Cleon Skousen, in his book The 5000 Year Leap, explains that the founders did not have the same view of right and left that we do. Here is how we commonly think of left and right today:
Left = Liberal/Socialist, Right = Conservative/fascist.
Conservatives at the time of the founders were supporters of royalty. Liberals of those bygone days would not recognize today's dictatorial, doctrinaire liberalism. Indeed, our founders were the classic free-thinking liberals. They were rebels against the crown after all.
We keep talking about right and left in this country, and that has it's place, but what we should really be talking about is the founders' left and right:
Left = Anarchy, Right = Tyranny
Look at the picture. That is how the founders saw right and left. The tyranny of an absolute ruler lay at one end, and stateless anarchy is found at the opposite extreme. The Constitution blazes a path between the two extremes. Modern-day left and right, Republicans and Democrats, Socialists and fascists, can both be found clawing and scratching for power at the Tyranny end of the arrow. Meanwhile, here we stand, trying to pull the thing back towards the middle.
Politics is about power and who gets to wield it. It doesn't matter if your party is in or out of power. If they are stacking law upon law, you are still powerless.
1 comments:
Exactly, Silverfiddle. I totally agree. I definitely want to teach my kids to respect the law and rules and everything else associated with doing good in the world. But acting like all this constant rule changing and addition of law is what a liberal society is all about is foolish.
In my job, Silverfiddle, I get to watch every day how investment in ideology - in my case, the ideology I grew up with my whole life - leads a lot of kids, parents, and teachers to be invested in notions of their own lives that clearly neither true nor serve them, but which serve an outlook on the world that is a well-intentioned, but forever flawed attempt to look after people. All ideology is like this, I think. Just depends on how people slice things. But getting too lost in the BS can be a problem. And I am surrounded by the problem every day. And, ironically, much of what I am surrounded by is the product of an ideology that I swore undying allegiance to for much of my life. Kind of funny to me, now.
Liberal societies are like loving families, I've decided, today. They get so wrapped up in what they think of as the vulnerabilities with embracing more freedom or being more loving that they begin to act like the more power-driven, leverage-obsessed, pressure-based, "hardcore" world is the "real" world that decent and liberal peoples, in all of their innocent purity, could just never fathom. When really that hardcore, cynical world is far too often the ugly consequence of that foolish, hardened outlook on life.
I'm sure you've seen, Silverfiddle, in your job, as I have in mine, what the most hardened and hardcore folks who don't appreciate the more decent and generally liberty-loving lives of those they often prey on and victimize.
When you spend enough time with illiberal folks in the world - gang members and families and kids with no respect for the law or much of anyone, in my case; terrorists and despots, in some of the most serious cases - you can better appreciate more decent and liberty-loving people, and the values that support them, I think, Silverfiddle.
This direction of rationalizing force and harder edges of life at every turn in politics, the media, and in life is kind of concerning for me, Silverfiddle. Maybe it's always been like that. But pretending like more cynical realities overwhelming more decent ones is "just life" is what creates illiberal societies and fuels illiberal actors in the world.
I'm still uneasy about the state of a politics that constantly fuels political fire like this with a fierce power battles that lose track of the most important lessons that liberal and wiser political thinkers more wisely skeptical of power have had to offer.
We'll see if we make some kind of correction. If it is going to happen moderate and decent people will have to expect that this nonsense ends with no clear winners except for those who do not covet power in this way, I think.
I'm hopeful and a little encouraged that this is the direction that Americans seem to be taking, as they seem to slowly lose confidence in both Republicans, then Democrats, who behave in this way.
Interesting times we live in.
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.