Author: Lee M.

Yes, localized direct democracy is majoritarian, but the citizen unhappy with a law may appeal to her neighbors, who are often kin or lifelong friends. At the national level, however, she is just a single vote in a mass of anonymous millions—not even a brick in the wall. A Vermonter who dislikes his town’s junk-car ordinance can remonstrate with his landsmen; a Vermonter who dislikes “No Child Left Behind” or the Iraq War can shut up or get drunk, but he can’t get within a Free Speech Zone of George W. Bush.



More here.

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man. — Johnny Cash

From the Washington Post:

If Gore’s America (and presumably John Kerry’s) is reproducing at a slower pace than Bush’s America, what does this imply for the future? Well, as the comedian Dick Cavett remarked, “If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.” When secular-minded Americans decide to have few if any children, they unwittingly give a strong evolutionary advantage to the other side of the culture divide. Sure, some children who grow up in fundamentalist families will become secularists, and vice versa. But most people, particularly if they have children, wind up with pretty much the same religious and political orientations as their parents. If “Metros” don’t start having more children, America’s future is “Retro.”

(via Godspy)

Lynne Stewart is the attorney for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (convicted of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) who has been indicted for illegally passing information from her client to outside terrorist groups. I have no idea if this woman broke the law, but if this interview with a far-left journal is any indication, she’s not going out of her way to win sympathy from the public:

SD: It’s a little frightening that left-wing political prisoners are conflated in the government’s eyes with right-wing Moslem fundamentalists.

LS: I don’t think it’s quite fair to say right-wing, because they are basically forces of national liberation. And I think that we, as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination, and allow people who are under the heel of a corrupt and terrifying Egypt—where thousands of people are in prison, and torture and executions are, according to Amnesty International and Middle East Watch, commonplace—to do what they need to do to throw off that oppression. To denigrate them as right-wing, I don’t think is proper. My own sense is that, were the Islamists to be empowered, there would be movements within their own countries, such as occurs in Iran, to liberate.

Islamists: liberals in a hurry!

And then there’s this:

SD: Let’s say you were part of a government that you actually trusted and supported, and your country held political prisoners. At what point would you think monitoring and controlling these people was acceptable?

LS: I’m such a strange amalgam of old-line things and new-line things. I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution. The CIA pays a thousand people and cuts them loose, and they will undermine any revolution in the name of freedom of speech.

Remember kids: Mao and Stalin – OK; George Bush and John Ashcroft – Evil!

(link via Hit and Run)

I’ve written before about the tensions between libertarians and conservatives. As a recovering libertarian these ideological differences still interest me a great deal. It seems to me that another way of shedding light on this tension might be by considering our evolving understanding of community.

Conservatives are, in essence, defenders of community. Preserving the tribe and its ways is perhaps the fundamental conservative impulse – the preference for the familiar over the unknown, to use Oakeshott’s phrase. Now, in the early American republic, most people’s primary allegiance was to their local community – the village, the town, or perhaps the state. The idea of a “national community” probably wouldn’t have made sense to most people. The Union was precisely that – a union of discrete communities.

The first major blow to this idea of community as fundamentally local was the victory of the principle of the Union over that of states’ rights that resulted from the Civil War. Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson reinforced the idea that the nation itself was the primary community to which citizens owed allegiance. Attachment to the nation threatened to replace attachment to the local community as the chief civic virtue.* Nationalism and progressivism went hand in hand.

What emerged as “conservatism” in 30s and 40s was in large part mounted as a defense of the prerogatives of local communities against the encroachment of the national State. This is also what allowed for a united front with early libertarians (or “individualists,” “classical liberals” etc.). The individualists were concerned, logically enough, with defending the rights of the individual, while the conservatives wanted to conserve local, organic communities. But they were united in seeing the federal government as the major threat to both. This is what accounted for the presence of both extreme libertarians and Southern agrarians in the Old Right coalition.

However, eventually the idea of a national community has come to all but obliterate the preference for localism. This was probably due in large part to World War II and the Cold War – crises that required the nation to pull together with a shared sense of purpose and identity. Few people now think of themselves as Kentuckians or Pennsylvanians first and Americans second.

But as the locus of communal allegiance shifted to the nation, it was perhaps inevitable that the focus of conservatism would shift as well. The Cold War was about defending the nation from threats both internal and external. And the instrument of that defense would, inevitably, be the national government. William F. Buckley saw this as early as 1952 when he wrote of the necessity for creating a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” to combat the Soviet menace.

