Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 8:00 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 7:47 pm
Consul wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 5:23 pm
The Left comprises
social liberalism (left-liberalism),
social democracy,
socialism, and
communism.
That's not really a problem. They share certain core ideological features, the only difference being the relative intensity with which they espouse them.
They're all basically economic nationalists, for example, they all put group or "social" rights ahead of individual rights, they all participate in Socialist utopianism, even if the utopias they envision are different, they share a naive and perfidious view of human perfectability, as well as an excessive faith in human government to produce progress. And they're all skeptical, to a greater or lesser degree, of core conservative values, such as individualism, competition, merit, reason, science, logic, family, rights, property, personal responsibility, and so on. The "family resemblance" there is so strong that I think the category holds well.
Well, sometimes conservatives don't seem to be as interested in "individualism, reason, science and logic". Competition and merit, seem to be bigger themes with conservatives than with liberals. Probably all of us also struggle with personal responsibility.
Individualism, certainly. Leftists are group-thinkers, by definition. As for science, reason and logic, I can only take them at their word: the Left has vigorous criticisms of all of them, as well as history, as inherently "white," "supremacist," "racist" and "privileged."
That being admitted, there are times when the Left WILL use "The Science," to back their agenda, as when they call Marxism "a scientific analysis," or when they demand that conservatives "follow The Science," by which they only ever mean whatever from technology appears to advance their agenda, such as COVID masks and COVID "vaccines", not
real science. And they'll use reason and logic and argumentation when it advances their agenda, but the minute reason or logic shows a flaw in their Great Program, they'll deny that either is determinative of anything. So their attitude to "science, reason and logic," is at best equivocal, at worst perfidious.