Tolerating dissent
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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You know that Not for Profit's and Public Health have CEO's too?
| Quote: | | Ultimately their biggest interest is in profiting from and expanding the capitalist system, along with all of the wealth inequality, destruction of labour rights and disenfranchisement of underprivileged groups that goes with it. |
I would say that is a wildly inaccurate generalisation.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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^ I mean big business CEOs, of course, as per my previous post. I'm sure they don't personally hate the poor, but most do love (and advocate for) the policies that end up $£$%^%%$ them over.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| stui magpie wrote: | You know that Not for Profit's and Public Health have CEO's too?
| Quote: | | Ultimately their biggest interest is in profiting from and expanding the capitalist system, along with all of the wealth inequality, destruction of labour rights and disenfranchisement of underprivileged groups that goes with it. |
I would say that is a wildly inaccurate generalisation. |
At 15, David, you would have have acknowledged that the capitalist system, unlovely though it is in many respects, has underpinned most of the societies that everyone wants to join. Now, only this sad, reductive, history-free caricature.
As Dylan said, “ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| The Nobel Laureate. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | ^ “The Left doesn’t control anything”. And just my saying it makes it true. It’s magic : The sky is zero. The monks are down stilled. The hour is tufted.
What a hoot. |
If you understand that liberals aren't leftists, that would be a good start. The dominant ideology in our society, neoliberalism, is of the right, and comes squarely from the tradition of Thatcher and Reagan. Leftists are, as I said, somewhat more prevalent in the entertainment industry and academia, but the people holding the purse strings in even those fields are neoliberals and conservatives. And the right nearly always wins when it comes to the real game, which is politics. We haven't had a left-wing prime minister since Whitlam, arguably (and if not him, then not since WW2, when Labor still had some socialist elements). Rudd and Gillard were not just neoliberals, but social conservatives, too, while Hawke was a centrist at best. You could argue the toss on Keating.
As for lobby groups, which of the following do you think holds real, policy-making power in this country: GetUp, or the Minerals Council of Australia?
I grant that many CEOs and even some Liberal Party ministers (including Turnbull) aren't conservative per se. But that doesn't mean they're not of the right, of course. Ultimately their biggest interest is in profiting from and expanding the capitalist system, along with all of the wealth inequality, destruction of labour rights and disenfranchisement of underprivileged groups that goes with it. |
I didn’t say that the Liberal Party was Leftist. I do say that the Liberal Party’s social policies, as expressed in their last manifesto, would be more acceptable to the Hamburg Marxist school of Marcuse et al, than they would be to an ordinary citizen of 1970. That’s what ideological hegemony looks like.
As for neo-liberalism, well, I consider that a profoundly destructive force, which has no moral values other than economics. Thatcher needed it to stop Britain going down the Venezuela path, so it can have its uses in certain historical circumstances, but as a philosophy I think it is value-free and has little to do with conservatism. Fortunately, Australia is not very neo-Liberal, despite the gesticulations : govt deficits in good economic weather, a high minimum wage, fair work acts and employment protection, high welfare payments and a high corporate tax rate by world standards. I happen to support these things, but they are hardly capitalism red in tooth and claw.
I had to smile at your possible reservation re Keating being on the Left. It is hard to think of any one individual who did so much to advance neoliberal policies in Australia.
The concerns of the modern Left are no longer primarily economic. They achieved most of what was possible long ago, and the economic uselessness and barbarity of most hard socialist societies through the second half of the 20th Century shot their fox. Exposed by history, they turned to the destruction of the other bases of social stability, solidarity and order - the family, national borders and patriotism , religion, sobriety, gender, sexuality, and respect for law. By overthrowing these, they can appropriate power amid the ruins of an atomized society. They have largely succceeded.
_________________
Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Thu Aug 09, 2018 11:14 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| David wrote: | | ^ I mean big business CEOs, of course, as per my previous post. I'm sure they don't personally hate the poor, but most do love (and advocate for) the policies that end up $£$%^%%$ them over. |
The poor are people who don't have jobs. How do CEO's of big businesses love and support policies that **** over poor people?
