Tag: liberalism

Categories
partisanship social media

Another Comedian Breaks Free

Sarah Silverman

Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has famously lent no small part of her cachet to the progressive cause, supporting Senator Bernie Sanders in both of his Democratic presidential runs, is now ditching the Democratic Party.

Her complaint isn’t that the party stiffed her candidate twice, first when the Democratic National Committee stabbed Bernie in the back for Hillary and next when it orchestrated ingenious maneuvers to gain the nomination (and then the presidency) for the tepid (and tepidly supported) Joe Biden.

I have argued before that Democrat insiders’ treatment of Sanders was deeply anti-democratic. But no, Ms. Silverman directs her ire against “the absolutist-ness of the party,” as she put it the other day on Instagram. “It’s so . . . elitist. You know, for something called ‘progressive,’ it allows for zero progress.”* Telling, perhaps, that Ms. Silverman emphasizes “progressive” and not “democratic,” as if it were named “The Progressive Party.”

Silverman specifically called attention not only to progressives’ unwillingness to compromise, but also to the it-takes-two-to-tango divide: “You know, Republicans might hear an idea that they would totally agree with, but, if it comes from AOC then they hate it.” She admitted that the same thing applied to her.

No wonder, then, that she does not “want to be associated with any party anymore,” complaining about “too much baggage.”

But she’s objecting to her fellow progressives’ anti-free speech agenda, too, characterizing it as “righteousness porn.”

Silverman, who has a special named Jesus Is Magic and is famous for her rape jokes, has herself felt the sting of cancel culture and would be a natural proponent of principled free speech.

But that is not a progressive cause, it is a very old-fashioned liberal one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* An f-bomb has been elided in the quotation from Ms. Silverman.

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Categories
general freedom

Free Brazil

Kim Kataguiri

Kim Kataguiri — a founder and the most prominent public face of the Free Brazil Movement, which recently led millions in protest against high inflation, high taxes, and economy-crippling cronyism — is an unusual man.

First, there’s his age: 19.

Second, there’s his background — atypical but hardly unique, given the country’s substantial Japanese-Brazilian minority.

Third and most important, there’s the fact that he’s influenced by the ideas of free-market thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, ideas communicated online by Brazilian and American think tanks. In consequence, Kataguiri’s popular, social-media-conveyed critique of Dilma Rousseff’s tax-happy socialist government is openly liberal in perspective.

“Liberal,” of course, as in “having something to do with freedom and responsibility.” Classical liberal. Libertarian. Not warmed-over socialist-leaning liberal, as in America’s Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Do his free-market ideas and those of other young Free Brazil leaders mean that most Brazilians inspired by the Free Brazil Movement are just as principled? No; they may just be angry at the destruction wrought by an openly socialist government. Consistency may be the furthest thing from their minds.

But they do seem open to a new, positive alternative.

Kataguiri is perhaps overly optimistic, predicting that “in the next decade or two, most of our society will not only understand classical liberalism, but defend it too.”

But I like optimism. Especially since, whether you call it “classical liberalism,” libertarianism, or “small-government conservatism,” freedom isn’t exactly winning here on our fertile soil.

Still, I invite Kataguiri to drop by the United States when he has a chance . . . and do what he can to convert us to classical liberalism as well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Kim Kataguiri

 

Categories
ideological culture links

Townhall: Racist Anti-Racism

This weekend’s Townhall column is about race. It is long, in part because talking about race is still so tricky that brief discussions can be easily taken out of context.

And there’s so much to say.

I expand on some comments I made on Friday. But I try to spell out the logic at greater length. So it doesn’t get missed. Racism is an affront to justice. Justice tries to mete out what people deserve, individually. It is especially concerned about establishing basic rules of how to behave. It doesn’t answer every problem of society. It answers crime with punishment and restitution, answers torts with redress. But it does so based on individual responsibility.

Racism is wrong because it judges individuals not on their merits, but by their race. It’s stupid as well as ugly and unjust.

Progressives, however, have been trying to overthrow the old idea of justice as personal freedom and individual responsibility since Progressivism first became an Era.

So it’s no wonder they spread a response to racism that is itself racist. They don’t understand what justice is. So they make an unjust response to an injustice.

Anyway, go over to the column and give it a read. Come back here and tell me what you think.

You will probably be brimming with ideas, complaints, responses. Fine. Me too. One idea I couldn’t include in the column was the sources for some of today’s inner-city African-American problems. It sure seems like they’ve been selected, by racists, for some horrible burdens. But I wouldn’t be hasty on this.

It’s certainly true that official policy has played a huge role in destroying a lot of lives in the inner cities (especially but not limited to African-Americans) — the progressive trifecta of minimum wage raises, welfare aid to families without in-home fathers, and the war on drugs, has devastated the culture of many inner city blacks. Some folks call one of more of these policies “racist,” but the intent, usually, has seemed to be color-blind. That these policies have hit African-American communities especially hard may be more of an accident of history than a policy of repression. But I could be wrong.

Writers from my perspective were once called liberal. Self-defined “Progressives” took over that word in the FDR era. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to uphold a commonsense view of justice. Important contributions to the study and advocacy of this concept of justice as they relate to racial issues include

  • The Economics of the Colour Bar, by W.H. Hutt
  • The Other Side of Racism, by Anne Wortham
  • Race and Culture, by Thomas Sowell
  • Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell
  • The State Against Blacks, by Walter Williams

These are all books worth looking up. For further reading about the links between laissez-faire individualism and true anti-racism, you couldn’t do better than start your reading here: