A New Ideology

By EmmaZahn on Sun, 10/27/2013 - 12:37pm |

A powerful ideology is a scary thing. If your ideology isn’t strong enough, doesn’t create enough fervent belief that people will die for it, then it won’t change the world. But if it does create that level of fervent belief, then it will be misused, so the question is simply: will this do more harm than good?

[...]

When faced, then, with a monstrous ideology, our duty is to come up with a better one, an opposing one. Because ideology determines what we do. It is both the lens we see the world through, and the motor that pushes us forward.

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http://www.ianwelsh.net/a-new-ideology/

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Part 2: How to Create a Viable Ideology

by EmmaZahn on Sun, 10/27/2013 - 12:39pm

Greed, Revolution, and Governance « naked capitalism

I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces.

It can be extremely useful to throw out a bunch of ideas as a forcing device: you offer up best guesses and are explicit about that. The purpose is not to create agreement on them, but simply to advance thinking, perhaps get a closer approximation of where answers might lie, and also expose area where further investigation and thinking is needed.

But that isn’t what Welsh seemed to be doing. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.

I’m not saying I have any answers to the Big Hard Problems of the day. But I think it’s important for us to keep trying to ask the right questions. That’s a necessary, though far from sufficient, condition for us to have any hope of pulling out of our collective nosedive we are in. (More)

by EmmaZahn on Thu, 10/31/2013 - 12:40pm

Just ran across this early October Yglesias post that argues Juan Linz was correct in seeing that the U.S. Constitutional system only works well when its political parties aren't ideologically disciplined. (And basically that we are doomed because of the constant drive towards ideological discipline.)

by artappraiser on Thu, 10/31/2013 - 4:29pm

Kevin Drum has written about this as well. He sees Republicans behaving like a disciplined parliamentary party in their opposition to anything not them. A major problem with that is that we only have two parties whereas most parliamentary systems have several that can unite or separate to form varying governing coalitions.

The people who set up our system hoped to design it to prevent or at least minimize the formation of factions. So much for best laid plans...

What Yglesias and Linz et al see as a bug in our system, others see a feature. A party that wants to make significant changes to it should have to win an overwhelming majority of votes for those changes. The Tea Party won with votes primarily on social issues then tried to use the tiny bit of leverage it gave them to make economic changes. Imagine what a mess a coalition of minor parties elected on separate single issues could make.

Parties can be problems in both systems but they form naturally so there is no point in trying to eliminate them. We just need more than two. I wonder if we (the people) might be better off voting for or against planks in party platforms and simply let the the party decide who will represent them. In other words, we vote for a party. Maybe we would get more ideologues and fewer demagogues. Or not. Best laid plans and all.

by EmmaZahn on Thu, 10/31/2013 - 11:31pm

A New Ideology

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