st Amendment and the privacy of person implied in the 4th Amendment constitute a generalized privacy right is heresy in neo-conservative camps.

The concept of a social contract however, requires a limited role for government in the regulation of human interactions: good government must justify its need for individual compromises. There must be a compelling interest – compelling in terms of the establishment of a threat to the greater good of the entire society – for a government to violate the sovereignty of the individual. That compelling interest is clear in the need to protect children from the predations of pornographers. It is far less clear, in fact there is no compelling interest at all, in the case of the willing participation of consenting adults in pornographic activities; even if the pornographers themselves are equally predatory.

We place few if any limits on the predations of capitalists in other areas of commerce, why are we so interested in the predatory capitalism of pornography? A person may find any number of features of modern society “obscene” in the word’s connotation of “repulsive” or “disgusting,” and have no compelling interest in limiting another’s right to find it otherwise. If pornography is demonstrably abusive, if crimes are committed in its production, if it is directed at young children, these things must be addressed through law enforcement. The fact that some in our society are uncomfortable with explicit sexuality however is not a government interest.

Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy has made this concept explicit: "Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct."
The standards for moral governance are laid out and limited in the Constitution, which has adequately prescribed and proscribed the moral, but secular function of government.

Mark Gerson, a Project Director for the neo-conservative policy think-tank The New American Century, says that “[neo-conservatives] have stressed that religious values are essential to public virtue” and that, to establish these values “…neo-conservatives have drawn directly from strong personal Jewish and Christian belief.”

What defines the neo-conservative is not his or her desire for morality in the daily transactions of life. There are few political theorists who do not make the claim that they seek to instill or restore virtue in public affairs. What defines the neo-conservative is the conceit that Western, hierarchical, paternalistic, Judeo-Christian religious practice is the singular path to the nation’s recovery of its moral compass.

It is in the area of morality that conservative condemnations of liberalism become most rabid. Tepid criticism such as that of Frank Mayer in 1960, who said that conservatives must reject the “utilitarian ethics and the secular progressivism that classical liberalism has also passed on to us” has given way to, for example, hysterical diatribes that reprise Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvany’s 1886 text entitled El Liberalismo es Pecado, (Liberalism Is a Sin) and include statements such as “The necessary consequences of [Liberalism] are… the abolition of the Divine right and of every kind of authority derived from God.”

The issue, simply, is this: Western Christian tradition has, in the words of Alan Watts “confused the profane with the sacred, the relative with the absolute, the social sphere of law and order with the divine nature.” The realm of the spirit is in its relationship to the mind and heart of the individual, not the functioning of a society. Spiritual traditions that produce moral people will produce moral societies. This outcome cannot be obtained in reverse, i.e. establishment of a rigid moral society will not produce moral people. In fact, what it will produce, has produced where it has been tried, is a totalitarian state that supports an immoral use of power.

The efforts of the neo-conservatives to establish a moral society based on Western Judeo-Christian doctrine is misguided and unnecessary. Judeo-Christian ethics has no corner on the market in producing moral people. As Thomas Paine said “: "Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad." What is clear about the neo-conservative position is that it is not “neo” at all and in fact is quite consistent with what Friedrich Hayek described as conservatism’s “paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies.”

The founders had faith that the Constitution of the United States , which establishes a secular government based on the morality of the Enlightenment – a morality that rejects religious dominance in the affairs of state – was sufficient to attend to the needs of the people. While some can claim that religious doctrine provides for a stronger moral structure, there is simply no basis for a claim that a government infused with religious doctrine can offer the country anything that is an improvement over what we now have in the Constitution.

Secular government works, and has been working for 225 years. Contrast that to recent efforts at Theocracy in the world and it becomes very clear that secular government must be preserved in the United States . Our society is not broken, and efforts to fix it are more about the desires for power of the fixers then any apparent deficit in that that would be fixed.
Government must serve as society’s tool for protecting its citizens, while also serving as a forum for redress of grievances.

What the individual citizen gets in the social contract is a government that will assure her that she will be protected from those who willfully violate the tenets of the agreement.

Societies make laws to protect the individual and his interests and there is no serious concept of individual liberty that exempts the individual from the prohibition against causing harm.

The neo-conservative position is that, in addition to enforcing the laws of the society, the government is charged with combating evil. While this is a laudable philosophy, it is impractical, if for no other reason than that it is impossible to eliminate evil. Without evil there is no good. Once evil is “eliminated” then what was previously simply less than good necessarily become reinterpreted to meet the new need for evil and so on it goes until the one who is left is the one who had everyone else burned at the stake.

