Ed Luce: evaluation

Transcript context

…We have a pretty good idea of what liberalism looks like for agricultural societies, also for manufacturing societies, but say the big political issues of the future or maybe the present were something like the environment, the Internet, intellectual property law, privacy, immigration, terrorism, and dementia. Not so implausible. With those as the major issues, do we even know what liberalism looks like, just to say people back in even the 1930s probably hardly ever debated gay marriage, if at all. If you were to ask me one of my favorite liberal thinkers, it would be Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke, who is normally thought of as a conservative thinker, but I see no contradiction ‑‑ I’m not using liberalism in the American sense of liberalism ‑‑ developed the idea during the time of the French Revolution of the superiority of representative democracy. Remember, we had the Jacobeans saying that we needed instant electric democracy, and nothing in between the people and the decisions. You are describing decisions here, very complex ‑‑ ethically, legally, societally, and internationally ‑‑ very complex decisions that you cannot decide by plebiscite, and I don’t care whether you can do it online and make it easier. It makes no difference. These are questions where you need to be able to delegate authority to your representatives who you can fire at the next opportunity to develop the skills as full‑time political representatives to make these judgments. If you don’t like those judgments, you throw them out. I don’t think the answer is either, what you might be implying, because you could go one of two ways ‑‑ the plebiscitary Robespierre kind of democracy on the one hand, or Singapore, basically non‑democracy and a rule of experts on the other. I don’t see anything better than representative democracy. I proposed to Mark Koyama a few days ago, over lunch, that we simply give everything to the House of Lords for about five years. [laughter] And then go back to the Constitution we have. In the middle of these, we always have this segment, “Overrated versus Underrated.” You’re from England, of course. You’ve moved to the United States, so I’m going to ask you about a number of other Brits who’ve done the same, and you tell me if you think they’re overrated or underrated. Stanley Kubrick.…

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