<p>Damn. And I had just figured out your second post. You're referring to the poem "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den," right? As for the next riddle, I think I cracked it, but I'm downright cheating by using a computer.</p>
<p>Translation- "Brothers or sisters have I none, but that man's father is my father's son. Who is that man?"</p>
<p>Answer- I am my father's son, so that man's father must be me. So that man must be my son.</p>
<p>Figuring out the reference in my second post is only half the hilarity. It is a reply to Bamboozler's post...</p>
<p>Very well done; I was hoping that a simple transliteration might throw you off.</p>
<p>So at last he really loved
He loved a girl into a bird
Once upon a time
Peter, he was wanting to go
Out and have a little walk
In the moonlight
And he said, "Mother can I please go out?
I want to go out in the moonlight!"
There he met a little girl by the name of Gwendolyn Alice Margarita
And there he said to her, "I love you so very much
Yes, I do! I do! I do! Alice, I do! I love you so very much
Will you please marry me and we
Will have some little children
I would like?"
She said, "I can not marry you Peter
Because I already have known another little boy
That I will marry him someday when he
Grows up"
So Peter he was so very sad
He saw that bluebird so sad
That she started to cry
She said, "Alright Peter, I really
Love you. Oh yes, I do! I do! I do! I do! I do."</p>
<p>Explain the mechanics of her transmutation. The reference is to George Antheil (the bad boy of music).</p>
<p>who's nervous?</p>
<p>Did any of you receive some sort of confirmation that your application had been received?</p>
<p>Shindig,</p>
<p>I wrote the applications committee asking if they had received everything, to which I didn't get a response back... I think they may just be uncommunicative to add to the mystique or generally make us (more) nervous.</p>
<p>Hopefully we should start hearing back towards the end of next week, if we're lucky.</p>
<p>If people are willing to share, I'd be curious to see what people wrote about for the second essay.</p>
<p>For mine, I tried to show that if the skeptic charge against Descartes that "I think" doesn't entail that there is a thinker ("I am") then it at the very least does entail the existence of language. I didn't go into it much in the essay, but to tie it all together I briefly outlined how some type of "language empiricism" (for instance a loose interpretation of the Private Language Argument) might be able to then show the existence of an outside world.</p>
<p>I wrote about Nabokov's Lolita as a destruction/deconstruction of the American dream.
My essay has sounded absolutely boring and dreary compared to every other one I've heard on this site. ha</p>
<p>I sent mine by FedEx and requested the "notify when received" service, so i do know that it was received.</p>
<p>My second essay was about the proper way for conservatives and libertarians to criticize the actions of the Obama-Biden administration. </p>
<p>I said that the conventional argument--"socialism is impossible because humans are too corrupt, stupid, etc. to govern properly"--is way too pessimistic and reeks of anti-humanism. That negative message coming from our side is what opened the way for Obama's affirmative "yes we can" message. Conservatives will never be able to regain power until we start looking like humanists again, and I made a little speculation as to how we can do that.</p>
<p>Bamboozler:</p>
<p>Lolita is a fantastic work, probably a good topic choice too, since I'd imagine most DSers have read it. I'm curious though, did you approach it as Humbert Humbert fulfilling an "inverted" American Dream or argue the book is evidence that there no longer exists a meaningful conception of the "American Dream" but only perversions of that ideal, or something completely different.</p>
<p>Sufjanfan:</p>
<p>I also used fedex for my part of the application, but I had my transcript sent seperately (or directly from the school), so I was hoping they'd confirm that arrived.</p>
<p>I hate to say it but it seems like you're advocating "compassionate conservatism" or something to that effect... It sounds like your argument might be largely based on the more economic side, which is interesting, since for me at least, anti-humanism evokes thoughts of more social policy issues.</p>
<p>I'm not arguing compassionate conservatism; believe me, I am far from it. But I see how you could have interpreted that from that short blurb I posted. :) Let me try to clarify.</p>
<p>What I'm saying is more along the lines of...conservatives believe that the average American knows how to regulate his own gas usage properly, whereas liberals believe that the average American is too gluttonous to do that and the government must put a Pigovian tax on gasoline. </p>
<p>Conservatives believe that the average American is responsible enough to donate an appropriate amount of his income to the poor, while whereas liberals believe that the average American is too greedy to do that so we need the government to forcibly redistribute the wealth. </p>
