July 6, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
All of excerpts for Segment 21 of the Nihilism series come from the book Why You Should Be a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson (2019). Mr. Robinson infers that he is a spokesperson for millennials as well as the Far Left of the Democratic Party.
My Takeaways:
In many respects the author’s advocacy represents a summary of the values and beliefs espoused by the Social Justice Activists throughout this series. They include:
Segment 22 is titled Socialism – A Counter View. The counterarguments to segment 21 come from excerpts from three books: The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialism Manifest, Countdown to Socialism and Blackout.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
All of excerpts for Segment 21 of the Nihilism series come from the book Why You Should Be a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson (2019). Mr. Robinson infers that he is a spokesperson for millennials as well as the Far Left of the Democratic Party.
My Takeaways:
In many respects the author’s advocacy represents a summary of the values and beliefs espoused by the Social Justice Activists throughout this series. They include:
- The United States is a very racist country with a shameful history. The defining issue of our age is income inequality. To address this, the country needs to be totally transformed.
- Socialists are seeking a society without profit, exploitation, racism, sexism, or social hierarchy. A system that promotes justice and equity by “righting” the oppression of indigenous people, communities of color, the poor, low-income workers, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and the youth. A society with socialized medicine, the Green New Deal, open borders, and no industrial farming of animals (one of the most important issues of our time).
- Socialists are not content with the objective of a robust welfare system sought by social democrats. They want that, too, but they want much more – total transformation.
- They believe that:
- Property ownership is theft, so property right should not be respected.
- Laws should not be treated as anything other than useful tools.
- Managers and owners should not decide what workers have to do but the workers should decide what the managers have to do (if they need managers at all). Further, managers should be elected by the workers.
- Being rich makes one a bad person.
- The U.S. Constitution is an illegitimate document.
- Socialist advocate for:
- Allowing prisoners and noncitizens to vote, scrapping the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court, and implementing ranked – choice voting.
- Immediate release, record expungement, and reparations for all drug related offenses and prostitution.
- Canceling all outstanding student debt as it is an unjust system because it punishes people who don’t have wealth parents.
- Imposing a heavy estate tax to prevent the accumulation of wealthy families. No one deserves a large inheritance.
- Elimination of conservatism and bipartisanship, with the belief that a person or principle needs to be more concerned with building power than with reaching agreement.
Segment 22 is titled Socialism – A Counter View. The counterarguments to segment 21 come from excerpts from three books: The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialism Manifest, Countdown to Socialism and Blackout.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 21
SOCIALISM FOR AMERICA -- EXCERPTS
Excerpts in this segment are from Why You Should a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson (2019)
MILLENNIAL DISCONTENT AND THE RISE OF A SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE: Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, young people in the United States have been becoming increasingly radicalized. Weighted down with debt, paying through the nose for health insurance the policy preferences of rich elites, millennials were both frustrated and tired. Millennial discontent has its roots in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Occupy Wall Street was a natural expression of this rage and disaffection. Its slogan, “We are the 99%,” accurately reflected the staggering wealth in this country, with a tiny fraction of people owning most of the actual wealth. To people saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, the 21st century economy seemed more feudalistic than meritocratic. The majority of millennials are skeptical of capitalism and have warm feelings toward socialism. The only group that expresses net positive support for capitalism are the people over 50 years old.
WHAT IS THE LEFT SO MAD ABOUT?
THE ILLS OF OUR SOCIETY: Harvard’s Steven Pinker has concluded that left-wing intellectuals must “hate progress,” because they don’t seem to appreciate that across the globe, life expectancy has grown, extreme deprivation has declined and on average, people are more prosperous than ever before. People who wish to dismiss leftist complaints often point out that today’s poor people, at least in the U.S., often have refrigerators and cell phones, something their ancestors never had. But we shouldn’t measure contemporary well-being against Depression-era poverty. Instead, we should measure our achievements against our potential.
Climate change and the environment were barely brought up during the 2016 presidential debates. And yet, the issues could not be more serious, nor the stakes higher. Then there are nuclear weapons. Some people think that nuclear arms control is not an especially pressing issue. This is a short-sided view. For us to be safe, the peace cannot just be long, it has to be eternal. It’s not enough that the world’s powerful countries are getting along at the moment. They literally have to never go to war again for the rest of history.
