I’m a Christian intellectual. (I hope that’s true, on both counts). I have a PhD in theology. That’s what I know best. I participate in the Christian form of life, or at least I try to. It provides me with my most basic intellectual tools. This Christian way of thinking is not inaccessible to non-Christian or secular people, but it can sometimes be hard for them to think it worth their while. That’s understandable. We all have to do triage.

Secular progressives also have theology of sorts, as well as a form of life. A friend of mine teaches at Andover and he has described it to me, which isn’t necessary since I was raised and educated at the point where progressivism overlapped with liberal religion. (Ah, for that earlier time when religious was not so nearly a synonym for conservative.) It’s in many ways a highly effective and appealing moral culture that I’m sometimes grateful for, and when I’m not I remind myself that there are aspects of traditional religious culture that I regret as well.

Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, The Righteous Mind, argues that secular progressives suffer from a kind of blindness. They don’t seem to “taste” the full range of moral concerns, if you’ll permit the shift in metaphors from eyes to mouth. I wrote about it in the Public Square last year (“Our One-Eyed Friends”)

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Economic or market liberalism and social liberalism both privilege the strong over the weak. Over the last one hundred years we’ve developed a system of checks and balances empower the weak and limit the strong: progressive taxation, labor laws, environmental regulation, and more. We can argue about whether we have the right policies, but aside from Randian libertarians, most agree that we need to protect the weak.

Over the last fifty years things have gone the other way when it comes to culture. The strong make war on the weak.

My friend Jim Rogers gave me an example. The old constitutional test for obscenity was to define it as material that tends “to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” The idea was to protect the morally vulnerable. That changed in Miller (1973). The Supreme Court substituted “average person” for “minds open to such immoral influences.” The test is less rigorous because, well, because we don’t want the weak to limit our freedom. We’re not going to let the moral vulnerability of the few to be a burden to the many.

Drug legalization is another obvious case of the socially liberal war on the weak. Gay marriage is a less obvious instance, but a significant one. The strong have the resources to sustain a post-traditional culture of marriage. Everybody else? Data of declining marriage among the poor and middle class suggest not. The deconstruction of what’s left of the tattered traditional culture of marriage is very likely to make things worse, unless of course the social liberals crusade for the revival of marriage as a social norms, which they show no signs of doing.

It’s an odd situation today. Progressivism today is mostly focused on social questions, not economic ones, and in doing so they’re prosecuting a war on the weak. Political correctness, LGBT rights, elaborate therapies of inclusion: these are luxury goods for the rich paid for by the poor.

It’s old news, but consistently ignored. In her 2011 book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, Kay Hymowitz reports basic facts about gender, income, and status. Here are some arresting statistics.

Women between 25-34 with college educations now outnumber men in their age group.

The pay for women has grown 44 percent since 1970. Pay for men during the same time period has grown 6 percent.

Single and childless women living in cities now earn 8% more than men in their age cohort.

I’m not altogether sure what these changes mean over the long term. But I’ll venture one thought. Men are in trouble, or at least the median man. (Elite men flourish in the hyper-competitive environment of global capitalism.) I’ve written in the past about how globalization hammers working class men with high school educations. Our educational system does as well. These days a great deal of emphasis is put on order and compliance, an understandable reaction to the laxity and chaos of post-sixties education. It’s an educational environment in which adolescent females excel and adolescent males don’t.

My son recently graduated from a large urban public high school with a diverse student population. The honor roll was 90% female. Shocking, and surely a sign of serious problems, though nobody seems to care.

Today Commentary Magazine’s website features my contribution to a symposium on the future of conservatism that was published in their January issue.

These reflections are part of my larger concerns about the future of American conservatism, which I elaborate on in the Public Square in the forthcoming February issue, which will be up on the web in a few days.

My basic concern is this. The Republican Party today is very ideological. It has a strong free market orientation. I like that emphasis, because free markets provide a robust civic space for people to cooperate as they undertake productive work. It’s also a vast system of communication and coordination that for all its failures (and of course there are many) outperforms command-and-control efforts, however well intended. But free markets works effectively over the long haul, while we live in the short to medium haul, which is why political interventions into economic affairs are inevitable.
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A friend’s wife recently gave birth. He reports that the New York birth certificate asks for the sex of the mother, and the sex of the father.