<p>Conservatives believe that the average American is a generally good person who can be trusted to treat his workers and customers fairly, whereas liberals assume that this businessman has the most malovent nature imaginable so we need the government to step in and keep him in line.</p>
<p>Those are just three examples where the conservative's position is more humanist than the liberal's. We trust the essential goodness of the average American, whereas the liberal places more faith in the decision-making skills of the educated elites who run the government. </p>
<p>The Republican line of attack should focus more on preserving individual freedom-of-choice, not saving the world from the so-called "impossible doctrines of Marx". I honestly am open to an anarcho-syndicalist/ liberatarian socialist option a la Noam Chomsky...I believe it's possible to make some sort of socialism work. I just remain strongly opposed to the use of government coercion.</p>
<p>To play devil's advocate for a moment:</p>
<p>That's an interesting way for you to adress what you're saying. A Conservative once described the difference between Conservatives and Liberals to me in Biblical terms, suggesting that Conservatives believed in Original Sin and the imperfectability of man, while the naive liberals believed that man could be perfected and thus tried to legislate against "Human Nature" with many of their policies. For instance, capitalism is an ideal policy because it relies on a basic human urge (a desire for comfort or even greed) in order to drive the system, while socialism would legislate against that basic urge and thus was doomed to fail.</p>
<p>Maybe this comes down to an issue of semantics and what message is more politically viable, but I also think there is a subtle distinction between the actual underlying philosophy here. I think perhaps much of your argument could be loosely grounded in Hayek's Road to Serfdom, while much of the "Human Nature" argument I wouldn't know where to place in terms of an intellectual heritage. I guess my concern perhaps is that what you just presented is more marketing spin than a substantive divide in conservative philosophy, which seems like it is no longer sufficient, at least judging by the November elections.</p>
<p>Without putting all my cards on the table and directly sharing my political beliefs yet, I'd be curious to know how you conceive of a libertarian-socialist arrangement coming about without some government intervention.</p>
<p>A few points...</p>
<ol>
<li>Just for the sake of saying it, I happen to practice a religion that does not teach original sin: Mormonism. </li>
</ol>
<p>We don't believe that man is perfectable, but then again we don't believe that God is perfectable either. We teach a doctrine of eternal progression: everyone is always learning new knowledge and improving themselves throughout eternity. My personal interpretation of it has been that "God" is just someone who has progressed so much that he is able to approximate perfection...something like a horizontal asymptote effect. Limit at infinity, if you're familiar with calculus. God is not truly "omniscient, omnipotent, etc." ...but he's progressed so much farther along than us that for the purposes of argument we can say that he is functionally perfect.</p>
<ol>
<li>I don't agree with what that conservative man told you: that Republicans have a pessimistic view of human nature while Democrats hold an optimistic one. That is exactly the kind of thought pattern that I am asserting is responsible for the fall of our party. I think, if we are ever to rise again, we need to reframe the debate in new terms. </li>
</ol>
<p>Both Republicans and Democrats have an optimistic view of at least some portion of the American population. It's just a matter of how large that portion is. The Republican's faith in human nature is far more lenient and broad....extending even to the scantily educated population, the "Joe the Plumbers". The Democrat has this same faith in human nature, but his field of optimism is far more limited; he only trusts the educated urban elite to make the important decisions and enforce them on "the stupid masses". The intrusion of anything like a "Sarah Palin" average Joe character onto the government scene is therefore an extremely disturbing prospect for the Democrat.</p>
<ol>
<li>If we do reframe the debate in these terms--away from "socialism doesn't work" and moving towards "government coercion is anti-humanist"-- I do think that is a big philosophical change, and not just a matter of semantics. The difference is that this new argument does allow the conservative to accept the possibility of alternatives to the market. It opens the way for the conservative to read and love Marx (which I do, and love doing). :)</li>
</ol>
<p>I don't know nearly enough about socialism yet to make a statement about how it would work in any situation, let alone a libertarian one. I just know that the only socialism that I would accept is one that was initiated on a completely voluntary basis. In such a situation, I might even be one of the first people to volunteer to join the community.</p>
