Now Pondering . . .
On the subway today, I jotted down the following ideas as possible questions to explore in my next few blog posts:
1. Are young Americans more culturally liberal and more open to social-democratic policies than their Boomer and Gen-Xer parents were at the same age? If so, to what extent and why? Social democracies have historically tended to flourish only in ethnically homogeneous nation-states (like Iceland, Germany, and Japan) whose people feel culturally and historically connected to each other as a "tribe". America's racial, ethnic, and religious differences were once considered the major reason social democracy could never work here. Have Americans gotten beyond that? Do millenials now understand and sympathize with each other, thanks to the Internet, to the point of spanning their generation's unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity?
2. Handicapping the 2010 election. Do the Republicans need a message beyond "fear the evil Democrats"? Do the Democrats need a message beyond "Fear the crazy Republicans"?
3. The "Race Card": Infinite Regression Do liberals cynically play the race card more or less than conservatives cynically allege that they do? What kinds of liberals and conservatives are involved in this, and is there any difference? Are we at risk of infinite regression?
4. Resources and Reality. The world's declining oil supply will have an increasingly profound accelerating effect, in the coming years, on a huge range of scarcity-motivated crises that already exist around the world. People tend to think of oil only as an energy source, but it is also (and, I think,even more importantly) the one critical input which -alone- sustains the world's unprecedented levels of agricultural and manufacturing output. Oil is just *one* source of energy (albeit an important one); but it's the *only* source of the hydrocarbons necessary to produce synthetic fertilizers and plastics. Isn't that what our politicians and scientists should really be worrying about?
5. Beyond Apatheism. Religion was once about providing a set of definitive *answers* to the deepest questions of human existence. People of faith tend to view the rise of atheism and agnosticism as a form of denial that such questions exist or indifference to the answers; but is that what's really going on? I get the impression that people are increasingly willing to accept and embrace the existence of profound spiritual questions, while denying both the existence and even the need for definitive answers to them. This has been called "apatheism," but is it really a form of apathy, or is it something more? Something new? Traditional religion was born of humanity's bottomless, instinctual fear of the unknown; but this new phenomenon seems to thrive on humanity's emerging love of the unknown. How common are such views, and with whom? And why? [Once again, I'm tempted to credit the Internet]
6. Small Government Originalism: The Hot Girl Who Sucks in Bed of American Politics. The Tea Party, Constitutional originalists, and most other conservatives these days have taken to advocating for a vision (ostensibly shared by the Constitution's Framers) of a Jeffersonian Republic based on religiously-inspired moral virtues and a sharply restricted role for government in American society, and for the Federal government in particular. This view is philosophically solid, and it lends itself to simple, cogent explanation (the "hot" part); but in practice this "conservative originalist" model has never worked. . . and historically almost all of America's triumphs as a nation have come as a direct result of ignoring it.
7. The Progressive Balanced Federal Budget. Conservatives have suggested balancing the budget without raising taxes or cutting the military, essentially by slashing discretionary spending and phasing out/privatizing Social Security and Medicare. I'd like to explore the numbers to see what it would take to balance the budget the opposite way, i.e.: by raising taxes on the rich and cutting military spending, while keeping Social Security and Medicare intact (or even expanding them).
Any thoughts, gentle reader?
1. Are young Americans more culturally liberal and more open to social-democratic policies than their Boomer and Gen-Xer parents were at the same age? If so, to what extent and why? Social democracies have historically tended to flourish only in ethnically homogeneous nation-states (like Iceland, Germany, and Japan) whose people feel culturally and historically connected to each other as a "tribe". America's racial, ethnic, and religious differences were once considered the major reason social democracy could never work here. Have Americans gotten beyond that? Do millenials now understand and sympathize with each other, thanks to the Internet, to the point of spanning their generation's unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity?
2. Handicapping the 2010 election. Do the Republicans need a message beyond "fear the evil Democrats"? Do the Democrats need a message beyond "Fear the crazy Republicans"?
3. The "Race Card": Infinite Regression Do liberals cynically play the race card more or less than conservatives cynically allege that they do? What kinds of liberals and conservatives are involved in this, and is there any difference? Are we at risk of infinite regression?
4. Resources and Reality. The world's declining oil supply will have an increasingly profound accelerating effect, in the coming years, on a huge range of scarcity-motivated crises that already exist around the world. People tend to think of oil only as an energy source, but it is also (and, I think,even more importantly) the one critical input which -alone- sustains the world's unprecedented levels of agricultural and manufacturing output. Oil is just *one* source of energy (albeit an important one); but it's the *only* source of the hydrocarbons necessary to produce synthetic fertilizers and plastics. Isn't that what our politicians and scientists should really be worrying about?
5. Beyond Apatheism. Religion was once about providing a set of definitive *answers* to the deepest questions of human existence. People of faith tend to view the rise of atheism and agnosticism as a form of denial that such questions exist or indifference to the answers; but is that what's really going on? I get the impression that people are increasingly willing to accept and embrace the existence of profound spiritual questions, while denying both the existence and even the need for definitive answers to them. This has been called "apatheism," but is it really a form of apathy, or is it something more? Something new? Traditional religion was born of humanity's bottomless, instinctual fear of the unknown; but this new phenomenon seems to thrive on humanity's emerging love of the unknown. How common are such views, and with whom? And why? [Once again, I'm tempted to credit the Internet]
6. Small Government Originalism: The Hot Girl Who Sucks in Bed of American Politics. The Tea Party, Constitutional originalists, and most other conservatives these days have taken to advocating for a vision (ostensibly shared by the Constitution's Framers) of a Jeffersonian Republic based on religiously-inspired moral virtues and a sharply restricted role for government in American society, and for the Federal government in particular. This view is philosophically solid, and it lends itself to simple, cogent explanation (the "hot" part); but in practice this "conservative originalist" model has never worked. . . and historically almost all of America's triumphs as a nation have come as a direct result of ignoring it.
7. The Progressive Balanced Federal Budget. Conservatives have suggested balancing the budget without raising taxes or cutting the military, essentially by slashing discretionary spending and phasing out/privatizing Social Security and Medicare. I'd like to explore the numbers to see what it would take to balance the budget the opposite way, i.e.: by raising taxes on the rich and cutting military spending, while keeping Social Security and Medicare intact (or even expanding them).
Any thoughts, gentle reader?
posted by Proconsul | 12:02 AM
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