What truly matters politically and socially is not public opinion broadly but institutional capture. While Democrats as a whole are much less extreme than the progressive line in most things, progressive control the vast majority of important social institutions and therefore their line drives the culture and political priorities. Conservatives, on the other hand, really only control the Republican Party itself and churches. This disparity is what colors the whole culture-war debate.
Well, the charitable reading is that people seek power because they have a certain view of what is good which they mean to implement; to achieve a political good requires political power. There is always, however, a temptation to misuse said power for personal benefit.
That would be a reasonable argument if there was an inventory of good human condition outcomes we could count for those having captured the institutions to amass power.
I mean, I don’t see much trouble in doing so. E.g. for “wokeness” it is self-expression & a particular conception of egalitarianism, for traditionalist conservatives virtue & community, for classical republicans civic participation, for libertarians non-interference, for market liberals economic growth, etc
"Power ... to implement", no matter how it's prettied up, generally ends up as coercion, and coercion in furtherance of a philosophical belief is no better than coercion in the service of personal benefit; in fact at the margins, they become increasingly difficult to tell apart, witness Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe.
It's true that there are exceptions, people whose power came from the excellence of their ideas and characters and not from coercion. The Buddha, Christ, Washington, Gandhi, Gorbachev, and Mandela come immediately to mind. Of them, only Washington and Mandela died comfortably in their beds and still esteemed by their fellow citizens. Power that refuses to depend on coercion is hard. Most people who achieve it take the easy way.
This is of course also a philosophical belief- but as far as I can tell Jesus had no objection to punishing criminals to keep public order and maintain life, at the care minimum.
Reminds of a Kantian a priori proposition: true, but uninformative. It is well recognized that a vast swath of America occupies and has always occupied the political middleground and avoids extremes. The quandry is how to induce our polarized political parties to acknowledge and represent that middle. One might argue that the endeavor is inherently doomed because parties are infinitely more concerned with retaining and consolidating power than doing the public good. With that as their guiding criterion, the have no incentive but to polarize and extract PAC money from special interests. The days of politicians signing up for their jobs out of a sense of public duty and then working hard to discharge that duty are gone and replaced with hyperbolic vitriol that poisons us all.
Also, in general, people are moderate on things they are not informed on; the more politically active and informed a person is, the more they gravitate to extremes. Most Americans are moderate on abortion not out of principle but because of a lack of any coherent framework to address it with- so we should not be particularly surprised that such moderation is not very influential; because it’s mostly unjustified.
In many cases, the perception that someone is "uninformed" on a particular issue is more accurately described as preference for or natural adherence to common sense values. Using words in their ordinary senses rather than as prescribed by a particular normative view. Most people are moderate on abortion, on this view, because they refuse to get drawn into an overly intellectualized debate over what "life" is. They know what the word means. They know how to use the word. Even the pathologically philosophical among us frequently wind up in the same place, recognizing that the search for a "word use everywhere bounded by rules" is sheer folly. I mean, even the Journal of Philosophy at one point stopped accepting articles on abortion or Rawls!
I mean, you can appeal to common sense all day long, but again, you shouldn’t be surprised that “just be moderate” isn’t a very influential position if its proponents don’t come to that conclusion on any logical basis. That is my main point.
As for questions of “ordinary” uses of words I think it is hardly unusual that we have to be precise and analytical when dealing with edge cases that are difficult to understand; all fields have technical jargon to describe things that can’t accurately be described or distinguished in colloquial language.
My point is that it SHOULD be influential. Our country would be so much better off if it were.
Ordinary language is exactly as precise as it needs to be. The notion that borderline cases require more "precise" language is based on a misguided picture of the way language functions. Science is not a "more accurate" version of ordinary language. It's a different language game altogether, and abortion is NOT a scientific subject. No science can resolve whether we should apply "life" after 15 weeks, just as no science can identify a one-to-one isomorpohic relationship between a brain state and the soul. My view is clearly informed strongly by Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and I believe that philosophy has quite a bit to say about precisely these issues.
