But the left, as a whole, has very few issues that they are all on the same page with. I am more liberal than most Americans and I am still pretty much a moderate fiscally.

Part of the reason I support single payer is that I want more money in my pocket and the money that I do spend on healthcare spread around only among those that really need it. I don't think an insurance CEO qualifies as worthy of charity. They want money for nothing? They can find thousands of people selling that fantasy on twitter.

I haven't read Hume or Mills in years - nay, DECADES - and have never read Kant. I'm not sure how much help I'd be, but I'd certainly be willing to read it.

Imagine if there were political blogs as good as the econoblogs...

Then again, where's our Simon Johnson?

I need to answer that "But you're killing people" with Rawls. The "if we were starting from scratch" thing on single payer is a denial of his theory of justice, completely. Yes, gq?

A central issue in political philosophy is addressing the plurality of views in societies.

I'm a little more into the politicking end of all this, and coming up with a short list of sine non qua objectives for the Democratic Party. I do think we can learn a lot by reviewing the history of post 1964 Movement Conservatism. Along those lines, the conservative think tanks did develop a rather comprehensive, if not logically consistent, philosophical system to knit together the Reagan coalition.

But let's be careful, New Deal liberalism is not an ideology. As FDR told the 1932 graduating class of Oglethorpe University:

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.

...Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you...

You may not find this exactly on point but, here is a comment I left at Hullabaloo recently. Seems to me the Democratic activists do a lot of analyzing but never really get around to developing talking points which are designed to last past a given election cycle nor do they have a "to do list" with anything on it that ends up taking precedence over electing Democratic office seekers.

From the article excerpted above:

After becoming President, Kennedy addressed Congress on the need for his Medical Care for the Aged legislation, as part of a State of the Union address. He told the assembled members of Congress: "We need to strengthen our nation by safeguarding its health. Our working men and women, instead of being forced to ask for help from public charity, once they are old and ill, should start contributing now to their own retirement health program through the Social Security system." (8) In a subsequent speech he said, "We're not asking for anybody to hand this out, we are asking for a chance for the people who will receive the benefit to earn their way-the same principle established under the Social Security system in the 30s."

The fight for Social Security went from the days of Thomas Paine to the days of FDR.

A French mathematician has once said that no matter how complicated a subject is, you should be able to explain it clearly to the first layman you encounter. American liberalism may be a multilayered problem, but one does not need Kant or Hume or JS Mill in order to explain and even discuss it.

Many of us, me included, were trained in precise sciences and have never encountered either of these names. We still can vividly see the dissolution of the liberal track in American politics. There is no doubt that connecticut man1 points correctly to affluence as the rot factor in dissolving liberalism. Better students of American political history will go back to when the rot started.

Anglachel has coined the term "Whole Food Nation," as a potential description of the body of the rotting fish. Liberals started to shop; liberals went to the expensive Whole Food chain because it became much more dominant in their lives than liberalism. At the same time, she also strongly admonished liberals for joining the Obama camp instead o the more liberal and more profound Hillary one. When the Nation en mass went to Obama, Carey McWilliams was abandoned and betrayed.

Obama's election may be a historical event for its racial aspect, but otherwise it is the collapse of the left, the proper term probably, into the center and the center is where you go to protect the status quo.

even though I go into the deep weeds of wonkery in science, which I kinda sorta understand from working as a low level scientist for nearly 40 years and also, lately, into econoblogs. Because I had so many science prerequisites I never read Hume, Mills, Kant, or Rawls. I'm not proud of that but am simply stating a fact. And that deficiency may be glaringly obvious from what I write.

I am angry at the weak vessel known as the Democratic Party that is the only game in town (federal level) for carrying liberal water. The vessel is not only leaking, it is poisoning the contents. The awfulness of the neoconservative right is awesome in its simplicity: cut taxes, shrink government, let the markets work and life will be good. Although even the dimmest bulbs in the room are beginning to suspect that this simple formula isn't working as advertised, the damage done by the right wing message makes it an uphill battle at best to turn the ship of state into a more healthy (no pun intended) direction.

