Although most of the time I think of myself to the left of center left, I basically agree with you. In my case, I have a healthy respect for the theory of private property, and I am aghast at the notion of eliminating it. I see the tragedy of the commons in so many places, and my estimation of the intelligence of our species has rapidly declined.
Love this essay; it clearly and carefully lays out the position of a sort of "liberal left" in its, as I see it, sensible values connected fairly strongly to the founding values of the United States.
(I don't very much like the locution "center left" because it's not really occupying some center point between a left extreme and a right, as the author has noted, but I suppose we must at times adopt the label that everyone seems to want to use.)
Let’s begin by acknowledging that Locke was wrong about the tabula rasa. Millions of years of biological evolution underly who we are and how we go about making decisions. As one who was formally trained in Anthropology with a specialty in human origins and evolution, and who continues to follow the continuing discoveries and theories surrounding both, I do not claim to ‘know’ all about either, but while the search for whatever ‘human universals’ are, it is clear that there are certain inherited tendencies that appear in all human groups.
The one that strikes me as the most crucial is what ethologists call ‘territoriality’. Our current crop of political pundits generally refer to the human version as ‘tribalism’, but I don’t think that term carries sufficient weight.
In the animal world, territoriality is a survival mechanism. It gives extra defensive and even offensive power of sorts to those on their home ground. We often give lip serviced to it in human terms as 'the home court advantage'
There are many clear lessons in human history when written with sufficient thoroughness and read with sufficient honesty. One of them is our endless and obsessive determination to separate ourselves into all sorts of groups based on nearly every set of criteria our fertile imaginations can come up with. In fact, of course, there is really only one biologically valid grouping - male and female - and the fact that Nature is continually tinkering makes it at least likely that even that one can have exceptions.
Most often this innately driven behavior results in little more than the endless discussions we all have and thoroughly enjoy, which discussions, of course can became quite passionate. One only has to hear a typical bar argument fueled by a couple of beers about whose professional sports team Is predominate to know how passionate it can get.
But once into the religious, political, social, and economic realms, it can become much more serious. If any one doubts that, one only has to look at our recent presidential campaigns or the world stage which is now so completely interconnected.
And finally, of course, the same determination can, and all often has resulted in those mass slaughters we call wars. Up until August 6th, 1945, they were, while possibly quite destructive in large areas, we did not have the capacity to end all life on earth. Now we do.
In light of that, John Kennedy’s words at American University following on the heels of the Cuba Missile Crisis, when those of us all around the world who were alive and aware waited with bated breath for resolution or Armageddon, come continually to mind and are completely in line with the essence of this article.
"So let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, , at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Our differences, whatever we perceive them to be, are minuscule beside what we share as members of this extraordinary species, the only one (as far as we know) who can reflect on ourselves and our actions towards one another.
And one more very much related idea. As Americans, we both the inheritors and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted.
If together we cannot remember those two essential truths, and recognize the sheer common sense in Dr. Lutz’ article, our self-congratulatory decision to call ourselves Homo sapiens must be called into very serious question. And we may not survive long enough to come up with a more appropriate one.
Why is ‘liberal’ so hard to understand? It’s the doctrine that the state should insofar as possible minimize the extent to which unchosen conditions and circumstances—sex, race, ethnicity, family origin, tribe, birthplace, limit people’s options—to liberate people from restrictions imposed on us by Nature, natural affiliations, and dumb luck so that more people can get more of that they want.
There’s no free ride providing more options for some people means restricting the options of others, but there are trade-offs: the state imposes relatively painless restrictions on a few to greatly expand the options of the many. The state taxes people who can afford it, redistributes income and provides public goods and services (roads, schools, parks, etc.) so that more people can get more of what they want.
It forces employers to comply with equal opportunity regulations so they can’t refuse to give serious consideration to women who qualify for jobs. Without state women, of which I am one and speak from experience, would be de facto restricted to narrow range of jobs and the huge benefits to women who have a much wider range of options outweigh the restrictions on employers. And anti-discrimination regulations force landlords to rent to minorities and real estate people to sell to qualified minorities. Without the state to enforce these regulations minorities segregation would persist and minorities’ options in the housing market would be limited.
