From: Arlo Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 04 2004 - 21:18:25 GMT
Erin,
At 12:04 PM 11/4/2004, you wrote:
> This set up of right = morals and left = no morals implication seems as
> oversimplistic as DMBs Democrats= intellectual level and Republicans =
> social level.
>Is freedom and respect for individual thought/rights/etc. really promoted
>when values is viewed through the lens of politics?
Just to clarify, if you were referring to my response to Platt, I would
never make the claim that **any** political party equals the intellectual
level. At the end of that post, I was quite clear that the democratic
platform needs to be criticized just as readily and with as much vigor when
it places the social level over the intellectual.
What I was referring to was the "ideological victories" of the right have
not been in using social-level values to restrict biological-level values,
they have been in using social-level values to restrict intellectual-level
values. Unless, of course, one conflates as Platt does the entire
intellectual level into "free financial markets". Both parties have been
guilty of this in the past, indeed, I have been quite vocal about false
dichotomy between the platforms of these parties (one=freedom, the
other=tyranny). It is this two party dichotomy that has all but removed
legitimate political discourse from the American landscape, and has
replaced it with a "my team is always right, yours is always wrong".
Like you, I have long supported third party candidates, primarily Green but
also Libertarian in many elections. I do not think we will have any viable
presidential candidate until we have a grass roots emergence of their
candidates. Sadly, in the two party dichotomy, whichever side is fractured
will always be out of power. That is, so long as any one side maintains
unity, the other side will always be out of power. This is precisely why it
was Republicans working in many states to get Nader on the ballots, i.e.,
they know Nader fractures the left and will thus keep them (the
Republicans) in power.
All in all, an aweful political landscape.
Arlo
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