I was taken aback. How could the State of New York be so behind the times? Don’t the bureaucrats in Albany know what the T in LGBT stands for? How could they presume the crazy essentialism that presumed a person is either male or female?

As everyone knows, well, at least everyone who isn’t motivated by irrational prejudices or in the thrall of religious fanaticism, the form should ask for the sex or sexes of the mother, and the sex or sexes of the father.

No, wait, there’s an incipient prejudice at work in that formulation, one that presumes monogamy, which as we know is a socially constructed idea that probably reflects the power interests of men, or perhaps women, or maybe just priests. . . . Anyway, you know what I mean. Consult your local cultural theorists for details.

Therefore, the form should ask for the sex or sexes of the mother or mothers, and the sex or sexes of the father or fathers.

Get with the program New York! Be the progressive state you claim to be!

Since the first of the year I’ve been working to catch up. A friend had sent a useful article by Chrystia Freeland, “The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent,” and I finally got around to clicking through and reading it.

Freeland has an interesting story to tell about Venice. The city went from a vibrant, growing culture to one dominated by an oligarchy that slowly sucked the vitality of what in the late middle ages was the most wealthy and powerful city in Europe. Her concern is that the growing divide between the super-rich in America and everybody else may lead us to evolve in the same direction.

Inequality, of course, has always been with us. Freeland quotes a letter from Thomas Jefferson that expresses the usual American delusions about equality. Freeland accepts Jefferson’s self-deceptions, writing, “In the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet.” Huh? Have we airbrushed chattel slavery out of our historical imaginations. Yes, today there are billionaires in New York who live according to very different rules than everybody else, but it’s hard to see how today is less egalitarian than early 19th century Virginia and the tens of thousands of men and women then in slavery.
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The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article advocating the decriminalization of drugs. Economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy argue the war on drugs has failed, and social costs of continuing with our current laws are too high. Their solution is to legalize drugs use, and eventually the drug market.

The facts seem straightforward. We spend a lot of money trying to prevent drug use ($40 billion they report). Laws against using and selling drugs put very large numbers of men in prison. Like prohibition, criminalization of drugs makes their sale very lucrative—and often dangerous, violent, and destructive of the neighborhoods where business is done. Indeed, whole countries are now convulsed by violence associated with the drug trade.

Given these facts, the argument for legalization isn’t stupid. But it’s not right.
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Daniel Henninger has gone down the rabbit hole. In his column for the Wall Street Journal he inveighs against the countless ways in which the tax code is manipulated by legislators to reward this or that constituency—or donors and lobbyists, as the case may be. The whole mess has been reaffirmed in the bill that was just passed to avert going over the fiscal cliff.

All to the good. Where he goes wrong is lumping this insider game with various efforts to use the tax code to encourage socially productive behavior. He writes: “The bill has $335 billion for the child tax credit, the sort of expenditure some conservatives like. But then no complaining about the rest of it.” He goes on, “You can’t pick and choose which tax heist to join. You’re in for all of them. In time everyone’s a tax gangster.”

Only a very ideological person can fail to distinguish between a tax code designed to subsidize the extraordinary costs of being a parent—the single most important act of citizenship anyone can perform—and one that subsidizes the production of ethanol. Unfortunately, many so-called conservatives think the way he does. For them, having a child is a “lifestyle choice” among many. Why should government be in the “social engineering” business of encouraging people to have children?

Purity, yes, but at the price of anything resembling political responsibility. One of the ideological dreams of modern men and women is government without politics. The Left entertains dreams of society administered by disinterested experts. The Right dreams of a libertarian society in which everybody’s private choices, unconstrained and undistorted by government, somehow constellate to make us all richer and happier—the invisible hand at work. But neither is possible. We’ve got to live in the world of actual human beings, which means a never-ending debate about how the power of government—including and perhaps especially its taxing power—should best serve the common good. No doubt that means doing our best to prevent the perversion of the tax code to serve special interests, but it also requires discerning when the tax code must be tilted this way or that to serve the general interest.