People acting freely as individuals are biased and selfish—left to their own devices they will discriminate and without government coercion they don’t have either the will or the ability to provide public goods and services. Liberals like me believe the state as the most effective and fair mechanism for enabling more people to get more of what they want: well-being is desire satisfaction. This is the core mission.
Classic liberalism (that of John Stuart Mill) recognizes that freedom and equality are essentially incompatible. Economic equality, for example, can only be achieved by placing severe restrictions on economic freedom and preventing people from accumulating wealth either through punitive taxation or through the state's ownership of the means of production. Historically, both have proven to be disastrous. So, by stating that inequality is a problem to be solved the entire debate is slanted. Poverty is a problem to be solved, and the example of China proves that the free market is the way to do it. China lifted a billion people out of poverty by switching to capitalism (China is not a democracy, of course, but this is a different issue). So, if the center-left position is that we can have both individual liberty and social equity, it is politically and intellectually incoherent.
I think your example of "inequality" being misidentified as a problem to be solved (versus poverty which, at least in some sense, given an objective definition of poverty that doesn't include "everyone in the bottom X percent") is a vital addition to the essay.
"For the last few years, discussion of cultural issues has been driven by a succession of left-wing social movements. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the current tangle of controversies over gender have been driven, in large part, by demands from left-wing activists that are far outside of what was considered mainstream a decade ago."
100% of the responsibility for our great partisan divide is explained simply by so called center-left liberal Democrats allowing their brains to be corrupted into Trump Derangement Syndrome (someday I think that psychologists will discover a common thread of sensitive personality type that amplifies unresolved childhood issues that projects resentment and rage about it into their adult life onto people that take on symbolic parental roles... like a President) and adopting the radical woke ideology as an opportunistic cudgel to attempt to own and destroy conservatives.
I debate these so called moderate liberal Democrats on a regular basis and have done so since 2015 in my support of a leader that would disrupt the status quo direction of the nation... and they have all gone nuts.
I debate my right-leaning friends... including the bible-thumpers that I disagree with. They are rational and civil and can converse with a respectful back and forth. But my liberal friends have had their brains fried... gaslit by their media bubble feed and their constant seek to reinforce their insanity.
And even today, after the Democrats got destroyed in the election from all of this woke bullshit... those people are still doubling down on the same.
We need millions of cognitive behavior therapists to fix what is broken.
I like these principles and frameworks for the center left. What about the first principle of Liberalism being actual physical security? Liberalism's first principle is restraints on power. Daneil Dudney claims that more people have been killed by hierarchical power than anarchical power. Liberalism and Republicanism both offer the greatest physical security for people.
I understand your text in general, and I have read similar texts in Europe for the last 10 years. To write to much feedback, I want to focus on the following:
- The idea of defining liberalism as something for certain groups only instead of the individual in a universal and global meaning will end up illiberal to many "others". One historical example is that liberal values existed in the past more for (white) heterosexual men while the more or less same arguments and opinions against transgender persons were used against mainly gay men as in the 1950s
- Being moderate and "in the middle" does not always work in the long term. In the past, for example, regarding slavery and equal voting rights, most people in the USA were not against or for slavery 100%. Still, most were in the middle of being in favor of certain types of slavery. Most people were not against or in favor of 100% voting rights for women but in favor of or against certain groups of women based on class. Today, this can be compared regarding im/migration where closed vs open borders are the radical opposing ideas.
So, in the end, many policies, institutions, laws, and so on sooner or later become "absolute," as, for example, certain civic rights, regardless of what a majority thinks or feels.
Matt. I believe that your premise is mistaken. You write « The far left has traditionally had similar but distinct concerns. While they value both freedom and equality, they tend to see equality as an overriding moral imperative. » Granting for the sake of argument that beliefs are linear, which is questionable at best, neither the far left nor the far right believe in freedom. Of course, both will employ Orwellian redefinitions of what freedom is. A prisoner getting three squares is free from want, for example.
Following the logic of this essay, we lean either towards Stalin or Hitler. Therefore, we all have something in common with them. In my view, it is Stalin and Hitler who are the same and liberals who have something in common.