<ol>
<li>I haven't read Hayek's Road to Serfdom, though I am very familiar with the title. I have mostly come to my ideas through independent thought, rather than from reading deep political theory. However, I guess I have been influenced by Atlas Shrugged/ Ron Paul (which led me to really oppose government coercion) and by the Leftist cultural criticism that I read (which has made me more prone to accepting socialist ideas).</li>
</ol>
<p>Do you care to share your political viewpoint?</p>
<p>Are there a lot of libertarians in the house? Contrary to my username, I'm a libertarian.</p>
<p>There is very little discrepancy between the Liberals and the Conservatives. Conservatives are enthusiastic warmongerers who are reluctant socialists, while liberals are enthusiastic socialists who are reluctant warmongerers. The difference between enthusiasm and reluctance is becoming less and less daily.</p>
<p>The libertarian argument against Obama can be split up into a dichotomy of party libertarianism and true libertarianism (minarchism/anarcho-capitalism). Party libertarianism uses single issues and utilitarian arguments. True libertarianism tries to uses the Rothbardian argument of self-ownership/property rights. But I'm seeing a lot of holes in self-ownership as a basis of libertarianism. For example, if I exhale, some people might consider me to be polluting since I'm releasing carbon dioxide into the air. So, therefore, I should have to pay these people some sort of retribution. How exactly can I calculate this? Can air be property? Also, air pollutants spread throughout the atmosphere. So should I pay everyone?</p>
<p>Hopefully if I get in to Deep Springs, I'll get some time to ponder this.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I’m actually on the right edge of the green movement, which incidentally places me a lot further to the left than both Sufjan and W… I would describe my beliefs as primarily pragmatic, although anymore that term doesn’t mean a whole lot.</p>
<p>In terms of economic policy, the best way I can explain my position is to give a picture of how I conceive an ideal economy. A few months ago it was a lot easier to try and advance this argument when oil prices were considerably higher, but I maintain that as the world continues to advance, the unrestrained consumption made possible by central manufacturing and big agribusiness will no longer be viable business models due to the high cost of fuels, even if we are able to develop alternatives to gasoline. As a result, economies are likely to shift towards the more local with things like community farms (the Intervale in Vermont, for example) and most manufactured goods would be produced within a one to two hundred mile radius from a given locality—reducing pollution. Essentially this would mean an end to most large scale agribusiness firms, and ideally most other large companies would be replaced with small locally owned firms. This would intentionally add inefficiencies to the existing system, hopefully increasing employment. The driving force behind all of this is that intellectual property would likely be disseminated much more quickly than current patent law allows (with the idea being licensing fees replacing patents) allowing information to be spread through the internet to further away locales, where the users would not be directly competing with the innovator. </p>
<p>Essentially all this is just an extension of anti-monopoly laws to remove many large corporations coupled with the effect of a constantly rising cost of transportation and a constantly decreasing cost of exchanging information. To use the Green Party buzzwords, it’s merging ecological wisdom with economic justice. To explain how I see government fitting into all of this, I think much of what I’ve described may eventually be mandated by natural economic forces, however it would be a much less painful transition with some regulations pushing us in that direction, for instance cap and trade systems and an end to subsidies for big agribusiness that really diminish the ability for small farmers to make an impact.</p>
<p>George Bush:
While I agree with you that both major parties today are in many respects believe there are some conditions that are appropriate to engage in war acts, I would be hesitant to say those are the same conditions or equate the major political parties to conservatives and liberals. For instance, many democrats seem to believe in some variant of just war theory, while republicans as a group seem to me slightly more divided between the neo-conservative preemptive strikes and invasions and more non-interventionist elements who believe that there are even more restricted instances when force is acceptable than the democrats. I personally would like to see the U.S. unilaterally halve our nuclear arsenal, however I still think there are limited instances where intervention (preferably non-military) is needed.</p>
