Tim Sommers argues that-
Liberalism is the view that the most fundamental principle of justice is that everyone has certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms.
However, there can be a Liberalism which is wholly unconcerned with Justice and which requires no coercive mechanism whatsoever for contract enforcement or adjudication. One may say 'Liberalism as the political philosophy of a particular polity under the rule of law, must have a fundamental principle of justice'. But this principle may be unconnected to 'Hohfeldian incidents' and be solely concerned with 'due process'. In other words, there can be a Liberalism in a polity without contracts or enforcement mechanisms or 'bonds of law'. Equally, no political Liberalism claims universal jurisdiction or grants 'basic rights' to aliens or invaders.
These freedoms are not arbitrary.
They are not 'natural'. They feature 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- e.g. the fact that I am the only son of my parents, you are not- which are arbitrary and which promote 'bourgeois strategies' and hence more robust or eusocial correlated equilibria.
These rights are the liberties required for people to pursue their own good in their own way (as John Stuart Mill put it)
But rights and liberties aren't required for people who are already doing so at this moment. Only if some force is stopping them would they be in a market for a remedy to their predicament. But this remedy may be provided bilaterally. It is not necessarily a collective action problem.
– including having some input on the political system as a whole (via democracy, for example).
Again, this is not necessary. A 'metic' may have no desire to participate in the collective life of the polis- i.e. the ecclesia. He is content to pursue his own good by trading with others in the agora.
The rule of law is one of those basic liberties – the oldest, in fact.
No. It is 'positive law' or law as command and has nothing to do with liberties.
It makes possible the rest by mandating that everyone, including the president or king, must obey the law – and that no one is above or beneath the law.
Sommers is not aware that the sovereign is above the law.
There’s also an epistemic side to liberalism.
No. It is merely a name given to a particular way of thinking or conducting business.
There are facts.
No. There are things which for some purpose may be deemed as facts. Thus a Jury might be asked to decide what the facts of the case are. They may be encouraged to grant the benefit of the doubt. 'If the glove does not fit, you must acquit'. But did the glove fit OJ's hand? Some thought so. Others did not. But the Jury's determination was final. OJ was acquitted in the criminal trial where the prosecution faced a greater burden of proof.
These facts are often knowable.
No. The Jury was not asked to be certain that the glove did not fit. That was not a knowable fact. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. To be on the safe side, the Jury decided to acquit.
There are reliable, though fallible, procedures for arriving at them.
We may think so, but then discover we are wrong. The conviction was unsafe.
These procedures and these facts are potentially available to everyone directly, via reasoning and empirical investigation, or indirectly from reliable sources.
No. It is not the case that a Jury can go back in time and witness the alleged events.
So, in addition to respecting the rights and liberties of everyone, our social institutions must be responsive to facts and expertise and avoid being overly political.
No. Institutions should be fit for purpose. If they keep responding to random shite, they will cease to be so.
The basic liberties include, specifically, the (1) freedoms of the person (from physical and psychological assault,
There is no such freedom. You are welcome to give me a dirty look which conveys the message- you are a stupid, fat, bastard.
the right to bodily integrity, and autonomy),
Though you generally have to supply the remedy for yourself if a dog tries to bite your hand off.
(2) liberties of conscience (freedom of thought, religion, expression, and association),
Many polities which described themselves as 'Liberal' curtailed them more particular under exigent circumstances.
(3) the rule of law (habeas corpus, due process, the right to own property, etc.),
these too could be suspended
(4) political liberties (of thought, speech, assembly, press, voting, holding office, etc.)
ditto.
(For another enumeration of these liberties, see the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.
Which was cool with slavery and genocide and no fucking votes for women
(But don’t forget the Ninth Amendment which says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” See also, the Reconstruction Amendments mandating equal protection, due process, and the right to vote for all.)
Which failed completely within a decade or two.
Liberalism was a response to the Wars of Religion which killed millions – as much as 30% of the population of some European countries – and raged on and off for two hundred years.