As a working analogy, I see the Democratic party as the medium and its unfortunate message is: we won't fight very hard for any of our beliefs (whatever they are....um....even though they are really really good). Somehow I can't see how better analysis and reasoning can fix this basic flaw...even if said reasoning plumbs the depths of human behavior to suss out how to get people to vote in their own best interest or how voting for the good of all will actually advantage the individual.

But I am willing to be educated and that's why I read what the smart folk here have to say. I won't be contributing to these analyses, but I'll certainly read them.

but I have to add that as a student of history I'm generally cautious about systems-politics isn't chemistry and there is no getting around the human element. We'd be in a very different world and having very different debates if (to pick but one example) the butterfly ballot in Florida in 2000 had been designed differently. As Lawrence Freedman puts it in his excellent book A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East:

"...the interplay of chance, personality and circumstance...have been the ruination of many a good theory. Behind every individual decision there is a churning background of economic and technological change, geographical continuities, cultural predispositions, instituional biases, and practical considerations, all of which deserve careful study, but to the fore there are human beings, fallible and infuriatingly unpredictable, capable of being passive in the face of golden opportunities and bold on the basis of unsubstantiated hunches."

this was probably my main objection to the humanities when i was in school. didn't matter what field -- art, philosophy, religion, history, literature -- all dead white men.

well, that and the fact that blowing up the chemistry lab was a lot more fun than just about anything else.

while its all well and good to try and relate Mill and Hume to our present circumstance, I think its far more instructive to understand how the Democratic Party became the "liberal" party. IMHO, it may have nothing to do with political philosophy per se, and everything to do with the "service" aspect of machine politics.

"liberalism" was the intellectual justification for the role played by political machines in the creation of a "social safety net"-- graft can't exist in a background; and kickbacks require that contracts be created.

as a concept -- it's just not very often adhered to these days, and so has become more cluttered conceptually than it need be, IMHO. Much in the same way that modern 'conservatives' have ceased to be 'conservative,' by definition - and are now, in fact, fascist, our neo-liberal modern democratic party is/has become, often as not - not liberal in fact, but conservative (often radically so) in nature. And, thus, are we confused and experience a disconnect generally when we try to talk about modern liberalism as it has come to be (re)defined today.

Liberalism as a concept - (as opposed to the divine right of kings & inherited social classes, rule of established religions and monopolies, etc.) -- or the respect for individual freedom/s and equality, open-mindedness, government by consent, rationalism, freedom of speech, etc., (i.e. much of what this country was founded upon) is not such a great and unknowable mystery.

It's all of these fence-straddling namby-pamby, conserva-dem postures and their attendant whichever way the wind blows 'pragmatist' claptrap that are what's confusing and vague (seemingly by definition) about today's so called 'liberal' ideology, and not liberalism itself that's disappeared into the realms of meaninglessness, per se. It's time, simply put, to get back to basics again.

The problem with all of these so called neo-liberal 'centrist' ideologies is that, as an ideology they don't have much if any inherent meaning at all connected to them in the first place. They are loosely defined (if at all) by sheer necessity. Opportunism, though, it seems to me anyway, isn't much of a guiding principle and opening your belief system up to the highest bidder has it's problems in terms of philosophical consistency, to be sure. . but this is to be expected, of course as our pay to play political system has come full circle to encompass the whole of both political parties as we know them. This, naturally, must change, and the sooner the better.

How? I think we need (less talk, more action) less pontification and masturbatory attempts to redefine ourselves philosophically, craft the perfect message, deliver the big speeches, etc., (always trying to re-shape and 'reinvent the wheel' so to speak) -- and, simply put, more staunchly 'liberal' stances/actions being taken generally speaking -- if we are intent on recapturing "liberalism" as a concept back from obscurity and from the conservatives who have infiltrated and undermined our party from within one Joe Lieberman, Max Baucus & Phil Spectre at a time.

So specifically speaking, then -- where to begin? OK. Here are a basic set of reforms that I think we as a nation could try to start with / that would do our country a world of good were they to be implemented - RE: elections & campaign finance/media reform..

