{"id":2511,"date":"2002-06-09T09:18:06","date_gmt":"2002-06-09T09:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=56"},"modified":"2002-06-09T09:18:06","modified_gmt":"2002-06-09T09:18:06","slug":"owens-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2511","title":{"rendered":"OWENS AGAIN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Owens<\/a> quickly replied to my quick reply, leaving me with one significant question:
\nHow the heck<\/u> does he write so quickly and lucidly?<\/i> I get away with a kind of breezy, conversational style which buys me a lot of room in structuring my arguments. He doesn\u0092t, damn his eyes.
\nBut here\u0092s a breezy, conversational reply:
\nHey! I read Adam Smith, too, ya know. (here I start feeling like Matt Damon defending his interpretation of the post-Revolutionary economy in the South). I don\u0092t think that what I believe violates what he suggests, or what Locke suggests for that matter. I believe that it is a matter of degree and emphasis. Remember, in the overall spectrum of political positions, the positions held by contemporary American conservatives and liberals occupy a very narrow band.
\nBut I do believe the distinctions are important, and more importantly, I am grasping for a different construction \u0096 it\u0092s out there and maybe I\u0092ll find it or help articulate it.
\nLook, the State cannot solve everyone\u0092s problems through direct intervention. But state policies, combined with individual action and responsibility, can go a long way to doing so while still defending, and even encouraging individual action and responsibility. I\u0092m trying to articulate a kind of \u00934th Generation\u0094 politics that includes and involves, one that, most importantly, somehow can operate on a finer grain than the massive, almost Stalinist programs of the 60\u0092s and 70\u0092s.
\nHistorically, a lot of what I\u0092m trying to get to was included in the culture out of which Smith, Locke, and the Founders came. They had no need to articulate it in their politics, because it was the water in which they swam. We don\u0092t have that embracing \u0096 and stultifying \u0096 culture any more, and we are trying to extend the kind of politics that have worked so well for us to vastly different cultures (your talk of democratization throughout the world). It won\u0092t work.
\nIt isn\u0092t working well for us today in the U.S., it isn\u0092t working in Europe, and it sure as hell won\u0092t work when we attempt to transplant it like a rose cutting to countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
\nNote: Just paged over to his site to get the permalink, and the no-goodnik has stolen my thunder for what was to be my third and reply to Steve Cohen. Read this<\/a>, and watch for my comments later this morning. It worries me sometimes that I agree with him so much\u0085<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Howard Owens quickly replied to my quick reply, leaving me with one significant question: How the heck does he write so quickly and lucidly? I get away with a kind of breezy, conversational style which buys me a lot of room in structuring my arguments. He doesn\u0092t, damn his eyes. But here\u0092s a breezy, conversational […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}