Unfortunately, McArdle does not answer her own question. However, shes on the right track. Conservatives support authority for a variety of reasons. One is tradition - if people have been doing something a certain way for 1,000 years, and theyre still around to talk about it, there is probably some value in those views. And thats not a totally unreasonable world view if you are engaged in a daily struggle for survival and you simply dont have time to re-think every principle you were taught from the ground up. Liberals may claim to oppose authority, but they use it on every front. For them, their views - whether politics or ethics - are right, and they know theyre right because some *authority* has told them theyre right. Their friends all parrot the same authorities. Look at ANY liberal argument about anything and it boils down to *someone smarter than you says so*. They usually lump themselves as being in the group of smarters because they have the good sense to believe the same as the smarters. Of course from an epistemological point of view this is total bunk. Its the same mental error the conservatives make, with an extra dose of insufferable snobbery. And these truths about human nature seem to elude them. Note an article on The New Republic today which without seeming irony proclaims local governments to be the greatest threat to liberty. So of course the solution is to give one central government total control of everything. Hah. This idea of authority is strongly ingrained in human nature. Its why we keep forming governments and why, when protections against tyranny fail, those governments always turn into some version of top ape. The only real cure for this is to ensure that we do not imbue any government with power sufficient to turn top ape into unstoppable ape. bloombergview/articles/2014-09-02/are-liberals-the-real-authoritarians
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:34:58 +0000
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