Majority rule and liberal democracy

Consider this: In the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump cornered 35.3 percent of the Republican votes and 11.7% went to Ted Cruz.  Together, that is just short of a majority of the GOP votes in the primary.  In the Iowa caucus, Cruz won with 27.6% and Trump was second with 24.3%, which together is more than a simple majority.

A majority of the GOP votes thus far has been for the Trump/Cruz ticket!

I point to these two because of the sheer number of atrocious and bigoted statements from them regarding war, religions and ethnic minorities, and more.  But, the duo has half of the GOP voters thus far backing them!

Against this background, Professor Ian Buruma writes about an "unhinged democracy in America"--yes, while thinking about Alexis de Tocqueville.

Buruma writes:

De Tocqueville identified another source of restraint in the US system: the power of religion. Human greed, as well as the temptation of going to extremes, was tempered by the moderating influence of a shared Christian faith. Liberty, in the US, was inextricably entwined with religious belief.
The spectacle of American politics today would seem to cast doubt on de Tocqueville’s observation. Or, rather, the rhetoric of many Republicans aspiring to be President sounds like a perversion of what he saw in 1831. Religion and liberty are still mentioned in one breath, but often to promote extreme views. Religious minorities are denounced. Apocalyptic fears are stoked. Intolerance is promoted. All in the name of God.

Atrocious statements and demagoguery in the name of god!

Buruma continues:

What is steadily falling away is not democracy, but the restraints that de Tocqueville thought were essential to make liberal politics work. More and more, populist leaders regard their election by the majority of voters as a license to crush all political and cultural dissent.
De Tocqueville’s nightmare is not yet the reality in the US, but it is close to what we see in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and perhaps Poland. Even Israel, which, despite its many obvious problems, has always had a robust democracy, is moving in this direction, with government ministers demanding proof of “state loyalty” from writers, artists, and journalists.

 Indeed.  Democracy is alive, but it is the "liberal democracy" that is under assault.  That absence of a focus on liberty/liberal has always been my problem with India's democracy too, increasingly so under the Narendra Modi-led federal government.

From across the continent, Stanford's Professor Josiah Ober writes:

Democracy and liberalism both contain much of value, but they’re not the same thing. They can be conjoined in a successful political order, but their marriage is not inevitable.

After reviewing the Athenian history of democracy, and after sorting out the role of liberalism, Ober concludes:

Both democracy and liberalism offer laudable features for a modern society. But we must not underestimate how hard it is to sustain collective self-governance by citizens while protecting and advancing liberal rights. That difficulty is manifest in the 21st-century US, as the country struggles with global and domestic terrorism, political polarisation, new and old forms of discrimination and group identity, and growing economic inequality. The prospects of both democracy and liberalism, at home and abroad, will be much improved if people understand the difference between them. 

It is democracy--people power and a majority backing--that has yielded the Trump/Cruz duo, who both threaten the "liberal" part of the liberal democracy.  It will be intellectually interesting, and emotionally taxing, to see what arises from this unhinged democracy.

Take us to your leader

Finally, the big day came.  And we are now done with it. Phew!

No, I am not referring to the theatricks, er, theatrics, er, primary in Iowa.  It was groundhog day, and the rodent said it will be an early spring.  Lucky Phil--he doesn't have to deal with the great pretenders that the candidates all are.

The way I understand the world is vastly different from how any of those candidates do.  Which means that when it comes down to voting for one, it will be about how much I want to engage in a deal with myself--compromises--and vote for one of them.  I am hoping that this time, too, it will not be a protest vote at the top of the ballot.

Listening to all those entertainers, er, presidential wannabes, one might end up thinking that ISIS is not only the greatest threat to the United States but to the entire humanity.  To deal with ISIS, one wannabe wants to carpet bomb and destroy ISIS, and another is ready to kill innocent women and children too.  A third one wants us to forget the rest of the world and focus on the domestic problems.

Seriously, these are some of the best that we can offer?

Listening to any of those wannabes will result in the viewer getting one heck of a screwed up understanding of the world.