The defining feature of our age is inequality. In the U.S. the top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 95% if families, and the bottom one-third of families own 0% of the country’s wealth. In the U.S. last year, 41% of workers didn’t have even one day of paid vacation, and 36% didn’t have a single day of paid sick leave. The word pension has become a joke, and 50% of private-sector pensions have disappeared. The absence of paid parental leave in the U.S., means that mothers and fathers often have to return to work immediately after the birth of a child. [Note: the author provides no reference for the genesis of these numbers. I challenge their accuracy].
Millennial’s financial situation, generally, is dire. A study based on the Survey of Consumer Finances concluded, “Millennials earned lower incomes, were less likely to own a home … had lower net wealth than their parents at the same stage of life,” and “had amassed just half the net worth of baby boomers had at the same age.”
THE INDENTURED LIFE: In a poll by Lending Tree, most debtors said that worries about their student loans affect their lives and even give them headaches. Student debt is an extraordinary unjust system: it punishes people who don’t have wealthy parents. It’s perverse, when you think about it: you can’t just go and educate yourself. Instead, you have to sign up for decades of indenture just to secure a qualification necessary for slight advancement in the workforce.
JUST A WHOLE MESS OF OTHER PROBLEMS:
Race: Nobody likes to be called a racist, but anyone who looks at the facts honestly has to admit that the U.S. is still a very racist country. Why? Because of the mere fact of being born a certain race makes a highly significant difference to your chances in life.
Sex & Gender: Everything from student debt to domestic violence disproportionately affects women, to say nothing of a sexist culture that demeans those who defy gender expectations or cannot meet impossible beauty standards.
Immigration: When we talk about “illegal immigrants” being deported, we’re taking about ordinary people trying to eke out a living, who are swept up by armed agents and sent away. This was, of course, not how it worked for most of the country’s history: it used to be that you could simply get on a boat, get checked for diseases, and then join the American family. The strict legal/illegal distinction is a recent development (ICE itself has only existed since 2003), and we have created a regime in which ordinary people must constantly worry about being asked for their papers. [Note: The first immigration act in the U.S. was in 1882: a ten-year moratorium on Chinese immigration].
Animals: Anyone who is honest with themselves must realize that the mass killing and eating of animals raises deep and discomforting moral questions. Animals can suffer, they can feel emotions, they can have desires of joy. The industrial farming of animals may well be one of the most important issues of our time.
General Despair: On the whole, it’s rough out there. Extreme poverty may have dropped, and the economy may be growing, but many millions of people are spending their whole lives trying to stay afloat, with little time to enjoy themselves.
CAPITALISM: When people talk about capitalism’s wondrous efficiency at improving productivity, they are often talking about disregarding the humanity of laborers and being willing to inflict any amount of fear and misery if it helps the collective. Certainly, this process is effective. But threatening a person at gun point is also effective, and unless we have a theory of what is and is not acceptable, a quest to improve results at all costs will lead to violations of people’s dignity.
“Property is theft,” meaning that the very thing property rights supposedly do (protect people’s right to use things), they actually abrogate completely by denying people’s right to share in the world’s resources. If we trace back existing property to its roots, we find much of it originates in conquest, and it’s hard to say that we should respect property rights when the property itself was stolen. Texas was stolen from Mexico, and the U.S. was stolen from its Native population. There was no “right to any of this, except to the extent that might makes right.”
Under our capitalist system, many people make money not by working, but by having money. Thirty percent of income in the U.S. is capital income. Capital income is a significant driver of inequality. Poor people simply do not own stocks and are unable to invest in assets that will allow them to make money in their sleep. And once your money makes money, that money makes even more money, further contributing to the cycle of inequality.
Corporate Power: Corporate power has important implications for people’s freedom. Employers can decide what their employees wear, who they can talk to, when they can pee, and what they can say on social media. In the U.S. we have complete at-will employment in most states, meaning that if you do anything to tick off your boss, they can send you packing and rob you of your livelihood. An employer can fire you not just for what you say at work, but what you say off the job. This creates an environment in which people are often scared to voice their opinion as they would be in a police state. [Note: I worked in corporate America for 40 years with three different companies and most of this is absolutely false].
Corporations have nothing resembling the democratic decision-making that holds government accountable. As an employee, your right to decide what the company does is usually nil. You don’t get to vote for your boss. [Note: This is true].
