Filed with Politics MOC · Related: Ideology & Foundations · 60.10 Argumentation
- Idea of American Experiment is over
- Founding fathers
- Influenced by Aristotle and Polybious
- Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the kyklos, it rotates through the three basic forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments: ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny
- Essential premise of the founders that people were a certain way, free. Not should be. Worth fighting for until it’s not
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Rhetoric is very liberal and abstract, but behavior of America is more conservative and traditional
- Liberalism unmoored from virtue turns into moral relativism
- Liberalism idea that a thousand flowers should bloom, that free speech is a good thing in and of itself and freedoms are an inherent value.
- Freedom is not a virtue itself without a framework of virtue
- When you freely choose to do something it makes you a worse person not a better person.
- Freedom itself is not a virtue
- Instrumental if you have a series of virtues and you can prioritize them those virtues
- With the lose of virtue in recent times, you end up with an inability between value systems—so all value systems get treated as equivalent = post-constructionism, idea that everything is a matter of grabbing power and imposing it on people you don’t like.
- Localism
- Conservatism is about conserving virtues
- John Locke spent half his time doing Protestant/Christian apologetics
- Conservatism is built ground up and Liberalism is built top down
- Instrumental value vs inherent value
- Instrumental value
- Freedom
- If you are on an empty island, you have freedom but no value
- Object oriented
- Freedom
- Inherent value
- Friendship
- Family
- Instrumental value
- What is freedom?
- Lord Acton, Dante, Cortez
- Freedom is willing and willing is predicated on knowledge
- Ability to do what we ought to do
- Lord Acton, Dante, Cortez
- Founding fathers