The opening of my latest column at EveryJoe:
“After beating up on some ‘left’ icons (here, here, and here, for example), it’s time to give some grief to the ‘right.’
“American political vocabulary tends to sort people into liberals on the left and conservatives on the right. All are big-tent labels, and we argue continuously about how to place libertarians, progressives, socialists, theocrats, and others.
“But one regular claim in the arguments is that conservatives favor free-market capitalism. Progressives and socialists are hostile to capitalism, and they are on the left, so the capitalists must be on the right with the conservatives.
“It’s a claim with a grain of journalistic truth. Yet it has a big problem: for a century the deep thinkers on the conservative side have, almost without exception, argued that conservatives cannot be capitalists. And the deep thinkers on the free-market capitalist side have, again almost without exception, gone out of their way to explain why they are not conservatives. And both sides are correct. …” [Read more here.]
Last week’s column: The Love Canal Environmental Disaster — Four Decades Later.
Great article. In the left leaning Salon.com article of Monday, May 26, 2014 ‘Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the right: “Cosmos,” Christians, and the battle for American science’ Sean Mcelwee makes what I think is a critically important observation: “…the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.” I think the same can be said of the left, particularly in the matter of capitalism.
The ideological civil war tearing America apart today is riddled with false dichotomies. In reality I see it as having three fronts: religious, Enlightenment liberal and socialist. The religious right is a grab-bag of contradictory premises from the former two weighted in favor of religion; the modern American left from the latter two increasingly weighted in favor of socialism.
The Enlightenment tradition of liberalism was infused with awareness of a critical fact: that the state is the one institution mandated to back its policies by violence i.e. to force people to act in ways they would not voluntarily choose to do. Thus they held that that terrible power must only be used as a last resort: in protection and defense against criminals or foreign aggressors – what Mussolini disparaged as “the nightwatchman state”. Otherwise they prefer that solutions come not from politicians, bureaucrats and their enforcers but from a free, creative citizenry, subject to the rule of law.
Nicely put, Ed. The three-way-debate framing has traction.