Beyond Liberalism vs. Conservatism: A System for Legitimate Disagreement

What they have in common is disagreement

Political disagreement is human, and so is authoritarianism

By now, anyone paying even modest attention to politics should see that many or most political disagreements cannot be conclusively settled by evidence or logic alone. Abortion is understood by some as a wrongful killing, while supporters disagree. Such conflicts are intensified by ordinary human limitations. We are often inconsistent, self-interested, tribal, and capable of hypocrisy. In politics simple answers rarely deliver uncontested truth or moral certainty. Politics is a struggle over (1) power and contested concepts, e.g., freedom, equality, justice, rights, security, order, morality, and the public interest, and (2) who gets to define them in law or state power. The rational objective here is not to abolish disagreement. That is impossible. Instead, to stay away from tyranny and corruption political systems need to contain disagreement in institutions that allow people to remain political equals while continuing to disagree.

What is eroding civil American political life is not just disagreement. The weakening of the norms and institutions that make disagreement governable are failing. What is needed is things like (1) good faith commitment to facts and robust truths, (2) acceptance of electoral loss, (3) reasonable constitutional restraints, (4) defense of civil liberties, equal citizenship, independent courts, peaceful political competition, and (5) willingness to compromise without surrendering basic rights any more than necessary. Our democracy is failing on multiple fronts, e.g., congressional gridlock, expanded executive power, overt partisan threats and reprisals linked to nonviolent speech, and greatly weakened anticorruption safeguards.

Contemporary conditions offer no basis for complacency. Expert analyses find global freedom declines for the last two decades. In a 2025 assessment, 54 countries deteriorated in political rights and civil liberties, while only 35 improved. Its assessment found that only 21 percent of the world’s population lived in countries rated “Free.”

The implication is that a pluralistic democratic society needs a durable system for legitimate disagreement. That means we need democratic elections and representation, secular, publicly defensible laws, defenses of civil liberties equal legal and political standing, independent non-partisan courts, functioning, accountable institutions, and compromise on revisable policy. We need to oppose compromises that unduly sacrifice basic rights or permit either state tyranny or private domination.

Meta-ideology: Moving past liberalism and conservatism

Politics is saturated with contested concepts, including freedom, equality, justice, democracy, rights, public interest, order, security, and decency. Reasonable people disagree deeply and often irreconcilably over what those terms mean and require in law or practice. A society that one group calls orderly and morally decent may appear to another as oppressive, exclusionary, economically dominating, or tyrannical. The danger begins when (1) a political faction treats its own contested conception of virtue, tradition, religion, national identity, or public order as self-evidently authoritative, and (2) uses the state and major private players to impose it on dissenters. Liberal theories of public justification address this by holding that coercive laws need reasons citizens can evaluate and have reasons to endorse.

Liberalism has the stronger inherent claim to personal freedom because it begins with the equal moral standing of persons and places the burden of justification on those who would coerce them. Conservatism can protect real and important liberties, but it also gives weight to inherited institutions, authority, social stability, property, religion, family norms, and cultural continuity. Those values can support human flourishing, but they can also become grounds for subordinating people whose identities, beliefs, relationships, or economic interests depart from dominant norms. The central liberal question is not whether tradition or order has value, but whether preserving either justifies restricting the equal freedom and civic standing of people who do not share the prevailing ideal.

Freedom, however, cannot be reduced to freedom from government action. In a capitalist society, people may be free from government, but dependent on employers, landlords, insurers, creditors, monopolies, or owners of wealth. Taxation, public services, labor law, antitrust, consumer protections, civil-rights law, and environmental regulation can restrict particular private powers while enlarging individual freedom, security, and independence. The crucial question is therefore not simply whether a policy involves government intervention, but whose power it limits, whose choices it expands, whether it prevents public or private domination, and whether it is necessary, proportionate, accountable, and consistent with basic civil liberties. Analyses of capitalism and economic democracy specifically identify the danger that concentrated wealth and corporate authority are sometimes sources of domination by converting economic inequality into unequal political power and influence.

Because no final agreement about the good life or public interest is possible, the best practical alternative is a system for legitimate disagreement. In the US, that means free and fair democratic elections, reasonable compromise, secular and publicly justifiable law, rule-bound institutions, equal citizenship, civil liberties, due process, independent courts, and protections against both state tyranny and concentrated private wealth and power. Such a system will be slow, imperfect, and contentious. Its virtue is not that it resolves disagreement. Its virtues is that it permits citizens with profoundly different convictions to live as equals, contest power peacefully, revise policy, and prevent any temporary majority, wealthy minority, religious orthodoxy, or authoritarian leader from turning a disputed moral vision into permanent rule. Democratic legitimacy is strengthened when most citizens see laws as publicly justified rather than the commands of a winning faction. The rule of law constrains this kind of arbitrary exercise of official power.