Ask the Japanese if having children isn’t very, very important for the future of society.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that “relativism” is the wrong way to describe the way in which secular elite culture approaches moral questions. It’s obvious that all things are not permitted, which is why Pope Benedict coined the term “dictatorship of relativism.” One MUST be affirming, inclusive, and non-judgmental. We’re heavily policed, as the term “political correctness” indicates.

Furthermore, the moral norms that progressives endorse aren’t just of this sort. In America, our secular elites put a great deal of emphasis on subtle forms of moral formation. First there is the imperative of success. Getting into a good college is all-important. This cult of success requires a great deal of self-discipline, and although one often sees a work-hard/play-hard mentality, that’s more characteristic of the 1980s and 1990s than the rising generation. Today parents emphasis the need to make “healthy choices” or “responsible choices.” That may allow for hedonism, but it’s a moderate hedonism organized around the larger goal of controlling one’s destiny and being successful.
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A friend was talking to me recently. He observed that the post-election drama in Washington seems to be about more than taxes and spending. Everybody seems to feel that the stakes are high, and two visions of the future of America are being contested. “It’s really pretty amazing,” he said, “because we just had a national election. Isn’t voting supposed to settle things. Majority rule and all that.” Not that he was opposed to Republican resistance to Obama’s proposals. On the contrary, he’s a limited government guy. Still, he’s right. It says something about the political moment in which we live that elections don’t settle things the way they used to. Both sides seem to be playing a long game.

It was then that he said: “Ya know, the more you hear about the fiscal cliff, the more you realize that it’s a metafiscal cliff we’re heading toward.”

Metafiscal cliff. Perfect.

With year’s end drawing near the editors of the Wall Street Journal‘s weekend review section asked fifty “friends” to tell us their favorite books of 2012. We hear from TV personalities, businessmen, writers, politicians, a college president, two baseball managers, three chefs, a Fed banker, actors, and journalists. Quite an eclectic list.

And quite remarkable for having no one remotely associated with religion. No pastor, not even Rick Warren. No priest or hierarch. No rabbi. No theologian. Tells us something about the editors, I suppose, which also tells us something about America at the end of 2012.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the fact that this set of fifty favorite books, which obviously serves to satisfy reader’s need for gift suggestions (chefs!), is presented with no reference to Christmas.

The Tablet is conducting an online survey to find out what people think of the new translation on the Mass after a full year of its use.

Log on and let them know what you think.

David Blankenhorn and I have had a useful exchange. In his last posting he questioned my argument that judging homosexual acts wrong isn’t akin to the racist view that skin color makes someone inferior:

I’m sure that Rusty Reno knows as well as anyone that almost no gay people (certainly no openly gay people, or at least none that I can think of) would accept the premise that being black-skinned is fixed whereas being gay is not — i.e., that being gay can be properly understood, as Reno suggests, as simply the choice to commit certain acts.  Reno can defend this position, of course, if that’s his position (and of course it’s a position that many have argued), but in my view in 2012 he can’t simply (with legitimacy) assume it, as if it were an uncontested fact, rather than what the whole fuss is all about.

Blankenhorn is right. That’s what the fuss is all about. We tend to assume that sexual expression is a normal and perhaps necessary part of being a healthy person. Thus, if you have homosexual desires, then it’s altogether unreasonable, and indeed unjust, for me to say that you should not have homosexual sex. (Here I want to be very clear that I’m talking about moral judgments—me saying “that’s wrong”—not legal ones.)

I want to explain why this view of sexual identity cannot serve as a reason to think people like me are “anti-gay.”
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A few days ago I wrote a sharply worded attack on Ken Mehlman’s argument that supporting gay marriage is the properly “conservative” position. David Blankenhorn offered some thoughtful reflections about what’s at stake for me (and others).

