Month: August 2004

So, the Democrats have been bellyaching for the last 3-and-a-half years about George Bush’s “stolen” election. Well, here in Pennsylvania at least, they’ve decided that turnabout is fair play. Local Democrats are pulling out all the stops to keep independent candidate Ralph Nader off the presidential ballot.

Nader’s campaign has reportedly collected over 40,000 signatures, almost twice the number needed to get on the ballot. But Democrats from the state House of Representatives have vowed to challenge those signatures in court. H. William DeWeese, the minority floor leader, is mounting a legal challenge to Nader’s petitions with backing from the AFL-CIO.

The irksome thing about this is the assumption that any potential Nader votes naturally belong to John Kerry, as if by divine right. And that the hapless voters are too stupid to vote in their own best interest.

This may come as news to the Democrats, but tere are any number of reasons that a potential Nader voter might not vote for Kerry even if the Nader option was precluded. Maybe he wants to cast an anti-war protest vote, and voting for Kerry, who supported the Iraq war, would hardly be an effective way to do that. Maybe he’s concerned about some other issue that neither of the major candidates are addressing, like civil liberties or the drug war. It’s even possible that he’s a disgruntled conservative upset with George Bush, but who can’t bring himself to pull the lever for Kerry.

In any event, maybe if the Democrats worked a little harder on making their candidate attractive to voters they wouldn’t have to worry so much about restricting our choices at the polls.

As a follow-up to the last post, here are two more counterintuitive political pieces:

“The Conservative Case for Voting Democratic” by Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute:

Complaints about Republican profligacy have led the White House to promise to mend its ways. But Bush’s latest budget combines accounting flim-flam with unenforceable promises. So how do we put Uncle Sam on a sounder fiscal basis?

Vote Democratic.

Democrats obviously are no pikers when it comes to spending. But the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity. Give either party complete control of government, and the Treasury vaults are quickly emptied. Neither Congress nor the President wants to tell the other no. Both are desperate to prove they can “govern”—which means creating new programs and spending more money. But share power between parties, and out of principle or malice they check each other. Even if a President Kerry proposed more spending than would a President Bush, a GOP Congress would appropriate less. That’s one reason the Founders believed in the separation of powers.

and “The Case for George W. Bush” by liberal writer Tom Junod (link via Presence of Mind):

As easy as it is to say that we can’t abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can’t abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.

Lotsa good stuff out there:

Arnold Kling (who’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite commentators) on the “happiness police.”

Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s antiwar Tory brother – weird family I guess) has a provocative essay on the “parental state” and the erosion of the rule of law.

The American Enterprise has two items of note from its current issue:

– sociologist Rodney Stark on “Fact, Fable, and Darwin”

– an interview with Thomas Sowell

A hilarious article from the New York Press: “The Liberal Case against Kerry”, and in the interest of fairness, also see “The Conservative Case against George W. Bush.” (links via Lew Rockwell)

Earlier I argued that our intuitive apprehension of certain moral principles justified us in adhering to a form of moral realism. I maintained that most people would assent to certain moral truisms, and that these judgments are independent, epistemologically speaking, of whatever theory about the nature of morality we happen to hold. In other words, my view is that first-order moral judgments don’t necessarily require backing from some second-order theory in order to be justified. Moral realism should be our default position, barring overwhelming reason to reject it. The burden of proof lies on those who would have us overturn our practice of making moral judgments, just as the burden of proof would lie on someone asking us to give up making perceptual judgments.

This position might appear at first to commit us to an extreme moral conservatism. If we take our unreflective first-order moral judgments as given, how can we make moral progress? But this worry comes from confusing first-order judgments with second-order theorizing. I can make adjustments in my first-order moral judgments independently of whatever ethical theory (if any) I might hold. Suppose I believe (as I do) that it’s (prima facie at least) wrong to take an innocent human life. Now suppose I become convinced that a fetus counts as an innocent human life. I will then draw the conclusion that abortion is wrong. All of this moral reflection can take place regardless of whether I take my moral principles as expressing a universal duty, the good of the greatest number, the will of God, or whatever.

Moreover, we should be aware of the fact that often in debates about morality, it’s not general moral principles that are being contested. In the debate about abortion, for example, nearly all parties accept the principle that it’s wrong to take an innocent human life. The debate usually revolves around whether a fetus counts as an innocent human life in the relevant sense. So, a judgment like “abortion is murder” is derivative of some more general moral principle along with certain other premises about the status of the fetus.

So, the position sketched is “conservative” only in the sense of claiming that there are certain unchanging universal moral principles. But it still allows for moral development and self-criticism, and may, in fact, lead us to quite radical positions. For instance, as the late James Rachels said in arguing for vegetarianism, “The rule against causing unnecessary pain is the least eccentric of all moral principles, and that rule leads straight to the conclusion that we should abandon the business of meat production and adopt alternative diets. Considered in this light, vegetarianism may be thought of as a severely conservative moral stance.”