Q1: Do we need (1) a robust, rule of law-constrained democratic system for legitimate disagreement to play out, or (2) since democracy is a failed system of governance, the winning side should take no prisoners and not worry about democracy, civil liberties or the rule of law?

Q2: Should the authoritarianism of Trump and MAGA elites, limit disagreement and just rule as they want because they are in power, or should there still be reasonable compromise?

Some info sources:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Liberalism”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Conservatism”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Democracy”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Rule of Law”

MAGA’s embrace of alt-facts: It can kill you, or at least cost you!

 

A core MAGA persuasion/demagoguery tactic is substitution of real facts with lies, falsehoods or crackpot nonsense, usually somehow self-serving. Sometimes alt-facts are benign. But sometimes they literally kill people. Other times they cause harm or impose economic costs.

Public health alt-facts

An arsTechnica article, RFK Jr. thinks AI will free us from the “tyranny” of medical facts, expertise, exemplifies the situation nicely. In his irrational exuberance about AI, America’s unqualified and incompetent public health leader, RFK Jr. comments: “We’re never, ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us trust the experts, because every American will be able to check their own medical advice. ….. If somebody tells you masks work, trust the experts, AI may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you social distancing works, trust the experts, AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection—oh, you need to take it to protect your grandmother—AI may say it actually doesn’t do that”. Kennedy goes on to say that AI will free us from the “medical tyranny” of doctors and health experts.

But AI can make boo-boos in health care responses. On the up-side, as ars points out, despite its errors at least AI seems to hallucinate less than Kennedy. Golly, that’s reassuring.

Global warming alt-facts

Despite overwhelming climate expert consensus that it’s real and humans are the primary cause, MAGA demagoguery continues to be packed with lies, falsehoods and crackpot denials. And despite overwhelming real world human experiences, outright denial has become harder to sustain. So MAGA the messaging now often moves the goalposts from denial to claims such as “it is happening, but it is harmless; adaptation alone will handle it; mitigation cannot work; or action is worse than the damage”. All of those MAGA propaganda assertions are alt-fact claims treated as facts that the available evidence overwhelmingly contradicts.

Human harms include deaths and injuries recorded during warming-enhanced hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, wild fires, and crop failures. One estimate is that global heat-related mortality averaged about 546,000 deaths per year in 2012–2021, up 63.2% from the 1990s. Obviously, not every such death can be assigned solely to climate change, but something major is going on and global warming is a major part of it.

Excluding loss of life, health-care costs, and ecosystem-service damages, an IPCC estimate is that global warming costs the US ~$150 billion/year.

Not surprisingly, special interests that significantly profit from pollution are still fighting tooth and claw to deny, downplay and avoid as much responsibility for global warming damages as they can get away with. So far, they’ve gotten away with a staggering amount by making society bear the costs and blocking governmental efforts to deal with global warming and greenhouse gas pollution.

Costs to individuals include (1) higher homeowners’, flood, and wildfire-insurance premiums, or loss of insurance entirely, (2) food price increases after heat, drought, crop disease, floods, or supply disruptions, (3) higher electricity demand for cooling, grid upgrades, and emergency response, (4) public costs for emergency aid, rebuilding, health care, firefighting, coastal protection, and disaster-resilient infrastructure, and (5) hard to price damages, e.g., deaths, disability, trauma, ecosystem loss, cultural loss, forced migration, etc.

Q1: How much responsibility, if any, do Trump and MAGA elites bear for decades of heavy reliance on alt-facts to deceive, distract, disinform, and polarize people into forming false beliefs that wind up killing or costing them?

Q2: Should oil companies, plastics companies, and other businesses that significantly profit from polluting be taxed to defray some or all of the costs that people, societies, and governments now pay?

Some info sources:

COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality Among Unvaccinated and Vaccinated Persons Aged ≥12 Years by Receipt of Bivalent Booster Doses and Time Since Vaccination — 24 U.S. Jurisdictions, October 3, 2021–December 24, 2022

IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: Chapter 3: Human Influence on the Climate System — The evidence for human influence on recent climate change strengthened from the IPCC Second Assessment Report to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, and is now even stronger in this assessment.