<p>Much of green ideology (or Green Party Ideology at least) can be traced back to a rejection of the “hyper-individualism” that results from Rothbardian views. Bill McKibben wrote a fantastic book, Deep Economy, on the sustainability and the effects of hyper-individualism on modern America…</p>
<p>Sufjan:
In reading your point number three, I can’t help but feel you’re largely making a case that any organic economic arrangement is inherently better than government regulation, perhaps because the government lacks sufficient authority to infringe upon individuals. And maybe I’m misjudging your argument here, but a conservative Marxist anarcho-syndicalism, if it’s not libertarianism, must rely on certain social norms being maintained, which would in turn seem to undermine your “pro-humanity” strategy (for instance extension of homosexual couples’ rights). I feel like I’m misunderstanding you… it's often easiest to miscomprehend a challenging argument than more directly confronting it. Would you care to elaborate more?</p>
<p>Atlas Shrugged and leftist cultural criticism make interesting bedfellows… I’m hoping that means you read Foucault, because that would be just fabulous :-p</p>
<p>And sorry for hijacking this thread and turning it towards the political, if somebody else out there wants a new topic, please speak up...</p>
<p>I'll start by disagreeing with george_bush's assertion that Rothbardians, or right-libertarians, are the only "true libertarians". Libertarianism just means freedom of individual choice, nothing more. </p>
<p>I happen to be a right-libertarian myself, but in a truly free society, individuals have the freedom to form any voluntary economic arrangement that they want--capitalism, socialism, green agrarianism, or what-have-you. There are libertarians on both the Left and the Right. As long as a person believes in the primacy of individual free choice, he can be considered a "true libertarian".</p>
<p>I've been using the term "conservative" very untraditionally to refer to a hypothetical coalition of these right-libertarians and left-libertarians all working together to fight against government coercion. I realize that I am a libertarian person hijacking the word "conservative", but that is exactly what I am trying to do: hijack, bend, distort and ultimately break the traditional Right-Left dichotomy for the sake of empowering libertarianism. </p>
<p>I try to do this by persuading Republicans to become libertarians. In this current Right-Left economic dichotomy, I argue, the Left does seem to present the more optimistic view of human nature: "yes we can" i.e. humans are indeed capable of running a large government efficiently. In the past, you Republicans were able to defeat the Democrats by successfully painting their Leftist optimism as mere naivete. However, the public seems to have shifted and they aren't buying into that argument anymore. Centrists and moderates have started to warm up to the ideas of the Left (from global warming to redistribution of wealth) and these changes are not going to be reversed. If you Republicans continue to directly challenge Leftist economics, I argue, you will continue to lose.</p>
<p>Instead, I argue, the Republican Party needs to redefine itself into a broad-tent party where Left-libertarians are welcome. The Party can do this by shifting away from the explicit support of capitalism so that the word "Republican" will no longer signify the endorsement of a specific economic system. </p>
<p>Republicanism would become a libertarian movement, a coalition of both Right-libertarians and Left-libertarians fighting against coercion. Being a Republican could then mean believing in whatever economic system you want, as long as you don't seek to force it upon other individuals. </p>
<p>This new Republican Party would have to be anti-war and virtually silent on social issues. Some gray area could be made on the issue of abortion, if it was argued on the grounds of protecting the fetus' freedoms, but Republicans would definitely have to abandon the drug war and stop campaigning against homosexuality.</p>
<p>The closest model I can think of is Ron Paul. His coalition of supporters was comprised of people from all over the ideological spectrum: Republican partisans, libertarians, anarchists, those on the Left. His problem was just that he was an ideological defender of free market capitalism, not an ideological defender of liberty in the general sense. If he had done more to affirm voluntary socialism as a legitimate alternative choice, he could have created a coalition large enough to subvert the Right-Left dichotomy.</p>
<p>Gosh, I hope this made at least some sense. I'm still in the process of developing the idea. And yes, bdmoore I do read Foucault. :)</p>
<p>Maybe this is an unfair argument in many respects, but I feel, Sufjan, that you're combining political theory with actual practical considerations of how to form a working coalition within the Republican Party. My gut reaction is that your contention that "left-libertarianism" is a real aspect of the libertarian movement is a practical political consideration, while george_bush was making a more academic claim.</p>
