Why Liberals & Conservatives Clash: A View from Annapolis

Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash offers an explanation for the extreme polarization between liberal and conservative that is the hallmark of the American political landscape today. It suggests that liberal thought is intrinsically different from conservative thought, and that each constitutes a self-subsistent world-view with its specific qualities and rules. The book offers a set of guidelines to predict a person's views based on other views s/he holds, given that each world-view is what it is for structural reasons, and is more than merely a sum of discrete positions. It explains, for example, why people who support gay marriage also typically support the woman's right to an early-term abortion, and why people who demand that citizens "support the military" understand this as meaning, support putting members of the military in harm's way. Because liberal thought and conservative thought each constitutes a closed world-view, neither side will ever convince the other in an argument. The most we can hope for is an acknowledgment by each side of the usefulness of the other, a goal Fleming proposes as the most reasonable one for our times. Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash makes logical the most striking, and hitherto puzzling feature of the contemporary American political landscape: its acrimony, its air of being an argument between the deaf: neither side understands the other. Fleming suggests this is so because neither side accepts the bases underlying the other's particular positions. We can, however, understand that they are different, and that trying to force the other side into submission won't work. We need to go beyond liberals dismissing conservatives with horror and conservatives dismissing liberals with disgust. Conservatives aren't merely imperfect liberals, they're something else entirely. Liberals aren't merely potential conservatives, they actually think differently.

Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash: A View from Annapolis

Politics & Social Sciences

Fleming, Bruce

Sociology

Routledge

Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash offers an explanation for the extreme polarization between liberal and conservative that is the hallmark of the American political landscape today. It suggests that liberal thought is intrinsically different from conservative thought, and that each constitutes a self-subsistent world-view with its specific qualities and rules. The book offers a set of guidelines to predict a person's views based on other views s/he holds, given that each world-view is what it is for structural reasons, and is more than merely a sum of discrete positions. It explains, for example, why people who support gay marriage also typically support the woman's right to an early-term abortion, and why people who demand that citizens "support the military" understand this as meaning, support putting members of the military in harm's way. Because liberal thought and conservative thought each constitutes a closed world-view, neither side will ever convince the other in an argument. The most we can hope for is an acknowledgment by each side of the usefulness of the other, a goal Fleming proposes as the most reasonable one for our times. Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash makes logical the most striking, and hitherto puzzling feature of the contemporary American political landscape: its acrimony, its air of being an argument between the deaf: neither side understands the other. Fleming suggests this is so because neither side accepts the bases underlying the other's particular positions. We can, however, understand that they are different, and that trying to force the other side into submission won't work. We need to go beyond liberals dismissing conservatives with horror and conservatives dismissing liberals with disgust. Conservatives aren't merely imperfect liberals, they're something else entirely. Liberals aren't merely potential conservatives, they actually think differently.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was informed by the belief that it was possible to get clarity once and for all on fundamental philosophical issues, and so to think our way to a silence where philosophy was no longer necessary. This is The New Tractatus: it sympathizes with Wittgenstein's impatience with the endless cycle of argument, but reacts to this impatience and takes it in different directions than Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein was concerned with questions like these: What is the meaning of language? What is our relationship to the universe? What is the nature of philosophy? These questions are covered in The New Tractatus, along with many other topics, such as: Why is sex a controversial issue? Why are we so interested in celebrities? What is the nature of love? Why do liberals and conservatives argue about so many things? What is magic? Can miracles occur? Is science objective? Does art lie to us? How do we win arguments? What is the meaning of life? What The New Tractatus shares with the old is the fundamental perception that we can never transcend what is. The world is all that is the case: whatever comes to be is part of the world.