The Super-Wealthy: At their core, these millionaires and billionaires believe that their money is theirs because they earned it, and the government has no “right” to take it away from them. They should get to spent it. There are several important fallacies at the heart of this view. First, is the conflation of market value and moral desert. Second, is the idea that taxes are an illegitimate of “your” money. Third, is the idea that capitalist build the fortunes of the workers, rather than workers building the fortunes of the capitalists. Fourth, it is incontrovertibly true that being rich does make you a bad person.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM AND WHY IS IT GOOD?
A SET OF PRINCIPLES: Twenty-first century socialism expresses a commitment to a certain set of values, values that are diametrically opposed to the dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire capitalism that both the Democratic and Republican parties seem to have fully embraced. Socialism starts with a feeling of connectedness and compassion, but this solidarity and concern are just the first principles. From its humanitarian sympathies, it derives a vision: it seeks a world in which people do not go to war; there are no class, racial, and gender hierarchies; there are not significant imbalances of power; there is no poverty coexisting alongside wealth; and everyone leads a pleasant and fulfilled life. Socialists are also interested in expanding democracy to cover the economic sphere itself. Workplaces are highly undemocratic. If a manufacturer decides to close a factory and move it overseas, the workers in that factory don’t get to “vote” on that decision. The idea of “economic democracy” means that they should get these kinds of decision-making rights. Managers and owners shouldn’t decide what the workers have to do, the workers should decide what manager have to do (if they need managers at all). Socialist do not have to be able to present an alternative, what we have to present is a recognition of the problem and a commitment to finding the alternative. This is how innovation works: you start with the question, not the answer.
A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS: We are often accused of advocating “open borders.” This isn’t because we reject the idea of making sure the people in a country are safe from dangerous intruders. Rather, it’s because the whole idea of borders strikes us as somewhat odd: fencing off stolen land and refusing to share its bounties with perfectly harmless people who want to come and share with them seems downright immoral.
SORTING OUR WORDS AND TERMS: The socialist is a utopian. They are fundamentally unsatisfied by the idea that the highest human ambition is simply to turn the United States into circa 2019 Scandinavia. This is not the dream. The dream is transformation. The dream is to see a total elimination of exploitation and hierarchy and a change in the structure of who owns capital. The difference between a socialist and a social democrat is that a socialist is constantly thinking about the dream. The social democrat is mostly content with the achievement of a robust welfare state. Socialists want that, too. But they won’t be satisfied with it.
SENSIBLE AGENDAS: Do socialists have a plan? We have lots of plans. We can look at the approach of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They believe in a society without profit, exploitation, racism, sexism, or social hierarchy. A system of socialize medicine. To promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth. The Green New Deal.
Bernie Sanders 2016 agenda is clear as can be: a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition, cancel all outstanding student loan debt, $16 trillion plan to fight climate change, bar the federal government from contracting with private prisons, U.S Department of Justice investigating every death that occurs in police custody, guaranteed 12 weeks of family and medical leave, universal childcare, and creating an Employee Ownership Bank to provide loans to help workers collectively purchase their companies and turn them into cooperatives.
Structural Change: Statehood to Washington, D.C.; making voting much easier, no voter registration, election day a holiday, everyone can vote including prisoners and noncitizens; scrap the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, implement ranked – choice voting.
It will be argued that these “structural reforms” are actually partisan, that they clearly favor the interests of the political left. Of course, they do! The bulk of the people in the U.S. lean left. As we make the political system fairer and more inclusive, it’s going to become less conservative. It’s also worth responding to those who give undue weight to the text of the Constitution and object to structural reforms that would involve altering it. It’s funny how much reverence the U.S. Constitution gets, considering that it’s a wholly illegitimate document. Women, African Americans, and Native Americans, despite together comprising the majority of the population at the time of the country’s founding, did not get to participate in the document’s drafting and ratification. Of course, we all abide by laws we did not make, but laws should not be treated as anything other than useful tools.
THE BLACK LIVES MATTER AGENDA: The Black Lives organization has put out a platform to tackle racial injustice in America, including its criminal justice section which includes: end money bail, fines, court surcharges, and “defendant funded” court proceedings; end capital punishment; end zero-tolerance school policies, arrests of students, and remove police from schools; reallocation of funds from police & incarnation to long term strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs; immediate release, record expungement, and reparations for all drug related offenses and prostitution.