<p>Maybe I use these terms differently then you do, in which case we'll have to agree on a definition, but I at least think of "left-libertarianism" as the view that any initial allocation of property must be fair and balanced amongst all the stakeholders in a community, which is extremely difficult to achieve, and since it didn's occur in the course of modern society, some sort of retributive mechanism may be justifiable. In contrast, "right-libertarianism" would be more along the lines of pure capitalism, where the initial distribution of resources will be compensated for by some type of meritocracy within the capitalist system.</p>
<p>If you're using those definitions, I think george_bush might have a theoretical case that "left-libertarianism" doesn't fit his framework for pure libertarian thought. Please disagree with me if I've misconstrued your position here :-/</p>
<p>Having said that, I think your contention that the conservative party in the U.S. needs rebranding and to broaden the tent are fair assertions as a practical matter for winning elections. I'm unsure though of the wisdom of trying to rebrand an existing party, but rather more success would be had in the collapse of a major party to be replaced by a minor party. As a green, I would ideally like to see the collapse of the republican party and the current democratic party become the primary conservative party with the green party becoming the major leftist party for the country. I think though it is equally plausible for the "populist" (i.e. Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin) movement within the conservative party win the existing power struggle for the next election cycle, creating a void in intellectual Goldwater-esque republicanism. The resulting void could then potentially be filled by a libertarian party (not necessarily the Libertarian Party, I could see the Constitution Party having that role as well).</p>
<p>I should probably add that I don't think this will be nearly as neat and clean as I might have made it sound here, it will probably take several election cycles and for respected "republicans" to run under the mantle of the constitution or libertarian parties, similar to the Bull-Moose Party, but that party emerging the victor opposed to the existing dominant party. It's also possible that the current parties are so thoroughly entrenched that they can't be replaced without a major national crisis, but one can hope...</p>
<p>I've only read the Archaeology of Knowledge and a collection of Foucault's essays and lectures, but it's fascinating stuff.</p>
<p>Wait, left-libertarians don't support coercion, right? They want to create redistributive communities where all property would be common, but membership in such communities would be strictly voluntary. If someone wanted to retain their private property and stay out of the community, that would be his freedom; left-libertarians wouldn't attempt to use a coercive mechanism like a State to confiscate his property (although they might try to pressure him in other ways like persuasion or ostracism).</p>
<p>That's my understanding of left-libertarianism. If that definition is wrong, then please correct me, but if what I said was accurate then I think it that left-libertarianism is a genuinely libertarian stream of thought. </p>
<p>Right-libertarians and left-libertarians are united in their opposition to the State, although they have come to that conclusion in their own ways. Right-libertarians reject the State because they see it as a coercive redistributor of wealth; left-libertarians reject the State because they see it as a coercive protector of private corporations (e.g. bailouts, "blood for oil", etc.)</p>
<p>If you want to define libertarianism as the opposition to wealth redistribution in all its' forms, you can go ahead, but I think that's both academically inaccurate and practically unwise. The best common denominator among libertarians is their lowest common denominator. And the lowest common denominator among libertarians is the rejection of coercion as a legitimate part of an economy.</p>
<p>As for the Republican Party, I share Ron Paul's belief that the Republican Party is the best medium for libertarians to use to fight for liberty. Therefore, as a proud libertarian-Republican, I certainly do not share bdmoore's hope that the Republican Party will "collapse"! :) Rather, I'd like to see the Republicans begin advocating economic libertarianism, abandoning the focus on war and social issues. </p>
