This evening I wandered into a section of the internet filled with the writings of academic liberals. This stuff is almost intentionally unreadable, as if written by a secret priesthood using a mixture of English and private code to ward off inquisitive outsiders. Writing to obscure clarity is a curious phenomenon for Professors being paid to be knowledgeable, but it seems to be a common defense against taxpayers asking to examine the results of our expenditures.
I was trying to uncover a concise explanation of the concept of Associative Democracy some sociologists are trying to develop into a political theory. My cursory glance over the material indicates Associative Democracy is the idea that organizations of people with shared concerns should have an equal place in government along side the elected officials of Representative Democracy. In other words, the AFL-CIO should have an official role in government policy, and the Sierra Club should have a vote on all environmental legislation. Of course, Church and State still need to be separated.
The search wasn’t coming up with anything interesting until I found this one paragraph, written as criticism, which seemed to capture the whole problem of the academic left.
Source: Cohen and Rogers proceed as if fundamental principles do not matter. They denounce the status quo and condemn both parties for their failure to see the situation we are really in. But do they propose a principled direction in American politics -- one the results of which they would accept because they accept the principles? I do not think so.These socialist scholars are desperately trying to find a way to organize social structures to achieve a desired outcome. They think equality and justice will come if they can just put the building blocks in the correct order. It is the desired outcome that is important and not foundational principles like individual liberty, including the right to be wrong. The socialist approach is like trying to assemble Frankenstein’s monster from bits and pieces of the dead. The socialists have given us a series of monsters from Hitler to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot and they are back in the lab still trying to perfect a construction.
