James Poulos has a good post up about the return of the inherent tension within the conservative coalition, between libertarians and traditionalists. He distinguishes between cultural libertarianism and political libertarianism. The post defies easy summation, but in the main, Poulos says political libertarianism should open up a space for those who reject cultural libertarianism to live. But it's not working out that way, because in the absence of cultural authority, politics and the law rush in to fill the gap.
MacIntyre (yes, him again) points out that even those political structures of modernity that seem values-neutral privilege a certain point of view. Which is true. Whenever I hear secular liberals complaining about religious conservatives seeking to "impose" their values on those who don't share it, I shake my head. They seek to impose their values on conservatives, but fool themselves into thinking that their values are normative and neutral. Politics today, MacIntyre writes, are "civil war by other means."
Which brings us to James Davison Hunter territory...
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"Strictly personally, for me the flaw in AA is that it defines the criteria wrong. It should establish and enforce blind employment application processes, where all arbitrary criteria unconnected to the job are eliminated from applications, and where any given person fits in any of those criteria is unknown until the final interview."
The closest we get to this in real life is civil service, and conservatives mostly hate it.
Choosing an unqualified candidate over a qualified one because the former is the boss' nephew is fairly unusual. The point in the employment process where most discrimination happens these days is in choosing among various qualified candidates, when it is usually very easy to claim that candidate X is MORE qualified than candidate Y, and gee isn't it interesting that candidate X is white and male and candidate Y isn't.
The idea that a boss has the right to hire, not only a qualified applicant, but the MOST qualified applicant, needs a second look. Often the question comes up because the job qualifications aren't properly defined in the first place, so that somebody who merely meets the official standards really CAN'T do the job very well. If the job standards are properly defined, then no injustice is done in requiring the boss to hire the first qualified candidate who walks in the door, which really would cut out a lot of discrimination.
Even libertarians don't say there are no values, do what you want. They say that the mechanisms of state power should not be harnessed to impose the values of one set of citizens on all citizens, and should in fact be used only to prevent HARM to citizens.
I'm tired of being slandered by conservatives, whose values, whatever else they may include, apparently don't cover bearing false witness.
The GOP seems to have resolved the conflict between libertarianism and cultural conservatism by offering cultural conservatism to the poor and economic libertarianism to the rich.
An aspect of libertarianism that doesn't get discussed much is its opposition to the criminalization of victimless behavior. Yes, certainly drug use and prostitution cause harm. But most of the people harmed by it either are too far down in the chain of causality to be able to invoke the law on their own behalf (like people who live in neighborhoods beset by drugs and prostitution), or have done their own risk-benefit calculation and decided they are better off participating in this immoral system than resisting it. So the state can't find any real victims to testify against the purveyors of drugs and prostitutes.
Which means that the only way to prosecute such crimes is by various kinds of entrapment or betrayal. Which enmeshes the criminal justice system in deceit and collaboration with evil, and ultimately corrupts it to the point where it can't do much of anything for real crime victims of any sort.
One doesn't even have to be a libertarian to believe that, while drugs may be bad, the War on Drugs is ultimately worse. One only has to believe that reducing public harm is more important than trying to make public statements about morality, if one has to choose between the two.
"Oh, I understand that Erin and crew interpret "love your neighbor as yourself" to mean, "if you in your omniscient wisdom think your neighbor is a sinner then beat them relentlessly over the head and deny them equal treatment under the law," but somehow that doesn't, for me, catch the spirit of the thing."
Yes, that's right - because loving your neighbor as yourself means:
A. One must be a liberal (of course, hatred is a conservative trait!)
and
B. Christian love is a love that is accepting of error and desires no correction on the part of another person, even if that correction is necessary to save their soul. If a father punishes his child for misbehaving, why, hes not loving enough! Similarly, if a preacher takes a stand against homosexuality, why, he's just a no good old fashioned bigot.
Oops, silly me, that's completely wrong. If I had a dime for every time a liberal claimed "love your neighbor as yourself" or "judge not, lest ye be judged" meant that homosexuality and sin and abortion and atheism are a-okay, I'd be a millionaire. Oh, how I wish people knew what agape really meant before spouting such nonsense.
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