02-22-2009, 09:23 PM
Quote:I would disagree only that the Bush administration focus on "Common Good" or his perversion of Communitarianism extended into pre-emptive war and domestic spying. Attacks on liberty from the right are just as chilling as psuedo-collectivism from the left.
I can't say I see Bush's doctrines post-2001 as an extension of the "compassionate conservative" doctrine at all. What seems much more fitting to me is that the airy-fairy centrist-sounding "compassionate" meme was essentially an advertising scheme to return to Reagan-era politics. Once 9/11 "changed everything", the facade became entirely redundant, or even a liability, and the neoconservative hawks moved into the limelight. The public, by that point, had become much less interested in post-partisan huggy-feel-good crap, and much more interested in muscular, testosterone-laden "with us or against us" governance. The erosion of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms under the PATRIOT act were justified entirely on the second philosophy, not the first.
And, and I'm sure you could guess, I certainly do not agree that locking people up without Habeas Corpus, violating privacy through wiretapping and illegal search and seizure, or kissing the Geneva Conventions goodbye are in any sense "just as chilling" as some milquetoast suggestions that maybe the individual is not the first, last and only concept in liberty.
-Jester