Young man, I salute your overall intentions, but you may end up banging your head against a wall, because the irrationality and corruption that plagues your country has a lot to do with institutional constraints that were put there at the country's founding. Compare the U.S. on various indices of well-being - lifespan, child poverty, infant mortality, and inequality - and you will find that the U.S. significantly lags every other advanced industrial country. This is not because Americans don't know how to solve these problems, these shortfalls exist because of institutional structures built into your political system. You have a constitution which is far more difficult to modify than any other modern industrial country. The country has changed since the eighteenth century and the country's constitution should reflect that change. You have state governments in charge of Federal elections which leads to gerrymandering, illegitimate restrictions on voting, and results in manifestly unrepresentative government. In Canada, which also has a federal system, voting is a federal responsibility and any changes are instituted by an impartial nonpartisan elections board. You have an ancient "Electoral System" originally instituted to favor the slave owning states, which subverts the democratic process, and allows Presidents to be elected by a minority of votes. You have a Supreme Court which has been captured by conservative Christians, whose decisions have supported big business over democracy - (Citizens United) and Christian doctrine over democracy (Dodds), as well as being a tool of the armaments industry. The Dodds decision alone has resulted in a growing division between "red" and "blue" states, and some degree of inter-state chaos. The election of a President (Trump) who was manifestly unfit to serve as a President was an obvious sign of serious, perhaps fatal weaknesses in the American democratic project. Your emphasis on Ethics is important. Trump's blatant corruption and the corruption inside the Republican party that he controls, and the media system in the U.S. that has broadcast his fire hose of lies are a direct cause of the present atmosphere of deceit and immorality in American political life. This cannot be changed by trying to change people's attitudes, the system needs to be overhauled, and, unfortunately, that is even less likely to happen. Your country is heading towards civil war, and everything that the extreme right is doing, including refusing to enact any reasonable form of gun control, is accelerating that movement towards chaos and dissolution.
Thank you for that detailed comment. I only got a cursory look at this article and got only to the point of seeing our political situation being attributed to a lack of "skills" which I have to say primes me to suspect that this could be a whitewash of the obvious practice of bad faith and political sociopathy coming from the an extremist maga-dominated Republican party. Maybe the article isn't euphemistic cover for decades of bad faith, skirting truth, and practicing sociopathy coming from the political right, but I have read so much elsewhere that tells me the problem is otherwise including maga's broken epistemology, broken moral compass, and autocratic aspirations. I have seen this obscured underbelly to this party since my adolescence 50 years ago. Some folks of my age just came to this same realization only recently. Some still have a notion that maga world is occupied by "good people" and "patriots". I have seen ample evidence that plenty of them are deliberately harmful and cruel. Of course, as in all aggression, the cruelty is dressed up as a rationalized interest in addressing an imaginary victim and finding a vulnerable minority to scapegoat as a cause of their or the nation's woes. I have no doubt that much confusion and fear is at the base of maga's dysfunction, but really its adherents are addicted to misinformation, disinformation, their biases, hate, and power and it is their responsibility to better inform themselves, use reasoning rather than myth, stop with the double standards in the application of principle, appreciate nuance and complexity, stop with the emotionally charged media dope they chronically consume, and get a grip on their exaggerated fears. I apologize for commenting without reading the article. I will try to get to it to it when i have time.