No. It was economic in origin and dated from much after those Wars. The Wars of Religion ended in Germany in 1635. But no liberalism would become visible for more than a century. Even then it was 'beamtenliberalismus'- i.e. an ideology for high ranking bureaucrats hoping to make their Prince- e.g. Fredrick the Great- richer and thus better able to wage war.
Liberalism brought peace by taking questions of religious conscience, and later how to live the best life, out of the hands of governments and leaving them to individuals and voluntary associations.
Not in England which retained an established Church. Americans, I suppose, were too busy exterminating or enslaving colored folk to have any need for such a thing.
The philosophy behind liberalism was provided by the Enlightenment with its emphasis on freedom, knowledge, and faith that people could regulate their own lives.
No. It was founded upon the notion of enlightened self-interest which, obviously, women and proles and darkies and Papists and Methodist ranters lacked. Still, if you had a large enough agricultural estate, a mansion in the fashionable part of Town, and a substantial portfolio of stocks and shares, you could pass for a Liberal provided you had spent a couple of years at University learning a bit of Latin and Greek.
“Liberalism” came to America in a big way during the Presidential election of 1932 both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both claimed to be the “true liberal” in the race. Hoover and his more laissez faire view lost to FDR’s New Deal liberalism – which included a commitment to fair equality of opportunity and concern with the material well-being of the least well off. Or, as FDR put it, there are four fundamental freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear.
FDR would often release the victims of lynch mobs from the fear that the KKK would string them up- right?
This style of liberalism was dominant in the U.S. until
the late Sixties and Seventies when nutters like Raws started raving about how, instead of collective insurance, Society should concentrate on creating a high level of material welfare for drug addicted scumbags.
the 1980s when reactionary conservatives began an organized, well-funded, and sustained project to make liberalism mean something, anything, perceived as bad; e.g.,
higher taxes to pay for Welfare Queens
Marxism, socialism, atheism, identity politics, etc.
Reagan spoke of the 'L word'. Why? People didn't want to pay more in tax.
In the early 1990s, for example, Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House, instructed his fellow Republicans to always use certain words when referring to liberals and democrats, including “bizarre”, “pathetic”, “radical”, “sick”, and “traitors”. It’s hard to believe that protecting basic liberties is the political philosophy that Gingrich, “conservative” Republicans, Tea Partiers, Trump, and the MAGA movement despise enough to have done violence, and promise to do more violence, to destroy.
It is even harder to believe that Newt Gingrich didn't personally sodomize every Eskimo on the Planet Neptune in his bid to overthrow the Constitution of the Untied States of Amrikaka while pretending to be Sommers dashing off yet another silly screed for 3 Quarks.
How, specifically, is Trump against liberalism? Here’s the tip of that iceberg.
He joined Gingrich in sodomizing Eskimos on the Planet Neptune.
Trump and the MAGA movement have given control of women’s bodies to the state,
sadly, the State didn't want those bodies. This is because the State is totes gay for Neptunian Eskimos.
denying them the right to make their own medical decisions,
like whether or not to chop off their own heads
even where they have been subjected to sexual violence
by their own heads trying to ram themselves up their rectums
or their lives are at stake.
or steak knives are for sale.
They have begun taking steps to track women’s menstrual cycles and to prevent them from traveling out of state while pregnant. They have also promised to put an end to contraception and ”recreational” sex.
Because they are trying to make us all gay for Neptunian Eskimos. Wake up sheeple!
Trump and other Republicans have assaulted voting rights, throwing out the Voting Rights Act of 1965, pushing for voting suppression one state at a time, and consistently refusing to accept the outcomes of elections. They have denied the rule of law and openly plan to go further if reelected. Their motto is, as another authoritarian fascist put it, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
In that case, fuck Liberalism. It is too weak to protect us.