I’m not going to debate abortion here, but while you might be able to justify this by appealing, appropriately, to philosophy, most Americans are not moderate for this reason. They are moderate because they haven’t thought about abortion very seriously or for any length of time and couldn’t give a coherent argument for their own position, so of course this will not be very influential.
I disagree, as noted. Most people are moderate because they prefer or naturally adhere to common sense values instead of overintellectualized philosophical positions. And this is a good thing and should be influential. That our society so fervently degrades common sense is one of its greatest vices.
There is a step beyond just being in the middle on a vast array of issues. There are also many people who may strongly adhere to a view on an issue that is considered left wing. They may also simultaneously strongly adhere to a view on another issue that is considered right wing.
The fact that one of their views is considered liberal and another is considered conservative does not, of itself, signify any actual contradiction. The lumping in of a large number of positions on issues into one ideological category and a large number of positions on other issues into another category can be arbitrary. Such herding of views into one camp or the other can fail to account for an individual’s assessment of a multiplicity of issues in accord with that person’s own set of values. Such an approach may defy a pure left/wing right wing categorization but it is not internally inconsistent.
For instance a person might strongly support same sex marriage and also want to curtail undocumented immigration, because this individual might believe that a nation has a right to control its borders and know at all times who is entering the country and in what total numbers for any given period of time. A person can also support full public funding of abortion for those who otherwise cannot afford it and yet oppose providing fully publicly funded medical care to anyone who unlawfully enters the United States. Whatever the merits are of each of these positions, holding them at the same time is not contradictory. The dubbing of one as a liberal view and the framing of the other as a conservative view does not, of itself, make one inconsistent for simultaneously holding these views.
So, it’s not just a matter of millions of people being centrist. It goes further in that one can hold views that are further left on some issues and further right on other issues and not be logically inconsistent.
"Moreover, interpersonal spats between members of Congress have grown increasingly acrimonious (and public) over the last few decades, and the attempt by several members of the Republican Party to overturn the results of the 2020 election only exacerbated interparty relations."
Well there you go feeding the fires.
Every politician that the left, Democrats and Trump-haters are claiming was "an attempt to overturn the election" were simply people noting the massive election irregularities and thinking that there is a strong probability that there was cheating and that the cheating gave the election to Democrat candidates where without the cheating the Republican would have won the office.
When you leave off this context and spew intellectually dishonest political hyperbole like "coup" and "insurrection" and "wanted to overturn the election", you really piss off the rest of us and make us want to crush you, not cooperate.
Stop sucking so much if you want to make a case of less polarization.
The 2920; election was probably the most highly scrutinized election in history. Republicans had every chance to uncover the fraud they claim occurred at levels resulting in a stolen election. They had Republicans in charge of key election offices in key states. 60 some lawsuits in front of plenty of Republican and even Trump appointed judges, and they lost them all. Move on for Pete’s sake.
Like those that believe Trump-Russia collusion and climate crisis?
I think many people cannot tell the truth from what is their faith. And with the secular left, their politics have supplanted religion as their faith. Their posturing over political memes and narratives is no different than pious religious demanding that Jesus rose from the dead to forgive sins.
Thanks for composing this. We have far more in common as a national foundation than cable TV news outlets want to admit. Very important cultural beliefs bind us together. The right to pursue social mobility is the most important. We need to reign in the use of advertising on news outlets. These channels should be funded by other means like PBS. Advertising driven revenue models cause media to seek maximum click rate, not deep attention. Sensation, not contemplation.
If a person held an extreme position before social media, that person would find it difficult to find another person holding the same position. This would have a moderating effect on the person or at least make the person less vocal. For example, people who believe the earth is flat would not find many or any other people in the community with the same belief. Now, however, a person can go online and find flat earth organizations, chat rooms, conventions etc., all promoting a belief that most people find ridiculous. People who believe the earth to be a sphere have no need to promote their belief because to them it is obvious.
What truly matters politically and socially is not public opinion broadly but institutional capture. While Democrats as a whole are much less extreme than the progressive line in most things, progressive control the vast majority of important social institutions and therefore their line drives the culture and political priorities. Conservatives, on the other hand, really only control the Republican Party itself and churches. This disparity is what colors the whole culture-war debate.
