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Mar/09
26
When liberals discover the utility of custom & tradition
2 Comments · Posted by David Hume in politics
There is a clip of a recent bloggingheads.tv between Matt Yglesias and Mark Schmitt which is rather amusing, as they express a rather conservative sensibility:
conservatism · finance · Liberalism
Caledonian · March 27, 2009 at 8:47 am
Custom itself is neither beneficial nor harmful. It’s the nature of the customs and their effects that is important.
If specific customs and traditions are reasonable, they’re useful. If they’re not, they aren’t. The problem is that customs and traditions tend to perpetuate themselves even when they’re harmful. They resist change, and so defend against corruption, but also against reform. And corruption is usually easier to arrange than reform.
Steel Phoenix · March 28, 2009 at 9:36 am
Part of the problem is the post-Lincoln view of These United States as The United States. At the point when we became a single giant entity rather than an alliance of individuals, we began pushing our traditions on those who had no desire for them. If we were to decentralize, our traditions wouldn’t so much expand beyond the boundaries of those who wished to practice them.