He raises a key question. Can those of us who resist gay rights or gay-marriage turn around and claim not to be “anti-gay”? I think he’s right to conclude that we can’t, at least not in the way a term like “anti-gay” is used.

Here’s how I see it. At the very least, the gay rights movement seeks to remove moral judgments about same-sex acts from any functional role in public policy. Whatever we think about the rights and wrongs of sexual morality, when it comes to the blurry sweep of options conjured by the LGBT tag, we’re not allowed to act on them in matters of employment, education, political office, etc. I take this to be what Blankenhorn refers to as “accepted” by society. In its more ambitious modes and following the Selma Analogy to the civil rights movement for blacks, the gay rights movement envisions positive and affirmative measures to try to get rid of or at least minimize the sexual morality that deems LGBT desires disordered and their attendant sexual acts immoral (for example, school programs, diversity training, etc.) This is probably what Blankenhorn means when he speaks of homosexual conduct “affirmed” by society.
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Ken Mehlman is either deluded or disingenuous. The former chairman of the Republican National Committee is among those now trying to bring the Republican Party around to the cause of gay marriage. In today’s Wall Street Journal he made his case.

Here is the most egregious paragraph.

Some misperceive the issue of marriage equality as exclusively progressive. Yet what could be more conservative than support for more freedom and less government? And what freedom is more basic than the right to marry the person you love? Smaller, less intrusive government surely includes an individual deciding whom to marry. Allowing civil marriage for same-sex couples will cultivate community stability, encourage fidelity and commitment, and foster family values.

Same-sex marriage will encourage fidelity and commitment, and foster family values? We can’t predict the future of culture, and I suppose Mehlman is entitled to his dreams. But a sober-minded observer sees that same-sex marriage puts an exclamation mark on the transformation of marriage and parenting from the basic norm for adult life into one life-style choice among many, one that we can enter and exit as our choices change. There’s nothing about same-sex marriage other than the now redefined word “marriage” that remotely suggests “family values.”

Even more ridiculous is the notion that redefining marriage makes government less intrusive. The notion of civil rights that fuels the push for “marriage equality” requires pumping up the power of the state to bulldoze older traditions and attitudes that stand in the way of the full acceptance and affirmation of homosexuality. It’s going to lead to litigation, regulation, mandated school programs and “inclusivity” seminars, and lots of other legislation. For good and for ill, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s created entire government bureaucracies, which in turn led to corporate diversity consultants and many other positions, all keyed to compliance.
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Marco Rubio was caught off guard during an interview by Michael Hainey for GQ. He was asked how old he thinks the earth is.

His response:

I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

What’s going on? Why would the interviewer even ask the question? And why would Rubio be so evasive?

In many circles, the earth’s age is a test question. For conservative evangelicals at places like Dallas Theological Seminary, it’s meant to determine who can be trusted to sustain the classical commitments of conservative Evangelicalism, not the least of which is a commitment to the propositional inerrancy of scripture. It’s also a political test question, one designed to identify who is willing to line up with conservative populists to resist the cultural control of the liberal establishment.

It’s clear that Hainey knows what’s what when it comes to evangelical politics, which is why he asked the question. And it’s clear that Rubio does as well, which is why he evaded, giving what is in effect a theological version of Obama’s famous response to the question about when life begins: that’s above my pay grade.

Two comments:

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Good grief. In a phone call to donors, Mitt Romney explained his defeat by referring to the “free stuff” that Democrats give their constituencies. He said that Obama’s strategy was to “give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government.”

I don’t deny the importance of pork. I lived for 20 years in Nebraska, and so I’m not unfamiliar with the “extraordinary gifts” known as agricultural policy. But it seems that today’s Republican Party is dominated by a perverse economic materialism that’s positively Marxist in its mechanical determinism. The idea that black or Hispanic voters tilt heavily Democratic because they’re “bought” by government handouts reflects a mentality that is extremely ideological. Hasn’t Mitt Romey ever heard of Lyndon Johnson. His “gift” to blacks was the Civil Rights Act. Or Barry Goldwater, the Republican who ran against him in 1964. He voted against the Civil Rights Act.