<p>This shift would probably happen in two steps. First, the Party would have to shift to become a right-libertarian party, shaking itself free of both the neoconservatives and the socially-interventionist Religious Right. I am a firm supporter of Sarah Palin because she really represents huge progress towards abandoning one of these groups: the neoconservatives. I will never forget the day when that interviewer asked her to state the Bush Doctrine and she looked at him with a blank stare and innocently asked "In what respect, Charlie?" She seriously didn't know what it was, and I loved that. She is the first major Republican politician I've seen who is not deeply immersed in the neoconservative school of thought. Sure, McCain's aides tried to cram the neoconservative ideology into her mind, but you could physically see what a thin layer of indoctrination it was. There was a clear difference between the passion and confidence and breadth of detail in her voice when she was talking about her true concerns (tax freedom, energy independence, protecting life)...as opposed to when she was awkwardly trying to use cliche platitudes to pretend that she was a neoconservative.</p>
<p>A lot of the prevarication and shakiness that you saw in the Palin interviews, and that the liberals loved to make fun of...if I remember correctly it was almost always when she was discussing issues of foreign policy, visibly uncomfortable as she hesitantly tried to remember the words on the McCain aides' flashcards and put on the appearance of being a faithful neoconservative. Remember when Katie Couric asked her what magazines she reads? I am firmly convinced that the reason Palin didn't answer that is becuase she reads such paleoconservative magazines as "The American Conservative" (which I read). "The American Conservative" expresses basically the Pat Buchanan school of thought, an anti-war Republicanism that also lacks the Religious Right's focus on social intervention. It's really likely; one liberal blogger scanning a picture of her noticed that she had writings from the anti-globalist John Birch Society on her desk, and another liberal blog reported that was a proud supporter of anti-war candidate Pat Buchanan back in 1996.</p>
<p>If Palin becomes the nominee in 2012, the Party will have taken a remarkable, though imperfect, step towards right-libertarianism. Among other things, the main change will be the retreat from the Bush-McCain level of ideological devotion to neoconservatism. Even if Palin becomes an interventionist as President, her foreign policy will be much more hesitant, cautious and doubtful than Bush's. At the end of the day, she is still a non-neoconservative, she is still the woman who said "In what respect Charlie?" the first time she was asked to iterate the Bush doctrine. She would start the job of making the Republicans a right-libertarian party, although more work certainly would need to be done.</p>
<p>After that change has happened, I'd like to see the Party expand beyond specifically right-libertarianism to a bi-libertarianism, inclusive of both Right and Left economics. Yeah, the right-libertarians would probably remain dominant at first, but we would adopt sort of a tolerant approach to left-libertarians: "if you want to redistribute wealth in your own community behind closed doors, then go ahead...just don't expect me to participate". With time, the left-libertarians would gain more and more acceptance in the Party. The focus would be on condemning coercion, not a defending specific economic system. Any voluntary system would be okay in our book.</p>
<p>(P.S. My Foucault study has mostly concentrated on his "History of Sexuality" series, but yeah it really is amazing stuff.)</p>
<p>Take this with a grain of salt since it's from Wikipedia, but their page on "Left Libertarianism" includes this snippet: "Some left-libertarians of this type support some form of income redistribution on the grounds of a claim by each individual to be entitled to an equal share of natural resources." I think this would entail some form of government action, which is more similar to the definition I'm familiar with, however. I think the definition that opposition to all government intervention is more similar to anarchism. Most libertarians I know (even one who believes in privatizing roads) are usually willing to concede a "night-watchman state" similar to the one described by Nozick is needed.</p>
<p>What you describe as "left-libertarianism" is what I would call anarcho-collectivism, but I think this is mostly a matter of semantics. :)</p>
<p>Having said that, I am astonished that you consider Buchananite paleo-conservatives as, "an anti-war Republicanism that also lacks the Religious Right's focus on social intervention." I've always seen paleo-conservatives as some of the staunchest "culture wars" issue supporters. It seems to me that many of their arguments have something to do with "preserving the western tradition" or something to that extent, of which Conservative Christianity is a huge part, and that informs much of their social policy positions.</p>
<p>And Palin is scary in many ways, but I felt like she often had very little substantive opinion on the economy, not just foreign policy. In fact, the only issues she seemed truly comfortable speaking on seemed to be those hot button social issues that libertarians deny the government has the necessary authority to control.</p>