This understandably made libertarians nervous since their whole agenda consisted of shrinking the federal government. They never abandoned their bedrock principle of defending the rights of the individual. What difference did it make if Big Brother spoke with an American or Russian accent?

As late as the 80s Ronald Reagan talked about a “new federalism” that would return autonomy to local communities and neighborhoods, but at the same time he was a staunch nationalist, perhaps not seeing the tension. In any event, modern conservatism as represented by George W. Bush’s Republican Party and the mainstream conservative press is unabashedly nationalistic. The national community is their chief concern; and defending the national community will require more, not less, activity by the federal government. David Brooks contends that the battle for small government has been lost and should be given up by the GOP in favor of a progressive nationalism in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt.

If this trend continues, libertarians will have less and less in common with their erstwhile conservative brethren, since libertarians regard the growth of the federal government as a threat to individual rights and bad per se. September 11th and its aftermath seemed to have accelerated this trend as a new wave of nationalism has energized what can only be called big-government conservatism.

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*For a critical account of this process see Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age.

From the Acton Institute:

The principle of subsidiarity, which teaches that a community of a higher order should not interfere in the activities of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, is a first principle in genuine Catholic social teaching. It requires each of us to be responsible for those who are suffering in our midst. Families, friends, associates, churches, local charitable organizations—these should be the first to respond to the needs of their brothers and sisters. Government should only be directly involved as the organization of last resort and should implement policies designed to support rather than replace intermediary groups. In this way, people are induced to serve one another, as Christ commanded.

While this sounds fine in theory, how does it play out in real life? Pope John Paul II presents an example in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. In discussing the social problem of unemployment, the Pope outlines the roles of the players in solving it. Government should be involved, he says, both directly and indirectly. Its direct activities include defending the weakest, limiting the autonomy granted to determine working conditions, and ensuring that a minimum of support exists for those who are unemployed. Indirectly, government should create an environment conducive to the free exercise of economic activity. Entrepreneurs then have the opportunity to create and operate businesses, leading to abundant employment and myriad sources of wealth. In this way, government and private actors both have their roles to play and neither seeks to do that which the other can do more effectively.

Subsidiarity respects the proper roles of all the players. It allows government to have a role, as the final source of assistance, and as implementer of policies encouraging to the practice of subsidiarity, while, at the same time, being respectful of human freedom. It allows businesses and entrepreneurs to use their unique talents and abilities to serve the common good by, among other goals, fulfilling the responsibility to make a profit justly. It takes into account the insights offered by economics, as well as Catholic theology, and it allows everyone to take the lead in caring for those in need, instead of simply allowing a government agency to do so.



(via Mark Shea)

Why has the “population bomb” been a bust? Largely because of freedom, individualism, and capitalism says Timothy Burke:

The population-explosion club was one part of a larger tendency that carried over the faith in centralization and statism that was characteristic of one lineage of high modernist thought and practice. I see that lineage today in scholars like Juliet Schor, whose work essentially proceeds from the position that most people don’t know what’s good for them, and that we would all be a lot better off if we consumed less, worked less, and lived lives that closely reflected Schor’s sense of what is good and valuable and meaningful–lives which turn out to be the usual kind of potted faux-gemeinschaft communalism that invariably pops up in these kinds of arguments. It’s the same sensibility that infects Neil Postman’s work, an essentially mystical belief that we were all much happier when we lived in small lineage-based village communities and that we need big authoritarian states to force us back to that future. (The mirror of the same desire is the social or religious conservative impulse to restrict the rights of women and de-emphasize individual rights and materialist pleasures.)

For the population control fanatics, there has been nothing more irksome and unexpected than to see that the thing they thought most crucial (the rapid reduction of rates of population increase) largely did not require the authoritarian intervention of the state (China being the very complicated exception here) but instead has derived significantly from consumerism, individualism and arguably even selfishness.

More here.

Michael Gilleland provides morsels of it for our delectation every day at his great blog Laudator Temporis Acti.

No one can avoid having some significant interest in her or his relationships to the nation-state just because of its massive resources, its coercive legal powers, and the threats that its blundering and distorted benevolence presents. But any rational relationship of the governed to the government of modern states requires individuals and groups to weigh any benefits to be derived from it against the costs of entanglement with it, at least so far as that aspect of states is concerned in which they are and present themselves as giant utility companies. — Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals

Disputations makes some distinctions.