I have been re-reading the classic work On Liberty published in 1859 by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). In it, he emphasizes the importance of allowing complete freedom for people to advocate ideas, even if they seem to contradict what seems to everyone to be obviously true because he says that we never know what is true or false and that it is by being challenged by alternative views that ideas become strengthened if they are good ones or overthrown because they are false, both outcomes being preferable to a fossilized unquestioned orthodoxy. He says, “The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.”
He says that while England in his time may seem tolerant, that is not really the case. Mill lived in a time and place when belief in the Christian god was the orthodoxy and where heresy was enough to get one ostracized if not outright punished.
“It will be said, that we do not now put to death the introducers of new opinions: we are not like our fathers who slew the prophets, we even build sepulchres to them. It is true we no longer put heretics to death; and the amount of penal infliction which modern feeling would probably tolerate, even against the most obnoxious opinions, is not sufficient to extirpate them. But let us not flatter ourselves that we are yet free from the stain even of legal persecution. Penalties for opinion, or at least for its expression, still exist by law; and their enforcement is not, even in these times, so unexampled as to make it at all incredible that they may some day be revived in full force.”
He pointed out that “no person can be allowed to give evidence in a court of justice, who does not profess belief in a God (any god is sufficient) and in a future state” and then goes on to add that people would be surprised if they know how many well-known people were actually unbelievers, saying “it is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor); and would be maintained by no one who had the smallest conception how many of the persons in greatest repute with the world, both for virtues and for attainments, are well known, at least to their intimates, to be unbelievers”.
In this, he was clearly speaking from personal experience. He himself was clearly a skeptic. He reported that his father James Mill once told him, “There is no God but it is a family secret.”
I was also interested in his attitude towards politics and how ideas in that sphere get developed and implemented. I was struck by how he spoke about the need for a party of stability and a party advocating change.
In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away.
…Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.
The party of stability, fighting to retain the status quo, is what we traditionally called conservatives while the party of reform is the one that argues that changes are necessary in order to achieve important social goals.
In the US, the Republican party used to be the party of conservatives but it struck me that that assignation is now somewhat doubtful. Republicans seem to be wanting to return to the way things were in the 1950s. Mill would have called such an attitude conservative if it was still the 1950s or the 1960s when major social changes were being advocated. But now, Republicans seem like a radical fringe party, seeking to overthrow established institutions, even the basic ones that govern elections, so that they can implement their radical agenda of reversing the rights that have been gained by various minority groups in so many areas, in favor of increasing the power of white Christians. It is now the Democrats who are ‘conservative’, seeking to preserve those hard-won rights.
Clearly, the labels ‘conservative’ and ‘reform’ no longer apply to large umbrella groups like the two major parties in the US. Those labels only apply to specific policies and for which the labels assigned to the parties’ policies can switch.
The destruction of the intellectual and policy side of the Republican party goes even further then that. The Republican party in the now distant past was not entirely opposed to change, just proposing that change must happen in measured steps. Not entirely opposed to government regulation, only that people be realists about what the government can do and how well government programs work.
Nixon ran on a cynical law and order platform but he actually took steps to reduce crime after he took office. He started drug treatment programs around the US because the analysts said that drug addiction was the root cause of a lot of petty crime. Today’s Republicans would never bother which such things, instead pushing for harsher sentences and making more things illegal. Under Reagan and Gingrich the Republican party realized that fixing problems was actually counter productive because then you couldn’t campaign on the promise of fixing them. So bold but ineffective programs are better then functional ones.
At the same time socially the party went from slow change to reactionary regressive. Forget careful change for the better, they want a return to the social structure of the 50’s. But not what really existed, as we get further and further from the 50’s their goal becomes more and more of a fictional history that never existed. Closer to Leave it to Beaver then any actual reality.
There is also the problem of Libertarians and Objectivists infiltrating the Republican party. Both of those groups hold economic policy as a matter of faith. Lower taxes and smaller government are always good and if events in the real world don’t line up then reality must be wrong. This lets them relentlessly hammer a few issues without concern for history or truth.
No they don’t, and you know it. Large parts of what they claim to want were not the case in the 1950s.
When your “idea” dehumanizes and calls for the death of minority groups, it needs to be smothered.
The correct labels for the two parties in the USA are conservative and reactionary.
Sorry this is a bit late but it took me awhile to sort out the right words for what I was thinking.
I agree with @xohjoh2n that it’s not the 1950’s they’re after. None of them ever say that. Only people on the other side politically say mention the 50’s because it’s the closest reality we can think of that has anything in common with what these loons are saying.
We’re doing them a disservice. We’re underestimating them. They’re much more unhinged than that.
What they really want is just one thing: their platform is pure wish fulfillment.
They want “the right people” to be able to do whatever they want and everyone else to not only get out of their way but to actively pay for and support it, both with blood and taxes. They want the ignorant white people’s dream where every one of them can be Emperor Karen the First whenever they want to be and make someone else pay for it when the consequences come due. The more they talk about it in their echo chambers the farther it all gets from reality.