u/lemon_lime_light

From "Classical Liberalism Without Strong Gods" in Quillette:

>Human beings are tribal creatures. We evolved in small communities. Our deepest intuitions are shaped by loyalty, sanctity, and shared identity. When liberal societies focus exclusively on autonomy and individual rights, they risk ignoring these foundations...

>Liberalism must deliver the conditions for flourishing: security, opportunity, and a path upward for those willing to take it. This does not necessarily mean more government, but it does mean that we need government that works and systems that reward effort, protect dignity, and enable self-reliance.

>Liberal societies cannot restore family life by decree, nor should they try. But they should stop undermining it. They can remove the welfare systems that penalise marriage and tax codes that undervalue caregiving. Families do not need strong gods. But they do need societies that stop punishing those who try to build something lasting.

>Most importantly, liberalism needs to reclaim its moral ambition. It has too often ceded the language of meaning to its critics. In doing so, it has come to be seen as technocratic and rootless—more focused on process than purpose, more fluent in rights than in the common good. Meanwhile, as elites have drifted leftwards toward relativism or identity-based theory, they have actively disavowed the institutions they inherited. Into this vacuum have stepped challengers—from religious nationalists to populist authoritarians—who promise strength without principle and belonging without liberty.

>Yet liberalism at its best is not morally indifferent. It is a tradition that believes dignity is discovered through freedom, character is formed in voluntary association, and solidarity is built through reciprocity, not coercion. The current turn toward strong gods reflects a fear that open societies can no longer provide meaning. That fear is misplaced. Liberal societies need not imitate sacred authority to inspire belonging. But they must stop outsourcing meaning to the very forces that threaten them. The open society will only endure if it is made into something people can believe in again—because it delivers not just rights, but prosperity; not just institutions, but ideals worth committing to. The real test is not whether liberalism should resurrect the religious or nationalist certainties of the past, but whether it can rebuild the civic and cultural foundations that allow meaning and freedom to flourish together.

A Washington Post opinion piece ("Democrats are facing their MAGA moment. Good luck containing it") shares a heartwarming anecdote about Amy Klobuchar (emphasis added):

>The DSA’s remarkable gains this primary season have triggered a fierce response from more moderate Democrats. Many want to fight to keep control of the party, pushing socialists to the sidelines, if not off the playing field altogether...

>The democratic socialist surge has been brewing within the Democratic Party for nearly a decade...Even before this year’s primaries, there were at least six socialists and fellow travelers in the Democratic House caucus....Socialists have been winning state and local contests, too...

>Most of those members obtained their posts by winning contested Democratic primaries in safely blue districts, then beating Republicans or third-party candidates in the general election. In other words, they represent a large faction, and often a majority, of Democratic primary voters in the seats they occupy. And that basic reality has made establishment Democrats leery of openly attacking them. In 2020’s presidential campaign, only Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and businessman Tom Steyer raised their hands at a New Hampshire debate when the moderator asked which candidates would be uncomfortable with a democratic socialist — in that case, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) — as the party’s nominee. It’s hard to fight an invasion when the defending forces let them land on the beaches.

Anti-socialism needs champions throughout the political spectrum. If Klobuchar maintains the same anti-"democratic socialist" convictions today as in 2020 then could her governorship help tamp down the radicalism of the left in Minnesota?

Does political polarization exist because people "live in different worlds" with different sets of facts? Dan Williams, a British philosopher, calls that "factual polarisation" but says "interpretive polarisation" is really the bigger problem and uses George Floyd as an example:

>Interpretive polarisation is not primarily disagreement over narrow, verifiable facts, nor disagreement over the values or high-level ideologies citizens bring to politics. It involves competing systems of interpretation that determine which facts citizens attend to, how they understand them, and how they connect their values and ideologies to political action...

>Among liberals and progressives...[George] Floyd’s death was imbued with maximal political salience. It was not an isolated or unrepresentative murder and tragedy but the cause for a national reckoning...

>The core narrative frame here was racism—not just Chauvin’s racism, but also the deeper, even more insidious forms of racism (structural, systemic, implicit) that had long poisoned Western cultures and institutions, which Floyd’s death was an awful symptom of...

>Most generally, the events were narrated through a story of victims and villains in which Floyd’s direct victimhood both demonstrated and reflected the broader oppression of all [black people] and other non-white groups around the Western world, who now depended on the heroic actions of progressive, anti-racist activists awake to the reality of such oppression.

