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There is no such thing as consistency of principles in politics. Politics is about group interest, not ideas.
This is yet one of those errors caused by looking at politics through the mythic liberal prism of mistake theory, this idea that we are all in this together and we just need to talk things out and everything can actually be solved peacefully. That is not what is happening, and if we want peace we actually need to recognize this.
The liberal will look around and see endless amounts of people using rhetoric that is wholly inconsistent with their actions, especially over time, and be puzzled. How could these people just lie when we're all trying to solve the same problem?
This is because he presupposes the nature of the object he looks at, and is thus unable to see this widespread duplicity for the feature of what is actually going on: war.
The fluidity in what is considered an acceptable tactic is an absolutely normal feature of conflict. Dancing around the acceptable and the expected is the font of tactical success.
And that is what politics is, or at least what it has become now that the people with potential access to power actually have substantial disagreements
The right wing didn't want cancel culture to be an available weapon and the left wing did, because the left controlled (and still controls to some degree) all the institutions that decide what is acceptable in society. The right failed to enforce this ban because what it was backed by (the judiciary) was already subverted by the left through previous conquests such as the Civil Rights Act.
This resulted in what we all saw and were at times victims of: total hegemony of the left over discourse.
Of course they made some mistakes and the right was able to capitalize on them. Notably the left forced Elon Musk to take over twitter which was a powerful stronghold of theirs, working under the delusion that they could push him around the way they pushed Jack Dorsey around. We all know what happened afterwards.
Now that the right has access to some cultural coordination and that the window of acceptable discourse can be acted upon by both sides, it's become a liability for the right to deny itself the weapon its enemy wields on the regular, and so the norm against it disappeared.
The more scary prospect is that there exists a similar one way norm that makes actual terrorism only acceptable for the left (the Weather Underground people would be rotting in prison like Breivik if they were right wing, and Luigi's right wing equivalent wouldn't get terrorism charges dismissed in a million years).
I fear that this norm too may eventually go, and that's the point where you get into the Troubles.
This is all to say that advocating for consistency of principle, whilst philosophically useful, will not produce any results. The people who are making political decisions are not operating under the rationale that they can convince their enemies at this point, if ever. You are asking soldiers not to shoot back at the enemy in the name of peace. This is futile.
Only when both sides are armed with the same weapons and expect to gain nothing from using them is disarmament possible. Censorship is negative sum ultimately because it destroys the ability to find the truth, but all fighting is negative sum, yet we still fight, because we need to survive.
Ironically, the idea that we can benefit our own interests by engaging in political activity out of group interest is, itself ... (pause for drama ruined by the spoiler at the start of the sentence) ... an incredibly idealistic idea.
If you're lucky enough to be registered in a swing state, the odds that your state carries the crucial electoral votes multipled by the odds that your vote will break a tie in the state is only as high as 1/10,000,000. Most of us are closer to the 1/1,000,000,000 range.
It sounds irrational to fight for an idea even at short-term cost to your group, but anybody who expends time and effort on politics without being paid for it has already self-selected to be the sort of person who will fight for at least one romantic abstract idea, the idea that they can and should try to sway the course of the whole nation even at the expense of their own self-interest. The other abstract ideas we try to make win, like "free speech is good even if I disagree" or "deaths are bad even among people I have no connection to", aren't nearly as irrational as anteing up to play the game in the first place.
This isn't to say that ideas are useless. They exist for a reason. As organizing principles uniting a coalition.
The problem comes when people start to believe that the ideas are valuable in themselves, and thus become unable to maintain anything but a single form of coalition, and when it becomes defunct they impotently try to invoke their propaganda as if it were an unchanging law of the universe.
Free speech is something that can exist, and something that I desire. But it is only possible if a powerful group of organized men agree that it benefits them to maintain as a norm, and in no other possible circumstance.
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What a weird thing to say. It feels deeply reductionist. It sounds like a straw-man atheist saying "religions are hostile memes infecting the population which stabilize social hierarchies, sometimes they call their gods Huitzilopochtli and sometimes Jesus, but in the end it is all the same".
Nobody is denying that group interests are a useful lens to look at politics. Cut subsidiaries for farmers, and the farmers will vote against you. Or take people voting along ethnic lines in Iraq after Bush ousted Saddam.
The problem is that there is plenty of behavior unexplained using the group interest lens. Why does the white college-educated woman care about an unemployed black man getting shot by the police? Why do grown adults care about the abortion of fetuses which are not family, for the most part? Why were so many intellectuals Marxists?
War is famously the continuation of politics with other means. And sure, some wars can be adequately explained by group interests. Two knights feuding might indeed be just a zero sum power struggle between two groups. But to frame the US war of independence as simply a group conflict between the colonies and England while ignoring all the ideological differences seems overly simplistic.
Human life today in the Western world is a lot less shitty than it was in Sparta. Part of that is technological progress. But a lot of it is also ideological progress, e.g. the long term aggregate result of politics.
People sometimes do what is good for them and their in-group. But they also have beliefs, religious or otherwise, and sometimes these beliefs guide their actions. Ignoring them will severely limit your predictive powers of human behavior.
You are denying however that it is the only useful lens at a foundational level, which is my claim (well really, that of Machiavellians).
Because they are in a political coalition that relies on the black vote. When they were not, they did not.
Because they don't want to be murdered and attacks on the sanctity of life undermine their security, and that of their community; moreover it has been banned by their religion, which is an organizing principle of their socio-political interest group.
In Europe, similar groups with similar interests don't find this to be a political issue despite holding similar principles. Because neither they nor their enemies would benefit from upsetting the compromises made. And insofar as they benefit, European politics start to look more like America's on this issue.
Because Marxism is a movement that primarily serves the interest of intellectuals.
I disagree with Clausewitz here. The natural state of Humanity is not peace. It is diplomacy that is the continuation of war by other means.
Nonsense, the ideology was an entirely self serving framework to organize a revolt desired by a specific class with specific interests with the support of the English Parliament. And evidence of this is plain: many of the ideas of self governance that were claimed as such were totally destroyed in the Federalist coup that ensued against the Articles of Confederation.
This is as ridiculous as saying the French Revolution was caused by the Enlightenment instead of both being downstream from the ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie.
Unlike Liberals like to believe, this does not change the nature of politics. Fukuyama was wrong. Liberals didn't win so hard they broke the game, their Reich won't last a thousand years. It's just a passing fad, as every political idiom that believes itself eternal has been.
No. People have individual and collective interests, and they use ideas to justify and organize those interests into coalitions such that they may act upon them.
It is wrong to believe that ideas animate people. And many political phenomena disprove that theory. The only way to hold onto it is to claim that exceptions are simply vices. As a scientist I refuse to entertain moralizing as an explanation framework. Politics is.
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What exactly are you referring to here please?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
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