MidCan said:
If we can count libertarians as on our side of the barricades, then the argument for conservative political diversity becomes even more strong, because the two tendencies have numerous disagreements.
I have started another thread on these disagreements, where you may read some of the leading thinkers of both tendencies attacking the other.
Although there is no necessary virtue in diversity of thought -- if something is true, everyone should believe it -- there is virtue in being more tolerant of what appear to be political error, than, say, physicists would be tolerant of someone challenging the scientific consensus.
This is because of one simple truth: politics is not science.
Humans are far more prone to error here, due to the distortion that self-interest can bring to our views, to the fact that our knowledge is necessarily limited, and to the fact that society is so complex that political solutions may have unintended consequences.
Thus it is positively useful for a culture to tolerate dissenters, who may be calling our attention to policy failures, or who may, in "thinking outside the box", come up with new insights on how to deal with social problems.
Glad to see they include libertarian now, I have always maintained Libertarian is more conservative than liberal.
If we can count libertarians as on our side of the barricades, then the argument for conservative political diversity becomes even more strong, because the two tendencies have numerous disagreements.
I have started another thread on these disagreements, where you may read some of the leading thinkers of both tendencies attacking the other.
Although there is no necessary virtue in diversity of thought -- if something is true, everyone should believe it -- there is virtue in being more tolerant of what appear to be political error, than, say, physicists would be tolerant of someone challenging the scientific consensus.
This is because of one simple truth: politics is not science.
Humans are far more prone to error here, due to the distortion that self-interest can bring to our views, to the fact that our knowledge is necessarily limited, and to the fact that society is so complex that political solutions may have unintended consequences.
Thus it is positively useful for a culture to tolerate dissenters, who may be calling our attention to policy failures, or who may, in "thinking outside the box", come up with new insights on how to deal with social problems.