08-09-2016, 04:27 AM
Ted King wrote:
[quote=rjmacs]
Feeling that the soft corruption of money in politics is a keystone issue that needs to be addressed is a chiefly practical matter, not an ideological one.
Yes, a person can disagree with another person about what is the "right" means to achieve the goal of greatly diminishing corruption of money in politics. There can be disagreement on whether or not an incremental approach to the problem is sufficient or that it is necessary to have radical change relatively quickly. It's a practical question but a very complex one for which a proposed answer necessarily involves invoking a lot of assumptions about human nature/social/political reality. The empirical components can be hard to identify and very tricky to measure.
The assessment of the "right" pace of change is not only an empirical one. Emotional predisposition probably plays an inevitable and important role in what seems to be the "right" pace for change. Hormones and emotions - it's probably not a coincidence that young people with the most tuned up hormonal systems are emotionally predisposed to want change now rather than later. You can argue that such emotional factors are misguided, but their assessments of the best means - including pace of change - are not necessarily ideologically driven assessments.
On rereading what you said, I see that I misunderstood how you were taking the metaphor I used - "keystone". It totally makes sense that that would suggest an engineering perspective, and, hence, the "practical" question perspective. I should have realized that. I was thinking of "keystone" as a keystone value in a moral arc of their value system. A conceptual anchor point for a lot of moral assessments. That was sort of the backdrop for what I wrote in my previous post (above).
But I can see that the word "keystone" suggests that the political stress lines lead back to it. Whether or not they do would be an empirical question. That means the disagreement would be an empirical one, not an ideological one - which is one of the points I think I was trying to make, that some Sanders supporters not supporting Clinton could be on (what you think are mistaken) empirical grounds, not necessarily because they are ideological twits.
Edit: Oh, I wanted to add that the choice of the concept of "keystone" was not a good one for what I wanted to say. I was fishing around in my head for a good metaphor and for some reason "keystone" popped up. Since I grew up in Keystone, Iowa, I think I felt like I just couldn't pass it up. :-)