Conservative Judge Speaks Out

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honorentheos
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Re: Conservative Judge Speaks Out

Post by honorentheos »

Manetho wrote:
Sat Jun 25, 2022 7:32 pm
honorentheos wrote:
Sat Jun 25, 2022 4:10 pm
Based on the confirmation it seems my initial thought was pretty close. That being, you weren't taking issue with specific content in my comment. Rather, your issue is with a couple of general ideas. Those being socialism as expressed in the US isn't a negative, but rather a positive ideology. And nothing that originates from the political left in the US can compare to what is seen coming from the political right. Does that seem accurate?
I'm reluctant to say it's "not a negative, but a positive ideology", because no political movement is uniformly positive, and such a movement is virtually guaranteed to produce some policies that end up not working. But, for the most part, yes.
Ok, that helps me better understand where you see discussion being valuable.

It seems probably best to focus on the second part given I do believe there is a need for principles over positions. We seem likely to agree the GOP as a political party has ceased to represent economic or social conservatism and is largely now a nationalist party with strong fantastical mythology based on fictionalized beliefs about the origins of the US and the centrality of Judeo-Christian culture to American prosperity. The fruit we see so abruptly ripening around us today in the Supreme Courts paleo-originalists turn, the reluctance to hold the architects of the January 6 insurrection accountable as brought up in the OP, or the Texas GOP platform referenced up-thread would have seemed unimaginable 15 years ago even as the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq had given rise to a new concern about the direction we were heading as a nation. How does one look at all of that and not feel the disproportionate threat it poses casts too great a shadow over the future of liberal democracy that anything claimed to be opposed to it be worthy of concern? Good question.

The issue is complex, in my opinion, in that illiberalism tends to breed authoritarianism not opposing liberalism. Historically we imagine the west rising to take on Fascist expansion in the mid-20th century in defense of freedom and democracy. The decade prior to the second world war suggests otherwise. Communism, nationalism, socialist movements the world over arose in the aftermath of what was seen as the failing of liberal capitalism at the end of the 1920s. One hears echos of that era today around the globe where the economic benefits of free markets have failed to prevent increasing inequality. The illiberal propoganda focuses the blame of struggle, decline and hardship on social liberalism, blaming the rise of individual abandonment of traditional moral foundations. Putin and Modi, Trump and Erdogan, from Poland to the Philippines the nationalists find purchase in pointing to the expansion of individual liberty and tying it to the lack of cohesion, domestic acts of violence and general ennui, why no one waves anymore or why businesses lay off people who worked there for decades as if they were just rows in an accounting ledger. Of course Justice Thomas wants to revisit Obergefell v Hodges through the same paleo-originalist lense as was cited in the overturning of Roe. The fantasy of the nationalist myth is now made substantial by the ruling with everything that implies about the threat to western liberalism the GOP poses.

So how does this make for concern directed at the left? The left has been at the front of the fight for many of the modern victories for liberalism after all, right? Right?
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