A very insightful column this weeekend from Ross Douthat:
Consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.
What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.
This is a crisis that the Republican Party often badly misunderstands, casting Democratic-leaning voters as lazy moochers or spoiled children seeking “gifts” (as a certain former Republican presidential nominee would have it) rather than recognizing the reality of their economic struggles.
But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.
“Secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of . . . disconnection from community in general” is an aphorism to which we will have to keep returning.
November 19th, 2012 | 5:11 pm
We hear a lot of aspirational, unspecific jawing about these “local associations”, “mediating institutions” and the like in the context of airy-fairy high-flown semi-notions like “subsidiarity” (which no pope or anyone else has ever thought through thoroughly – this is a concept that has about as much content to it as “small is beautiful”) these days. Douthat, a supposedly “thoughtful commentator”, is just mouthing from the same well-worn hymnal. I’m tired of it.
Can anybody come up with an *example* from the 20th century USA where these mediating institutions were actually operating in such a way as to obviate the need for such (horrible) things as public health insurance, union bargaining, mandated decent wages, some level of job and professional security, etc? What, concretely and realistically, as the pace of Creative Destruction ineluctably speeds up, do you guys have in mind? Which wonderful mediating institution is going to provide insurance for me and my wife in perpetuity if I lose it, e.g. (we have lots of preexisting conditions)? My local parish? My diocese? The K of C? The Lions Club? The Kings College? Notre Dame? The Young Republicans? The Koch brothers? Some rich guy in my town? The Sisters of Charity? The Douthats? (Don’t mention the Mormons, please.) I mean, seriously, would *you* want to rely on some “subsidiary” voluntary organization if you had really bad luck? How long could you expect to rely on them do you think?
I don’t embrace any of the cartoon secular leftist attitudes that Douthat tiresomely trots out again (capital-F future, suspicion of domesticity; well, ok, the churches ARE certainly irritants in many respects, especially if you’re a serious believer). I just want a common good that works, not pious evasions.
November 19th, 2012 | 6:03 pm
One wonders whether liberalism is attempting to eliminate all that stands between the individual and the state.
November 19th, 2012 | 8:03 pm
I think your question needs highlighting, HT; it’s a good one. So I’ll repeat it: “I mean, seriously, would *you* want to rely on some ‘subsidiary’ voluntary organization if you had really bad luck? How long could you expect to rely on them do you think?”
November 20th, 2012 | 3:36 am
Tom Gilson asks, “whether liberalism is attempting to eliminate all that stands between the individual and the state.”
The answer is yes and it always has. It is implicit in the liberal concept of equality and its hatred of privilege. As Lord Acton noted, “It condemns, as a State within the State, every inner group and community, class or corporation, administering its own affairs; and, by proclaiming the abolition of privileges, it emancipates the subjects of every such authority in order to transfer them exclusively to its own.”
The English legal historian, F W Maitland, having quoted the famous declaration of August 18, 1792: “A State that is truly free ought not to suffer within its bosom any corporation, not even such as, being dedicated to public instruction, have merited well of the country,” suggested that “An appreciable part of the interest of the French Revolution seems to me to be open only to those who will be at pains to give a little thought to the theory of corporations.”
Also at work is a suspicion, going back to Rousseau, of particular interests and allegiances that undermine the general will.
This is why, as Lord Acton explains, “Under its sway, therefore, every man may profess his own religion more or less freely; but his religion is not free to administer its own laws. In other words, religious profession is free, but Church government is controlled. And where ecclesiastical authority is restricted, religious liberty is virtually denied.”
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