What today’s Republican Party can’t seem to get its mind around is that globalization has disoriented and disadvantaged large portions of American society, just as industrialization did more than one hundred years ago. Democrats aren’t “creating dependency” by inventing social programs, they’re responding to the social reality in the way progressives have for more than a century. I’m not in favor of the progressive approach, but the fantasy that politics is simply about everybody getting the best deal for themselves is absurd. We have an instinct for solidarity, not just self interest.

David Axelrod is right. Romney’s post-election remarks suggest that he’s stuck in the 47% mentality. It’s a gray place, one that essentially says that Blacks, Hispanics, and other who voted for Barack Obama aren’t concerned about the common good, but just about themselves. Not a message likely to win their votes any time soon.

I’m frustrated by the way in which the Republican leadership has largely suppressed debate about moral and cultural issues in this electoral cycle. Yes, the economic situation is very important. But in the long run a productive economy requires a healthy culture. I wish Karl Rove would put a post-it note on his computer screen: “It’s the culture, stupid.”

But the question of abortion came up yesterday. Romney said he had no anti-abortion legislation in mind (how could he in light of Roe v. Wade?), but would reinstate the Mexico City policy that forbids U.S. aid that goes to funding abortions. Basically, since Reagan this has been the Republican position when the party has controlled the White House.

No news, but what caught my attention was the statement by the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund: “Mitt Romney’s views on women’s health are far outside of the mainstream, and that’s why he’s trying to hide them in the last weeks until the election.”

“Women’s health.” That’s now the standard euphemism for abortion, which can’t be anything other than encouraging to those of us eager to defend the unborn. You know you’re winning when the other side does everything it can to avoid saying the word “abortion.”

“Out of the mainstream.” That’s another rhetorical device that suggests weakness. Pro-lifers aren’t people one argues with on the merits. No, they’re “extremists” who are “out of the mainstream.” I guess the Catholic Church is out of the mainstream, and so are Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews. And then there’s the rising percentage of Americans who find our abortion regime morally troubling, a cohort now in the majority. I suppose they’re “out of the mainstream” as well.

When liberals talk about views being “out of the mainstream,” it’s sign that they are on the defensive, retreating behind the barricades of the Establishment.

Recently I was rereading Rawls on the notion of public reason. This idea is dear to Rawls, because it’s part of his larger vision of participatory democracy. We need to be “in on” the reasons behind public policies, because that’s necessary in order for us to be able to assent or dissent in an informed way to the regime that governs us.

Informed consent (or dissent, as the case may be) is part of the deep meaning of political freedom. Yes, what Isaiah Berlin called our negative liberty can be protected by various civil rights that limit government interference, but positive liberty, what Kant called autonomy, involves willing for ourselves or consenting to what the state requires us to do.
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Mother Jones recently posted a video that captures Romney talking to some Republican Party donors.

In response to a question Romney drew on a distinction that I’ve heard a number of people make. The future of the country is in the balance, this way of thinking argues, because nearly half the population are “takers” who don’t pay income taxes and are in some way dependent on government, while the other half are “makers” who produce and drive the economic engine forward. So, we are warned, the “takers” will overwhelm the “makers.”

I’ll leave analysis of the impact of this video on the campaign to the political handicappers. When it comes to the substance of this way of thinking, however, I find myself agreeing entirely with David Brooks’ column yesterday. Anyone who imagines that we can divide Americans in such a facile way doesn’t know much about our country.

In fact, I’m probably more exasperated by this way of thinking than Brooks, who is pretty exasperated.
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Joan Desmond at the National Catholic Register conducted a very useful interview with Ross Douthat.

I find myself agreeing with what Douthat has to say about Catholicism’s realignment from Democratic to Republican (a very partial and complicated but real change). We face a challenge. Because the Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by a secular mentality at odds with the public role and influence of religion, religious people are moving to the Republican Party. The danger for Cardinal Dolan is that the Catholic Church will become Republican in the same way that some Catholic liberals of the old school are now apologists for the Democratic Party. The trick, it seems to me, is to get things moving in the other direction. If there is in fact a continued shift of Catholics toward the Republican Party, then we need to work to make the GOP different—in a Catholic sort of way, as Douthat says.