Although most of the time I think of myself to the left of center left, I basically agree with you. In my case, I have a healthy respect for the theory of private property, and I am aghast at the notion of eliminating it. I see the tragedy of the commons in so many places, and my estimation of the intelligence of our species has rapidly declined.
Love this essay; it clearly and carefully lays out the position of a sort of "liberal left" in its, as I see it, sensible values connected fairly strongly to the founding values of the United States.
(I don't very much like the locution "center left" because it's not really occupying some center point between a left extreme and a right, as the author has noted, but I suppose we must at times adopt the label that everyone seems to want to use.)
Let’s begin by acknowledging that Locke was wrong about the tabula rasa. Millions of years of biological evolution underly who we are and how we go about making decisions. As one who was formally trained in Anthropology with a specialty in human origins and evolution, and who continues to follow the continuing discoveries and theories surrounding both, I do not claim to ‘know’ all about either, but while the search for whatever ‘human universals’ are, it is clear that there are certain inherited tendencies that appear in all human groups.
The one that strikes me as the most crucial is what ethologists call ‘territoriality’. Our current crop of political pundits generally refer to the human version as ‘tribalism’, but I don’t think that term carries sufficient weight.
In the animal world, territoriality is a survival mechanism. It gives extra defensive and even offensive power of sorts to those on their home ground. We often give lip serviced to it in human terms as 'the home court advantage'
There are many clear lessons in human history when written with sufficient thoroughness and read with sufficient honesty. One of them is our endless and obsessive determination to separate ourselves into all sorts of groups based on nearly every set of criteria our fertile imaginations can come up with. In fact, of course, there is really only one biologically valid grouping - male and female - and the fact that Nature is continually tinkering makes it at least likely that even that one can have exceptions.
Most often this innately driven behavior results in little more than the endless discussions we all have and thoroughly enjoy, which discussions, of course can became quite passionate. One only has to hear a typical bar argument fueled by a couple of beers about whose professional sports team Is predominate to know how passionate it can get.
But once into the religious, political, social, and economic realms, it can become much more serious. If any one doubts that, one only has to look at our recent presidential campaigns or the world stage which is now so completely interconnected.
And finally, of course, the same determination can, and all often has resulted in those mass slaughters we call wars. Up until August 6th, 1945, they were, while possibly quite destructive in large areas, we did not have the capacity to end all life on earth. Now we do.
In light of that, John Kennedy’s words at American University following on the heels of the Cuba Missile Crisis, when those of us all around the world who were alive and aware waited with bated breath for resolution or Armageddon, come continually to mind and are completely in line with the essence of this article.
"So let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, , at least we can make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Our differences, whatever we perceive them to be, are minuscule beside what we share as members of this extraordinary species, the only one (as far as we know) who can reflect on ourselves and our actions towards one another.
And one more very much related idea. As Americans, we both the inheritors and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human government ever attempted.
If together we cannot remember those two essential truths, and recognize the sheer common sense in Dr. Lutz’ article, our self-congratulatory decision to call ourselves Homo sapiens must be called into very serious question. And we may not survive long enough to come up with a more appropriate one.
Why is ‘liberal’ so hard to understand? It’s the doctrine that the state should insofar as possible minimize the extent to which unchosen conditions and circumstances—sex, race, ethnicity, family origin, tribe, birthplace, limit people’s options—to liberate people from restrictions imposed on us by Nature, natural affiliations, and dumb luck so that more people can get more of that they want.
There’s no free ride providing more options for some people means restricting the options of others, but there are trade-offs: the state imposes relatively painless restrictions on a few to greatly expand the options of the many. The state taxes people who can afford it, redistributes income and provides public goods and services (roads, schools, parks, etc.) so that more people can get more of what they want.
It forces employers to comply with equal opportunity regulations so they can’t refuse to give serious consideration to women who qualify for jobs. Without state women, of which I am one and speak from experience, would be de facto restricted to narrow range of jobs and the huge benefits to women who have a much wider range of options outweigh the restrictions on employers. And anti-discrimination regulations force landlords to rent to minorities and real estate people to sell to qualified minorities. Without the state to enforce these regulations minorities segregation would persist and minorities’ options in the housing market would be limited.