In the area of civil law, while tort reform is important and necessary, it is equally important that citizens not be denied the right to bring suit against those with whom they have a legitimate grievance.
A democratic government functions only insofar as it is accessible and controllable by individual citizens through the vote. If government is controlled by moneyed interests, corporations or special interest groups it ceases to function as a democratic government.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “Men by their makeup are naturally divided into two camps: those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of higher classes; and those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them the safest and most honest, if not always the wisest repository of the public interest."

Elitists abound in our society today, on the right, in the center and on the left. The basic principle of the elitist is that the unwashed masses are incapable of self governance and therefore need the wiser, more educated and more worldly patrician classes to establish the bounds and rules of society.

Fortunately, a compromise was reached in the design of our Constitution between the two groups that Jefferson defined. This compromise: a bi-cameral legislature, a judiciary and executive branch and specific mechanisms for balancing the powers of these branches is designed to function at the will of the people. Who and what the voter is has evolved over the course of time to include people of all races and both genders, but there was never any question that the voter, buy choosing who would take the reigns of power, maintained the power in the hands of the people.

Special interests – primarily through the use of money – threaten the balance that has served us these many years. This is not entirely new; money has always been a source of power. But, in a democratic republic every effort must be made to assure that nothing comes between the voter and the elected representative. To do otherwise is to facilitate the disenfranchisement of the voter.

No other government reform makes sense until we have tackled the issue of campaign finance reform and lobbying, because money now contaminates the discussion of everything else. This will mean, at the least, designing a method and process for those running for office to have access to the voter at little or no cost. It will also mean placing limits on the numbers of lobbyists who can have access to congress at any one time and limiting those lobbyists to their verbal powers of persuasion.

The cost of electoral politics has been the tool that the elitists have used to make sure that only one of their number has the means to run for office. Failing in that, in the case where a reformer has snuck into office, the elite uses money to seduce that person into membership. The current electoral process is one in which representatives are elected that have no knowledge of the commoner, or if elected with such knowledge, become quickly insulated from that knowledge.

Money is like a virus that takes over an organic system and systematically invades and corrupts every cell in it. If our nation is to survive, this virus must be killed.
The primary mission of the government is to address the domestic interests of its people. Foreign intervention is warranted only under circumstances of direct threats to those interests.

It is not a function of government to spread the ideology of its political system to other countries. It is not the function of a government to meddle in the operations of other sovereign states. When Stalin did this we called it totalitarianism. When we do it we call it democracy. The idea that democracy can be imposed on a people is no more credible, and clearly no more moral, than the idea that communist socialism could be imposed; with the difference that communism was compatible with totalitarianism.

When we set up totalitarian states in the name of democracy (as we have done with far greater frequency than we have set up democracies,) we can only do so with heavy doses of delusion and denial; we can only do so with callous disregard for the people who have been promised freedom only to be saddled with the brutality of dictatorship. Democracy requires the presence of a variety of circumstances before it can flourish. These circumstances can be encouraged or facilitated, but they cannot be imposed.

More to the point, the function of a government is to assure that welfare of its citizens. Its actual citizens. As in the citizens who live in the actual country in which the government exists. Not the citizens of another country. Any larger evangelical purpose, any political or personal agenda that a particular leader may have is secondary in all circumstances to the obligations that individual has to his or her government and that that government has to its people.

The long term future for the people of the United States is uncertain. Our future is no more secure, nor is it more securable, then that of Rome in its heyday. Historical models make it clear that imperialism and international adventurism do not assure the long term success of a nation. Our success to date has been a combination of lucky provenance (a hugely resourceful geography) and the brilliance of the constitutional democracy that was founded here. The Pax Romana did not save Rome . There is no reason to assume that the current efforts at a Pax Americana will save the United States .
Liberalism restored

Conservative hysteria notwithstanding, our country and our future is dependent upon our capacity to change and to adapt to the circumstances of the real world. While a moral core is important, the idea that we can only preserve that core by rigidly holding on to the principles and practices of the past is ridiculous. At the same time, it is important to be clear that all human enterprises – especially governments – are fraught with conflict and complication. While it is clear that the combination of capitalism and democracy provide for a good basis for the self-determination of the individual, it is equally clear that it is only through a firm dedication to individual freedom and liberty that democratic capitalism can flourish.

In the end, there is nothing to conserve if there is no change or growth. Liberalism provides a viable atmosphere to support change and growth, and the maintenance of the core values of the human race.

We should be proud to call ourselves liberals, but only as we liberals define ourselves, not in terms delineated by those who would have us silenced. It is time to take back our pride in the historical traditions and accomplishments of liberalism. It is also time to take back our government. We will never do that so long as we let the opposition define us.

[Mister D]

Elibe, a link and an excerpt will do. Please do not copy and paste the complete piece if it is not your own.