Well, lots more. This new report about a civil union between three people (a man and two women) in Brazil suggests that those of us worried about the slippery slope aren’t out of our minds.

I should say that Brazil and South America in general has a much stronger political tradition on the Left than in the United States, and so the truisms of the Left (“marriage is what we say it is”) are more likely to be followed to their logical conclusions. But as many have pointed out, plural marriage is a logical conclusion of the “equality” argument made on behalf of same-sex marriage. In fact, the logical conclusion of same-sex marriage is the end of marriage as a normative institution. Its logic is that we can have sex, babies, and domestic contracts in whatever styles and arrangements suit our desires.

I’m not one who thinks that social reality invariably follows to logical conclusions. (Even though it’s often a good bet when it comes to many social trends, the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy.) My guess is that marriage between a man and women for the sake of children will remain quasi-normative in America, in part because it is actually gaining strength among the upper middle class and elites. But there’s little doubt in my mind that “redefining” marriage weakens it as an institution.

And has been the case for most of the personal liberation projects since the 1960s, the poorest and most vulnerable will pay the price.

Times sure have changed. It wasn’t but a generation ago (OK, a long generation, but still) that the Republican Party was the party of moderately conservative mainline Protestants, while Jews and Catholics were solidly in the Democratic camp. Now the GOP will feature a rabbi giving the convention’s opening prayer, and a Cardinal the closing prayer.

Both are friends of the magazine. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has written for us over the years. Cardinal Tim Dolan was an Erasmus Lecturer half a dozen years ago. There’s some precedent. There certainly are Jewish Republicans (some of whom read this blog, I hope), and Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia gave the opening prayer for the 1972 GOP convention that nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Nonetheless, Soloveichik and Dolan are signs of the times.

The Democratic Party is becoming the secular party with an attitude, as the HHS mandate and arguments of Obama administration lawyers in various religious cases indicates. This is driving religious people toward the Republican Party. That’s been happening for decades, of course, most obviously in the shift of Evangelical voters toward the Republican Party in the 1980s. (They went for Jimmy Carter as one of their own in 1976.) They reshaped the GOP, as the recent Republican primaries showed so clearly. It will be interesting to see how a second wave of Jews and Catholics continues to reshape the GOP.
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A particularly amusing book came across my desk recently. It’s Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans by David Niose, a “secular activist” in Washington. This is not a book to turn to for nuance. Here’s a sample:

Anti-intellectualism, the disappearing middle class, the sorry state of participatory democracy, the low level of public dialogue — all these problems (and many others) trace back, directly or indirectly, to the exaltation of religion and marginalization of non-believers.

The “indirectly” is magnanimous, isn’t it?

Basically, Niose thinks the Religious Right is the root of all evil (directly or indirectly). But for religious believers butting into politics and speaking up in the public square, we could have a pretty good country. We’d be solving the problems of poverty, injustice, global warming (and many others!) in the mornings, and going to yoga classes in the afternoons.

What’s pathetic about this book is the pious posturing that punctuates the bitter denunciations. Here’s a sample: “Secular activism is not about bashing religion but about defending the rights of those who choose secularity as a personal identity and worldview.” We can all get along nicely if the rights of secularists are respected. Sounds very friendly and peaceful and tolerant, but like liberal tolerance more generally, it’s very fake. Niose presumes one very important “right” that secularists enjoy, which is to define what counts as reasonable, mainstream, and true. Funny how that might lead to conflict with religious people.

Nonbeliever Nation is one of those books that’s so bad that it’s useful. It exhibits a simple-minded mentality that would make any self-respecting fundamentalist blush. Is there anyone more comically parochial than a confident secular cosmopolitan who after watching Fox News can’t contain his outrage?

Enthusiasts of St. Thomas should know about the ambitious publication project being undertaken by the Aquinas Institute at Wyoming Catholic College.

It’s very good indeed to see that the Institute is launching Latin and English editions of the works of the Angelic Doctor.