WHAT ARE THE OTHER POLITIAL IDEOLOGIES AND WHY ARE THEY BAD? THE UGLINESS OF CONSERVATISM: At the heart of my objection to conservatism, in all its forms, is its fundamental meanness. I think it’s very telling that conservatives tend to criticize liberals as “bleeding hearts.” When you see bad things, your heart should bleed, unless you’re some kind of monster. You notice this meanness or indifference everywhere in conservative writing.
THE INADEQUACY OF LIBERALISM: What actually separates a liberal from a leftist? What exactly are we leftists trying to rid politics of?
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
SOCIALISM FOR AMERICA -- EXCERPTS
Excerpts in this segment are from Why You Should a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson (2019)
MILLENNIAL DISCONTENT AND THE RISE OF A SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE: Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, young people in the United States have been becoming increasingly radicalized. Weighted down with debt, paying through the nose for health insurance the policy preferences of rich elites, millennials were both frustrated and tired. Millennial discontent has its roots in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Occupy Wall Street was a natural expression of this rage and disaffection. Its slogan, “We are the 99%,” accurately reflected the staggering wealth in this country, with a tiny fraction of people owning most of the actual wealth. To people saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, the 21st century economy seemed more feudalistic than meritocratic. The majority of millennials are skeptical of capitalism and have warm feelings toward socialism. The only group that expresses net positive support for capitalism are the people over 50 years old.
WHAT IS THE LEFT SO MAD ABOUT?
THE ILLS OF OUR SOCIETY: Harvard’s Steven Pinker has concluded that left-wing intellectuals must “hate progress,” because they don’t seem to appreciate that across the globe, life expectancy has grown, extreme deprivation has declined and on average, people are more prosperous than ever before. People who wish to dismiss leftist complaints often point out that today’s poor people, at least in the U.S., often have refrigerators and cell phones, something their ancestors never had. But we shouldn’t measure contemporary well-being against Depression-era poverty. Instead, we should measure our achievements against our potential.
Climate change and the environment were barely brought up during the 2016 presidential debates. And yet, the issues could not be more serious, nor the stakes higher. Then there are nuclear weapons. Some people think that nuclear arms control is not an especially pressing issue. This is a short-sided view. For us to be safe, the peace cannot just be long, it has to be eternal. It’s not enough that the world’s powerful countries are getting along at the moment. They literally have to never go to war again for the rest of history.
The defining feature of our age is inequality. In the U.S. the top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 95% if families, and the bottom one-third of families own 0% of the country’s wealth. In the U.S. last year, 41% of workers didn’t have even one day of paid vacation, and 36% didn’t have a single day of paid sick leave. The word pension has become a joke, and 50% of private-sector pensions have disappeared. The absence of paid parental leave in the U.S., means that mothers and fathers often have to return to work immediately after the birth of a child. [Note: the author provides no reference for the genesis of these numbers. I challenge their accuracy].
Millennial’s financial situation, generally, is dire. A study based on the Survey of Consumer Finances concluded, “Millennials earned lower incomes, were less likely to own a home … had lower net wealth than their parents at the same stage of life,” and “had amassed just half the net worth of baby boomers had at the same age.”
THE INDENTURED LIFE: In a poll by Lending Tree, most debtors said that worries about their student loans affect their lives and even give them headaches. Student debt is an extraordinary unjust system: it punishes people who don’t have wealthy parents. It’s perverse, when you think about it: you can’t just go and educate yourself. Instead, you have to sign up for decades of indenture just to secure a qualification necessary for slight advancement in the workforce.
JUST A WHOLE MESS OF OTHER PROBLEMS:
Race: Nobody likes to be called a racist, but anyone who looks at the facts honestly has to admit that the U.S. is still a very racist country. Why? Because of the mere fact of being born a certain race makes a highly significant difference to your chances in life.
Sex & Gender: Everything from student debt to domestic violence disproportionately affects women, to say nothing of a sexist culture that demeans those who defy gender expectations or cannot meet impossible beauty standards.