The New Tractatus: Summing Up Everything

Philosophy

University Press of America

Many otherwise competent adults are wobbly writers, whether they're college students or already thriving in a job. They probably exhibit a "go get 'em" attitude for most of their lives, but find themselves stumped by a blank computer screen or a piece of paper. What, they wonder, do I do now? What's my next word, next sentence? But their problems aren't solved by somebody telling them what to do, only by someone helping them figure things out themselves. As the adage says: give a person a fish and s/he eats that day; teach a person to fish and s/he eats for life. They need a little help from Bill the Goat.Bill is the mascot of the U.S. Naval Academy, where Bruce Fleming has taught literature and writing for over twenty years. Bill is the fellow, or at least the old goat, who's reading what you've written. The secret to answering your question, "What do I do now? " is seeing writing not from your own perspective, but from Bill's. Learning to write is difficult, like learning to act. What you feel doesn't matter, only what it looks like to the audience. Your audience is Bill. Bill the Goat's Adult Refresher Guide to Writing isn't a reference book, to be kept tucked into your office bookshelf for crisis management. Even its grammar section is different from usual grammar brush-ups. It's a book to be read and internalized, a book to re-align the way you conceive. It's a book for the beach, the porch, the subway, or an armchair. It's fun to read. You're the Bill for this book, after all. It's for students and executives, leaders and followers, everybody who has to communicate effectively in writing. You don't even have to hide this book behind another when you read it. There's no shame in a refresher course from Bill. He's your buddy, and he's here to remind you that when you make mistakes, he pays the price. This is grammar without guilt, syntax without a sense of sin. It's pure pragmatics. If you want Bill to get your po

Bill the Goat's Adult Refresher Guide to Writing

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

What is the taste of life as we really live it, rather than the way we imagine it in others? What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards we've been dealt, to play them as well as we can, to understand what has happened to us, and to try to control the future? Journey to the Middle of the Forest answers these questions in a way that celebrity memoirs, where events seem so much more intense than happenings in our own lives because of our perspective and the writer's fame, cannot. In Journey to the Middle of the Forest, Bruce Fleming considers the slippages between presupposition and reality in a life begun and continued in Maryland, with intervals in pre-civil war Rwanda, the walled-in city of West Berlin, and the central European Freiburg im Breisgau, once Austrian, then part of the Duchy of Baden, now part of Germany. Like all lives, it has its crises-more, it may be, than an average life: a childhood marked by an alcoholic and abusive father, a marriage gone horribly awry, an autistic child and a bipolar stepchild, a dragged-out divorce, the death of a brother to A.I.D.S., and the re-tooling of hopes to meet the new givens of the world. And, then re-marriage, two little boys, and the threat of childhood leukemia.

Journey to the Middle of the Forest: A Maryland Half-Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Hamilton Books

Taking a literature class in college could be a life-changing experience. Literature can help us give names to feelings and situations that did not have names, allows us to understand what has happened and what is happening to us so we can move forward. This is all that literary studies could be. Nowadays it rarely is. In the last fifty years or so the professorate has developed a new animal: literary studies. The point of reading is no longer to help students process their world. It is not about helping students achieve freedom from the limitations of their own viewpoints or their own youth; instead it is about control. Every person discovers the world anew, comes to problems as if for the first time. Literature can help them see that others have done the same before them, and give them ways to make their own decisions, live their own life. Professors can be the coaches in this so-momentous undertaking, guiding, showing, encouraging, challenging. This is a profession we could be proud to belong. Soon, with luck, we might be able to cry: Literary Studies is dead! Long Live Literature!

What Literary Studies Could Be, And What It Is

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

This book is set in many places-Cairo, the Eastern Sierras, Las Vegas, New York's Adirondack Mountains, and Barcelona, among others-but always in the moving body of the runner hurtling both through and into the world. It is a hymn to human motion and an explanation of its sweetness.

Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity

Looking at Ballet: Ashton & Balanchine, 1926-1936

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Russell Sage College

Kigali, Rwanda is the fictional autobiography of a young American diplomat named Derek Johnston who, in the eerie calm of pre-civil war Rwanda in the early 1980s, learns that he has contracted a new and relatively unknown virus, then called HTLV. Since he was 16, Derek has lived for his sometimes secretive and always tempestuous relations with women. In Kigali, he contracts the disease from the local prostitutes as a love affair shatters. Writing at night, Derek is haunted by his childhood in Paris, his high school years in Illinois, his time as a photographer in New York, his passage through Munich, and the women who have defined his life. Struggling to understand the people and events of his distant and recent past, he both discovers and imposes meaning, as all of us are destined to do.Kigali, Rwanda is a meditation on sex, exile, and the constraints of the social world, on the intensity of life and desire and the vanity of human wishes.

Kigali, Rwanda

Six Gallery Press

A Structure Opera

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