Libertarians
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Liberalism 5.0?, Part 2
Last week I posted about Walter Russell Mead's article "The Once and Future Liberalism." There is much in it I like, and I think he is correct when he attributes the political impasse that we are in to a futile argument between "conservatives"–Liberal 4.1 types (i.e., New Deal/Great Society Democrats) and reactionaries– Liberal 3.0 types,
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Finding the Balance between Centralization and Localism I
I was listening to something the other day, and the guy was making a point I had never considered. Empires for the most part, whether ancient or modern, are not particularly intrusive regarding local cultures and customs. Empires more often than not live with local cultural pluralism so long as locals pay their taxes and
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Liberalism 5.0?
The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old
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Michael Lind on Realignment
Michael Lind this afternoon in a post on Salon: When party systems collapse in American history, the new party system tends to emerge from within the dominant party. The defeat of the Confederates meant that the politics of the Gilded Age would be fought between the business and farmer wings of the hegemonic Republican Party.
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Tom Frank on Fizzling Protests
From a Salon Interview: Occupy once looked like it could play that role. Certainly the focus on income inequality and the concept of the 99 percent never would have resonated without their hard work. And it just … It sort of fizzled. That was a real shame. I was real excited about it at first. There was
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The Freedom Paradox
In contemporary Libertarian America, freedom is a question mainly of multiplying choices, the more the better. Freedom is a question of being unshackled from any restriction. Liberation is understood as the unrestricted pursuit of any compulsion, so long as it does not harm others. From the Christian point of view, nothing could be cruder or
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Eric Alterman & the Progressive Future
The American political system is nothing if not complicated and so too are the reasons for its myriad points of democratic dysfunction. Some are endemic to our constitutional regime and all but impossible to address save by the extremely cumbersome (and profoundly unlikely) prospect of amending the Constitution. Others are the result of a corrupt
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Deneen’s Two Cents
I came across this recent talk entitled “Sensus Communis and Nature’s Law: Why Communities Know Natural Law Better Than Philosophers” given by Patrick Deneen at a conference at Princeton. It supports Mike McG's dissent to my posts about the perils of allowing our social lattices to disintegrate and why kids' attitudes, and those of society