The proprietor of After Aristotleagrees with me that polemics has no place in philosophy. But he has a question for me: "Do his [my] statements about philosophy apply also to political philosophy?"
My answer is that if polemics has no legitimate place in philosophy, then it follows that it has no legitimate place in political philosophy. I am assuming, of course, that political philosophy is a species of philosophy in general, an assumption that strikes me as plainly true.
To appreciate my answer bear in mind my distinction between philosophy-as-inquiry and philosophy-as-worldview. When I write 'philosophy,' without qualification, I almost always intend the former. My thesis, then, is that polemics has no place in philosophy-as-inquiry or in any of its branches, however things may stand with regard to the many philosophical worldviews.
The problems of political philosophy are much more likely to ignite human passions than, say, abstruse questions in metaphysics. The misnamed 'problem of universals,' for example, is not likely to be 'taken to the streets.' But polemics is just as out of place in political philosophy as it is in metaphysics.
Addendum (6 August): It may be that the proprietor of After Aristotle had a different question in mind: "You maintain that polemics has no place in philosophy, but you polemicize regularly in political philosophy. But surely what goes for philosophy goes for political philosophy! Are you not being inconsistent?" If that is the question, then my answer is that politics is not the same as political philosophy; that I do not polemicize in political philosophy; and that polemics is not out of place in politics. I wish it were not true, but politics is war conducted by other means. That is clearly how our opponents on the Left view it, and so that is how we must view it if we are to oppose them effectively.
As a cultural warrior, I do battle with my enemies. As a philosopher, I seek truth with my friends.
Liberals support separation of church and state, and so do I. But they have no problem with using the coercive power of the state to impose leftist ideology. Now leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager (see article below), but it is very much like one, and if you can see what is wrong with allowing contentious theological doctrines to drive politics, then you ought to be able to see what is wrong with allowing the highly contentious ideological commitments of leftism to drive politics, most of which revolve around the leftist trinity (Prager) of race, gender, and class. If "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ," as per the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, then it ought to make no law that establishes the quasi-religion of leftism.
This is a large topic, and I have a substantial post in the works. But for today, just one example of what I am getting at.
It is a tenet of contemporary liberalism that opposition to same-sex 'marriage' is 'discriminatory' and that opponents of it are 'bigots.' Now this is both obtuse and slanderous. But liberals have a right to their opinions, even if it is to be wished that they would give some thought to the corresponding obligation to form correct opinions. Be that as it may, liberals have a right to their benighted views, and we ought to tolerate them. After all, we too are liberals in a much older, and a defensible, sense: we believe in toleration, open inquiry, free speech, individual liberty, etc. And we are liberal and self-critical enough to countenance the possibility that perhaps we are the benighted ones.
But toleration has limits.
What we ought not tolerate is the sort of coercion of the individual by the state that we find in the case of the Washington State florist who refused to sell floral arrangements to be used at a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony. This woman has no animus against gays, and had sold flowers to the homosexual couple. But she was not about to violate her own conscience by providing flowers for a same-sex event. As a result she was sued by the Washington State attorney general, and then by the ACLU.
Now do you see what is wrong with that? The state says to the individual: you have a right to your religious and philosophical beliefs, but only so long as you keep them to yourself and don't allow them to be expressed in your relations with your fellow citizens. You may believe what you want in the privacy of your own mind, but you may not translate your beliefs into social or political action. But we are free to translate our leftist 'theology' into rules and regulations that diminish your liberty. What then becomes of the "free exercise of religion" spoken of in the First Amendment? It is out the window. The totalitarian state has taken one more step in its assault on the liberty of the individual.
The totalitarian state of the contemporary liberal says to the individual: you have no right to live your beliefs unless we allow you to; but we have every right to impose our leftist beliefs on you and force you to live as we see fit.
Here are some home truths that cannot be repeated too often:
We are not the property of the state.
Our rights and liberties do not come from the state, but are logically antecedent to it, inscribed as they are in the very nature of things.
We do not have to justify our keeping of what is ours; the state has to justify its taking.
