Pursuant to my previous posting about politicians posing as moral thinkers:
A striking case in point is NYC Mayor DeBlasio declaring that "the money is in the wrong hands." Now, if he and fellow "progressives" weren't intellectually bankrupt buffoons, they'd know which philosophical insights and thinkers to invoke for maximum credibility and impact -- e.g., Rawls. Now, Rawls is a serious thinker -- more serious than, say, Rand's polemics against him would suggest, or about as serious as Nozick's commentary/critique would suggest -- and as such an aggressively polemical style against him and philosophers generally isn't warranted. (I can think of one major exception I might make to this rule: Marx and Marxism.) But when political actors and commentators act like un-philosophical imbeciles, they should be called out as such. They are posing as thoughtful and duly-informed people as they propose enacting policies that (through force of law) affect other people's spheres of activity.
It's not unusual to hear from snooty "intellectuals" -- more often than not aligned with the political left -- how intellectually inferior, backwards, bigoted, etc. those on the right are. Today's leftists self-identify as progressives, suggesting if not implying that their leftist ideas are synonymous with progress (a good thing by definition). But if they were intellectually progressive they'd know how to advance their ideas in the most intellectually-rigorous -- i.e., philosophically-rigorous -- fashion. They'd have a command of Rawlsian theory and lexicon -- e.g., by reasoning the way moral agents would reason in the Original Position we would arrive at principles of justice that tell us how the benefits and burdens of social cooperation ought to be distributed. Only then would we have some basis for saying whether money is "in the wrong hands" (although in my experience only radical leftists would use such phraseology in a philosophical context -- they usually speak in terms of the rich using their power to exploit everyone else).
Now, certainly, if the "progressives" were to start speaking like Rawlsians on the political stage, they'd sound more formidable. They'd certainly consider themselves to be really formidable, given their very high opinion of their own intellectual powers. But for them to be really formidable, they'd also have to have command of the libertarian theories and lexicon as expounded by its most formidable thinkers (not to mention the conservative theories, but on matters of 'distributive justice' today's conservatives tend to fall back on the libertarian arguments or else speak of the un-wisdom of left-wing theories in contrast to traditional conceptions of justice, rights, etc.). In other words, they would demonstrate familiarity with the intellectual arms race (dialectic) that happens as one side confronts another with the strongest arguments available up to that point. They would find that the case for left-wing politics over the alternatives is far from the slam-dunk they believe it to be (just as the case for Clinton over Trump in '16 was far from the slam-dunk they believe it to be).
I don't see any of this intellectual development happening in today's mainstream political discussions, coming from left or the right, meaning that the current mainstream dialogue is intellectually impoverished. (Have no political-activist-level intellects gleaned a goddamn thing from The Republic? Do they know a single thing about that work, aside from its existence and author?) But it's the "progressives" who are more galling in their pretense to intellectual superiority, right down to their (fraudulent) self-labeling. And it's not like Rawls or Nozick (or Rand) are too obscure or difficult to grasp the basic concepts involved. So there is unavoidably some degree of intellectual laziness involved -- and this laziness is exacerbated by uncompetitive elections in which the winning party is known ahead of time, or where viewpoint diversity is otherwise lacking.
And so, as long as this intellectual poverty continues, in absence of an infusion of philosophy and dialectic -- as long as the likes of Rawls, Nozick, Rand, Plato, Aristotle, or Kant remain almost totally unknown in the political dialogue (i.e., a pathetic excuse for dialogue) -- how can we expect our political environment to improve?
As unwary children, we are under the impression that political leaders are exceptionally wise -- they are entrusted by adults with power to make important decisions -- but as we grow up we come to discover how idiotic so many of them are (aside from what we might term "social intelligence," but tyrants have that, too). The only way out of this situation -- with respect to politics or to life generally qua breeding ground for cynicism -- is philosophy, not passing this or that law.
