everybody all right so we are going to continue our discussion of kind of themes of of political theory in this uh this section where we talk about political ideologies so ideologies are really ideas about how political life should be structured um and should be structured like so how it's structured and how it should be um in general these are the axes around which conflict emerges um so you know liberals and conservatives sh the United States but then also like ideologies in terms of uh International relation in Conflict as well the fact that we are uh we have good relationships with other Advanced democracies for example we have a pretty fraught relationship with a lot of uh uh countries that are totalitarian authoritarian Marxist and communist right like we have we have a much difficult much more difficult relationship with them than we do with other capitalist uh democracies and so like that helps us understand that as well okay so the basic idea is that we want to know how people should organize their lives in society now Plato um argued that political power should be given to those who have great knowledge and a love for wisdom that is to say philosophers which is also people like him uh who' be free from corruption and know best about what communities needed so basically the idea is that you should have one person or two people who are really thoughtful who are smart and uh who are uncorruptible and then let them be in charge that's true it's going to be really efficient the problem is that there's no world where uh that happens right like once one person gets power then they tend to be corrupt right we don't get these benevolent dictators um but that's that's that was kind of Plato's idea Aristotle kind of built on that idea which focused on a few things so the first thing is who is making decisions is it one person is it a few people uh is it the majority of people and then are they making decisions that are going to be good for their themselves or for everybody so the I the sort of the best outcome is actually not democracy where we're all self-interested the actually best outcome is where we're all involved in making decisions but we're all involved in making decisions that are best for the best for for everybody um if we go a little bit farther down um the fewer people making decisions you can't have an aristocracy where you have 10 people are making you know 10 10% of the country is making decisions for the other for the for everybody but the 10% of people are making decisions that are best for everybody that's going be aristocracy or the 10% of people was making decisions that would be best for them like an oligarchy that's kind of what you have in Russia in Russia right now um only a few people are making decisions and they're making decisions that are for the be their their own benefit and not for the average Russian uh citizen then of course we have the rule by one right where if you're doing stuff that are bad for everybody like in North Korea Kim Jong-un right he's a tyrant um by contrast you know we've had monarchs are kind of P at this point but uh the you know the king or the queen um of England back in the day they they had power right they ostensively were making decisions that are benefit for everybody okay so for the longest time everybody had power only because of your uh family your because either your family to uh took it or you were you fought for it or your bestowed power your power and authority was bestowed On You by the pope or something else like that the idea of government actually being responsive to the citizens and thinking about the needs of the citizens really did not come around until the enlightened uh during the Enlightenment thinkers really said that like political systems should really secure social peace not promote like a particular religion and this goes back to what we talked about in the last video which is that um without some sort of powerful authority to achieve peace and safety we're in a state of nature which is a war of all against all that nasty brutish and short that we talked about last time we give our loyalty to a political ruler we give up our right to kill each other life is better the laws of nature upheld John Lock took that idea and went farther right he says the government should uh protect rights and public property uh private property as well but it also have to maintain the consent of the government that is to say all of us have to agree with this and if we are not comfortable with this if we're not if the ruler is not protecting our private property the ruler is not protecting our rights we actually have the right of Revolution we have the right to overturn uh the political uh leaders and replace them right so that's that's the idea of like they owe us and if they are not doing what we want then we can kick them out uh uh a little bit later there's a french guy named rouso and rouso had this kind of odd idea is that people should develop a Civic religion not a not a religious religion right the like your belief in God or something else like that but they actually should all kind of buy into uh working together as a collective as a group and then they can determine those uh laws that should apply for everyone this is the this will secure what he called the general will and promot civic virtue okay so this kind of kind of a crash course and sort of the way that we came around this but these themes are stuff that you've heard and your American government classes the idea that um yeah Thomas Jefferson was heavily influenced by John Lock and the idea of us having the right to Revolution and the need for this consent of the government and the need for government to maintain and protect uh right rights and and private property all of those things are elements that you've seen in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution and that you've certainly heard about from uh people like uh our founding fathers so the the idea of liberalism uh has evolved dramatically over time the when we say liberal now that typically means somebody who wants the government to be involved in uh in in the economy who is going to maybe tax the rich more than more than others will promote education those kinds of things a classical liberal is different a classical liberal really focused on a few things right natural rights uh limited government a government that did very little right and then also a real strong protection of capitalism right the protection of private property and then the freedom to invest in the pursuit of profit so that's all about is really that's almost kind of closer to what we would call libertarian now rather than um than than than some somebody who's liberal right so you might if you run into this somebody somebody calls himself the classical liberal right that makes them more likely to be kind of libertarian rather than somebody who like a classical liberal now is sorry contemporary liberal now is going to be you know like Joe Biden or something else like that this idea the Contemporary liberalism um has uh been criticized from from a whole bunch of folks sometimes from the left sometimes from the right but one of the best uh kind of criticisms of liberalism came from this guy named fa H he's an Austrian philosopher in the 20th century and he pointed out one thing right