My only goal here is to sketch one liberal position -- one that wants to change society, but one step at a time. It is a vision in contrast to Dissy's.

For many years I too was committed to radical change in society; I thought long and hard about how it could be done. When considering various attempts at revolutionary change in the last hundred and fifty years, occasional success had very little to do with the strategy of the revolutionaries -- it rested on the spectacular and gross incompetence of the parties in power. Even when successful, those revolutions on balance made things worse rather than better. Consider the USSR, Cuba, and Cambodia, or the sponsored revolutions in North Korea or Eastern Europe (circa 1945). China is more debatable but hardly produced a classless and just society. The Islamic revolutions are a bit different but I hardly think they have made things better either.

The energy behind the modern revolutionary is, "But I can SEE how things are broken, how they can be so much better! We HAVE to change it!" The energy of the moderate is to see all those things and wince -- but engage them at the level of educating people and try to build coalitions to change things one step at a time. Yes, it's really painful to see so much injustice in the world -- but when we have people from so many other places saying, "This place is a paradise!", they are a reminder that in other places and times things have been so very much worse. If you're a Chinese peasant in 1945, things are pretty darn bad and revolution seems like a good gamble. Not when you're an American in 2015. "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" is a painfully short-sighted analysis when we're talking US Presidential politics. "Are you better off than your forebears were 100 years ago?" is not.

What does a liberal have to offer in contrast to Dissy's "Liberation for all!" Unfortunately, a world view that sees a great many complexities shades of gray, and compromises among ideals doesn't make good copy the way a call for radical change does. I was amused to see signs at a march saying roughly, "What do we want? Incremental Improvement!" "When do we want it? In a reasonable timeframe!" They're just not the sort of rousing signs that fire up the crowds.

I am accused of accepting all the institutions of present society intact. Here are some policy changes I would favor; see for yourself.

I would favor strict limits on campaign and campaign-related advertising in the period before an election. I favor the idea of international trade treaties that take into account environmental issues and human rights issues as part of free trade. I favor a heavy carbon tax, feeling that climate change is the greatest threat humanity faces. I favor a much-expanded earned income credit, effectively amplifying wages for low-wage work, paying for it with higher taxes on the well-to-do. I favor much heavier investment in infrastructure and basic research, and government support of education and the arts. I favor single-payer health care, a curb on advertising prescription drugs directly to the public, and government support for testing promising drugs that are no longer patentable and thus of no interest to for-profit drug companies. I would legalize some street drugs, and for others limit significant prison sentences to those who are far up the line in wholesale. I favor stricter regulation of corporations for environmental issues, and favor no longer regarding them as "persons" for purposes of political speech. I favor curbing complicated financial instruments and breaking up financial companies that are too big to fail, maybe even a tiny tax on buying and selling of stocks. I favor closing loopholes in the inheritance tax. Some of my ideas about changing society's treatment of pedophilia and related issues are in my blog (celibatepedos.blogspot.com).

It is in no way a complete list. Taken together, they would make our society a much more progressive place. It is likely that if those were achieved, the revised society would present other challenges and opportunities for improvement that are not apparent now.

Many of the items on my list seem impossible at this point, when the country can't even elect a Democratic House.

My current plan is to make this single post. I expect Dissy and others will reply. We could go back and forth endlessly -- we've started to in other threads. The web is full of such discussions. They raged in print for centuries before the web, and with clenched fists and raised voices in countless face-to-face discussions. I don't think you'll learn the truth by listening to either of us. But I do remind you that there is a sensible, respectable liberal view that is in fact embraced by far more people than Dissy's.

You will most likely make your decision by indirect means. Perhaps you'll stay with the Dissy plan because it's something of a GC consensus. Maybe you'll think about what other people in your life outside of GC believe. Maybe you'll go for the Dissy plan because Ethan disagrees, and Ethan is wrong about everything.

I just ask you to think about it. This analysis matches Dissy's scope in being about the entirety of society. An opinion on youth liberation can be viewed as a more specific question, which I would like to do.

Keep in mind that you can retain your belief that adult-child sex is fundamentally OK no matter what you decide.