I read it and mid way through came to this sentence: "Skillful politics thus demands citizens who are sufficiently virtuous and knowledgeable to perform well, and who have the proper perspective on what is demanded of them and what they are using politics for." I would not ordinarily think of virtue and knowledge as "skills" but requisites. There are plenty of folks with virtue and knowledge but who lack the skill to influence people who are disinterested or who have their own alternative notions of virtue and knowledge. I agree with you that social conservatism is a large problem in developing a liberal society. Conformity itself for them has become the virtue. So the way i see it, real skill would be in getting social conservatives to abandon conformity as virtue and to focus more on actual harms rather than their reflexively accepting rules that are dissociated from harms. It would also be a real skill to dissuade neoliberals from equating unregulated capitalism, the profit motive, and market forces to virtue and liberty and to appreciate the disastrous runaway effects of wealth concentration and governance by the fossil fuel and gun manufacturing industries. We also see that one party has, through rhetorical skill, distorted liberal principles to accommodate their own biases, interests, and fetishes and are quite willing to use double standards when it suits them. As for knowledge, that is quite the chore for ordinary citizens from whom much necessary information is difficult to come by or overwhelming when discovered. Politicians have to be generalists when it comes to knowledge but effectiveness may come from application of policy through specialists through the regulatory state. Markets, like governments, aren't gods and can also be colosally wasteful. Then we run into the problem of application of effective policy conflicting with special interests. So while "lack of skills" may be a nice little synopsis of our political problems, I think at this point in the demise of democracy, we are required to jump to specifics: distorted notions of virtues or liberal principles, the bad faith practice of dishonest rhetoric and double standards, a too common lack of interest in the distribution of opportunity and the common good, a populace that is deliberately inundated with misinformation and disinformation and fact-free opinions rather than actual knowledge, an outdated and undemocratic structure to our elections, and the control of politicians by unelected oligarchs, special interests, and ideologies. But then that is my preference of course given that the Republican platform has become whatever Donald wants. We are well beyond any of his supporters having any interest in basic facts or virtue.
Treating virtues as skills, or treating being virtuous as a variety of skillfulness, has deep roots. My arguments in this essay draw from Buddhist philosophy, where it's common, but it also shows up in Western virtue ethics, such as Julian Annas's book, "Intelligent Virtue."
I just think "skill" is more aptly applied to how fascist rhetoric and politics operate in a non-virtuous way. One can be quite skillful in assimilating knowledge, practicing reason and virtue and be utterly ineffectual in influencing others who have an alternative epistemology and alternative loyalties and priorities. Practicing virtue for most people runs up against other priorities and complexity. Too many want credit for virtue merely through identity and handed to them from above.
The skill in question in this essay is "the skill of doing politics well." This includes successfully achieving one's political ends. (Or acting in such a way that one has maximized the chances of achieving his ends, because random chance or events outside our control might still prevent them from being realized.) But it also includes those ends being ethical, as too the behaviors one takes to achieve them. To take the sports analogy, someone who cheats might achieve their ends of scoring points, but we don't refer to the cheater as "skilled" at the game, because his "success" isn't the result of skill at playing the game, but rather dishonesty. Or, a dirty player might have success on the field, but we don't call a dirty player "skilled" at playing the game, because his success is the result of unethical (unsportsmanlike) behavior on the field.
Thus skillfulness in this regard includes an ethical/virtue component. Likewise, virtue contains a skill component, because a virtue isn't (just) an internal motivation, but it is the capacity to act on that motivation in a way that achieves (or maximizes the likelihood of achieving) the proper results of that motivation. This is why, for example, Aristotelian virtue theorizing includes practical wisdom within each virtue.
Methinks this is The Liberal Trap all over again. This is a practical, analytical, factual evaluation of "how we ought to do it". Sadly, The Facts Don't Matter. Politics is, at root, not based on rational discussion and wise decisions but instead is emotional (Kahneman System 1). Your analysis does not once deal with the insatiable desire of politicians to get and maintain *power*. That's sorta' practical (they can't do anything without it) but getting it and reveling in it is emotional, as is their inability (in most cases) to let go of it. Without taking into account the emotional forces involved in politics, any rational analysis is doomed from the start. Good, but doomed.
The author spends gallons of ink purporting to address this question, but to my mind never even comes close. Politics is bad because it involves ripping people off and doling the money out for supposedly worthy needs. This will ALWAYS lead to corruption, and to people focusing their energies jockeying for a good spot at the feeding trough rather than being productive in any way.
America will continue its downward spiral until it returns to founding principles: government should do NOTHING other than protect people's liberties from intrusion.
This isn't quite right. Politics *can* involve "ripping people off and doling the money out," and it might, in fact, often do so. But that doesn't mean "ripping people off and doling the money out" is *definitionally* the same thing as politics, or that politics *necessarily* entails that. It is logically—and practically—possible to direct and apply politics in ways that don't entail such behavior. If "ripping people off and doling the money out" is unskillful use, then we can still figure out how to engage in skillful use instead, rather than concluding that all use must necessarily be unskillful use.