<p>Much of what you said towards the end of that last post seems actually consistent with Nozick's framework for utopia, which is in turn a model many greens would like if it included some sort of pollution restrictions (and guarantee of basic human rights) for each given community. The problem of course arises in how to retain the supremacy of the majority in such a system. If whenever a local governance were to pass a decision a faction of the community sufficiently disliked, a splinter group would form, which would encroach on the contracted community's authority. It's a bit vexing...</p>
<p>You're right. I made the mistake of equating left-libertarianism with anarcho-collectivism. Most left-libertarians will believe in some sort of minimal state action, just like most right-libertarians believe in some sort of minarchist state limited to essential duties of defense and security.</p>
<p>I have to defend my girl Sarah haha. She's really my second-highest political hero next to Ron Paul. The media did a great job painting her as a brainless dolt with no significant thoughts about anything but social conservatism. However, as anyone who has actually looked at her record knows, she's always been primarily a champion of economic reform, letting social issues take a secondary role. </p>
<p>There's a surreal disjunction between the real Sarah Palin and this straw man caricature that the media has managed to create. It's really astounding. She's not a dolt; she's in charge of the largest natural gas pipeline in North America. She's not a bigot; she actually passed executive orders to preserve equal rights for homosexual civil unions in Alaska. She never tried to ban books in Alaska...some of those supposed books, like Harry Potter, weren't even in print at the time in question.</p>
<p>I agree with you that paleo-conservatives are traditionalist, socially-conservative Judeo-Christian people, but they are also some of the most principled constitutionalists and federalists, and that does differentiate them from the Religious Right. </p>
<p>Paleocons don't believe, as the Religious Right does, that America has a special mandate from heaven to militarily protect Israel. Many paleocons probably supported Prop 8, but it was the Religious Right who led the fight for something as massive as the Federal Marriage Amendment. Paleocons were either silent on the FMA or possibly even in opposition. </p>
<p>I will look into Nozick...</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Palin had absolutely no interest in actually protecting homosexual rights when she gave those executive orders. Yes, she did issue them, but only because the Alaska Supreme Court gave a ruling mandating that she comply after she tried to ban hospital visitation rights for same sex couples. As for banning books, as mayor of Wasilla, she definately asked the local librarian about removing a book about a male homosexual couple, which she hadn't even read herself. Admittedly, she didn't ban the book, and the librarian continued to serve under Palin for a considerable time after this reportedly occured, but it's something to think about. I will grant that by most pre-VP selection accounts, she did a good job of managing the Alaska pipeline and negotiating with the oil companies, although I don't really know that much about it specifically.</p>
<p>I was recently interning with a group that tries, don't laugh, to provide non-partisan information to voters. I answered their toll free line from late September until after the election, and there were all kinds of calls on Palin's record as a reformer governor, and the actual things she had done in office usually wasn't what the caller wanted to hear (most of these calls seemed to come from conservatives, surprisingly enough)... That may be a little anecdotal, but I think there certainly is a narrative about Palin produced by McCain and the Right that Palin's record doesn't match (the same should be noted about the left and Obama), just an observation. I don't mean to be attacking your hero, but I have a hard time seeing Palin as the future of the republican party.</p>
<p>Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I tend to think of paleoconservative ideology as being closely tied to <em>**uyama and the End of History. The link being that it was imperative that the west push its ideology and values to achieve the spread of "liberal democracracy" across the globe for *</em>*uyama, and the paleoconservatives trying to protect the heritage of liberal democracy in the U.S. I use liberal democracy here to mean more classical liberalism than the modern more socialist-leaning conception.</p>
<p>If you're willing to devote a lot of time to reading political philosophy, I'd suggest trying to read Rawls' Theory of Justice before Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia; although I personally read Nozick first, I felt like I didn't get as much as I could have out of the first few chapters where he criticizes Rawls. You could also probably just read the last part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the chapter on a framework for utopia, as if I remember correctly, it's mostly self contained.
:)</p>