Trump’s MAGAs are also planning to do away with freedom of religion in favor of religious nationalism
How many more innocent Muslims do the Yanks want to kill? We have seen plenty of racialist and religious nationalism from the guys who gave us Hiroshima and Vietnam and Afghanistan and so forth. What would be nice is the Yanks stuck to fucking each other over.
To espouse an ideology or a Belief System does not mean that you have to stick with it under any and all circumstances. It is fine to be Liberal when you are dealing with nice people and to be a gnarly bastard when that's what works best for you.
and killed off so many, were mostly a dispute between Protestants and Catholics, because whether MAGA Christian Nationalism will be Protestant Christian Nationalism (“establishing an exclusivist version of Protestant Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural order”) or Catholic Integralism (the Catholic faith “should be the basis of all public law and public policy within civil society”) remains to be seen.
Very True. Trump isn't just a Nazi, he will re-introduce the Spanish Inquisition.
Trump is waging war against facts as well as rights.
He is also cornholing Sommers and making him squeal like a pig. Did you see 'Deliverance'? The hillbilly clan depicted in it was based on Vance's family.
He ushered in the age of “alternative facts” – better described as “alternatives to facts” or propaganda or simply lies – by himself lying in public 30,570 times during his presidency.
Clinton never lied. As for Biden- he doesn't have the mental competence to maintain a volitional state which is why he can't be prosecuted for anything. That's a pretty good get out of jail free card.
His Supreme Court is busy cashing out this disdain for facts with a war on expertise. In the face of a global scientific consensus on climate change, SCOTUS denied the EPA the ability to regulate greenhouse gasses.
No. It denied them the right to do so absent the approval of Congress. This was sad. Sommers is emitting greenhouse gasses from his anus. EPA should be allowed to shove a cork up it even if the fucking bleeding hearts in Congress refuse to endorse any such procedure.
In defending gerrymandering, the Chief Justice dismissed the mathematical models submitted by experts as “sociological gobbledygook” – though these models are already used by gerrymanders to effectively gerrymander.Eric McGhee and Nicholas Stephanopoulos came up with the notion of an 'Efficiency Gap' which they said was evidence of Republican gerrymandering. But correlation is not causation. Thus what they had produced was gobbledygook good in enough for their profession but which had no fucking probative value. Courts can't send a guy to jail just because he has a dick and most rapists have dicks. There has to be evidence that the guy was wearing a MAGA cap and the lady was a porn star or something of that sort.
Finally, SCOTUS knee-capped all the Federal Agencies that rely on nonpartisan expertise all at once by throwing out the Chevron Doctrine that allows agencies to appropriately apply regulations to cases.
This was very wicked. Why should Agencies not get to shove things up Sommer's rectum if they think doing so would be in the public interest or entertaining to themselves?
There are hundreds of Federal Agencies, by the way, with a total of 3 million employees.
All of whom should be allowed to shove stuff up Sommer's rectum if they feel like it.
These agencies’ fight the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
which Sommers may have hidden in his rectum
direct air traffic,
airplanes may easily crash into his rectum if it is not properly plugged.
run lighthouses,
which may be lodged up his rectum
maintain federal highways, predict weather, track hurricanes and tornadoes, and provide emergency disaster relief
all of which activities are imperiled if Sommer's anus is left unplugged.
– among many other things. The fact that Republicans have, for a long time, wanted to do away with the Department of Energy – which mainly deals with nuclear safety and nuclear weapons – suggests they lack the most basic knowledge about what these various agencies actually do.
Very true. Did you know that Trump will legalize concealed carry of nuclear weapons? The NRA are already developing a cruise missile you can carry in your purse- or, in Sommer's case, your prison purse or anus.
And the fact that a recent SCOTUS decision confused the pollutant at issue in the case with “laughing gas” five times, suggests the Court’s also lack the knowledge to take over for Federal Agencies.
SCOTUS issued a correction. Nitrogen oxide was incorrectly referred to as nitrous oxide. However, the legal issue was whether the state of Ohio was right to claim that the EPA was violating dual sovereignty or whether Congress had given it authority to issue a specific order. Perhaps Sommers wants to get rid of States' Rights. But what if Trump comes to power? The thing is a double edged sword.
