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Showing posts from November, 2017

...or is ideology here to stay? The case for a new golden rule: "shared values first"

In the last post I made the case that perhaps, if we could engage in political discourse without ideology, we might find more synergies between seemingly opposite points of view. Is it possible to break down polarized politics by removing ideology from the equation, and focusing on specific policies, localities, and data? Boris DeWiel, "Democracy: A History of Ideas", (2000) Political scientists such as Boris DeWiel would suggest that the answer is no; that politics is fundamentally a contest of values, and political discourse boils down to alternate conceptions of a "good" society. His book, Democracy: A History of Ideas , reminds us that our political differences are often the result of the values that are most important to us. For some: personal and individual liberty, for others: equality and fairness. These values are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and there's nothing inherently wrong with values such as these. Our difficulties begin when we pri