In an open letter to Republican Catholics (to be followed next week by a letter to Democratic Catholics), Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter describes his sympathy for and his disagreements with American conservatism. As a member of his intended audience, I think he offers a prescient warning:
The heresy of libertarianism has taken root within the Republican Party, and it has done so in the area of our culture where it is most dangerous because most pervasive: economics. I say “heresy” for two reasons. First, because libertarianism fits with the definition of heresy attributed to Lord Acton, it is a “truth run amok,” that is, it takes sound ideas about human freedom and responsibility and runs too far with them . . . Secondly, and more dangerously, this libertarianism raises issues of theological anthropology of the first order. . . .
Nowhere is the inability to grasp the social nature of man more obvious than in the reluctance of today’s Republican Party to come to terms with the fact of rising income inequality. Over at Vox Nova, Morning’s Minion has a great article about Catholic teaching on the sin of income inequality, with quotes going back to Pope Pius XI. The willingness of Republicans to trash the very idea that government has an obligation to ensure that its citizens have adequate health care and other basic human needs places them squarely at odds with a different, but equally long, catalogue of explicit papal teachings. . . . Above all else, Catholic Social Teaching stands for the proposition that all human activities and organizations, including the economy, must be judged in terms of their moral worth. . . . The Master, of course, was clear on this: We will be judged not on the basis of our material success but on how we treat the least of these our brethren.
Of course, as Winters would doubtless agree, the way we treat “the least of these” is expressed not merely through the government but also through society’s “little platoons,” through families, churches, charities, and voluntary associations. Still, the government plays a crucial role in the creation of a just society. Republicans should not forget that in their efforts to shrink the state and grow the economy.
August 29th, 2012 | 5:24 pm
Society is people. The little platoons create a just society. The little platoons create a just government. Government cannot make people good, but people can make government good. I hope he writes that in his letter to Democratic Catholics.
August 29th, 2012 | 9:49 pm
For goodness’ sake, the Ryan budget proposal was to slow the growth of entitlement spending, not to end entitlement spending! In the end, we’ll be lucky just to avoid going off the fiscal cliff–the chances that libertarianism could ever run amok in government are so slim as to be roughly equivalent to my chances of winning the lottery.
August 29th, 2012 | 10:34 pm
This mush, again? Republicans have been the ones declaiming against crony capitalism, the heresy that has run amok in the present administration. And they are the ones who understand that the great source of inequality is precisely the government that interferes on behalf of the politically favored individuals or classes. Many decry libertarianism’s misunderstanding of human nature. Well, maybe libertarians have that deficiency. But they have the great virtue of not mistaking the nature of government, which is Mr Winters’ deficiency. And as between the two, Mr Winters’ mistake is more grievous in its practical outcomes.
August 30th, 2012 | 3:08 am
so as a Catholic do i have to accept Obama’s banal observation that people benefit from their communities and infrastructure, and then conclude that means individual achievement is essentially secondary? or would I be an evil Randian if I say that’s false.
August 30th, 2012 | 6:44 am
When the United States government goes broke (opps! We’d have to pay back over six trillion dollars just to be broke), it will not be funny. The poor will really suffer. All the preaching and quoting of Catholic social teaching will not matter one wit. Even if we totally defund the military (a favorite answer from the left and “compassionate” religious types), it will not pay for all the shortfalls in our entitlement programs. When our navy will no longer be able to defend the freedom of the seas, the price of food will rise beyond the means of most the working poor and trouble even the lower middle class. Fuel prices will make driving to work a luxury. At the top end, many of the rich will take their wealth and seek safer havens–depriving America of much investment capital and taxable income. When our well-meaning clerics address this loaming tragedy, then I will take them seriously.
August 30th, 2012 | 7:35 am
And here I’ve been noticing the way Paul Ryan so often speaks of our responsibility to the weakest among us, and our need to save the “safety net.” I guess the mention of Ayn Rand in connection with Ryan has driven the left into hysterics. Ryan is no more a Randian than my poodle. He was simply one of the many who grew up surrounded by collectivist teachers, collecitivest media, and collectivist everything else in the culture, and found a dramatic attack on collectivism in his formative years in Ayn Rand. He’s a smart guy, and he’s a serious Catholic. Like many others, he took the anti-collectivism from Rand and went on with his development. And I think his political views are representative of current Republicanism.
As for income inequality, the belief in economic growth as the way to bring opportunity and prosperity to people is not “reluctance…to come to terms with the fact of rising income inequality.” Rather, it’s the sensible belief that increased prosperity for all is more important than equality, which goal usually means everybody becomes equally poor.
August 30th, 2012 | 8:51 am
I wonder if the mistake starts with calling these things “little platoons”, giving the impression that the government really is the big important thing, and these other things just help the government do its job. It really ought to be the other way around: the government should ensure social justice by making sure the “little platoons” (businesses and larger scale voluntary associations included in that) can do their job (by encouraging solidarity e.g.) and then pick up the slack (as an application of subsidiarity) when they fail.