Immigration: When we talk about “illegal immigrants” being deported, we’re taking about ordinary people trying to eke out a living, who are swept up by armed agents and sent away. This was, of course, not how it worked for most of the country’s history: it used to be that you could simply get on a boat, get checked for diseases, and then join the American family. The strict legal/illegal distinction is a recent development (ICE itself has only existed since 2003), and we have created a regime in which ordinary people must constantly worry about being asked for their papers. [Note: The first immigration act in the U.S. was in 1882: a ten-year moratorium on Chinese immigration].
Animals: Anyone who is honest with themselves must realize that the mass killing and eating of animals raises deep and discomforting moral questions. Animals can suffer, they can feel emotions, they can have desires of joy. The industrial farming of animals may well be one of the most important issues of our time.
General Despair: On the whole, it’s rough out there. Extreme poverty may have dropped, and the economy may be growing, but many millions of people are spending their whole lives trying to stay afloat, with little time to enjoy themselves.
CAPITALISM: When people talk about capitalism’s wondrous efficiency at improving productivity, they are often talking about disregarding the humanity of laborers and being willing to inflict any amount of fear and misery if it helps the collective. Certainly, this process is effective. But threatening a person at gun point is also effective, and unless we have a theory of what is and is not acceptable, a quest to improve results at all costs will lead to violations of people’s dignity.
“Property is theft,” meaning that the very thing property rights supposedly do (protect people’s right to use things), they actually abrogate completely by denying people’s right to share in the world’s resources. If we trace back existing property to its roots, we find much of it originates in conquest, and it’s hard to say that we should respect property rights when the property itself was stolen. Texas was stolen from Mexico, and the U.S. was stolen from its Native population. There was no “right to any of this, except to the extent that might makes right.”
Under our capitalist system, many people make money not by working, but by having money. Thirty percent of income in the U.S. is capital income. Capital income is a significant driver of inequality. Poor people simply do not own stocks and are unable to invest in assets that will allow them to make money in their sleep. And once your money makes money, that money makes even more money, further contributing to the cycle of inequality.
Corporate Power: Corporate power has important implications for people’s freedom. Employers can decide what their employees wear, who they can talk to, when they can pee, and what they can say on social media. In the U.S. we have complete at-will employment in most states, meaning that if you do anything to tick off your boss, they can send you packing and rob you of your livelihood. An employer can fire you not just for what you say at work, but what you say off the job. This creates an environment in which people are often scared to voice their opinion as they would be in a police state. [Note: I worked in corporate America for 40 years with three different companies and most of this is absolutely false].
Corporations have nothing resembling the democratic decision-making that holds government accountable. As an employee, your right to decide what the company does is usually nil. You don’t get to vote for your boss. [Note: This is true].
The Super-Wealthy: At their core, these millionaires and billionaires believe that their money is theirs because they earned it, and the government has no “right” to take it away from them. They should get to spent it. There are several important fallacies at the heart of this view. First, is the conflation of market value and moral desert. Second, is the idea that taxes are an illegitimate of “your” money. Third, is the idea that capitalist build the fortunes of the workers, rather than workers building the fortunes of the capitalists. Fourth, it is incontrovertibly true that being rich does make you a bad person.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM AND WHY IS IT GOOD?
A SET OF PRINCIPLES: Twenty-first century socialism expresses a commitment to a certain set of values, values that are diametrically opposed to the dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire capitalism that both the Democratic and Republican parties seem to have fully embraced. Socialism starts with a feeling of connectedness and compassion, but this solidarity and concern are just the first principles. From its humanitarian sympathies, it derives a vision: it seeks a world in which people do not go to war; there are no class, racial, and gender hierarchies; there are not significant imbalances of power; there is no poverty coexisting alongside wealth; and everyone leads a pleasant and fulfilled life. Socialists are also interested in expanding democracy to cover the economic sphere itself. Workplaces are highly undemocratic. If a manufacturer decides to close a factory and move it overseas, the workers in that factory don’t get to “vote” on that decision. The idea of “economic democracy” means that they should get these kinds of decision-making rights. Managers and owners shouldn’t decide what the workers have to do, the workers should decide what manager have to do (if they need managers at all). Socialist do not have to be able to present an alternative, what we have to present is a recognition of the problem and a commitment to finding the alternative. This is how innovation works: you start with the question, not the answer.