Just minutes before ambling by your place and seeing your link to Brooks, I had run across this riposte. It's worth a look, I think.
This administration has aggressively sought to hollow out all the mediating layers of civil society that stand between the atomized citizen and the Leviathan (those civil associations having been discussed by Tocqueville as by far the most important part of American life). I think Brooks is right that the "solitary naked individual" can easily feel himself alone against the "gigantic and menacing State", but it can go the other way too: the radically atomized individual – for whom the traditional embedding in civil society, with its web of mutually supportive associations and obligations, no longer exists – is left with only the State as friend, protector, and provider. This was creepily evident in, e.g., the Obama campaign's horrifying Life of Julia slideshow, in which a faceless female goes from childhood to dotage with, apparently, no human interactions whatsoever, and subsisting entirely upon the blessings that flow from the federal behemoth.
In the article I linked above, the author points out that our natural embedding in civil society is a lever for the totalitarian State to use to compel obedience; Brooks, on the other hand, seems to see civil society and State as almost the same thing, and appears to argue that loyalty to the former should entail obedience to the latter. He speaks of "gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world", but he makes the gradation seem very gentle indeed, if not downright flat.
Response. We agree that disaster looms if the Left gets its way and manages to eliminate the buffering elements of civil society lying between the naked individual and the State. We also agree that the State can wear the monstrous aspect of Leviathan or that of the benevolent nanny whose multiple tits are so many spigots supplying panem et circenses to the increasingly less self-reliant masses. To cite just one example, the Obama administration promotes ever-increasing food stamp dependency to citizens and illegal aliens alike under the mendacious SNAP acronym thereby disincentivizing relief and charitable efforts at the local level while further straining an already strapped Federal treasury. A trifecta of stupidity and corruption, if you will: the infantilizing of the populace who now needs federal help in feeding itself; the fiscal irresponsibilty of adding to the national debt; the assault on the institutions of civil society out of naked lust for ever more centralized power in the hands of the Dems, the left wing party. (Not that the Repubs are conservative.)
I grant that a totalitarian State could make use of familial and other local loyalties as levers to coerce individuals as is argued in the Jacobin piece. But that is not a good argument against those local loyalties and what go with them, namely, respect for well-constituted authority and a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs and practices. Besides, it is precisely the strength of the institutions of civil society that will serve as a brake on the expansion of federal power.
In general, arguments of the form 'X is ill-advised because X could be misused' are unsound due to probative overkill: they prove to much. Most anything can be misused. Blogger buddy and fellow Arizonan Victor Reppert argued against Arizona Senate Bill 1070 on the ground that cops could use it to harass Hispanics or people who look Hispanic. Here is part of my response:
A certain distrust of law enforcement is reasonable. Skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism and has been from the founding. But we need to make a simple distinction between a law and its enforcement. A just law can be unjustly applied or enforced, and if it is, that is no argument against the law. If the police cannot be trusted to enforce the 1070 law without abuses, then they cannot be trusted to enforce any law without abuses. Someone who thinks otherwise is probably assuming, falsely, that most cops are anti-Hispanic racists. What a scurrilous assumption!
At this point one must vigorously protest the standard leftist ploy of 'playing the race card,' i.e., the tactic of injecting race into every conceivable issue. The issue before us is illegal immigration, which has nothing to do with race. Those who oppose illegal immigration are opposed to the illegality of the immigrants, not to their race. The illegals happen to be mainly Hispanic, and among the Hispanics, mainly Mexican. But those are contingent facts. If they were mainly Persians, the objection would be the same. Again, the opposition is to the illegality of the illegals, not to their race.
You write, "Brooks, on the other hand, seems to see civil society and State as almost the same thing, and appears to argue that loyalty to the former should entail obedience to the latter." I've read Brooks' piece about four times and I don't get that out of it.
