What values do the political left/right share?

We are the liberal, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

 

This reminds me of the famous Sting song about the cold war: "I hope the Russians love their children too". That's definitely something we all have in common, we love our children, and we want the best for their future, we just disagree on how that "best" future looks like. Those disagreements are amplified in the media and social media and turned into mutual hate.

On a basic level, we can probably all agree on the behaviors that make a society civilized, i.e. respect, compassion, respect for property of others, polite, courteous, shouldn't lie... I bet that I and ANY poster on this board from the other side of the aisle, if we would meet at an airport bar and know nothing about each other, could have a polite conversation over a beer, finding lots of things we would have in common. However, media trains us to ONLY look at the disagreements and uses those to stoke divisions. All of that just to make profit. We only have ourselves to blame that we fall for this spiel.

 

Ya, subjectivity is at the heart of it. Everyone wants prosperity and freedom, yet you can find plenty of contradictions from one person to the next in what those words actually mean to them. I dont really know how to relate to people who think they have a right to prosper without laboring a valuable skill, or be free without being prepared to defend themselves from violent tyranny. We cant both accept the same laws with such conflicting ideals. The only peaceful solution is two different sets of governing laws, and that requires two seperate governments, two seperate societies. At least two...

 

Oh lord, how soon they forget.

 

We also disagree about how to best to get to a future and what that future looks like. The current administration is wholly owned by the WEF and its godawful dystopian views of what the future should look like.

 

This thread is about what both sides agree on. However, it speaks for your attitude that you can't see beyond the "the other side wants to destroy the nation" claptrap.

 

With all due respect, if you aren't willing to read the writing on the wall I can't help you. The facts are the facts most of Europe is seeing the same thing we are here and the results are pretty much the same societal fragmentation inflating food prices.

 

Are you arguing for authoritarianism or totalitarianism? Each side having their own ideologically homogeneous country? Because from an authoritarian or totalitarian standpoint both can feel like freedom to those that are ideologically and/or theologically aligned with the government. Splitting the two sides apart is anti-democratic, which is also our nature. Democracy goes against our authoritarian nature. Yet authoritarianism comes with its own pitfalls that over enough time will devolve into chaos and corruption. I argue that the division that destroys democracy is the same division that destroys authoritarianism. Human nature is tribal… for me and mine at the expense of you and yours. This makes a harmonious society all but impossible.

I think democracy is the best bad way we have to organize society. I am not ready to give up on it and think what blocks us from a healthy functioning democracy is human bias, prejudice and delusions which exists in abundance on both sides of the political coin. Separation is not the answer. We need to quit being lazy and blaming “them” while accepting no responsibility ourselves for the failure of our political system. Sadly this will not happen as it is not our nature to do so. Our nature is to blame anyone other than ourselves.

 

I can't think of a shared value the Left and the Right have, either.

I found one of your observations rather interesting, and perhaps this might shed some light on the root of the "problem". You said:

It seems to me that in America the left and right want to expand their freedoms while doing all they can to limit the freedoms of the opposition.

I'm nitpicking here, but I think this would be more accurate:

In America the left and right want to expand their power while doing all they can to limit the power of the opposition.

I think this has more to do with power than freedom, and the only consistent exception I see in this zero sum game is in the libertarian camp, which wants individuals to possess as much power and freedom as possible.

 

And ...???? Forget what?

If you won't answer except with more snarkiness, don't bother. Nice display of your credibility, or lack thereof.

 

The mandated covid shots that never kept anyone from catching covid.

 

IMO, all human beings value the "pursuit of happiness", and could probably agree on many of the same ways to achieve happiness that would at the same time remove some of the urgent societal needs that dominate the political debate.

"In other words, he had abandoned his own 'despotism of liberty', his dictatorship for the sake of the foundation of freedom, to the 'rights of the Sans-Culottes', which were 'dress, food and the reproduction of their species'. It was necessity, the urgent needs of the people, that unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom.

Robespierre, finally, knew well enough what had happened though he formulated it (in his last speech) in the form of prophecy: 'We shall perish because, in the history of mankind, ***we missed the moment to found freedom***. Not the conspiracy of kings and tyrants but the much more powerful conspiracy of necessity and poverty distracted them long enough to miss the 'historical moment'.

Meanwhile, the revolution had changed its direction; it aimed no longer at freedom, the goal of the revolution had become the happiness of the people. The transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of Sans-Culottes was the turning point not only of the French Revolution but of all revolutions that were to follow."
ON REVOLUTION,The Social Question, Hannnah Arendt, Penguin Classics, NY, NY, 2006. p. 61. (emphasis mine)

The French revolutionary government did not have enough capital to effectively empower many people to pursue happiness.
Governments in the USA have flushed enough capital down the crapper to float a vast armada of happy little boaters.


“Infinite Horizon
The fiscal imbalance increases to $244.8 trillion (with Measure = “Present values in trillions of constant 2021 dollars”) or 10.2 percent of all future GDP (with Measure = As a percent of the present value of GDP). Making the federal government’s fiscal policy permanently sustainable could now be achieved by increasing all future receipts by 52.7 (10.2 / 19.3) percent, a 35.6 (10.2 / 28.6) percent reduction in expenditures, or some combination of both.” (Emphasis mine)

The U.S. Fiscal Imbalance: June 2022

Penn Wharton Budget Model
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu › issues › us-fisc...
Jun 22, 2022 — We estimate that, under current law, the U.S. federal government faces a permanent present-value fiscal imbalance of $244.8 trillion, or 10.2 ...
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/6/22/us-fiscal-imbalance-june-2022

 

Do Democrats have values?

