Jon Henke: "Recently, Democrats have won on promises to "empower" people. But Democrats are much more concerned with entitlements than empowerment. Progressives mostly succeed in making progress towards Washington, DC."
Will the right never learn the meaning of positive liberty? I really think it would help the debate if we could realize that freedom doesn't just run in one direction. Taxing the wealthy to create social programs that increase social mobility ultimately increases liberty--not for the rich dudes, but for the poor people who otherwise wouldn't have had a shot. This is fundamentally what positive liberty is, and while negative liberty isn't invalid by any means it would be nice to know that the smarter voices on the right at least understand this distinction.
Now, admittedly, positive liberty can get out of hand, and I think it's a good idea to have a party with the opposite conception of liberty to balance things out. However, conservatives actually love positive liberty when it comes to everything except for taxing the wealthy. In fact, on questions of social and foreign policy it is the Democratic Party that sees things in terms of negative liberty, while it's the GOP that believes that government can rule the world and get teens to stop fornicating--tasks that have eluded centuries of aspirees--but the very notion that government could do a decent job running a health care system is not only immoral but insane to them. I guess it's not really possible to be absolutely positive or negative due to the complexities of life, and some sort of mixture is necessary. But conservatives seem to think that the evils of big government don't apply to virtually everything they believe in. Maybe they should figure out what they really do stand for before trying to win power again?
