Relativism refuses to understand or respect the actual relations. Concepts are hierarchically organised in the mind of the rational person; if some seem to conflict, it's because you're failing to understand their places in the hierarchy. They go from broad and deep to concrete and shallow: from dirt to Reality.
We go from individual particles to complex Human Beings (made of many trilliions of particles, and more importantly, many hundreds or thousands of ideas, to the collective of human beings - tribes, communities, races, nations; which comprise various combinations of all of the above.
Western Civilisation focuses its policies on allowing various people's ideas to reach fulfillment. Failed attempts at social organisation focus on controlling physical combinations.
The emphasized word is one I meant to say, but didn't.
I must add that not all ideas will succeed in reaching fulfillment, nor will the majority, having reached fulfillment, succeed in achieving their proclaimed goals. Their goals would be the long-term happiness of their adherents, in this life or the next, or (for atheistic ideologies) among their descendants (as long as they adhere to The Plan).
Our Founders never expected us to achieve a permanent state of Utopia or Nirvana. They only hoped to create an ideological framework within which we could find solutions to our problems.
Departures from that framework - communism, socialism, fascism, monarchy, oligopoly, theocracy and totalitarianism - have proven to be marked failures.
As has, I suppose, Atomistic Individualism, though, within the Framework of a Constitution which respects individual, natural rights, I doubt that it would.
Tribalism has yet to prove to be a failure within that framework, except in the cases where it oversteps its bounds (shown by a tribe, or clan, inflicting harm on another). The Nuclear Family certainly hasn't proven to be a failure...
Well, I need to cut this off. What, though, is the goal of political theory?
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