I think that the whole debate between positive and negative liberty is rather important and tend to see things through a more positive liberty lens.

There is a need for both positive and negative liberties and one of my problems with the current American system is that we have not really found language to support positive liberty.

In the end though, you are right, I care much more about the rights of minorities to participate fully in economic and civil life than I do care about the rights of bigots to run their businesses in ways that conform with their prejudiced and illogical world view.

Do you live in Japan and hanging around Harajuku on Sundays?

More seriously, I know what you mean, there does seem to be a subculture that goes along with a rockabilly look to varying degrees. I even think there is a chain of stores called "Bettie Page" that sells 1950s styled dresses.

I've wondered about this and had it explained to me that the dresses from the 1950s are good for women with hips and curves.

That being said you bring up an interesting issue about how much of embracing the aesthetics of an era or culture is also am implicit embracing of the worst parts of an era.

My mom hates Mad Men and thinks it glamorizes all of the racism and sexism of the 1960s especially in the pre-hippie parts. My friends who were born way after the 1960s seem to embrace the show and aesthetic. I've never been to one but have seen lots of photos of Mad Men parties on the web at sites like OKCupid. Women seem to think it is a selling point to show pictures of their Mad Men parties.

I personally find it interesting that a lot of hipsters are now embracing tattoo subculture because hipsters tend to be progressive but many of the mid-century tattoo artists that they lionize like Sailor Jerry were far-right reactionaries.

I thin you are still right. Republicans do embrace their crazies. Kevin Drum thinks that this will blow over and I have just seen reports saying that Akin will not stand down.

You can go very far on the Republican crazy train but every now and then, there will be someone who exceeds the bounds of all decency in the name of their crazy. Akin might be that person.

As a non-libertarian, I think you are right that many of the libertarians on this site are open to criticism of the field. Or at least willing to try and answer pointed questions that seek to criticize libertarianism as a philosophy.

However, I think that the libertarian movement does still have a reputation as being "Republicans who like to smoke pot". In short, they are very libertarian when it comes to their own personal interests and likes but not so libertarian when it comes to liberties that are more aimed at non-white men. Hence the always bone-headed talk among some libertarians on the right's of business owners to practice discrimination while not understanding the right to be a minority and fully-participate in civil and economic life without fear of bigotry, discrimination, or segregation.

There are times when some libertarians seem to eager to defend the rights of bigots to practice their bigotry in ways that matter.

You are going to be in for a very long wait.

Yup

The other way to view the use of the word "legitimate" is that he is going back to the day's of old-English common law when a woman had to do everything in her power (and beyond) to prevent the non-consenting sex from happening. She also had to be as pure as driven snow.

"They might be idiots but they are our idiots"

In Republican world, anyone not with a trademarked R next to their name is hard left.

This feels like it should be an Onion headline.

I'll second this.

See below.

Orwell's journalism like the Road to Wigen Pier and Homage to Catalonia is much better liberalism than his novels especially 1984 and Animal Farm. Both of those are great but too connected to their times and have been sort of co-opted by all ideologies because everyone likes to speak in the language of "freedom".

For Russians? I love Dostoyevsky but he supported the Czars during his time. The Devils is an indictment against the anti-Czarist students. While Chekov was not as explicitly political as the Communists made him to be, he at least understood that the gig was up for the Czars and Russian nobles. Herzen and Gorki are better Russian left writers.

All the writers you mention are very good and much better than Ayn Rand (not that this is very hard) but they were writing for the hot button issues of their day. Sinclair Lewis is probably less dated than Dreiser especially in the Zenith novels and his portrait of Midwestern pompousity.

Rand's novels have a vague quality that places them in any age. Lewis was very much writing for his time and Babbit can only take place in the 1920s. It is a great novel and many teenagers and young adults will love it but I can't see a rising liberal political star talking about their love for Sinclair Lewis like many on the right talk about their love for Ayn Rand.

Vonnegut:

Perhaps. He seems popular enough but he has a more-broad base appeal than Ayn Rand. There are plenty of conservatives who love him. I can't think of anyone on the left who loves Rand novels.