That’s all familiar enough, I suppose, but it is essential to see that the basic rights are not simply a list of things that are important. They are a coherent set of liberties that follows from a particular philosophy.
States Rights may prevent you imposing your views on people in other States but equally it can prevent the opposite from happening. On the other hand, everybody would benefit if the EPA put a cork in Sommers.
The list of rights is liberalism operationalized.
Only if incentive compatible remedies are provided under a bond of law. Liberalism gets unstuck when tax payers can't or won't pay for those remedies.
So, we should note that there are also things that MAGA people want to add to this list that have no place. I am tempted to talk about masks and vaccines, but here’s a much longer running public health problem.
Viz. the fact that Sommer's arse has not been safely and sustainably corked up this protecting the environment in a manner that is respectful of Lesbian goats/
Massive amounts of empirical evidence shows that more guns lead to more suicides, murders, and accidents.
But drug overdoses kill four times as many. Why not ban drugs? Oh. You did that already. I suppose the same thing will happen if you ban guns.
Lots of people die because of gun proliferation. Nowhere else in the world do school children suffer through mass shooter drills. (After every mass shooting, the Onion’s headline is, “’No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where this Regularly happens.”)
We are told that the reason all this is unavoidable is that people have a basic right to own guns that is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
So what? If Americans wanted to scrap that right, they could have done so by now. Kamala Harris's policy is more money for awareness and enforcement of 'red flag laws' which already exist in 21 states.
This is nonsense. The Second Amendment was meant to give the States (frankly, the slave states in particular)
if that was the intention, then, like slavery itself, the thing would have been restricted to the slave states.
the right to arm a standing militia to stand against slaves and the Federal Government, if it became necessary (frankly, to defend slavery).
The Constitution obliged the Federal Government to defend slavery by putting down any and every slave rebellion.
This is not shrouded in the mists of history. Start with Hamilton in the Federalist Papers #29.
Don't bother. He was talking about something which had obtained in England and had to do with the people of a particular community having to house and feed and work for troops (who might be foreign- e.g. Hessians) sent by the Monarch.
But I don’t want to argue Constitutional interpretation here.
You can't. You are too stupid.
The deeper point is philosophical.
See above.
We do not, cannot, have a fundamental right to own any kind of physical object.
So you can't have a right to eat the pasta you just cooked for yourself in your own kitchen.
You don’t have a basic right to own a gas stove or a microwave oven.
Unless you actually own it. You have a basic right to own stuff you bought unless there is a specific law which forbids it. Currently an American can own gold bullion. But for 40 years, after 1934, this was not the case.
Nor do you have a right to own particular projectile devices.
You may do. It depends. Harpoons and spears are legal in some states but not in other
A gun is just metaphysically the wrong kind of thing to be the object of a fundamental right.
If a thing can be sold legally, buying it makes it property and thus an object of the fundamental right to property. I suppose what this nutter is trying to say is 'guns are repugnant. Nobody should own them. They must be banned.' Sadly, American voters don't seem to agree. Currently, Kamala is a bit to the left of Trump on this issue but not by very much.
Another way to put it is that owning a particular physical thing is at the wrong level of abstraction to be a basic liberty.
No. Sommers is at the wrong level of abstraction. He should understand that some contracts are unconscionable and some markets are repugnant and thus no property claim can arise under them. Thus if I sell myself to Beyonce to be her sex-slave, the police will take me away from her house because it is repugnant that one person own another person, even if that person most ardently consents to the arrangement.
You could argue that your website not being censored is essential to your free speech, which is a basic right. But the right is not to have a website, the right is to speak freely.
No. The right is to free expression. However it is defeasible. This is a justiciable, not a metaphysical, matter.
Similarly, you could argue that you have a right to self-defense (against individuals or the government) that requires a gun. But the right is to self-defense not to own anything in particular, including a gun or any certain type of gun.
