Legal Boxer Briefs :: Jewsade for Justice

Continued from Part I

8. Your Revolution isn’t coming. I think that it’s about time that the left accepts that the Revolution isn’t around the corner. Orthodox Marxists have gotten to the point in their claims of the imminent downfall of capitalism where they’re taken even less seriously than those who predict Armageddon any day now. It’s time to give up unrealistic visions of the future and realize that if you want to improve the lot of humanity, you’re going to have to work within the system and make it as humanitarian as possible.

9. If the Revolution came, it probably wouldn’t do much good. History has demonstrated, again and again, that major revolutions frequently accomplish very little. The French Revolution was very quickly replaced by Bonapartism — the modern French Republic evolved gradually over the course of the next two hundred years; the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia has been almost universally recognized as a total failure, supplanting tyranny with tyranny.

10. Stop making excuses for bad people. I seriously considered folding this one in to my Part I’s “There are certain things that are always bad” but I figured this one needed its own section. The Left (or, perhaps more accurately, the New Left) has acquired the bad habit of defining itself as not the Right. Just as, during the Cold War, America’s habit of supporting brutal-but-at-least-they’re-not-Communist dictatorships, the left has made a habit of supporting brutal-but-at-least-they’re-not-Western/Capitalist/Affiliated with America dictatorships.

Even more unfortunately, perhaps, is that the way in which the Left attempts to cope with the resulting cognitive dissonance: by becoming apologists for those same regimes. Instead of recognizing the failures of Castro to guarantee things like freedom of the press, or Hamas’ explicitly-stated goal of instituting blatantly-human-rights-violating shari’a law, the “Left” frequently responds with nonsense like “well, but they’re being oppressed by the evil white people/capitalists/Jews”. It’s time to realize that the enemy of my enemy is not your friend.

11. Assume good faith. Anyone who claims to be interested in dialogue or any worthwhile discussion about, well, anything — but, most saliently, politics — has to at the very least make an effort to assume good faith. What this means is essentially starting off with the assumption that everyone has the goal of changing the world for the better. This is not to be confused with assuming that everyone always has that goal — the idea is to start off with that idea, though, obviously, it can be disproved as time goes on.

This is my problem with people like Ann Coulter. Regardless of whether or not you view her as the voice of millions of conservative Americans, her philosophical starting-point is that liberals hate America and want to destroy it.

Many leftists are equally guilty of this sort of view. Rather than attempting to understand conservatives as merely approaching issues from a different philosophical standpoint or as simply having different values, leftists freely lob accusations of racism, sexism, classism and xenophobia, often when such accusations have little or no basis in reality. (This is not to say, of course, that all conservatives are free of such vices).

The problem with such approaches is that when you assume that the person you’re talking to shares no common ground, there is essentially no point in talking to them. By contrast, if you can make the assumption that both you and the person to whom you’re talking envision a better America, then you can frame the debate in terms of which policies would be best for that shared goal. No such productive discussion can occur when there no shared common ground is assumed.

12. The ideological world is divided by priority of rights, not by good or evil. This is most true in terms of economic ideology. Both the left and right must do away with the idea that the other side is simply “wrong” or that they’re trying to destroy everything. As a member of the economic left, I can assure you that we have no interest in enslaving mankind in some sort of state-regulatory bondage; as someone who has friends on the right, I can also be sure that the economic right would take no pride in achieving a world of poverty, suffering, and massive inequality.

There is a tradeoff between economic freedom and economic equality in the world, and it depends what it is that you value most that determines your economic beliefs. Of course, the actual economic discussion is far more complicated than this, but this is the essential breakdown.

I consider myself to be on the left because I believe that economic equality is more important than economic freedom — though, of course, I don’t advocate radical socialism. I further consider myself to be on the economic left because I see economic equality to be tied in to other freedoms which might be threatened in a world of unfettered economic freedom.

In the United States, we have witnessed the increasing disappearance of public spaces and the waxing influence of malls and the centers of our civilization. Yet here is where we run into problems: if malls are private property, then don’t they have the right to constrain free speech? Yet if the key to any free civilization is free speech, then how can we allow this to happen? If, as the Supreme Court claims, money is speech, then isn’t allowing excessive economic inequality the same as allowing certain people to be cut out of the American political process?