This is the start of a new blog. I know there are a lot out there, but I don’t think my point of view is well represented. I hope that Republicans will read this blog because I hope to change their minds and would like to hear why I should change mine.
Identity: A Matter of Opinion
Please do not ignore me because I call myself a liberal (next paragraph) and think that the Republican Party has lost its way and has almost no worthwhile goals. I do want responses from people who disagree with me with arguments for their positions and reasons for their disagreement. Simply saying that you disagree is just an opinion. There is no basis for a discussion or for changing my mind without reasons and facts to support your opinion so please include those with any comments.
Since if we don’t choose our own labels someone else will choose them for us, I choose to call myself a liberal because the root(s) of the word comes from Latin for both freedom and generosity and other labels don’t fit. When we lived as hunter gathers, and even in small villages in the 1800s, we helped our neighbors and did not respect the greedy. The west was not won by loners but by barn raisings and wagon trains.
Now, the most serious issues and problems we face are almost all national and the vast majority of Americans (80% in the 2020 census) live in metropolitan areas. We no longer know the business people who sell us goods or run our banks, or the people in our communities, not even most of our immediate neighbors, except, maybe, by name. If we are to help others, and ourselves, we must consider all the citizens of our communities, states, and the United States our neighbors. (The rest of the world is a different discussion, but the rich and the strong, us, do have responsibilities.)
Core Values
I also consider myself to be a Humanist. The commitments/values of humanism are:
- Responsibility
- Democracy (representative government)
- Ethical Development
- Empathy/Altruism
- Critical and Scientific Thinking
- Environmentalism
- Global Awareness
- Communal/Community
- Humility
- Peace
- Social Justice
These are my values. I will talk about some of them, in particular social justice, in later blogs: what is it and why, I wonder, don’t we all support it. While many humanists are atheists or agnostics, people of faith are and can be humanists as well. I think that all of the original humanists were people of faith.
Shared Progress
As for other labels, “Progressive” doesn’t suit me because it doesn’t identify a set of values. What is progress? It’s not just growth and our having more, fancier stuff. They share goals with social democrats and liberals, but ‘Social Democrat” raises fears in the United States of socialism, so I don’t use that. However, it is a lie of the right that they are socialists. Social Democrats are not socialists and most of the people who rant about socialism don’t know what it is or lie about what socialism is. Socialism is the government owning what are now private businesses. Originally it was industries like steel, railroads, mining, communications and electricity. Western democracies don’t do that anymore. We do have the welfare state, which I will talk about in a later blog. It is not socialism except in the United Kingdom where the National Health Service is a government agency and all of its employees work for the government.
I share some values but few policy positions with Conservatives. I generally agree with Friedrich Hayek’s position in his essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” (He was a conservative economist and author of The Road to Serfdom.) He thought that conservatives were too against the changes and improvements that successful societies need and make.
Honor (“not disposed to cheat or defraud; not deceptive or fraudulent; deserving of esteem and respect”) and acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions were key conservative values. American conservatism was never the same as the British. There has been no sese of noblesse oblige, a responsibility of care to others, the community and the nation as part of American conservatism.
One More Thing…
I must add that I think that there are no real conservatives left in the Republican Party and certainly none in the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives. They neither live nor promote those two conservative values. (The members of the Freedom Caucus are not even Republicans. They are a third party in a weak alliance with the Republicans. Weak as evidenced by their forcing 15 ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker, then throwing him out, and Republicans not being able to present a legislative agenda.) The only Conservative goal left in the Republican Party is smaller government almost solely so that they do not have to pay taxes for anything except the military, law enforcement and the military. Look at the cuts they wanted to make in their battle to not raise the national debt ceiling.
The blog will be about current events, politics, public policy, and, sometimes, ethics or the lack of it in our elected officials and voters, especially honesty and a willingness to make decisions based on facts not ideology. Traditionally politicians have avoided answering questions directly, but they usually have not lied. That is no longer the case. Too many repeat claims that they know, or should, know, are lies. Our republic cannot survive if our representatives, senators, and executives lie about basic, clearly understood facts.
With this as a base for how I frame and develop my opinions, here we go.
Notes:
1 The United States is the only developed nation without universal healthcare and the only developed/rich nation without it. Only 9 other nations in the world don’t have universal healthcare: Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Syria, and Yemen. And yet we are one of the richest nations as measured by GDP or household income. Do we really think that we are like those nations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult#cite_note-CS2023-1-1