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | The Nobel Laureate. |
Yes, the proud owner of a Nobel Prize for doggerel.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| stui magpie wrote: | | David wrote: | | ^ I mean big business CEOs, of course, as per my previous post. I'm sure they don't personally hate the poor, but most do love (and advocate for) the policies that end up $£$%^%%$ them over. |
The poor are people who don't have jobs. How do CEO's of big businesses love and support policies that **** over poor people? |
Well, downsizing and offshoring is one of their first reflexes. I’ve seen it often enough, and had to manage it often enough. I don’t entirely disagree with .david’s attitude to CEOs. Many are wildly overpaid in good weather and bad. People who build their own businesses, sure. But not technocrats who take no capital risk at all with their own money and do not actually create much.
Now, I have worked with many CEOs. They all work hard and have little life away from work, they’re always very bright, and they have succeeded in a highly meritocratic system. Many try to do the right thing. But so are top civil servants, and CEOs, like many doctors and lawyers, are overpaid, by and large.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| I’ve never met an overpaid lawyer. Wash your mouth. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | I’ve never met an overpaid lawyer. Wash your mouth. |
 Nothing personal !
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Two more flags before I die! |
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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^agreed, Jezza, though conservatism has different meanings. I think libertarian “conservatism” shares the same bed as the establishment. It too relativizes everything. The US Republicans seem to me just as radical as the mad-eyed Left. It’s partly how they arrived at Trumpland.
Burke’s conservatism is what the new Leftist establishment fear and despise, because it checks their power. It means belief in particular, local values, shared and defended and developed by a people whose common experience has shown them what works best, and what is beautiful.
Family, faith, tradition and patriotism, liberty under the law and a well-regulated market framework : this sum of things has been so long derided and undermined that it seems quaint and reactionary. Yet it really is subversive, underlying (as it once did) the most civilized, plurally tolerant, safe and improving societies that have ever graced the planet.
Great societies and hegemonic powers die, often explosively, when the values that hold them together no longer grip. That gravity, in our civilization, is now very weak. |
Agree with most of that. I've listened to Peter Hitchens consistently advocate for Burkean Conservatism, and I agree with him on most things so I understand your rationale and world view for the most part.
I think with Trump, his ideological beliefs are akin to the paleoconservative school of thought which was the primary ideology of the Republican Party before the Neoconservatives started taking over and shaping the direction of the party under Reagan and Bush. Trump's positions during the 2016 election campaign with on trade, immigration and a non-interventionist foreign policy to name a few examples are consistent with the paleoconservative strand of thought.
Many thought Paleoconservatism was redundant in the US when it's primary advocate Pat Buchanan was defeated in the 1992 Republican Primaries to George Bush, but I suspect it's making a comeback under Trump in some capacity even if Trump is incoherent and inconsistent in many of his statements. I think with the reputation of neocons battered and bruised after the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan and the GFC, it's left an opening for paleoconservatism to be revived, which Trump took advantage of.
Overall, I agree that the positions held by Burkean Conservatism are sensible and very much align with my own values and positions, so I don't disagree with you on much especially when I read your posts on many topics.
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | I’ve never met an overpaid lawyer. Wash your mouth. |
I've never met an underpaid one (over 35)
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Jezza wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | ^agreed, Jezza, though conservatism has different meanings. I think libertarian “conservatism” shares the same bed as the establishment. It too relativizes everything. The US Republicans seem to me just as radical as the mad-eyed Left. It’s partly how they arrived at Trumpland.
Burke’s conservatism is what the new Leftist establishment fear and despise, because it checks their power. It means belief in particular, local values, shared and defended and developed by a people whose common experience has shown them what works best, and what is beautiful.
Family, faith, tradition and patriotism, liberty under the law and a well-regulated market framework : this sum of things has been so long derided and undermined that it seems quaint and reactionary. Yet it really is subversive, underlying (as it once did) the most civilized, plurally tolerant, safe and improving societies that have ever graced the planet.
Great societies and hegemonic powers die, often explosively, when the values that hold them together no longer grip. That gravity, in our civilization, is now very weak. |
Agree with most of that. I've listened to Peter Hitchens consistently advocate for Burkean Conservatism, and I agree with him on most things so I understand your rationale and world view for the most part.