August 30th, 2012 | 10:32 am
“The willingness of Republicans to trash the very idea that government has an obligation to ensure that its citizens have adequate health care and other basic human needs places them squarely at odds with a different, but equally long, catalogue of explicit papal teachings. . . . .” Does this mean that we are required to passively stand by while the national debt crosses the $16 trillion mark which it will in the next few weeks? I’m sure we will be told that by taxing the 1% we can afford an endless array of ever-growing entitlements. Unfortunately, taxing the rich won’t pay the bills. There is nothing moral about marching blindly down the road to default — if you are genuinely concerned about ‘the least of our breathren’ then avoiding that day of reckoning is the only moral course of action.
August 30th, 2012 | 10:48 am
If little platoons are so important what do we consider Walmart to be? A slightly bigger platoon? Give me a break. Little platoons have no chance faced with bigger platoons, thus small businesses are destroyed by huge corporations. Why voters would buy the rhetoric and not the reality is beyond me. And as for Catholics, we are INNATELY communitarian because we know everyone is either part of the Body of Christ or potentially so. Nothing could be further from this than Ayn Rand’s selfish individualism.
August 30th, 2012 | 12:31 pm
Communitarian and collectivist are not synonymous, though Obama is doing his best to make you believe they are.
August 30th, 2012 | 1:26 pm
The statistics show income inequality is rising among households, not individuals. The rising inequality is thus a matter of how we structure our households, which is only somewhat related to economics and more strongly related to social ethics – those individual/community and bedroom issues. It’s a question of single-person households. It’s a question of persons marrying later in life, if at all, and largely among established income levels. It’s a question of institutionalizing and rejecting of our poorer family and friends. If libertarianism is a threat, which I agree it is (especially among those who dismiss principles or forge their own to justify the temporary circumstances), its impact through economics is not to blame for rising income inequality.
August 30th, 2012 | 6:34 pm
While what Winters says about the Church’s opinion on social justice is true as far as I know, I want to point out three things:
1. I agree with the Catholic Church on this, but one can disagree with the Church in good conscience on the most effective way to provide for the poor and protect the weak. The Church doesn’t claim infallibility here.
2. “Government” does not equal “national government”. Many of the things Winters mentioned could be handled most effectively, and most in accord with the humanism of JPII, if handled on a state or local level. I reject the mentality that every problem that requires government intervention, requires NATIONAL government intervention.
3. This issue is not a central issue to this election. The contrast between Republicans and Democrats in this election is greater than ever. The Republican party is not perfect, but the majority of it’s positions (especially the important ones) are right in line with Catholic teaching.
August 30th, 2012 | 11:52 pm
Was it business that destroyed the family as first warned by Sen. Moynihan and recently documented by Prof. Murray? Or was it social engineering in the name of economic security and educating the young? Now of course thanks to so many social justice/social activist campaigns even business is part of the effort to redefine everything intimate and personal and private – particularly the family. I can tell you that Target now asks prospective employees if they will follow “traditional values” in the work place. What an odd question. What could it possibly mean? What connnection could it have to the ubiquitous “diversity orientations” now found in every large business? My impression of so many in the Catholic Church is that they haven’t begun to asks these questions much less think about what one sees all around us. Income inequality? First you have to have a job. Social injustice? Without family or faith or values or education or constitutional order or fundamental decency? This week the Archdiocese of Detroit is buying back guns in the imploded and blasted urban heath known as the Motor City. Where does one begin the address the futility and the thoughtlessness behind it
August 31st, 2012 | 12:00 am
Was it business that destroyed the family as first warned by Sen. Moynihan and recently documented by Prof. Murray? Or was it social engineering in the name of economic security and educating the young? Now of course thanks to so many social justice/social activist campaigns even business is part of the effort to redefine everything intimate and personal and private – particularly the family. I can tell you that Target now asks prospective employees if they will follow “traditional values” in the work place. What an odd question. What could it possibly mean? What connnection could it have to the ubiquitous “diversity orientations” now found in every large business? My impression of so many in the Catholic Church is that they haven’t begun to asks these questions much less think about what one sees all around us. Income inequality? First you have to have a job. Social injustice? Without family or faith or values or education or constitutional order or fundamental decency? This week the Archdiocese of Detroit is buying back guns in the imploded and blasted urban heath known as the Motor City. Where does one begin the address the futility and the thoughtlessness behind it?
August 31st, 2012 | 10:12 am
Those evil Republicans! They want to take the country back to the dark ages of 1997!
August 31st, 2012 | 2:58 pm
This is an area of intellectual difficulty for me. The author, and applauded as “prescient” by First Things, equates “governments providing adequate health care and other human needs” with Christ’s command to care for the poor. This is such a wild equation that one does not know where to start. I vote that YOU give your money to HER because she NEEDS something. That is not charity.
