RE: don't fence me in

There you go Scottie, Jim, despite his appreciation of Derrida, knows
exactly what the words really mean, all under the ironic heading of "don't
fence me in".
Daniel

You're right. That's what liberal has always meant and really still
means. So really both the left and right wings of the US political
spectrum are "liberals." Most people don't know this, though. That's
why so much US informal political dialog is and will be pretty stupid.
The arguments are really over the correct application of the same principle.

So "individual liberty" as a first principle has been taken over by the
right and left wings of the US political spectrum in different ways, to
mean different things.

Please put up with a silly caricature that may be a little instructive
at the moment.

Righties focus on individual liberty to own weapons and not have
government interfere in the market or with their businesses. But they
follow the reasoning of _The Federalist Papers_ -- government has to
restrain the passions of the people so that the reason of the people can
restrain government. So they're OK with being anti-porn and
anti-abortion and anti-flag burning. This isn't what they think of,
first, when they think of individual liberty.

Lefties focus on individual liberty in the sense of supporting gay
marriage, freedom of expression even when it means pornography, right to
abortion (in fact, anything and everything anyone wants is generally a
"right"), pro-right-to-burn-flags (if not necessarily pro-flag-burning
themselves), etc.

The right tends to be associated with traditional morality and power
structures.

The left tends to be associated with critique of traditional morality
and power structures.

So anyone who critiques power structures and traditional ideas about
language, etc., are necessarily part of the "left" from a right point of
view.

As a result, righties see guys like Derrida (who really critique
enlightenment liberalism) as being "liberal" because they critique
traditional power structures, even though the truth is they're
critiquing liberalism itself and its many failures to actually produce
that elusive thing called "individual liberty," trying to establish this
principle on different grounds.

Jim
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Received on Wed Oct 1 14:15:06 2003