Great Political Thinkers

Libertarian Strategy and Principle:

It didn’t take long for the shift to transpire. The conservatives, after eight years defending the obscenely criminal and authoritarian Bush regime to the most degenerate depths, have rediscovered their role as rigorous defenders of Constitutional federalism, boasting that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, questioning the very legal and moral legitimacy of governmental and even executive power, daring to hope aloud that the regime fails. The left-liberals, meanwhile, have resumed their role as the most enthusiastic admirers of American leviathan, calling for its expansion in a hundred different directions, questioning the patriotism of those who oppose their commander in chief and even, at times, calling dissent treason. The transition concerning who plays opposition is typically awkward but usually has the pretense of being gradual and organic. This time, it came rather quickly right after Obama’s inauguration and, in the last two years, has taken on a surreal character.

Now it is the beginning of the 2012 election season and the same maddening hypocrisy will surely escalate. We will hear absurdities that would cause a saint to lose his composure in frustration. Much of the dissonance arises because both Bush and Obama have been unspeakably energetic and abusive with government power, and because more than 95% of their policies are identical. And so when those who a few years back lobbied for loyalty oaths today question the legitimacy of the president, cheering on some of the most histrionic and irreverent displays of political protest since Vietnam – and when those who once called the president a war criminal today declare that those who deride the president are anti-American and should be censored – all of this is much more frustrating since the domestic and foreign policies are fundamentally the same.

One could say the conservatives are more jarring in their metamorphosis given how completely brown-shirted they could be at the height of the Bush years, and just how Jeffersonian they pretend to be today, some of them even comfortable with the ideas of challenging the Federal Reserve. You turn the radio’s dial to the right and it’s all about the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the Tenth Amendment. The blather is intolerable.

Against Tory Cuts: Tony Judt – one of the great political thinkers ...

… The British were susceptible to the suggestion that their difficulties arose from the omnipresence of an inefficient and vaguely threatening central power, though they had no desire to squander the achievements of state-administered social legislation in the fields of health, welfare, and education, as the Tories' final, ignominious defeat revealed. experience and examples were interchangeable. There are doubtless many European Socialists and liberals who would like to emulate Tony Blair. But the price of that would be to pass through the experience of Margaret Thatcher (without whom Tony Blair would still be an obscure Labour politician with no original ideas of his own), and no European politician of any hue imagines for a moment that his own country could survive that the state will continue to play the major role in public life for three general reasons. The first is cultural. People expect the state—the government, the administration, the executive offices—to take the initiative or at least pick tip the pieces. When the French demand that their government provide shorter-working hours, higher wages, employment security, early pensions, and more jobs, they may be unrealistic but they are not irrational… We are accustomed to understanding this point when it is directed to the need for voluntary organizations, community structures, small-scale exercises of autonomy in public life, and local civic ventures or issues of common concern, such as safety, environment, education, culture. And we understand, or think we understand, the importance of intermediate institutions when we study totalitarian regimes and notice the importance their rulers attached to the destruction of anything that came between the isolated, anomic subject and monopolistic state. What we have failed to grasp is that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, the state itself is now an intermediary institution too. When the economy, and the forces and patterns of behavior that accompany it are truly international, the only institution that can effectively interpose itself between those forces and the unprotected individual is the state.

Great political thinkers, Plato to the present

Great political thinkers

Great political thinkers, Plato to the present

Great political thinkers, Plato to the present

Great political thinkers