[FRIAM] words for Nick (political-words focused)

Eric Charles eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com
Sat Aug 22 11:03:01 EDT 2020 

>
> Liberal; was, "laissez-faire, free market"; is now, "humanist, socialist".
>
> Conservative: was "royalist, authoritarian;  is now, "fascist,
> oligarchic."


It is worse than that. At this point they don't mean anything so clear as
what your quote implies.

Circa the French and American revolutions, the royalists were correctly
labeled as conservatives, because authoritarian-government was what they
had already, and the liberals were progressive, because they thought a
world with more freedom would be a better world.  So a bunch of the terms
became conflated by historic accident.

It *should *be that there is a spectrum from libral to authoritarian, and
an orthagonal scale from progressive to conservative.

A liberal is someone who is striving to increase liberty (for whatever
reason). An authoritarian is striving to give control to a small central
group or individual (for whatever reason).

A progressive is striving towards some future state (gambling with the
current state in the belief there are better states coming). A conservative
is striving to maintain the current state (leering of risking what we have,
because what comes next might be worse).

It should, therefore, be possible to be a libreal conservative, a liberal
progressive, an authoritarian conservative, or an authoritarian
progressive, depending on what the current state is, and whether you want
to keep it or move on from it.

If we had people on some sort of normal distribution of people in those
perspectives, with all of them coming to the town square, they could act as
checks and balances on each other. Society-as-a-whole could be most
conservative about the things that most needed conserving, while being the
most progressive about the things that most needed progressing. Similarly,
we could be delicate and precise in our restrictions of freedoms. THAT is
the means by which democracy adds value as a means of governing (see Dewey,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other pragmatist political philosophers). That
democracy is sometimes implemented as "50% + 1 can do whatever they want"
is a different matter entirely, which is why (as brought up in FRIAM this
week), "the tyranny of the majority" was a big topic of discussion at
various points in the past.

The conflation of the crucial political terms has made it
extremely difficult to have certain types of political conversations in the
U.S. For example, the cake-baking controversy:

   - Some people think that forcing someone to bake a cake for an event
   they don't want to support is a "liberal" stance. That's crazy. The liberal
   stance would be to let the bakers do what they want. Telling them they have
   to bake the cake *because *a world in which they bake the cake is a
   better world, is a progressive-authoritarian stance. (It might be the right
   thing to do, it might be the wrong thing to do; our inability to describe
   the stances sensibly interferes with our ability to reach consensus on
   the issue.) Our "liberals" aren't trying to make us freer, they are trying
   to dictate from a seat of power; their efforts are authoritarian.
   - Other people think it would be a better world if the baker could
   refuse to make cakes much more broadly. For example, that it would be
   better if the bakers could refuse to bake cakes for interracial couples, or
   for a couple being married by a heathen religion. That isn't conservative
   at all! It isn't a respect for the hard-fought gains of the past and a
   reticence to risk losing those gains.

Uhg!

(Yes, yes,  many of those so-called conservatives imagine that the "better
state" they seek has already existed in some mythic past, but that is a
different issue all together; our liberal-progressive founders were
inspired by stories of ancient Greece and Rome, but they weren't trying to
conserve ancient Greece.)

Some other examples:

   - We have had Social Security in the U.S. for almost 100 years. At this
   point, it is a thing achieved in the distant past. Wanting to change social
   security *is* progressive, and efforts to ensure social security can
   continue as it is indefinitely *are *conservative.
   - At this point we have had a schizophrenic web of social-safety-net and
   wealth-redistribution programs for decades (from social security and food
   stamps to Pell grants, child tax credits, and first-time homebuyer
   programs). Each program has its own requirements, and its own hoops to jump
   through, and it could easily become a full time job just trying to get all
   the benefits one is entitled to. In the face of that, one could easily be a
   liberal-progressive arguing for Universal Basic Income, *if* you were
   using that as a means to dismantle the existing programs and provide people
   more freedom regarding how they are using the cash you are giving them.
   Milton Freedman argued in favor of UBI for that reason, but it is hard for
   most people to imagine that, because "wasn't he a conservative?" In
   contrast, one could also argue for UBI from an authoritarian position, if
   you can only think of the effort as coupled with a big tax increase,
   because your main motivation is to use government power to force more of
   rich people's money to be given to poor people. The latter is, in
   comparison to the Freedman version, much closer to the midline of the
   progressive-conservative spectrum.

Uhg all around!

When Libertarians complain (not as often now as in decades past) the two
major parties are "basically the same" (not as true now as in past
decades), they mean to point out that both parties are heavily, Heavily,
authoritarian. Both parties flood power to the Presidency that shouldn't be
there. Both parties want to legislate and regulate how people should behave
in a heavy handed manner, in a ridiculously wide range of situations. Both
parties are an inconsistent and contradictory mix of progressivism and
conservatism, depending on the issue. Etc. See, for example, Pelosi tearing
up the state of the union speech while working to nigh-simultaneously to
ensuring the renewal of the Patriot Act and FISA, and worse, ensuring that
it happened without any of the bi-partisan proposed amendments to enhance
privacy protections. That is straight authoritarian-conservative where it
counts, with a thin veneer of performative grandstanding. I get it Nancy,
"Orange Man Bad!", but, like, would it be that hard to to support even a
shred of actually liberal efforts while you are shouting that from the
rafters?!?

Sure, some of the things democrats want to dictate about my behavior are
different than some of the things conservatives want to dictate... but
those are (under more normal circumstances) small details, if you would
consider the possibility that we could maybe go a few years without
stripping freedoms and without funneling more unchecked power to the
Presidency. If I stand a decent distance on the liberal side of the
liberal-to-authoritarian spectrum, and both "major parties" stand towards
the extreme of the authoritarian side, sharing the variation from
authoritarian-progressive to authoritarian-conservative with a heavy amount
of overlap, they look pretty similar from where I stand a lot of the time.

Of course, there is a difference, and I have a preference, and there is a
lot more pressure to vote that preference this cycle than in more normal
cycles... but that is a different issue.
<echarles at american.edu>


On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:22 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, we add to Dave's list, as follows.
>
> Liberal; was, "laissez-faire, free market"; is now, "humanist, socialist".
>
> Conservative: was "royalist, authoritarian;  is now, "fascist, oligarchic."
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russell Standish
> Sent: Friday, August 21, 2020 8:27 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] words for Nick
>
> On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:24:20AM -0400, Eric Charles wrote:
> > "Awesome" is one of my favorites. Now used to indicate general
> > goodness.  Not generally used in situations where one say "i was in awe".
> >
> > "Liberal" and "conservative" are two of my least favorite.  Liberal
> > was about promoting freedom.  Conservative was about retaining past
> > ways. Note that those are clearly orthogonal issues in their original
> > usage,  and now we act like they are opposites,  which is terrible.
>
> And just as bizarrely, in Australia they are synonyms. The Liberal party is
> the conservative party.
>
>
> --
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders     hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
>                       http://www.hpcoders.com.au
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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