Here's an outline for the necessary reform measures:

1) Disband all PAC's or 521's (and so forth) and shut down all lobbying firms. Eliminate the K Street project entirely. K street is counterproductive to a healthy functioning democracy.
2) No more political advertisements allowed on TV, Radio, etc. - issues can be sorted out exclusively through debates (which are freely hosted on the public airwaves by truly impartial moderators, with no excluded or marginalized candidates or parties).
3) Abolish the 2 party system completely - or political parties outright.
4) Get rid of the electoral college.
5) Stop taking pre-election polls which contribute to the 'election as horse-race' mentality that has come to permeate our culture today and corrupt our election process.
6) Get rid of computerized voting schemes and standardize the voting process itself nationwide to eliminate confusion or inconsistency (problems possible hanging chads, etc.).
7) Eliminate campaign fundraising/contributions entirely.
8) Bring back the fairness doctrine and institute heavy fines (or perhaps even prison sentences) for persons or media figures who circulate dishonest or slanderous political propaganda.
9) Crack down on the concentration of ownership/monopolies in the media.

(h/t J.G.)

Not that there's anything wrong with putting together what they used to, in the old days, call a "manifesto"; far from it, since most reform (and liberal) movements arose due to the corruption of every establishment avenue of power.

Kind of like what we have now.

I guess I'm more of the "light as disinfectant" crowd*, and the blogosphere examples Lambert pointed out above** are instructive: they all were about exposing the rot, parasites and injustice. The one thing that the vast majority of people across the political spectrum (I'm excluding broken humans like John Yoo and Dick Cheney and their enablers) have in common is that when confronted with rank injustice (children dying due to withheld medical care, etc.) is that they agree something should be done about it (exactly what is where things break down). The same with being robbed by oligarchs, even right-wingers and tea-baggers don't want that, but they don't know it is happening to them (in both the financial world AND the health insurance scam) or why. Exposing both what and why and exposing the cockroaches to sunlight is a good first step.

Likewise, most people (regardless of their religious convictions) don't want to die, don't want to pollute the planet, and don't want to leave the world a worse place for their children. That is why there is even a growing ecological movement even within the evangelical community. When was the last time that movement, or making common cause with it against global warming and environmental destruction was mentioned? When was the last time you read about ending the war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Ending the killing? More common cause to be made, soldiers and their families are tired of this.

Most of all though, I want to mention how grateful I am for the excellent posters and commenters at this site, and the excellent analysis and thinkers (Anglachel, Silber, the econoblogs, etc.) I've been exposed to since making this my primary home last year. This post and subsequent discussion is a great example.

To conclude, I think changing the larger zietgiest is as important as anything else that can be done. Hence the desperation on the part of the Obama crowd to own all avenues of communication. I actually believe that co-opting the A-list was (and is) a vital strategy for them to maintain control of the left-leaning world by controlling its narrative. Reclaiming the narrative is as important as reclaiming liberalism. Imagine if commenters on all the A-list blogs moved them to the left and liberalism, rather than to Obama, hero worship, and hopey-changey ponies?

* I'm also more of the "run in and kick them in the balls" crowd, but that's somewhat beside the point.

** and the current econoblogs' excellence, and the torture exposes, and other

Their focus on the pragmatic aspects, on "messaging", on mimicking the consevative movement has done what exactly? My central idea is that pragmatism led to a substitution of electoral politics over principles.

Yes we had a beast in Bush that needed to be countered. But once he was gone, the focus on pragmatism meant there was all we had to focus. "Progressives" did *everything* people are talking about that are so much more important than enumerating principles. They even attained power. And what happened?

I'd argue for a new term and not "liberal." Not on pragmatic grounds at all, but -- correct me, if I'm wrong here, historians -- the term as we use it comes from Locke and Hume and Smith when what we understand as our capitalist system was getting started in the 18th C. Well, with peak oil, and climate change, it's not clear to me that an 18th C construct is going to prove out well. (Nor is it clear to me that a 19C concept, Marxism, would prove out well. The track record of its implementors in the 20th C is pretty bad, if millions of lives lost is the metric.)

