KNP continues as Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Expanding on a somewhat specific point I realized as I wrapped up the previous post that it was insufficiently clear, in my mind anyway, what exactly it is that conservatives have done in response to recessions (I think I explained to the extent other people would be interested and/or understand what is that I think anybody should do and what it was that libertarian/conservative intellectuals recommended be done)

Basically what I would explain is that the common perspective of the Great Depression as realized by the average person now is that it started because Hoover didn't do anything. Rome burned while Nero fiddled is the explanation. In comparison to the vigorous tinkering of FDR, this might be true. But in any reasonable historical and economic analysis of the facts, Hoover was in fact VERY busy, and thought he was being very busy to solve a difficult problem for which he was in fact inadequately trained. The true problem, from analysis of history and the perspective of people at the time (both academics like Irving Fisher and his political opponents like FDR, for different reasons), was that he was doing the WRONG things. I think in time we might find a similar analysis applied to Bush. It was even a prevailing opinion already that he wasn't doing things at the end of his term (or rather his administration wasn't). It was in fact very busy that last year. But probably not busy in any productive or helpful way.

The problem has different roots for Hoover and Bush. Bush was ideologue or motivated by ideological hegemony. That means he doesn't listen to critical opinions outside his sphere. Hoover was a technocratic genius (Hoover Dam ring any bells). That means he didn't listen to anybody else's opinions period. I think we are fortunate as a result thus far that concerns and opinions seem to be genuinely considered, even if often they should more properly be completely dismissed, by this current administration. Avoiding such a committee of one attitude is essential to good democratic governance.

By contrast Obama has, like FDR, been very busy, even if not everything he's tried to do has passed yet, unlike FDR. And that will probably sway public and historical opinion. To my mind the problem isn't a conservative perspective to do nothing and never use government policy to resolve an issue, though that can be a core problem of its own, it's instead the perspective not to actually understand policies and be critical of them as they actually happen and develop in response to emergencies. This critique applies naturally enough to foreign policy. Slapping "freedom" or "patriot" on a law or an invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation outside our sphere of influence seems to dissuade critical opinion from forming. After all, how could you call yourself an American citizen and be against "freedom". Like the mantra for "lower taxes" however, it often escapes people what is actually meant by the term and its actual utility.

So I then move on to explain how I arrive at a sort of radical politics outside the normative understanding of right and left, liberal/conservative. Most generally, I see the purpose and existence of government, particularly democratic forms, as a guarantor of liberties. Socrates put it as licentia per lex, "liberty through law". The understood premise there is not that a majority may form opinions and impose its will through government but that government exists to protect the views of a minority. Where we must be in fear of persecution or even safety, that's a sensible role for government (for now I think we could regard it as a given that human beings in general are not well versed in ethical treatment and behavior in order to do this without government in a large scale society).

These are some core distinctions from mainstream right wing thought. For instance, this obviously means that majority rule is not a sufficient explanation for passage of social customs as law, even on a local decentralized scale. The reason being that minority views, including those of an individual, are sacrosanct in almost all cases, not just when they agree with the prevailing opinion of the masses. I describe this more colloquially as an understanding that "I am 'weird', therefore other people must also appear to be at times weird and I must tolerate their weirdness if they are to tolerate mine". This must be so simply because all of us arrive at some opinions or issues which are not in the common understanding of a vast majority, or even amongst our peers, at some level or time. We will wish others to hear our views where they differ and so convince them of the rightness of them or we may simply wish to disagree with a prevailing opinion for our particular case. There are unfortunate consequences to this, namely putting up with people whose opinions are or could be viewed as insane or asinine or even dangerous. But the net result is that it is the individual and their rights are the ultimate minority view being defended by government.

Conservatives instead replace this rigorous individualism with a view that families are the sacrosanct body politic. This view occasionally possesses some merit. But a critical analysis really suggests that what they are saying in practice is not "families" but "fathers/authority figures". I view very skeptically the idea that we should accept and accede to authority without question or consent. Including as children. The perspective of conservatives is that institutions which exist have value accumulated from years of existence and that these values have social importance in some manner. This is, as I said, occasionally true. But it is not the a priori development that simply because that's the way it is that is the way it should be in all cases. An institution has value only so long as it exists to provide that value and not so long as it exists solely because it always has. Likewise the assumption that a position of authority is to be obeyed or followed without question has some obvious demerits. I'm not sure therefore that a father, a President, or a cop has any real power over us as individuals that we don't permit them to have. Occasionally a leader is needed and indeed organisation will often be preferred to chaos so we extract some value from the existence of an established hierarchy in the sense that it trains us to accept expertise and coordination when needed and available. But this is not to say that this organisation should not be subject to any rigorous development process to determine its nature and purpose or that this organisation must be fixed in the moment of present values and move unceasingly into future with unwavering support. Authority becomes useful, but must be capable of being subjected to something like criticism, even if only a brief fleeting moment in our own minds. Where there becomes no choice, authority will, in the long run, fail.

There are some specific caveats to this. For instance, science is based principally on this sort of rigorous analysis of evidence through experimentation and debate. What is flawed is that public discourse on science is not and includes all sorts of revealed evidence that cannot be tested or debated instead. In all public debates there are not fundamentally "two sides" which have equally valid viewpoints regarding public interest and debate. Or charitably, if there are the legitimacy of a minority view is often highly specious if not an outright distortion of the actual facts (sometimes this is true of the majority views as well, another reason to be suspicious of majority rule and pre-existing institutions). We are seeing this tactic politically being used in such important matters as health care and with non-essential matters like where the President was born. Existing institutions like media often pride themselves on a sort of "teaching the controversy" perspective. But within science there is no controversy of the sort we are speaking of outside of it. Likewise among intellectually serious people who examine evidence there are no death panels and the President was born in Hawaii. Presenting all minority views as inherently equal is not quite what is meant by making such speech sacrosanct. You can certainly say or believe pretty much whatever you want, no matter how ridiculous. Whether or not other people or their institutions will take you seriously and do anything about it is entirely up to them. Particularly when there is no actual evidence to support your claims.

That's the long winded variation on why it is that I'm more or less libertarian. Small decentralised power centers allow for choice to the degree that it is possible. I still think that some basic guarantor of rights is needed, such as a Constitution, established to defend basic liberties of the people from, of all ironies, the people. And it seems, with some occasional misfortune, necessary to do this by means of employing the public to watch the watchers, as it were, through the use of democratic institutions. I say this because of a decreasing amount of hope in the ability of the public to do so, certainly to its own benefit. The increasing trend among political bodies like American society is apparently to disagree for the purposes of disagreement. The party of no! for example, rather than to disagree out of any relevant principle and be held accountable to that by independent or rational observers.