I think with Trump, his ideological beliefs are akin to the paleoconservative school of thought which was the primary ideology of the Republican Party before the Neoconservatives started taking over and shaping the direction of the party under Reagan and Bush. Trump's positions during the 2016 election campaign with on trade, immigration and a non-interventionist foreign policy to name a few examples are consistent with the paleoconservative strand of thought.
Many thought Paleoconservatism was redundant in the US when it's primary advocate Pat Buchanan was defeated in the 1992 Republican Primaries to George Bush, but I suspect it's making a comeback under Trump in some capacity even if Trump is incoherent and inconsistent in many of his statements. I think with the reputation of neocons battered and bruised after the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan and the GFC, it's left an opening for paleoconservatism to be revived, which Trump took advantage of.
Overall, I agree that the positions held by Burkean Conservatism are sensible and very much align with my own values and positions, so I don't disagree with you on much especially when I read your posts on many topics. |
Thank you Jezza, i’m an enormous admirer of Peter Hitchens too. I do not agree with him on many things (notably global warming and gun control) but he seems to me a far greater figure than his celebrated brother, who was a brilliant literary critic but a slightly vain and shallow man overall. Peter Hitchens is also a better writer than his brother : less brio, but more depth and beauty. Some of his essays in “First Things” are quite beautiful and moving, notably “A Church that Was”.
Roger Scruton is the other great serious conservative voice of our age, I think.
I would need some persuading that Trump is the inheritor of Buchananism.
Pat Buchanan, to the limited extent I have read him, was an intellectual and a historian, with a strong religious belief. He was also an isolationist, where Trump seems broadly keen to project American power. I think the roots of Trump lie in an older American tradition of raw democratic mountebank politics, along the lines of Huey (“the Kingfish”) Long and William Jennings Bryan. Trump is dumber than those men because America is less serious than it used to be, but that basic belief in the power of emotion over reason seems the mainspring of his success.
What the Leftist establishment really hates about Burkean conservatism, I think, is that they fear, deep down,that ordinary people are happier within it. Like the Soviet Union, they know that a better way is an existential threat and must be exterminated, not tolerated. It’s why they consistently react with outrage and censorship toward us where we can mostly act with tolerance to them.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Last paragraph = “They just hate us cos they ain’t us”.
I think a more sophisticated critique is possible. It could even be that – as hard as it may be to believe – leftists think that people will be happier under the system they advocate for than the system pushed by the defenders of existing power structures, colonialism, cultural chauvinism and tradition for its own sake. If one starts from the presumption that political views are generally held in good faith, one will be much better at understanding them.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Jezza
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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| Mugwump wrote: | I didn’t say that the Liberal Party was Leftist. I do say that the Liberal Party’s social policies, as expressed in their last manifesto, would be more acceptable to the Hamburg Marxist school of Marcuse et al, than they would be to an ordinary citizen of 1970. That’s what ideological hegemony looks like.
The concerns of the modern Left are no longer primarily economic. They achieved most of what was possible long ago, and the economic uselessness and barbarity of most hard socialist societies through the second half of the 20th Century shot their fox. Exposed by history, they turned to the destruction of the other bases of social stability, solidarity and order - the family, national borders and patriotism , religion, sobriety, gender, sexuality, and respect for law. By overthrowing these, they can appropriate power amid the ruins of an atomized society. They have largely succceeded. |
I think you mean the Frankfurt School rather than the Hamburg school, but you're definitely on the right track. This is how 'cultural marxism' was born through the universities in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the 1960s, which coincided with the subsequent culture wars.
Marxists such as Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer realised that the working classes were too loyal to their nation, churches, family and their cultural values rather than transcending borders with their fellow counterparts to rise up against the bourgeoise, so the way to achieve this was to change the culture and change the way people thought.
When he was in prison under the Mussolini regime in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote a series of notebooks known as "The Prison Notebooks' and he explored the notion of "marching through the institutions" (NOTE: this phrase was adopted in 1971 but the ideas behind this phrase were underpinned in Gramsci's writing) through the media, film industry, academia et al and it was only then when Socialist ideas would be embraced by the wider public rather than them being resisted by the public.
Unfortunately you're right in your assessment that they've succeeded.
_________________
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