Real "Tolerance" ....

 This article is full of MSM nonsense about Trump, but Haidt strikes a chord I agree with. It will never be the case that "all of us" will agree on the complex issues of government and human liberty. It would serve us better if we could view those with differing perspectives as "equally human" in spite their threat what we value. 

Haidt discovered that conservatives had some important insights to offer on human nature, the value of institutions, and the importance of moral capital. He felt conservatism offered an important counterbalance to the excesses of progressivism. He also came to appreciate the pedigree of conservatism, from the writings of people like Edmund Burke in the 18th century to Thomas Sowell in the 20th. (Haidt told me he considers himself to be a centrist, engaging with views from multiple sides in order to understand issues. But he’s a centrist who only ever votes for Democrats, because he thinks the Republican Party has been in a state of moral and philosophical decline for many years.)

Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/jonathan-haidt-pandemic-and-americas-polarization/612025/

Walter Williams on Individual Liberty

 He appeals to the authority of the founders too much, but his logic is always spot on. Hand salute, again, Dr. Williams, on the journey.

On the other side of the coin from limited government is individual liberty. The Founders understood private property as the bulwark of freedom for all Americans, rich and poor alike. But following a series of successful attacks on private property and free enterprise—beginning in the early 20th century and picking up steam during the New Deal, the Great Society, and then again recently—the government designed by our Founders and outlined in the Constitution has all but disappeared. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this when he said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

"Ironically, the free market system is threatened today not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has done so well in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind—disease, pestilence, gross hunger, and poverty—that other human problems seem to us unacceptable. So in the name of equalizing income, achieving sex and race balance, guaranteeing housing and medical care, protecting consumers, and conserving energy—just to name a few prominent causes of liberal government these days—individual liberty has become of secondary or tertiary concern."

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/future-prospects-for-economic-liberty/?utm_campaign=williams&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=101929147&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_7Xid2e4YvUwbiTjrmw2xXJfrmqurfhpWDcYSOULhZa6PD5GENDtXckseLMDURb4szR5W3KFI3lBpJpBJAg8BFOkBbVA&utm_source=housefile

Bearing the Weight of Liberty

It appears we've become security state lap dogs with not appetite for bearing the weight of self government. The home of notsofree and the notreallybrave. Maybe the generation suffering from the current jelly spined responses to government over-reach will grow hungry again for the benefits of individual liberty.

In The Price of Panic, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards offer a contemporaneous answer to this question while at the same time exploring alternative ways to deal with the pandemic that are not violations of mere socialnorms, let alone the inalienable rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There have been violations of the free exercise of religion and the right to peacefully assemble, both enshrined in the First Amendment. The Second Amendment’s guarantee of right to keep and bear arms, which is fundamental to allowing a free people to defend themselves against both criminals and the government has also been restricted; this is particularly important when the government does not protect its people from criminals. The sanctity of private households, the Fourth Amendment, has been disregarded. Presently in most of California, you are not supposed to have any friends or family over to your house. Many governments have disregarded the right of due process and property, which as part of the Fifth Amendment are not to be ignored. The Twenty-First Amendment’s guarantee to drink liquids of one’s choice is in many places functionally returning to the Eighteenth Amendment. While some may quibble at “intoxicating liquors” as an inalienable right, the ability to drink such liquids is certainly part of the natural law tradition.

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/viral-panic/

Tyranny For the People

Venezuela has some of the world’s largest supplies of oil, with more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. But about 15 years ago, the late president Hugo Chavez set out to impose a socialist revolution, making a particular point about his great munificence in providing free health care for everyone. In pursuit of this revolution, Chavez crushed every industry outside the oil sector and brought the state-owned oil company under his control. The result has been a long spiral into poverty and oppression. Now we can see the results: socialism literally kills babies.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/20/imagine-no-possessions-imagine-venezuela/

The experiment has been repeated, same result.  

Knockouts High and Low | National Review Online

Which brings us to that other death of November 22: Aldous Huxley. "Don't you want to be free and men?" rages a dissenting voice. "Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are?" Gee, he sounds like a talk-radio guy demanding to know where the outrage is. Written in 1931, Brave New Worldisn't as famous a dystopia as Orwell's 1984 — because it posits tyranny not as "a boot stamping on a human face" but as a soft, beguiling caress of a human face, a land in which enslavement takes the form of round-the-clock sensory gratification: drugs, sex without love, consumer trinkets, sensory distractions . . . Crazy, huh? Like that'd ever happen.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364659/knockouts-high-and-low-mark-steyn/page/0/1

Seemingly, we do not want to be free men.