Not necessarily. It isn’t a mere average - as I said, take the good ideas from both, reject the garbage.
And it just so happens that the sum total of the "good ideas" more or less aligns with a softer left wing, early 21st century political ideology? Right.
The garbage often tends to collect at the poles, because that’s where the extremists end up, and good thinkers they usually are not.
It's really strange to reject any kind of hardline position on something simply because it's on one extreme or the other.
Well yeah, I’m not about to go neoreactionary or anything because that’s just dumb.
Right, you're just going to safeguard the status quo and take issue with people further left pushing too hard too fast without really opposing any of the things they've accomplished.
Progress in the broadest possible sense is generally desirable.
Unless you have some specific end goal in mind, how do you propose to advocate for something as vague as progress without giving rise to what we see today?
Does that mean you embrace critical theory, dye your hair neon and go around beating up people you disagree with? Not really.
Why not?
I’m for a social safety net, more so than I was, largely because I think lack of social mobility is one of the things destabilising the west at the moment, and that’s something that’s become increasingly worse over time. I’m generally in favour of technological progress, and allowing businesses to be as free as one can reasonably otherwise be in those sorts of circumstances. I’m increasingly for a constructive version of national pride that isn’t jingoistic or isolationist - and I think the critical theory types have a lot to answer for in souring that discussion.
Let's take the last bit just to keep things streanlined. What sort of national pride do you think would be good, and how does it relate to nationalism more generally? And how has the left soured the discussed, in your view?
No, because as I said, it’s not simply an average of the two poles. The point is to reject the poles as a valid framing of politics.
How exactly do you plan to reject ideas on the extremes if you don't think that those extremes are even valid as such? I'm not quite sure what this even means, tbh.
Progress in what sense? Equality? I’m in favour of it because I see no compelling argument against it, and it tends to allow more individuals to flourish. I’d argue that what we’ve seen recently being put forward in the name of equality isn’t actually equality.
Equality in any meaningful sense is, at best, an unattainable pipe dream.
See, the issue here is that if your societal telos is "equality" or something else equally vague, you're never going to reach it, because inequality is a fundamental fact of our existence. If you combine this with the idea that ensuring equality is a moral imperative for individuals and groups, you are required to keep pushing further and further to fix the inequalities that you see around you.
More pragmatically speaking, even when you correct for legal inequality, people are going to start off in different places. If you're about equality of outcome, this is never going to be a reality unless you artificially ensure that everyone starts on the same footing, which requires large-scale social engineering and enforcing equality of outcome. Why do you think the left does what it does? It sees disparities between different people, and because it largely rejects the fact of inequality among people, it concludes that there is some institutional problem that is creating these disparities. And if they can just fix the problems with the institutions, or with societal attitudes, then these problems should eventually disappear.
A lot of this goes back to some of the problems with the fundamental assumptions of liberalism itself, but that's a much deeper topic.
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