Tag Archives: liberal democracy

"Liberal democracy" is an oxymoron. What passes for liberal democracy is dying owing to its internal oppositions. Liberalism and democracy are incompatible. Being based on property, liberalism is naturally biased toward oligarchy Property ownership and property rights are dominant in liberalism and this leads to plutocracy. Ian McKay cites C. B. Macpherson on this. The problem arises from the basis of liberalism in property to the bias toward capitalism as an economic system....

Traditionalism is on the rise and it's taking a bite out of liberalism. This wave is not unique to Hungary. In an annual speech to ethnic Hungarians in Baile Tusnad in neighboring Romania, Orban portrayed the 2019 European parliamentary vote as decisive for the future of Europe. He said the Western political “elite” of the EU had failed to protect the bloc from Muslim immigration and it was time for them to go. “The European elite is visibly nervous,” Orban told hundreds of cheering...

Unusual to find praise for a radical "Ivy League" leftist in The American Conservative, but here it is. In Defense of Howard Zinn The American Conservative David Masciotra

Something more to think about, although the title is more provocative than it needs to be. "Nazi-like" would be more apt in my view.The term "Nazi" more than raises eyebrows and more than eyebrows need to be raised.Asia TimesUS military brass seek unified ‘Nazi’ command William Holland The United States has already gone against the views of the Founding Fathers regarding "entangling alliances" and constitutional delegation of wars powers to the legislative branch. Would replacement of...

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the cautionaryadmonition: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Too often, we have ignored that warning. Gina Haspel’s defenders assert that her behavior conformed to procedures that senior CIA officials (and presumably the Bush White House) had approved. The international community rejected the “just following orders” defense that defendants invoked at the Nuremberg trials. Haspel’s defense is no...

I found Populism: A Very Short Introduction by Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser to be very useful and conceptually clear, a worthy addition to Oxford’s charming Very Short Introductions series.The real contribution of the book is that it provides a definition of populism that is both conceptually clear and empirically useful–no mean feat. Here it is: We define populism as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and...