I think it comes from the European model of kings, which was used to create the papacy and corresponding structures. It becomes assumed that “good stuff comes from the king” rather than the American model of all power residing with the people.
I agree that humanism is a very present danger in hanging with Libertarians, although WFB was one throughout his very faithful political and Catholic life.
The cure for “income inequality” is generosity, not government programs. That Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became wealthier than I is not something that bothers me. My life is materially and emotionally better because of their contribution. Even spiritually, as I carry my bible and breviary on my iPad.
September 3rd, 2012 | 9:33 am
I read Winters’ post at NCR, and found jarring the contrast between his tone — just reasonable folks laying out undeniable truths for consideration — and his actual reasoning.
I find “libertarianism” as a fully-defined and -embraced “ism” to be morally repellant, and I did so before I became a Roman Catholic. But to simply assert that this “ism” has “taken root in the Republican Party” — without bothering to examine what or how libertarian thinking is influencing concrete Republican policy proposals — is shoddy.
[As an example, Mark Shea (and I believe Winters also) has condemned Paul Ryan because Ryan says he was greatly influenced by Ayn Rand. But neither Shea nor Winters has shown in what ways Ryan's thinking or acting actually has influenced Ryan -- what Ryan has actually taken from Rand, and used in his policy proposals.]
In Winters’ NCR post, he links to the “great article about Catholic teaching on the sin of income inequality.” The article consists of quotes, the first set from historians and economists, the second from popes and Vatican 2. Focusing on the second set, all agree that social and economic equality is unjust, and advocated, in the name of justice, a more equitable distribution of goods and services.
But surely the issue for most Catholics who think about these issues is not “the Church is wrong about more equitable distribution” but “what does ‘more equitable distribution means’” and “what are the best ways to achieve it?”
The quote from Pope Pius IX for example has this: “…the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless.” That seems to suggest that the pope saw that a key, perhaps the key, to this injustice lies in the fact that vast numbers are without property. That’s not something that I hear many progressives, especially progressive Catholics, talking about — what is the best way to ensure that the propertyless class joins the propertied class?
Paul VI’s quote focuses on the inequality of power even more than that of goods: insightfully so, since the perversion of crony capitalism, so evident in the favor-trading of both the Republican and Democratic parties, perverts the “blind eye” of the market to the detriment of the propertyless who seek to own property.
Finally, Winters talks only generally about “rising income inequality” without looking at specific influences or indeed at any numbers whatsoever. One area where this is, apparently, undeniable, is the striking rise in poverty for single-women-with-children. This seems to be a situation in which several currents are converging: the devaluation of marriage (and the implications), and of the positive relationship between marriage and income levels especially for women and children, the earnest and misplaced campaign to de-stigmatize single motherhood, and so on.
The complexity of that poverty nexus isn’t going to be solved by simply increasing taxes to increase transfer payments.
September 4th, 2012 | 6:43 pm
“…the government plays a crucial role in the creation of a just society…”
If the goal of Christian political involvement is to “create” a just society, then naturally the government will be THE crucial player, for among earthly powers only Leviathan can fool us into thinking it capable of creation.
If the goal is to ACT JUSTLY, in ways that do right by the poor and needy, as natural and divine law define right, then government will be only one, and not often the most important, player.
It is precisely the pretension of “creation” that is at the heart of the Left’s illusions: the idea that a complex society can be re-engineered from the ground up by a smart and compassionate elite, so that the outcome is some pattern of social and economic relationships arbitrarily described as “justice.”
Catholic concern for the poor and needy would be more impressive to many conservatives if it gave evidence of having thought through and consistently rejected the idea of “creating” a particular kind of society through social and economic engineering.
That means accepting that we cannot have it all, that the imagined perfect is often the enemy of the attainable good, that there are costs to all our actions, most of them unpredictable.
For example, are we allowed to entertain the possibility that we may not be able to do away with “income inequality” without doing away at the same time with income itself, impoverishing everybody but the powerful? Maybe the good that economic policy can accomplish is a rising tide that lifts at least most boats, even though some boats rise higher than others for no good reason that we can see.
The left today seems to have no actual plan for bringing in the Just Society, just an insistence that nothing less will do. That is why they would rather stagger on doggedly towards the abyss than think about Ryan’s very moderate reforms of entitlement programs that might keep them functional and helpful to needy people. Such reforms would make them imperfect in design from the point of view of the Left’s dream of “justice.” It would be better for all of us to fall into the abyss than just to help people without seeking perfection. That is the nihilism of the contemporary Left, what is left to them after the Left’s Century, the disastrous 20th.
I share the concern that the Right’s thinking has been overinfluenced by libertarianism since the end of the Cold War. But if Catholics want to lecture conservatives about the corruptions of libertarianism, they need to give evidence of having broken free of the illusions of the Left.
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