We let our politicians tell us what should be our greatest fears. And they serve us really badly. Of course, ISIS is a group with evil intent who behave barbarically. But they do not and will not have the ability to invade the U.S. and kill Americans in their beds. This does not mean that they should not be opposed. But they should not, I would argue, dominate our debate about foreign policy.

Exactly.

There is a good reason for these wannabes (and the Oval Office occupants) to talk up ISIS and other threats--leading us into wars is pretty much the only thing they can do on their own and they seem to be forever enthusiastic about it.

Maybe that’s because these are the only kinds of threats that they can even remotely plausibly suggest they can do something about – preferably using muscular and provocative terms that make them sound like “leaders.”
Nobody is going to “kick nature’s ass,” as those of us who recently lived through Winter Storm Jonas on the East Coast will testify.

To take leadership on climate change or on helping wiping out malaria, on the other hand, is to be a wimp bowing to the international community!  We apparently want in the oval office huge cojones and nothing else!

No surprise, therefore, that alien life does not want to make contact with us! ;)

Philosophy talk at the GOP debate?

The email from the long-time (measured in blog-years) debating partner read:

"Welders make more money than philosophers.  We need more welders and less philosophers.”      
- Thus spake the junior Senator from the state of Florida at yesterday's GOP debates. Surely you have to post on that :)"

I stopped watching the debates a long time ago; it is all ackamarackus, as I blogged a while back.  So, of course, I had no idea about what went on during the debate, until I read about that much later.  But, this philosophy versus welding is too good to pass up.  However, I want to approach it from a perspective that might not be what the good emailer intended ;)

First, we will dispense with the basics: Marco Rubio is wrong.  The average welder does not make anywhere near the average earnings of philosophers.  Nor does the average welder earn higher than those who majored in philosophy.

A point that is a tad more than the basics: the job market suggests that there is a shortage of welders, and it does not seem like there is a shortage of philosophers.  In that case, a follow-up question might be this: why don't welders get paid a lot more if there is a shortage?  I will leave that as an exercise for the interested reader. ;)

Those two points aside, here is the real issue that I have with Rubio's comment: He seems to have conveniently overlooked that his comment and the debate itself are essentially philosophy.  It is all about philosophical issues over which people disagree--within the GOP, and among everybody else too.

In his commentary, John Dickerson parenthetically notes:

Indeed, one of the evening’s most interesting exchanges revolved around the philosophical question of what it means to be a conservative

Rand Paul apparently got some time to air out the philosophy:

We have to decide what is conservative and what isn’t conservative,

Hey, guess what?  That's philosophy!

The father of modern conservatism is Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British political philosopher who was deeply suspicious of radicals of any stripe. Burke generally viewed prudence and stability as the guiding lights of conservatism. “A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances,” he wrote, in an oft-quoted passage, “and judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment he may ruin his country for ever.”

To put it simply, Trump is no Burkean.  Nor is Rubio, or anybody else.  They might reflect a Burkean conservatism on an issue here or there, but never consistently.  (For that matter, one might even wonder what it meant for Burke to be Burkean.)

The Burkeans have been losing ground in the Republican Party for a while now. Too often their old conception of conservatism strikes others in the G.O.P. as a form of surrender or, at the very least, an acceptance of the liberal status quo.

Yes, we need welders and we need to train those who might be interested in welding.  But, it is stupid, to say the least, that we don't need to educate people in philosophy!  To a large extent, the mess that we find ourselves in is a result of politicians and the higher education industry pooh-poohing the old-fashioned ideas, which some of us cherish, that students need rigorous schooling in such important ideas.

What truly shocked me was this: Ted Cruz has made references to John Rawls. Cruz writes:

Republicans should conceptualize and articulate every domestic policy with a single-minded focus on easing the ascent up the economic ladder.
We should assess policy with a Rawlsian lens, asking how it affects those least well-off among us. We should champion the 47 percent.

Imagine an electorate educated and knowledgeable enough to take up Rand Paul's challenge on defining what it means to be conservative, and to know what "a Rawlsian lens" means and how Cruz would champion the 47 percent without going the liberal route.  If we can produce such an educated electorate who can think through the philosophical ideas, then we will truly be an exceptional country that will be a shining city on a hill--and I might even vote for a conservative then!