IPCC Fifth National Climate Assessment Report —  Extreme events cost the US close to $150 billion each year—a conservative estimate that does not account for loss of life, healthcare-related costs, or damages to ecosystem services.

NOAA: Climate change impacts

Climate Science, Risk & Solutions: Dispelling Myths — All analyses of all surface temperature data sets compiled by major climate centers around the world show a clear warming trend. ….. It is well-established that human activity is the dominant cause of the warming experienced over the past 50 years.

The 2025 Global Report of the Lancet Countdown — The report represents the work of 128 experts from 71 institutions, monitoring progress across 57 indicators – from heat-related deaths to bank lending to fossil fuels – providing the most comprehensive assessment yet of the links between climate change and health.

A climate scientist on how to recognize the new climate change denial — Delay, deflect, downplay, and other ways fossil fuel companies block climate action.

DENIAL, DISINFORMATION, AND DOUBLESPEAK: BIG OIL’ S EVOLVING EFFORTS TO AVOID ACCOUNTABILITY FOR CL IMATE CHANGE — The key findings include: Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science. ….. Big Oil’s deception campaign evolved from explicit denial of the basic science underlying climate change to deception, disinformation, and doublespeak.

Regarding the Christian nationalist theocratic wealth & power movement

Source

Context

A NYT opinion, This Case Has Flown Under the Radar. It Won’t Stay There, summarizes the gravity the threat of bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy presents to what’s left of our democracy, rule of law, civil liberties, and defenses of the public interest. In a nutshell, theocratic MAGA elites are not close to finished with their goal of making America an aggressive, arrogantly bigoted theocracy.

The opinion starts with a very short list of some of the damage that Trump and MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy have caused so far. It includes mention of (1) lost abortion rights that Roe v. Wade used to afford, (2) gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rendering it incapable of preventing states from undermining the political power of minority citizens, (3) killing off the independence of executive branch agencies, leaving the president now able to fire nearly all agency heads for any or no reason, (4) neutering federal agency power by removing federal judges deference to an agency’s interpretation of its own authority, instead being told to decide for themselves the validity of agency regulations, and (5) eliminated the government’s ability to pass reasonable gun safety laws. All of those lost functions and powers were generally pro-public interest.

Although that short list covers a huge amount of damage to our democracy, rule of law, civil liberties and public interest power, there is a lot more that isn’t mentioned. For example, undermining reasonable public health measures, killing off funding for genuinely useful research, transferring vast wealth and power from the people and the public interest to wealthy people and special interests, normalizing lying, corruption and bigotry, etc. Vast amounts of power have been redirected to serve and protect wealthy people and special interests at the expense of the public interest.

Regarding Christian nationalist theocracy

Not mentioned in the damage list is religion. What do elite MAGA theocrats plan for us, whether we want it or not? They have huge plans. Aggressive plans. The opinion cites an assessment by three constitutional scholars that MAGA’s theocracy for America plan amounts to a massive shift in the law that raises theocracy to the same level as existing secular law. In those minds, there is no such thing as church-state separation. The scholars write:

The slow undoing of constitutional limits on government support for religion that began with the Rehnquist Court has intensified over the last several years into a systematic dismantling of the previous legal regime. The Court has mandated government funding of religious schools alongside secular schools, where before the government had been forbidden from doing so under the Establishment Clause.

In essence, the NYT opinion is warning is that MAGA-aligned legal politics can turn Christianity into a preferred constitutional interest, instead of being one freedom among equal freedoms. MAGA’s way of doing this has not been a simple, explicit declaration that Christianity outranks everything else. Instead, theocratic MAGA judges have weakened church-state separation in a series of court rulings. Over time, the new dictates increasingly require government to include, fund, or exempt religious entities while giving much less weight to competing “secular” rights. In essence, what the MAGA judges have done in decisions over decades is to write the Establishment Clause almost completely out of the US Constitution by narrowing with MAGA judges say they want it to mean. With the Establishment Clause gone, there’s nothing left to stop America from degenerating into a bigoted, racist, misogynist Christian nationalist theocracy.

Not all Christians support an American theocracy

If the MAGA USSC goes further by allowing religious providers to receive public funds while disregarding nondiscrimination conditions, that would put religious claims above the equal citizenship and civil rights of the people taxpayer-funded programs are supposed to serve. That obviously strengthens the Christian-nationalist theocracy agenda by forcing public power and money to be freely available to institutions that can deny equal treatment in the name of religious dogma.

