A pyromaniac in a field of straw men
George Will:
The thing I do not like about Warren is that she is a control freak. She has the same view of business as the fascists . She is worse than a socialist who wants to own all the business enterprises. She is content to let others own the businesses as long as she is allowed to run them. That si the Obama Dodd-Frank model.
Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says. Warren says:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.
...There is much more.
The thing I do not like about Warren is that she is a control freak. She has the same view of business as the fascists . She is worse than a socialist who wants to own all the business enterprises. She is content to let others own the businesses as long as she is allowed to run them. That si the Obama Dodd-Frank model.
George Will's Us-them anti-government rhetoric ironically illustrates a conclusion contrary to his.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, it is the us-them anti-government ideology which is in fact contrary to society when and if that society is all about self-governance. Self-governance, we the people, is the quintessential value of this American society and experiment.
Summary: George thinks conservatives take society more seriously because they are, unlike liberals, not collectivists.
George's Fallacies today: Redherring, Begging the Question, and affirmation from negative premises, or affirming the disjunct, depending on how you read it.
George Will wrote: "Warren's emphatic assertion of the unremarkable -- that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others -- misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously."
Once again, George puts his thesis (conservatives, not liberals, gotz social contract) at the end, after his redherring rant about liberals being commies, because he can't support it.
The point, which George misses and seems to be trying to refute, is actually one of Warren's premises, not her point.
Warren's premise is that Society and Government are one and the same. And they are. Government is an inextricable component of the social contract.
This puts George in a tizzy, because he embraces the us-them anti-government ideology.
For his redherring rant, George absurdly turns reality on its head, trying to redefine and counter the general perception and reality that liberalism is far more synonymous with American individualism than the right wing classism/nationalism/religiuosity bigotry. He conflates all of liberalism with communism, that liberals are *really* the commy collectivists who want to take take take take from you and eat your babies.
His begging the question redherring bigotry aside, this is not only absolutist idiocy, but it does nothing to support his apparent premise and conclusion (also begging the question), that conservative's gotz the social contract bestest!
The us-them anti-government rhetoric, ironically illustrates quite the opposite.
George Will said: "Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts."
LOL
A strawman argument is an informal fallacy, a redherring: i.e. it changes the topic. It typically comes in the form of stating an irrelevant self-evident fact in such a manner that it appears that your opponent was arguing otherwise.
Quite clearly, Warren's simply making her argument for the social contract, and the social contract is not irrelevant.
George Will exhibits that classic right wing problem in which they are so accustomed to their own fallacies, so accustomed to their rhetorical illegitimacy, that when someone comes a long and actually arrives at a conclusions about something with relevant premises, presents a legitimate argument about something, they think it's somehow fallacious, because they've come to believe that their fallacies are legitimate.
I suppose it's quite handy though, to believe that any argument not in harmony with your delusions is somehow fallacious, thus not requiring you to refute it.