Young man, I salute your overall intentions, but you may end up banging your head against a wall, because the irrationality and corruption that plagues your country has a lot to do with institutional constraints that were put there at the country's founding. Compare the U.S. on various indices of well-being - lifespan, child poverty, infant mortality, and inequality - and you will find that the U.S. significantly lags every other advanced industrial country. This is not because Americans don't know how to solve these problems, these shortfalls exist because of institutional structures built into your political system. You have a constitution which is far more difficult to modify than any other modern industrial country. The country has changed since the eighteenth century and the country's constitution should reflect that change. You have state governments in charge of Federal elections which leads to gerrymandering, illegitimate restrictions on voting, and results in manifestly unrepresentative government. In Canada, which also has a federal system, voting is a federal responsibility and any changes are instituted by an impartial nonpartisan elections board. You have an ancient "Electoral System" originally instituted to favor the slave owning states, which subverts the democratic process, and allows Presidents to be elected by a minority of votes. You have a Supreme Court which has been captured by conservative Christians, whose decisions have supported big business over democracy - (Citizens United) and Christian doctrine over democracy (Dodds), as well as being a tool of the armaments industry. The Dodds decision alone has resulted in a growing division between "red" and "blue" states, and some degree of inter-state chaos. The election of a President (Trump) who was manifestly unfit to serve as a President was an obvious sign of serious, perhaps fatal weaknesses in the American democratic project. Your emphasis on Ethics is important. Trump's blatant corruption and the corruption inside the Republican party that he controls, and the media system in the U.S. that has broadcast his fire hose of lies are a direct cause of the present atmosphere of deceit and immorality in American political life. This cannot be changed by trying to change people's attitudes, the system needs to be overhauled, and, unfortunately, that is even less likely to happen. Your country is heading towards civil war, and everything that the extreme right is doing, including refusing to enact any reasonable form of gun control, is accelerating that movement towards chaos and dissolution.
Thank you for that detailed comment. I only got a cursory look at this article and got only to the point of seeing our political situation being attributed to a lack of "skills" which I have to say primes me to suspect that this could be a whitewash of the obvious practice of bad faith and political sociopathy coming from the an extremist maga-dominated Republican party. Maybe the article isn't euphemistic cover for decades of bad faith, skirting truth, and practicing sociopathy coming from the political right, but I have read so much elsewhere that tells me the problem is otherwise including maga's broken epistemology, broken moral compass, and autocratic aspirations. I have seen this obscured underbelly to this party since my adolescence 50 years ago. Some folks of my age just came to this same realization only recently. Some still have a notion that maga world is occupied by "good people" and "patriots". I have seen ample evidence that plenty of them are deliberately harmful and cruel. Of course, as in all aggression, the cruelty is dressed up as a rationalized interest in addressing an imaginary victim and finding a vulnerable minority to scapegoat as a cause of their or the nation's woes. I have no doubt that much confusion and fear is at the base of maga's dysfunction, but really its adherents are addicted to misinformation, disinformation, their biases, hate, and power and it is their responsibility to better inform themselves, use reasoning rather than myth, stop with the double standards in the application of principle, appreciate nuance and complexity, stop with the emotionally charged media dope they chronically consume, and get a grip on their exaggerated fears. I apologize for commenting without reading the article. I will try to get to it to it when i have time.
I would encourage you to read the essay.
