Chris
04-17-2017, 12:27 PM
Pew points to (http://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/) the highest degree of animosity among partisans.
D'Amato, in Both Sides of the Aisle Are Degenerating into Authoritarianism (https://fee.org/articles/both-side-of-the-aisle-are-degenerating-into-authoritarianism/), offers a counterintuitive insight:
But the conspicuousness of America’s political polarization belies a counterintuitive insight: the belligerents of the nation’s social and political war are actually very much alike. Culturally and aesthetically, the groups appear quite different, yet their political philosophies share a common heritage, rooted in the anti-Enlightenment ideas of the first half of the twentieth century.
Classical liberalism has been sidelined because...
Gripped by reductionist groupthink, a toxin generated by the United States’ acrid culture-war politics, left and right are moving–regressing, in fact–toward their most crudely authoritarian incarnations. Their declension recalls the totalitarian communist and fascist ideologies of the early twentieth century.
The authoritarianism has Hegelian roots in "idea that the state precedes the individual in importance....the organic state, the state as 'the Divine Idea' and source of the individual’s 'spiritual reality.'"
It harkens back historically too too...
At present, group identity and its insignia are an all-consuming obsession of both the left and the right, just as they were of the fascists and communists who marched in the streets, eager to spill each other’s blood. Both sides carry and carefully guard the kind of sustained righteous indignation that comes with certainty of the religious kind.
That kind of certainty is dangerous to a free society; once it takes hold, the virtues of the Cause, held beyond any doubt, seem to excuse any crime committed in their pursuit. Orders must be followed because the ends justify the means.
Yet "A free and open society requires the round rejection of both left and right flavors of failed twentieth-century authoritarianism, the restoration of the classical liberal ideas that transformed the world and yet were never given their due."
D'Amato, in Both Sides of the Aisle Are Degenerating into Authoritarianism (https://fee.org/articles/both-side-of-the-aisle-are-degenerating-into-authoritarianism/), offers a counterintuitive insight:
But the conspicuousness of America’s political polarization belies a counterintuitive insight: the belligerents of the nation’s social and political war are actually very much alike. Culturally and aesthetically, the groups appear quite different, yet their political philosophies share a common heritage, rooted in the anti-Enlightenment ideas of the first half of the twentieth century.
Classical liberalism has been sidelined because...
Gripped by reductionist groupthink, a toxin generated by the United States’ acrid culture-war politics, left and right are moving–regressing, in fact–toward their most crudely authoritarian incarnations. Their declension recalls the totalitarian communist and fascist ideologies of the early twentieth century.
The authoritarianism has Hegelian roots in "idea that the state precedes the individual in importance....the organic state, the state as 'the Divine Idea' and source of the individual’s 'spiritual reality.'"
It harkens back historically too too...
At present, group identity and its insignia are an all-consuming obsession of both the left and the right, just as they were of the fascists and communists who marched in the streets, eager to spill each other’s blood. Both sides carry and carefully guard the kind of sustained righteous indignation that comes with certainty of the religious kind.
That kind of certainty is dangerous to a free society; once it takes hold, the virtues of the Cause, held beyond any doubt, seem to excuse any crime committed in their pursuit. Orders must be followed because the ends justify the means.
Yet "A free and open society requires the round rejection of both left and right flavors of failed twentieth-century authoritarianism, the restoration of the classical liberal ideas that transformed the world and yet were never given their due."