What Disturbed Me About the Facebook Meeting
medium.com
medium.com
No, they are not.
I am pretty sure they don't believe in abolishing all forms of government excepting national defence and contract enforcement.
What they actually want is for the government to support their priorities. Like preserving open space and parks and zoning against development, environmental regulation, support of infrastructure and transportation improvements, education and science research etc. But they don't like paying taxes much, they aren't interested in the government regulating their reproductive choices or recreational drug habits, etc.
Those positions are far from libertarianism. The accurate political term to describe this general world view is "elitism".
Silicon Valley types as described above are just pro-business types that fetishize technology and are socially liberal. Or what used to be coastal Republicans before that party was overrun. Libertarians they certainly are not.
In the same way, there are people who correctly call themselves 'democrats' that don't believe in the kind of gun control that is part of the official party dialog.
It's a thoughtful commentary regarding how conservative media has developed a victim complex akin to those they criticize.
The whole Progressive movement is based on the philosophy of improving business conditions by balancing power. It sees conflicts coming from monopolies and consolidations of power and tries to minimize those through strategic government intervention. Lots of people believe in small businesses but think that some government intervention is needed to allow them to compete. Theodore Roosevelt considered himself a Progressive Conservative. I can easily accept that Glenn Beck doesn't think that this kind of intervention is effective, but I can't believe he isn't even aware that this opinion exists when he spends every day of his life talking about it.
Maybe he's just pretending not to understand to relate to his audience who generally like straw man arguments. Maybe it's a brilliant strategy to slowly introduce people to the idea that the other side might have some things in common with them. If it is, I hope it works.
Glenn Beck is acting as if Progressives would naturally be anti-business, but the movement, even the modern movement, is based on improving business conditions. Of course other areas too, but it has a big focus on people's jobs because that's where they spend their time.
It started out to address the concerns of the left while also standing against socialist ideas. You could say it's like the Open Source movement that saw the Free Software movement as a little too anti-business and wanted to pursue a similar agenda while not coming out too hard against business as usual.
Conservatives and Progressive have a lot more in common that I could get into here, but that's not the point. It's that Glenn Beck knows a lot of Democrats are pro business and pro tech and acts as if he doesn't understand how it could be possible. He's just playing dumb.
Which is the last thing I'd expect out of Glenn Beck. I'm off to go read it now.
(EDIT: comes back from reading the article...)
Were you to have read it to me out loud and then later tell me Beck wrote it, I'd say you were lying. Thoughtful it was indeed (a bit thick on the disclaimers, but whatever). But it raises the question in my head: Has Beck recently backed off his whack-a-doodle persona to something reasonable? To me it was like reading an article authored by Jim Cramer telling you to buy S&P 500 index funds, roll credits.
OTOH, perhaps it is the crisis others theorized. Because it came across in some ways as, "oh, so this is how it must look from the other side?"
I was as surprised as you were.
>a bit thick on the disclaimers, but whatever
I, too, wondered when he would finally get to his main point which seemed endlessly prefaced.
Anyway, I was as shocked as you were. And I never thought I'd say the words "thoughtful commentary" and "Glenn Beck" in the same sentence.
Politics is, by it's very nature, the game of compromise and by telling conservatives to put people into categories doesn't really help that. If politicians refuse to play the game of compromise then the political system becomes extremely ineffective (i.e. what we have at the moment with Republican obstructionism)