A WORLD WITHOUT BORDERS: We are often accused of advocating “open borders.” This isn’t because we reject the idea of making sure the people in a country are safe from dangerous intruders. Rather, it’s because the whole idea of borders strikes us as somewhat odd: fencing off stolen land and refusing to share its bounties with perfectly harmless people who want to come and share with them seems downright immoral.
SORTING OUR WORDS AND TERMS: The socialist is a utopian. They are fundamentally unsatisfied by the idea that the highest human ambition is simply to turn the United States into circa 2019 Scandinavia. This is not the dream. The dream is transformation. The dream is to see a total elimination of exploitation and hierarchy and a change in the structure of who owns capital. The difference between a socialist and a social democrat is that a socialist is constantly thinking about the dream. The social democrat is mostly content with the achievement of a robust welfare state. Socialists want that, too. But they won’t be satisfied with it.
SENSIBLE AGENDAS: Do socialists have a plan? We have lots of plans. We can look at the approach of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They believe in a society without profit, exploitation, racism, sexism, or social hierarchy. A system of socialize medicine. To promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth. The Green New Deal.
Bernie Sanders 2016 agenda is clear as can be: a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition, cancel all outstanding student loan debt, $16 trillion plan to fight climate change, bar the federal government from contracting with private prisons, U.S Department of Justice investigating every death that occurs in police custody, guaranteed 12 weeks of family and medical leave, universal childcare, and creating an Employee Ownership Bank to provide loans to help workers collectively purchase their companies and turn them into cooperatives.
Structural Change: Statehood to Washington, D.C.; making voting much easier, no voter registration, election day a holiday, everyone can vote including prisoners and noncitizens; scrap the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, implement ranked – choice voting.
It will be argued that these “structural reforms” are actually partisan, that they clearly favor the interests of the political left. Of course, they do! The bulk of the people in the U.S. lean left. As we make the political system fairer and more inclusive, it’s going to become less conservative. It’s also worth responding to those who give undue weight to the text of the Constitution and object to structural reforms that would involve altering it. It’s funny how much reverence the U.S. Constitution gets, considering that it’s a wholly illegitimate document. Women, African Americans, and Native Americans, despite together comprising the majority of the population at the time of the country’s founding, did not get to participate in the document’s drafting and ratification. Of course, we all abide by laws we did not make, but laws should not be treated as anything other than useful tools.
THE BLACK LIVES MATTER AGENDA: The Black Lives organization has put out a platform to tackle racial injustice in America, including its criminal justice section which includes: end money bail, fines, court surcharges, and “defendant funded” court proceedings; end capital punishment; end zero-tolerance school policies, arrests of students, and remove police from schools; reallocation of funds from police & incarnation to long term strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs; immediate release, record expungement, and reparations for all drug related offenses and prostitution.
WHAT ARE THE OTHER POLITIAL IDEOLOGIES AND WHY ARE THEY BAD? THE UGLINESS OF CONSERVATISM: At the heart of my objection to conservatism, in all its forms, is its fundamental meanness. I think it’s very telling that conservatives tend to criticize liberals as “bleeding hearts.” When you see bad things, your heart should bleed, unless you’re some kind of monster. You notice this meanness or indifference everywhere in conservative writing.
THE INADEQUACY OF LIBERALISM: What actually separates a liberal from a leftist? What exactly are we leftists trying to rid politics of?
- Reluctance to Challenge the Powerful
- Belief in Bipartisanship: Ultimately, a person of principle needs to be more concerned with building power than with reaching agreement.
- Politics of Attributes: Liberalism thinks more about who a candidate is than what that candidate is actually going to do with power.
- Whitewashing of History: America has a shameful history. The land we live on was stolen from its original inhabitants, who were systematically wiped out. But “liberal history” wants to tell an uplifting narrative about America, as a country that has had its problems and flaws but is constantly getting better.
- Use of Right-Wing Premises: Sometimes liberals say things like “we’re real patriots” or “we’re the ones who really embody the Founding Fathers principles.” A leftist wouldn’t say these things. They would say, “Patriotism is overrated and many of the Founding Fathers beat and raped slaves, so a principle isn’t good just because the Founding Fathers happened to believe in it.” Liberals often adopt the right’s premises even when they are making ostensibly left arguments.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 21_nihilism_socialism_in_america_--_segment_21.pdf |