In some instances, to be a Republican conservative may even include regret that, as a practical political matter, a valid critique of government programs supposedly intended to aid the poor or “underprivileged” is unnecessarily obscured or diverted by disparate impacts on racially or ethnically or, one might even say, historically and naturally defined sectors. Beutler and possibly Chait, as true left-liberal believers, will be reluctant to believe that anyone could possibly think such a thing.
To root_e, agreeing to argue on the basis of a mutually agreed upon, or equal or fair, observation of the taboo against expression of a white racist or racial interest amounts to unilateral disarmament. He might say that racists do not deserve fairness, but to act on that basis consistently would mean to pursue an “unfair” political discourse or a discourse without presumption of good faith – an illiberal discourse whose uses were entirely subordinate to the successful prosecution of a power struggle against a designated enemy that must be destroyed, with whom no public space truly worthy of preservation can be sustained.
“The Temporary Name” points (( 226 The Temporary Name 03.22.14 at 3:26 pm In any case, any form of government seems to attract and empower the very sort of people it is supposed to suppress, and employing the pathological to…
“…the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.”
The early modern political philosophers… did rather exhaustively examine these questions and the related ones on the nature of power or the origins of authority. They did provide answers. They knew we wouldn’t all like them or fully understand them. Indeed, to a very significant degree the early modern philosophers not only acknowledged, but rather depended on the latter – on general incapacities of understanding. They hoped and trusted that enough of us would accept and implement their proposals under well-considered modifications. If we are in fact still living with those answers, showing no sign of succesfully implementing alternative ones, then Hegel was right, as far as we can say, to claim that in his time humanity had reached the end of history in principle.
(proofread version of comment at Crooked Timber) Mr. Timberman @125 [Italics in original comment], “converting freedom into political [or any kind of] obligation” appears to translate as “converting freedom into its opposite.” If I’m obligated to you and yours at…
Libertarianism is infant liberal-democracy, the arrested development of the polity fixated at the level of the pre-socialized or socialization-resistant individual – the pre-dialogical, self-sufficient, natural “I-atheist.”
We like to believe we are Lockean, but we suspect we are Machiavellian or on our best days Ciceronian, and we are ever-insecurely deluded about having evaded Hegel and Rousseau.
…a residue or by-product of the same (world-)historical process realized as a nearly entirely dysfunctional passive aggressive national government care-taking the affairs of the passive aggressive polity that it passive-aggressively reflects, represents, and embodies, and that it is expected to preserve and to protect.
As is typical for Administration critics among left-liberals and libertarians, Digby blames the the executive branch, here represented by its last two chiefs and its current top lawyer, for offering lawyerly locutions on a decisively legal matter, as though the answers to the underlying questions would and must be both non-legalistically simple as well as simply favorable to the ideological liberal legal position. As an ideologue, she is unwilling to imagine that the truth might be relatively simple, but unfavorable to her ideology or at least to the notion of its universality and completeness. The spokesperson for the executive branch is at such times embodying the foundational paradoxes of the liberal democratic order, at the classic exceptional moment in which liberalism encounters the coincidence of its own real-political and conceptual limits.