No. It is a right to use things in self-defense which are your property and which it is legal for you to possess. Thus, I don't have a right to break into your house to use your gun in self-defense against you. I do have the right to use the gun I legally own in my own self-defense even if I am in your house by your express invitation.
Why does this matter?
It doesn't. Sommers is making a fool of himself, presumably because the EPA has not adequately put a cork in him.
The degree to which having a gun supports your right to self-defense is an empirical question not a rights question.
Your right to self-defense is supported by the law iff a court judges you had an immunity for killing, wounding or threatening to kill someone you had reasonable cause to believe would do you grievous harm. Your exercise of that right may be more successful if you have a gun and have bullets and are a good marksman.
For example, if there were robust evidence that reducing the availability of guns (or certain kinds of guns) promoted your self-defense better than you being allowed to own a gun does, there would be no further relevant, rights-based argument that you should get to own one anyway, regardless of the consequences.
No. If it is legal to buy or otherwise own a thing, then your possession of it is part and parcel of your right to property. The legislature may decide, with or without robust evidence, that the possession of a thing is wrong. FDR didn't allow Americans to own gold. Guns, however, they could buy by the dozen.
In other words, something can be essential to some fundamental right without itself being a fundamental right.
No. It can be claimed of anything at all that it is essential to something else. But if it isn't that thing it isn't essential to it. Consider a property claim. The claim may be upheld by the courts. However, enforcement is impossible. Here the remedy to the right's violation is unavailable. Tough titty. Cry me a river. Them's the breaks, kiddo. In other words, the fact that something essential to make a right meaningful is lacking, does not mean that the right does not exist.
It could turn out that guns are essential in that way. But the empirical evidence for such a claim is not promising.
So what? This is a case of caveat emptor. The buyer decides what is best for herself. She may be wrong. Tough titty. Cry me a fucking river.
According to Benjamin Constant, while political rights were central to the “Liberty of the Ancients,”
they weren't. What mattered was fucking over any coalition of cities, or invading tribes, which tried to enslave you and grab all your cool, shiny, stuff.
since only a small number of people make politics central to their lives now,
in America there were plenty of small towns whose solitary Church could fit in all the citizens.
the “Liberty of the Moderns” (our nonpolitical liberties) are more important.
The Law Merchant is more important because of Oceanic trade.
Yet, the courts have consistently privileged, for example, political speech over nonpolitical artistic expression.
Because saying Vance fucks sofas and ottomans (both are Islamic) is 'political speech'. Sadly shoving a sofa up Sommers' bum is considered 'nonpolitical artistic expression' of a meretricious type.
To be fair, Sommers may be thinking of SCOTUS's decision in Hurley (1995). But that was protecting private speech even if it was not something 'narrow' or 'set' or, indeed, political. It was enough that there was a message and that the Council (which wanted to exclude a Gay contingent) had the right to present it in its own way.
Why? Because beyond the intrinsic value of these liberties to those engaged in politics,
including the liberty of making up your own facts or suggesting Vance fucks his sofa.
political rights play an essential instrumental role.
No. Political rights can be suspended, abrogated or denied remedies. They are not essential. What is essential is that the State survives insurrection, invasion, or financial collapse.
Democracy is the last line of defense of the rest of our liberties.
Nope. That's the Army and the guys who are supposed to guarding the borders. A Democracy may provide or take away Liberties. An 'enlightened despot' or a commercial enterprise may provide plenty of Liberty. If you don't like how the place is run, you can move. The fact is, 'Exit' is what causes competing jurisdictions to converge in some matters though, as 'Tiebout models', they may maintain different fiscal mixes to appeal to different sorts of potential residents.
In other words, vote to keep liberalism. Please.
Vote for high spending Kamala who is nice and sweet or vote for Trump who might actually do something useful. The good news is Sanders type lunacy seems to be dying out. Either way, the remainder of this decade is likely to be even more horrible than what went before.
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