The issue underlying the Snowden case is a very difficult one and may be irresolvable. Perhaps it can be formulated as finding the correct middle position between two extremes. On the one end you have the alienated, deracinated, twentysomething cyberpunk loyal to no one and nothing except some such abstraction as the common good or the good of humanity. On the other end end you have the Blut-und-Boden type who uncritically respects and accepts every form of authority from that of his parents on up though the mediating associations of civil society to the the authority of der Fuehrer himself. At the one extreme, the hyper-autonomy of the rootless individual, full of excessive trust in his own judgment, who presumes to be justified in betraying his country. At the other extreme, the hyper-heteronomy of the nativist, racist, xenophobe who justifies his crimes against humanity by saying that he was following orders and who invokes the outrageous "My country right or wrong."
In between lie the difficult cases. The brother of the Unabomber turned him in, or 'ratted him out' depending on your point of view. I say he did right: familial loyalty is a value but it has limits. I have no firm opinion about the Snowden case or where it lies on the spectrum, but I am inclined to agree with Brooks. It's bloody difficult!
If anyone is interested in my debate with Reppert over AZ SB 1070 from three years ago, it unfolds over three posts accessible from this page.
People complain of the undue influence of special interest groups in Washington, D. C. Government itself, however, is a special interest group. For it profits those who work for it, and those who, while not working for it, depend on it for their livelihood, having been made dependent on it by policies and gimmicks that create dependency, a dependency that government then exploits for its own expansion. The services to the rest of us that government at all levels provides are costly, frequently substandard, sometimes nonexistent, often unnecessary, and sometimes positively injurious.
Every one of us comes into the world endowed with a material and cultural inheritance that we have not earned and can never justify. There are no "takers" and "makers" in our society. All of the takers are makers, and all of the makers are takers. And quite often those who start out with, or end up with, the most stuff have worked considerably less industriously than those who start out and end up with the least.
It is this fact that constitutes the real justification for Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program slogan: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."
The first sentence expresses a conjunction of two claims. The first is perfectly obvious. I did not earn my good eyesight or any of the material and cultural benefits that accrued to me upon birth. The same is true of all of us. The second claim, however, is not obvious. The claim that I can never "justify" unearned benefits presupposes that they need justification. It is not at all clear that unearned benefits need justification, or even what 'justification' in this context means. It is true that I didn't do anything to deserve my good eyesight, my intelligence, my being born in Southern California, etc. But I have a right to my natural and cultural endowments despite my not having earned them. It is my right to my two eyes that makes it wrong for the state to take one of my eyes and 'redistribute' it to a sightless person.
Wolff's first sentence, being a conjunction of a truth and what is arguably a falsehood is itself arguably a falsehood. However his argument proceeds, it will be arguably unsound.
As for the second and third sentences, it is trivially true that all takers are makers, and vice versa. Charles Manson is a maker and Bill Gates is a taker. But no substantive juice can be squeezed from a trivial truth such as this. In particular, one cannot validly infer from it the socialist "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need."
Nor can the utility of the taker-maker distinction be impugned by hammering on the trivial truth. To put it mildly, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are much more makers than takers, whereas Manson is much more a taker than a maker.
Wolff is essentially just reiterating the Obama "You didn't build that!" riff, to which I respond:
1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort. "No man is an island." No one pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. But of course no conservative denies this. Not even libertarians deny it. What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down. He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.Wolff is doing the same thing.
2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure. But there is no necessary connection to Big Government. I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school. And my teaching jobs were all at private schools. Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education. That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well. Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools. There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school. A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.
There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play. It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education. It is also important to point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S. But that is a huge separate topic.
3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government. Obama is confusing the products of collective effort with the products of government effort. It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it. One can work with others without the intrusion of government. He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure. The first is a genus, the second a species thereof.
4. How did the Internet begin? This from a libertarian site: "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network." So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.
But what do we mean by 'Internet'? Those huge interconnected mainframes? That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure. But don't forget the peripherals. For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC). Did Big Government provides us with PCs? No. It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage. It was private companies like IBM. And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed. Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy? Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs? No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo. Germans are great engineers. But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.
How do you hook up the PC to the Internet? Via the phone line. (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government. Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?) To convert digital information into analog information transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem. Who gave us the modem? Government functionaries? Al Gore? Was Obama the mama of the modem? Nope. Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977. In the private sector.
