More on Democracy
Dean
The blogosphere is an amazing place, not least of which is that it allows us all, free of charge, to attend free seminars with some of the world's foremost thinkers. Today political scientist Rudy Rummel answers a few of my questions (although you can ask him questions too), then embarks on a tour-de-force examination of an extraordinary fact that most public intellectuals have utterly missed. We have come to wrongly believe that racism, greed, hatred, nationalism, religious extremism, and bigotry cause wars, but they don't. Those are often symptoms, but rarely causes, of war. Rudy explains why.
After reading Neo-neocon's conclusion of her "A Mind Is A Difficult Thing to Change" series, I thought Rudy's piece explained a lot of what she talked about.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan would be a "neocon" these days. So would Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Oddly enough, so would Richard Nixon, at least until he bought into Kissengerian "realpolitick." The odd thing being that, these days, it is mostly Democrats, the left-wing "liberals" who have taken up Kissenger's banner, preferring to coddle dictators and to value "stability" over human rights.
All of which should go to show you why political partisanship, which has its moderate uses, is ultimately a fool's errand for thinking people. It has its uses, but what's ultimately most important is what you believe in, not the slime people throw around at partisans.
I've been saying this for months that there has been a role reversal between our political parties. It's like we've passed through some time warp or worm hole into an alternate universe where things are reversed.
I mentioned this in a thread over at Discarded Lies:
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"The "neocons" were the liberals in generations past.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan would be a "neocon" these days. So would Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Oddly enough, so would Richard Nixon, at least until he bought into Kissengerian "realpolitick." The odd thing being that, these days, it is mostly Democrats, the left-wing "liberals" who have taken up Kissenger's banner, preferring to coddle dictators and to value "stability" over human rights."
I have always blamed Kissinger for Nixon's "detente" with the Communists. Other than that, I've always loved (or love to hate, back in my youth) President Nixon. He had style. It was he who helped Whittaker Chambers to expose Alger Hiss, for which his enemies never forgave him.
Yes, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has always stood out in my mind as the anti-Communist, pro-Western liberal, as has Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Senator Hubert Humphrey also. They would all be considered "neo-conservatives" today, along with all the Presidents you named. President Johnson also. President Bush is actually in that quadrant as well.
They were all what, in the rest of Europe, would be called democratic socialists or social democrats, anti-Communist socialists or advocates of a mixed economy. Sidney Hook was an exemplar of that tradition, as was George Orwell, and Christoper Hitchens is today. In my younger days, they often praised Sweden as an ideal "middle way" between American capitalism and Soviet Communism. In the 1950s, they were known as "The Vital Center". Their platforms and ideas were not that far from Norman Thomas or Eugene Victor Debs, who ran explicitly as Socialists.
Today, they are called "neo-conservatives", and are hated even more than "conservatives" (as Stalin hated Trotsky more than "reactionaries"). To today's "post-modern" nihilists, "de-constructionists", "animal rights" egalitarians, etc., Gracchus Babeuf and Karl Marx look old-fashioned. As we have oft noted, today's totalitarian Left is increasingly fascist and Nazi as much as it is Communist. E.g., rejection of the Enlightenment, love for dictators (of any kind), racial quotas, hatred for "Zionists", etc..
"Dean's World: defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy" Indeed. The more I read of you, Dean, the more I know that you are just obviously, just Peikoff-obviously, a liberal, in every but the most corrupted sense of the word. You are definitely in that tradition I described. Very much like my own father in many ways.
Which gets me to thinking, by contrast, of some of the other characters here in Dean's World. The Queen is conservative, of course, though I would say a very liberal conservative. At least half of those commenting in her realm are liberals or Leftists. Mark Noonan stands out for me as a quintessential conservative. Arnold Harris is clearly a man of the Right, though he has never called himself nor been called a conservative. He is an individualist, as am I. I'm on the Far Right on many spectra, conservative in the sense that, e.g., Alain de Benoist is conservative, reactionary. Many others here, e.g., Paul Burgess, Kevin D., Scott Harris, etc., etc.... Extremely interesting!
MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA
There you go again with that extreme right wing hate speech.