People acting freely as individuals are biased and selfish—left to their own devices they will discriminate and without government coercion they don’t have either the will or the ability to provide public goods and services. Liberals like me believe the state as the most effective and fair mechanism for enabling more people to get more of what they want: well-being is desire satisfaction. This is the core mission.
Classic liberalism (that of John Stuart Mill) recognizes that freedom and equality are essentially incompatible. Economic equality, for example, can only be achieved by placing severe restrictions on economic freedom and preventing people from accumulating wealth either through punitive taxation or through the state's ownership of the means of production. Historically, both have proven to be disastrous. So, by stating that inequality is a problem to be solved the entire debate is slanted. Poverty is a problem to be solved, and the example of China proves that the free market is the way to do it. China lifted a billion people out of poverty by switching to capitalism (China is not a democracy, of course, but this is a different issue). So, if the center-left position is that we can have both individual liberty and social equity, it is politically and intellectually incoherent.
I think your example of "inequality" being misidentified as a problem to be solved (versus poverty which, at least in some sense, given an objective definition of poverty that doesn't include "everyone in the bottom X percent") is a vital addition to the essay.
"For the last few years, discussion of cultural issues has been driven by a succession of left-wing social movements. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the current tangle of controversies over gender have been driven, in large part, by demands from left-wing activists that are far outside of what was considered mainstream a decade ago."
100% of the responsibility for our great partisan divide is explained simply by so called center-left liberal Democrats allowing their brains to be corrupted into Trump Derangement Syndrome (someday I think that psychologists will discover a common thread of sensitive personality type that amplifies unresolved childhood issues that projects resentment and rage about it into their adult life onto people that take on symbolic parental roles... like a President) and adopting the radical woke ideology as an opportunistic cudgel to attempt to own and destroy conservatives.
I debate these so called moderate liberal Democrats on a regular basis and have done so since 2015 in my support of a leader that would disrupt the status quo direction of the nation... and they have all gone nuts.
I debate my right-leaning friends... including the bible-thumpers that I disagree with. They are rational and civil and can converse with a respectful back and forth. But my liberal friends have had their brains fried... gaslit by their media bubble feed and their constant seek to reinforce their insanity.
And even today, after the Democrats got destroyed in the election from all of this woke bullshit... those people are still doubling down on the same.
We need millions of cognitive behavior therapists to fix what is broken.
I like these principles and frameworks for the center left. What about the first principle of Liberalism being actual physical security? Liberalism's first principle is restraints on power. Daneil Dudney claims that more people have been killed by hierarchical power than anarchical power. Liberalism and Republicanism both offer the greatest physical security for people.
I understand your text in general, and I have read similar texts in Europe for the last 10 years. To write to much feedback, I want to focus on the following:
- The idea of defining liberalism as something for certain groups only instead of the individual in a universal and global meaning will end up illiberal to many "others". One historical example is that liberal values existed in the past more for (white) heterosexual men while the more or less same arguments and opinions against transgender persons were used against mainly gay men as in the 1950s
- Being moderate and "in the middle" does not always work in the long term. In the past, for example, regarding slavery and equal voting rights, most people in the USA were not against or for slavery 100%. Still, most were in the middle of being in favor of certain types of slavery. Most people were not against or in favor of 100% voting rights for women but in favor of or against certain groups of women based on class. Today, this can be compared regarding im/migration where closed vs open borders are the radical opposing ideas.
So, in the end, many policies, institutions, laws, and so on sooner or later become "absolute," as, for example, certain civic rights, regardless of what a majority thinks or feels.
Matt. I believe that your premise is mistaken. You write « The far left has traditionally had similar but distinct concerns. While they value both freedom and equality, they tend to see equality as an overriding moral imperative. » Granting for the sake of argument that beliefs are linear, which is questionable at best, neither the far left nor the far right believe in freedom. Of course, both will employ Orwellian redefinitions of what freedom is. A prisoner getting three squares is free from want, for example.
Following the logic of this essay, we lean either towards Stalin or Hitler. Therefore, we all have something in common with them. In my view, it is Stalin and Hitler who are the same and liberals who have something in common.
Ah, okay… So, umm… Who dictates my opinions now? Is it you? Sorry; just tell me what to think.