Back in the day we operated from the C prompt using DOS commands. That was before the GUI: graphical user interface. Who invented that? Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft. All in the private sector.
And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)? Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector. The WWW is not the same as the Internet. The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet. The government did not give us the WWW.
Returning now to the blog that I built. I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No. That too is in the private sector.
And then there are the search engines. Did the government give us Google?
Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, puts things in historical perspective. His piece concludes:
History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.
So much wisdom, insight, and erudition can be found in the conservative commentary of men like Hanson, and so little in the febrile and adolescent outbursts of Paul Krugman and his ilk.
There is no wisdom on the Left.
The philosopher in me looks forward to dusk and the owl of Minerva's spreading of her wings. The natural man, however, hopes the end is postponed until after I make my physical exit. Meanwhile, philosopher and natural man live on, fight on, and do what they can.
Support for Obama among 18-29 year olds exceeds that of any other age cohort. Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie argues that Obama is in the process of "screwing them big time." Gillespie is right. What caught my eye, however, was Gillespie's explanation of why conservatives fail to get the youth vote:
I'd argue that what makes "the conservative message" resonate less among younger people is its, well, conservatism on things such as war, alternative lifestlyes, [sic] drug legalization, and immigration. Younger people are less hung up on the sorts of things that really twist conservatives' knickers. And young people then assume that many of the other things that conservatives espouse – such as generally free markets and open trade – are similarly warped. That conservatives are so inconsistent with their basic message – We want smaller government…except when we're talking about immigrants, the gays, and the ability to kill people overseas! – doesn't help matters, either. Most people surely don't prize consistency as much as libertarians do, but the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy are off-putting to anyone with the smallest taste for consistency.
As a philosopher, logical consistency looms large for me. And so you will get my attention 'big time' if you can lay out for me "the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy." But if they are obvious, then presumably all you need to do is draw my attention to them.
Unfortunately, public intellectuals, not being logically trained as most philosophers are, have an egregiously spongy notion of what a contradiction is. This is true of even very good public intellectuals such as Nat Hentoff and Nick Gillespie. (Hentoff, for whom I have a very high degree of respect, thinks one is being inconsistent if one is pro-life and yet supports capital punishment. He is demonstrably wrong.)
Ignoring Gillespie's invective and hyperbole, his point seems to be that the following propositions are logically inconsistent:
1. The legitimate functions of government are limited.
2. Among the the legitimate functions of government are national defense, securing of the borders, and preservation of traditional marriage's privileged position.
Now it should be obvious that these propositions are logically consistent: they can both be true. They are not logical contradictories of each other.
It is therefore foolish for Gillespie to accuse conservatives of inconsistency. And to speak of obvious inconsistency is doubly foolish. What he needs to do is argue that the governmental functions that conservatives deem necessary and legitimate are neither. This will require a good deal of substantive argumentation and not a cheap accusation of 'inconsistency.' For example, he can mount an economic argument for open borders. I wish him the best of luck with that. He will need it.
Curiously, Gillespie's own reasoning can be used against him. Suppose an anarchist comes along. Using Gillespie's own form of reasoning, he could argue that Gillespie the libertarian is being inconsistent. For he wants smaller government . . . except when it comes to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad, I call it). Then he wants coercive government to do its thing and come down hard on the malefactors. He's inconsistent! If he were consistent in his desire for limited government, he would favor no government. His libertarianism would then collapse into anarchism.
So by his own understanding of consistency, Gillespie is not being consistent. The same reasoning that he uses against conservatives can be used against him. The reasoning is of course invalid in both applications. It is invalid against the libertarian and equally so against the conservative.
But I like his black leather jacket schtick. It is always a pleasure to see him on the O'Reilly Factor.
Liberals have been calling for a 'conversation' about gun control. The call is both silly and disingenuous. Silly, because it is not as if we haven't been talking about this for decades. So suddenly we need to have a 'conversation'? Disingenuous, because what liberals mean by a conversation is more like: you shut up and listen and acquiesce in our point of view or we'll shout you down! Here is Medea Benjamin of CodePink 'conversing' with Wayne LaPierre:
But suppose, contrary to fact, that our leftist pals were serious about a conversation, no scare quotes. Then we would have to discuss not only gun control for citizens, but for government as well. Fair is fair.
