1. Had I known my RIP piece below would attract attention, I surely would have made it better or at least clearer.
2. It goes without saying that I agree with Pete’s center-right agenda below, with its mend them, don’t end them approach to our minimalist entitlements and its due concern for doing everything that can be done to sustain our nongovernmental intermediary institutions (which, of course can be choked by too much or the wrong kind of government). The role of government is real but limited in helping out our sinking middle and lower-middle class. So while I admire Presidents Coolidge and McKinley, I don’t like the rhetoric that suggests that they tell us everything we need to know about the problems that face us now.
3. I don’t say to hell with both parties (as do American conservatives and MacIntyreans) from some European Christian Democratic view. Or, for that matter, from some medieval village view. I agree with all those traditionalist Catholics writing this morning that the our present philosopher-pope is not a stereotypical American conservative. He’s not for “unfettered capitalism” and he is for some environmentalism. Well, I admit that Romney sometimes talked as if the ticket was “unfettered capitalism,” but in fact the general Republican view is for some fettering. And we Republicans notice that there’s some de-fettering of capitalism going on in the more responsible countries of Europe. The social services provided by Christian Democrats might well be sustainable if the Europeans exhibited distinctively Catholic reproductive behavior, but they don’t. It’s surely in the interest of the Catholic Church, it’s easy to add, to be for some form of privatization (with subsidies) of health care. Some key “religious liberty” issues would wither away if government-enabled, employer-based health care would. And in truth prudent privatization could address more effectively “social justice” issues than single-payer schemes given our demographic and debt challenges. Catholics should admit that the Catholic Paul Ryan’s version of commitment to social justice is authentic and plausible.
4. And surely most Republicans support a kind of prudent anthropocentric environmentalism or conservationism. I know I do. But that’s different from Green pantheism and excessive alarmism that produce new and unsustainable forms of big government. And it’s just not Christian to worry too much about CLIMATE CHANGE. Capitalism, in truth, is pretty ambiguous as a cause of environmental devastation. Conservationism is in some ways easier to sell as a “post-materialistic” value in an era of abundance or lack of grinding scarcity. And we’re not going back to the family farm in big numbers, and it might be an environmental catastrophe if we really tried.
5. So the Catholic bishops were perfectly correct to suggest strongly that if you’re for freedom of the institutional church to perform its evangelical mission, then Romney was far preferable to Obama. It’s disheartening, of course, that more voters who call themselves Catholics didn’t follow their lead.
There’s more, but I have to go to class.
February 18th, 2013 | 10:07 am
Yes, to the self-destructive temptations that are inherent in the Coolidge-talk.
February 18th, 2013 | 10:56 am
[...] 1. Had I known my RIP piece below would attract attention, I surely would have made it better or at least clearer. 2. It goes without saying that I agree with Pete’s center-right agenda below, with its mend them, don’t end them approach to our minimalist entitlements and its due concern Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 18th, 2013 | 11:21 am
I’m not one to judge the state of a “Catholic Moment.” I will just note that, whenever I fall into a conversation with someone on fundamental moral-political questions and we find ourselves broadly agreeing on essentials (anti-statist but not libertarian, for example — and definitely pro-[real] family), then I almost always discover I’m talking to a Catholic. So long live such moments!
RR Reno has some very discerning and important reflections on “First Things and Politics” on p. 6 of the March FT. Quoting Midge Decter: “There comes a time to join the side you’re on.” (Would that more of Midge’s fellow Jews would grasp this.) As Reno points out, both major parties are messy coalitions, and both include much error (including libertarianism). But it is no accident that people of real faith (that is, not reducible to progressivism) are lining up on the right.
I will add this to Reno’s analysis: Both parties offer caricatures of the other: Republicans see demos as morally relativist statists, and Demos see Republicans as oligarchic capitalists. What is decisive for me is that, although the latter caricature has too much truth in it, the former description is all-too-true (despite inevitable exceptions).
February 18th, 2013 | 11:29 am
Coolidge-talk:
“Statutes must appeal to more than material welfare. Wages won’t satisfy, be they never so large. Nor houses; nor lands; nor coupons, though they fall thick as the leaves of autumn. Man has a spiritual nature. Touch it, and it must respond as the magnet responds to the pole. To that, not to selfishness, let the laws of the Commonwealth appeal.”
“I do not underestimate schools of science and technical arts. They have a high and noble calling in ministering to mankind. They are important and necessary. I am pointing out that in my opinion they do not provide a civilization that can stand without the support of the ideals that come from the classics.”
C.C., Have Faith in Massachusetts (Houghton Mifflin, 1919), pp. 8-9, 186
February 18th, 2013 | 11:38 am
Brad, that’s Coolidge-talk I can believe in.
February 18th, 2013 | 11:50 am
Well, me too on the Coolidge-talk by the actual Coolidge.
February 19th, 2013 | 1:58 pm
Peter: If it’s not Christian to worry much about climate change, then it’s presumably not Christian to worry much about any other possibly avoidable or meliorable human calamity in the future either, for example the presumed ‘burden of debt’ that my son’s son will carry owing to today’s ‘big government’ overreach. Somehow a lot of professed Christians manage to feign worry about the latter anyway. I’d say that the empirical evidence for the former is at least as good as that for the latter.
(Speaking as a firm moral-realist but largely non-conservative Aristotelian/Thomist/Wittgensteinian lapsed Catholic convert who retains sympathy with much of the faith.)
February 20th, 2013 | 1:40 pm
Well, for one thing, the debt is more within our control.
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