>Conservatives and right-wing populists viewed the events through a very different interpretive framework.

>Most obviously, they resisted any treatment of what they deemed a rare and unrepresentative act of police misconduct as the basis for a broader condemnation of American policing, let alone Western societies as a whole.

>They emphasised the specific facts of the case, including Floyd’s criminal record and behaviour. They expressed agnosticism or outright scepticism about the relevance of racism to the events, and often made efforts to publicise similar cases in which white victims were killed by police without receiving comparable media or political attention.

>Finally, this media and political attention was itself explained in terms of a broader, familiar pattern: the left’s cynical exploitation of isolated, unrepresentative incidents to advance its hysterical ideological agenda...

>For liberals and progressives, this very narrative is itself further confirmation that the right inhabits a deranged fantasyland. Floyd’s death reflected the extreme, well-documented historical oppression of Black people, which contrasts with the delusional victim complex of deplorable, racist white citizens today.

>This is what interpretive polarisation looks like....To understand what is going on...focusing on narrow disagreements over verifiable facts won’t get us very far. That’s not to say that there are no such disagreements, or that nobody is deluded or lying about basic facts. The point is rather that we need a richer account of how such facts become selected, ignored, and narrated in the minds of those who identify with different political tribes.

Williams then provides a different framework for "how facts become selected, ignored, and narrated..." (via Walter Lippmann). It's a too long to share here in full but I think it's worth reading if you find "interpretive polarization" interesting.

Is "interpretive polarization" a useful idea? Does it have better explanatory power than "factual polarization"?

Senators Bernie Moreno and Elizabeth Warren shared a plan to "save" Social Security in the opinion section of the New York Times:

>Unless Congress acts, the fund from which most Social Security beneficiaries are paid will be significantly depleted by late 2032. After that, Social Security benefits could be cut by more than 20 percent....Instead of cutting benefits for the retirees who count on Social Security, we need to take bipartisan action to protect those benefits, reward work and restore fairness.

>That starts with a common-sense solution: lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap....Today, the maximum Social Security withholding for one worker is $22,878, or 12.4 percent of $184,500...

>According to one estimate, eliminating the payroll tax cap would inject around $3 trillion into the program over the next 10 years. Lifting the cap so that all income is treated the same would generate substantial revenue that would extend the solvency of Social Security for another generation.

A Washington Post editorial in response ("How to make Social Security worse") points out the plan doesn't actually solve the program’s insolvency ("removing the cap would only close about half of Social Security’s funding shortfall"), raises top marginal income tax rates to "among the highest...in the world", and threatens economic growth. It also questions the wisdom of spending the new revenue on old people in the same old way:

>[I]t would be foolish to raise taxes by this much and use 100 percent of the revenue to keep Social Security benefits the same for all seniors....One-third of benefits go to people with incomes over $100,000. A program that’s supposed to be about keeping seniors out of poverty does not need to be structured this way. It’s not worth devoting over 5 percent of the United States’ enormous GDP to help keep its wealthiest seniors off the streets, but that’s what the federal government spends on Social Security right now.

Do you think Moreno and Warren's plan for "lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap" is a good idea? Or will it make the program worse?

From Liberalism.org:

>[T]he structural setup of public-sector unionism is different [from private-sector unionism] in two specific and consequential ways...

>The first difference is on the union side. A private-sector union bargains with a counterparty, the corporation’s management, whose election it does not finance and whose tenure it cannot directly affect. A public-sector union bargains with a counterparty—a state legislator, a city councilmember, a school board member—whose campaign it has often funded...A counterparty in that position has weaker reasons than a normal employer to drive a hard bargain, and stronger reasons to please the people sitting opposite.

>The second difference is on the government side. A private employer who agrees to a generous contract feels the consequences in firm revenue, share price, and maybe in personal compensation. The negotiator either has equity at stake or reports to people who do. A public-sector negotiator faces none of these incentives. The money committed to wages, benefits, and pensions is not the negotiator’s money; it is the taxpayer’s...The state’s incentive structure tilts systematically toward giving in...

>The point is structural. Public-sector unions exhibit, with unusual clarity...the core liberal concern: a concentrated organized interest that has captured the public institutions meant to constrain it, in a way that imposes costs on a diffuse counterparty without meaningful political resistance.