So here’s an amusing essay about how to tweet like a Straussian. I would comment more if I were an actual tweeter. It does seem to me that ALL CAPS could become an indispensable form of twitter pithiness.
I do have a student–Kristian Canler (Berry name: Christian with a K)–who has set up a twitter thing for me. It’s not going so well. I only have 126 followers. Pete has A LOT MORE.
So HERE’S YOUR CHANCE to follow me down…
So says our friend Ivan the K.
So says Rusty Reno. Compare today with 1980! Those who still fear socialism (or, I would add, even progressivism) just haven’t being paying attention. Sure, there’s ObamaCare. But it’s only a relatively small part of a big picture.
Unlike our friends the Porchers, Rusty realizes that this victory is more good than not. But it still has to be managed politically. In Rusty’s view, Romney was wrong to view our big problems as economic. And our libertarians are just as wrong to think that freedom is just another word for having less and less government.
I’m getting more impressed with those who worry about the “individualism” or displaced irresponsibility of our new ruling class–the cognitive elite. It’s not so much that the rich are quickly getting richer, and the middle class not at all. But our cognitive elite–that, in a way, deserves what it has because brains are what sell these days–is politically irresponsible. Its method of ruling is “nudge” economics–incentivizing the poor, vulnerable, and stupid to behave better. That’s not the same as respecting the freedom and dignity of ordinary people and their tough struggles in a deteriorating environment.
One domestic consequence of the victory of the competitive marketplace of global capitalism is the erosion of the various safety nets that balance our individualism with various venues for what Rusty calls “social solidarity.” Here we can talk about unions, pensions, families, churches, local government, government entitlements, and so forth. We can even talking about having space for “voluntary caregiving.” It’s here that we can even find space for Rod Dreher and his ruralism, as long as we don’t forget that the collapse of the safety nets disproportionally affects rural communities. On balance, Charles Murray would say, our small towns get stupider–as they are increasingly ruled by the cognitive elite in an undisclosed location. That might be true even as intellectuals who can work from anywhere decide to move home. Having an independent contractor writer in town doesn’t make up for the local bank, hardware, restaurants, and so forth losing their intellectual independence.
One reason among many to question the sustainability of capitalism’s victory is, of course, the birth dearth that’s pretty much gone global. It’s surely typically the case that you have to be from some place to have lots of kids. It’s certainly true that our youthful productive meritocracy will be stuck with paying for a world in which more and more people are unproductive.
So global capitalism or cosmopolitanism is, as Pierre Manent explains, at war against BODIES and every institution that’s rooted in our EMBODIMENT. Among those institutions are our FAMILIES, COUNTRIES, and CHURCHES. So global capitalism is also at war against personal eros, just as it’s at war against personal birth and personal death.
There I go again, becoming all Marxist or libertarian by overemphasizing globalism. That’s because I took Rusty’s point and ran (too far) with it. Our political problems, as Pete explains time and again, potentially have political solutions.
So Richard Reinsch has a good article on the limits of James Madison’s religious thought–as expressed in the overrated MEMORIAL AND REMONSTRANCE. There the duty each of us has to our Creator is private or merely “conscientious.” It’s a limit to government, to be sure. But it’s a personal–or not social–limit. It’s far from clear that Madison is saying that government is limited by the freedom the church as an organized body of thought and action.
Richard is quick to add he’s not saying that America is ill-founded. That’s actually true if we remember that our First Amendment doesn’t embody the thought of Madison the polemical theorist. It was shaped, as Chief Justice Rehnquist reminded us, by Rep. Madison’s sensible legislative compromises. The Constitution, unlike the M and R, actually the protects “the free exercise of religion”–as opposed to “the [mere] rights of conscience,” and clearly our Framers understood religion to be more than “the religion of the self.”
So what separates the American Founding–a compromise throughout between Lockean (Cartesian) abstracted or isolated personalism and Christian or relational personalism–from the thoroughgoing “republicanism” of the French revolution is that our understanding of religious freedom is freedom of the church (meaning organized religious body). And that’s why the ObamaCare contraceptive mandate is unconstitutional (although I would want that fact expressed with a doctrine better than the “compelling” SHERBERT one affirmed in the RFRA).
As the underrated and unjustly neglected Orestes Brownson explained, our Constitution limits government “from below” by our freedom to satisfy our economic needs as material beings and “from above” by our freedom to satisfy our spiritual needs (and do our spiritual duties) as relational, religious beings. Brownson goes on to explain how our Constitution presupposes the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, but I’ll save that weighty explanation for another time.
So the very important posts below by Carl, Pete, and Kate are all about the harm unconstitutional or a-constitutional judicial activism does to our political life.
On abortion: The BIAS of the MSM is finally justified by the Court’s decision that anti-abortion SPEECH is unconstitutional. The Court has said time and again that the issue has been decided, and those who continue to speak oppose the consensus of the reasonable part of the community. The Court’s connection of the “watershed” precedents BROWN and ROE ties together pro-life speech and racist speech. So, as Carl suggests, the FIRST MOVE of the Republicans should be to insist each and every day that the Court had no right under the Constitution to do that.
On SSM: Carl plus the thread reach the conclusion that there are two issues: “What is marriage?” and what is the authority of the Court to resolve that issue. We can’t say that the marriage is a contract between two autonomous individuals based on love. That’s not enough to sustain a RELATIONAL institution. Nonetheless, that kind of definition is arguably the “evolved” product of our sophisticated understanding of liberty today. The Court’s likely assertion of authority is based on the claim that it can reconstruct every social institution on an individualistic basis. That means it has the authority to end political controversy over “what is marriage?” in such a way as to silence publicly those who have another view of what marriage is.
The truth is there’s no national consensus on “what abortion is” and “what marriage is.” One important reason is that the Constitution doesn’t really given us sufficient guidance on how to think about the relevant facts in either case. It does give us enough to think about blacks, women, and homosexuals as free and equal persons. But it doesn’t tell us, truth to tell, what or who the unborn baby or foetus is. It also doesn’t tell us what the relational institution marriage is. We do know enough to know that precluding interracial marriage is plainly arbitrary or based simply on vain animosity. But opposition to SSM plainly is based on a reasonable–although contestable–understanding of what the relational institution is.
The strongest (and it is strong) argument for SSM is something like: Given that no one knows what marriage is, it’s arbitrary to exclude any understanding of what it is from legal affirmation. But that kind of thinking “deconstructs” marriage as such as a legal category. The Constitution can’t be understood to go that far in its individualism without understanding it as commanding a thoroughgoing atomization of American life, without commanding that government not recognize the existence–much less the goodness–of any social institution. Imagine the consequences for “the free exercise of religion.”
So Republicans ought to explain every day the deep and unconstitutional dangers of the Court telling Americans what abortion is and what marriage is. Americans are free to figure out what they think about abortion and marriage according to democratic political deliberation. The current trend points to more and more “voting in” SSM, and there’s nothing constitutionally wrong with that. But we need more “space” and a more fair-and-balanced MSM for really talking about marriage and abortion with persuasive arguments and minimum possible animosity.
They’ve nominated us for a big prize. I appreciate both the nomination and telling the world about it (AND making it easy for others to do the same–a shameless hint to all our readers). You really do need to check out the brothers’ site, which includes not only a blog but birthdays and book reviews. There’s nowhere better to go for incisive reviews of the best on the web. I would go on to praise them more, but that would also be pretty shameless, given how much attention they’ve given my work over the years.