Q1: Is it reasonable to see MAGA elite’s Christian nationalist theocracy agenda as aggressive and significantly intolerant, bigoted, racist, or misogynist?

Q2: Should America be a Christian theocracy or a secular democracy that protects freedom of religion but separates church from state?

Some info sources:

Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership — Comment: This is the primary document that lays out Christian theocracy for America. It details a highly intolerant authoritarian executive-branch agenda that uses explicitly Christian religious framing. That includes a “biblically based” definition of marriage and family. This is the best source to answer the question, “Where does the MAGA agenda include Christian theocracy?”

Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change — Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, recently said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” He’s not exaggerating.

Project 2025: What’s At Stake for Civil Rights — Comment: This is one of the clearest sources linking the Heritage Foundation-led agenda to racial, gender, LGBTQ, disability, immigrant, and religious-minority rights. This assessment characterizes the Project 2025 blueprint as reflecting “extreme white Christian nationalist ideology”.

Project 2025’s Threat to LGBTQI+ Equality, Safety, and Health, Racial and Gender Equity, and Sexual and Reproductive Health

The line between fact and truth

 

Source

In history and politics, a claim counts as established fact when (1) it is supported by independent convergent, reliable, and publicly checkable evidence, (2) it survives reasonable attempts to refute it, (3) it fits the broader body of evidence better than competing or different claims; and (5) it may retain some uncertainty, but only to a point that does not rationally materially affect the accuracy of the claim.

The 2020 election

An example is the fact that the 2020 election was not stolen. Trump and MAGA demagoguery still consistently claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by several different means, e.g., rigged ballot count machines, massive voter fraud, pedophilic communist Democrats, etc. For competing explanations, the question is: Which explanation best predicts the total evidence, including the evidence one would expect but does not find?

In over 60 lawsuits and lies repeated hundreds of times, Trump and MAGA elites challenged the 2020 election result. All except one of those lawsuits failed to find evidence of significant election theft. Nothing found would have changed the outcome. The two biggest single instances of election stealing probably were (1) Trump trying to get Georgia to give him over 11,000 votes so he would win that state, and (2) Trump’s 1/6 coup attempt, which tried to negate the entire election and overthrow the government by force. Other than those major attempts at election theft, there was no evidence of major fraud or theft. Every attempt to find the theft failed. That included re-examination of paper records, inquiries by local and state election administration officials, recounts, audits, adversarial litigation in courts, and federal investigations.

Despite all the intense scrutiny, there were no major discrepancies found ballots, ballot counts, tabulation records, voter records, recounts, canvasses, audits, sworn testimony, or litigated evidence. Repeated review across all of those channels failed to find any major discrepancy, other than efforts by Trump and MAGA elites, e.g., the fake electors fiasco. That is not just a situation where we have not seen proof. It’s affirmative, cumulative evidence against the stolen election hypothesis. There just was no persuasive evidence.

Source

The boundary

Political matters do not become facts by majority vote, institutional prestige, or repeated assertion. They acquire fact standing when the evidence and procedures appropriate to the question converge. Despite that, the exact fact-truth boundary is pragmatic, not partisan or popular. One does not need to wait for absolute certainty, because then almost no historical, scientific, or political proposition would count as fact. And we cannot call something factual merely because an official, pundit, or expert announces it. Simply put, the standard is proportionate to the stakes and evidence. The higher the stakes, the more evidence and verifying is warranted.

For the 2020, the political truth to political fact threshold was crossed long ago. The outcome was certified, audited, recounted where requested or required, litigated, and independently investigated. Later repetition of allegations without new, credible, outcome-changing evidence does not restore the original uncertainty. This is a about continued rational, evidence-based belief, not questioning of the evidence due to some asserted epistemological, partisan or ideological belief detached from solid, verifiable evidence.

Source — Trump’s pants are on fire a lot — but usually he’s lying at least some

Q: Is it fact, truth or false that Trump’s public record supports describing him as a chronic liar, not simply a near-constant source of good faith mistakes.

Some info sources:

Transcript: President Trump’s Phone Call With Georgia Election Officials — The president pressured [Georgia’s] Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results of the election in an hourlong phone conversation. Here is a transcript of the audio recording.

No Evidence Found that a Foreign Government Manipulated Any Election Results

Ballotpedia’s 2020 Election Help Desk: Tracking election disputes, lawsuits, and recounts

Vote Recounts and Election Contests in Battleground States

GPO J6 Report: Executive summary