Right. Because institutional capture facilitates and consolidates power. It's all about power, not the public good.
Well, the charitable reading is that people seek power because they have a certain view of what is good which they mean to implement; to achieve a political good requires political power. There is always, however, a temptation to misuse said power for personal benefit.
You are indeed more charitable than I.
That would be a reasonable argument if there was an inventory of good human condition outcomes we could count for those having captured the institutions to amass power.
I mean, I don’t see much trouble in doing so. E.g. for “wokeness” it is self-expression & a particular conception of egalitarianism, for traditionalist conservatives virtue & community, for classical republicans civic participation, for libertarians non-interference, for market liberals economic growth, etc
"Power ... to implement", no matter how it's prettied up, generally ends up as coercion, and coercion in furtherance of a philosophical belief is no better than coercion in the service of personal benefit; in fact at the margins, they become increasingly difficult to tell apart, witness Fidel Castro and Robert Mugabe.
It's true that there are exceptions, people whose power came from the excellence of their ideas and characters and not from coercion. The Buddha, Christ, Washington, Gandhi, Gorbachev, and Mandela come immediately to mind. Of them, only Washington and Mandela died comfortably in their beds and still esteemed by their fellow citizens. Power that refuses to depend on coercion is hard. Most people who achieve it take the easy way.
This is of course also a philosophical belief- but as far as I can tell Jesus had no objection to punishing criminals to keep public order and maintain life, at the care minimum.
Reminds of a Kantian a priori proposition: true, but uninformative. It is well recognized that a vast swath of America occupies and has always occupied the political middleground and avoids extremes. The quandry is how to induce our polarized political parties to acknowledge and represent that middle. One might argue that the endeavor is inherently doomed because parties are infinitely more concerned with retaining and consolidating power than doing the public good. With that as their guiding criterion, the have no incentive but to polarize and extract PAC money from special interests. The days of politicians signing up for their jobs out of a sense of public duty and then working hard to discharge that duty are gone and replaced with hyperbolic vitriol that poisons us all.
Also, in general, people are moderate on things they are not informed on; the more politically active and informed a person is, the more they gravitate to extremes. Most Americans are moderate on abortion not out of principle but because of a lack of any coherent framework to address it with- so we should not be particularly surprised that such moderation is not very influential; because it’s mostly unjustified.
In many cases, the perception that someone is "uninformed" on a particular issue is more accurately described as preference for or natural adherence to common sense values. Using words in their ordinary senses rather than as prescribed by a particular normative view. Most people are moderate on abortion, on this view, because they refuse to get drawn into an overly intellectualized debate over what "life" is. They know what the word means. They know how to use the word. Even the pathologically philosophical among us frequently wind up in the same place, recognizing that the search for a "word use everywhere bounded by rules" is sheer folly. I mean, even the Journal of Philosophy at one point stopped accepting articles on abortion or Rawls!
I mean, you can appeal to common sense all day long, but again, you shouldn’t be surprised that “just be moderate” isn’t a very influential position if its proponents don’t come to that conclusion on any logical basis. That is my main point.
As for questions of “ordinary” uses of words I think it is hardly unusual that we have to be precise and analytical when dealing with edge cases that are difficult to understand; all fields have technical jargon to describe things that can’t accurately be described or distinguished in colloquial language.
My point is that it SHOULD be influential. Our country would be so much better off if it were.
Ordinary language is exactly as precise as it needs to be. The notion that borderline cases require more "precise" language is based on a misguided picture of the way language functions. Science is not a "more accurate" version of ordinary language. It's a different language game altogether, and abortion is NOT a scientific subject. No science can resolve whether we should apply "life" after 15 weeks, just as no science can identify a one-to-one isomorpohic relationship between a brain state and the soul. My view is clearly informed strongly by Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and I believe that philosophy has quite a bit to say about precisely these issues.
