[governance] right to development, the structure of IGC and IG issues for march deadline

[Milton Mueller]

>A libertarian interpretation is entirely appropriate for an 
>individual to claim.  It cannot be said to characterize the US - 
>that would be a misrepresentation.

David:
I think you are confusing your own normative judgment with an empirical assessment of the American legal and philosphical tradition. An individualist approach to rights is deeply engrained in American culture -- even among its Left and democrats -- relative to Europe and Asia. That's why a Mao or a Hitler -- both sides of the collectivist coin -- could never happen here. The Lockean basis of the thinking of the constitution drafters and of American political institutions is firmly established in the historical literature. No point in debating that. 

When you say this,  

>The great schism that now characterizes US political life 
>finds libertarian thought on one side, arrayed against 
>quite opposite thinking.

I am not sure which sides you are talking about. Which in itself proves you wrong. Both the American left and right claim on the surface to be libertarian - the conservatives claiming to be for small government and free markets (an increasingly dubious claim under Bush) and the liberals claiming to be for civil liberties and for the positive, 2nd-gen freedoms and entitlements of the post-WW2 era. Both rely heavily on the rhetoric of liberal freedoms.

True, the religious right have hugely undermined the freedom orientation of the Republicans, combining with militaristic nationalism in dangerous ways. But I was talking about the prevailing understanding of philosophical approaches to rights, I was not in any way attempting to characterize the current political alignments of the population. 


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