Adam Gurri

And the next thing is very much like the old things.

It's just reactionary nationalism.

Right.

So it's the idea that communities have rights rather than individuals, if we're going to even talk about rights at all.

And it's very slippery because the left communitarians don't want to say things like, well, obviously a traditional patriarchal community can just do whatever the hell they want to women.

They don't really want to say that.

So they play a lot of games where they talk about

sort of the bad effects of just isolating individuals and leaving them to their own you know they look at the negative side of what happens if there is not sufficient community support for an individual they also argue that there's not really any such thing as an individual per se everyone is formed in this social context you know humans are social animals um

But when you're circling around to what's the positive prescription, frankly, the left communitarians get very squishy.

Probably the one who is the most concrete, and also, in my opinion, the best, is Charles Taylor up in Canada.

Because it's a little more like...

they have a lot more concrete ways of approaching it in Canada, right?

And there's some more like specific issues that they address that way.

So with Taylor, it's like in Canadian pluralism, there's the role of Quebec relative to the rest of the country, but there's also the role of minorities in Quebec relative to the Quebec majority.

And thinking about those different communities and what rights they have.

And, you know, often...

Rights given to the minorities within Quebec are going to come at the expense, at least perceived by the Québécois nationalists, come at the expense of the institutional things that keep the autonomy of Quebec.

So there's this tense, tense balancing act.

And of course, when people push for like a communitarian argument for self-determination so that Quebec could be independent or something, they sort of don't leave out the fact that there's a good, there's a first nation population within Quebec that absolutely would not want the territory they live in to go along with that independent Quebec.

Right.