My Political Philosophy

I recently realized that although I’ve discussed certain of my political opinions in detail on this journal, I’ve never stated my overall political philosophy. Thus I’ve received feedback from people who have read probably one or two of my journal entries that leaned toward a particular political philosophy, and wrongly concluded that my political philosophy was something that it wasn’t. In order to have something to point towards in the future, I will state my political philosophy in this entry. Here I go…

The state is necessary to enforce laws, protect individual rights, safeguard personal property, enforce environmentally sustainable resource management, solve large-scale coordination problems, and many other critical tasks. The state should protect individual rights like freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of (and from!) religion, and personal privacy. The state should provide people infrastructure, education, healthcare, and due process of law. Everybody must be equal under the law. There should not be privileged individuals who don’t have to follow it.

The legitimacy of the government and its laws comes from the consent of the governed. To ensure continual consent of the governed, the government must be democratic. Democracy can take many different forms, but that basic requirement—that the people get the final word on how they’re governed—must be satisfied. If the government no longer serves the people who it rules, then that government is illegitimate and should be replaced.

The state should be secular—not endorsing any particular religion (or lack thereof). This way, everyone feels comfortable practicing whichever religion they choose. Since public education is an extension of the state, no religious doctrine can be taught as truth in any public school. It’s fine to learn about different religious beliefs and critically analyze them in public schools though.

It is a good thing to have people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, age groups, languages, genders, opinions, and experiences all living together, enabled by their assent to the same basic rules and tolerance of each others’ differences. That form of diversity makes society stronger and more interesting. Bad diversity is when people can’t agree on the basic operating principles of society such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality under the law, pluralism, etc. Bad diversity erodes the core tenants on which the society functions. Immigration law should be written with this framework in mind.

Fascism and authoritarianism must be avoided, because they deprive individuals of important freedoms. They also don’t get the consent of the governed, which results in a government that serves a small elite class over its citizens. As an aside, this is exactly what’s happening in the US right now. People have been duped into throwing away the core tenants of democracy to support a narcissistic authoritarian moron who they think can solve all their problems. (Spoiler: he won’t, and he’s make everything worse)

The state should maintain a criminal justice system predicated on the understanding that free will is incoherent, and thus even the worst people are just malfunctioning robots not ultimately responsible for their actions. It should rehabilitate them rather than making them worse, emulating the Norwegian prison model.

Liberals and progressives would agree with most of what I’ve said so far, but that’s because I haven’t mentioned the economy yet. Since work is necessary for society to function and the legitimacy of power comes from the consent of those whom it’s exercised over, the state must enforce workplace democracy to ensure work is the least coercive it can be.

Exceptions may be allowed for small businesses, the military, etc, but the general expectation should be that workplaces are democratic entities. For workplace democracy to mean anything, the means of production have to be collectively owned and controlled. Markets are fine, but some industries such as healthcare and utilities should not be left to market forces. They should be managed by the government.

The government must provide a welfare state adequate for taking care of those who don’t work. As more jobs become automated, the welfare state must scale to cover the needs of the increasing number of people who are not working. It could scale through a progressive tax or collective ownership of the robots, for example. The point is that nobody should need to rely on charity or work bullshit jobs to survive.

So there you have it. That’s my political philosophy. If I had to assign myself labels, I’d say “progressive” and “democratic socialist” are the most fitting. Since this is a broad overview, I avoided going into much detail on specific topics, but this should suffice to give people who know nothing about me a general idea of where I stand politically.