05-03-2017, 08:16 AM
This is from a year ago in a philosophy forum, and I would guess that many of you would enjoy this site.
Politics has a philosophical basis, whether we like it or not -- or heed it or not. Ideas and values have consequences. and bad ideas and values can get only sordid results.
http://dailynous.com/2016/03/14/philosop...tial-race/
This poster, as many other Americans (I included), could not believe that Donald Trump could be elected President until he was elected. But we weren't so concerned about getting into a wreck that put us in traction in a hospital and put us in bankruptcy and foreclosure, either, when we drove on an icy road and slid upon the ice on a bridge that we thought little of the danger of driving that night.
Donald Trump has shown himself for what he is: an irresponsible and reckless crony capitalist, a big-government right-winger in contempt of rationality and community, someone who practices the most destructive sorts of material and personal indulgence. This happens when conservatism morphs from Edmund Burke to Rush Limbaugh. This did not happen steadily over two centuries; this happened nearly overnight. It is not surprising that the Party of Lincoln became the conservative party because it aligned itself with productive enterprise that won the Civil War. But the Party of Lincoln has become the Party that has abandoned Lincoln and a philosophy that required opportunity, respect for learning, property rights in the real and abstract, economic restraint (for productive investment) in favor of something that indulges the few and bleeds the many.
I am old enough to remember when the Republican Party exemplified old conservative virtues that it has now abandoned. We have a gaping hole in the political spectrum and in effect a bimodal distribution of political values. We are in deep trouble.
Politics has a philosophical basis, whether we like it or not -- or heed it or not. Ideas and values have consequences. and bad ideas and values can get only sordid results.
Quote:We have never embraced political conservatism. However, we also think that the conservative tradition in American politics is intellectually formidable. We find the best representatives of that tradition to be rigorous, insightful, and philosophically astute. They are political commentators for whom ideas matter. In their best work we find proposals and principles that we think are incorrect, but never merely stupid.
The trouble with political conservatism in America is that for the past fifty years, its central ideals have been growing increasingly unpopular with the American citizenry. The sociological, demographic, and economic explanations of this need not detain us. The fact is that the core conservative values of personal responsibility, self-reliance, restrained government, shared community, and the moral authority of tradition have given way to tendencies that conservatives must regard as base and uncivilized: insatiable appetites for luxury, excess, spectacle, and power, all of which are social forces that dissolve tradition and foster divisions. It is no accident that W.F. Buckley Jr. defined conservatives as standing athwart history yelling, Stop!
http://dailynous.com/2016/03/14/philosop...tial-race/
This poster, as many other Americans (I included), could not believe that Donald Trump could be elected President until he was elected. But we weren't so concerned about getting into a wreck that put us in traction in a hospital and put us in bankruptcy and foreclosure, either, when we drove on an icy road and slid upon the ice on a bridge that we thought little of the danger of driving that night.
Donald Trump has shown himself for what he is: an irresponsible and reckless crony capitalist, a big-government right-winger in contempt of rationality and community, someone who practices the most destructive sorts of material and personal indulgence. This happens when conservatism morphs from Edmund Burke to Rush Limbaugh. This did not happen steadily over two centuries; this happened nearly overnight. It is not surprising that the Party of Lincoln became the conservative party because it aligned itself with productive enterprise that won the Civil War. But the Party of Lincoln has become the Party that has abandoned Lincoln and a philosophy that required opportunity, respect for learning, property rights in the real and abstract, economic restraint (for productive investment) in favor of something that indulges the few and bleeds the many.
I am old enough to remember when the Republican Party exemplified old conservative virtues that it has now abandoned. We have a gaping hole in the political spectrum and in effect a bimodal distribution of political values. We are in deep trouble.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.