Sanburg? Possibly. I would need to read more.

Upton Sinclair was writing too much for the hot events of his day. I studied Sinclair in my school history classes along with Jacob Riis, not in English class. Ayn Rand's books seem not to be connected to specific issues of when they were published. This is not to go against Sinclair.

Steinbeck might be better but has a bit of the historical problem that Sinclair has, he is writing for his day.

I think you are falling into a bit of the same trap as your cri de coeur.

Your picks are all philosophers and not really storytellers. All the talk about the right and Rand is basically because of her novels. They are absolutely horrible novels and poorly written but they seem to attract a certain kind of teenager and some of these teenagers go on to become rich and powerful. Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, Alan Greenspan, the guy who founded Lululemon all do a lot to promote the cult of Rand.

I suppose the right also likes Hayek but I think more people probably talk about the Road to Serfdom than have actually read the work.

There is no liberal variant of Ayn Rand. A person who sells his or her political philosophy via novels. There are certainly many writers whose writings are imbued with leftist ideas and ideals like Arthur Miller, Harper Lee, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, John Irving but most of these authors are associated with English class in high school especially Miller. Kushner is too political, too current, and too homosexual for all but the most progressive and probably private high schools ironically enough. Arthur Miller probably strikes most people as old-fashioned except for the theatre kids. John Irving's liberalism is often just incidental except in The Cider House Rules. And none of these writers really have any kind developed philosophy that can be ismed.

I find arguable whether FDR overplayed his hand with the courtpacking.

On the one hand, he clearly wanted to do it and much of Congress balked even some ardent New Dealers.

On the other hand, he really did not fail in his goal and arguably won a game of chicken with the Supreme Court. He was able to get Owen Roberts to be the famous Switch in Time in the Parish case. And Chief Justice Hughes eventually convinced one of the four hoursemen to retire so FDR could put someone on the court. Then in a random stroke of luck, FDR got to put a lot of people on the Court in the normal way and probably remade 20th Century Jurisprudence with picks like Douglas and Black.

Do you have any citations?

I think it is fairly mixed among the Greatest generation and Boomers. My mom (born 1946) moved from the Bronx to Long Island when she was five and attended high school in a Jewish suburb. We attended the same high school (34 years apart) and it was still considered a Jewish suburb during my youth. About half my classmates were Jewish and I think the town had more synagogues than churches.

On the other hand, my dad grew up in Washington Heights.

The League will soon discover that my typos often lead to unintentional hilarity.

This is what happens when I write before coffee.

Anti-communist views.

Jesse,

I agree. It is very hard to find a good compromise when the most conservative Democrats are still to the left of the most liberal Republicans.

MFarmer seems to also be on of those libertarians who give other libertarians a bad name by his simple belief that making Democratic supporters into the evil ones is a reason for existence.

Not you or many others on this site but there does seem to be a healthy subset of libertarians who seem to get off more on annoying liberals. Stephen Brainbridge once made a comment on his blog about how he preferred some kind of policy or was sticking to one simply because it "annoys liberals". This is a man who teaches at UCLA Law and he is still getting his greatest pleasure out of annoying liberals like a poorly socialized 12 year old adolescent likes annoying a substitute teacher.

There seems to be a lot of this juvenile attitude in certain quarters of the right. I see a lot of "annoy a liberal" type of gear via t-shirts or bumper stickers. I have yet to see sale of "annoy a conservative" stuff to the same degree.

I think that a lot of people are scared by the social conservatism of the Republican Party. There is no more room for people like Jacob Javits or Lincoln Chaffee in the Republican Party. And that is quite a sad commentary on the Party of Lincoln (Abraham, not Chaffee)

Recent Jewish immigrants from Russia tend to be more conservative and Republican because of their anti-conservative views.

The same dynamic plays out in Israel. The recent immigrants and the Sephardim tend to be Likudniks and they see Labor as being the party of the old-guard Ashkenazi "elite".

1. I have a very unruly JewFro

2. Define boring. Most of what I read is hardly the stuff of the NYTimes bestseller list or any best seller list.

Sadly, it is just a very stupid typo. Around 20 percent vote Republican.