I read it and mid way through came to this sentence: "Skillful politics thus demands citizens who are sufficiently virtuous and knowledgeable to perform well, and who have the proper perspective on what is demanded of them and what they are using politics for." I would not ordinarily think of virtue and knowledge as "skills" but requisites. There are plenty of folks with virtue and knowledge but who lack the skill to influence people who are disinterested or who have their own alternative notions of virtue and knowledge. I agree with you that social conservatism is a large problem in developing a liberal society. Conformity itself for them has become the virtue. So the way i see it, real skill would be in getting social conservatives to abandon conformity as virtue and to focus more on actual harms rather than their reflexively accepting rules that are dissociated from harms. It would also be a real skill to dissuade neoliberals from equating unregulated capitalism, the profit motive, and market forces to virtue and liberty and to appreciate the disastrous runaway effects of wealth concentration and governance by the fossil fuel and gun manufacturing industries. We also see that one party has, through rhetorical skill, distorted liberal principles to accommodate their own biases, interests, and fetishes and are quite willing to use double standards when it suits them. As for knowledge, that is quite the chore for ordinary citizens from whom much necessary information is difficult to come by or overwhelming when discovered. Politicians have to be generalists when it comes to knowledge but effectiveness may come from application of policy through specialists through the regulatory state. Markets, like governments, aren't gods and can also be colosally wasteful. Then we run into the problem of application of effective policy conflicting with special interests. So while "lack of skills" may be a nice little synopsis of our political problems, I think at this point in the demise of democracy, we are required to jump to specifics: distorted notions of virtues or liberal principles, the bad faith practice of dishonest rhetoric and double standards, a too common lack of interest in the distribution of opportunity and the common good, a populace that is deliberately inundated with misinformation and disinformation and fact-free opinions rather than actual knowledge, an outdated and undemocratic structure to our elections, and the control of politicians by unelected oligarchs, special interests, and ideologies. But then that is my preference of course given that the Republican platform has become whatever Donald wants. We are well beyond any of his supporters having any interest in basic facts or virtue.
Treating virtues as skills, or treating being virtuous as a variety of skillfulness, has deep roots. My arguments in this essay draw from Buddhist philosophy, where it's common, but it also shows up in Western virtue ethics, such as Julian Annas's book, "Intelligent Virtue."
I just think "skill" is more aptly applied to how fascist rhetoric and politics operate in a non-virtuous way. One can be quite skillful in assimilating knowledge, practicing reason and virtue and be utterly ineffectual in influencing others who have an alternative epistemology and alternative loyalties and priorities. Practicing virtue for most people runs up against other priorities and complexity. Too many want credit for virtue merely through identity and handed to them from above.
The skill in question in this essay is "the skill of doing politics well." This includes successfully achieving one's political ends. (Or acting in such a way that one has maximized the chances of achieving his ends, because random chance or events outside our control might still prevent them from being realized.) But it also includes those ends being ethical, as too the behaviors one takes to achieve them. To take the sports analogy, someone who cheats might achieve their ends of scoring points, but we don't refer to the cheater as "skilled" at the game, because his "success" isn't the result of skill at playing the game, but rather dishonesty. Or, a dirty player might have success on the field, but we don't call a dirty player "skilled" at playing the game, because his success is the result of unethical (unsportsmanlike) behavior on the field.
Thus skillfulness in this regard includes an ethical/virtue component. Likewise, virtue contains a skill component, because a virtue isn't (just) an internal motivation, but it is the capacity to act on that motivation in a way that achieves (or maximizes the likelihood of achieving) the proper results of that motivation. This is why, for example, Aristotelian virtue theorizing includes practical wisdom within each virtue.
Methinks this is The Liberal Trap all over again. This is a practical, analytical, factual evaluation of "how we ought to do it". Sadly, The Facts Don't Matter. Politics is, at root, not based on rational discussion and wise decisions but instead is emotional (Kahneman System 1). Your analysis does not once deal with the insatiable desire of politicians to get and maintain *power*. That's sorta' practical (they can't do anything without it) but getting it and reveling in it is emotional, as is their inability (in most cases) to let go of it. Without taking into account the emotional forces involved in politics, any rational analysis is doomed from the start. Good, but doomed.
"Politics is bad, but why?"
The author spends gallons of ink purporting to address this question, but to my mind never even comes close. Politics is bad because it involves ripping people off and doling the money out for supposedly worthy needs. This will ALWAYS lead to corruption, and to people focusing their energies jockeying for a good spot at the feeding trough rather than being productive in any way.
America will continue its downward spiral until it returns to founding principles: government should do NOTHING other than protect people's liberties from intrusion.
This isn't quite right. Politics *can* involve "ripping people off and doling the money out," and it might, in fact, often do so. But that doesn't mean "ripping people off and doling the money out" is *definitionally* the same thing as politics, or that politics *necessarily* entails that. It is logically—and practically—possible to direct and apply politics in ways that don't entail such behavior. If "ripping people off and doling the money out" is unskillful use, then we can still figure out how to engage in skillful use instead, rather than concluding that all use must necessarily be unskillful use.