Hugo Schwyzer says:

To be honest, one of the reasons I’m a socialist is because I do think that virtue sometimes needs to be compelled by an external source. Left to my own devices, despite my faith, I will choose expensive clothes and trips over giving money to the poor. I do give a great deal to charity (to be honest, I tithe on my net income, not my gross), but I often think more good could be done if the money were taken from me involuntarily. Come the revolution, no ankle boots for me. (My conservative readers are really frothing now, aren’t they?)

Now, kudos to him for admitting where he falls short, and, heaven knows that I have a looong way to go in surrendering back to the Good Lord my self, my time, and my possessions. But the early church, or so we’re told, didn’t lobby Caesar for better welfare programs, rather they took matters into their own hands:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. (Acts 2: 44-45)



All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need. (Acts 4: 32-35)

Please note that I’m not arguing against all government redistribution of wealth. I think Christian tradition clearly teaches that the civil authorities can set limits to the right of private property in the interest of the common good. Aquinas and Luther, just to pick a couple of heavyweights, both taught that the rich had an obligation to share with the poor, and that this is a matter of justice, not just charity.

Still, Christians believe that the church, not the state, is where God’s new life is making its presence felt. As John Howard Yoder argued, the church is an “aftertaste of God’s loving triumph on the cross and foretaste of His ultimate loving triumph in His kingdom”- a community that shows the world that a different way is possible. Who can doubt that Christians would have vastly more credibility in the modern world if we practiced the kind of radical discipleship that we see in the New Testament?

Here’s an interesting piece from Chris Armstrong in Christianity Today that uses the absurd “reality” show Amish in the City as a jumping off point to discuss how the lifestyle of the Old Order Amish offers a telling critique of many aspects of modern life, even – perhaps especially – among Christians.

The Amish, according to Armstrong, are a kind of relic of the Middle Ages who continue to embody many of the habits of medieval life. “The Amish,” he writes, “help us to see that, as the World War-era visionaries J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis saw and taught us to see, the dismantling of the medieval world by Enlightened, capitalist, and eventually industrializing hands was by no means ‘all good.’”

Precisely what good aspects of medieval life have we lost? Armstrong notes that the Amish have a relational and communal rather than sentimental and individualistic understanding of love. They emphasize acts of obedience over doctrinal correctness. They value the tried and true over the latest fad and the mentality of “bigger, faster, newer.” And they display and gentleness and reserve that stands in stark contrast to mainstream society’s penchant for aggressive hyper-emotionalism and exhibitionism.

While I think there’s much that’s right here, I do think it’s tempting to succumb to a “grass is greener” mentality and underestimate the real blessings of modernity. Note, for one, that people who write admiring profiles of the Amish seldom elect to join up! As much as we talk of wanting to simplify, simplify, simplify, most of us like our modern conveniences. And “community” may be the buzzword of the moment, but how many of us would really want to subject ourselves to the kind of scrutiny and discipline that living in a tight-knit religious community would involve?

This is illustrated by the movie The Village, which I saw this weekend. Without giving too much away, the action of the movie revolves around the choices the characters must make between their idyllic isolated (and Amish-like) existence, and the benefits (and dangers) of the outside world. And it’s by no means clear which is preferable. Each has its costs and benefits.

Secondly, it’s a fact, and a paradoxical one, that groups like the Amish seem best able to flourish in the heart of that engine of freedom and modernity, the good ol’ US of A. In late-medieval Europe, let’s not forget, the forbears of the Amish were persecuted for their distinctive way of life. Groups like the early Anabaptists represented cracks in the monolithic culture of Catholic Europe, and were perceived as a threat. The more flexible, easy-going cutlture of decadent capitalist America is happy to leave them to their devices for the most part.

Surely the Amish have had their identity affected and shaped in their encounter with modernity. They’ve had to defend their way of life against the encroachments of state and economy, and that has no doubt shaped their own self-perception. A way of life that is followed unthinkingly by everyone in society has a different character than one that is followed in opposition to the dominant society. The Amish may not be so much medieval as medieval-in-or-against-modernity.

Whatever else might be said about modernity and its accompanying social, economic, and political structures, one thing it does provide is a framework in which diverse approaches to life can co-exist and flourish.* Liberal democracy is, officially and within contestable limits, neutral between the forms of life that people choose to pursue. It may be that this is the very thing that allows the Amish to exist as a living rebuke of many of modernity’s values.

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*I’m aware of those critics who would say that liberal modernity creates only the appearance of tolerance and diversity by suppressing and silencing ways of life that fall outside of its boundaries. These criticisms can come from the “right” as well as the “left.” While there’s certainly truth to this, I think it’s patently obvious that, comparatively speaking at least, liberal modernity allows for a greater variety than virtually any other social system yet devised.

This is still a free enough country that no one actually has to vote. Perhaps it is the only freedom we have left: the freedom not to collaborate with any segment of the political class that is destroying the last vestiges of the American republic. Whether you choose to withhold your vote or to throw it away on candidates who do not (for all practical purposes) want to win, you will at least have the smug satisfaction of saying, “I told you so,” no matter which candidate wins. I’m going to be selling bumper stickers that say, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t vote.” — Thomas Fleming