is when the government grows it does not shrink it never goes backwards um moreover as Government gets more and more involved in regulations it tends to be inefficient in the way that goods are produced and this can ultimately lead to a worse standard of living so his idea was that government should not be involved in in any of this um leave let the market do it and then if we overproduce something then people are not going to buy it the government learns or not the the private Market learns so he he was a strong kind of opponent of of liberalism and a big strong promoter of of capitalism there are a lot of other isms though that you will kind of run into right so the first one is of course nationalism which is the attachment to shared blood history soil um you know this can nationalism is certainly parts of it can be positive um is good to have civic pride in the rest of it right rouso would agree with that but aspects of nationalism can obviously run us uh run us into trouble um when we decide if who is or is not part of a country um when we decide that uh one country is superior to another um so then it can lead to war it can lead to social exclusion and the rest of it now obviously we talked about Marxism briefly in the last uh slide as well or last video as well but the basic idea of Marxism is that uh because people sell their labor to a few large companies these companies do not have an obligation to actually make uh everybody's life better they the companies instead make their own lives better so this lead to poor conditions and this poor conditions will eventually Mark POS suggested was that people will develop a class Consciousness and demand change they'll take control of the state they'll overthrow um the the rulers and then they'll organize itself into a classless society so this is an idea for Marxism we we've never seen a truly Marxist place before um but we certainly have communist countries um you know Soviet Union was for a long time China and so Venezuela to a certain extent um another ISM that you'll hear about another ideology is of course fascism fascism right fascism is a few things right it is nationalism it's also explicitly anti-communist and also it consolidates power into one ruler right so fascism uh you know Europe had a lot lot of fascists in the 20th century um musolini in Italy Hitler in Germany um Franco in Spain um these were all really really anti-communist nationalist um and all kind of around one individual and then then there's authoritarianism right authoritarianism says that there is no Challenger to a ruler uh there's no uh and then the the freedoms that you have are determined by the ruler right so authoritarianism uh you that can be you know that that kind of this kind of Russia right like Vladimir Putin elections uh but nobody runs against him in those elections his political opponents get killed um that's that's that's that's kind of classical authoritarianism uh kind of case so we talked briefly about uh liberalism right a contemporary liberalism uh is is again the idea the government should be promoting the common good it should be involved in regulations to make sure the workplaces are safe that that we tax from the rich give to the poor those kinds of ideas contemporary conservatives is different right contemporary conservativism kind of takes some of the ideas for Classical liberalism and then add some other aspects as well so they do have some kind of the moderate like economic libertarianism right which is that like like that that I should be able to do what I want right don't take my money if I want to run a business I get to run the business the way that I want to um and so you can't kind of restrict that um proper true Libertarians uh actually don't like the idea of borders and the rest of it right so there's like so there's not a lot of true Libertarians are there but what we instead the idea is that uh we should have you know borders and Border restrictions and things like that but we should not have government growing into other aspects the government should not be regulating um uh my conduct as a business person and government should not be taking money from me that's related also to the idea of social conservativism right which is that there's going to be a particular set of moral standards that you know people have and government job is to maintain those particular moral standards right so this leads to opposition to samex marriage or trans rights or abortion access things like that right that's kind of the the Nexus of the Contemporary conservativism which is a combination of the economic libertarianism with that social conservativism as well there are a bunch of other ideologies as well um you talk talks about them um in quite a bit of detail we'll just kind of run through them briefly right on the liberal side of things there's the idea of multiculturalism that like a diversity of cultures actually enrich a societ um there's environmentalism which of course the idea that government intervention is critical to forestall a climate crisis there's feminism uh which has had different waves of thought right starting with suffrage and women's opportunity to work that's the first way of feminism second way of feminism talked into bodily freedoms and safety and sex and personal relationships that second wave feminism and then third wave feminism is now the critique of the patriarchal Norms in society that is to say um it's not just that women's ability to work women's abil ability to get divorced if they want to women's ability to uh you know have a restraining order against an abusive spouse but more in general calling into question the broader uh sort of way that Society uh supports men at the expense of women last other thing we'll talk about the liberal side is a critical race Theory um which has a term that a lot of people use I think often inappropriately but the basic idea is that uh the current sort of experience of somebody who is say black um is shaped not just by their immediate experience but it's also shaped on a legacy of of of structural racist decisions right that that that have that have a long tail and effectively mean they don't determine things but they do make it harder for you know for somebody who's black to get head than somebody who's white that's idea of critical reace theory now on the right um there's a new wave of something that that we typically call the new right which is that the the we need to be doing more to protect cultural norms right and so we need to be doing more to uh kind of enforce that nationalism idea we should be doing more to uh to exclude some people who maybe have not been traditionally been part of the social Fabric in the country need to do more to uh make sure government responds to the demands of ordinary people maybe have women go return to the home instead of the workplace um single family uh sorry single income family should should be able to exist all of those kinds of things as well right that's kind of that's kind of what we're getting a little bit more with a new right particularly people like JD Vance and Josh Holly all right so that's it for our sort of ideology crash course and ideologies and this is going to be where we leave our political Theory friends behind and we move into other aspects and thinking about uh about politics