"Left" is wrong too -- we are on a plane, not a line. Progressive, even if the term hadn't been utterly polluted by Moderate "progressives," is also linear, except on a timeline. Progress toward what? Well, status for the "creative [cough class," of course, but that's another matter.

We need discourse that's under our control, not under the control of the bi-polar disordered system that's trying to prevent us from coming into being.

Now, I don't know what the term should be, but when things are new, that is to be expected. One might, perhaps, call it temporarily Politics Without a Name. Other things may be named, of course. But this proposal short circuits the whole meta thing.

Do people think that political philosophers assume everyone is the same and we'll all get along all the time? No, one of the central issues is deciding what to do in cases of conflict. If their are two candidats, call them HRC and BO, how do we reconcile those two candidacies? What are appropriate ways to campaign against each other? Etc?

I guess I learned a different lesson from 2006 to now than most people here. I see electoral politics (getting rid of XYz) as the driving force of liberal discussion having disasterous outcomes. If liberalism is so well understood then we should get coherent answers from supposed liberals, right? Try asking.

Conservatives believe that some people deserve more than others. Liberals believe in equality (liberty and fraternity, too, for that matter).

Liberals lost when they adopted the conservative view, "equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome." So the parents blew their opportunities and ended up poor. Won't try to fix that outcome. We'll just develop a complex of laws so that their kids will have the same opportunity as the rich kids. How has that worked out?

Remember that every group has a reason why we deserve more than others. We work harder. We took the initiative to prepare ourselves and they didn't. Our parents worked hard and deserve to have us have it easier. We do what's right, and they're immoral. And so they're undeserving. This is deeply psychic. Unless there is immediate personal need, conservatives will refuse improvement to avoid having to give it to the undeserving.

Anyway, it's the deeply felt hierarchy that separates conservatives and liberals.

>Do people think that political philosophers assume everyone is the same and we'll all get along all the time? No, one of the central issues is deciding what to do in cases of conflict.

But conflict and human fallibility are two very different things. The fact is that people-even, or perhaps especially, very powerful people- behave in the same ways we all do; they can and do act on half-understood impulses, out of personal grudges, jealousies, and desires, and against their own interests or ideals. And they can simply be ignorant and stupid.

The problem I have with a lot of the posts from the Left is the assumption that the policies that come from DC are simply the result of Congress and the White House responding to the plans of their corporate masters. That is undoubtedly true to a degree, and may even be entirely true in the results, but it implies a level of coherence, self-knowledge, and intent that my 40 years of studying history simply won't allow. These people aren't evil genuises; the Beltway isn't run by Spectre with an evil masterplan. The Shock Doctrine is an invention of the Left not the Right, reading into recent events a pattern that never existed in the stunted minds and hearts ruling over us-they simply aren't that bright.

To take a relevant historical example (and at the risk of violating Godwin's Law) for years Nazi Germany was viewed as a well-organized state following Hitler's master plan. We now know that Nazi Germany was an excercise in chaos, division, and rivalry, in which only the general desire to "work towards the Fuhrer" was constant.

As that example shows you don't need a well-ordered plan to end up with the most terrible results. But that reality should affect how we go about fighting back. In many ways it would be a lot easier if there were simply a cabal of corporate string-pullers we could target rather than tens of millions of people with a lack of knowledge and fear of change and if the political bad guys in DC (including Obama) were cartoon bad guys instead of a collection of narrow-minded mediocrities.

When we talk about them as if they planned out the last decade step by step, the main result (imo) is that we discourage many people from fighting back: if the Beltway is run by Blofeld, most people know that they aren't Bond, and faced with that sort of enemy they understandably decide to abandon the fight to others. Instead we need to recognize-and most importantly make clear to others-that we aren't fighting super-villians but ordinary (and less-than-ordinary) human beings.

Of course YMMV, but then I can only express my pov.

>It's like Versailles is a lot more like an ant colony than a pirate ship, if you see what I mean.

Yes, I think that's closer to the truth.

and maybe he's onto something.