11-09-2019, 07:44 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-09-2019, 07:54 PM by Eric the Green.)
(11-09-2019, 05:14 PM)Anthony Wrote: A nearly 27-minute video about neoliberalism - and not one mention of social, moral, and religious issues and the very real role they play?
Michael Lind pointed this role out in his twin best-sellers of the '90s - The Next American Nation and [I]Up From Conservatism: Why The Right Is Wrong For America[I]. In these books, Lind introduced the concept of politics as a compass rather than a spectrum, whose four cardinal points are as follows:
Conservatism: Adhering to the conservative position on both economic and social issues.
Libertarianism: Conservative on economic issues but liberal on social issues.
Left-liberalism: Adhering to the liberal position on both economic and social issues.
National liberalism: Liberal on economic issues but conservative on social issues.
A classification of facebook pages using these categories would appear to be about 45% conservative, 45% left-liberal, 9% libertarian, and 1% national liberal, if even that.
But is that in effect how we are divided as a nation?
That's the same as the Libertarian Party's version of the political compass. I agree with it.
National liberal is the opposite of libertarian, and can also be called statist. It favors the state to regulate or rule over both the economy and social/cultural matters. It's extreme form is Stalinism.
Neo-liberalism is essentially libertarianism, but the emphasis is so strong on economic issues that you can be a neo-liberal and still be either liberal or conservative on social issues. In fact, no I don't think neo-liberals give much credit to the role of religious, moral and social issues. They think: let the market operate, see to it that it operates without government restraint everywhere, and all other issues will take care of themselves. They are wrong, of course.
I think America is divided across left and right on that compass (left-liberal vs. conservative), and between red and blue, despite many people who don't think so; but many is a relative term. Those who dissent from this picture of the divide are a relatively small portion of the public, even though it's a larger portion of folks on social media.