Late Summer Musings on Politics

If you have read the Voice for much of its 19 years on-line you have run into the occasional "think piece" that spices up the usual fare.  The quiet weeks of mid-August before everyone gets back to our little town is a particularly good time for such a post.  With plenty of time to read things like book reviews of books I'll never read (perhaps that is the purpose of a book review), some gems can pop out.  Barton Swain at the WSJ did just such a favor in reviewing a new book about John Locke, the 17th century British philosopher.  Locke is sometimes referred to as "the first liberal".  Swain uses that as a jumping off point:

One way to sum up postwar American politics is to say that conservatives try to stop liberals from breaking the liberals’ own rules. The “rules” in this formulation are those of liberalism in the broadest sense: constitutional principles, the rule of law, rights-based protections. 

“Liberal” regimes aren’t supposed to impose a particular understanding of the Good on their citizens; they’re meant to ensure local and individual freedoms and enable citizens to figure out what the Good is for themselves. But some liberals—typically the highly educated and privileged sort—tend to forget they are liberals and try to define righteousness for everybody. They do this by reallocating citizens’ wealth according to their own ideals, regulating private economic behavior, dictating to local communities how they should govern themselves, imposing protean codes of correct speech and behavior on everybody else, and so on. Conservatives, in this admittedly biased way of putting it, are there to stop liberals from indulging these illiberal impulses; to remind them, in other words, that they are liberals, not potentates.

Well put.  We see the potentates very clearly in Sacramento; and the county and our city are not immune by any means.  We see Sacramento "dictating to local communities how they should govern themselves" all over the place.  It makes one wonder why someone who just wants to serve the community, instead of climbing the political ladder, would want to run for city council when Newsom, the state senate and assembly can dictate how everything will run?  We have an election in 13 weeks.  We will have at least one brand new city council member (in the new, open seat that was dictated to us), a new assemblywoman and a new federal House member.  Here's hoping they will be truly Locke-style "liberals".

Comments

[[email protected]]

Who will that be Joe?