There are foolish and irresponsible and criminal individuals among the citzenry and they shouldn't have guns. But it is equally true that there are foolish and irresponsible and criminal people in government and they shouldn't have guns either.
Besides, quis custodiet custodies? Who governs the government? If we can't govern ourselves, but need government to govern us, then the government, which is composed of the same "crooked timber of humanity" (Kant) as we are, needs some entity to keep it in line. That 'entity' is us, the armed citizenry.
Why do we need to be kept in check, but not them? Come on you feel-good liberals, try thinking for a change. Do you really believe that government is inherently benevolent and composed of angels from above? Do you really believe they can be trusted when we can't? Do you think that they are the parents and we the children? Then you are Chris Rock and and your brain is as 'petrified' as his.
Anthony Gregory's Why Not Gun Control for Government? is an extreme piece that I cannot endorse in toto. But it does throw the issue into relief.
The case against Swedenization, then, is that it threatens a soft and insidious despotism. Unlike the totalitarianism of the USSR, where the evil flowed from the top down, engulfing every aspect of society, the danger posed by social democracy is of social, political, and economic debilitations’ compounding one another. Progressivism began as, and remains, “an alliance of experts and victims,” according to Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard. It gains strength as the experts assert their expertise more confidently and the victims accept their helplessness more compliantly. The kind of robust mediating structures Tocqueville thought essential to the success of democracy in America will not prevail against that alliance. If the experts determine that employer-provided health insurance must include contraception, the objections of religious organizations opposed to some or all forms of contraception are immaterial. The possibility that the republic’s free citizens could initiate financial or employment arrangements to secure contraceptives, rather than relying completely on government directives to their employers, is also ruled out of order.
To which I add:
The aim of the Left is to weaken the once robust "mediating structures" of civil society that serve as a buffer between individual and state. Among these are the family, private charities, voluntary service organizations, private associations and clubs of all kinds, churches and parochial schools, and the private economy. Indeed, the aim is to weaken the mediating structures to the point where the space between individual and state is hollowed out.
The Left is totalitarian, which is why it will brook no competitors such as religion and family.
"One of my New Year’s resolutions is to work harder to persuade ideological friends and foes alike that the way to reduce partisanship and maximize happiness in America is to embrace federalism — the view that we should push as many decisions as possible to the lowest local level feasible."
This old entry, from about a year and half ago, has gained in relevance after Obama's reelection. Here it is again re-titled and revised.
………………………
Another fit topic of rumination on this Independence Day 2011 is the question of voluntary segregation or balkanization. Herewith, a few very preliminary remarks.
I have been inclining toward the view that voluntary segregation, in conjunction with a return to federalism, might be a way to ease tensions and prevent conflict in a country increasingly riven by deep-going differences. We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues. Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power, and numerous others.
We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.
We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty. Comity (social harmony) in whose terms? On what common ground? Peace is always possible if one side just gives in. If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign. But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.' We can come together only on common ground, only under the umbrella of shared principles. And what would these be?
There is no point in papering over very real differences.
Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, asa good thing, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing. Some go so far as to consider it "the greatest social evil." The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Does Bible study tend to make us better people?
The conservative will answer no and yes respectively and will feel sure that he is right. For example, as a conservative, I find it utterly absurd that there has been any fight at all over the Mojave cross, and I have utter contempt for the ACLU shysters who brought the original law suit. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.
As for whether sincere Bible study makes us better, isn't that obvious? Will you be so bold as to maintain that someone who has taken to heart the Ten Commandments will not have been improved thereby? If you do maintain this, then you are precisely the sort of person contact with whom would be pointless or worse, precisely the sort of person right thinking people need to segregate themselves from, for the sake of peace.
