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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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