I’m not going to debate abortion here, but while you might be able to justify this by appealing, appropriately, to philosophy, most Americans are not moderate for this reason. They are moderate because they haven’t thought about abortion very seriously or for any length of time and couldn’t give a coherent argument for their own position, so of course this will not be very influential.
I disagree, as noted. Most people are moderate because they prefer or naturally adhere to common sense values instead of overintellectualized philosophical positions. And this is a good thing and should be influential. That our society so fervently degrades common sense is one of its greatest vices.
There is a step beyond just being in the middle on a vast array of issues. There are also many people who may strongly adhere to a view on an issue that is considered left wing. They may also simultaneously strongly adhere to a view on another issue that is considered right wing.
The fact that one of their views is considered liberal and another is considered conservative does not, of itself, signify any actual contradiction. The lumping in of a large number of positions on issues into one ideological category and a large number of positions on other issues into another category can be arbitrary. Such herding of views into one camp or the other can fail to account for an individual’s assessment of a multiplicity of issues in accord with that person’s own set of values. Such an approach may defy a pure left/wing right wing categorization but it is not internally inconsistent.
For instance a person might strongly support same sex marriage and also want to curtail undocumented immigration, because this individual might believe that a nation has a right to control its borders and know at all times who is entering the country and in what total numbers for any given period of time. A person can also support full public funding of abortion for those who otherwise cannot afford it and yet oppose providing fully publicly funded medical care to anyone who unlawfully enters the United States. Whatever the merits are of each of these positions, holding them at the same time is not contradictory. The dubbing of one as a liberal view and the framing of the other as a conservative view does not, of itself, make one inconsistent for simultaneously holding these views.
So, it’s not just a matter of millions of people being centrist. It goes further in that one can hold views that are further left on some issues and further right on other issues and not be logically inconsistent.
"Moreover, interpersonal spats between members of Congress have grown increasingly acrimonious (and public) over the last few decades, and the attempt by several members of the Republican Party to overturn the results of the 2020 election only exacerbated interparty relations."
Well there you go feeding the fires.
Every politician that the left, Democrats and Trump-haters are claiming was "an attempt to overturn the election" were simply people noting the massive election irregularities and thinking that there is a strong probability that there was cheating and that the cheating gave the election to Democrat candidates where without the cheating the Republican would have won the office.
When you leave off this context and spew intellectually dishonest political hyperbole like "coup" and "insurrection" and "wanted to overturn the election", you really piss off the rest of us and make us want to crush you, not cooperate.
Stop sucking so much if you want to make a case of less polarization.
The 2920; election was probably the most highly scrutinized election in history. Republicans had every chance to uncover the fraud they claim occurred at levels resulting in a stolen election. They had Republicans in charge of key election offices in key states. 60 some lawsuits in front of plenty of Republican and even Trump appointed judges, and they lost them all. Move on for Pete’s sake.
Sometimes telling the truth "trumps" pissing people off, especially when the pissed off are delusional.
Like those that believe Trump-Russia collusion and climate crisis?
I think many people cannot tell the truth from what is their faith. And with the secular left, their politics have supplanted religion as their faith. Their posturing over political memes and narratives is no different than pious religious demanding that Jesus rose from the dead to forgive sins.
Y'know how it's sometimes prudent to just let stuff go without responding? This is one of those times.
LOL. Apparently you don't listen to your own advice. Your time started with your first post.
Thanks for composing this. We have far more in common as a national foundation than cable TV news outlets want to admit. Very important cultural beliefs bind us together. The right to pursue social mobility is the most important. We need to reign in the use of advertising on news outlets. These channels should be funded by other means like PBS. Advertising driven revenue models cause media to seek maximum click rate, not deep attention. Sensation, not contemplation.
If a person held an extreme position before social media, that person would find it difficult to find another person holding the same position. This would have a moderating effect on the person or at least make the person less vocal. For example, people who believe the earth is flat would not find many or any other people in the community with the same belief. Now, however, a person can go online and find flat earth organizations, chat rooms, conventions etc., all promoting a belief that most people find ridiculous. People who believe the earth to be a sphere have no need to promote their belief because to them it is obvious.
Thanks for this piece...need some reason for hope at this point...