[A] common point between academic and media analysis is the tendency to “unmask” an ideological opponent. To unmask is to reveal a delusion beneath a political or intellectual claim. To unmask is to presuppose that there is no principled basis for debate. There is nothing to understand besides the error of the other. The presence of difference of opinion attests only to the existence of false-consciousness, not to the existence of a question that admits more than one answer.
Not read the whole essay, but this is to the point:
The Republican Party has largely decided to cover for Donald Trump’s massive corruption, grotesque lies, and manifest unfitness for office. But few of them have gone quite so far, or quite so cravenly, as Rand Paul. The junior senator from Kentucky, and onetime hope of the extremely short-lived “libertarian moment” in American politics, has not only attached himself to Trump, but is actively snuffing out whatever faint stirrings of opposition his colleagues can muster.
While the GOP Congress has ignored the president’s self-enrichment, refusal to disclose his tax returns, and clear violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, some have expressed willingness to investigate his opaque ties to Russia. Paul is not one of them. And not only does he see no need for investigation on Russia, Paul has staked out a stance against any investigations, period, on the brutally frank grounds that it would impair the party’s legislative agenda. “I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party,” he told “Kilmeade and Friends.” “We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans.”
Many Republicans have made piecemeal excuses not to exercise the oversight function. Only Paul has elevated the practice of looking away from the crimes of the Executive branch to an actual principle of governance.
But it ignores the fact that many people - increasingly many people, including some very powerful and influential people, right up to Trump himself - base their opinions on 'facts' that are at best grossly distorted, if not plucked out of thin air. The 'Bowling Green massacre' is not an opinion to be debated: it's an imaginary event.
Would you willingly 'compromise' on a point of fact with someone you knew to be telling outright lies?
Lie = willingly say untrue things.
I rather have the impression a lot of people absolutley believe what they say - no matter if it's factual or not. for them it IS factual (just look at the conspiracy theories going wild these days). - which further complicates things.
Lie = willingly say untrue things.
I rather have the impression a lot of people absolutley believe what they say - no matter if it's factual or not. for them it IS factual (just look at the conspiracy theories going wild these days). - which further complicates things.
Would you willingly 'compromise' on a point of fact with someone you knew to be telling outright lies?
Here’s the bottom line. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers [of refugees from Muslim-majority countries]. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe.
you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden
you look at [the TV segment I was watching last night about the situation] in Sweden
It's the same with Trump's "Swedish terrorist atrocity" - it's still terrible, in different ways, whether he straight-up lied or confused Sweden with a town in Pakistan that has some of the same letters in its name. And then he definitely lied by claiming he was talking about ongoing cultural strife.
wtf? so, now something is "factual" simply because one "absolutely believe(s)" it?
You're letting them off the hook far too easily.
In families, people often get together to discuss matters of shared concern. There will be many opinions, conflicting counsels and even factions. But in a happy family everyone will accept to be bound by the final decision, even if they disagree with it. They have a shared investment in staying together. Something is more important to all of them than their own opinion, and that is the family, the thing whose welfare and future they have come together to discuss.
To put it in another way, the family is part of their identity. It is the thing that does not change, as their several opinions alter and conflict. A shared identity takes the sting from disagreement. It is what makes opposition, and therefore rational discussion, possible. And it is the foundation of any way of life in which compromise, rather than dictatorship, is the norm.
The same is true in politics. Opposition, the free expression of dissent and the rule of compromise all presuppose a shared identity. There has to be a first-person plural, a "we", if the many individuals are to stay together, accepting each other's opinions and desires, regardless of disagreements.
Religion provides such a first-person plural.... But... that kind of first-person plural does not sit easily with democratic politics.
(...)
Hence the need for a national rather than a religious "we". A nation state is the by-product of human neighbourliness, shaped by an invisible hand from the countless agreements between people who speak the same language and live side by side. It results from compromises established after many conflicts, and expresses the slowly forming agreement among neighbours both to grant each other space and to protect that space as common territory. It depends on localised customs and a shared routine of tolerance. Its law is territorial rather than religious and invokes no source of authority higher than the intangible assets that its people share.
All those features are strengths, since they feed into an adaptable form of pre-political commitment. Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance - in something like the way people identify themselves with a family - the politics of compromise will not emerge.
People have to take their neighbours seriously, as fellow citizens with an equal claim to protection, for whom they might be required, in moments of crisis, to lay down their lives. They do this because they believe themselves to belong together in a shared home. The history of the world is proof of this. Wherever people identify themselves in terms that are not shared by their neighbours, then the state falls apart at the first serious blow - as has happened in the former Yugoslavia, in Syria and Lebanon, and in Nigeria today.