The leftist will give opposite answers to the two questions with equal confidence. There is no possibility of mediation here. That is a fact that can't be blinked while mouthing the squishy, bien-pensant, feel-good rhetoric of 'coming together.' Again, on what common ground? Under the aegis of which set of shared principles? There can be no 'coming together' with those whose views one believes are pernicious. A man like A. C Grayling holds views that are not merely false, but pernicious. He of course would return the 'compliment.'
If we want peace, therefore, we need to give each other space by adopting federalism and limiting government interference in our lives, and by voluntary segregation: by simply having nothing to do with people with whom there is no point in interacting given unbridgeable differences.
Unfortunately, the Left, with its characteristic totalitarian tendency, will not allow federalism. But we still have the right of free association and voluntary segregation. At least for the time being.
No doubt there are disadvantages to segregation/balkanization. Exclusive association with the like-minded increases polarization and fosters extremism. See here. The linked piece ends with the following suggestion:
Bishop cites research suggesting that, contrary to the standard goo-goo exhortations, the surer route to political comity may be less civic engagement, less passionate conviction. So let’s hear it for the indifferent and unsure, whose passivity may provide the national glue we need.
Now that is the sort of preternatural idiocy one expects from the NYT. Less civic engagement! The reason there is more civic engagement and more contention is because there is more government interference! The Tea Party movement is a prime example. The solution is less government. As I have said more than once, the bigger the government the more to fight over. The solution is for government to back off, not for the citizenry to acquiesce like sheep in the curtailment of their liberties.
You may have noticed the paradox: Civic engagement is needed to get to the point where we don't need to engage civically with people we find repellent.
Glenn Reynolds talks sense. My rather more academically worded federalism post. And here is a short federalism post of mine with a link to a post by Jonah Goldberg.
According to this article, if every Food Stamp recipient voted for Obama, it would account for 75% of his total.
As you know, it is not called Food Stamps anymore. It has been given the snappy new label, at once both a euphemism and an acronym, SNAP: Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. And it is actively promoted.
Liberals will call it part of the social safety net. That metaphor suggests something to keep one from falling to one's death. But it is also a net in the sense of a fishing net, a device that entraps and deprives of liberty. But liberals ignore this aspect of their favorite programs. For self-reliance and the nanny state don't go together. Since the nanny state serves the interests of liberals, self-reliance has to be diminished. Part of the motivation of the liberal is to help the needy. But another part is the lust for power which, to be retained, requires plenty of clients, plenty of dependents who can be relied upon to vote Democrat, thereby voting goodies for themselves in the short term– and the long-term fiscal and moral solvency of the nation be damned.
Am I opposed to all social welfare programs? No. There are those who truly need help and cannot be helped by private charities. But I am opposed to the current, utterly irresponsible expansion of the welfare state, and for two reasons. One is economic: the expansion is unsustainable. The other is moral: it diminishes and degrades and infantilizes people. "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." (D. Prager)
You say you're Catholic and you are going to vote for Obama? Are you stupid? Apart from the fact that the Dems are the abortion party, the Obama administration's attack on civil society is at odds with Catholic social teaching which rests on the principle of subsidiarity. David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:
One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.
The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest drift of the Obama administration, on the one hand, and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other. By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education. He was right to question whether the Federal government has any legitimate role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.
Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama. 'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead. Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose Obama and the Left. The argument is this:
1. The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state. (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)
2. Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.
Therefore
3. If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.
Addendum: This just over the transom from an old sparring partner of mine from the early days of the blogosphere, Kevin Kim:
Thank you for your recent post on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which I had never heard of despite years of dealing with Catholics. I had a good chuckle when I read this:
"This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization."
And this from a gigantic, thoroughly hierarchized organization!
But what really burbled to the surface of my mind was the thought that, for a supposedly Catholic principle, subsidiarity sounds remarkably Protestant. Heh.
But isn't it obvious what the Catholic response would be? The church is in the business of mediating salvation. What the church does cannot be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. Nulla salus extra ecclesiam, where the church in question is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church founded by Christ himself on St. Peter as upon a rock and presided over by the Holy Spirit. It might also be argued that the principle of subsidiarity is a secular or temporal political principle and not one that has any bearing on soteriology. For the same reason there is nothing Protestant about it.
