>>I think we should wish to rid ourselves of that kind of parochial approach to discussions.<<
Curious as to why?
One of the things that puzzles conservatives is the blinders that liberals wear towards their liberalism.
Hmmm, so far as I know we weren't discussing liberalism. The author of that piece drew on the left-right distinction. A bit different.
As for as blinders and liberals being less willing to acknowledge blinders than conservatives, you would have to help me a bit with that one. The point I was trying to make is not about those distinctions but rather about the need to discuss issues as issues.
Let's say on US foreign policy right now, one wished to make some sort of distinction between liberals and conservatives or left and right. Where would the division be placed? Where would Pat Buchanan and Bob Novak go since each is opposed to an Iraqi invasion? Or where would John Kerry, John Edwards, and the good friend of labor, Dick Gephardt etc. go since they favor one.
It's been my experience that the folk who insist on those divisions draw the lines in their own favor--something like here are the sensible ones and over there are the less than sensible.
Or would you do the division in terms of voting for Gore or Bush? In that case, the US is a liberal not a conservative country. A liberal who ran an absolutely miserable campaign won the popular vote. Whoops. Doesn't fit the paradigm. Clearly 9-11 changed a good bit of that. Right now it's difficult to make a case for a clear division.
It's plain as day that modern liberalism and 19th century liberalism are different things, but I am perfectly willing to concede that many present day liberal institutions are well intended, for example, the ACLU.
A tad patronizing but I get your point.
Increasingly, my perception of discussing things with you is that when I say, I see the world this way because my spectacles are blue, you are not willing to say, I see the world this way because my spectacles are red. Instead, you seem to argue that your spectacles are clear.
Hmm, again. I have precisely the same experience with you. But that's not strange. When you and I discuss things, we try to make persuasive points, we try to find some sort of grounds on which we can agree in order to persuade the other. If we say your glasses are different from mine, therefore that explains our positions, politics becomes only power; not persuasion. It becomes the kind of "gotcha" that Nadine does all too often.
The glasses metaphor is a bit overdetermined to me. I prefer the lower level notion that Bill and I seem to have reached, largely at his urging, that there are simply some things we will just have to disagree about. Having said that, we find, at least to me, a surprising number of things we can discuss and, occasionally, agree about. |