 

That question has no purpose other than to flame-bait other forum participants. That's also one of the most ignorant, mean-spirited, hate-filled thing I've ever seen here, and that's a high bar.

Shame on you. This forum is for civil debate, not for the likes of you to villainize others just to make yourself feel superior. You clearly aren't.

 

Benjamin Constant had another interesting take on why the French Revolution failed that is also somewhat relevant to our own time (as I will explain after the quote) - @robini123 might want to read this, too. The following is from Constant's 1819 address/essay The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns:

The liberty of the ancients…consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. You find among them almost none of the enjoyments we have just seen form part of the liberty of the moderns. All private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence, neither in relation to opinions, nor to labor, nor, above all, to religion…

Thus among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations. As a citizen he decided on peace and war; as a private individual he was constrained, watched and repressed in all his movements; as a member of the collective body he interrogated, dismissed, condemned, impoverished, exiled or sentenced to death his magistrates and superiors; as a subject of the collective body he could himself be deprived of his status, stripped of his privileges, banished, put to death, by the discretionary will of the whole of which he belonged…

I said at the beginning that, through their failure to perceive these differences, otherwise well-intentioned men caused infinite evils during our long and stormy revolution…But those men had derived several of their theories from the works of two philosophers who had themselves failed to recognize the changes brought by two thousand years in the dispositions of mankind. I shall perhaps at some point examine the system of the most illustrious of these philosophers, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and I shall show that, by transposing into our modern age an extent of social power, of collective sovereignty, which belonged to other centuries, this sublime genius, animated by the purest love of liberty, has nevertheless furnished deadly pretexts for more than one kind of tyranny…

Moreover, as we shall see, it is not to Rousseau that we must chiefly attribute the error against which I am going to argue; this is to be imputed much more to one of his successors, less eloquent but no less austere and a hundred times more exaggerated. The latter, the Abbé de Mably, can be regarded as the representative of the system that, according to the maxims of ancient liberty, demands that the citizens should be entirely subjected in order for the nation to be sovereign, and that the individual should be enslaved for the people to be free…

The Abbé de Mably, like Rousseau and many others, had mistaken, just as the ancients did, the authority of the social body for liberty; and to him any means seemed good if it extended his area of authority over that recalcitrant part of human existence whose independence he deplored. The regret he expresses everywhere in his works is that the law can only cover actions. He would have liked it to cover the most fleeting thoughts and impressions; to pursue man relentlessly, leaving him no refuge in which he might escape from its power. No sooner did he learn, among no matter what people, of some oppressive measure, than he thought he had made a discovery and proposed it as a model. He detested individual liberty like a personal enemy…

The men who were brought by events to the head of our revolution were, by a necessary consequence of the education they had received, steeped in ancient views that are no longer valid, which the philosophers whom I mentioned above had made fashionable…They believed that everything should give way before the collective will, and that all restrictions on individual rights would be amply compensated by participation in social power…

https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/liberty-ancients-compared-moderns


Consistent with Rousseau's collectivist social contract, the people who insisted their individual rights extended above and beyond the mere participation in social power or otherwise dared to defy the “general will”, they would be “forced to be free”. It was upon this convoluted logic, which was completely alien to the individualist revolution in America, that the scaffold of the Reign of Terror was raised.

How is this relevant to our own time?

Today, we hear a lot of empty talk about "democracy" from Democrats and many of their supporters on the Left while they attack the Constitution, the rule of law, individual rights and our democratic institutions and norms. When I see and hear all of this, I can't help but think of Constant's essay, because his observations apply to many of the self-styled "defenders of democracy" in our country who are making the same mistake Robespierre & Co. made when they suspended the Constitution of 1793 and attacked the rule of law, individual rights and the democratic institutions and norms in their country and provided the model that Leftists have followed to this day. You also see a glimpse into this Rousseauian mentality when Leftists say America is a democracy and then get upset when people correctly point out that it is more than a democracy - it is constitutional democratic republic that was instituted to secure our inherent and inalienable individual rights and governed by the rule of law, not a glorified version of mob rule.

 

Yes, but by now virtually everyone knows that authoritarian leftists intellectuals like Rousseau are just unhappy obnoxious little Utopian piggies.

“The women’s entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, care for them as adults… these are women’s duties in all ages and these are what they should be taught from childhood
Jacques Rousseau

Which is not to say that Rousseau is not "progressive" as compared to Zangi "The Sanguine".

"But by other Muslim authors he was also praised for his leadership, as he was the first to unite all the Muslims of Syria against the crusaders. He was a forerunner of Saladin and Baybars.
Did he mutilate his courtiers? He had eunuch servants who had been castrated, if that’s what you mean, but that wasn’t something unique to Zengi, so I don’t think that was seen as particularly cruel. I’m also not sure I’ve ever seen him called “the Sanguine” but I think I know what that refers to. His name was rendered in Latin as “Sanguinus”, which happens to look like the Latin word for blood (or “bloody/murderous”), so it was an easy pun:
“One night, as the prince, gorged with wine and unusually drunk, was lying in his tent, he was slain by some of his own servants. When the news of his death arrived, one of our people remarked apropos of his assassination, ‘What a happy coincidence! A guilty murderer, with the bloody name Sanguinus, has become ensanguined with his own blood.” (William of Tyre, vol 2, p. 146)
(It’s a terrible pun in Latin too: “Fit sanguine sanguinolentus, vir homicida reus nomine Sanguineus.”)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...e_atabeg_of_aleppo_during_the_second_crusade/