Liberty or Death

 I identify with this guy. Both sides have a better grip on some pieces of virtue than the other, and both sides have some "so wrong for so long" strongly held beliefs. Both sides are at their best when grounded in individual liberty and self government with rule of law. I'm pretty sure many of our citizenry either doesn't care about or doesn't understand the idea of individual liberty and self government.

"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,” ... "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.”"

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

"Hang Tough" - WTF?

The basic message of this article is this:
"
“Hang tough” was a regular refrain of Winters' during the war. He exhorted his men to do the best they could given their circumstances (often horrific). We as a country would do well to remember that advice too."
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/06/12/normandys_lessons_for_obama_--_and_all_of_us.html

What I am struck by is the juxtaposition of this message with the reason we need to give each other this messag right now - that is to say, because we seem to unwilling to let people hang tough in their individual lives, we have established a circumstance in which the entire western world is on the brink of permanent financial implosion.

We can't hang tough, we know that.  We can't bear the brutal suffering of having folks say mean things to us, we can't be expected to provide for ourselves or our families.  We can't be expected to save our own retirements or work out our own arrangements for health care.  We are not smart enough to choose whether we should take the drugs deemed illegal, nor whether we can satisfy our sexual needs with a financial transaction.  That stuff is hard.  We threw in the towel on hanging tough a long time ago.  We made the choice - we need tough talking politicians waging wars on poverty and drugs and the health care emergency.  We need political geniuses, compassionate and wise, to establish the rules for us and throw us in jail if we violate those rules. 

We cannot be expected to be responsible for ourselves! 

Hang tough?  That message is about forty years too late.  Singing that song now is a bit late.  We should've considered trying that before we gave up our authority to an all knowing, all loving, and much too powerful government.