Holding a yardstick to politics

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I was just on Facebook and saw one of an LGBT couple I know post something about their amazement that two conservative supreme court justices voted in favor of preventing people from being fired from jobs over LGBT status.

That got me thinking - if we really get down to brass tacks in terms of what a conservative is, if they're filling that position appropriately, and what a liberal or even progressive would be if they're filling that seat appropriately, there's a measuring stick you can hold up to any of the three mentioned categories and see if they measure up or whether they're just a cheap knock off.

A conservative, for example, is holding on to a given set of laws or way of doing things and challenging anyone's claims that they've come up with something better. You need these people because - most new ideas are crap and need to be vetted. At the same time if a new idea includes morally important revisions to or extensions of old ideas, and in this particular case extending rights, with our founding document being the constitution you need to check it against the constitution and see if it's sitting within that framework.

A progressive is someone who'd be trying to make structural changes, diametrically opposite to conservatives in that aspect, and to really be making progress they should be taking every new idea they have, weighing it, putting it through very rigorous tests (scientific levels of disconfirmation), and bringing it conservatives as a challenge when the idea is properly baked. If the conservatives who they bring it to evaluate it for secondary and tertiary side effects and agree that it's either a benign improvement or even a 'raise all ships' improvement they should have no problem with it.

Liberals I'd say in this context would be doing something slightly different, ie. they'd be cleaning up areas where culture has enforced certain rules over and above the constitution that are inconsistent with the constitution. I put this out seprately because in a way I think you could be a liberal progressive or you could even be a liberal conservative in this sense.

Obviously these three containers are a bit dumbed down but I guess I'm trying to hone in one some lenses.

Pretty much we should be able to tell, by relatively simple litmus tests, which Democrats, which Republicans, and which other party politicians we'd want to keep and which ones are either low-quality populists, sell-outs, or in some other way completely out of alignment with their role in government.

I'm sure some people here could challenge or add on to these categories but, do you think these sound like good quick-and-dirty acid or litmus test of politicians and representatives? I think they're at least a good way of at least penetrating one's analysis down below the level of a given politician or representative's wranglings to see if they're logically consistent and, if they're both very popular and completely out of line with their purported political alignment, you can tell that there's something wrong and it's great place to start your inspection of both them and what lies behind them.

I think that is a good, if US-centric, summary.

In another thread I tried to illustrate the differences between liberalism, progressivism, and “big spending” (call it leftism, or social democracy, or socialism - none really fits), and how one could be influenced by any of those three ideologies and still be a conservative.
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That’s not particularly relevant to the Supreme Court of the USA of course.

I don’t think the current hyper partisan environment in the US really lends itself to analysing these sorts of differences. Things like the Political Compass, sh***y as they are, can prove helpful tools for elucidating the difference between liberalism and leftism. But progressivism being a third dimension hasn’t quite percolated into public consciousness in the same way.

The Supreme Court is something else entirely because it is about philosophies of jurisprudence. Conservative politicians often prefer a textual originalist perspective, while Democrats tend to prefer contextual approaches, but these aren’t true political ideologies.

People have a tendency to view Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as partisan types but I don’t really think either is. Gorsuch is something of a libertarian with a lot of sympathy for the American Indian cause, and Kavanaugh believes the rules should be simple and applied as the legislature intended.

Gorsuch’s opinion today is really clever and marks him as a great mind. I dare say it is partially a result of his time as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford but in all seriousness it’s way ahead of most progressive thinking even here and is sure to be influential throughout liberal democracies worldwide. It seems so obvious now that he has said it.

I think it's just critically important for us to hold ourselves steady.

Another way to think of certain aspects of the moment, and especially the social media food fight that so many people, including Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, and now Coleman Hughes have hit on, it's an amusement park and fun-house all rolled into one. Going to the local amusement park to jump on the latest roller coaster that has a 300+ foot apex on its tallest hill and gets up close to 100mph on the way down is fun, that's also the right context for it. When we start taking that need for excitement to sports hooliganism we've gotten into somewhat murky waters. When we expand that out to political hooliganism then we're in even more danger of losing what we have.

This is one of those refocusing and recalibrating thing though that probably has to happen at the level of the polity. If a person can write something akin to a mathematical equation or a short set of them for what government and parties should be doing that could fit on a t-shirt, it seems like the sort of thing that should really do damage to the kayfabe and Godzilla-sized parade floats. The trick is for people to just hold their focus steady on some object that doesn't move, if they do that the magicians will have a much harder time pulling their parlor tricks, and if they can do that long enough the hucksters and snake oil salemen lose a lot of their power.

Also more directly to what you said above - I remember a brief time in 2016 when our city actually had short videos about local level judges and politicians who were running for office and the thing that really struck home to me, ie. one of those things I already sort of sense but had never properly articulated when it came to judges, the idea is that if their party affiliation is obvious then they're terrible judges and so the last thing you'd want to do is vote for them based on party affiliation, if anything you're really looking for high-quality political androgyny.

Kudos for introducing the term kayfabe into political analysis!