Showing posts with label liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberalism. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Libertarianism: Live Free...OR DIE!!!

Anyone familiar with me knows I have a low opinion of libertarianism. Like its leftwing twin, anarchism, it is a utoppian idea which falls apart quickly. The big difference between the two is that libertarianism wants to get rid of regulation and let the oligarch foxes run the chicken coop.

That said, this shows how the utopian ideal doesn't work.

The best part is that they defunded the police with the obvious consequences.


 

Friday, January 9, 2026

Liberals aren't Leftists, and neither is the democratic party

 Yet another way to distract you from the US uniparty to give an illusion of choice. The people who scream socialism and communism would freak if either system were anywhere close to being implemented in the United States.




Saturday, March 25, 2023

Dissent editor Michael Walzer on "the crisis of liberalism"

It's interesting what he is saying.  It's not exactly what my last two posts have been about, but very similar.

Liberalism in Europe, today, is something like “libertarianism”—it is a right-wing ideology. There used to be a left libertarianism, which is probably better called anarchism, and that persists in various sectarian versions, but it isn’t much in the public eye. And then in the United States, liberalism generally means “New Deal liberalism.” It’s our very modest version of social democracy, and it isn’t a very strong doctrine, since many of its practitioners became neoliberals much too easily. So, the -ism is not a strong or coherent doctrine. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t liberals. But liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. But those liberal qualities don’t imply any social or economic doctrine. So, there are liberals in the world, and I can recognize them, but liberalism does not describe their actual political commitment. The word is better used to qualify the kinds of commitments that I write about: democracy, socialism, nationalism, et cetera.

He's making a good point since "liberal arts" is a field of study "based on rational thinking, and it includes the areas of humanities, social and physical sciences, and mathematics. A liberal arts education emphasizes the development of critical thinking and analytical skills, the ability to solve complex problems, and an understanding of ethics and morality, as well as a desire to continue to learn." That means the division is between closed mindedness and open mindedness: not whether one is on the left or the right.

The problem with US politics is that it is based upon fallacious thinking. "The Democrats are progressives/socialists/liberals/etcetera" and "The Republican Trump supporters, etc." Is the divide that clear cut? Fox news calls the democratic party "socialist", yet that party has a long track record of destroying the moderate "socialist" policies of the new deal. What Sanders was proposing wasn't too far out from where FDR was going, and what is pretty much expected in the rest of the world as far as social policy goes.

As I said, not exactly what I have been saying in the past few posts, but definitely something I agree with:

Liberal Commitments An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics. in Dissent Magazine