Is social democracy left adjacent a little bit? People do like some aspects of social democracy like social security and dislike, to put it mildly, the health insurance industry. What the Republican Party and conservatives are really good at is using social conservatism to win elections.
Is social democracy left adjacent a little bit? People do like some aspects of social democracy like social security and dislike, to put it mildly, the health insurance industry. What the Republican Party and conservatives are really good at is using social conservatism to win elections.
I think my tentative answer is that European Christian Democracy is intellectually coherent. Most of what passes for social democracy is less so, having been hollowed out by its alliance with liberal universalist ideals.
You make these kinds of comments frequently, but I think they rest on double standards. You generally accept тАЬitтАЩs my religionтАЭ as an acceptable explanation without asking whether itтАЩs intellectually coherent. As a result, religious arguments get a free pass from you on many of the deeply difficult questions.
Is тАЬEuropean Christian DemocracyтАЭ even a coherent category? Europe is a diverse collection of nations that use different kinds of Christianity (when they are Christian at all) and that have almost all been through dramatic political changes over the past few hundred years. One of those changes is that most of them are far less Christian, and national Protestantisms are among the hardest hit.
What kinds of space are you willing to allow for ideological diversity within a country? Does a country, or even a political party, need to rest on a single coherent ideology that covers both the personal and the political? The Protestant/liberal tradition of having some separation between a broad but shallow official stance and a collection of deep and detailed personal stances is a useful innovation, not lightly to be cast aside in favour of the тАЬcoherenceтАЭ of enforced conformity.
Within the liberal tradition, I completely agree that we could use more deep theories of value and less reliance on capitalism and proceduralism as ultimate structures (instead of containers for deeper structures). Greater attention to our philosophical roots is called for. I cannot accept that such philosophy ought to be confined to established religious traditions, though. Nor does it necessarily need to be imposed from above, politically speaking. Liberal proceduralism is, from this perspective, not so much incoherent as deliberately incomplete. Reminders of the incompleteness are justified but that neednтАЩt mean we throw the whole thing out.
I don't think we disagree. But Christian Democracy ultimately lies on supra-rational/transcendent justifications, which is a feature, not a bug. And it's not like Christian Democrats have proven to be exclusivist bigots.
Meanwhile, I'd argue that the deliberate incompleteness works as long as it is quietly exploited so that more grounded traditions can co-exist. But it should never be celebrated as an end in and of itself.
I am so sorry; I am so very confused. Maybe IтАЩm just lost. Just bear with me and humor me for a moment. Is there any truth to the ideas that the United States is basically an Enlightenment project. Being American is not really an ethnicity like most other ethnicities. Being American is to adhere to an idea of basic human equality which is as universal as it gets. America started out as a Anglo-Protestant thing but it was never explicitly written into the constitution and so the Enlightenment ideas behind the Declaration and Bill of Rights was able to grow to become something other than a particular language or religion or ethnicity. Like I said, IтАЩm confused. Do people really dislike the idea of universal human rights that much? This is breaking my mind.
Start by reconciling universal human rights with the concept of citizenship. One is an empty construct, another is an emergent property of an anarchic world.
I guess what I was trying to say is that the American Enlightenment project does reconcile universal human rights with citizenship at least within the nation itself. To be American is not to be a particular ethnicity or follow a certain religion or even to speak a particular language. To be American is to believe certain basic Enlightenment principles about human equality. And besides, even patriotic Americans still believe that those who arenтАЩt American are still human beings who are entitled to basic rights and freedoms, donтАЩt they? Maybe IтАЩm too Enlightenment brained to get this.
Universal human rights is an empty concept? The concept that inspired long and arduous battles for emancipation, the rights of women, equality before the law, the rights of noncombatants in warfare, and virtually every other achievement of civilization is "empty"?
I tend to agree. The only god republicans' worship is the almighty dollar, with it they've destroyed the working class, and their growing dividends prove that they have Christian God's favor, so why change?
Is social democracy left adjacent a little bit? People do like some aspects of social democracy like social security and dislike, to put it mildly, the health insurance industry. What the Republican Party and conservatives are really good at is using social conservatism to win elections.
I think my tentative answer is that European Christian Democracy is intellectually coherent. Most of what passes for social democracy is less so, having been hollowed out by its alliance with liberal universalist ideals.
You make these kinds of comments frequently, but I think they rest on double standards. You generally accept тАЬitтАЩs my religionтАЭ as an acceptable explanation without asking whether itтАЩs intellectually coherent. As a result, religious arguments get a free pass from you on many of the deeply difficult questions.
Is тАЬEuropean Christian DemocracyтАЭ even a coherent category? Europe is a diverse collection of nations that use different kinds of Christianity (when they are Christian at all) and that have almost all been through dramatic political changes over the past few hundred years. One of those changes is that most of them are far less Christian, and national Protestantisms are among the hardest hit.
What kinds of space are you willing to allow for ideological diversity within a country? Does a country, or even a political party, need to rest on a single coherent ideology that covers both the personal and the political? The Protestant/liberal tradition of having some separation between a broad but shallow official stance and a collection of deep and detailed personal stances is a useful innovation, not lightly to be cast aside in favour of the тАЬcoherenceтАЭ of enforced conformity.
Within the liberal tradition, I completely agree that we could use more deep theories of value and less reliance on capitalism and proceduralism as ultimate structures (instead of containers for deeper structures). Greater attention to our philosophical roots is called for. I cannot accept that such philosophy ought to be confined to established religious traditions, though. Nor does it necessarily need to be imposed from above, politically speaking. Liberal proceduralism is, from this perspective, not so much incoherent as deliberately incomplete. Reminders of the incompleteness are justified but that neednтАЩt mean we throw the whole thing out.
I don't think we disagree. But Christian Democracy ultimately lies on supra-rational/transcendent justifications, which is a feature, not a bug. And it's not like Christian Democrats have proven to be exclusivist bigots.
Meanwhile, I'd argue that the deliberate incompleteness works as long as it is quietly exploited so that more grounded traditions can co-exist. But it should never be celebrated as an end in and of itself.
I am so sorry; I am so very confused. Maybe IтАЩm just lost. Just bear with me and humor me for a moment. Is there any truth to the ideas that the United States is basically an Enlightenment project. Being American is not really an ethnicity like most other ethnicities. Being American is to adhere to an idea of basic human equality which is as universal as it gets. America started out as a Anglo-Protestant thing but it was never explicitly written into the constitution and so the Enlightenment ideas behind the Declaration and Bill of Rights was able to grow to become something other than a particular language or religion or ethnicity. Like I said, IтАЩm confused. Do people really dislike the idea of universal human rights that much? This is breaking my mind.
Start by reconciling universal human rights with the concept of citizenship. One is an empty construct, another is an emergent property of an anarchic world.
I guess what I was trying to say is that the American Enlightenment project does reconcile universal human rights with citizenship at least within the nation itself. To be American is not to be a particular ethnicity or follow a certain religion or even to speak a particular language. To be American is to believe certain basic Enlightenment principles about human equality. And besides, even patriotic Americans still believe that those who arenтАЩt American are still human beings who are entitled to basic rights and freedoms, donтАЩt they? Maybe IтАЩm too Enlightenment brained to get this.
Universal human rights is an empty concept? The concept that inspired long and arduous battles for emancipation, the rights of women, equality before the law, the rights of noncombatants in warfare, and virtually every other achievement of civilization is "empty"?
I tend to agree. The only god republicans' worship is the almighty dollar, with it they've destroyed the working class, and their growing dividends prove that they have Christian God's favor, so why change?
The working class love them. I give up.